“Halo!” Brown’s muffled voice carried faintly from the depths of the engine-room.
“How’s it going?”
“Not too bad, sir. Assembling it now.”
Mallory nodded in relief.
“How long?” he called. “An hour?”
“Aye, easy, sir.”
“An hour.” Again Mallory glanced through the tarpaulin, looked back at Andrea and Stevens. “Just about right. We’ll leave in an hour. Dark enough to give us some protection from our friends up top, but enough light left to navigate our way out of this damned corkscrew of a channel.”
“Do you think they’ll try to stop us, sir?” Stevens’s voice was just too casual, too matter of fact. He was pretty sure Mallory would notice.
“It’s unlikely they’ll line the banks and give us three hearty cheers,” Mallory said dryly. “How many men do you reckon they’ll have up there, Andrea?”
“I’ve seen two moving around,” Andrea said thoughtfully. “Maybe three or four altogether, Captain. A small post. The Germans don’t waste men on these.”
“I think you’re about right,” Mallory agreed. “Most of them’ll be in the garrison in the village–about seven miles from here, according to the chart, and due west. It’s not likely–”
He broke off sharply, stiffened in rigid attention. Again the call came, louder this time, imperative in its tone. Cursing himself for his negligence in not posting a guard–such carelessness would have cost him his life in Crete–Mallory pulled the tarpaulin aside, clambered slowly on to the deck. He carried no arms, but a halfempty bottle of Moselle dangled from his left hand: as part of a plan prepared before they had left Alexandria, he’d snatched it from a locker at the foot of the tiny companionway.
He lurched convincingly across the deck, grabbed at a stay in time to save himself from falling overboard. Insolently he stared down at the figure on the bank, less than ten yards away–it hadn’t mattered about a guard, Mallory realised, for the soldier carried his automatic carbine slung over his shoulder–insolently he tilted the wine to his mouth and swallowed deeply before condescending to talk to him.
He could see the mounting anger in the lean, tanned face of the young German below him. Mallory ignored it. Slowly, an inherent contempt in the gesture, he dragged the frayed sleeve of his black jacket across his lips, looked the soldier even more slowly up and down in a minutely provocative inspection as disdainful as it was prolonged.
“Well?” he asked truculently in the slow speech of the islands. “What the hell do you want?”
Even in the deepening dusk he could see the knuckles whitening in the stock of the carbine, and for an instant Mallory thought he had gone too far. He knew he was in no danger–all noise in the engine-room had ceased, and Dusty Miller’s hand was never far from his silenced automatic–but he didn’t want trouble. Not just yet. Not while there were a couple of manned Spandaus in that watch-tower.
With an almost visible effort the young soldier regained his control. It needed little help from the imagination to see the draining anger, the first tentative stirrings of hesitation and bewilderment. It was the reaction Mallory had hoped for. Greeks–even half-drunken Greeks–didn’t talk to their overlords like that–not unless they had an overpoweringly good reason.
“What vessel is this?” The Greek was slow and halting but passable. “Where are you bound for?”
Mallory tilted the bottle again, smacked his lips in noisy satisfaction. He held the bottle at arm’s length, regarded it with a loving respect.
“One thing about you Germans,” he confided loudly. “You do know how to make a fine wine. I’ll wager you can’t lay your hands on this stuff, eh? And the swill they’re making up above”–the island term for the mainland–“is so full of resin that it’s only good for lighting fires.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, if you know the right people in the islands, they _might_ let you have some ouzo. But some of us can get ouzo _and_ the best Hocks _and_ the best Moselles.”
The soldier wrinkled his face in disgust. Like almost every fighting man he despised Quislings, even when they were on his side: in Greece they were very few indeed.
“I asked you a question,” he said coldly. “What vessel, and where bound?”
“The caique _Aigion_,” Mallory replied loftily. “In ballast, for Samoa. Under orders,” he said significantly.
“Whose orders?” the soldier demanded. Shrewdly Mallory judged the confidence as superficial only. The guard was impressed in spite of himself.
“Herr Commandant in Vathy. General Graebel,” Mallory said softly. “You will have heard of the Herr General before, yes?” He was on safe ground here, Mallory knew. The reputation of Graebel, both as a paratroop commander and an iron disciplinarian, had spread far beyond these islands.
Even in the half-light Mallory could have sworn that the guard’s complexion turned paler. But he was dogged enough.
“You have papers? Letters of authority?”
Mallory sighed wearily, looked over his shoulder.
“Andrea!” he bawled.
“What do you want?” Andrea’s great bulk loomed through the hatchway. He had heard every word that passed, had taken his cue from Mallory: a newlyopened wine bottle was almost engulfed in one vast hand and he was scowling hugely. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” he asked surlily. He stopped short at the sight of the German and scowled again, irritably. “And what does this haifling want?”
“Our passes and letters of authority from Herr General. They’re down below.”
Andrea disappeared, grumbling deep in his throat. A rope was thrown ashore, the stern pulled in against the sluggish current and the papers passed over. The papers–a set different from those to be used if emergency arose in Navarone–proved to be satisfactory, eminently so. Mallory would have been surprised had they been anything else. The preparation of these, even down to the photostatic facsimile of General Graebel’s signature, was all in the day’s work for Jensen’s bureau in Cairo.
The soldier folded the papers, handed them back with a muttered word of thanks. He was only a kid, Mallory could see now–if he was more than nineteen, his looks belied him. A pleasant, open-faced kid–of a different stamp altogether from the young fanatics of the S.S. Panzer Division–and far too thin. Mallory’s chief reaction was one of relief: he would have hated to have to kill a boy like this. But he had to find out all he could. He signalled to Stevens to hand him up the almost empty crate of Moselle. Jensen, he mused, had been very thorough indeed: the man had literally thought of everything. . . . Mallory gestured lazily in the direction of the old watch-tower.
“How many of you are up there?” he asked.
The boy was instantly suspicious. His face had tightened up, stified in hostile surmise.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked stiffly.
Mallory groaned, lifted his hands in despair, turned sadly to Andrea.
“You see what it is to be one of them?” he asked in mournful complaint. “Trust nobody. Think everyone is as twisted as. . . .” He broke off hurriedly, turned to the soldier again. “It’s just that we don’t want to have the same trouble every time we come in here,” he explained. “We’ll be back in Samos in a couple of days, and we’ve still another case of Moselle to work through. General Graebel keeps his–ah–special envoys well supplied. . . . It must be thirsty work up there in the sun. Come on, now, a bottle each. How many bottles?”
The reassuring mention that they would be back again, the equally reassuring mention of Graebel’s name, plus, probably, the attraction of the offer and his comrades’ reaction if he told them he had refused it, tipped the balance, overcame scruples and suspicions.
“There are only three of us,” he said grudgingly.
“Three it is,” Mallory said cheerfully. “We’ll bring you some Hock next time we return.” He tilted his own bottle. “_Prosit!_” he said, an islander proud of airing his German, and then, more proudly still, “_Auf Wiedersehen!_”
The boy murmured something in return. He stood hesitating for a moment, slightly shame-faced, then wheeled abruptly, walked off slowly along the river bank, clutching his bottles of Moselle.
“So!” Mallory said thoughtfully. “There are only three of them. That should make things easier–”
“Well done, sir!” It was Stevens who interrupted, his voice warm, his face alive with admiration. “Jolly good show!”
“Jolly good show!” Miller mimicked. He heaved his lanky length over the coaming of the engine hatchway. “‘Good’ be damned! I couldn’t understand a gawddamned word, but for my money that rates an Oscar. That was terrific, boss!”
“Thank you, one and all,” Mallory murmured. “But I’m afraid the congratulations are a bit premature.” The sudden chill in his voice struck at them, so that their eyes aligned along his pointing finger even before he went on. “Take a look,” he said quietly.
The young soldier had halted suddenly about two hundred yards along the bank, looked into the forest on his left in startled surprise, then dived in among the trees. For a moment the watchers on the boat could see another soldier, talking excitedly to the boy and gesticulating in the direction of their boat, and then both were gone, lost in the gloom of the forest.