‘So I was wrong,’ Andrea murmured. ‘He wasn’t asleep.’
‘He certainly wasn’t,’ Mallory agreed grimly. ‘He fooled me too – and he heard what I said.’ His mouth twisted. ‘He knows now why we’re so anxious to look after him. He knows now that he was right when he spoke about a millstone. I should hate to feel the way he must be feeling right now.’
Andrea nodded. ‘It is not difficult to guess why he has gone.’
Mallory looked quickly at his watch, pushed his way out of the cave.
‘Twenty minutes – he can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes. Probably a bit less to make sure we were well clear. He can only drag himself – fifty yards at the most. We’ll find him in four minutes. Use your torches and take the hoods off – nobody will see us in this damn blizzard. Fan out uphill – I’ll take the gully in the middle.’
‘Uphill?’ Louki’s hand was on his arm, his voice puzzled. ‘But his leg –’
‘Uphill, I said,’ Mallory broke in impatiently. ‘Stevens has brains – and a damn sight more guts than he thinks we credit him with. He’ll figure we’ll think he’s taken the easy way.’ Mallory paused a moment then went on sombrely: ‘Any dying man who drags himself out in this lot is going to do nothing the easy way. Come on!’
They found him in exactly three minutes. He must have suspected that Mallory wouldn’t fall for the obvious, or he had heard them stumbling up the slope, for he had managed to burrow his way in behind the overhanging snowdrift that sealed off the space beneath a projecting ledge just above the rim of the gully. An almost perfect place of concealment, but his leg betrayed him: in the probing light of his torch Andrea’s sharp eyes caught the tiny trickle of blood seeping darkly through the surface of the snow. He was already unconscious when they uncovered him, from cold or exhaustion or the agony of his shattered leg: probably from all three.
Back in the cave again, Mallory tried to pour some ouzo – the fiery, breath-catching local spirit – down Stevens’s throat. He had a vague suspicion that this might be dangerous – or perhaps it was only dangerous in cases of shock, his memory was confused on that point – but it seemed better than nothing. Stevens gagged, spluttered and coughed most of it back up again, but some at least stayed down. With Andrea’s help Mallory tightened the loosened splints on the leg, staunched the oozing blood, and spread below and above the boy every dry covering he could find in the cave. Then he sat back tiredly and fished out a cigarette from his waterproof case. There was nothing more he could do until Dusty Miller returned with Panayis from the village. He was pretty sure there was nothing that Dusty could do for Stevens either. There was nothing anybody could do for him.
Already Louki had a fire burning near the mouth of the cave, the old, tinder-dry wood blazing up in a fierce, crackling blaze with hardly a wisp of smoke. Almost at once its warmth began to spread throughout the cave, and the three men edged gratefully nearer. From half a dozen points in the roof, thin, steadily increasing streams of water from the melting snows above began to splash down on the gravelly floor beneath: with these and with the heat of the blaze, the ground was soon a quagmire. But, especially to Mallory and Andrea, these discomforts were a small price to pay for the privilege of being warm for the first time in over thirty hours. Mallory felt the glow seep through him like a benison, felt his entire body relax, his eyelids grow heavy and drowsy.
Back propped against the wall, he was just drifting off to sleep, still smoking that first cigarette, when there was a gust of wind, a sudden chilling flurry of snow and Brown was inside the cave, wearily slipping the transmitter straps from his shoulders. Lugubrious as ever, his tired eyes lit up momentarily at the sight of the fire. Blue-faced and shuddering with cold – no joke, Mallory thought grimly, squatting motionless for half an hour on that bleak and frozen hillside – he hunched down silently by the fire, dragged out the inevitable cigarette and gazed moodily into the flames, oblivious alike of the clouds of steam that almost immediately enveloped him, of the acrid smell of his singeing clothes. He looked utterly despondent. Mallory reached for a bottle, poured out some of the heated retsina – mainland wine heavily reinforced with resin – and passed it across to Brown.
‘Chuck it straight down the hatch,’ Mallory advised. ‘That way you won’t taste it.’ He prodded the transmitter with his foot and looked up at Brown again. ‘No dice this time either?’
‘Raised them no bother, sir.’ Brown grimaced at the sticky sweetness of the wine. ‘Reception was first class – both here and in Cairo.’
‘You got through!’ Mallory sat up, leaned forward eagerly. ‘And were they pleased to hear from their wandering boys tonight?’
‘They didn’t say. The first thing they told me was to shut up and stay that way.’ Brown poked moodily at the fire with a steaming boot. ‘Don’t ask me how, sir, but they’ve been tipped off that enough equipment for two or three small monitoring stations has been sent here in the past fortnight.’
Mallory swore.
‘Monitoring stations! That’s damned handy, that is!’ He thought briefly of the fugitive, nomad existence these same monitoring stations had compelled Andrea and himself to lead in the White Mountains of Crete. ‘Dammit, Casey, on an island like this, the size of a soup plate, they can pin-point us with their eyes shut!’
‘Aye, they can that, sir,’ Brown nodded heavily.
‘Have you heard anything of these stations, Louki?’ Mallory asked.
‘Nothing, Major, nothing.’ Louki shrugged. ‘I am afraid I do not even know what you are talking about.’
‘I don’t suppose so. Not that it matters – it’s too late now. Let’s have the rest of the good news, Casey.’
‘That’s about it, sir. No sending for me – by order. Restricted to code abbreviations – affirmative, negative, repetitive, wilco and such-like. Continuous sending only in emergency or when concealment’s impossible anyway.’
‘Like from the condemned cell in those ducky little dungeons in Navarone,’ Mallory murmured. ‘“I died with my boots on, ma.”’
‘With all respects, sir, that’s not funny,’ Brown said morosely. ‘Their invasion fleet – mainly caiques and E-boats – sailed this morning from the Piraeus,’ he went on. ‘About four o’clock this morning. Cairo expects they’ll be holing up in the Cyclades somewhere tonight.’
‘That’s very clever of Cairo. Where the hell else could they hole up?’ Mallory lit a fresh cigarette and looked bleakly into the fire. ‘Anyway, it’s nice to know they’re on the way. That the lot, Casey?’
Brown nodded silently.
‘Good enough, then. Thanks a lot for going out. Better turn in, catch up with some sleep while you can … Louki reckons we should be down in Margaritha before dawn, hole up there for the day – he’s got some sort of abandoned well all lined up for us – and push on to the town of Navarone tomorrow night.’
‘My God!’ Brown moaned. ‘Tonight a leaking cave. Tomorrow night an abandoned well – half-full of water probably. Where are we staying in Navarone, sir. The crypt in the local cemetery.’
‘A
