"The guns of Navaronne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)CHAPTER 6The German patrol was everything that Mallory had feared — efficient, thorough and very, very painstaking. It even had imagination, in the person of its young and competent sergeant, and that was more dangerous still. There were only four of them, in high boots, helmets and green, grey and brown mottled capes. First of all they located the telephone and reported to base. Then the young sergeant sent two men to search another hundred yards or so along the cliff, while he and the fourth soldier probed among the rocks that paralleled the cliff. The search was slow and careful, but the two men did not penetrate very far into the rocks. To Mallory, the sergeant's, reasoning was obvious and logical. If the sentry had gone to sleep or taken ill, it was unlikely that he would have gone far in among that confused jumble of boulders. Mallory and the others were safely back beyond their reach. And then came what Mallory had feared — an organised, methodical inspection of the cliff-top itself: worse stifi, it began with a search along the very edge. Securely held by his three men with interlinked arms — the last with a hand hooked round his belt — the sergeant walked slowly along the rim, probing every inch with the spotlit beam of a powerful torch. Suddenly he stopped short, exclaimed suddenly and stooped, torch and face only inches from the ground. There was no question as to what he had found — the deep gouge made in the soft, crumbling soil by the climbing rope that had been belayed round the boulder and gone over to the edge of the cliff… . Softly, silently, Mallory and his three companions straightened to their knees or to their feet, gun barrels lining along the tops of boulders or peering out between cracks in the rocks. There was no doubt in any of their minds that Stevens was lying there helplessly in the crutch of the chimney, seriously injured or dead. It needed only one German carbine to point down that cliff face, however carelessly, and these four men would die. They would have to die. The sergeant was stretched out his length now, two men holding his legs. His head and shoulders were over the edge of the cliff, the beam from his torch stabbing down the chimney. For ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, there was no sound on the cliff-top, no sound at all, only the high, keening moan of the wind and the swish of the rain in the stunted grass. And then the sergeant had wriggled back and risen to his feet, slowly shaking his head. Mallory gestured to the others to sink down behind the boulders again, but even so the sergeant's soft Bavarian voice carried clearly in the wind. «It's Ehrich all right, poor fellow.» Compassion and anger blended curiously in the voice. «I warned him often enough about his carelessness, about going too near the edge of that cliff. It is very treacherous.» Instinctively the sergeant stepped back a couple of feet and looked again at the gouge in the soft earth. «That's where his heel slipped — or 'maybe the butt of his carbine. Not that it matters now.» «Is he dead, do you think, Sergeant?» The speaker was only a boy, nervous and unhappy. «It's hard to say.… Look for yourself.» Gingerly the youth lay down on the cliff-top, peering cautiously over the lip of the rock. The other soldiers were talking among themselves, in short staccato sentences, when Mallory turned to Miller, cupped his hands to his mouth and the American's ear. He could contain his puzzlement no longer. «Was Stevens wearing his dark suit when you left him?» he whispered. «Yeah,» Miller whispered back. «Yeah, I think he was.» A pause. «No, thmmit, I'm wrong. We both put on our rubber camouflage capes about the same time.» Mallory nodded. The waterproofs of the Germans were almost identical with their own: and the sentry's hair, Mallory remembered, had been jet black — the same colour as Stevens's dyed hair. Probably all that was visible from above was a crumpled, cape-shrouded figure and a dark head. The sergeant's mistake in identity was more than understandable: it was inevitable. The young soldier eased himself back from the edge of the cliff and hoisted himself carefully to his feet. «You're right, Sergeant. It Mallory felt Andrea's massive hand squeezing his arm, felt the quick surge of relief, then elation, wash through him. So Stevens was alive! Thank God for that! They'd save the boy yet. He heard Andrea whispering the news to the others, then grinned wryly to himself, ironic at his own gladness. Jensen definitely would not have approved of this jubilation. Stevens had already done his part, navigated the boat to Navarone and climbed the cliff: and now he was only a crippled liability, would be a drag on the whole party, reduce what pitiful chances of success remained to them. For a High Command who pushed the counters around crippled pawns slowed up the whole game, made the board so damnably untidy. It was most inconsiderate of Stevens not to have killed himself so that they could have disposed of him neatly and without trace in the deep and hungry waters that boomed around the foot of the cliff… . Mallory clenched his hands in the darkness and swore to himself that the boy would live, come home again, and to hell with total war and all its inhuman demands… . Just a kid, that was all, a scared and broken kid and the bravest of them all. The young sergeant was issuing a string of orders to his men, his voice quick, crisp and confident. A doctor, splints, rescue stretcher, anchored sheer-legs, ropes, spikes — the trained, well-ordered mind missing nothing. Mallory waited tensely, wondering how many men, if any, would be left on guard, for the guards would have to go and that would inevitably betray them. The question of their quick and silent disposal never entered his mind — a whisper in Andrea's ear and the guards would have no more chance than penned lambs against a marauding wolf. Less chance even than that — the lambs could always run and cry out before the darkness closed over them. The sergeant solved the problem for them. The assured competence, the tough, unsentimental ruthlessness that made the German N.C.O. the best in the world gave Mallory the chance he never expected to have. He bad just finished giving his orders when the young soldier touched him on the arm, then pointed over the edge. «How about poor Ehrich, Sergeant?» he asked uncertainly. «Shouldn't — don't you think one of us ought to stay with him?» «And what could you do if you did stay — hold his hand?» the sergeant asked acidly. «If he stirs and falls, then he falls, that's all, and it doesn't matter then if a hundred of us are standing up here watching him. Off you go, and don't forget the mallets and pegs to stay the sheer-legs.» The three men turned and went off quickly to the east without another word. The sergeant walked over to the phone, reported briefly to someone, then set off in the opposite direction — to check the next guard post, Mallory guessed. He was stifi in sight, a dwindling blur in the darkness, when Mallory whispered to Brown and Miller to post themselves on guard again: and they could still hear the measured crunch of his firm footfalls on a patch of distant gravel as their belayed rope went snaking over the edge of the cliff, Andrea and Mallory sliding swiftly down even before it had stopped quivering. Stevens, a huddled, twisted heap with a gashed and bleeding cheek lying cruelly along a razor-sharp spur of rock, was still unconscious, breathing stertorously through his open mouth. Below the knee his right leg twisted upwards and outwards against the rock at an hapossible angle. As gently as he could, braced against either side of the chimney and supported by Andrea, Mallory lifted and straightened the twisted limb. Twice, from the depths of the dark stupor of his unconsciousness, Stevens moaned in agony, but Mallory had no option but to carry on, his teeth clenched tight until his jaws ached. Then slowly, with infinite care, he rolled up the trouser leg, winced and screwed his eyes shut in momentary horror and nausea as he saw the dim whiteness of the shattered tibia sticking out through the torn and purply swollen flesh. «Compound fracture, Andrea.» Gently his exploring fingers slid down the mangled leg, beneath the lip of the jack-boot, stopped suddenly as something gave way beneath his feather touch. «Oh, my God!» he murmured. «Another break, just above the ankle. This boy is in a bad way, Andrea.» «He is indeed,» Andrea said gravely. «We can do nothing for him here?» «Nothing. Just nothing. We'll have to get him up first.» Mallory straightened, gazed up bleakly at the perpendicular face of the chimney. «Although how in the name of heaven—» «I will take him up.» There was no suggestion in Andrea's voice either of desperate resolve or consciousness of the almost incredible effort involved. It was simply a statement of. intention, the voice of a man who never questioned his abifity to do what he said he would. «If you will help me to raise him, to tie him to my back… .» «With his broken leg loose, dangling from a piece of skin and torn muscle?» Mallory protested. «Stevens can't take much more. He'll die if we do this.» «He'll die if we don't,» Andrea murmured. Mallory stared down at Stevens for a long moment, then nodded heavily in the darkness. «He'll die if we don't,» he echoed tiredly. «Yes, we have to do this.» He pushed outwards from the rock, slid half a dozen feet down the rope and jammed a foot in the crutch of the chimney just below Stevens's body. He took a couple of turns of rope round his waist and looked up. «Ready, Andrea?» he called softly. «Ready.» Andrea stooped, hooked his great hands under Stevens's armpits and lifted slowly, powerfully, as Mallory pushed from below. Twice, three times before they had him up, the boy moaned deep down in his tortured throat, the long, quavering «Aabs» of agony setting Mallory's teeth on edge: and then his dangling, twisted leg had passed from Mallory's reach and he was held close and cradled in Andrea's encircling arm, the rain-lashed, bleeding mask of a face lolling grotesquely backwards, forlorn and lifeless with the dead pathos of a broken doll. Seconds later Mallory was up beside them, expertly lashing Stevens's wrists together. He was swearing softly as his numbed hands looped and tightened the rope, softly, bitterly, continuously, but he was quite unaware of this: he was aware only of the broken head that lolled stupidly against his shoulder, of the welling, rain-thinned blood that filmed the upturned face, of the hair above the gashed temple emerging darkly fair as the dye washed slowly out. Inferior bloody boot-blacking, Mallory thought savagely: Jensen shall know of this — it could cost a man's life. And then he became aware of his own thoughts and swore again, stifi more savagely and at 'himself this time, for the utter triviality of what he was thinking. With both hands free — Stevens's bound arms were looped round his neck, his body lashed to his own — Andrea took less than thirty seconds to reach the top: if the dragging, one hundred and sixty pound deadweight on his back made any difference to Andrea's climbing speed and power, Mallory couldn't detect it. The man's endurance was fantastic. Once, just once, as Andrea scrambled over the edge of the cliff, the broken leg caught on the rock, and the crucifying torture of it seared through the merciful shell of insensibility, forced a brief shriek of pain from his lips, a hoarse, bubbling whisper of sound all the more horrible for its muted agony. And then Andrea was standing upright and Mallory was behind him, cutting swiftly at the ropes that bound the two together. «Straight into the rocks with him, Andrea, will you?» Mallory whispered. «Wait for us at the first open space you come to.» Andrea nodded slowly and without raising his head, his hooded eyes bent over the boy in his arms, like a man sunk in thought. Sunk in thought or listening, and all unawares Mallory, too, found himself looking and listening into the thin, lost moaning of the wind, and there was nothing there, only the lifting, dying threnody and the chill of the rain hardening to an ice-cold sleet. He shivered, without knowing why, and listened again; then he shook himself angrily, turned abruptly towards the cliff face and started reeling in the rope. He had it all up, lying round his feet in a limp and rain-sodden tangle when he remembered about the spike still secured to the foot of the chimney, the hundreds of feet of rope suspended from it. He was too tired and cold and depressed even to feel exasperated with himself. The sight of Stevens and the knowledge of how it was with the boy had affected him more than he knew. Moodily, almost, he kicked the rope over the side again, slid down the chimney, untied the second rope and sent the spike spinning out into the darkness. Less than ten minutes later, the wetly-coiled ropes over his shoulder, he led Miller and Brown into the dark confusion of the rocks. They found Stevens lying under the lee of a huge boulder, less than a hundred yards inland, in a tiny, cleared space barely the size of a billiard table. An oilskin was spread beneath him on the sodden, gravelly earth, a camouflage cape covered most of his body: it was bitterly cold now, but the rock broke the force of the wind, sheltered the boy from the driving sleet. Andrea looked up as the three men dropped into the hollow and lowered their gear to the ground; already, Mallory could see, Andrea had rolled the trouser up beyond the knee and cut the heavy jack-boot away from the mangled leg. «Sufferin' Christ!» The words, half-oath, half-prayer, were torn involuntarily from Miller: even in the deep gloom the shattered leg looked ghastly. Now he dropped on one knee and stooped low over it. «What a mess!» he murmured slowly. He looked up ov#x443;r his shoulder. «We've gotta do something about that leg, boss, and we've no damned time to lose. This kid's a good candidate for the mortuary.» «I know. We've got to save him, Dusty, we've just got to.» All at once this had become terribly important to Mallory. He dropped down on his knees. «Let's have a look at him.» Impatiently Miller waved him away. «Leave this to me, boss.» There was a sureness, a sudden authority in his voice that held Mallory silent. «The medicine pack, quick — and undo that tent.» «You sure you can handle this?» God knew, Mallory thought, he didn't really doubt him — he was conscious only of gratitude, of a profound relief, but he felt he had to say something. «How are you going—» «Look, boss,» Miller said quietly. «All my life I've worked with just three things — mines, tunnels and explosives. They're kinda tricky things, boss. I've seen hundreds of busted arms and legs — and fixed most of them myself.» He grinned wryly in the darkness. «I was boss myself, then — just one of my privileges, I reckon.» «Good enough!» Mallory clapped him on the shoulder. «He's all yours, Dusty. But the tent!» Involuntarily he looked over his shoulder in the direction of the cliff. «I mean—» «You got me wrong, boss.» Miller's hands, steady and precise with the delicate certainty of a man who has spent a lifetime with high explosives, were busy with a swab and disinfectant. «I wasn't fixin' on settin' up a base hospital. But we need tent-poles — splints for his legs.» «Of course, of course. The poles. Never occurred to me for splints — and rye been thinking of nothing else for—» «They're not too important, boss.» Miller had the medicine pack open now, rapidly selecting the items he wanted with the aid of a hooded torch. «Morphine-- that's the first thing, or this kid's goin' to die of shock. And then shelter, warmth, dry clothin'—» «Warmth! Dry clothing!» Mallory interrupted incredulously. He looked down at the unconscious boy, remembering how Stevens had lost them the stove and all the fuel, and his mouth twisted in bitterness. His own executioner… . «Where in God's name are we going to find thorn?» «I don't know, boss,» Miller said simply. «But we gotta find them. And not just to lessen shock. With a leg like this and soaked to the skin, he's bound to get pneumonia. And then as much sulfa as that bloody great hole in his leg will take — one touch of sepsis in the state this kid's in…» His voice trailed away into silence. Mallory rose to his feet. «I reckon you're the boss.» It was a very creditable imitation of the American's drawl, and Miller looked up quickly, surprise melting into a tired smile, then looked away again. Mallory could hear the chatter of his teeth as he bent over Stevens, and sensed rather than saw that he was shivering violently, continuously, but oblivious to it all in his complete concentration on the job in hand. Miller's clothes, Mallory remembered again, were completely saturated: not for the first time, Mallory wondered how he had managed to get himself into such a state with a waterproof covering him. «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.» Stevens stirred uncomfortably, but the dead pallor of the high-boned cheeks was stained with embarrassed pleasure. «Please, sir,» he pleaded. «Don't talk like that. It was just one of these things.» He paused, eyes screwed shut and indrawn breath hissing sharply through his teeth as a wave of pain washed up from his shattered leg. Then he looked at Mallory again. «And there's no credit due to me for the climb,» he went on quietly. «I hardly remember a thing about it.» Mallory looked at him without speaking, eyebrows arched in mild interrogation. «I was scared to death every step of the way up,» Stevens said simply. He was conscious of no surprise, no wonder that he was saying the thing he would have died rather than say. «I've never been so scared in all my life.» Mallory shook his head slowly from side to side, stubbled chin rasping in his cupped palm. He seemed genninely puzzled. Then he looked down at Stevens and smiled quizzically. «Now I know you «Andrea!» Stevens laughed, then cried out as the movement triggered off a crepitant agony in his boneshattered leg. For a moment Mallory thought he had lost consciousness, but almost at once he spoke again, his voice husky with pain. «Andrea!» he whispered. «Scared! I don't believe it!» «Andrea He looked across at Stevens and smiled. «There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die — that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer. Or sometimes ten minutes, or twenty minutes — or the time it takes a man sick and bleeding and afraid to climb a cliff.» Stevens said nothing. His head was sunk on his chest, and his face was hidden. He had seldom felt so happy, seldom so at peace with himself, He had known that he could not hide things from men like Andrea and Mallory, but he had not known that it would not matter. He felt he should say something, but he could not think what and he was deathly tired. He knew, deep down, that Andrea was speaking the truth, but not the whole truth; but he was too tired to care, to try to work things out. Miller cleared his throat noisily. «No more talkin', Lieutenant,» he said firmly. «You gotta lie down, get yourself some sleep.» Stevens looked at him, then at Mallory in puzzled inquiry. «Better do what you're told, Andy,» Mallory smiled. «Your surgeon and medical adviser talking. He fixed your leg.» «Oh! I didn't know. Thanks, Dusty. Was it very — difficult?» Miller waved a deprecatory hand. «Not for a man of my experience. Just a simple break,» he lied easily. «Almost let one of the others do it… . Give him a hand to lie down, will you, Andrea?» He jerked his head towards Mallory. «Boss?» The two men moved outside, turning their backs to the icy wind. «We gotta get a fire, dry clothing, for that kid,» Miller said urgently. «His pulse is about 140, temperature 103. He's rnnnin' a fever, and he's losin' ground all the thne.» «I know, I know,» Mallory said worriedly. «And there's not a hope of getting any fuel on this damned mountain. Let's go in and see how much dried clothing we can muster between us.» He lifted the edge of the canvas and stepped inside. Stevens was still awake, Brown and Andrea on either side of him. Miller was on his heels. «We're going to stay here for the night,» Mallory announced, «so let's make things as snug as possible. Mind you,» he admitted, «we're a bit too near the cliff for comfort, but old Jerry hasn't a clue we're on the island, and we're out of sight of the coast. Might as well make ourselves comfortable.» «Boss …» Miller made to speak, then fell silent again. Mallory looked at him in surprise, saw that he, Brown and Stevens were looking at one another, uncertainty, then doubt and a dawning, sick comprehension in their eyes. A sudden anxiety, the sure knowledge that something was far wrong, struck at Mallory like a blow. «What's up?» he demanded sharply. «What is it?» «We have bad news for you, boss,» Miller said carefully. «We should have told you right away. Guess we all thought that one of the others would have told you… . Remember that sentry you and Andrea shoved over the side?» Mallory nodded, somberly. He knew what was coming. «He fell on top of that reef twenty-thirty feet or so from the cliff,» Miller went on. «Wasn't much of him left, I guess, but what was was jammed between two rocks. He was really stuck good and fast.» «I see,» Mallory murmured. «I've been wondering all night how you managed to get so wet under your rubber cape.» «I tried four times, boss,» Miller said quietly. «The others had a rope round me.» He shrugged his shoulders. «Not a chance. Them gawddamned waves just flung me back against the cliff every time.» «It will be light in three or four hours,» Mallory murmured. «In four hours they will know we are on the island. They will see him as soon as it's dawn and send a boat to investigate.» «Does it really matter, sir,» Stevens suggested. «He could still have fallen.» Mallory eased the canvas aside and looked out into the night. It was bitterly cold and the snow was beginning to fall all around them. He dropped the canvas again. «Five minutes,» he said absently. «We will leave in five minutes.» He looked at Stevens and smiled faintly. «We are forgetful, too. We should have told you. Andrea stabbed the sentry through the heart.» The hours that followed were hours plucked from the darkest nightmare, endless, numbing hours of stumbling and tripping and falling and getting up again, of racked bodies and aching, tortured muscles, of dropped loads and frantic pawing around in the deepening snow, of hunger and thirst and all-encompassing exhaustion. They had retraced their steps now, were heading W.N.W. back across the shoulder of the mountain — almost certainly the Germans would think they had gone due north, heading for the centre of the island. Without compass, stars or moon to guide, Mallory had nothing to orientate them but the feel of the slope of the mountain and the map Viachos had given them in Alexandria. But by and by he was reasonably certain that they had rounded the mountain and were pushing up some narrow gorge into the interior. The snow was the deadly enemy. Heavy, wet and feathery, it swirled all around them in a blanketing curtain of grey, sifted down their necks and jackboots, worked its insidious way under their clothes and up their sleeves, blocked their eyes and ears and mouths, pierced and then anaesthetised exposed faces, and turned gloveless hands into leaden lumps of ice, benumbed and all but powerless. All suffered, and suffered badly, but Stevens most of all. He had lost consciousness again within minutes of leaving the cave and clad in clinging, sodden clothes as he was, he now lacked even the saving warmth generated by physical activity. Twice Andrea had stopped and felt for the beating of the heart, for he thought that the boy had died: but he could feel nothing for there was no feeling left in his bands, and could only wonder and stumble on again. About five in the morning, as they were climbing up the steep valley head above the gorge, a treacherous, slippery slope with only a few stunted carob trees for anchor in the sliding scree, Mallory decided that they must rope up for safety's sake. In single file they scrambled and struggled up the ever-steepening slope for the next twenty minutes: Mallory, in the lead, did not even dare to think how Andrea was getting on behind him. Suddenly the slope eased, flattened out completely, and almost before they realised what was happening they bad crossed the high divide, still roped together and in driving, blinding snow with zero visibility, and were sliding down the valley on the other side. They came to the cave at dawn, just as the first grey stirrings of a bleak and cheerless day struggled palely through the lowering, snow-filled sky to the east. Monsieur Vlachos had told them that the south of Navarone was honeycombed with caves, but this was the first they had seen, and even then it was no cave but a dark, narrow tunnel in a great heap of piled volcanic slabs, huge, twisted layers of rock precariously poised in a gulley that threaded down the slope towards some broad and unknown valley a thousand, two thousand feet beneath them, a valley still shrouded in the gloom of night. It was no cave, but it was enough. For frozen, exhausted, sleep-haunted men, it was more than enough, it was more than they had ever hoped for. There was room for them all, the few cracks were quickly blocked against the drifting snow, the entrance curtained off by the boulder-weighted tent. Somehow, impossibly almost in the cramped darkness, they stripped Stevens of his sea- and rain-soaked clothes, eased him into a providentially zipped sleeping-bag, forced some brandy down his throat and cushioned the blood-stained head on some dry clothing. And then the four men, even the tireless Andrea, slumped down to the sodden, snow-chilled floor of the cave and slept like men already dead, oblivious alike of the rocks on the floor, the cold, their hunger and their clammy, saturated clothing, oblivious even of the agony of returning circulation in their frozen hands and faces. |
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