“You fix him up. I’ll find a place.” Mallory wasn’t as confident as he felt: still, on the scree-strewn, volcanic slopes of these hills behind, there ought to be a fair chance of finding a rock shelter, if not a cave. Or there would have been in daylight: as it was they would just have to trust to luck to stumble on one. . . . He saw that Casey Brown, grey-faced with exhaustion and illness–the after-effects of carbon monoxide poisoning are slow to disappear–had risen unsteadily to his feet and was making for a gap between the rocks.
“Where are you going, Chief?”
“Back for the rest of the stuff, sir.”
“Are you sure you can manage?” Mallory peered at him closely. “You don’t look any too fit to me.”
“I don’t feel it either,” Brown said frankly. He looked at Mallory. “But with all respects, sir, I don’t think you’ve seen yourself recently.”
“You have a point,” Mallory acknowledged. “All right then, come on. I’ll go with you.”
For the next ten minutes there was silence in the tiny clearing, a silence broken only by the murmurs of Miller and Andrea working over the shattered leg, and the moans of the injured man as he twisted and struggled feebly in his dark abyss of pain: then gradually the morphine took effect and the struggling lessened and died away altogether, and Miller was able to work rapidly, without fear of interruption. Andrea had an oilskin outstretched above them. It served a double purpose–it curtained off the sleet that swept rOund them from time to time and blanketed the pin-point light of the rubber torch he held in his free hand. And then the leg was set and bandaged and as heavily splinted as possible and Miller was on his feet, straightening his aching back.
“Thank Gawd that’s done,” he said, wearily. He gastured at Stevens. “I feel just the way that kid looks.” Suddenly he stiffened, stretched out a warning arm. “I can hear something, Andrea,” he whispered.
Andrea laughed. “It’s only Brown coming back, my friend. He’s been coming this way for over a minute now.”
“How do you know it’s Brown?” Miller challenged. He felt vaguely annoyed with himself and unobtrusively shoved his ready automatic back into his pocket.
“Brown is a good man among rocks,” Andrea said gently; “but he is tired. But Captain Mallory. . .” He shrugged. “People call me ‘the big cat,’ I know, but among the mountains and rocks the captain is more than a cat. He is a ghost, and that was how men called him in Crete. You will know he is here when he touches you on the shoulder.”
Miller shivered in a sudden icy gust of sleet.
“I wish you people wouldn’t creep around so much,” he complained. He looked up as Brown came round the corner of a boulder, slow with the shambling, stumbling gait of an exhausted man. “Hi, there, Casey. How are things goin’?”
“Not too bad.” Brown murmured his thanks as Andrea took the box of explosives off his shoulder and lowered it easily to the ground. “This is the last of the gear. Captain sent me back with it. We heard voices some way along the cliff. He’s staying behindto see what they say when they find Stevens gone.” Wearily he sat down on top of the box. “Maybe he’ll get some idea of what they’re going to do next, if anything.”
“Seems to me he could have left you there and carried that damned box back himself,” Miller growled. Disappointment in Mallory made him more outspoken than he’d meant to be. “He’s much better off than you are right now, and I think it’s a bit bloody much. . .” He broke off and gasped in pain as Andrea’s fingers caught his arm like giant steel pincers.
“It is not fair to talk like that, my friend,” Andrea said reproachfully. “You forget, perhaps, that Brown here cannot talk or understand a word of German?”
Miller rubbed his bruised arm tenderly, shaking his head in slow self-anger and condemnation.
“Me and my big mouth,” he said ruefully. “Always talkin’ outa turn Miller, they call me. Your pardon, one and all.. . . And what is next on the agenda, gentlemen?”
“Captain says we’re to go straight on into the rocks and up the right shoulder of this bill here.” Brown jerked a thumb in the direction of the vague mass, dark and strangely foreboding, that towered above and beyond them. “He’ll catch us up within fifteen minutes or so.” He grinned tiredly at Miller. “And we’re to leave this box and a rucksack for him to carry.”
“Spare me,” Miller pleaded. “I feel only six inches tall as it is.” He looked down at Stevens lying quietly under the darkly gleaming wetness of the oilskins, then up at Andrea. “I’m afraid, Andrea–”
“Of course, of course!” Andrea stooped quickly, wrapped the oilskins round the unconscious boy and rose to his feet, as effortlessly as if the oilskins had been empty.
“I’ll lead the way,” Miller volunteered. “Mebbe I can pick an easy path for you and young Stevens.” He swung generator and rucksacks on to his shoulder, staggering under the sudden weight; he hadn’t realised he was so weak. “At first, that is,” he amended. “Later on, you’ll have to carry us both.”
Mallory had badly miscalculated the time it would require to overtake the others; over an hour had elapsed since Brown had left him, and still there were no signs of the others. And with seventy pounds on his back, he wasn’t making such good time himself.
It wasn’t all his fault. The returning German patrol, after the first shock of discovery, had searched the clifftop again, methodically and with exasperating slowness. Mallory had waited tensely for someone to suggest descending and expmining the chimney–the gouge-marks of the spikes on the rock would have been a dead giveaway–but nobody even mentioned it. With the guard obviously fallen to his death, it would have been a pointless thing to do anyway. After an unrewarding search, they had debated for an unconscionable time as to what they should do next. Finally they had done nothing. A replacement guard was left, and the rest made off along the cliff, carrying their rescue equipment with them.
The three men ahead had made surprisingly good time, although the conditions, admittedly, were now much easier. The heavy fall of boulders at the foot of the slope had petered out after another fifty yards, giving way to broken scree and rain-washed rubble. Possibly he had passed them, but it seemed unlikely: in the intervals between these driving sleet showers–it was more like hail now–he was able to scan the bare shoulder of the hill, and nothing moved. Besides, he knew that Andrea wouldn’t stop until he reached what promised at least a bare minimum of shelter, and as yet these exposed, windswept slopes had offered nothing that even remotely approached that.
In the end, Mallory almost literally stumbled upon both men and shelter. He was negotiating a narrow, longitudinal spine of rock, had just crossed its razor-back, when he heard the murmur of voices beneath him and saw a tiny glimmer of light behind the canvas stretching down from the overhang of the far wall of the tiny ravine at his feet.
Miller started violently and swung round as he felt the hand on his shoulder: the automatic was half-way out of his pocket before he saw who it was and sunk back heavily on the rock behind him.
“Come, come, now! Trigger-happy.” Thankfully Mallory slid his burden from his aching shoulders and looked across at the softly laughing Andrea. “What’s so funny?”
“Our friend here.” Andrea grinned again. “I told him that the first thing he would know of your arrival would be when you touched him on the shoulder. I don’t think he believed me.”
“You might have coughed or somethin’,” Miller said defensively. “It’s my nerves, boss,” he added plaintively. “They’re not what they were forty-eight hours ago.”
Mallory looked at him disbelievingly, made to speak, then stopped short as he caught sight of the pale blur of a face propped up against a rucksack. Beneath the white swathe of a bandaged forehead the eyes were open, looking steadily at him. Mallory took a step forward, sank down on one knee.
“So you’ve come round at last!” He smiled into the sunken parchment face and Stevens smiled back, the bloodless lips whiter than the face itself. He looked ghastly. “How do you feel, Andy?”
“Not too bad, sir. Really. I’m not.” The bloodshot eyes were dark and filled with pain. His gaze fell and he looked down vacantly at his bandaged leg, looked up again, smiled uncertainly at Mallory. “I’m terribly sorry about all this, sir. What a bloody stupid thing to do.”
“It wasn’t a stupid thing.” Mallory spoke with slow, heavy emphasis. “It was criminal folly.” He knew everyone was watching them, but knew, also, that Stevens had eyes for him alone. “Criminal, unforgiveable folly,” he went on quietly, “–and I’m the man in the dock. I’d suspected you’d lost a lot of blood on the boat, but I didn’t know you had these big gashes on your forehead. I should have made it my business to find out.” He smiled wryly. “You should have heard what these two insubordinate characters had to say to me about it when they got to the top. . . . And they were right. You should never have been asked to bring up the rear in the state you were in. It was madness.” He grinned again. “You should have been hauled up like a sack of coals like the intrepid mountaineering team of Miller and Brown. . . . God knows how you ever made it–I’m sure you’ll never know.” He leaned forward, touched Stevens’s sound knee. “Forgive me, Andy. I honestly didn’t realise how far through you were.”