a box on the opposite side of the fire, occasionally turning a heavy stone to be wrapped in cloth and put to Stevens’s numbed feet, and blissfully hugging the flames. By and by he became aware of Mallory’s close scrutiny and looked up.
‘You look worried, Major.’ Louki seemed vexed. ‘You look – what is the word? – concerned. You do not like my plan, no? I thought we had agreed –’
‘I’m not worried about your plan,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘I’m not even worried, about you. It’s that box you’re sitting on. Enough HE in it to blow up a battleship – and you’re only three feet from that fire. It’s not just too healthy, Louki.’
Louki shifted uneasily on his seat, tugged at one end of his moustache.
‘I have heard that you can throw this TNT into a fire and that it just burns up nicely, like a pine full of sap.’
‘True enough,’ Mallory acquiesced. ‘You can also bend it, break it, file it, saw it, jump on it and hit it with a sledge-hammer, and all you’ll get is the benefit of the exercise. But if it starts to sweat in a hot, humid atmosphere – and then the exudation crystallises. Oh, brother! And it’s getting far too hot and sticky in this hole.’
‘Outside with it!’ Louki was on his feet, backing farther into the cave. ‘Outside with it!’ He hesitated. ‘Unless the snow, the moisture –’
‘You can also leave it immersed in salt water for ten years without doing it any harm,’ Mallory interrupted didactically. ‘But there are some primers there that might come to grief – not to mention that box of detonators beside Andrea. We’ll just stick the lot outside, under a cape.’
‘Pouf! Louki has a far better idea!’ The little man was already slipping into his cloak. ‘Old Leri’s hut! The very place. Exactly! We can pick it up there whenever we want – and if you have to leave in a hurry you do not have to worry about it.’ Before Mallory could protest, Louki had bent over the box lifted it with an effort, half-walked, half-staggered round the fire, making for the screen. He had hardly taken three steps when Andrea was by his side, had relieved him firmly of the box and tucked it under one arm.
‘If you will permit me –’
‘No, no!’ Louki was affronted. ‘I can manage easily. It is nothing.’
‘I know, I know,’ Andrea said pacifically. ‘But these explosives – they must be carried a certain way. I have been trained,’ he explained.
‘So? I did not realise. Of course it must be as you say! I, then, will bring the detonators.’ Honour satisfied, Louki thankfully gave up the argument, lifted the little box and scuttled out of the cave close on Andrea’s heels.
Mallory looked at his watch. One o’clock exactly. Miller and Panayis should be back soon, he thought. The wind had passed its peak and the snow was almost gone: the going would be all that easier, but there would be tracks in the snow. Awkward, these tracks, but not fatal – they themselves would be gone before light, cutting straight downhill for the foot of the valley. The snow wouldn’t lie there – and even if there were patches they could take to the stream that wound through the valley, leaving no trace behind.
The fire was sinking and the cold creeping in on them again. Mallory shivered in his still wet clothes, threw some more wood on the fire, watched it blaze up, and flood the cave with light. Brown, huddled on a groundsheet, was already asleep. Stevens, his back to him, was lying motionless, his breathing short and quick. God only knew how long the boy would stay alive: he was dying, Miller said, but ‘dying’ was a very indefinite term: when a man, a terribly injured, dying man, made up his mind not to die he became the toughest, most enduring creature on earth. Mallory had seen it happen before. But maybe Stevens didn’t want to live. To live, to overcome these desperate injuries – that would be to prove himself to himself, and to others, and he was young enough, and sensitive enough and had been hurt and had suffered so much in the past that that could easily be the most important thing in the world to him: on the other hand, he knew what an appalling handicap he had become – he had heard Mallory say so; he knew, too, that Mallory’s primary concern was not for his welfare but the fear that he would be captured, crack under pressure and tell everything – he had heard Mallory say so; and he knew that he had failed his friends. It was all very difficult, impossible to say how the balance of contending forces would work out eventually. Mallory shook his head, sighed, lit a fresh cigarette and moved closer to the fire.
Andrea and Louki returned less than five minutes later, and Miller and Panayis were almost at their heels. They could hear Miller coming some distance away, slipping, falling and swearing almost continuously as he struggled up the gully under a large and awkward load. He practically fell across the threshold of the cave and collapsed wearily by the fire. He gave the impression of a man who had been through a very great deal indeed. Mallory grinned sympathetically at him.
‘Well, Dusty, how did it go? Hope Panayis here didn’t slow you up too much.’
Miller didn’t seem to hear him. He was gazing incredulously at the fire, lantern jaw drooping open as its significance slowly dawned on him.
‘Hell’s teeth! Would you look at that!’ He swore bitterly. ‘Here I spend half the gawddamned night climbing up a gawddamned mountain with a stove and enough kerosene to bath a bloody elephant. And what do I find?’ He took a deep breath to tell them what he found, then subsided into a strangled, seething silence.
‘A man your age should watch his blood pressure,’ Mallory advised him. ‘How did the rest of it go?’
‘Okay, I guess.’ Miller had a mug of ouzo in his hand and was beginning to brighten up again. ‘We got the beddin’, the medicine kit –’
‘If you’ll give me the bedding I will get our young friend into it now,’ Andrea interrupted.
‘And food?’ Mallory asked.
‘Yeah. We got the grub, boss. Stacks of it. This guy Panayis is a wonder. Bread, wine, goat-cheese, garlic sausages, rice – everything.’
‘Rice?’ It was Mallory’s turn to be incredulous. ‘But you can’t get the stuff in the islands nowadays, Dusty.’
‘Panayis can.’ Miller was enjoying himself hugely now. ‘He got it from the German commandant’s kitchen. Guy by the name of Skoda.’
‘The German commandant’s – you’re joking!’
‘So help me, boss, that’s Gospel truth.’ Miller drained half the ouzo at a gulp and expelled his breath in a long, gusty sigh of satisfaction. ‘Little ol’ Miller hangs around the back door, knees knockin’ like Carmen Miranda’s castanets, ready for a smart take off in any direction while Junior here goes in and cracks the joint. Back home in the States he’d make a fortune as a cat-burglar. Comes back in about ten minutes, luggin’ that damned suitcase there.’ Miller indicated it with a casual wave of his hand. ‘Not only cleans out the commandant’s pantry, but also borrows his satchel to carry the stuff in. I tell you, boss, associatin’ with this character gives me heart attacks.’
‘But – but how about guards, about sentries?’
‘Taken the night off, I guess, boss. Old Panayis is like a clam – never says a word, and even then I can’t understand him. My guess is that everybody’s out lookin’ for us.’
‘There and back and you didn’t meet a soul.’ Mallory filled him with
