“Why not?” Miller interrupted. He gestured largely with his hands. “Just a lot of useless rocks
“They can’t afford to lose face with the Turks,” Mallory went on patiently. “The strategic importance of these islands in the Sporades is negligible, but their political importance is tremendous. Adolf badly needs another ally in these parts. So be flies in Alpenkorps troops by the thousand and Stukas by the hundred, the best he has–and he needs them desperately on the Italian front. But you’ve got to convince your potential ally that you’re a pretty safe bet before you can persuade him to give up his nice, safe seat on the fence and jump down on your side.”
“Very interestin’,” Miller observed. “So?”
“So the Germans are going to have no compunction about thirty or forty of their best troops being cut into little pieces. It’s no trouble at all when you’re sitting behind a desk a thousand miles away. . . . Let ’em come another hundred yards or so closer. Louki and I will start from the middle and work out: you and Andrea start from the outside.”
“I don’t like it, boss,” Miller complained.
“Don’t think that I do either,” Mallory said quietly. “Slaughtering men forced to do a suicidal job like this is not my idea of fun–or even of war. But if we don’t get them, they get us.” He broke off and pointed across the burnished sea to where Kheros lay peacefully on the hazed horizon, striking golden glints off the westering sun. “What do you think they would have us do, Dusty?”
“I know, I know, boss.” Miller stirred uncomfortably. “Don’t rub it in.” He pulled his woollen cap low over his forehead and stared bleakly down the slope. “How soon do the mass executions begin?”
“Another hundred yards, I said.” Mallory looked down the slope again towards the coast road and grinned suddenly, glad to change the topic. “Never saw telegraph poles shrink so suddenly before, Dusty.”
Miller studied the guns drawn up on the road behind the two trucks and cleared his throat.
“I was only sayin’ what Louki told me,” he said defensively.
“What Loiiki told you!” The little Greek was indignant. “Before God, Major, the Americano is full of lies!”
“Ah, well, mebbe I was mistaken,” Miller said magnanimously. He squinted again at the guns, forehead lined in puzzlement. “That first one’s a mortar, I reckon. But what in the universe that other weird looking contraption can be–”
“Also a mortar,” Mallory explained. “A five-barrelled job, and very nasty. The _Nebelwerfer_ or Moanin’ Minnie. Howls like all the lost souls in hell. Guaranteed to turn the knees to jelly, especially after nightfall–but it’s stifi the other one you have to watch. A six-inch mortar, almost certainly using fragmentation bombs–you use a brush and shovel for clearing up afterwards.”
“That’s right,” Miller gowled. “Cheer us all up.” But he was grateful to the New Zealander for trying to take their minds off what they had to do. “Why don’t they use them?”
“They will,” Mallory assured him. “Just as soon as we fire and they find out where we are.”
“Gawd help us,” Miller muttered. “Fragmentation bombs, you said!” He lapsed into gloomy silence.
“Any second now,” Mallory said softly. “I only hope that our friend Turzig isn’t among this lot.” He reached out for his field-glasses but stopped in surprise as Andrea leaned across Louki and caught him by the wrist before he could lift the binoculars. “What!s the matter, Andrea?”
“I would not be using these, my Captain. They have betrayed us once already. I have been thinking, and it can be nothing else. The sunlight reflecting from the lenses . . .”
Mallory stared at him, slowly released his grip on the glasses, nodded several times in succession.
“Of course, of course! I had been wondering. . . Someone has been careless. There was no other way, there _could_ have been no other way. It would only require a single flash to tip them off.” He paused, remembering, then grinned wryly. “It could have been myself. All this started just after I had been on watch–and Panayis didn’t have the glasses.” He shook his head in mortification. “It _must_ have been me, Andrea.”
“I do not believe it,” Andrea said flatly. “You couldn’t make a mistake like that, my Captain.”
“Not only could, but did, I’m afraid. But we’ll worry about that afterwards.” The middle of the ragged line of advancing soldiers, slipping and stumbling on the treacherous scree, had almost reached the lower limits of the blackened, stunted remains of the copse. “They’ve come far enough. I’ll take the white helmet in the middle, Louki.” Even as he spoke he could hear the soft scrape as the three others slid their automatic barrels across and between the protective rocks in front of them, could feel the wave of revulsion that washed through his mind. But his voice was steady enough as he spoke, relaxed and almost casual. “Right. Let them have it now!”
His last words were caught up and drowned in the tearing, rapid-fire crash of the automatic carbines. With four machine-guns in their hands–two Brens and two 9 mm. Schmeissers–it was no war, as he had said, but sheer, pitiful massacre, with the defenceless figures on the slope below, figures still stunned and uncomprehending, jerking, spinning round and collapsing like marionettes in the hands of a mad puppeteer, some to lie where they fell, others to roll down the steep slope, legs and arms flailing in the grotesque disjointedness of death. Only a couple stood still where they had been hit, vacant surprise mirrored in their lifeless faces, then slipped down tiredly to the stony ground at their feet. Almost three seconds had passed before the handful of those who still lived–about a quarter of the way in from either end of the line where converging streams of fire had not yet met–realised what was happening and flung themselves desperately to the ground in search of the cover that didn’t exist.
The frenetic stammering of the machine-guns stopped abruptly and in unison, the sound sheared off as by a guillotine. The sudden silence was curiously oppressive, louder, more obtrusive than the clamour that had gone before. The gravelly earth beneath his elbows grated harshly as Mallory shifted his weight slightly, looked at the two men to his right, Andrea with his impassive face empty of all expression, Louki with the sheen of tears in his eyes. Then he became aware of the low murmuring to his left, shifted round again. Bitter-mouthed, savage, the American was swearing softly and continuously, oblivious to the pain as he pounded his fist time and again into the sharp-edged gravel before him.
“Just one more, Gawd.” The quiet voice was almost a prayer. “That’s all I ask. Just one more.”
Mallory touched his arm. “What is it, Dusty?”
Miller looked round at him, eyes cold and still and empty of all recognition, then he blinked several times and grinned, a cut and bruised hand automatically reaching for his cigarettes.
“Jus’ daydreamin’, boss” he said easily. “Jus’ daydreamin’.” He shook out his pack of cigarettes. “Have one?”
“That inhuman bastard that sent these poor devils up that hill,” Mallory said quietly. “Make a wonderful pietare seen over the sights of your rifle, wouldn’t he?”
Abruptly Miller’s smile vanished and he nodded.
“It would be all of that.” He risked a quick peep round one of the boulders, eased himself back again. “Eight, mebbe ten of them still down there, boss,” he reported. “The poor bastards are like ostriches–trying to take cover behind stones the size of an orange. . . . We leave them be?”
“We leave them be!” Mallory echoed emphaticaliy. The thought of any more slaughter made him feel almost physically sick. “They won’t try again.” He broke off suddenly, flattened himself in reflex instinct as a burst of machine-gun bullets struck the steep-walled rock above their beads and whined up the gorge in vicious ricochet.
“Won’t try again, huh?” Miller was already sliding his gun around the rock in front of him when Mallory caught his arm and pulled him back.
“Not them? Listen!” Another burst of fire, then another, and now they could hear the savage chatter of the machine-gun, a chatter rhythmically interrupted by a weird, half-human sighing as its belt passed through the breech. Mallory could feel the prickling of the hairs on the nape of his neck.
“A Spandau. Once you’ve heard a Spandau you can never forget it. Leave it alone–it’s probably fixed on the back of one of the trucks and can’t do us any harm. . . . I’m more worried about these damned mortars down there.”
“I’m not,” Miller said promptly. “They’re not firing at us.”
“That’s why I’m worried. . . . What do you think, Andrea?”
“The same as you, my Captain. They are waiting. This Devil’s Playground, as Louki calls it, is a madman’s maze, and they can only fire as blind men–“