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ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Night Without End
HARPER
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This paperback edition 2005
2
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1962
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1959
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1959
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
ISBN 9780006161226
Set in Meridien by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire
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Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007289356
2020-09-04
To Bunty
CONTENTS
SIX: Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m.
SEVEN: Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight
NINE: Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m.
TEN: Thursday 4 p.m.–Friday 6 p.m.
ELEVEN: Friday 6 p.m.–Saturday 12.15 p.m.
TWELVE: Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m.
Where Eagles Dare: Alistair MacLean
It was Jackstraw who heard it first – it was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stove – curio collectors paid fancy prices for what they imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusks – rose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough.
‘Aeroplane,’ he announced casually.
‘Aeroplane!’ I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. ‘Jackstraw, you’ve been hitting the methylated spirits again.’
‘Indeed, no, Dr Mason.’ The blue eyes, so incongruously at variance with the swarthy face and the broad Eskimo cheekbones, crinkled into a smile: coffee was Jackstraw’s strongest tipple and we both knew it. ‘I can hear it plainly now. You must come and listen.’
‘No, thanks.’ It had taken me fifteen minutes to thaw out the frozen condensation in my sleeping-bag, and I was just beginning to feel warm for the first time. Heaven only knew that the presence of a plane in the heart of that desolate ice plateau was singular enough – in the four months since our IGY station had been set up this was the first time we had had any contact, however indirectly, with the world and the civilisation that lay so unimaginably beyond our horizons – but it wasn’t going to help either the plane or myself if I got my feet frozen again. I lay back and stared up through our two plate glass skylights: but as always they were completely opaque, covered
