Torch and revolver dangling loosely in his hands, only dimly aware of the curious tingling in the tips of his fingers, Mallory walked slowly forward. Slowly, but not with the stealthy slowness, the razor-drawn expeotancy of a man momentarily anticipating trouble–there was no guard in the cave, Mallory was quite sure of that now–but with that strange, dream-like slowness, the half-belief of a man who has accomplished something he had known all along he could never accomplish, with the slowness of a man at last face to face with a feared but long-sought enemy. I’m here at last, Mallory said to himself over and over again, I’m here at last, I’ve made it, and these are the guns of Navarone: these are the guns I came to destroy, the guns of Navarone, and I have come at last. But somehow he couldn’t quite believe it. . . .
Slowly still Mallory approached the guns, walked half-way round the perimeter of the turn-table of the gun on the left, examined it as well as he could in the gloom. He was staggered by the sheer size of it, the tremendous girth and reach of the barrel that stretched far out into the night. He told himself that the experts thought it was only a nine-inch crunch gun, that the crowding confines of the cave were bound to exaggerate its size. He told himself these things, discounted them: twelve-inch bore if an inch, that gun was the biggest thing he had ever seen. Big? Heavens above, it was gigantic! The fools, the blind, crazy fools who had sent the _Sybaris_ out against these . . .
The train of thought was lost, abruptly. Mallory stood quite still, one hand resting against the massive gun carrIage, and tried to recall the sound that had jerked him back to the present. Immobile, he listened for it again, eyes closed the better to hear, but the sound did not come again, and suddenly he knew that it was no sound at all but the absence of sound that had cut through his thoughts, triggered off some unconscious warning bell. The night was suddenly very silent, very stifi: down in the heart of the town the guns had stopped firing.
Mallory swore softly to himself. He had already spent far too much time daydreaming, and time was running short. It _must_ be running short–Andrea had withdrawn, it was only a matter of time until the Germans discovered that they had been duped. And then they would come running–and there was no doubt where they would come. Swiftly Mallory shrugged out of his rucksack, pulled out the hundred-foot wire-cored rope coiled inside. Their emergency escape route–whatever else he did he must make sure of that.
The rope looped round his arm, he moved forward cautiously, seeking a belay but had only taken three steps when his right knee-cap struck something hard and unyielding. He checked the exclamation of pain, investigated the obstacle with his free hand, realised immediately what it was–an iron railing stretched waist-high across the mouth of the cave. Of course! There had been bound to be something like this, some barrier to prevent people from falling over the edge, especially in the darkness of the night. He hadn’t been able to pick it up with the binoculars from the carob grove that afternoon– close though it was to the entrance, it had been concealed in the gloom of the cave. But he should have thought of it.
Quickly Mallory felt his way along to the left, to the very end of the railing, crossed it, tied the rope securely to the base of the vertical stanchion next to the wall, paid out the rope as he moved gingerly to the lip of the cave mouth. And then, almost at once, he was there and there was nothing below his probing foot but a hundred and twenty feet of sheer drop to the land-locked harbour of Navarone.
Away to his right was a dark, formless blur lying on the water, a blur that might have been Cape Demirci: straight ahead, across the darkly velvet sheen of the Maidos Straits, he could see the twinkle of far-away lights–it was a measure of the enemy’s confidence that they permitted these lights at all, or, more likely, these fisher cottages were useful as a bearing marker for the guns at night: and to the left, surprisingly near, barely thirty feet away in a horizontal plane, but far below the level where he was standing, he could see the jutting end of the outside wall of the fortress where it abutted on the cliff, the roofs of the houses on the west side of the square beyond that, and, beyond that again, the town itself curving sharply downwards and outwards, to the south first, then to the west, close-girdling and matching the curve of the crescent harbour. Above-but there was nothing to be seen above, that fantastic overhang above blotted out more than half the sky; and below, the darkness was equally impenetrable, the surface of the harbour inky and black as night. There were vessels down there, he knew, Grecian caiques and German launches, but they might have been a thousand miles away for any sign he could see of them.
The brief, all encompassing glance had taken barely ten seconds, but Mallory waited no longer. Swiftly he bent down, tied a double bowline in the end of the rope and left it lying on the edge. In an emergency they could kick it out into the darkness. It would be thirty feet short of the water, he estimated–enough to clear any launch or masted caique that might be moving about the harbour. They could drop the rest of the way, maybe a bone-breaking fall on to the deck of a ship, but they would have to risk it. Mallory took one last look down into the Stygian blackness and shivered; he hoped to God that he and Miller wouldn’t have to take that way out.
Dusty Miller was kneeling on the duckboards by the top of the ladder leading down to the magazine as Mallory came running back up the tunnel, his hands busy with wires, fuses, detonators and explosives. He straightened up as Mallory approached.
“I reckon this stuff should keep ’em happy, boss.” He set the hands of the clockwork fuse, listened appreciatively to the barely audible hum, then eased himself down the ladder. “In here among the top two rows of cartridges, I thought.”
“Wherever you say,” Mallory acquiesced. “Only don’t make it too obvious–or too difficult to find. Sure there’s no chance of them suspecting that we knew the clock and fuses were dud?”
“None in the world,” Miller said confidently. “When they find this here contraption they’ll knock holes in each others’ backs congratulatin’ themselves-and they’ll never look any further.”
“Fair enough.” Mallory was satisfied. “Lock the door up top?”
“Certainly I locked the door!” Miller looked at him reproachfully. “Boss, sometimes I think . .
But Mallory never heard what he thought. A metallic, reverberating clangour echoed cavernously through the cave and magazine, blotting out Miller’s words, then died away over the harbour. Again the sound came, while the two men stared bleakly at one another, then again and again, then escaped for a moment of time.
“Company,” Mallory murmured. “Complete with sledge-hammers. Dear God, I only hope that door holds.” He was already running along the passage towards the guns, Miller close behind him.
“Company!” Miller was shaking his head as he ran. “How in the hell did they get here so soon?”
“Our late lamented little pal,” Mallory said savagely. He vaulted over the railing, edged back to the mouth of the cave. “And we were suckers enough to believe he told the whole truth. But he never told us that opening that door up top triggered off an alarm bell in the guardroom.”
CHAPTER 16
Wednesday Night
2115–2345
Smoothly, skillfully, Miller paid out the wire-cored rope–double-turned round the top rail–as Mallory sank out of sight into the darkness. Fifty feet had gone, he estimated, fifty-five, sixty, then there came the awaited sharp double tug on the signal cord looped round his wrist and he at once checked the rope, stooped and tied it securely to the foot of the stanchion.
And then he had straightened again, belayed himself to the rail with the rope’s end, leaned far out over the edge, caught hold of the rope with both bands as far down as he could reach and began, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then with gradually increasing momentum, to swing man and rope from side to side, pendulum-wise. As the wings of the pendulum grew wider, the rope started to twist and jump in his hands, and Miller knew that Mallory must be striking outcrops of rock, spinning uncontrollably as he bounced off them. But Miller knew that he couldn’t stop now, the clanging of the sledges behind him was almost continuous: he only stooped the lower over the rope, flung all the strength of his sinewy arms and shoulders into the effort of bringing Mallory nearer and still nearer to the rope that Brown would by now have thrown down from the balcony of the house where they had left him.