The Guns of Navarone

CHAPTER 15

Eight-thirty, his watch said. Eight-thirty. Exactly half an hour to curfew. Mallory flattened himself on the roof, pressed himself as closely as possible against the low retaining wall that almost touched the great, sheering sides of the fortress, swore softly to himself. It only required one man with a torch in his hand to look over the top of the fortress wall — a catwalk ran the whole length of the inside of the wall, four feet from the top — and it would be the end of them alL The wandering beam of a torch and they were bound to be seen, it was impossible not to be seen: he and Dusty Miller — the American was stretched out behind him and clutching the big truck battery in his arms — were wide open to the view of anyone who happened to glance down that way. Perhaps they should have stayed with the others a couple of roofs away, with Casey and Louki, the one busy tying spaced knots in a rope, the other busy splicing a bent wire hook on to a long bamboo they had torn from a bamboo hedge just outside the town, where they had hurriedly taken shelter as a convoy of three trucks had roared past them heading for the castle Vygos.

Eight thirty-two. What the devil was Andrea doing down there, Mallory wondered irritably and at once regretted his irritation. Andrea wouldn't waste an unnecessary second. Speed was vital, haste fatal. It seemed unlikely that there would be any officers inside — from what they had seen, practically half the garrison were combing either the town or the countryside out in the direction of Vygos — but if there were and even one gave a cry it would be the end.

Mallory stared down at the burn on the back of his hand, thought of the truck they had set on fire and grinned wryly to himself. Setting the truck on fire had been his only contribution to the night's performance so far. All the other credit went to either Andrea or Miller. It was Andrea who had seen in this house on the west side of the square — one of several adjoining houses used as officers' billets — the only possible answer to their problem. It was Miller, now lacking all time-fuses, clockwork, generator and every other source of electric power who had suddenly stated that he must have a battery, and again it was Andrea, hearing the distant approach of a truck, who had blocked the entrance to the long driveway to the keep with heavy stones from the flanking pillars, forcing the soldiers to abandon their truck at the gates and run up the drive towards their house. To overcome the driver and his mate and bundle them senseless into a ditch had taken seconds only, scarcely more time than it had taken Miller to unscrew the terminals of the heavy battery, find the inevitable jerrican below the tailboard and pour the contents over engine, cab and body. The truck had gone up in a roar and whoosh of flames: as Louki had said earlier in the night, setting petrol-soaked vehicles on fire was not without its dangers — the charred patch on his hand stung painfully — but, again as Louki had said, it had burned magnificently. A pity, in a way — it had attracted attention to their escape sooner than was necessary-- but it had been vital to destroy the evidence, the fact that a battery was missing. Mallory had too much experience of and respect for the Germans ever to underrate them: they could put two and two together better than most.

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.

He wondered if the other two were at their posts, unmolested; they should be, the search party had long passed through the upper part of the town; but you never knew what could go wrong, there was so much that could go wrong, and so easily. Mallory looked at his watch again: he had never seen a second hand move so slowly. He lit a last cigarette, poured a final glass of wine, listened without really hearing to the weird, keening threnody of the rembetika song in the corner. And then the song of the hashish singers died plaintively away, the glasses were empty and Mallory was on his feet.

«Time bringeth all things,» he murmured. «Here we go again.»

He sauntered easily towards the door, calling good night to the tavernaris. Just at the doorway he paused, began to search impatiently through his pockets as if he had lost something: it was a windless night, and it was raining, he saw, raining heavily, the lances of rain bouncing inches off the cobbled street — and the street itself was deserted as far as he could see in either direction. Satisfied, Mallory swung round with a curse, forehead furrowed in exasperation, started to walk back towards the table he had just left, right hand now delving into the capacious inner pocket of his jacket. He saw without seeming to that Dusty Miller was pushing his chair back, rising to his feet. And then Mallory bad halted, his face clearing and his hands no longer searching. He was exactly three feet from the table where the four Germans were sitting.

«Keep quite still!» He spoke in German, his voice low but as steady, as menacing, as the Navy Colt .455 balanced in his right hand. «We are desperate men. If you move we will kill you.»

For a full, three seconds the soldiers sat immobile, expressionless except for the shocked widening of their eyes. And then there was a quick flicker of the eyelids from the man sitting nearest the counter, a twitching of the shoulder and then a grunt of agonyas the .32 bullet smashed into his upper arm. The soft thud of Miller's silenced automatic couldn't have been heard beyond the doorway.

«Sorry, boss,» Miller apologised. «Mebbe be's only sufferin' from St. Vitus' Dance.» He looked with interest at the pain-twisted face, the blood welling darkly be.. tween the fingers clasped tightly over the wound. «But he looks kinda cured to me.»

«He is cured,» Mallory said grimly. He turned to the inn-keeper, a tall, melancholy man with a thin face and mandarin moustache that drooped forlornly over either corner of his mouth, spoke to him in the quick, colloquial speech of the islands. «Do these men speak Greek?»

The tavernaris shook his head. Completely unruffled and unimpressed, he seemed to regard armed hold-ups in his tavern as the rule rather than the exception.

«Not them!» he said contemptuously. «English a little, I think — I am sure. But not our language. That I do know.»

«Good. I am a British Intelligence officer. Have you a place where I can hide these men?»

«You shouldn't have done this,» the tavernaris protested mildly. «I will surely die for this.»

«Oh, no, you Won't.» Mallory had slid across the counter, his pistol boring into the man's midriff. No one could doubt that the man was being threatened — and violently threatened — no one, that is, who couldn't see the broad wink that Mallory had given the inn-keeper. «I'm going to tie you up with them. All right?»

«All right. There is a trap-door at the end of the counter here. Steps lead down to the cellar.»

«Good enough. I'll find it by accident.» Mallory gave him a vicious and all too convincing shove that sent the man staggering, vaulted back across the counter, walked over to the rembetika singers at the far corner of the room.

«Go home,» he said quickly. «It is almost curfew time anyway. Go out the back way, and remember — you have seen nothing, no one. You understand?»

«We understand.» It was the young bouzouko player who spoke. He jerked his thumb at his companions and grinned. «Bad men — but good Greeks. Can we help you?»

«No!» Mallory was emphatic. «Think of your families — these soldiers have recognised you. They must know you weli — you and they are here most nights, is that not so?»

The young man nodded.

«Off you go, then. Thank you all the same.»

A minute later, in the dim, candle-lit cellar, Miller prodded the soldier nearest him — the one most like himself in height and build. «Take your clothes off!» he ordered.

«English pig!» the German snarled.

«Not English,» Miller protested. «I'll give you thirty seconds to get your coat and pants off.»

The man swore at him, viciously, but made no move to obey. Miller sighed. The German had guts, but time was running out. He took a careful bead on the soldier's hand and pulled the trigger. Again the soft plop and the man was staring down stupidly at the hole torn in the heel of his left hand.

«Mustn't spoil the nice uniforms, must we?» Miller asked conversationally. He lifted the automatic until the soldier was staring down the barrel of the gun. «The next goes between the eyes.» The casual drawl carried complete conviction. «It won't take me long to undress you, I guess.» But the man had already started to tear his uniform off, sobbing with anger and the pain of his wounded hand.

Less than another five minutes had passed when Mallory, clad like Miller in German uniform, unlocked the front door of the tavern and peered cautiously out. The rain, if anything, was heavier than ever — and there wasn't a soul in sight. Mallory beckoned Miller to follow and locked the door behind him. Together the two men walked up the middle of the street, making no attempt to seek either shelter or shadows. Fifty yards took them into the town square, then left along the east side, not breaking step as they passed the old house where they had hidden earlier in the evening, not even as Louki's hand appeared mysteriously behind the partly opened door, a hand weighted down with two German Army rucksacks — rucksacks packed with rope, fuses, wire and high explosive. A few yards farther on they stopped suddenly, crouched down behind a couple of huge wine barrels outside a barber's shop, gazed at the two armed guards in the arched gateway, less than a hundred feet away, as they shrugged into their packs and waited for their cue.

They had only moments to wait — the timing had been split-second throughout. Mallory was just tightening the waist-belt of his rucksack when a series of explosions shook the centre of the town, not three hundred yards away, explosions followed by the vicious rattle of a machine-gun, then by further explosions. Andrea was doing his stuff magnificently with his grenades and home-made bombs.

Both men suddenly shrank back as a broad, white beam of light stabbed out from a platform high above the gateway, a beam that paralleled the top of the wall to the east, showed up every hooked spike and strand of barbed wire as clearly as sunlight. Mallory and Miller looked at each other for a fleeting moment, their faces grim. Panayis hadn't missed a thing: they would have been pinned on these strands like flies on flypaper and cut to ribbons by machine-guns.

Mallory waited another half-minute, touched Miller's arm, rose to his feet and started running madly across the square, the long hooked bamboo pressed close to his. side, the American pounding behind him. In a few seeonds they had reached the gates of the fortress, the startled guards running the last few feet to meet them.

«Every man to the Street of Steps!» Mallory shouted. «Those damned English saboteurs are trapped in a house dawn there! We've got to have some mortars. Hurry, man, hurry, in the name of God!»

«But the gate!» one of the two guards protested. «We cannot leave the gate!» The man had no suspidons, none at all: in the circumstances — the near darkness, the pouring rain, the German-clad soldier speaking perfect German, the obvious truth that there was a gunbattle being fought near-hand — it would have been remarkable had he shown any signs of doubt

«Idiot!» Mallory screamed at him. «Dummkopf! What is there to guard against here? The English swine are in the Street of Steps. They must be destroyed! For God's sake, hurry!» he shouted desperately. «If they escape again it'll be the Russian Front for all of us!»

Mallory had his hand on the man's shoulder now, ready to push him on his way, but his hand fell to his side unneeded. The two men were already gone, running pell-mell across the square, had vanished into the rain and the darkness already. Seconds later Mallory and Miller were deep inside the fortress of Navarone.

Everywhere there was complete confusion — a bustling purposeful confusion as one would expect with the seasoned troops of the Alpenkorps, but confusion nevertheless, with much shouting of orders, blowing of whistles, starting of truck engines, sergeants running to and fro chivvying their men into marching order or into the waiting transports. Mallory and Miller ran too, once or twice through groups of men milling round the tailboard of a truck. Not that they were in any desperate hurry for themselves, but nothing could have been more conspicuous — and suspicious — than the sight of a couple of men walking calmly along in the middle of all that urgent activity. And so they ran, heads down or averted whenever they passed through a pool of light, Miller cursing feelingly and often at the unaccustomed exercise.

They skirted two barrack blocks on their right, then the powerhouse on their left, then an ordnance depot on their right and then the Abteilung garage on their left. They were climbing, now, almost in darkness, but Mallory knew where he was to the inch: he had so thoroughly memorised the closely tallying descriptions given him by Vlachos and Panayis that' he would have been confident of finding his way with complete accuracy even if the darkness had been absolute.

«What's that, boss?» Miller had caught Mallory by the arm, was pointing to a large, uncompromisingly rectangular building that loomed gauntly against the horizon. «The local hoosegow?»

«Water storage tank,» Mallory said briefly. «Panayis estimates there's half a million gallons in there — magazine flooding in an emergency. The magazines are directly below.» He pointed to a squat, box-like, concrete structure a little farther on. «The only entrance to the magazine. Locked and guarded.»

They were approaching the senior officers' quarters now — the commandant had his own flat on the second story, directly overlooking the massive, reinforced ferro-concrete control tower that controlled the two great guns below. Mallory suddenly stopped, picked up a handful of dirt, rubbed it on his face and told Miller to do the same.

«Disguise,» he explained. «The experts would consider it a bit on the elementary side, but it'll have to do. The lighting's apt to be a bit brighter inside this place.»

He went up the steps to the officers' quarters at a dead run, crashed through the swing doors with a force that almost took them off their hinges. The sentry at the keyboard looked at him in astonishment, the barrel of his sub-machine-gun lining up on the New Zealander's chest.

«Put that thing down, you damned idiot!» Mallory snapped furiously. «Where's the commandant? Quickly, you oaf! It's life or death!»

«Herr — Herr Kominandant?» the sentry stuttered. «He's left — they are all gone, just a minute ago.»

«What? All gone?» Mallory was staring at him with narrowed, dangerous eyes. «Did you say 'all gone'?» he asked softly.

«Yes. I — I'm sure they're …» He broke off abruptly as Mallory's eyes shifted to a point behind his shoulder.

«Then who the hell is that?» Mallory demanded savagely.

The sentry would have been less than human not to fall for it. Even as he was swinging round to look, the vicious judo cut took him just below the ear. Mallory had smashed open the glass of the keyboard before the unfortunate guard bad bit the floor, swept all the keys — about a dozen in all — off their rings and into his pocket. It took them another twenty seconds to tape the man's mouth and hands and lock him in a convenient cupboard; then they were on their way again, still running.

One more obstacle to overcome, Mallory thought as they pounded along in the darkness, the last of the triple defences. He did not know how many men would be guarding the locked door to the magazine, and in that moment of fierce exaltation he didn't particularly care. Neither, he felt sure, did Miller. There were no worries now, no taut-nerved tensions or nameless anxieties. Mallory would have been the last man in the world to admit it, or even believe it, but this was what men like Miller and himself had been born for.

They had their hand-torches out now, the powerful beams swinging in the wild arcs as they plunged along, skirting the massed batteries of A.A. guns. To anyone observing their approach from the front, there could have been nothing more calculated to disarm suspicion than the sight and sound of the two men running towards them without any attempt at concealment, one of them shouting to the other in German, both with lit torches whose beams lifted and fell, lifted and fell as the men's arms windmilled by their sides. But these same torches were deeply hooded, and only a very alert observer indeed would have noticed that the downward arc of the lights never passed backwards beyond the runners' feet.

Suddenly Mallory saw two shadows detaching themselves from the darker shadow of the magazine entrance, steadied his torch for a brief second to check. He slackened speed.

«Right!» he said softly. «Here they come — only two of them. One each — get as close as possible first. Quick and quiet — a shout, a shot, and we're finished. And for God's sake don't start clubbing 'em with your torch. There'll be no lights on in that magazine and I'm not going to start crawling around there with a box of bloody matches in my hand!» He transferred his torch to his left hand, pulled out his Navy Colt, reversed it, caught it by the barrel, brought up sharply only inches away from the guards now running to meet them.

«Are you all right?» Mallory gasped. «Anyone been here? Quickly, man, quickly!»

«Yes, yes, we're all right.» The man was off guard, apprehensive. «What in the name of God is all that noise—»

«Those damned English saboteurs!» Mallory swore viciously. «They've killed the guards and they're inside! Are you sure no one's been here? Come, let me see.»

He pushed his way past the guard, probed his torch at the massive padlock, then straightened his back.

«Thank heaven for that anyway!» He turned round, let the dazzling beam of his torch catch the man square in the eyes, muttered an apology and switched off the light, the sound of the sharp click lost in the hollow, soggy thud of the heel of his Colt catching the man behind the ear, just below the helmet. The sentry was still on his feet, just beginning to crumple, when Mallory staggered as the second guard reeled into him, staggered, recovered, clouted him with the Colt for good measure, then stiffened in sudden dismay as he heard the vicious, hissing plop of Miller's automatic, twice in rapid succession.

«What the hell—»

«Wily birds, boss,» Miller murmured. «Very wily indeed, There was a third character in the shadows at the side. Only way to stop him.» Automatic cocked in his ready hand, he stooped over the man for a moment, then straightened. «Afraid he's been stopped kinda permanent, boss.» There was no expression in his voice.

«Tie up the others.» Mallory had only half-heard him; he was already busy at the magazine door, trying a succession of keys in the lock. The third key fitted, the lock opened and the heavy steel door gave easily to his touch. He took a last swift look round, but there was no one in sight, no sound but the revving, engine of the last of the trucks clearing the fortress gates, the distant rattle of machine-gun fire. Andrea was doing a magnificent job — if only he didn't overdo it, leave his withdrawal till it was too late… . Mallory turned quickly, switched on his torch, stepped inside the door. Miller would follow when he was ready.

A vertical steel ladder fixed to the rock led down to the floor of the cave. On either side of the ladder were hollow lift-shafts, unprotected even by a cage, oiled wire ropes glistening in the middle, a polished metal runner at each side of the square to guide and steady the spring-loaded side-wheels of the lift itself. Spartan in their simplicity but wholly adequate, there was no mistaking these for anything but what they were — the shell hoist shafts going down to the magazine.

Mallory reached the solid floor of the cave and swept his torch round through a 180-degree arc. This was the very end of that great cave that opened out beneath the towering overhang of rock that dominated the entire harbour. Not the natural end, he saw after a moment's inspection, but a man-made addition: the volcanic rock round him had been drilled and blasted out. There was nothing here but the two shafts descending into the pitchy darkness and another steel ladder, also leading to the magazine. But the magazine could wait: to check that there were no more guards down here and to ensure an emergency escape route — there were the two vital needs of the moment.

Quickly Mallory ran along the tunnel, flipping his torch on and off. The Germans were past-masters of booby traps — explosive booby traps — for the protection of important installations, but the chances were that they had none in that tunnel — not with several hundred tons of high explosive stored only feet away.

The tunnel itself, dripping-damp and duckboard floored, was about seven feet high and even wider, but the central passage was very narrow — most of the space was taken up by the roller conveyors, one on either side, for the great cartridges and shells. Suddenly the conveyors curved away sharply to left and right, the sharplysheering tunnel roof climbed steeply up into the neardarkness of the vaulted dome above, and, almost at his feet, their burnished steel caught in the beam from his torch, twin sets of parallel rails, imbedded in the solid stone and twenty feet apart, stretched forward into the lightened gloom ahead, the great, gaping mouth of the cave. And just before he switched off the torch — searchers returning from the Devil's Playground might easily catch the pin-point of light in the darkness — Mallory had a brief glimpse of the turn-tables that crowned the far end of these shining rails and, crouched massively above, like some nightmare monsters from an ancient and other world, the evil, the sinister silhouettes of the two great guns of Navarone.

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.»