and gentlemen, sorry, gentlemen,’ said Wing-Commander Maurice Hartford. ‘We are now one hour from drop. Air Pyrenees hopes you are enjoying the ride. Personally, I think you are all crazy.’
Naturally, nobody could hear him, because the intercom was turned off. But it relieved his feelings. Why, he thought, is it always me?
It had been a nice takeoff. Six men plus the crew, not much equipment: a trivial load for the Albemarle, droning up from Termoli, over the wrinkled peaks of the Apennines, and into the sunset. The red sunset.
Hartford switched on the intercom. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said, ‘why don’t you pop up to the sharp end?’
Mallory stirred in his steel bucket seat. He had slept for a couple of hours this afternoon. So had Andrea and Dusty Miller. An orderly had woken them for a dinner of steak and red wine, upon which they had fallen like wolves. The Frenchmen had picked at the food; nobody had wanted to talk. Jaime had remained dour. Hugues, unless Mallory was much mistaken, had developed a bad case of the jitters. Nothing wrong with that, though. The bravest men were not those who did not know fear, but those who knew it and conquered it. On the aeroplane, the Frenchmen had stayed awake while Andrea made himself a bed with his head on the box of fuses, and Miller sank low in his bucket seat, propped his endless legs on the radio, and began a snore that rivalled the clattering thunder of the Albemarle’s Merlins.
Mallory had slept lightly. What he wanted was ten days of unconsciousness, broken only by huge meals at four-hour intervals. But that would have to wait. Among the rockfalls and avalanches of the Southern Alps, and during the long, dangerous months in Crete, he had learned to sleep a couple of inches below the surface, a wild animal’s sleep that could give way to complete wakefulness in a fraction of a second.
He clambered out of his seat and went to the cockpit. The pilot gestured to the co-pilot’s seat. Mallory sat down and plugged in the intercom.
‘Cup of tea?’ said the pilot, whose ginger moustache rose four inches above his mask, partially obscuring the goggles he wore to keep it out of his eyes.
Mallory said, ‘Please.’
‘Co-pilot’s having a kip.’ The pilot waved a thermos over a mug. ‘Sunset,’ he said, gesturing ahead.
There was indeed a sunset. The western sky was full of an archipelago of fiery islands, on which the last beams of the sun burst in a surf of gold. Above, the sky was dappled with cirrus. Below, the Mediterranean was darkening through steel to ink.
‘Red sky at night,’ said the pilot. ‘Pilot gets fright.’
The plane bounced. Mallory captured a mouthful of tea and hot enamel. ‘Why?’ he said.
Quiet sort of chap, thought Hartford. Not bashful. Just quiet. Quiet like a bomb nobody had armed yet. Brown eyes that looked completely at home, completely competent, wherever they found themselves. A lean, tired face, motionless, conserving energy. Dangerous-looking blighter, thought Hartford, cheerfully. Lucky old Jerry.
‘Weather,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful weather up there. Front coming in. All right for shepherds. Shepherds walk. But we’re flying straight into the brute. Going to get very bumpy.’
‘Okay for a drop?’
Hartford said, ‘We’ll get you down.’ Actually, it was not okay for a drop. But he had orders to get these people onto the ground, okay or not. ‘Tell your chaps to strap in, could you?’ He pulled a dustbin-sized briar from his flying-suit pocket, stuffed it with tobacco, and lit it. The cockpit filled with acrid smoke. He pulled back the sliding window, admitting the tooth-jarring bellow of the engines. ‘Smell that sea,’ he said, inhaling deeply. ‘Wizard. Yup. We’ll go in at five hundred feet. Nice wide valley. All you have to do is jump when the light goes on. All at once.’
‘Five hundred feet?’
‘Piece of cake.’
‘They’ll hear us coming.’
The pilot grinned, revealing canines socketed into the holes they had worn in the stem of the pipe. ‘Not unless they’re Spanish,’ he said.
They hit the front over the coast, and flew on, minute after endless minute, until the minutes became hours. The Albemarle swooped and plunged, wings battered by the turbulent upcurrents. By the dark-grey light that crept through the little windows, Mallory looked at his team. Andrea and Miller he took for granted. But the Frenchmen he was not so sure about. He could see the flash of the whites of Jaime’s eyes, the nervous movement of Thierry’s mouth as he chewed his lips from inside. And Hugues, contemplating his hands, hands with heavily-bitten fingernails, locked on his knees. Mallory felt suddenly weary. He had been in too many little metal rooms, watched too many people, wondered too many times how they would shape up when the pressure was on and the lid had blown off…
The Albemarle banked steeply to port, then starboard. Mallory thought there was a new kind of turbulence out there: not just the moil of air masses in collision, but the upward smack of waves of air breaking on sheer faces of rock. He looked round.
The doorway into the cockpit was open. Beyond the windscreen the flannel-coloured clouds separated and wisped away. Suddenly Mallory was looking down a valley whose steep sides rose out of sight on either side. The upper slopes were white with snow. There was a grey village perched up there - up there, above the aeroplane. A couple of yellow lights showed in the gloom. No blackout: Spain, thought Mallory -
A pine tree loomed ahead. It approached at two hundred miles an hour. He saw the pilot’s shoulders move as he hauled on the yoke. The tree was higher than the plane. Hey, thought Mallory, we’re going to hit that -
But the Albemarle roared up and over. Something slapped the deck under his feet. Then the tree was gone, and the aircraft was banking steeply to port, into the next valley.
Mallory got up and closed the door. There were some things it was not necessary to see. Pine trees were, what? A hundred feet high? Maximum. Mallory decided if he was going to be flown into a mountain, he did not want to see the mountain coming.
It went on: the howl of the wind, the bucket of the airframe, the bellow of the engines. Mallory fell asleep.
Next thing he knew the racket was still there, and someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt terrible: head aching, thoughts slow as cold oil. The Albemarle’s bomb-aimer was pushing a cup of tea in his face. Benzedrine, he thought. No. Not yet. This is only the beginning.
He had woken into a different world: the sick-at-the-stomach world of dangerous things about to happen. He badly wanted a cigarette. But there would be no time for cigarettes for a while.
A dim yellow light was burning in the fuselage. Bulky camouflage forms swore and collided, struggling into their parachutes and rounding up equipment.
‘Five minutes,’ said the bomb-aimer with repellent cheerfulness, when he had finished checking the harnesses. ‘Onto the trench.’
‘Trench?’ said Miller.
The bomb-aimer indicated a long slot in the floor of the aircraft. ‘Get on there,’ he said. ‘Stand at ease, one foot either side.’ He pointed at a pair of light bulbs. ‘When the light goes green, shun!
‘Gee, thanks,’ said Miller, and shuffled into position. The first light bulb
