morning. Meantime, you might tell the guards at the gate to come here for a minute. Then get to bed yourself – you’ll catch your death of cold!’
‘Shall I detail a relief guard –’
‘Of course not!’ Turzig said impatiently. ‘It’s just for a minute. Besides, the only people to guard against are already in here.’ His lips tightened for a second as he realised what he had said, the unconscious irony of the words. ‘Hurry up, man! We haven’t got all night!’ He waited till the sound of the running footsteps died away, then looked steadily at Mallory. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Perfectly. And my very sincere apologies,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘I hate to do a thing like this to a man like you.’ He looked round the door as Andrea came into the room. ‘Andrea, ask Louki and Panayis if there’s a telephone switchboard in this block of huts. Tell them to smash it up and any receivers they can find.’ He grinned. ‘Then hurry back for our visitors from the gate. I’d be lost without you on the reception committee.’
Turzig’s gaze followed the broad, retreating back.
‘Captain Skoda was right. I still have much to learn.’ There was neither bitterness nor rancour in his voice. ‘He fooled me completely, that big one.’
‘You’re not the first,’ Mallory reassured him. ‘He’s fooled more people than I’ll ever know … You’re not the first,’ he repeated. ‘But I think you must be just about the luckiest.’
‘Because I’m still alive?’
‘Because you’re still alive,’ Mallory echoed.
Less than ten minutes later the two guards at the gates had joined their comrades in the back room, captured, disarmed, bound and gagged with a speed and noiseless efficiency that excited Turzig’s professional admiration, chagrined though he was. Securely tied hand and foot, he lay in a corner of the room, not yet gagged.
‘I think I understand now why your High Command chose you for this task, Captain Mallory. If anyone could succeed, you would – but you must fail. The impossible must always remain so. Nevertheless, you have a great team.’
‘We get by,’ Mallory said modestly. He took a last look round the room, then grinned down at Stevens.
‘Ready to take off on your travels again, young man, or do you find this becoming rather monotonous?’
‘Ready when you are, sir.’ Lying on a stretcher which Louki had miraculously procured, he sighed in bliss. ‘First-class travel, this time, as befits an officer. Sheer luxury. I don’t mind how far we go!’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Miller growled morosely. He had been allocated first stint at the front or heavy end of the stretcher. But the quirk of his eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.
‘Right, then, we’re off. One last thing. Where is the camp radio, Lieutenant Turzig?’
‘So you can smash it up, I suppose?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘What if I threaten to blow your head off?’
‘You won’t.’ Turzig smiled, though the smile was a trifle lopsided. ‘Given certain circumstances, you would kill me as you would a fly. But you wouldn’t kill a man for refusing such information.’
‘You haven’t as much to learn as your late and unlamented captain thought,’ Mallory admitted. ‘It’s not all that important … I regret we have to do all this. I trust we do not meet again – not at least, until the war is over. Who knows, some day we might even go climbing together.’ He signed to Louki to fix Turzig’s gag and walked quickly out of the room. Two minutes later they had cleared the barracks and were safely lost in the darkness and the olive groves that stretched to the south of Margaritha.
When they cleared the groves, a long time later, it was almost dawn. Already the black silhouette of Kostos was softening in the first feathery greyness of the coming day. The wind was from the south, and warm, and the snow was beginning to melt on the hills.
All day long they lay hidden in the carob grove, a thick clump of stunted, gnarled trees that clung grimly to the treacherous, scree-strewn slope abutting what Louki called the ‘Devil’s Playground’. A poor shelter and an uncomfortable one, but in every other way all they could wish for: it offered concealment, a first-class defensive position immediately behind, a gentle breeze drawn up from the sea by the sun-baked rocks to the south, shade from the sun that rode from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky – and an incomparable view of a sun-drenched, shimmering Aegean.
Away to their left, fading through diminishing shades of blue and indigo and violet into faraway nothingness, stretched the islands of the Lerades, the nearest of them, Maidos, so close that they could see isolated fisher cottages sparkling whitely in the sun: through that narrow, intervening gap of water would pass the ships of the Royal Navy in just over a day’s time. To the right, and even farther away, remote, featureless, back-dropped by the towering Anatolian mountains, the coast of Turkey hooked north and west in a great curving scimitar: to the north itself, the thrusting spear of Cape Demirci, rock-rimmed but dimpled with sandy coves of white, reached far out into the placid blue of the Aegean: and north again beyond the Cape, haze-blurred in the purple distance, the island of Kheros lay dreaming on the surface of the sea.
It was a breath-taking panorama, a heart-catching beauty sweeping majestically through a great semicircle over the sunlit sea. But Mallory had no eyes for it, had spared it only a passing glance when he had come on guard less than half an hour previously, just after two o’clock. He had dismissed it with one quick glance, settled by the bole of a tree, gazed for endless minutes, gazed until his eyes ached with strain at what he had so long waited to see. Had waited to see and come to destroy – the guns of the fortress of Navarone.
The town of Navarone – a town of from four to five thousand people, Mallory judged – lay sprawled round the deep, volcanic crescent of the harbour, a crescent so deep, so embracing, that it was almost a complete circle with only a narrow bottleneck of an entrance to the north-west, a gateway dominated by searchlights and mortar and machine-gun batteries on either side. Less than three miles distant to the north-east from the carob grove, every detail, every street, every building, every caique and launch in the harbour were clearly visible to Mallory and he studied them over and over again until he knew them by heart: the way the land to the west of the harbour sloped up gently to the olive groves, the dusty streets running down to the water’s edge: the way the ground rose more sharply to the south, the streets now running parallel to the water down to the old town: the way the cliffs to the east – cliffs pock-marked by the bombs of Torrance’s Liberator Squadron – stretched a hundred and fifty sheer feet above the water, then curved dizzily out over and above the harbour, and the great mound of volcanic rock towering above that again, a mound barricaded off from the town below by the high wall that ended flush with the cliff itself: and, finally, the way the twin rows of AA guns, the great radar scanners and the barracks of the fortress, squat, narrow-embrasured, built of big blocks of masonry, dominated everything in sight – including that great, black gash in the rock, below the fantastic overhang of the cliff.
