“A _what?_” Miller demanded in astonishment. Stevens and Brown were equally incredulous.
“You heard me. Lieutenant-colonel. Outranks me by a fairish bit, you might say.” He smiled at them quizzically. ‘Puts Andrea In rather a different light, doesn’t it?”
They nodded silently but said nothing. The genial, hail-fellow Andrea–a good-natured, almost simpleminded buffoon–a senior army officer. The idea had come too suddenly, was too incongruous for easy assimilation and immediate comprehension. But, gradually, it began to make sense to them. It explained many things about Andrea to them–his repose, his confidence, the unerring sureness of his lightning reactions, and, above all, the implicit faith Mallory had in him, the respect he showed for Andrea’s opinions whenever he consulted him, which was frequently. Without surprise now, Miller slowly recalled that he’d never yet heard Mallory give Andrea a direct order. And Mallory never hesitated to pull his rank when necessary.
“After Servia,” Mallory went on, “everything was pretty confused. Andrea had heard that Trikkala–a small country town where his wife and three daughters lived–had been flattened by the Stukas and Heinkels. He reached there all right, but there was nothing he could do. A land-mine had landed in the front garden and there wasn’t even rubble left.”
Mallory paused, lit a cigarette. He stared through the drifting smoke at the fading outlines of the tower.
“The only person he found there was his brother-in-law, George. George was with us in Crete–he’s still there. From George he heard for the first time of the Bulgarian atrocities in Thrace and Macedonia–and his parents lived there. So they dressed in German uniforms–you can imagine how Andrea got those–commandeered a German army truck and drove to Protosami.” The cigarette in Mallory’s hand snapped suddenly, was sent spinning over the side. Miller was vaguely surprised: emotion, or rather, emotional displays, were so completely foreign to that very tough New Zealander. But Mallory went on quietly enough.
“They arrived in the evening of the infamous Protosami massacre. George has told me how Andrea stood there, clad in his German uniform and laughing as he watched a party of nine or ten Bulgarian soldiers lash couples together and throw them into the river. The first couple in were his father and stepmother, both dead.”
“My Gawd above!” Even Miller was shocked out of his usual equanimity. “It’s just not possible–”
“You know nothing,” Mallory interrupted impatiently. “Hundreds of Greeks in Macedonia died the same way–but usually alive when they were thrown in. Until you know how the Greeks hate the Bulgarians, you don’t even begin to know what hate is. . . . Andrea shared a couple of bottles of wine with the soldiers, found out that they had killed his parents earlier in the afternoon–they had been foolish enough to resist. After dusk he followed them up to an old corrugated-iron shed where they were billeted for the night. All he had was a knife. They left a guard outside. Andrea broke his neck, went inside, locked the door and smashed the oil lamp. George doesn’t know what happened except that Andrea went berserk. He was back outside in two minutes, completely sodden, his uniform soaked in blood from head to foot. There wasn’t a sound, not even a groan to be heard from the hut when they left, George says.”
He paused again, but this time there was no interruption, nothing said. Stevens shivered, drew his shabby jacket closer round his shoulders: the air seemed to have become suddenly chili. Mallory lit another cigarette, smiled faintly at Miller, nodded towards the watch-tower.
“See what I mean by saying we’d only be a liability to Andrea up there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do,” Miller admitted. “I had no idea, I had no idea. . . . Not all of them, boss! He couldn’t have killed–”
“He did,” Mallory interrupted flatly. “After that he formed his own band, made life hell for the Bulgarian outposts in Thrace. At one time there was almost an entire division chasing him through the Rhodope mountains. Finally he was betrayed and captured, and he, George and four others were shipped to Stavros–they were to go on to Salonika for trial. They overpowered their guards–Andrea got loose among them on deck at night–and sailed the boat to Turkey. The Turks tried to intern him–they might as weli have tried to intern an earthquake. Finally he arrived in Palestine, tried to join the Greek Commando Battalion that was being formed in the Middle East –mainly veterans of the Albanian campaign, like himself.” Mallory laughed mirthlessly. “He was arrested as a deserter. He was released eventually, but there was no place for him in the new Greek Army. But Jensen’s bureau heard about him, knew he was a natural for Subversive Operations.. . . And so we went to Crete together.”
Five minutes passed, perhaps ten, but nobody broke the silence. Occasionally, for the benefit of any watchers, they went through the motions of drinking; but even the half-light was fading now and Mallory knew they could only be half-seen blurs, shadowy and indistinct, from the heights of the watch-tower. The caique was beginning to rock In the surge from the open sea round the bluff. The tall, reaching pines, black now as midnight cypress and looming impossibly high against the stardusted cloud wrack that scudded palely overhead, were closing in on them from either side, sombre, watchful and vaguely threatening the wind moaning in lost and mournful requiem through their swaying topmost branches. A bad night, an eerie and an ominous night, pregnant with that indefinable foreboding that reaches down and touches the well-springs of the nameless fears, the dim and haunting memories of a million years ago, the ancient racial superstitions of mankind: a night that sloughed off the tissue veneer of civilisation and the shivering man complains that someone is walking over his grave.
Suddenly, incongruously, the spell was shattered and Andrea’s cheerful hail from the bank had them all on their feet in a moment. They heard his booming laugh and even the forests seemed to shrink back in defeat. Without waiting for the stern to be pulled in, he plunged into the creek, reached the caique in half a dozen powerful strokes and hoisted himself easily aboard. Grinning down from his great height, he shook himself like some shaggy mastiff and reached out a hand for a convenient wine bottle.
“No need to ask how things went, eh?” Mallory asked, smiling.
“None at all. It was just too easy. They were only boys, and they never even saw me.” Andrea took another long swig from the bottle and grinned in sheer delight. “And I didn’t lay a finger on them,” he went on triumphantly. “Well, maybe a couple of little taps. They were all looking down here, staring out over the parapet when I arrived. Held them up, took their guns off them and locked them in a cellar. And then I bent their Spandaus–just a little bit.”
This is it, Mallory thought dully, this is the end. This is the finish of everything, the strivings, the hopes, the fears, the loves and laughter of each one of us. This is what it all comes to. This is the end, the end for us, the end for a thousand boys on Kheros. In unconscious futility his hand came up, slowly wiped lips salt from the spray bulleting off the wind-flattened wave-tops, then lifted farther to shade bloodshot eyes that peered out hopelessly into the storm-filled darkness ahead. For a moment the dullness lifted, and an almost intolerable bitterness welled through his mind. All gone, everything– everything except the guns of Navarone. The guns of Navarone. They would live on, they were indestructible. Damn them, damn them, damn them! Dear God, the blind waste, the terrible uselessness of it alit
The caique was dying, coming apart at the seams. She was literally being pounded to death, being shaken apart by the constant battering shocks of wind and sea. Time and time again the poop-deck dipped beneath the foam-streaked cauldron at the stern, the fo’c’sle rearing crazily into the air, dripping forefoot showing clear; then the plummetting drop, the shotgun, shuddering impact as broad-beamed bows crashed vertically down into the cliff-walled trough beyond, an explosive collision that threw so unendurable a strain on the ancient timbers and planks and gradually tore them apart.
It had been bad enough when they’d cleared the creek just as darkness fell, and plunged and wallowed their way through a quartering sea on a northward course for Navarone. Steering the unwieldy old caique had become difficult in the extreme: with the seas fine on the starboard quarter she had yawed wildly and unpredictably through a fifty degree arc, but at least her seams had been tight then, the rolling waves overtaking her in regular formation and the wind settled and steady somewhere east of south. But now all that was gone. With half a dozen planks sprung from the stem-post and working loose from the apron, and leaking heavily through the stuffing-gland of the propeller shaft, she was making water far faster than the ancient, vertical handpump could cope with: the wind-truncated seas were heavier, but broken and confused, sweeping down on them now from this quarter, now from that: and the wind itself, redoubled in its shrieking violence, veered and backed insanely from south-west to south-east. Just then it was steady from the south, driving the unmanageable craft blindly on to the closing iron cliffs of Navarone, cliffs that loomed invisibly ahead, somewhere in that all-encompassing darkness.