Force 10 from Navarone

‘Please.’ He indicated the bottle of brandy.

Andrea smiled, briefly and for the first time, poured some of Miller’s five-star into their glasses, reread the message and handed it back to Mallory. ‘I must think it over. I have some business to attend to first.’

Mallory looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Business?’

‘I have to attend a wedding.’

‘A wedding?’ Miller said politely.

‘Must you two repeat everything I say? A wedding.’

‘But who do you know?’ Miller asked. ‘And at this hour of night.’

‘For some people in Navarone,’ Andrea said drily, ‘the night is the only safe time.’ He turned abruptly, walked away, opened the door and hesitated.

Mallory asked curiously: ‘Who’s getting married?’

Andrea made no reply. Instead he walked back to the nearest table, poured and drained a half-tumbler of the brandy, ran a hand through his thick dark hair, straightened his cummerbund, squared his shoulders and walked purposefully towards the door. Mallory and Miller stared after him, then at the door that closed behind him: then they stared at each other.

Some fifteen minutes later they were still staring at each other, this time with expressions which alternated between the merely bemused and slightly stunned.

They were seated in the back seat of the Greek Orthodox church – the only part of any pew in the entire church not now occupied by islanders. From where they sat, the altar was at least sixty feet away but as they were both tall men and sitting by the central aisle, they had a pretty fair view of what was going on up there.

There was, to be accurate, nothing going on up there any more. The ceremony was over. Gravely, the Orthodox priest bestowed his blessing and Andrea and Maria, the girl who had shown them the way into the fortress of Navarone, turned with the slow dignity becoming the occasion, and walked down the aisle. Andrea bent over, tenderness and solicitousness both in expression and manner, and whispered something in her ear, but his words, it would have seemed, bore little relation to the way in which they were expressed, for halfway down the aisle a furious altercation broke out between them. Between, perhaps, is not the right word: it was less an altercation than a very one-sided monologue. Maria, her face flushed and dark eyes flashing, gesticulating and clearly mad through, was addressing Andrea in far from low tones of not even barely-controlled fury: Andrea, for his part, was deprecatory, placatory, trying to hush her up with about the same amount of success as Canute had in holding back the tide, and looking apprehensively around. The reaction of the seated guests varied from disbelief through open-mouthed astonishment and bafflement to downright horror: clearly all regarded the spectacle as a highly unusual aftermath to a wedding ceremony.

As the couple approached the end of the aisle opposite the pew where Mallory and Miller were seated, the argument, if such it could be called, raged more furiously than ever. As they passed by the end pew, Andrea, hand over his mouth, leaned over towards Mallory.

‘This,’ he said, sotto voce, ‘is our first married quarrel.’

He was given time to say no more. An imperative hand seized his arm and almost literally dragged him through the church doorway. Even after they had disappeared from sight, Maria’s voice, loud and clear, could still be heard by everyone within the church. Miller turned from surveying the empty doorway and looked thoughtfully at Mallory.

‘Very high-spirited girl, that. I wish I understood Greek. What was she saying there?’

Mallory kept his face carefully expressionless. ‘What about my honeymoon?’

‘Ah!’ Miller’s face was equally dead-pan. ‘Don’t you think we’d better follow them?’

‘Why?’

‘Andrea can take care of most people.’ It was the usual masterly Miller understatement. ‘But he’s stepped out of his class this time.’

Mallory smiled, rose and went to the door, followed by Miller, who was in turn followed by an eager press of guests understandably anxious to see the second act of this unscheduled entertainment: but the village square was empty of life.

Mallory did not hesitate. With the instinct born from the experience of long association with Andrea, he headed across the square to the communal hall where Andrea had made the earlier of his two dramatic statements. His instincts hadn’t betrayed him. Andrea, with a large glass of brandy in his hand and moodily fingering a spreading patch of red on his cheek, looked up as Mallory and Miller entered.

He said moodily: ‘She’s gone home to her mother.’

Miller glanced at his watch. ‘One minute and twenty-five seconds,’ he said admiringly. ‘A world record.’

Andrea glowered at him and Mallory moved in hastily.

‘You’re coming, then.’

‘Of course I’m coming,’ Andrea said irritably. He surveyed without enthusiasm the guests now swarming into the hall and brushing unceremoniously by as they headed, like the camel for the oasis, towards the bottle-laden tables. ‘Somebody’s got to look after you two.’

Mallory looked at his watch. ‘Three and a half hours yet before that plane is due. We’re dead on our feet, Andrea. Where can we sleep – a safe place to sleep. Your perimeter guards are drunk.’

‘They’ve been that way ever since the fortress blew up,’ Andrea said. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’

Miller looked around the islanders, who, amid a loud babel of cheerful voices, were already quite exceptionally busy with bottles and glasses. ‘How about your guests?’

‘How about them, then?’ Andrea surveyed his compatriots morosely. ‘Just look at that lot. Ever known a wedding reception yet where anybody paid any attention to the bride and groom? Come.’

They made their way southwards through the outskirts of Mandrakos to the open countryside beyond. Twice they were challenged by guards, twice a scowl and growl from Andrea sent them back hurriedly to their ouzo bottles. It was still raining heavily, but Mallory’s and Miller’s clothes were already so saturated that a little more rain could hardly make any appreciable difference to the way they felt, while Andrea, if anything, seemed even more oblivious of it. Andrea had the air of a man who had other things on his mind.

After fifteen minutes’ walk, Andrea stopped before the swing doors of a small, dilapidated and obviously deserted roadside barn.

‘There’s hay inside,’ he said. ‘We’ll be safe here.’

Mallory said: ‘Fine. A radio message to the Sirdar to send her CE message to Cairo and -’

‘CE?’ Andrea asked. ‘What’s that?’

‘To let Cairo know we’ve contacted you and are ready for pick-up … And after that, three lovely hours’ sleep.’

Andrea nodded. ‘Three hours it is.’

‘Three long hours,’ Mallory said meditatively.

A smile slowly broke on Andrea’s craggy face as he clapped Mallory on the shoulder.

‘In three long hours,’ he said, ‘a man like myself can accomplish a great deal.’

He turned and hurried off through the rain-filled night. Mallory and Miller looked after him with expressionless faces, looked at each other, still with the same expressionless faces, then pushed open the swing doors of the barn.

The Mandrakos airfield would not have received a licence from any Civil Air Board anywhere in the world. It was just over half a mile long, with hills rising steeply at both ends of the alleged runway, not more than forty yards wide and liberally besprinkled with a variety of bumps and potholes virtually guaranteed to wreck any undercarriage in the aviation business. But the RAF had used it before so it was not impossible that they might be able to use it at least once again.

To the south, the airstrip was lined with groves of carob trees. Under the pitiful shelter afforded by one of those, Mallory, Miller and Andrea sat waiting. At least Mallory and Miller did, hunched, miserable and shivering violently in their still sodden clothes. Andrea, however, was stretched out luxuriously with his hands behind his head, oblivious of the heavy drips of rain that fell on his upturned face. There was about him an air of satisfaction, of complacency almost, as he gazed at the first greyish tinges appearing in the sky to the east over the black-walled massif of the Turkish coast.

Andrea said: ‘They’re coming now.’

Mallory and Miller listened for a few moments, then they too heard it – the distant, muted roar of heavy aircraft approaching. All three rose and moved out to the perimeter of the airstrip. Within a minute, descending rapidly after their climb over the mountains to the south and at a height of less than a thousand feet, a squadron of eighteen Wellingtons, as much heard as seen in the light of early dawn, passed directly over the airstrip, heading for the town of Navarone. Two minutes later, the three watchers both heard the detonations and saw the brilliant orange mushrooming of light as the Wellingtons unloaded their bombs over the shattered fortress to the north. Sporadic lines of upward-flying tracers, obviously exclusively small-arm, attested to the ineffectuality, the weakness of the ground defences. When the fortress had blown up, so had all the anti-aircraft batteries in the town. The attack was short and sharp: less than two minutes after the bombardment had started it ceased as abruptly as it had begun and then there was only the fading dying sound of desynchronized engines as the Wellingtons pulled away, first to the north and then the west, across the still-dark waters of the Aegean.

For perhaps a minute the three watchers stood silent on the perimeter of the Mandrakos airstrip, then Miller said wonderingly: ‘What makes us so important?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mallory said. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to enjoy finding out.’

‘And that won’t be long now.’ Andrea turned round and looked towards the mountains to the south. ‘Hear it?’

Neither of the others heard it, but they did not doubt that, in fact, there was something to hear. Andrea’s hearing was on a par with his phenomenal eyesight. Then, suddenly, they could hear it, too. A solitary bomber – also a Wellington – came sinking in from the south, circled the perimeter area once as Mallory blinked his torch upwards in rapidly successive flashes, lined up its approach, landed heavily at the far end of the airstrip and came taxiing towards them, bumping heavily across the atrocious surface of the airfield. It halted less than a hundred yards from where they stood: then a light started winking from the flight deck.

Andrea said: ‘Now, don’t forget. I’ve promised to be back in a week.’

‘Never make promises,’ Miller said severely. ‘What if we aren’t back in a week? What if they’re sending us to the Pacific?’

‘Then when we get back I’ll send you in first to explain.’

Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t really think I’d like that.’

‘We’ll talk about your cowardice later on,’ Mallory said. ‘Come on. Hurry up.’

The three men broke into a run towards the waiting Wellington.

The Wellington was half an hour on the way to its destination, wherever its destination was, and Andrea and Miller, coffee mugs in hand, were trying, unsuccessfully, to attain a degree of comfort on the lumpy palliasses on the fuselage floor when Mallory returned from the flightdeck. Miller looked up at him in weary resignation, his expression characterized by an entire lack of enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure.

‘Well, what did you find out?’ His tone of voice made it abundantly clear that what he had expected Mallory to find out was nothing short of the very worst. ‘Where to, now? Rhodes? Beirut? The flesh-pots of Cairo?’

‘Termoli, the man says.’

‘Termoli, is it? Place I’ve always wanted to see.’ Miller paused. ‘Where the hell’s Termoli?’

‘Italy, so I believe. Somewhere on the south Adriatic coast.’

‘Oh, no!’ Miller turned on his side and pulled a blanket over his head. ‘I hate spaghetti.’

TWO Thursday 1400–2330

The landing on Termoli airfield, on the Adriatic coast of Southern Italy, was every bit as bumpy as the harrowing take-off from the Mandrakos airstrip had been. The Termoli fighter airbase was officially and optimistically listed as newly-constructed but in point of fact was no more than half-finished and felt that way for every yard of the excruciating touchdown and the jack-rabbit run-up to the prefabricated control tower at the eastern end of the field. When Mallory and Andrea swung down to terra firma, neither of them looked particularly happy: Miller, who came a very shaky last, and who was widely known to have an almost pathological loathing and detestation of all conceivable forms of transport, looked very ill indeed.

Miller was given time neither to seek nor receive commiseration. A camouflaged British 5th Army jeep pulled up alongside the plane, and the sergeant at the wheel, having briefly established their identity, waved them inside in silence, a silence which he stonily maintained on their drive through the shambles of the war-torn streets of Termoli. Mallory was unperturbed by the apparent unfriendliness. The driver was obviously under the strictest instructions not to talk to them, a situation which Mallory had encountered all too often in the past. There were not, Mallory reflected, very many groups of untouchables, but his, he knew, was one of them: no one, with two or three rare exceptions, was ever permitted to talk to them. The process, Mallory knew, was perfectly understandable and justifiable, but it was an attitude that did tend to become increasingly wearing with the passing of the years. It tended to make for a certain lack of contact with one’s fellow men.

After twenty minutes, the jeep stopped below the broad-flagged steps of a house on the outskirts of the town. The jeep driver gestured briefly to an armed sentry on the top of the steps who responded with a similarly perfunctory greeting. Mallory took this as a sign that they had arrived at their destination and, not wishing to violate the young sergeant’s vow of silence, got out without being told. The others followed and the jeep at once drove off.

The house – it looked more like a modest palace – was a rather splendid example of late Renaissance architecture, all colonnades and columns and everything in veined marble, but Mallory was more interested in what was inside the house than what it was made of on the outside. At the head of the steps their path was barred by the young corporal sentry armed with a Lee-Enfield .303. He looked like a refugee from high school.

‘Names, please.’

‘Captain Mallory.’

‘Identity papers? Pay-books?’

‘Oh, my God,’ Miller moaned. ‘And me feeling so sick, too.’

‘We have none,’ Mallory said gently. ‘Take us inside, please.’

‘My instructions are -’

‘I know, I know,’ Andrea said soothingly. He leaned across, effortlessly removed the rifle from the corporal’s desperate grasp, ejected and pocketed the magazine and returned the rifle. ‘Please, now.’

Red-faced and furious, the youngster hesitated briefly, looked at the three men more carefully, turned, opened the door behind him and gestured for the three to follow him.

Before them stretched a long, marble-flagged corridor, tall leaded windows on one side, heavy oil paintings and the occasional set of double-leather doors on the other. Halfway down the passage Andrea tapped the corporal on the shoulder and handed the magazine back without a word. The corporal took it, smiling uncertainly, and inserted it into his rifle without a word. Another twenty paces and he stopped before the last pair of leather doors, knocked, heard a muffled acknowledgement and pushed open one of the doors, standing aside to let the three men pass him. Then he moved out again, closing the door behind him.

It was obviously the main drawing-room of the house – or palace – furnished in an almost medieval opulence, all dark oak, heavily brocaded silk curtains, leather upholstery, leather-bound books, what were undoubtedly a set of Old Masters on the walls and a flowing sea of dull bronze carpeting from wall to wall. Taken all in all, even a member of the old-pre-war Italian nobility wouldn’t have turned up his nose at it.

The room was pleasantly redolent with the smell of burning pine, the source of which wasn’t difficult to locate: one could have roasted a very large ox indeed in the vast and crackling fireplace at the far end of the room. Close by this fireplace stood three young men who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rather ineffectual youngster who had so recently tried to prevent their entry. They were, to begin with, a good few years older, though still young men. They were heavily-built, broad-shouldered characters and had about them a look of tough and hard-bitten competence. They were dressed in the uniform of that élite of combat troops, the Marine Commandos, and they looked perfectly at home in those uniforms.

But what caught and held the unwavering attention of Mallory and his two companions was neither the rather splendidly effete decadence of the room and its furnishings nor the wholly unexpected presence of the three commandos: it was the fourth figure in the room, a tall, heavily built and commanding figure who leaned negligently against a table in the centre of the room. The deeply-trenched face, the authoritative expression, the splendid grey beard and the piercing blue eyes made him a prototype for the classic British naval captain, which, as the immaculate white uniform he wore indicated, was precisely what he was. With a collective sinking of their hearts, Mallory, Andrea and Miller gazed again, and with a marked lack of enthusiasm, upon the splendidly piratical figure of Captain Jensen, RN, Chief of Allied Intelligence, Mediterranean, and the man who had so recently sent them on their suicidal mission to the island of Navarone. All three looked at one another and shook their heads in slow despair.

Captain Jensen straightened, smiled his magnificent sabre-toothed tiger’s smile and strode forward to greet them, his hand outstretched.

‘Mallory! Andrea! Miller!’ There was a dramatic five-second pause between the words. ‘I don’t know what to say! I just don’t know what to say! A magnificent job, a magnificent –’ He broke off and regarded them thoughtfully. ‘You – um – don’t seem at all surprised to see me. Captain Mallory?’

‘I’m not. With respect, sir, whenever and wherever there’s dirty work afoot, one looks to find -’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Quite, quite. And how are you all?’

‘Tired,’ Miller said firmly. ‘Terribly tired. We need a rest. At least, I do.’

Jensen said earnestly: ‘And that’s exactly what you’re going to have, my boy. A rest. A long one. A very long one.’

‘A very long one?’ Miller looked at him in frank incredulity.

‘You have my word.’ Jensen stroked his beard in momentary diffidence. ‘Just as soon, that is, as you get back from Yugoslavia.’

‘Yugoslavia!’ Miller stared at him.

‘Tonight.’

‘Tonight!’

‘By parachute.’

‘By parachute!’

Jensen said with forbearance: ‘I am aware, Corporal Miller, that you have had a classical education and are, moreover, just returned from the Isles of Greece. But we’ll do without the Ancient Greek Chorus bit, if you don’t mind.’

Miller looked moodily at Andrea. ‘Bang goes your honeymoon.’

‘What was that?’ Jensen asked sharply.

‘Just a private joke, sir.’

Mallory said in mild protest: ‘You’re forgetting, sir, that none of us has ever made a parachute jump.’

‘I’m forgetting nothing. There’s a first time for everything. What do you gentlemen know about the war in Yugoslavia?’

‘What war?’ Andrea asked warily.

‘Precisely.’ There was satisfaction in Jensen’s voice.

‘I heard about it,’ Miller volunteered. ‘There’s a bunch of what-do-you-call-’em – Partisans, isn’t it – offering some kind of underground resistance to the German occupation troops.’

‘It is probably as well for you,’ Jensen said heavily, ‘that the Partisans cannot hear you. They’re not underground, they’re very much over ground and at the last count there were 350,000 of them tying down twenty-eight German and Bulgarian divisions in Yugoslavia.’ He paused briefly. ‘More, in fact, than the combined Allied armies are tying down here in Italy.’

‘Somebody should have told me,’ Miller complained. He brightened. ‘If there’s 350,000 of them around, what would they want us for?’

Jensen said acidly: ‘You must learn to curb your enthusiasm, Corporal. The fighting part of it you may leave to the Partisans – and they’re fighting the cruellest, hardest, most brutal war in Europe today. A ruthless, vicious war with no quarter and no surrender on either side. Arms, munitions, food, clothes – the Partisans are desperately short of all of those. But they have those twenty-eight divisions pinned down.’

‘I don’t want any part of that,’ Miller muttered.

Mallory said hastily: ‘What do you want us to do, sir?’

‘This.’ Jensen removed his glacial stare from Miller. ‘Nobody appreciates it yet, but the Yugoslavs are our most important Allies in Southern Europe. Their war is our war. And they’re fighting a war they can never hope to win. Unless -’

Mallory nodded. The tools to finish the job.’

‘Hardly original, but true. The tools to finish the job. We are the only people who are at present supplying them with rifles, machine-guns, ammunition, clothing and medical supplies. And those are not getting through.’ He broke off, picking up a cane, walked almost angrily across the room to a large wall-map hanging between a couple of Old Masters and rapped the tip of the bamboo against it. ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina, gentlemen. West-Central Yugoslavia. We’ve sent in four British Military Missions in the past two months to liaise with the Yugoslavs – the Partisan Yugoslavs. The leaders of all four missions have disappeared without trace. Ninety per cent of our recent airlift supplies have fallen into German hands. They have broken all our radio codes and have established a network of agents in Southern Italy here with whom they are apparently able to communicate as and when they wish. Perplexing questions, gentlemen. Vital questions. I want the answers. Force 10 will get me the answers.’

‘Force 10?’ Mallory said politely.

‘The code name for your operation.’

‘Why that particular name?’ Andrea said.

‘Why not? Ever heard of any code name that had any bearing on the operation on hand? It’s the whole essence of it, man.’

‘It wouldn’t, of course,’ Mallory said woodenly, ‘have anything to do with a frontal attack on something, a storming of some vital place.’ He observed Jensen’s total lack of reaction and went on in the same tone: ‘On the Beaufort Scale, Force 10 means a storm.’

‘A storm!’ It is very difficult to combine an exclamation and a moan of anguish in the same word, but Miller managed it without any difficulty. ‘Oh, my God, and all I want is a flat calm, and that for the rest of my life.’

‘There are limits to my patience, Corporal Miller,’ Jensen said. ‘I may–I say may – have to change my mind about a recommendation I made on your behalf this morning.’

‘On my behalf?’ Miller said guardedly.

‘For the Distinguished Conduct Medal.’

‘That should look nice on the lid of my coffin,’ Miller muttered.

‘What was that?’

‘Corporal Miller was just expressing his appreciation.’ Mallory moved closer to the wall-map and studied it briefly. ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina – well, it’s a fair-sized area, sir.’

‘Agreed. But we can pinpoint the spot – the approximate location of the disappearances – to within twenty miles.’

Mallory turned from the map and said slowly: ‘There’s been a lot of homework on this one. That raid this morning on Navarone. The Wellington standing by to take us here. All preparations – I infer this from what you’ve said – laid on for tonight. Not to mention –’

‘We’ve been working on this for almost two months. You three were supposed to have come here some days ago. But – ah – well, you know.’