He felt Miller tug at his ankle, started, twisted round quickly. The American was pointing beyond him, and he turned again and saw Andrea signalling to him from the raised trap in the far corner: he had been so engrossed in his thinking, the giant Greek so catlike in his silence, that he had completely failed to notice his arrival. Mallory shook his head, momentarily angered at his own abstraction, took the battery from Miller, whispered to him to. get the others, then edged slowly across the roof, as noiselessly as possible. The sheer deadweight of the battery was astonishing, it felt as if it weighed a ton, but Andrea plucked it from his hands, lifted it over the trap coaming, tucked it under one arm and nimbly descended the stairs to the tiny hail-way as if it weighed nothing at all…
Andrea moved out through the open doorway to the covered balcony that ovetlooked the darkened harbour, almost a hundred vertical feet beneath. Mallory, following close behind, touched him on the shoulder as he lowered the battery gently to the ground.
“Any trouble?” he asked softly.
“None at all, my Keith.” Andrea straightened. “The house is empty. I was so surprised that I went over it all, twice, Just to make sure.”
“Fine! Wonderful! I suppose the whole bunch of them are out scouring the country for us–interesting to know what they would say if they were told we were sitting in their front parlour?”
“They would never believe it,” Andrea said without hesitation. “This is the last place they would ever think to look for us.”
“I’ve never hoped so much that you’re right!” Mallory murmured fervently. He moved across to the latticed railing that enclosed the balcony, gazed down into the blackness beneath his feet and shivered. A long long drop and it was very cold; that sluicing, vertical rain chilled one to the bone. . . . He stepped back, shook the railing.
“This thing strong enough, do you think?” he whispered.
“I don’t know, my Keith, I don’t know at all.” Andrea shrugged. “I hope so.”
“I hope so,” Mallory echoed. “It doesn’t really matter. This is how it has to be.” Again he leaned far out over the railing, twisted his head to the right and upwards. In the rain-filled gloom of the night he could just faintly make out the still darker gloom of the mouth of the cave housing the two great guns, perhaps forty feet away from where he stood, at least thirty feet higher–and all vertical cliff-face between. As far as accessibility went, the cave mouth could have been on the moon.
He drew back, turned round as he heard Brown limping on to the balcony.
“Go to the front of the house and stay there, Casey, will you? Stay by the window. Leave the frontt door unlocked. If we have any visitors, let them in.”
“Club ’em, knife ’em, no guns,” Brown murmured. “Is that it, sir?”
“That’s it, Casey.” .
“Just leave this little thing to me,” Brown said grimly. He hobbled away through the doorway.
Mallory turned to Andrea. “I make it twenty-three minutes.”
“I, too. Twenty-three minutes to nine.”
“Good luck,” Mallory murmured. He grinned at Miller. “Come on, Dusty. Opening time.”
Five minutes later, Mallory and Miller were seated in a _taverna_ just off the south side of the town square. Despite the garish blue paint with which the _tavernaris_ had covered everything in sight–walls, tables, chairs, shelves all in the same execrably vivid colour (blue and red for the wine shops, green for the sweetmeats shops was the almost invariable rule throughout the islands)–it was a gloomy, ill-lit place, as gloomy almost as the stern, righteous, magnificently-moustached heroes of the Wars of Independence whose dark, burning eyes glared down at them from a dozen faded prints scattered at eye-level along the walls. Between each pair of portraits was a brightly-coloured wail advertisement for Fix’s beer: the effect of the decor, taken as a whole, was indescribable, and Mallory shuddered to think what it would have been like had the _tavernaris_ had at his disposal any illumination more powerful than the two smoking oil lamps placed on the counter before him.
As it was, the gloom suited him well. Their dark clothes, braided jackets, _tsantas_ and jackboots looked genuine enough, Mallory knew, and the black-fringed turbans Louki had mysteriously obtained for them looked as they ought to look in a tavern where every islander there–about eight of them–wore nothing else on their heads. Their clothes had been good enough to pass muster with the _tavernaris_–but then even the keeper of a wine shop could hardly be expected to know every man in a town of five thousand, and a patriotic Greek, as Louki had declared this man to be, wasn’t going to lift even a faintly suspicious eyebrow as long as there were German soldiers present. And there were Germans present–four of them, sitting round a table near the counter. Which was why Mallory had been glad of the semi-darkness. Not, he was certain, that he and Dusty Miller had any reason to be physically afraid of these men. Louki had dismissed them contemptuously as a bunch of old women–headquarters clerks, Mallory guessed–who came to this tavern every night of the week. But there was no point in sticking out their necks unnecessarily.
Miller lit one of the pungent, evil-smelling local cigarettes, wrinkling his nose in distaste.
“Damn’ funny smell in this joint, boss.”
“Put your cigarette out,” Mallory suggested.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but the smell I’m smelling is a damn’ sight worse than that.”
“Hashish,” Mallory said briefly. “The curse of these island ports.” He nodded over towards a dark corner. “The lads of the village over there will be at it every night in life. It’s all they live for.”
“Do they have to make that gawddamned awful racket when they’re at it?” Miller asked peevishly. “Toscanini should see this lot!”
Mallory looked at the small group in the corner, clustered round the young man playing a _bouzouko_–a long-necked mandolin–and singing the haunting, nostalgic _rembetika_ songs of the hashish smokers of the Piraeus. He supposed the music did have a certain melancholy, lotus-land attraction, but right then it jarred on him. One had to be in a certain twi-lit, untroubled mood to appreciate that sort of thing; and he had never felt less untroubled in his life.
“I suppose it _is_ a bit grim,” he admitted. “But at least it lets us talk together, which we couldn’t do if they all packed up and went home.”
“I wish to hell they would,” Miller said morosely. “I’d gladly keep my mouth shut.” He picked distastefully at the _meze_–a mixture of chopped olives, liver, cheese and apples–on the plate before him; as a good American and a bourbon drinker of long standing he disapproved strongly of the invariable Greek custom of eating when drinking. Suddenly he looked up and crushed his cigarette against the table top. “For Gawd’s sake, boss, how much longer?”
Mallory looked at him, then looked away. He knew exactly how Dusty Miller felt, for he felt that way himself–tense, keyed-up, every nerve strung to the tautest pitch of efficiency. So much depended on the next few minutes; whether all their labour and their suffering had been necessary, whether the men on Kheros would live or die, whether Andy Stevens had lived and died in vain. Mallory looked at Miller again, saw the nervous hands, the deepened wrinkles round the eyes, the tightly compressed mouth, white at the outer corners, saw all these signs of strain, noted them and discounted them. Excepting Andrea alone, of all the men he had ever known he would have picked the lean, morose American to be his companion that night. Or maybe even including Andrea. “The finest saboteur in southern Europe” Captain Jensen had called him back in Alexandria. Miller had come a long way from Alexandria, and he had come for this alone. To-night was Miller’s night.
Mallory looked at his watch.
“Curfew in fifteen minutes,” he said quietly. “The balloon goes up in twelve minutes. For us, another four minutes to go.”
Miller nodded, but said nothing. He filled his glass again from the beaker in the middle of the table, lit a cigarette. Mallory could see a nerve twitching high up in his temple and wondered dryly how many twitching nerves Miller could see in his own face. He wondered, too, how the crippled Casey Brown was getting on in the house they had just left. In many ways he had the most responsible job of all–and at the critical moment he would have to leave the door unguarded, move back to the balcony. One slip up there. . . . He saw Miller look strangely at him and grinned crookedly. This had to come off, it just had to: he thought of what must surely happen if he failed, then shied away from the thought. It wasn’t good to think of these things, not now, not at this time.