Thunderbolt from Navarone

The cigarette had not done Private Schenck any good. He felt sleepy, and there was a filthy taste in his mouth. What he really needed was a swim, but if anyone caught him swimming on duty there would be hell to pay –

He had arrived at the end of the beach. He turned round and started back, moving smartly to wake himself up, shoulders square, eyes on the tip of his nose, trying as he often did to feel the way he had felt all those years ago at Nuremberg in the temple of searchlights, when he had believed in all this damned Nazi nonsense –

Behind him, something rose from the water beyond the small waves that broke on the shore: something impossibly huge that gleamed with water in the starlight and took two loping steps towards him, clapped a vast hard hand over his mouth and hauled him through the breakers and bent him creaking towards the water, as he tried to shout, but managed no sound at all, like a child in the hands of this terrible thing from the sea. Schenck had given up even before his face hit the water, gently, oh so gently, and stayed there, under those huge, remorseless hands, until his mouth opened and the bad taste of cigarettes and old wine became the taste of salt, and he breathed.

Andrea waited until the bubbles ceased to rise. Then he swam back to the dinghy, and talked low and short to Mallory. A minute later, the dinghy was heading for the beach.

Things now began to move very fast for the still-dazed Wills. As soon as the dinghy’s nose touched the sand, they were out, dragging the packs on to their backs, hustling him and Nelson up the beach and into the low scrub of thorn and oleander at its back. ‘Watch them,’ said Mallory to Carstairs. Carstairs looked as if he was going to protest, but suddenly Mallory and Miller were gone, and there was nowhere else to go, so Carstairs had no option.

Dimly in the starlight they saw Andrea drag Dawkins’ body from the dinghy, and tow him out through the little breakers and into deep water. Nelson started forward, but Wills put a hand on his arm. They heard the hiss as Miller enlarged the hole in the dinghy and left it in the surf, watched Mallory and Miller brush out the footprints on the beach, reversing up into the bushes.

Wills’ head was buzzing like a hive full of bees. He was streaming sweat, and he felt sick, or rather he felt as if someone else a lot like him felt sick, because he was somewhere else. Nearby, Andrea was climbing back into his fatigues. Wills heard himself say, ‘All right, Nelson?’

‘Shouldn’t have done that to poor Dawks,’ said Nelson.

‘He’s dead,’ said Wills. ‘He doesn’t know. He’s being useful.’

‘It ain’t right,’ said Nelson. He sounded aggrieved: bit of a barrack-room lawyer, Nelson. “E needs burying. There’s no call to chuck ‘im in the sea.’

‘There was a guard,’ said Andrea. ‘I killed him. Now the Germans will think he found poor Dawkins, and they fought, and both drowned.’

‘You ‘ope,’ said Nelson, who did not hold with foreigners.

‘Yes,’ said the foreigner, in that lion-like purr of his. ‘And so should you, if you do not want to die.’

Hearing the voice, Nelson realized that he desperately and passionately wanted to live.

‘Miller,’ said Andrea. ‘Have a look at Nelson’s arm.’

Miller pulled out a pencil light, lodged it between his teeth, and unwrapped the strip of rag from the seaman’s right forearm. The cut gaped long and red against the white skin. ‘You’ll live,’ said Miller. ‘Sew you up later.’

‘Jesus,’ said Nelson weakly. ‘It’s really bad. Oh Jesus. It feels bloody terrible.’

‘You won’t die,’ said Miller. ‘Not of a cut arm, anyway. No bleeding, and all nice and clean and tidy with seawater.’ He sprinkled sulfa into the wound, bound it swiftly and expertly with a bandage from the first-aid kit, and made a sling out of the rag. ‘Good as new,’ he said.

But as he tied the sling, he could feel that despite the warmth of the night, Nelson was shivering.

Mallory said, very quiet, ‘Put out that light and let’s go.’

They crossed a stony track along the back of the beach. Inland, the ground rose steeply. Mallory halted them in a grove of oleanders. ‘Wait here,’ he said. Nelson sat down with a heavy thump.

‘Shut up,’ said Carstairs, too loud.

Silence fell: a silence full of the rustle of the breeze in the oleanders, and the trill of the cicadas, and the small crunch of the surf on the shore.

And German voices, talking, from the next beach.

It was just the chatting of sentries bored by a long night duty. But it ran a bristle of small hairs up Nelson’s spine. And suddenly the silence of the group was not just six people keeping quiet, but a sort of frozen hole in the middle of the night noises. He felt sick, with burning petrol, and his shipmates gone, and a nauseating pain in his arm, and poor old Dawks chucked in the sea. And now he was mixed up in God knew what with a bunch of bandits, in enemy territory. He had signed up for the Navy, not the bleeding Commandos. What he wanted now was a nice POW camp, not to get shot out of hand for raiding enemy territory with the skipper and these four hard nuts …

These two hard nuts.

As Nelson counted the heads against the sky, he saw that in the middle of the silence – quieter than the silence itself, in fact – the big one and the thin one had vanished.

Mallory and Andrea went quickly down the track, one either side. They moved quiet as shadows, stooping to avoid the tell-tale flick of a silhouette against the sky. Their packs were with Miller in the oleanders. They carried knives and Schmeissers, and the knowledge that if they used either they were dead, and the mission was finished.

As he trotted on, part of Mallory’s mind was chewing at the problems of the mission. There were several ways of adding up a fire at sea, a cut-up rubber dinghy, a dead British matlow and a drowned German sentry. Some of them were innocent – a survivor of the wreck, a fight in the shallows. Others were not. The rubber boat was a type used in aircraft, not MTBs. Why would a guard drown, having fractured a British seaman’s skull? Anyone with any brains was going to bump into these questions, particularly on an island as sleepy as Kynthos. Perhaps in a couple of Wehrmacht platoons, there would not be too many brains.

But from Mallory’s experience, there would be brains in plenty: thorough, inquisitive, fine-slicing brains …

Speed was what was needed.

They had rounded a headland. There was a low, regular lump that might have been an observation post. They skirted it to the rear, and found the road improving, running round the back of a half-mile beach of pale sand washed with the drowsy roar of the small surf. Behind the beach, an untidy huddle of rectilinear blocks gleamed white in the starlight. Houses. Parmatia.

They moved inland, through a belt of scrub and onto a valley floor tiled with little gardens and lemon groves. A couple of dogs barked lazily as they passed. The air was warm and still.

Mavrocordato Street was a long jumble of small farms and sheds. Number three was shuttered up tight against the sickly influences of the night air. Round the back, a shutter stood open. Andrea and Mallory took a last look over the dark plain. Then Andrea went in through the window.

If Miller had not been Miller, he would have been getting bored. Instead, once he had closed the cut in Nelson’s forearm with a neat line of stitches he had propped his head on his pack, felt a large regret that in their present circumstances it was not possible to light a cigarette, and closed his eyes. Not that he was asleep. It was merely that Miller was a man who hated unnecessary effort. In the darkness of the rocks, the only thing you got from a visual inspection of your surroundings was eye-ache. Also, by closing your eyes you gave your ears the best possible chance. He lay there, and sorted the sounds of the night: breeze in the leaves, the rustle of the sea, cicadas, the small click of a beetle rolling a pebble, the breathing of Wills and Nelson and Carstairs –

No breathing from Carstairs.

Carstairs had gone.

Carstairs had gone God knew where.

Miller was a gambler. Before the war, he had spent much of his life in the weighing of odds. Since he had been mixed up with Mallory and Andrea, not much had changed, except that the consequences of losing a bet had become more deadly. And even in the old days, the kind of people Miller had played poker with were not the kind of people you welshed on and lived.

So Miller weighed up the odds. Carstairs was reputed to know what he was doing. Miller was a corporal, Carstairs was a captain, running his own show under the Admiral.

Carstairs was on his own.

Mallory waited outside the window in a horrible silence, the dreary silence of the hours before the dawn, when nature is at its lowest ebb and sleep most closely approximates to death. His finger rested on the trigger of his Schmeisser. He tested the night sounds, found nothing amiss. He was a soldier, Mallory, and a mountaineer, a man not given to fantasy or speculation. But once again he felt the tightness in his stomach he had felt on the way out of the armoury in Plymouth. This warm world that smelt of farms lay under the shadow of death –

The shutter creaked faintly. Andrea’s voice said, ‘Come.’

Mallory found himself in a cool room that smelt of scrubbed floors and old wine. The shutter closed, and there were fumbling sounds, as if someone was draping the window with a cloth. A match scraped, and a mantle flared and began to glow. The person who had lit it was small, with a hood over his head and a long, Bedouin sort of robe. ‘Achilles?’ said Mallory.

‘Achilles is dead,’ said Andrea. ‘The partisans have blown up the road. The Germans took reprisals. One hundred and thirty-one people were killed in the square on Saturday. Achilles was one of them.’

Mallory said nothing. If there was no road, it would be hard to get the Thunderbolt force across the mountains even if there were no wounded. With wounded, it would be next to impossible –

‘I will take you,’ said their host, and swept back the hood of the robe. Swept it back from a tangled mass of black hair, and a smooth face with a straight nose and big, black eyes that glowed with tears and fury.

‘This,’ said Andrea, ‘is Clytemnestra. She was the sister of Achilles.’

‘For twenty-three years,’ said the woman. ‘Twenty-three years, and two months, and three days, and four hours, before those pigs … those worse than pigs’ – here she plunged into a machine-gun rattle of abuse in a dialect that Mallory recognized from his months in the White Mountains in Crete – ‘saw fit to take him away and murder him.’ She pulled a wine bottle and some glasses out of a worm-eaten cupboard. ‘But we are together,’ she said. ‘We will be together again. Together, we will take you across the mountains.’ She sloshed wine into the glasses.

‘You know the paths,’ said Andrea.

‘Of course I know,’ she said. ‘And if I do not know, then my brother Achilles will walk at my side, and show me.’

They drank in silence. Mallory heard the glass rattle against her teeth. Too wild, thought Mallory. He made his voice calm and level, the voice of a policeman at the scene of an accident. ‘Could you bear to tell me what’s been going on, this past week?’

She did not look up. ‘The more people who know, the better,’ she said. ‘It should be carved in letters four feet high on the cliff of the Acropolis, so people can see – ‘ She caught Andrea’s eye. Then her head bowed again, and she took his mighty hand, and for some time could not speak.

After a little while, she dried her eyes on her rusty black shirt and took a deep breath. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ said Andrea, and the slow fire in his eyes kindled hers, and she nodded. ‘Tell us, and we will avenge your brother.’

‘Achilles was a farmer,’ she said. ‘A farmer and a policeman. There were half-a-dozen men in the mountains, klephts, thieves, what have you. We all on this island hate the Germans, we do what we can to make their lives awkward, in small ways, you understand. But these klephts in the mountains, they were always causing trouble. For their own pleasure, not Greece’s freedom. They stole Iannis’s wine, and Spiro’s sheep, and they raped poor Athene, and every man’s hand was against them, because they were bandits, not fighters. Then last Monday they tried to steal a German patrol truck, and they were drunk, so they made a mess of it and one of them got killed.’ Her head dropped.

‘Steady,’ said Andrea, squeezing her hand.

She nodded, pushing the hair out of her eyes. ‘So on Tuesday there arrived many aeroplanes at the aerodrome, with many soldiers. And the word went round the island that from now on it was a new world, with no mercy. But these klephts either did not hear or did not want to hear. So in revenge for the killing of their man they planted a big charge of explosive at a place where the cliff overhangs the road to Antikynthos and the Acropolis, the only road, you understand.’ Mallory nodded. He understood all too well. ‘And they blew the cliff down on to the road. Nobody was passing, of course.’ Here she looked disappointed. ‘But these new soldiers came, and they climbed over the rubble. They had a new kind of uniform, mottled-looking, like the sun in an olive grove. There was one man, with a crooked face and very pale eyes, the officer. He took one person for every metre of road destroyed, he said.’ The tears were running again. ‘One hundred and thirty-one people, men, women, children, it didn’t matter. The women and children he machine-gunned. The men he hanged.’ She fell silent.

Mallory left her in peace for a couple of minutes. Then he said, ‘And the partisans?’

‘They left the island the night before the hangings. Saturday. They stole Kallikratides’ boat, and went away, who knows where, who cares? They left a note saying it was a tactical withdrawal. But we know that they were frightened that someone would catch them, us or that man Wolf, it didn’t matter – ‘

‘Wolf?’ said Mallory.

‘That’s this officer’s name. Dieter Wolf, they call him, may he rot in hell. He hanged Kallikratides, too. With his own hands.’

‘The same Dieter Wolf?’ said Andrea.

‘Sounds like it.’

Andrea nodded, heavily. In his mind he could see a village in the white mountains of Crete, dry mountains, full of the song of grasshoppers and the smell of the herbs the peasants plucked from the wild plants to eat with their lamb. But today there was another smell wafting across the ravine. The smell of smoke, the black plume that rose from the caved-in roof of the village church. The church into which a Sonderkommando had driven the women and children of the village; the church to which they had then set fire. All this because one of the patriarchs of the village had shot with his old shotgun one of the Sonderkommando he had found in the act of raping his daughter …

Andrea and Mallory had lain in cover across the unbridged ravine that separated them from the village. They had arrived too late. In the shaking disc of his field glasses an officer stood: a man in scuffed jackboots, with a white, crooked face and no hair, cleaning a knife. Later, they discovered why the knife had needed cleaning, when they found a grandfather disembowelled by the roadside. Even at this range, the officer’s eyes caught the sun pale and opaque, like slits of brushed aluminium. Then he and his troops had boarded their armoured personnel carriers and roared away down the road to Iraklion.

Andrea had found out that this man was Dieter Wolf, and promised himself and the dead of that village that he would have his revenge.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘God is very good.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It will be getting light,’ he said.

‘I will get dressed,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Then I will show you across the mountains.’

She went. Doors slammed. Mallory poured Andrea a glass of wine, drank one himself, lit a cigarette.

According to Lieutenant Robinson in the bunker at Plymouth, Kynthos was a soft target. But if Dieter Wolf was here taking reprisals, that meant only one thing. Cambridge don or not, Robinson had been wrong.

He ground out his cigarette and tossed the butt into the stove. The door opened. Clytemnestra was wearing baggy black breeches, soft leather boots, a fringed shawl at her waist, a worn embroidered waistcoat lined with sheepskin over her black shirt. Her hair was bound into a black silk scarf. She looked dull, crow-black, a thing of the shadows. Only her eyes were alive, burning –

There was a thunderous knocking at the door. She shooed Andrea and Mallory on to the stairs. ‘Coming, coming,’ she said, and opened up.

Andrea’s world was keyhole-shaped. He could see very little, and his breathing was deafening in his ears. The kitchen seemed to have filled with people. There was silence, except for the shuffle of boots on tiles: not jackboots, though; boots with unnailed soles. The talk broke like a wave; a Greek wave. Despite all the noise, there were only two visitors.

‘Be quiet, be quiet!’ cried Clytemnestra. ‘Please!’ She seemed to be a woman people listened to. Silence fell. ‘Now. Ladas, what is it?’

‘There was this man,’ said Ladas. ‘Iannis the Nose saw him. He was snooping in the square, looking into cars, windows, you name it. Dressed in a soldier’s uniform. Not a German uniform: British, maybe, Greek, who knows? Straight away we thought, the partisans are back. And you may call us cowards, but you know yourself they were no better than thieves, and my poor Olympia that they shot … for a victory perhaps it might be worth losing a sister, but for those damned thieves of partisans, those Kommunisti bastards, never, God’s curse on – ‘

‘You are right,’ said Clytemnestra, soothingly, without impatience. ‘Tell me more about this man, in whom I must tell you I do not believe.’

‘He has curly hair and a thin moustache, so thin, like a worm on his lip. He carries a rifle, many grenades. When he saw me I thought he would shoot. But he vanished only, into the dark, like a ghost.’

‘Perhaps he is a ghost.’

Ladas scowled so that his mighty eyebrows nearly met his mighty moustache. He did not look like a man who believed in ghosts. ‘You know this town,’ he said. ‘It is full of spies. If a spy says to this German pig, “I have seen a ghost”, this German pig will kill people until the ghost comes to life. What can we do?’

‘Watch and pray until the ghost goes away.’

‘How can you know?’

‘This can only be a ghost. This is the way you deal with ghosts.’

There was a silence. The man with Ladas had a heavy, stupid face with small, suspicious eyes. He looked like a man who might believe in ghosts. He said, ‘She is wearing her clothes.’

‘Yes,’ said Ladas. ‘You are wearing your clothes.’

Clytemnestra looked drawn and weary. ‘When you have no man in the house,’ she said, ‘you must take the sheep to the mountain yourself. And it will soon be dawn. Now back to your beds. Some of us have work to do, even if you want to run around in the dark squeaking of ghosts.’

They left.

Clytemnestra opened the stairs door. ‘What is this?’ she said. ‘Who is in the village?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Mallory. But he knew. It was Carstairs, of course. There were things he needed to say to Carstairs. ‘It will soon be light,’ he said.

Outside, the air smelt sharp and fresh. The sky over the mountains was still deep blue and thick with stars, but low down, towards the peaks, the blue was paling.

‘This man,’ said Andrea to Clytemnestra. ‘He is one of our people.’

She walked fast through a maze of paths that wound among the gardens. ‘Then you should control him,’ she said. ‘Why is he wandering in the village like a madman? He will get people killed.’ They walked on in silence.

Something was worrying Mallory. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be with us. We are soldiers, in uniform. We have no connection with you. There will be no reprisals. But if they find you with us – ‘

‘If I don’t come with you, how will you find your way across the mountains?’

‘We have maps.’

She laughed, a large, scornful laugh that sent a couple of doves flapping from their roost. ‘Use them to roll cigarettes,’ she said. ‘If you use the tracks you will see on them, the Germans will find you. They have the same maps – ‘

‘Hush,’ said Mallory.

They were on the road through the dunes, approaching the southern end of the beach.

‘Down!’ said Andrea. A figure stood suddenly outlined against the paling sky. Its head was blocky with a coal-scuttle helmet, its shoulders tense over its rifle. ‘Wer da?’ it said.

Mallory’s breath was loud in his ears as he lay face down in the dunes. Andrea was at his side. Mallory knew what he would be thinking, because he was thinking it himself. The pre-dawn was quiet. The cocking lever of the Schmeisser would sound like a train crash. One shot, and it would all be over …

Clytemnestra walked forward, hips swaying insolently. ‘Who wants to know?’ she said, in Greek. ‘What murdering son of a whore comes to my home and gets between me and my work?’

‘Vas?’ said the soldier.

‘I looking for my sheeps,’ said Clytemnestra, in terrible German.

The soldier stood undecided. Mallory could not work out whether he had seen them. Beside him, Andrea sighted on the place under the man’s left shoulder blade where he would drive the knife. He put one mighty palm on the gritty soil, tensed his legs to spring –

‘Go on, then,’ said the soldier.

‘I evacuate my bowels on your mother’s grave,’ said Clytemnestra, in Greek. ‘I dig up her remains and feed them to my pigs, who vomit.’

‘Nice meeting you,’ said the German, in German, and stamped back down the beach.

Mallory took his hand away from the cocking lever. The palm was wet with sweat. He and Andrea rose from cover. After that, they marched in silence.

As they turned up the track behind the beach, Andrea said, ‘Wait.’

They waited.

Ahead, over the noise of the cicadas, there came the sound of a stone rolling under a boot.

‘Three minutes,’ said Andrea’s huge, purring whisper by Mallory’s ear. Then, silent as a shadow, he was gone.

The path unreeled under Andrea’s boots as he ran. He could feel the blood taking the power around his body, the thing that made him not a man in the grey pre-dawn, but a hunting animal closing with its prey. He saw the figure ahead, clambering up the path. He was alone, moving probably quite fast, but to Andrea slow and clumsy.

Andrea looked around him with that special radar of his. He sensed the town, Mallory and Clytemnestra behind him, the German soldiers on the beach, the two corpses in the surf, the little party ahead.

He sprang.

A great hard hand went over the mouth. The other hand went to the nape of the neck. He began the pull sideways to dislocate the vertebrae.

It was the smell that stopped him.

It was the smell of hair oil; a hair oil that Andrea had smelt before, on the MTB, in the dinghy, tonight. A powerful smell, sickly even by Greek standards. Expensive.

The smell of Captain Carstairs.

Andrea decided not to break the neck, after all. Instead he kept a hand over the mouth, and said, ‘No noise, or you die.’ Then he waited for Mallory.

So Miller lay with his eyes closed, devoting himself to analysis of the night sounds.

He heard Carstairs coming up the path, and rolled to his feet, Schmeisser in hand. Then he heard Andrea’s attack. After the brief scuffle came the brief bleep of a Scops owl. Mallory’s signal. Miller let out a long breath as three dark figures arrived in the camp.

‘All right,’ said Mallory’s voice. ‘Moving out.’

‘Where to?’ said Miller.

‘Germans on the beach,’ said Mallory. ‘Silence.’

Wills was already upright. Nelson’s cut had stiffened, and he needed some persuading. ‘Hurts,’ he said, whining.

‘Up,’ said Wills. ‘Show a leg.’