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Storm Force from Navarone
Sam Llewellyn

Литагент HarperCollins








SAM LLEWELLYN

Storm Force from Navarone


The sequel to Alistair MacLean’s

Force 10 from Navarone







To David Burnett




PROLOGUE March 1944 (#ulink_27ea7fb9-1fee-5521-8cc1-04bcf1114a67)


The radar operator said, ‘Contact. Three bloody contacts. Jesus.’

The Liberator dipped a wing, bucking heavily as it carved through one of the squalls of cloud streaming over the Atlantic towards Cabo Ortegal, at the top left-hand corner of Spain. ‘Language,’ said the pilot mildly. ‘Bomb-aimer?’

Down in the nose the bomb-aimer said, ‘Ready.’ The pilot’s leather-gloved hand went to the throttles. The note of the four Pratt and Whitney engines climbed to a tooth-rattling roar. The pilot eased the yoke forward. Girders creaking, the Liberator bounced down into the clouds.

Vapour streamed past the bomb-aimer’s Perspex window, thick and grey as coal smoke. At five hundred feet it became patchy. There was sea down there: grey sea, laced with nets of foam.

The bomb-aimer’s mouth was dry. Just looking at the heave of that sea made you feel sick. But there was something else: a wide, smooth road across those rough-backed swells, as if they had been ironed -

‘See them yet?’ said the pilot.

The bomb-aimer could hear his heart beat, even above the crackle of the intercom and the roar of the engines. ‘See them,’ he said.

At the end of the smooth road three long, low hulls were tearing chevrons of foam from the sea. The hulls were slim and grey, with streamlined conning towers. Slim, grey sitting ducks.

‘They’re bloody enormous,’ said the radar operator, peering over the pilot’s shoulder. ‘What the hell are they?’

They were submarines, but submarines twice the size of any British or German craft the pilot had seen in four years of long flights over weary seas that had made him an expert on submarines. They were indeed bloody enormous.

The pilot frowned at the foam-crested waves of their wakes. Hard to tell, of course, but they looked as if they were making at least thirty-five knots. If they were theirs, thought the pilot, they could really do some damage. Hope they’re ours -

Glowing red balls rose lazily from the conning towers and flicked past the cockpit canopy.

‘Theirs,’ said the pilot, slamming the plane into a tight 180° turn. The tracers had stripped him of his mildness. ‘Commencing run.’

There was a lot of tracer now, pouring past the Liberator’s cockpit, mixed with the black puffs of heavier flak. The Liberator bucked, its rivets groaning in the heat-wrenched sky. The bomb-aimer tried not to think about his unprotected belly, and closed his mind to the bad-egg fumes of the shell bursts and the yammer of the nose-gunner’s Brownings above his head. It was an easy two miles to bombs away: twenty endless seconds, at a hundred and eighty knots.

‘Funny,’ said the pilot. ‘Why aren’t they diving?’

The bomb-aimer stared into his sight. ‘Bomb doors open,’ he said. He felt the new tremor of the airframe as the doors spoilt the streamlining. The sight filled with grey and wrinkled sea. The submarines swam in V-formation down the stepladder markings towards the release point, innocent as three trout in a stream, except for the lazy red bubbles of the tracer.

The bomb-aimer frowned, pressing his face into the eyepiece of the sight. There was something wrong with the submarine in the middle. The deck forward of the conning tower looked twisted and bent. Christ, thought the bomb-aimer, someone’s rammed her. Nearly cut her in half. That’s why she’s not diving. She’s damaged -

Something burst with a clang out on the port side. Icy air was suddenly howling at the bomb-aimer’s neck. The little submarines in the bomb-sight drifted off to starboard. ‘Right a bit,’ said the bomb-aimer, calmly, over the hammer of his heart. ‘Right a bit.’ The three grey fish slid back onto the line. ‘Steady.’ His leather thumb found the release button. The tracer was horrible now, thick as a blizzard. The bomb-aimer concentrated on hoping that Pearl in the mess wouldn’t overcook his bloody egg again, like cement it was yesterday -

‘Steady,’ he said. The grey triangle was half an inch from the release point. ‘Going,’ he said. ‘Going-’

A giant hammer smashed into the fuselage somewhere behind him. He felt a terrible agony in his left leg. Hit, he thought. Bastard hit us. His hand clenched on the bomb-release button. He felt the upward bound of the aircraft as the depth charges dropped free.

Too early, he thought.

Then there was no more thinking, because his face was full of smoke and his head was full of the agony of a leg broken in four places, and someone was howling like a dog, and as the grey clouds reached down and closed their hands round the Liberator, he realised that the person making all that racket was him.

Ten minutes later the radar operator finished the dressing and threw the morphine syrette out of one of the rents torn in the fuselage by the shell. He thought the bomb-aimer looked bloody awful, but then compound fractures are not guaranteed to bring a smile to the lips. To cheer him up, the radar operator gave him the thumbs up and mouthed, ‘Got one!’ Through pink clouds of morphine the bomb-aimer saw his lips move, and tried to look interested.

‘Hit one,’ said the radar operator. ‘Saw smoke. One was damaged already, looked like someone rammed it. And we hit at least one.’ But of course he might as well have been talking to himself because you couldn’t hear anything, what with the engines and a sodding great hole in the fuselage, and anyway, the bomb-aimer was asleep.

Bloody great U-boats, though, thought the radar operator. Never seen anything like them before. Not that big. Nor that fast.

The Liberator droned north and west across the Bay of Biscay, above the corrugated mat of cloud, towards the Coastal Command base at St-Just. There the crew, nervously preoccupied with the hardness of their eggs, were comprehensively debriefed.




CONTENTS


Cover (#uc5ce3275-e154-5431-b392-f921d05248af)

Title Page (#u585e29e0-e001-559c-9a76-b029afd1f50c)

PROLOGUE March 1944 (#u66c268fc-bdcb-51b3-9156-f1a3003fc436)

ONE Sunday 1000-1900 (#u8973c27b-9601-5906-8751-8b8b0e106e42)

TWO Sunday 1900-Monday 0900 (#u88f1c1dc-702a-5096-bc20-9117d451421a)

THREE Monday 0900-1900 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOUR Monday 1900-Tuesday 0500 (#litres_trial_promo)

FIVE Tuesday 0500-2300 (#litres_trial_promo)

SIX Tuesday 2300-Wednesday 0400 (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN Wednesday 0400-0500 (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE Wednesday 1400 (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Sam Llewellyn (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




ONE Sunday 1000-1900 (#ulink_1680a4ec-f98b-5c4d-9906-8651b8a05cb1)


Andrea stared at Jensen. The huge Greek’s face was horror-stricken. ‘Say again?’ he said.

‘A job,’ said Captain Jensen. He was standing in a shaft of Italian sun that gleamed on his sharp white teeth and the gold braid on the brim of his cap. ‘Just a tiny little job, really. And I thought, since the three of you were here anyway

As always, Jensen was dreadfully crisp, his uniform sparkling white, his stance upright and alert, the expression on his bearded face innocent but slightly piratical. The three men in the chairs looked the reverse of crisp. Their faces were hollow with exhaustion. They sat as if they had been dropped into their seats from a height. The visible parts of their bodies were laced with sticking plaster and red with Mercurochrome. They looked one step away from being stone-dead.

But Jensen knew better.

It had cost him considerable effort to assemble this team. There was Mallory, who before the war had been a mountaineer, world-famous for his Himalayan exploits, and conqueror of most of the unclimbed peaks in the Southern Alps of his native New Zealand. Mallory had spent eighteen months behind enemy lines in Crete with the man sitting next to him: Andrea. The gigantic Andrea, strong as a team of bulls, quiet as a shadow, a full colonel in the Greek army, and one of the deadliest irregular soldiers ever to knife a sentry. And then there was Corporal Dusty Miller from Chicago, member of the Long Range Desert Force, sometime deserter, goldminer, and bootlegger. If it existed, Miller could wreck it. Miller had a genius for sabotage equalled only by his genius for insubordination.

But Jensen valued soldiers for their fighting ability, not their standard of turnout. In Jensen’s view these men were very useful indeed.

The gleam of those carnivorous teeth hurt Andrea’s eyes. It does not take much to hurt your eyes, when you have not slept for the best part of a fortnight.

‘A tiny little job,’ said Mallory. His face was gaunt and pouchy. Like Andrea, he was by military standards badly in need of a shave. ‘Are you going to tell us about it?’

The grin widened. ‘I thought maybe you would be feeling a bit unreceptive.’

Corporal Dusty Miller had been almost horizontal in a leather-buttoned chair, staring with more than academic interest at the frescoed nudes on the ceiling of the villa Jensen had commandeered as his HQ. Now he spoke. That never stopped you before,’ he said.

Jensen’s bushy right eyebrow rose a millimetre. This was not the way that captains in the Royal Navy were accustomed to being addressed by ordinary corporals.

But Dusty Miller was not an ordinary corporal, in the same way that Captain Mallory was not an ordinary captain, or for that matter, Andrea was not an ordinary Greek Resistance fighter. Because of their lack of ordinariness, Jensen knew that he would have to treat them with a certain respect: the same sort of respect you would give three deadly weapons with which you wished to do damage to the enemy.

For in that room full of soldiers who were not ordinary soldiers, Jensen was not an ordinary naval captain. As an eighteen-year-old lieutenant, he had run a successful Q-ship, sinking eight U-boats in the final year of the 14-18 war. Between the wars he had been, frankly, a spy. He had led Shiite risings in Iraq; penetrated a scheme to block the Suez Canal; and as a marine surveyor employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, perpetrated a set of alarmingly but intentionally inaccurate charts of the Sulu Sea. Now, in the fifth year of the war, he was Chief of Operations of the Subversive Operations Executive. Some said that Allied victory at El Alamein had been partly due to SOE’s clandestine substitution of a carborundum paste for grease in a fuel dump. And in the last month he had successfully planned the destruction of the impregnable battery of Navarone, and the diversionary raid in Yugoslavia that had led to the fall of the Gustav Line and the breakout from the Anzio beachhead.

But Jensen had only done the planning. These three men - Mallory, the New Zealander, a taciturn mountaineer, tough as a commando knife; the American Dusty Miller, an Einstein among saboteurs; and Andrea, the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man-mountain with the quietness of a cat and the strength of a bear - were the weapons he had used.

If there were deadlier weapons in the world Jensen’s enquiries had failed to reveal them. And Jensen’s enquiries were notoriously very searching indeed.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Any of you gentlemen speak French?’

Mallory frowned. ‘German,’ he said. ‘Greek.’

Andrea yawned and covered his mouth with a gigantic hand, still covered in bandages from the abrasions he had sustained holding onto the iron rungs of a ladder under the flume of water from the bursting Zenitsa dam.

‘I do,’ said Dusty Miller.

‘Fluent?’

‘I had a job in Montreal once,’ said Miller, his eyes blue and innocent. ‘Doorman in a cathouse.’

‘Thank you, Corporal,’ said Jensen.

‘Il n’y a pas de quoi,’ said Miller, with old-world courtesy.

‘We’ve found you some interpreters,’ said Jensen.

Mallory sighed inwardly. He knew Jensen. When Jensen wanted you aboard, you were aboard, and the only thing to do was to check the location of the life jackets provided, and settle in for the ride. He said, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why do we need to speak French?’

Jensen grinned a grin that would have looked impressive on a hungry shark. He walked across the bronze carpet to the huge ormolu desk, bare except for two telephones, one red, one black. He said, ‘There is someone I want you to meet.’ He picked up the black telephone. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Please send in the gentlemen in the waiting room.’

Mallory gazed at the veining on a marble pillar. Aircraft were droning overhead, flying air support for the troops advancing north from the wreckage of the Gustav Line. He lit another cigarette, the taste of the last one still bitter in his mouth. He wanted to sleep for a week. Make that a month -

The door opened, and two men came in. One of them was a tall major with a Guards moustache. The other was shorter, stocky and bull-necked, with three pips on his epaulettes.

‘Major Dyas. Intelligence,’ said Jensen. ‘And Captain Killigrew. SAS.’

Major Dyas nodded. Captain Killigrew fixed each man in turn with a searching glare. His face was brick-red from the sun, and something that Mallory decided was anger. Mallory returned his salute. Andrea nodded and, being a foreigner, got away with it. Dusty Miller remained horizontal in his chair, acknowledging Killigrew by opening one eye and raising a bony hand.

Killigrew swelled like a toad. Jensen’s ice-blue eyes flicked between the two men. He said quickly, ‘Take a seat, Captain. Major, do your stuff.’

Killigrew lowered himself stiffly onto a hard chair, on which he sat bolt upright, not touching the backrest.

‘Yah,’ said Dyas. ‘You may smoke.’ Mallory and Miller were already smoking. Dyas ran his hand over his high, intellectual forehead. He could have been a doctor, or a professor of philosophy.

Jensen said, ‘Major Dyas has kindly agreed to brief you on the background to this … little job.’ Mallory leaned back in his chair. He was still tired, but soon there would be something to override the tiredness. The same something he remembered from huts in the Southern Alps, after a gruelling approach march, two hours’ sleep, and waking in the dark chill before dawn. Soon there would be no way to go but up and over. Climbing and fighting: plan your campaign, grit your teeth, do the job or die in the attempt. There were similarities.

‘Now then,’ said Dyas. ‘To start with. What you are about to hear is known to only seven men in the world, now ten, including you. Other people have the individual bits and pieces, but what counts is the … totality.’ He paused to stuff tobacco into a blackened pipe, and applied an oil well-sized Zippo. ‘June is going to be an important month of this war,’ he said from inside a rolling cloud of smoke. ‘Probably the most important yet.’ Miller’s eyes had opened. Andrea was sitting forward in his chair, massive forearms on his stained khaki knees. ‘We are going to take a gamble,’ said Dyas. ‘A big gamble. And we want you to adjust the odds for us.’

Miller said, ‘Trust Captain Jensen to run a crooked game.’

‘Sorry?’ said Dyas.

Mallory said, ‘The Corporal was expressing his enthusiasm.’

‘Ah.’ Another cloud of smoke.

Mallory could feel that jump of excitement in his stomach. ‘This gamble,’ he said. ‘A new front?’

Dyas said, ‘Put it like this. What we are going to need is complete control of the seas. We’re good in the air, we’re fine on the surface. But there’s a hitch.’ Killigrew’s face was darkening. Looks as if he’ll burst a blood vessel, thought Mallory. Wonder what he’s got to do with this.

‘Submarines,’ said Dyas. ‘U-boats. There has been an idea current that between airborne radar and asdic and huff-duff radio direction finding, we had ‘em licked.’ Another cloud of smoke. ‘An idea we all had. Until a couple of months ago.

‘In March we had a bit of trouble with some Atlantic convoys, and their escorts too. Basically, ships started to sink in a way we hadn’t seen ships sink for two years now.’ The professorial face was grim and hard. ‘And it was odd. You’d get a series of explosions in say a two-hundred-mile circle, and you’d think, same old thing, U-boats moving together, wolf pack. But it wasn’t a wolf pack, because there was no radio traffic, and the sinkings were too far apart. So then they thought it was possibly mines. But it didn’t seem to be mines either, because one day in late March HMS Frantic, an escort destroyer, picked up an echo seven hundred miles off Cape Finisterre. There had been two sinkings in the convoy. The destroyer went in pursuit, but lost it.’ He returned to his pipe.

‘Nothing unusual about that,’ said Mallory.

Dyas nodded, mildly. ‘Except that the destroyer was steaming full speed ahead at the time, and the submarine just sailed away from her.’

‘Sorry?’ said Miller.

‘The destroyer was steaming at thirty-five knots,’ said Dyas. The U-boat was doing easily five knots better than that.’

Miller said, ‘Why is this guy telling us all this stuff?’

Mallory said, ‘I think Corporal Miller would like to know the significance of this fact.’

Jensen said, ‘Excuse me, Major Dyas.’ His face wore an expression of strained patience. ‘For your information, U-boats have to spend most of their time on the surface, running their diesels to make passage and charge their batteries. Submerged, their best speed has so far been under ten knots, and they can’t keep it up for long because of the limitations of their batteries.’ His face was cold and grim, its deep creases as if carved from stone. ‘So what we’re faced with is this: the English Channel full of the biggest fleet of ships ever assembled, and these U-boats - big U-boats - carrying a hundred torpedoes each, God knows they’re big enough - travelling at forty knots, under water. We know Jerry’s got at least three of them. That could mean three hundred ships sunk, and Lord knows how many men lost.’

Miller said, ‘So you get one quick echo. Not much of a basis for total panic stations. How fast do whales swim?’

Jensen snapped, ‘Try keeping your ears open and your mouth shut.’

It was only then that Mallory saw the strain the man was under. The Jensen he knew was relaxed, with that naval quarterdeck sang-froid. Piratical, yes; aggressive, yes. Those were his stock in trade. But always calm. As long as Mallory had known Jensen, he had never known him lose his temper - not even with Dusty Miller, who did not hold with officers. But this was a Jensen balanced on a razor-honed knife’s edge.

Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and frowned. Then he said, ‘Corporal Miller’s got a point, sir.’

‘Whales,’ said Dyas. ‘Actually, we thought of that. But one has been … adding up two and two.’ His mild voice was balm to the frazzled nerves under the frescoed ceiling. ‘Another escort reported ramming a large submarine. Then a Liberator got shot up bombing two U-boats escorting a third that bore signs of having been rammed. They were huge, these boats, steaming at thirty-odd knots on the surface. The Liberator reported them as damaged. But when we sent more aircraft out to search for them, they had vanished.

‘They were reckoned to be in no state to dive, so they were presumed sunk. Then there was a message picked up - doesn’t matter what sort of message, doesn’t matter where, but take it from me, it was a reliable message - to say that the Werwolf pack was refitting after damage caused by enemy action. Said refit to be complete by noon Wednesday of the second week in May.’

It was now Sunday of the second week in May.

The painted vaults of the ceiling filled with silence. Mallory said, ‘So these submarines. What are they?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Dyas, with an academic scrupulousness that would have irritated Mallory, if he had been the sort of man who got irritated about things. ‘The Kriegsmarine have maintained pretty good security, but we’ve been able to patch a couple of ideas together. We know they’ve got a new battery system for underwater running, which stores a lot of power. A lot of power. But there’ve been rumours about something else. We think it’s more likely to be something new. Development of an idea by a chap called Walter. They’ve been working on it since the thirties. An internal combustion engine that runs under water. Burns fuel oil.’

Miller’s eyes had opened now, and he was sitting in a position that for him was almost upright. He said, ‘What in?’

‘In?’ Dyas frowned.

‘You can’t burn fuel oil under water. You need oxygen.’

‘Ah. Yes. Quite. Good question.’ Miller did not look flattered. Engines were his business. He knew how to make them run. He knew even more about destroying them. ‘Nothing definite. But they think it’s probably something like hydrogen peroxide. On the surface, you’d aspirate your engine with air, of course. As you submerged, you’d have an automatic changeover, a float switch perhaps, that would close the air intake and start up a disintegrator that would get you oxygen out of something like hydrogen peroxide. So you’d get a carbon dioxide exhaust, which would dissolve in sea water. Or so the theory goes.’

Jensen stood up. ‘Theory or no theory,’ he said, ‘they’re refitting. They must be destroyed before they can go to sea again. And you’re going to do the destroying.’

Mallory said, ‘Where are they?’

Dyas unrolled a map that hung on the wall behind him. It showed France and Northern Spain, the brown corrugations of the Pyrenees marching from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and snaking down the spine of the mountains the scarlet track of the border. He said, They were bombed off Cabo Ortegal. They couldn’t dive, so they wouldn’t have gone north. We believe that they are here.’ He picked up a billiard cue and tapped the long, straight stretch of coast that ran from Bordeaux south through Biarritz and St-Jean-de-Luz to the Spanish border.

Mallory looked at the pointer. There were three ports: Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. Otherwise, the coast was a straight line that looked as if it probably meant a beach. He said, ‘Where?’

Dyas avoided his eye and fumbled at his moustache. Since he had been in the room, he had found himself increasingly unnerved by the stillness of these men, the wary relaxation of their deep-eyed faces. The big one with the black moustache was silent and dangerous, with a horrible sort of power about him. Of the other two, one seemed slovenly and the other insubordinate. They looked like, well, gangsters. Dashed unmilitary, thought Dyas. But Jensen knew what he was doing. Famous for it. Still, Mallory’s question was not a question he much liked.

He said, ‘Well, Spain’s a neutral country.’ He forced himself not to laugh nervously. ‘And we’ve got good intelligence from Bordeaux, so we know they’re not there.’ He coughed, more nervously than he had intended. ‘In fact, we don’t know where they are.’

The three pairs of eyes watched him in silence. Finally, Mallory spoke. ‘So we’ve got until Wednesday noon to find some submarines and destroy them. The only difficulty is that we don’t know where they are. And, come to that, we don’t actually know if they exist.’

Jensen said, ‘Oh yes we do. You’ll be dropped to a reception committee - ‘

‘Dropped?’ said Miller, his lugubrious face a mask of horror.

‘By parachute.’

‘Oh my stars,’ said Miller, in a high, limp-wristed voice.

‘Though if you keep interrupting we might forget the parachute and drop you anyway.’ There was a hardness in Jensen’s corsair face that made even Miller realise that he had said enough. ‘The reception committee, I was saying. They will take you to a man called Jules, who knows a fisherman who knows the whereabouts of these U-boats. This fisherman will sell you the information.’

‘Sell?’

‘You will be supplied with the money.’

‘So where is this fisherman?’

‘We are not as yet aware of his whereabouts.’

‘Ah,’ said Mallory, rolling his eyes at the frescoes. He lit yet another cigarette. ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have the advantage of surprise.’

Miller pasted an enthusiastic smile to his doleful features. ‘Gosh and golly gee,’ he said. ‘If they’re as surprised as we are, they’ll be amazed.’

Dyas was looking across at Jensen. Mallory thought he looked like a man in some sort of private agony. Jensen nodded, and smiled his ferocious smile. He seemed to have recovered his composure. ‘One would rather hope so,’ he said, ‘because these submarines have got to be destroyed. No ifs, no buts. I don’t care what you have to do. You’ll have carte blanche.’ He paused. ‘As far as is consistent with operating absolutely on your own.’ He coughed. If a British Naval officer schooled in Nelsonian duplicities could ever be said to look shifty, Jensen looked shifty now. ‘As to the element of surprise … Well. Sorry to disappoint,’ he said, ‘but actually, not quite. Thing is, an SAS team went in last week, and nobody’s heard from them since. So we think they’ve probably been captured.’

Mallory allowed the lids to droop over his gritty eyeballs. He knew what that meant, but he wanted to hear Jensen say it.

‘In fact it seems quite possible,’ said Jensen, ‘that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you.’

Killigrew seemed to see this as his cue. He was a small man, built like a bull, with a bull’s rolling eye. He rose, marched to the centre of the room, planted his feet a good yard apart on the mosaic floor, and sank his head between his mighty shoulders. ‘Now listen here, you men,’ he barked, in the voice of one used to being the immediate focus of attention.

Jensen looked across at Mallory’s lean crusader face. His eyes were closed. Andrea was gently stroking his moustache, gazing out of the window, where the late morning sun shone yellow-green in the leaves of a vine. Dusty Miller had removed his cigarette from his mouth, and was talking to it. ‘Special Air Squads,’ he said. ‘They land with goddamn howitzers and goddamn Jeeps, with a noise like a train wreck. They do not think it necessary to employ guides or interpreters, let alone speak foreign languages. They have skulls made of concrete and no goddamn brains at all - can I help you?’

Killigrew was standing over him with a face of purple fire. ‘Say that again,’ he said.

Miller yawned. ‘No goddamn brains,’ he said. ‘Bulls in a china shop.’

Mallory’s eyes were open now. The veins in Killigrew’s neck were standing out like ivy on a tree trunk, and his eyes were suffused with blood. The jaw was out like the ram of an icebreaker. And to Mallory’s amazement, he saw that the right fist was pulled back, ready to spread Miller’s teeth all over the back of his head.

‘Dusty,’ he said.

Miller looked at him.

‘Miller apologises, sir,’ said Mallory.

‘Temper,’ said Miller.

Killigrew’s fist remained clenched.

‘You’re on a charge, Miller,’ said Mallory, mildly.

‘Yessir,’ said Miller.

Jensen’s voice cracked like a whip. ‘Captain!’

Killigrew’s heels crashed together. His florid face was suddenly grey. He had come within a whisker of assaulting another rank. The consequence would have been, well, a court-martial.

Mallory ground out his cigarette in a marble ashtray, his eyes flicking round the room, sizing up the situation. God knew what kind of strain the SAS captain must have been under to come that close to walloping a corporal. Jensen, he saw, was hiding a keen curiosity behind a mask of military indignation. Without apparently taking a step, Andrea had left his chair and moved halfway across the room towards Killigrew. He stood loose and relaxed, his bear-like bulk sagging, hands slack at his sides. Mallory knew that Killigrew was half a second away from violent death. He caught Miller’s eye, and shook his head, a millimetre left, a millimetre right.

Miller yawned. He said, ‘Why, thank you, Captain Killigrew.’ Killigrew stared straight ahead, eyes bulging. ‘Seeing that there fly crawling towards my ear,’ said Miller, pointing at a bluebottle spiralling towards the chandelier, ‘the Captain was about to have the neighbourliness to swat the little sucker.’ Jensen’s eyebrow had cocked. ‘I take full responsibility.’

Jensen did not hesitate. ‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘Or charges. Carry on, Captain.’

Killigrew swallowed, “ssir.’ His face was regaining its colour. ‘Right,’ he said, with the air of one wrenching his mind back from an abyss. ‘Our men. Five of them. Dropped Tuesday last, with one Jeep, radio, just south of Lourdes. They reported that they’d landed, were leaving in the direction of Hendaye, travelling by night. They were supposed to radio in eight-hourly. But nothing. Absolutely damn all.’

Once again, Miller caught Mallory’s eye. Jeep, he was thinking. A Jeep, for pity’s sake. Have these people never heard of road blocks?

‘Until last night,’ said Killigrew. ‘Some Resistance johnny came on the air. Said there’d been shooting in some village or other in the mountains twenty miles west of St-Jean-de-Luz. Casualties. So we think it was them. But there was a bit of difficulty with the radio message. Code words not used. Could mean the operator was in a hurry, of course. Or it could mean that the network’s been penetrated.’

Mallory found himself lighting another cigarette. How long since he had drawn a breath not loaded with tobacco smoke? He was avoiding Miller’s eye. They were brave, these SAS people. But Miller had been right. They went at things like a bull at a gate. That was not Mallory’s way.

Mallory believed in making war quietly. There was an old partisan slogan he lived by: if you have a knife you can get a pistol; if you have a pistol, you can get a rifle; if you have a rifle, you can get a machine gun -

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ said Jensen. ‘I’m grateful for your cooperation.’ Dyas and Killigrew left, Killigrew’s blood-bloated face looking straight ahead, so as not to catch Miller’s sardonic eye.

‘So,’ said Jensen, grinning his appallingly carnivorous grin. Think you can do it?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You may think this is a damn silly scheme. I can’t help that. It could be that a million men depend on those submarines not getting to sea. I’m afraid the SAS have made a balls-up. I just want you to find these damn things. If you can’t blow them up, radio a position. The RAF’ll look after the rest.’

Mallory said, ‘Excuse my asking, sir. But what about the Resistance on the ground?’

Jensen frowned. ‘Good question. Two things. One, you heard that idiot Killigrew. They may have been penetrated. And two, it may be that these U-boats are tucked up somewhere the RAF won’t be able to get at them.’ He grinned. ‘I told Mr Churchill this morning that as far as I was concerned, you lot were equivalent to a bomber wing. He agreed.’ He stood up. ‘I’m very grateful to you. You’ve done two jolly good operations for me. Let’s make this a third. Detailed briefing at the airfield later. There’s an Albemarle coming in this afternoon for you. Takeoff at 1900.’ He looked down at the faces: Mallory, weary but hatchet-sharp; Andrea, solid behind his vast black moustache; and Dusty Miller, scratching his crewcut in a manner prejudicial to discipline. It did not occur to Jensen to worry that in the past fourteen days they had taken a fearsome battering on scarcely any sleep. They were the tool for the job, and that was that.

‘Any questions?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Mallory, wearily. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a drop of brandy about the house, is there?’

An hour later the sentries on the marble-pillared steps of the villa crashed to attention as the three men trotted down into the square, where a khaki staff car was waiting. The sentries did not like the look of them. They were elderly, by soldier standards - in their forties, and looking older. Their uniforms were dirty, their boots horrible. It was tempting to ask for identification and paybooks. But there was something about them that made the sentries decide that it would on the whole be better to keep quiet. They moved at a weary, purposeful lope that made the sentries think of creatures that ate infrequently, and when they did eat, ate animals they had tracked down patiently over great distances, and killed without fuss or remorse.

Mallory’s mind was not, however, on eating. ‘Not bad, that brandy,’ he said.

‘Five-star,’ said Miller. ‘Nothing but the best for the white-haired boys.’

After Jensen’s villa the Termoli airfield lacked style. Typhoons howled overhead, swarming on and off the half-built runway in clouds of dust. Inevitably, there was another briefing room. But this one was in a hut with cardboard walls and a blast-taped window overlooking the propeller-whipped dust-storm and the fighters taxiing in the aircraft park. Among the fighters was a bomber, with the long, lumpy nose of a warthog, refuelling from a khaki bowser. Mallory knew it was an Albemarle. Jensen was making sure that the momentum of events was being maintained.

Evans, one of Jensen’s young, smooth-mannered lieutenants, had brought them from the staff car. He said, ‘I expect you’ll have a shopping list.’ He was a pink youth, with an eagerness that made Mallory feel a thousand years old. But Mallory made himself forget the tiredness, and the brandy, and the forty years he had been on the planet. He sat at a table with Andrea and Miller and filled out stores indents in triplicate. Then they rode a three-tonner down to the armoury, where Jensen’s handiwork was also to be seen, in the shape of a rack of weapons, and a backpack B2 radio. There were also two brass-bound boxes whose contents Miller studied with interest. One of them was packed with explosives: gelignite, and blocks of something that looked like butter, but was in fact Cyclonite in a plasticising medium - plastic explosive. The other box contained primers and time pencils, colour-coded like children’s crayons. Miller sorted through them with practised fingers, making some substitutions. There were also certain other substances, independently quite innocent but, used as he knew how to use them, lethal to enemy vehicles and personnel. Finally, there was a flat tin box containing a thousand pounds in used Bradbury fivers.

Andrea stood at a rack of Schmeissers, his hands moving like the hands of a man reading Braille, his black eyes looking far away. He rejected two of the machine pistols, picked out three more, and a Bren light machine gun. He stripped the Bren down, smacked it together again, nodded, and filled a haversack with grenades.

Mallory checked over two coils of wire-cored rope and a bag of climbing gear. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Load it on.’

In the briefing hut, three men were waiting. They sat separately at the schoolroom tables, each of them apparently immersed in his own thoughts. ‘Everything all right?’ said Lieutenant Evans. ‘Oh. Introductions. The team.’ The men at the tables looked up, eyeing Mallory, Andrea and Miller with the wariness of men who knew that in a few hours these strangers would have the power of life and death over them.

‘No real names, no pack-drill,’ said Evans. He indicated the man on the right: small, the flesh bitten away under his cheekbones, his mouth hidden by a black moustache. He had the dour, self-contained look of a man who had lived all his life among mountains. ‘This is Jaime,’ Evans said. ‘Jaime has worked in the Pyrenees. He knows his way around.’

‘Worked?’ said Mallory.

Jaime’s face was sallow and unreadable, his eyes unwilling to trust. He said, ‘I have carried goods. Smuggler, you would say. I have escaped Fascists. Spanish Fascists, German Fascists. All die when you shoot them.’

Mallory schooled his face to blankness. Fanatics could be trustworthy comrades; but that was the exception, not the rule.

‘And that,’ said Evans quietly, ‘is Hugues. Hugues is our personnel man. Knows the Resistance on the ground. Practically encyclopaedic. Looks like a German. Don’t be fooled. He was at Oxford before the war. Went back to Normandy to take over the family chateau. The SS shot his wife and two children when he went underground.’

Hugues was tall and broad-shouldered, with light brown hair, an affable pink-and-white Northern face, and china-blue eyes. When he shook Mallory’s hand his palm was moist with nervous sweat. He said, ‘Do you speak French?’

‘No.’ Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and held it.

‘None of you?’

That’s right.’ Many virtues had combined to keep Mallory, Miller and Andrea alive and fighting these past weeks. But the cardinal virtue was this: reserve your fire, and never trust anyone.

Hugues said, ‘I’m glad to meet you. But … no French? Jesus.’

Mallory liked his professionalism. ‘You can do the talking,’ he said.

‘Spent any time behind enemy lines?’ said Hugues.

‘A little.’ There was a wild look in Hugues’ eye, thought Mallory. He was not sure he liked it.

Evans cleared his throat. ‘Word in your ear, Hugues,’ he said, and took him aside. Hugues frowned as the Naval officer murmured into his ear. Then he blushed red, and said to Mallory, ‘Oh dear. ‘Fraid I made a fool of myself, sir.’

‘Perfectly reasonable,’ said Mallory. Hugues was fine. Pink and eager and bright. But there was still that wild look … Not surprising, in the circumstances. A Resistance liaison would be as vital as a guide and a radio operator. Hugues would do.

The last man was nearly as big as Andrea, wearing a ragged, oddly urban straw hat. Evans introduced him as Thierry, an experienced Resistance radio operator. Then he drew the blinds, and pulled a case of what looked like clothing towards him. ‘Doesn’t matter about the French,’ he said, ‘you can stick to German.’ From the box, he pulled breeches and camouflage smocks of a pattern Mallory had last seen in Crete. ‘I hope we’ve got the size right. And you’d better stay indoors for the next wee while.’

It was true, reflected Mallory wryly, that there would be few better ways of attracting attention on a Allied air base than wandering around wearing the uniform of the Waffen-SS.

‘Try ‘em on,’ said Evans.

The Frenchmen watched without curiosity or humour as Mallory, Miller and Andrea pulled the German smocks and trousers over their khaki battledress. Disguising yourself in enemy uniform left you liable to summary execution. But then so did working for the Resistance, or for that matter operating behind German lines in British uniform. In occupied France, Death would be breathing down your neck without looking at the label inside your collar.

‘Okay,’ said Evans, contemplating the Feldwebel with Mallory’s face, and the two privates. ‘Er, Colonel, would you consider shaving off the moustache?’

‘No,’ said Andrea, without changing expression.

‘It’s just that-’

‘SS men do not wear moustaches,’ said Andrea. ‘This I know. But I do not intend to mix with SS men. I intend to kill them.’

Jaime was looking at him with new interest. ‘Colonel?’ he said.

‘Slip of the tongue,’ said Mallory.

Evans looked for a moment faintly flustered. He strode busily to the dais, and unrolled the familiar relief map of the western part of the Pyrenees. There was a blue bite of Atlantic at the top. Along the spine of the mountains writhed the red serpent of the Spanish border.

‘Landing you here,’ said Evans, tapping a brisk pointer on what could have been a hanging valley above St-Jean-Pied-du-Port.

‘Landing?’ said Mallory.

‘Well, dropping then.’

Miller said, ‘I told Captain Jensen. I can’t stand heights.’

‘Heights won’t be a problem,’ said Evans. ‘You’ll be dropping from five hundred feet.’ He smiled, the happy smile of a man who would not be dropping with them, and unrolled another larger-scale map with contours. ‘There’s a flat spot in this valley. Pretty remote. There’s a road in, from Jonz?re. Runs on up to the Spanish border. There’ll be a border post up there, patrols. We don’t want you in Spain. We’ve got Franco leaning our way at the moment, and we don’t want anything to happen that would, er, make it necessary for him to have to show what a beefy sort of chap he is. Plus you’d get yourselves interned and the camps are really not nice at all. So when you leave the drop site go downhill. Jaime’ll remind you. Uphill is Spain. Downhill is France.’

Andrea was frowning at the map. The contours on either side of the valley were close together. Very close. In fact, the valley sides looked more like cliffs than slopes. He said, ‘It’s not a good place to drop.’

Evans said, ‘There are no good places to drop just now in France.’ There was a silence. ‘Anyway,’ he said briskly. ‘You’ll be met by a man called Jules. Hugues knows him.’

The fair-haired Norman nodded. ‘Good man,’ he said.

‘Jules has been making a bit of a speciality of the Werwolf project. He’ll brief you and pass you on. After that, you’ll be on your own. But I hear you’re used to that.’ He looked at the grim faces. He thought, with a young man’s arrogance: they’re old, and they’re tired. Does Jensen know what he’s doing?

Then he remembered that Jensen always knew what he was doing.

Mallory looked at Evans’ pink cheeks and crisp uniform. We all know you have been told to say this, he thought. And we all know that it is not true. We are not on our own at all. We are at the mercy of these three Frenchmen.

Evans said, ‘There is a password. When anyone says to you, “L’Amiral”, you will reply “Beaufort”. And vice versa. We put it out on the BBC. The SAS used it, I’m afraid. No time to put out another one. Use with care.’ He handed out bulky brown envelopes. ‘Callsigns,’ said Evans. ‘Orders. Maps. Everything you need. Commit to memory and destroy. Any questions?’

There were no questions. Or rather, there were too many questions for it to be worth asking any of them.

‘Storm Force,’ said Miller, who had torn open his envelope. ‘What’s that?’

‘That’s you. This is Operation Storm,’ said Evans. ‘You were Force 10 in Yugoslavia. This follows on. Plus …’ he hesitated.

‘Yes?’ said Mallory.

‘Joke, really,’ said Evans, grinning pinkly. ‘But, well, Captain Jensen said we might as well call you after the weather forecast.’

‘Great,’ said Miller. ‘Just great. All this and parachutes too.’




TWO Sunday 1900-Monday 0900 (#ulink_c267a392-b3b1-5bae-9abe-2c98cb5caa0a)


‘Ladies and gentlemen, sorry, gentlemen,’ said Wing-Commander Maurice Hartford. ‘We are now one hour from drop. Air Pyrenees hopes you are enjoying the ride. Personally, I think you are all crazy.’

Naturally, nobody could hear him, because the intercom was turned off. But it relieved his feelings. Why, he thought, is it always me?

It had been a nice takeoff. Six men plus the crew, not much equipment: a trivial load for the Albemarle, droning up from Termoli, over the wrinkled peaks of the Apennines, and into the sunset. The red sunset.

Hartford switched on the intercom. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said, ‘why don’t you pop up to the sharp end?’

Mallory stirred in his steel bucket seat. He had slept for a couple of hours this afternoon. So had Andrea and Dusty Miller. An orderly had woken them for a dinner of steak and red wine, upon which they had fallen like wolves. The Frenchmen had picked at the food; nobody had wanted to talk. Jaime had remained dour. Hugues, unless Mallory was much mistaken, had developed a bad case of the jitters. Nothing wrong with that, though. The bravest men were not those who did not know fear, but those who knew it and conquered it. On the aeroplane, the Frenchmen had stayed awake while Andrea made himself a bed with his head on the box of fuses, and Miller sank low in his bucket seat, propped his endless legs on the radio, and began a snore that rivalled the clattering thunder of the Albemarle’s Merlins.

Mallory had slept lightly. What he wanted was ten days of unconsciousness, broken only by huge meals at four-hour intervals. But that would have to wait. Among the rockfalls and avalanches of the Southern Alps, and during the long, dangerous months in Crete, he had learned to sleep a couple of inches below the surface, a wild animal’s sleep that could give way to complete wakefulness in a fraction of a second.

He clambered out of his seat and went to the cockpit. The pilot gestured to the co-pilot’s seat. Mallory sat down and plugged in the intercom.

‘Cup of tea?’ said the pilot, whose ginger moustache rose four inches above his mask, partially obscuring the goggles he wore to keep it out of his eyes.

Mallory said, ‘Please.’

‘Co-pilot’s having a kip.’ The pilot waved a thermos over a mug. ‘Sunset,’ he said, gesturing ahead.

There was indeed a sunset. The western sky was full of an archipelago of fiery islands, on which the last beams of the sun burst in a surf of gold. Above, the sky was dappled with cirrus. Below, the Mediterranean was darkening through steel to ink.

‘Red sky at night,’ said the pilot. ‘Pilot gets fright.’

The plane bounced. Mallory captured a mouthful of tea and hot enamel. ‘Why?’ he said.

Quiet sort of chap, thought Hartford. Not bashful. Just quiet. Quiet like a bomb nobody had armed yet. Brown eyes that looked completely at home, completely competent, wherever they found themselves. A lean, tired face, motionless, conserving energy. Dangerous-looking blighter, thought Hartford, cheerfully. Lucky old Jerry.

‘Weather,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful weather up there. Front coming in. All right for shepherds. Shepherds walk. But we’re flying straight into the brute. Going to get very bumpy.’

‘Okay for a drop?’

Hartford said, ‘We’ll get you down.’ Actually, it was not okay for a drop. But he had orders to get these people onto the ground, okay or not. ‘Tell your chaps to strap in, could you?’ He pulled a dustbin-sized briar from his flying-suit pocket, stuffed it with tobacco, and lit it. The cockpit filled with acrid smoke. He pulled back the sliding window, admitting the tooth-jarring bellow of the engines. ‘Smell that sea,’ he said, inhaling deeply. ‘Wizard. Yup. We’ll go in at five hundred feet. Nice wide valley. All you have to do is jump when the light goes on. All at once.’

‘Five hundred feet?’

‘Piece of cake.’

‘They’ll hear us coming.’

The pilot grinned, revealing canines socketed into the holes they had worn in the stem of the pipe. ‘Not unless they’re Spanish,’ he said.

They hit the front over the coast, and flew on, minute after endless minute, until the minutes became hours. The Albemarle swooped and plunged, wings battered by the turbulent upcurrents. By the dark-grey light that crept through the little windows, Mallory looked at his team. Andrea and Miller he took for granted. But the Frenchmen he was not so sure about. He could see the flash of the whites of Jaime’s eyes, the nervous movement of Thierry’s mouth as he chewed his lips from inside. And Hugues, contemplating his hands, hands with heavily-bitten fingernails, locked on his knees. Mallory felt suddenly weary. He had been in too many little metal rooms, watched too many people, wondered too many times how they would shape up when the pressure was on and the lid had blown off…

The Albemarle banked steeply to port, then starboard. Mallory thought there was a new kind of turbulence out there: not just the moil of air masses in collision, but the upward smack of waves of air breaking on sheer faces of rock. He looked round.

The doorway into the cockpit was open. Beyond the windscreen the flannel-coloured clouds separated and wisped away. Suddenly Mallory was looking down a valley whose steep sides rose out of sight on either side. The upper slopes were white with snow. There was a grey village perched up there - up there, above the aeroplane. A couple of yellow lights showed in the gloom. No blackout: Spain, thought Mallory -

A pine tree loomed ahead. It approached at two hundred miles an hour. He saw the pilot’s shoulders move as he hauled on the yoke. The tree was higher than the plane. Hey, thought Mallory, we’re going to hit that -

But the Albemarle roared up and over. Something slapped the deck under his feet. Then the tree was gone, and the aircraft was banking steeply to port, into the next valley.

Mallory got up and closed the door. There were some things it was not necessary to see. Pine trees were, what? A hundred feet high? Maximum. Mallory decided if he was going to be flown into a mountain, he did not want to see the mountain coming.

It went on: the howl of the wind, the bucket of the airframe, the bellow of the engines. Mallory fell asleep.

Next thing he knew the racket was still there, and someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt terrible: head aching, thoughts slow as cold oil. The Albemarle’s bomb-aimer was pushing a cup of tea in his face. Benzedrine, he thought. No. Not yet. This is only the beginning.

He had woken into a different world: the sick-at-the-stomach world of dangerous things about to happen. He badly wanted a cigarette. But there would be no time for cigarettes for a while.

A dim yellow light was burning in the fuselage. Bulky camouflage forms swore and collided, struggling into their parachutes and rounding up equipment.

‘Five minutes,’ said the bomb-aimer with repellent cheerfulness, when he had finished checking the harnesses. ‘Onto the trench.’

‘Trench?’ said Miller.

The bomb-aimer indicated a long slot in the floor of the aircraft. ‘Get on there,’ he said. ‘Stand at ease, one foot either side.’ He pointed at a pair of light bulbs. ‘When the light goes green, shun!

‘Gee, thanks,’ said Miller, and shuffled into position. The first light bulb flicked on: red.

Hugues was behind him. Hugues’ mind would not stay still. It kept flicking back over the past two years, with the weary insistence of a stuck gramophone record. After the SS had done what they had done to his family, he had not cared if he lived or died. Then Lisette had come along. And in Lisette, he had found a new reason for living …

On a night like this, a reason for living was the last thing you needed. Remember what they taught you in school, he thought. Keep it buttoned up. Don’t let anything show -

Lisette. When shall I see you again?

Fear prised his mind apart and climbed in. Fear became terror. His bowels were water, and icy sweat was pouring down him. First, there was the parachute descent, and of course it was possible that the parachute would not open. Then, even if the parachute did open, that big thin man Miller had two boxes balanced in front of him - attached to him, for the love of God! - full of explosives. So they were all dropping out of this plane, six humans and a land mine, in a lump. Jesus. He would be all over the landscape. He would never see Lisette -

Underfoot, he felt a new vibration, like gears winding. The trench opened. The night howled in, black and full of wind. He felt stuck, trapped, cramped by this damned harness, Schmeisser, pack, equipment.

A hand landed on his shoulder. He looked round so fast he almost overbalanced.

It belonged to the big man who did not speak, the bear with the moustache. The big face was impassive. A reflection of the little red bulb swam in each black eye. One of the eyes winked. Jesus, thought Hugues. He knows what I’m thinking. What will he think of me?

But surprisingly, he found that the fear had lessened.

Jaime was not comfortable either, but for different reasons. He had the short legs of the mountaineer. In his mind, he had been tracking their route: up the Valle de Tena, then north, across the Col de Pourtalet. He had walked it himself, first with bales of cigarettes, then with mules bearing arms for the Republican cause in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He reckoned that now they would be coming down on Colbis. He did not like the feel of the weather out there. Nor did he like the fact that they were flying in cloud down a fifty-degree hillside at two hundred miles an hour. Feet on the ground were safe. Mules were safer. He wanted to get back on the ground, because his legs were aching, straddled over the trench, and he could feel the fear radiating from Thierry, slung about with his radios, straw hat stuffed in his pack, his big face improbably healthy in the red light -

Thierry’s face turned suddenly green.

Shun.

Six pairs of heels crashed together. The static lines ran out and tautened. The hold was empty.

Through the bomb doors the bomb-aimer glimpsed points of yellow light forming a tenuous L. He said into the intercom, ‘All gone.’ The pilot hauled back on the stick, and the clouds intervened. The Albemarle banked steeply and set its nose for Italy.

The ground hit Mallory like a huge, wet hammer. There were lights looping in his eyes as he rolled. A rock made his ears ring. He got rid of the parachute, invisible now in the dark, flattened himself against the ground, and worked the cocking lever of the Schmeisser, taut as an animal at bay. For a moment there was the moan of the wind and the feel of grit on his cheek. Then a voice close at hand said, ‘L’Amiral.’

‘Beaufort’ he said.

There was shouting. Then more lights - a lot of lights, a ridiculous number - in his eyes. He levelled the Schmeisser. The lights wavered away, and someone shouted, ‘Non! Non! L’Amiral Beaufort. Welcome to France, mon officier.’

Unnecessary hands pulled him to his feet. He said, ‘Where are the others?’

‘Safe.’ A flask found his hand. ‘Buvez. Drink. Vive la France!’ He drank. It was brandy. It drilled a hole in the cold and the rain. People were lighting cigarettes. There was a lot unmilitary of noise, several bottles. A dark figure materialised at his side, then another.

Miller’s voice said, ‘Any minute now someone is going to start playing the goddamn accordion.’

‘All here?’ There were grunts from the darkness. There were too many people, too much noise, not enough discipline. ‘Hugues.’

‘Sir.’

‘Tell these people to put the bloody lights out. Where’s Jules?’

There was a conversation in French. Hugues replied, his voice rising, expostulating. ‘Merde,’ he said finally.

‘What is it?’

‘These idiots. These goddamn Trotskyite sons of-’

‘Quick.’ Mallory’s voice brought him up sharp as a choke-chain.

‘Jules is held up in Colbis. There was an incident with your forces last week. The Germans are nervous.’

That would have been the SAS, thought Mallory, charging around like bulls in a china shop.

‘But Colbis is only in the next valley. We will take you there, when we have transport. There is a problem with the transport. They don’t know what. A lorry will come soon, they say. Franchement,’ said Hugues, his voice rising, ‘I do not believe these people. They are like the Spanish, always ma?ana-’

‘Ask them how soon.’ And calm them down, thought Mallory. Calm them down.

They say to wait,’ said Hugues, not at all calm. ‘It is seven miles to the village. There may be patrols. There is a cave they know. It is dry there, and German patrols do not visit it. They say it will be a good place to wait. The lorry will come to collect you, in one hour, maybe two.’

Mallory looked at his watch. Raindrops blurred the glass. Just after midnight. Monday already. And they were being told to wait on a mountain top in the rain, and the Werwolf pack was leaving at noon on Wednesday.

He said, ‘Where’s this cave?’

‘I know it,’ said Jaime’s voice.

Mallory sighed. Patience. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Andrea appeared at his side. Mallory felt the comfort of his gigantic presence. ‘This is not good,’ said the Greek, under the babble of excited talk from the escort.

‘We will make it better,’ said Mallory. ‘Hugues. Tell these people to be quiet.’

Hugues started shouting. The crowd fell silent. They started to walk in the lashing rain.

Jaime set a cracking pace up the valley, towards Spain, following a track that wound through a field of tea chest-sized boulders which had fallen from the valley’s sides. The map had been right; those sides were not so much slopes as cliffs. From the rear, Mallory could hear Hugues’ voice, speaking French, raised in violent argument with someone. Mallory was beginning to worry about Hugues. Staying alive behind enemy lines meant staying calm. It was beginning to sound as if Hugues was not a calm person. He called softly, ‘Shut up.’

Hugues shut up. The procession became quiet.

Mallory said to Miller, ‘What was that about?’

‘He was looking for someone. Someone who’s not around.’

In ten minutes the valley floor had narrowed to a hundred yards, and the sides had become vertical walls of rock, undermined at their base, hidden in inky shadows. ‘Here,’ said Jaime’s voice from the dark. A flashlight beam illuminated a dark entrance.

Andrea materialised at Mallory’s side. ‘Bad place,’ he said. The cave had no exit except into the valley. And the valley was more a gorge than a valley. It felt bad. It felt like a trap. ‘Hugues,’ said Mallory, without looking round. ‘Tell these people that this is no good.’

Mallory turned. ‘Hugues,’ he said. ‘Tell these people-’

He stopped. There were no people. Hugues was a solitary dark figure against the paler grey of the rocks.

Hugues said, ‘They have left.’

‘Left?’ said Mallory.

‘Gone to look for the transport. Also, there was a … person I wished to see who did not arrive. That was why I had a discussion - yes - an acrimonious discussion.’ His voice was rising. ‘These people are frankly peasants-’

Andrea said, ‘Enough.’

Hugues stopped talking as if someone had flipped a switch. Mallory said to Andrea and Miller, ‘We’re stuck with this. We need the transport. If we move, they’ll lose us. We’ll have to wait. Take cover.’

Andrea and Miller were already fading into the dark, taking up positions not in the cave, but among the rocks on the valley floor.

The night became quiet, except for the sigh of the wind and the swish of the rain, and the drowsy clonk of a goat bell from inside the cave.

This is all wrong, thought Mallory. We have been inadequately briefed, and we are dependent on a Resistance organisation that seems completely disorganised. It sounds as if the SAS have already compromised us. If the enemy comes up the valley there is no way out, except into an internment camp in Spain.

Mallory lay and strained his ears into the wet dark rain, wind, goat bells -

And another sound. A mechanical sound, but not a motor. The sound of metal on metal, gears turning. The sound of a bicycle.

There was a sudden crash. The old sounds returned, with behind them the noise of a back wheel spinning, ticking to a stop.

Mallory waited. Then he heard the brief, otherworldly bleep of a Scops owl.

Mallory had as yet heard no Scops owls in the Pyrenees. But there had been plenty in Crete, where he had served his time with Andrea.

Something moved at his shoulder: something huge, blacker than the night. Andrea said, ‘I found this,’ and dropped something on the gritty ground beside him, something that drew breath and started to croak.

Mallory allowed the muzzle of the Schmeisser to rest gently in the hollow under the something’s ear. He said, ‘Quiet.’

The something became quiet.

Mallory said, ‘I am a British officer. What do you want?’

The something said, ‘Hugues.’

‘Good God,’ said Mallory.

The something was a woman.

The woman got her voice back. She batted at Mallory with her hands. She was strong. She said, ‘Laisse-moi,’ in a voice both vigorous and tough.

Out in the dark and the rain, Hugues’ voice said, ‘Bon Dieu!’ Mallory thought he could hear something new in it: shock, and awe. He heard the uncoordinated stumble of Hugues’ boots in the dark. ‘Lisette!’ cried Hugues.

‘Hugues!’ cried the woman. ‘C’est bien toi?

Then Hugues was embracing her. The fear was gone now. All the terrible things were gone. All Hugues’ life, people had taken what he loved away from him, for reasons that seemed excellent to them but incomprehensible to him. They had taken away his parents and sent him to a stupid English school. They had taken away Mireille and the children because he was a saboteur. And then he had met Lisette, in the Resistance, and become her lover. When SOE had flown him out in the Lysander, he had thought that that had been the end of Lisette, too.

But here she was. In his arms. As large as life, if not larger.

‘My darling,’ he said.

She kissed him on the cheek, murmuring what sounded like pet names. Then Mallory heard her tone change. She sounded frantic about something.

‘Merde,’ said Hugues, in his new, firm voice. ‘We must leave. Now.’

Mallory said, quietly, ‘Who is this?’

‘Lisette,’ said Hugues. ‘A friend. A rеsistante.’

‘Is she the person you wanted to see who did not arrive?’

‘Yes. She is an old friend. She knows the people on the ground in the region. It is an excellent thing that she has found us. Providential. She says there are sixty Germans coming up the valley.’

‘Three lorries,’ she said. Her accent was heavy, but comprehensible. ‘The ones who reached Jonz?re told me they caught two of your reception committee, found them with parachutes.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Half an hour,’ said Lisette. ‘At the most. They told me to warn you.’

Mallory’s stomach felt shrivelled like a walnut. One and a half hours in France, and the operation was as good as over. He pushed the thought into the back of his mind. ‘Jaime!’ he said.

Jaime appeared out of the night. ‘Lisette,’ he said, without surprise.

‘Bonjour, Jaime.’

Briskly, Mallory explained the position.

Jaime said, ‘We must go to Spain. It is over. Finished.’

In his mind Mallory saw a soldier, pack on his back, seasickness in his belly and fear in his soul, squashed against the steel side of a ship by a thousand other soldiers. And suddenly, without warning, something stove in the side of that ship, smashed the soldier like an egg, and the cold green water poured in.

Once Mallory had been in a little steel room on a ship in the Mediterranean, checking grenades. There had been a bang. Someone had said, ‘Torpedo.’ Then the room had started to fill up with water, and the ship with screams, quickly cut off. Mallory had been one of four survivors. Four out of three hundred.

If the Werwolf pack got out intact, there could be a thousand such ships.

Mallory said, ‘No other way?’

‘None.’ Jaime seemed to hesitate. ‘Except the Chemin des Anges.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing. A goat track, no more. It runs from Jonz?re, at the bottom of the valley, up the ridge, in the manner of the old roads. The pilgrims used to use it, the men with the cockle shells in their hats, bound for Santiago de Compostela, when there were bandits in the mountains. It is a dangerous road. It killed almost as many pilgrims as the bandits did.’

‘Where is it?’

Against the dark sky Jaime’s small shoulders appeared to shrug. He pointed upwards. ‘On the spine of the hill. Here it runs three hundred metres above the valley. Above the cliff. Then it turns over the mountain and down to Colbis. There were pilgrims’ inns in Colbis. But we can’t go to Jonz?re, to the start of the track. It’ll be full of Germans-’

‘We’ll go up the cliff,’ said Mallory, as if he were proposing a walk in the park.

There was a second’s silence. Then Jaime said, ‘To join the Chemin des Anges here? That is not possible.’

Mallory said, ‘It is necessary.’

The chill of his voice silenced Jaime for a moment. Then he said, ‘But you do not understand. Nobody can climb those cliffs.’

‘That is what the Germans will think. Miller?’

Miller had been sitting on a boulder. He knew what Mallory was going to say, and he found the knowledge depressing. ‘Yep?’

‘Round up the people. Andrea and I are going up the cliff. We’ll do a pitch, belay and drop you a fixed rope. Make sure everyone comes.’

Miller pushed his SS helmet back on his head and looked up. For a moment it was like being in a tunnel. Then, far overhead, clouds shifted, and there appeared between the two cliff-masses a thread-fine crack of sky. The wind was blowing up the valley. He could hear no lorries. The dark bulk that was Mallory slung a coil of wire-cored rope over his shoulder and walked towards the cliff. Wearily, Miller rounded up Hugues and Lisette, and Jaime, and Thierry the radio operator, and assembled the stores, and the radio, and the two wooden boxes of explosives, under the cliff. Mallory and Andrea seemed to vanish into the solid rock. The group at the cliff foot sat huddled against the icy rain. From above came the infrequent sound of a low word spoken, the clink of hammer on spike, the scuff of nailed boot on rock. The sounds receded quickly upwards. Human goddamn flies, thought Miller, gloomily. Personally, he had no suckers on his feet, and no plans to grow any. He stood up, cocked his Schmeisser and moved fifty yards down the valley in the rain. Someone had to stand sentry, and the only person on the valley floor Miller trusted was Miller.

Fall in with bad companions and what do you get?

I tell you what you get, he told himself, settling into a natural embrasure in the rock and preparing for the first of the sixty Germans to come round the corner.

You get problems.

There had been times in Mallory’s life when he would have enjoyed a good crack at a limestone cliff in the dark. On a cold morning, perhaps, in a gorge in the Southern Alps, when you had got up at one in the morning, the stars floating silver and unwinking between the ice-white peaks of the range.

This was not one of those times.

This was a vertical slab of rock he could barely see. This was climbing by Braille, running fingers and feet over the smooth surface looking for pockmarks and indentations, tapping spikes into hair-cracks, standing with the tip of a boot-toe balanced on a foothold slim as a goose-quill.

But Mallory knew that there is a greater spur to climbing a cliff in the dark than a wish to dwell in the white Olympus of the high peaks. It is to get you and your comrades away from three lorry loads of Germans.

So Mallory climbed that sopping wall until his fingernails were gone, and the sweat stung his eyes, and the breath rasped in his tobacco-seared throat. And after fifty feet, he found a chimney.

It was a useful chimney, the edge of a huge flake of rock that would in a few hundred years separate from the face of the cliff and slide into the gorge. Mallory made a belay, called down to Andrea, and went up the chimney as if it had been a flight of stairs.

At first the chimney was vertical. After thirty feet it started to trend leftward. Then suddenly there was a chockstone, a great boulder that had rolled down the cliff and jammed in the chimney. It formed a level floor embraced on two sides by buttresses of rock, invisible from the bottom of the valley. It was more than Mallory had dared hope for. Fifty people could have hidden up there while the Germans rumbled up the valley and flattened their noses against the Spanish border. Over which they would assume the Storm Force had fled -

Mallory felt a sensation he hardly recognised.

Hope.

Don’t count your chickens.

Jaime was the first to arrive. He was carrying the bulky, square-edged radio pack. Jaime was a useful man on a mountain. There was a pause, and Andrea came up, carrying the second rope. ‘All at the base of the chimney,’ he said. ‘Stores too.’

‘Good,’ said Mallory, belaying the rope and letting the end go.

Now that there were two ropes, things started to move fast. Thierry came up one, breathing in a high, frightened whimper, his straw hat crammed over his eyebrows. The second rope seemed to be taking a long time. ‘It’s the woman,’ said Andrea. ‘She doesn’t have the strength in her arms.’ Mallory saw his huge back dark against the sky as he bent to the rope. She was a big woman; there were not many fat people in wartime France, but she was one of them. She must have weighed ten stone. But Andrea hauled her up as if she had been a bag of sugar, set her on her feet, and dusted down her bulk.

‘Merci,’ she said.

Andrea’s white teeth flashed under his moustache. He had the smile of a musketeer, this Greek giant. Even now, with the rain lashing down and Germans in the valley, Lisette felt enveloped in a protective cloak of courtesy and understanding. Andrea bowed, as if she had been a lady of Versailles, not a shapeless bundle of overcoats crouched on a cliff ledge. Then he let the rope go again.

Hugues came up, too breathless to complain, and went to Lisette’s side. Mallory had a nagging moment of worry. Hugues’ priorities had to be with the operation, not his girlfriend. Mallory did not know enough about this woman. And he did not know enough about Hugues. For the moment, if her information was good, she had saved their bacon. But if Mallory’s instincts were right, she was going to be a distraction. And distractions had no place on an operation like this. On this operation there was a single priority: find and destroy the Werwolf pack.

Hugues would need watching.

Mallory turned away, and hauled up the boxes of explosives and a couple of packs. The rain was turning even colder, developing a grainy feel. Mallory thought, soon it will be snowing. His hands were cracked and sore, and the plaster had peeled off the reopening wounds. God knew how Andrea must be feeling. But the stores were up, stacked on the edge of the boulder, and Miller was on his way up, but with no rope yet. Must get a rope to him; Miller was no climber.

The wind moaned and died. Andrea said, ‘Listen.’

There was a new sound in the raw, snow-laden air. Lorry engines.

All the way up the bottom forty feet of the cliff, Miller had been feeling the void snapping at his heels. The wind was freezing, but inside his uniform a Niagara of hot sweat was running. His knees felt weak, his hands shaky. Miller had been raised on the flatlands of the American Midwest. One hold at a time, he told himself. Don’t look down. Don’t think of the sheer face down there -

Miller patted the cliff above his head, groping for chinks and crevices. Mallory must have found some. But as far as Miller was concerned he might as well have been trying to climb a plate glass window. Both ropes were in use …

Hurry, please, thought Miller politely. For forty feet down, things were happening. On the wind from the valley came the sharp whiff of exhaust. He looked up.

The cold, slushy rain battered his face. What he could see of the cliff was black and shiny, the chimney a dark streak rising to the chockstone. He had seen Mallory in a chimney, his shoulders one side, his heels the other, gliding his way skyward with that weightless fluency of his. Miller’s limbs were too lanky for that, and his body wanted to plaster itself against the rock, not sit out over the emptiness as Mallory did, applying weight where it was needed, on fingers and toes -

Without a rope there was no way of getting to the chimney.

He pressed his face into the rock. The earthy smell of wet stone filled his nostrils. There was a lightening of the walls. Headlights down the valley.

He moved his hands again. The rock was rough, but there was nothing you could hold on to. Not unless you were a human fly like Mallory. Can’t go up, thought Miller. Can’t go down. So you just stand here, and hold on, and try not to follow that voice in your head that is telling you to shout and scream and keel gently out and back and plummet into space.

There were lights under his feet, and the gorge was churning with engines. A voice above him said, ‘Rope coming!’

The lorries were directly below him now. By the grind of their engines they were moving at a slow, walking pace. Searching. Nobody looks up. It is fine. Nobody ever looks up. Particularly not up sheer cliffs.

Not even Germans. No matter how thorough they may be.

You wish.

The rope nudged his face, cautiously. Miller said a quiet, polite thank you. Then he wound his hands into it and began to climb.

‘He’s coming up now,’ said Andrea, in his soft, imperturbable voice.

They were standing at the back of the ledge formed by the chockstone. Its edge was a horizon now, backlit by the glow of the lorries’ headlamps. Against the edge was something hard-edged and square. The radio.

‘Move that,’ said Mallory to Thierry.

Thierry started forward, shuffling, his great bulk moving against the lights. He was tired, thought Mallory. Tired and frightened, in a wet straw hat.

If he had been less tired himself, he might have prevented what happened next.

Thierry scooped up the radio and slung it over his shoulder. As he turned, his foot hit something that could have been a tuft of grass but was actually a rock. The rock went over the edge.

It whizzed past Dusty Miller’s head. At the base of the chimney it bounced, removing a fair-sized boulder. By the time it hit the valley floor it was a junior landslide. It landed with a roar fifteen feet to the right of the second truck in the convoy. Small stones pattered against the passenger door of the cab.

The truck stopped. A searchlight on the roof sent a white disc of light sliding across the black face of the cliff.

Miller was fifteen feet from the top, sweating, his breath coming in gasps. Clamp a hand on the rope. Pull up, shoving with feet. Clamp the other hand. There was shouting down below. Clamp the other hand. The hands like grey spiders against the cliff. They could have belonged to anyone, those hands, except for the pain, and the heavy thump of his heart.

And suddenly the other hand was not grey, but blazing, brilliant flesh-colour, and every fibre of the rope stood out in microscopic detail. And Miller was a moth, kicking on the pin of the searchlight.

A rifle cracked, then another. Chips of rock stung his face. His back crawled with the expectation of bullets. Ten feet to go. It might as well have been ten miles.

But there was a burst of machine-gun fire from above, and the searchlight went out, and suddenly the rope in his hands was alive, moving upwards like the rope of a ski tow. And he looked up and saw a huge shape, dim above the cliff, shoulders working. Andrea.

Andrea pulled him up those last ten feet as if he had weighed two hundred ounces instead of two hundred pounds. Miller hit the dirt in cover, rolled, and unslung his Schmeisser. Trouble, he thought. I am not a goddamn human fly, and as a result we are in it up to our necks, and sinking.

Beyond the boulder the cliffs were brilliant white. In their light he could see Andrea cocking a Bren.

‘I’ll cover you,’ said Andrea, in his unruffled craftsman’s voice. ‘Grenades?’

Miller and Mallory each took two grenades from their belt pouches and pulled the pins. Two, three,’ said Mallory. ‘Throw.’

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the metallic clatter of the grenades bouncing down the cliff, two left, two right. The world seemed to hold its breath. They would be setting up a mortar down there; taking up positions, radioing for reinforcements. Though, in a gorge like this, radio reception would be terrible -

Then the night flashed white, and four explosions rang as one, followed by a deeper explosion. Andrea crawled to the edge of the ledge. The lights had gone out. There was a new light, orange and black: a burning lorry. The firing lulled, then began again.

Mallory said, ‘Cover us for ten minutes. We’ll meet you at the top.’

Andrea’s head was a black silhouette against the orange flicker of the gasoline fire. The silhouette nodded. For a moment his huge shoulders showed against the sky, the Bren slung over the right. Then he faded into the rocks. The five other men and Lisette gathered up the packs. Jaime said, in a voice apparently unaffected by fear, ‘There is a path. A little higher.’

‘Miller,’ said Mallory. ‘We don’t want those trucks to get back. Or anywhere with anything like decent radio reception. Anything you can do?’

Miller shrugged. ‘I’ll give it the old college try,’ he said. His hands were already busy in the first of the brass-bound boxes. He felt for one of the five-pound bricks of plastic explosive, laid it on the ground, latched the first box and unlatched the second. The second box was thickly lined with felt. Unclipping a flashlight from the breast pocket of his smock, he used it to select a green time pencil: thirty seconds’ delay. Delicately he pressed the pencil into the primer and looked at the radium-bright numerals on his watch. Then he snapped the time pencil, yawned, and carefully lit a cigarette. By the time he had pocketed his Zippo, twenty-five seconds had elapsed. He took the brick in both hands and heaved it out and over the vehicles in the valley below.

Miller really hated heights. But nice, safe explosives were familiar territory. It felt great to be back.

For the space of a breath, there was darkness and silence in which the sound of Germanic shouting rose from the valley, mixed with the scrape of steel on rock as they set up the mortars. Then the night turned white, whiter than the searchlights, and Mallory was blasted against the cliff by a huge metallic clang that felt as if it would drive his eardrums together in the middle of his head.

‘Go,’ he said, the sound small and distant behind the ringing in his ears.

They began to file up the cliff: Mallory in the lead, then Jaime, Lisette, and Hugues, with Miller bringing up the rear. Andrea climbed the fifty-degree face behind the chockstone until he found another boulder. There he stopped, unfolded the Bren’s bipod, and rested it on the stone.

Fires were still burning on the valley floor. The flames cast a flickering light on torn rock and twisted metal, and many still bodies dressed in field-grey. There were three trucks. Two of them were burning. The other lay like a crushed beetle under a huge slab of rock prised away from the gorge wall by the force of the explosion. At the far side of the gorge, three grey figures were draped over the rocks beside what had once been a mortar.

One of the figures moved.

Andrea pulled the Bren into his shoulder, and fired. The heavy drum of the machine gun echoed in the rocks. The grey figure went over backwards and did not move any more.

Then there was silence, except for the moan of the wind and the patter of sleet on rock.

Andrea watched for another five minutes, patient, not heeding the icy moisture soaking through his smock and into his battledress blouse.

Nothing moved. As far as he could tell, the radio sets were wrecked, and there were no survivors. But of course there would be survivors. He had no objection to going down and cutting the survivors’ throats. But if he did, it was unlikely that he would be able to rejoin the main party.

Andrea thought about it with the deliberation of a master wine maker deciding on which day he would pick his grapes: perhaps a little light on sugar today, but if he waited a week, there was the risk of rain …

Naturally, the Germans would assume that the force that had attacked them had gone on to Spain.

Andrea took a final look at the flames and the metal and the bodies. He felt no emotion. Guerrilla warfare was a job, a job at which he was an expert. His strength and intelligence were weapons in the service of his comrades and his country’s allies. He did not like killing German soldiers. But if it was part of the job, then he was prepared to do it, and do it well.

To Andrea, this looked like a decent piece of work.

He slung the Bren over his shoulder and began to lope rapidly up the steep mountain. It had begun to snow.

It was a wet snow that fell in flakes the size of saucers, each flake landing on skin or cloth or metal with an icy slap, beginning immediately to melt. They slid into boots and down necks, becoming paradoxically colder as they melted. Within ten minutes the whole party was soaked to the skin. And for what seemed like an eternity, there was only the rasp of breath in throats, the hammer of hearts, and the sodden rub of boots against feet as they marched doggedly up the forty-five-degree slope in the icy blackness. Miller’s mind was filled with anxiety.

He said to Andrea, ‘What do you think?’

Andrea knew what he was being asked. ‘They will think we have gone to Spain.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And they will send out patrols. In case we have not gone to Spain.’

‘Exactly.’

One foot in front of the other. Hammering hearts. Sore feet. Soon they would have to stop. Food was needed, and warmth. But they were walking away from food and warmth, upwards. Into unknown territory. Where they had been assured Jules would be waiting, somewhere warm and dry. Assured by Lisette.

Mallory was having to rely on people he did not know. And that made Mallory nervous.

Mallory said quietly, ‘We’d better watch the rear, in case anyone drops out.’

Andrea stepped to one side. The walkers passed him: Jaime in the lead, Miller, Thierry. Then, a long way behind, too far, Hugues and Lisette: Hugues hunched over Lisette, apparently half-carrying her, their shapes odd and lumpy against the white snow, like a single, awkward animal. Andrea could hear Hugues’ breathing.

‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said Hugues, in a voice whose cheerfulness even exhaustion could not mar.

Andrea frowned. Then he fell in behind, and kept on upwards.

It felt like an eternity. But in reality it was only a little more than an hour before Jaime emitted a bark of satisfaction, and said, ‘Voil?!’

The ground had for some time been rising less steeply. Between snow flurries, Mallory saw a silvery line of snow lying across the black-lead sky: the ridge. Between the walkers and the ridge was what might have been a narrow ledge, running diagonally upwards, its lines softened by six inches of snow. Jaime kicked at the downhill side with his foot, revealing a coping of roughly-dressed stone. ‘The Chemin des Anges,’ he said.

The path was easy walking, following the contours, skirting precipices over which Miller did not allow his eyes to stray. They followed it up and onto the ridge.

Lack of effort let them feel the chill of their sodden clothes. They paused to let Lisette and Hugues catch up. Mallory took his oilcloth-wrapped cigarettes from the soaking pocket of his blouse, and gave one to Miller. Their faces were haggard in the Zippo’s flare. Hugues and Lisette approached.

Hugues said, ‘Lisette needs food. Rest, warmth-’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Lisette’s voice. She sounded weak, but resolute.

‘But my darling-’

‘Don’t you darling me,’ she said. ‘Can we go on?’

Mallory said nothing. It was possible to admire this woman’s spirit. It was less possible to admire the speed at which she moved. Too slow, thought Mallory. It was all getting too slow, and there was a hell of a distance to travel before they even got to the start line.

His watch said it was 0200 hours. He said to Jaime, ‘How long?’

‘Two hours. All downhill. The slope is not so bad now.’

Mallory could hear Hugues’ teeth chattering. There was a thin. icy wind up here, and the snow was colder. ‘Any shelter before then?’

‘In ten minutes. A shepherd’s hut. There will be nobody.’

‘We’ll stop for twenty minutes.’

‘Thank God.’

The shepherd’s hut had a roof and three walls, facing providentially away from the wind. The floor was covered in dung-matted straw, but it was dry, and after the snow it was as good as a Turkish carpet. They burrowed into the filthy straw, smoking, letting their body heat warm their soaking clothes. Jaime produced a bottle of brandy. Lisette was half-buried in the straw next to Hugues. When Mallory shone his flashlight at her, he saw her face was a dead grey. He took the brandy bottle out of Thierry’s hand and carried it over to her. ‘Here,’ he said.

The neck of the bottle rattled against her teeth. She coughed. ‘Thank you,’ she said, when she could speak.

Mallory said, ‘It was a good thing you found us.’

‘Love,’ said Hugues. ‘It was the power of love. A sixth sense -’

‘There was a little more to it than that,’ she said, dryly. ‘Hugues, you are getting carried away.’

‘Yes,’ said Mallory, warming to her toughness. ‘So how did you do it?’

She shook her head. Her shivering was lending a faint seismic movement to the straw. They were talking, the rеsistants. One of them I knew. They said the radio signal arranging your drop mentioned that you were carrying money, I don’t know if it’s true. They made a deal with a German officer. They are demoralised, some of these Germans in the mountains here. And of course the rеsistants too; some of them are no more than bandits. The German was to kill you. Then he was to give them the money and collect a medal, I guess.’ Her teeth gleamed in the pale reflection from the snow outside. ‘I saw them come back to warn the officer. I knew where they had come from. So I got on my bicycle, and fell off in the right place. And it didn’t work out for those pigs.’

‘Thank God,’ said Hugues, fervently.

Mallory found he was smiling. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He got up, his weary knees protesting. It looked as if there was a new addition to the party. A brave addition, but a slow one. He hoped that Hugues would get his ardour under control, and start acting human again. He said, ‘We’re moving out.’

An hour and a half later Jaime led them down a snowy path and into the trees above the village. There was another barn-like building in the trees.

Jaime opened the door and said, ‘Wait in here.’

Mallory said, ‘Where are you going?’

‘To find some friends.’ There was a fireplace. Jaime struck a match, lit the piled kindling, and threw on an armful of logs. ‘Be comfortable. Dry yourselves.’ His eyes were invisible in the shadows under his heavy eyebrows.

Mallory’s eyes met Andrea’s. He did not like it. Nor, he could tell, did Andrea. But there was nothing he could do.

Jaime disappeared into the night. Lisette sank down in front of the fire and began to pull her boots off.

‘Outside,’ said Mallory.

She looked at him as if he was mad.

‘What if Jaime comes back with a German patrol?’

‘Mais non,’ said Thierry.

‘Jaime?’ said Lisette. ‘Never. He hates Germans.’

Hugues’ face was pink and nervous. ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘How does anyone know? The Germans arrived at the drop site within half an hour. Someone betrayed us-’

‘I told you what happened,’ said Lisette. ‘Now for God’s sake -’

‘Outside,’ said Hugues.

Something happened to Lisette’s face. ‘Non,’ she said. ‘Non, non, non, non. I am staying.’

‘And I also,’ said Thierry, his big face the colour of lard under the straw hat.

‘Women,’ said Hugues.

‘I am not women! snapped Lisette. ‘I am someone who knows Jaime. And trusts him.’

‘Ah, ?a!’ said Hugues. ‘Well-’

‘But perhaps you trust your friends more,’ said Lisette.

And when Hugues looked round, he saw that where Mallory, Miller and Andrea had been standing were only wet footprints.

Out in the woods Miller lay and shivered in a pile of sodden pine needles, and thought longingly of the warm firelight in the barn. He had watched Hugues storm out, heard the slam of the door. Then nothing, except the icy drip of rainwater on his neck, and the mouldy smell of pine needles under his nose.

After half an hour, the rain stopped. There was silence, with dripping. And behind the dripping, the wheeze and clatter of an engine. Some sort of truck came round the corner, no lights. Miller sighted his Schmeisser on its cab. Three men got out. As far as Miller could see, the truck was small, and not German.

A voice said, ‘L’Amiral Beaufort!’

Another voice said, ‘Vive la France!’

The barn door opened and closed.

Mallory saw Hugues come out of the bush in which he had been hiding, and walk across to the barn. Hugues knew these men, it appeared. That was Hugues’ area of speciality. So Mallory got up himself, and went in.

The men Jaime had brought wore sweeping moustaches and huge berets that flopped down over their eyes. They carried shotguns. Two of them were talking to Hugues in rapid French. Mallory thought they looked a damned sight too pleased with themselves.

‘There are no Germans in the village,’ said Jaime. ‘But there is a small problem. It seems that Jules has had an accident. A fatal accident, they tell me. He was shot at Jonz?re, last night.’

Mallory stared at him. ‘How?’ he said.

‘A matter of too much enthusiasm,’ said Jaime.

Hugues ceased his conversation and turned to Mallory. He said, ‘Or to tell the truth, a mess.’

Jaime shrugged. He said, The rеsistants heard we had landed. There was an idea that we were a regiment, maybe more, because there were only two survivors from the German patrol in the gorge. So Jules heard all this and went to Jonz?re to stop these hotheads getting themselves killed. But he was too late. They were firing on the Germans, and the Germans were firing back, and they got themselves killed, all right. And Jules got himself killed with them.’

Hugues blew air, expressing scorn. ‘It is not as it is in the north. These mountain people have too many feelings and too few brains.’

It was Jules who had known the man who knew where the Werwolf pack were being repaired. Without Jules, the chain was broken.

Mallory said, with a mildness he did not feel, ‘So how are we to continue with the operation?’

‘Ah,’ said Jaime. ‘Marcel has a surprise for you, in Colbis.’ He did not look as if he approved of surprises.

‘Marcel the baker?’ said Hugues.

‘That’s the one.’

Hugues nodded approvingly. ‘A good man,’ he said.

Mallory had the feeling that he was sitting in on gossip about people he did not know. He said, ‘I need information about the Werwolf pack, not bread.’

‘Voil?,’ said Jaime. ‘Marcel proposes breakfast in the … in his cafе. Then he will provide you with transport to where it is you wish to go. He has another Englishman there, you will be glad to hear, who may have information.’

May, thought Mallory. Only may. He took a deep, resigned breath.

‘Oh, good,’ said Miller, edging towards the fire. ‘And the dancing girls?’

‘You may find some dancing girls.’

‘Breakfast would be fine,’ said Miller.

Mallory beckoned Jaime over. The men with the berets followed him as if glued to his side. ‘Why are there no Germans in the village?’

One of the men with the berets grinned, and spoke quickly. Jaime translated. ‘Because they are all in Jonz?re. First, fighting. Now, trying to catch some bandits before they arrive in Spain.’ There was more talk in a language that was not French. Basque, Mallory guessed. ‘This man says there has been a battle. Many Germans have been killed. There may be reprisals. It is said there was an Allied army in the mountains. In the next valley.’

Mallory raised his eyebrows. ‘An army,’ he said. From regiment to army, in the space of three minutes.

‘Yes,’ said Jaime, solemn-faced in the dim light of the torch. ‘And they say it is lucky that we were not involved, being so few, and one of us a woman.’

Mallory looked at Jaime hard. Was that the ghost of a wink? Andrea’s face was impassive. He had seen it too. His great head moved, almost imperceptibly. Nodding. Suddenly, Mallory found himself perilously close to trusting Jaime.

Mallory hardened his heart. ‘Now you listen,’ he said. ‘I am grateful for your offers of hospitality. But I don’t want to go into the village, breakfast or no breakfast. I want our transport out here, and I want to get up to the coast. The more time we spend in the mountains, the messier it’s going to get, the bigger the rumours. We want to do this quick and quiet. I don’t like rumours and reprisals, or battles. I want intelligence, and I want transport, and I want them before daylight. Tell these people to tell Marcel.’

Jaime said, ‘I don’t know-’

Mallory said, ‘And make it snappy.’

Jaime looked at the steady burn of the deeply-sunken eyes over the long, unshaven jaw. Jaime thought of the cliff that nobody could climb, that this man had climbed; of three burned-out lorries in the pass; and the pursuit on a wild goose chase towards the Spanish border. This was not a man it was easy to disobey. Perhaps he had underestimated this man.

‘Bon,’ he said.

‘And now,’ said Mallory, when the men in berets had gone outside, Thierry. Time to tell the folks at home we’ve arrived.’

Thierry nodded. He looked big and pale and exhausted. His head moved slowly, as if his neck was stiff, the big jowls creasing and uncreasing, stray strands of straw waving jauntily over the burst crown of his hat. He began to unpack the radio. Miller was in a corner, stretched out full-length on the straw, humming a Bix Beiderbecke tune. Andrea was relaxed, but close to a knothole in the door, through which he could keep tabs on the sentries. Mallory leaned his head against the wall. He could feel his clothes beginning to steam in the heat from the fire.

He said to Hugues, quietly, ‘What do you know about this Marcel?’

‘Jules’ second-in-command,’ said Hugues. ‘It is an odd structure, down here. Security is terrible. But they are brave men.’

‘And we trust them?’

Hugues smiled. He said, ‘Is there any choice?’

Mallory kept hearing Jensen’s voice. It seems quite possible that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you.

Damn you, Jensen. What did you know that you did not tell us?

It was raining again, a steady rattle on the roof of the barn. On the mountain it would be snowing on their tracks. Perhaps their tracks would be comprehensively covered, and the Germans would not be waiting for them. Perhaps they would be lucky.

But Mallory did not believe in luck.

Thierry said, ‘Contact made and acknowledged.’

‘Messages?’

‘No messages.’

Mallory closed his eyes. Sleep lapped at him. Despite the fire he was cold. Two hours later, he was going to remember being cold; remember it with nostalgic affection. For the moment, he lay and shivered, dozing.

Then he was awake.

A lorry engine was running outside. He gripped his Schmeisser and rose to his feet, instantly alert. He could see Miller covering the door. Andrea was gone. What -

The door crashed open. A man was standing there. He was short and fat, with a beret the size of a dinner plate, and a moustache that spread beyond it like the wings of a crow. His small black eyes flicked between the Schmeisser barrels covering him. He grinned broadly. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Colbis welcomes its allies from beyond the seas. Allons, l’Amiral Beaufort.’

Mallory said, ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Marcel,’ said the man. ‘I am delighted to see you. I am only sorry that you had some little problems last night, of which I have already heard.’ He bowed. ‘My congratulations. Now, into the lorry. It will soon be light, and there are many eyes connected to many tongues.’

Outside, a steady rain was falling. In the grey half-light black pines rose up the steep hillside into a layer of dirty-grey cloud. The lorry was an old Citro?n, converted to wood-gas, panting and fuming in the yard. ‘Messieurs,’ said Marcel. ‘Dispose yourselves.’

Mallory closed the Storm Force into the canvas back of the lorry, and climbed into the front. Marcel ground the gears, and started to jounce down a narrow track that snaked through the dripping trees. ‘Quite a fuss,’ said Marcel. ‘The Germans have met an army of maquisards, it is said. Oh, very good -’

Mallory said, ‘I am looking for three submarines.’

‘Naturally,’ said Marcel. ‘And I know a man who will take you to them. We must meet him now. At breakfast.’

‘A man?’

‘Wait and see,’ said Marcel, hauling the lorry round a pig in the road.

The trees had stopped. They were crossing open meadows scattered with small, earth-coloured cottages. Ahead was a huddle of houses, and the arched campanile of a church. Nothing was moving; it was four-thirty in the morning. But Mallory did not like it.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Breakfast, of course. In the village.’

‘Not the village.’ Villages were rat-traps. In the past eight hours, Mallory had had enough rat-traps for a lifetime.

Marcel said, ‘There are no Germans in Colbis. No collaborators. It is important that we go into the village. To see this person.’

‘Who is this person?’

‘As I say,’ said Marcel, with a winsome smile, ‘this will be a surprise.’

Mallory told himself that there was no future in getting angry. He said, ‘Excuse me, but there is very little time. I do not wish to commit myself to a position from which there is no retreat.’

Marcel looked at him. Above the jolly cheeks, the eyes were hard and knowing: the eyes of a lieutenant whose commanding officer had been killed in the night. Mallory began to feel better. Marcel said, ‘This person you must meet cannot be moved. Believe me.’

Mallory gave up. He pulled his SS helmet over his eyes, checked the magazine of his Schmeisser, and leaned back in the seat. Slowly the lorry wheezed out of the meadows and wound its way through streets designed for pack-mules into the centre of Colbis.

There was a square, flanked on its south side by the long wall of the church. In the middle were two plane trees in which roosting chickens clucked drowsily. There was a mairie, and a line of what must have been shops: butcher’s, baker’s, ironmonger’s. And on the corner, a row of tall windows streaming with rain, with a signboard above them bearing the faded inscription Cafе Des Sports.

“Ere we are,’ said Marcel, cheerfully. “Op out.’

Boots clattered on the wet cobbles. The etched-glass windows of the cafе reflected the group of civilians and the three Waffen-SS with heavy packs and Schmeissers; the civilians might have been prisoners. It was a sight to cause twitched-aside curtains to drop over windows - not that there was any visible twitching. The German forces of Occupation in the frontier zone were remarkably acute about twitched curtains.

Grinning and puffing, Marcel hustled his charges into the cafе, and shepherded them up through the beaded fringe covering the mouth of a staircase behind the bar. Miller’s nostrils dilated. He said, ‘Coffee. Real coffee.’

‘Comes from Spain,’ said Marcel. ‘With the senoritas and the oranges. Particularly the senoritas. Come up, now.’

Miller went up the stairs. Mallory was behind him. Miller stopped, dead. Mallory’s finger moved to the trigger of his Schmeisser. At the top of the stairs was a large landing overlooking the square. The landing had sofas and chairs. Too many doors opened off it. It smelt of stale scent and unwashed bodies.

Miller said, ‘It’s a cathouse.’

Mallory said, ‘So you will feel completely at home.’

They had been walking most of the night. Mallory was soaking wet and shivering. His hands felt raw, his feet rubbed and blistered inside the jackboots. He wanted to find the objective of the operation, and carry the operation out while there was still an operation to carry out.

And instead, they were attending a breakfast party in a brothel.

‘Village this size?’ said Miller. ‘With a cathouse?’

It should have meant something. But the smell of the coffee had blunted Mallory’s perceptions. All he knew was that he had to get hold of some, or die.

It was light outside, cold and grey. But inside on the sideboard there was coffee, and bread, and goat’s cheese, and a thin, fiery brandy for those who wanted it. Mallory drank a cup of coffee. He said to Marcel, ‘You said there was someone here.’

Marcel nodded. ‘He will be sleeping. Another croissant? I make them my own self.’

‘We’ll wake him.’

Marcel shrugged, and opened one of the doors off the landing.

The smell of sweat and perfume intensified. It was a bedroom, decorated in dirty pink satin. On the bed was a man in khaki uniform, lying on his back like a crusader on a tomb. Bandages showed through the unbuttoned waistband of his battledress blouse: bandages with rusty stains. On the chair beside the bed was a beret bearing the winged-hatchet badge of the SAS.

Mallory glanced at the pips on the epaulette. He said, ‘Morning, Lieutenant.’

The man on the bed stirred and moaned. His eyes half-opened. They focused on Mallory. They saw a man in a coal-scuttle helmet and a Waffen-SS smock, carrying a Schmeisser.

‘Hiding up in a brothel,’ said Mallory. ‘All right for some.’

The man’s hand crawled towards his pillow. Mallory’s hand beat him to it. His fingers closed on metal. He came out with the Browning automatic. ‘Relax,’ said Mallory.

The Lieutenant glared at him with berserk blue eyes. His face was white, with grey shadows. Pain. He was badly wounded. ‘SOE,’ said Mallory. ‘We’ve come to bail you out.’ Inwardly, his heart was sinking. This would be one of Killigrew’s men. One of the gung-ho shoot-em-up boys who had been dropped and got themselves lost. Who had probably compromised the operation already. Things were in a bad enough mess without a wounded SAS man to slow them down. A badly wounded SAS man, by the look of him. Perhaps he could be smuggled over the border into Spain.

‘How do I know that?’ said the Lieutenant.

‘Admiral Beaufort will tell you,’ said Mallory. ‘So did a little man called Captain Killigrew.’ He opened the buttons of the SS smock. ‘And this is British battledress. Seemed tactless to wear it on the outside, somehow.’

‘Who told you I was here? Marcel-’

‘Marcel was very discreet,’ said Mallory, soothingly.

Slowly, the blue eyes lost their berserk glare. The wariness remained. ‘Killigrew,’ he said. ‘Yes. When did you get in?’

‘Albemarle, last night,’ said Mallory. There was no time for chitchat. ‘I need to know what happened to you.’

‘Landed on a bit of a plateau … near here,’ said the SAS man. He obviously wanted to give as little away as possible. ‘Brought a Jeep.’ A Jeep, thought Mallory. A full-size actual Jeep. On parachutes. Amazing. But that was the SAS for you. ‘Heading for the coast. Ambushed. Other chaps bought it. I took a bang on the head and a bullet in the guts.’

Mallory said, ‘How did it happen?’

‘Driving down a track,’ said the SAS man. ‘Next thing we knew, there were two Spandaus. One either side of the road. Don’t remember much after that. The Resistance brought me here.’ There was a shake in his voice. He was very young.

‘So it was a road block?’ said Mallory.

‘Not much of one.’

Mallory nodded. Give me strength, he thought. Conning your way through a checkpoint behind enemy lines, SAS style. Two grenades and put your foot down. ‘Where were you going on the coast?’

‘Doesn’t really matter,’ said the Lieutenant. This was his first operation. It was just like school, on the Rugby XV. You went for it, and sod the consequences. Your own team tactics were your own team tactics, and you kept them to yourself. The only thing different about war was this damned bullet. He did not let his mind stray too close to the bullet, in case the pain made him sick again. It felt the size of a cricket ball, down there. And it hurt. Was hurting worse, lately … He concentrated on his dislike for this old man in the Waffen-SS uniform who had burst in and dropped a few names, and thought that gave him a license to pump him, take over the operation, grab the glory. Let him find out for himself.

The old man’s face was close to his. It had a broad forehead and very young brown eyes; eyes like old Brutus, who taught Latin at Shrewsbury and climbed Alps in the summer hols. The eyes seemed to remove the Lieutenant’s reserve the way a tin- opener would take the lid off a tin. The old man said, ‘Where were you going and who were you going to see?’

The Lieutenant summoned up his undoubted toughness. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

The eyes hardened. The old man said, ‘Don’t be childish. There’s very little time.’

The Lieutenant gritted his teeth. He desperately wanted to tell someone. It would be less lonely, for one thing, and he was really, terrifyingly, lonely. But a secret was a secret. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t … I’m not authorised.’

Mallory allowed his eyes to rest on this lieutenant. He really was absurdly young. His was the berserker’s bravery, frenzied and unbending. If the Gestapo got their hands on him, he would break like a twig.

Mallory sighed inwardly. He got up, opened the door and put his head out. There seemed to be a party going on. He said, ‘Andrea.’

The huge Greek padded across from his seat overlooking the square. His shoulders seemed to blot out the light in the little room. Mallory said, ‘If you won’t tell me, tell the Colonel.’

The SAS man frowned. He saw no colonel. He saw an unshaven giant with a huge moustache. He saw a pair of black eyes, eyes like the eyes on a Byzantine icon, that understood everything, forgave everything. ‘Colonel?’ he said.

‘Andrea is a full colonel in the Greek army.’

‘How do I know that’s not another bloody lie?’

Andrea sat down in the pink plush armchair. Suddenly the SAS man felt weak, and ill, and about fourteen years old. ‘You are frightened,’ said Andrea.

‘I bloody well am not,’ said the Lieutenant. But even as Andrea spoke, he could feel it draining away, all the team spirit, the gung ho, war-as-a-game-of-rugby. He saw himself as he was: a wounded kid who would die in a dirty little room, alone.

‘Not of dying,’ said Andrea. ‘But of yourself, of failing. I also am frightened, all the time. So it is not possible to let myself fail.’

He did not sound like any colonel the Lieutenant had ever heard. He sounded like a man of warmth and common sense, like a friend. Careful, said a voice in the Lieutenant’s head. But it was a small voice, fading fast.

Andrea’s eyes alighted on a crude wooden crutch, a section of pole with a pad whittled roughly to the shape of an armpit. ‘Yours?’ he said.

‘I’m going to use it,’ said the SAS man. ‘I can get around all right.’ It was not altogether a lie. He could move. It was just that when he moved, he could feel that bit of metal in his guts twisting, doing him damage. But that was not the point. The point was fighting a war. ‘Couple of days,’ he said. ‘Get into the hills.’

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ said Andrea, tactfully. This boy and his crutch would not last an hour in the mountains. He could see it in his face. ‘We will take you with us,’ said Andrea. ‘And you and I, and Miller and Mallory, will finish this operation.’

The Lieutenant’s eyes moved back to the first man, the thin one. ‘Mallory?’ he said. He saw newspaper front pages pinned to the board behind the fives courts. On the front pages were pictures of this man, with a pyramid of snow-covered rock in the background. That Mallory. He came to a decision. He said, ‘Jules told me. Guy Jamalartеgui. At the Cafе de L’Ocеan in St-Jean-de-Luz. We would have told you. But … there’s been a lot of German activity. Radio silence, except in emergency. Jerry’s very quick.’

Mallory nodded. Radio detector vans would not be the only reason. The SAS liked to keep their intelligence to themselves, particularly when it was information that might help Jensen and SOE.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’ Sounds of revelry were percolating through the door. ‘Now. Can I get you some breakfast?’

Once the shock had worn off. Miller had almost started to enjoy himself. The coffee was undoubtedly coffee, and the bread was still warm from the oven, and while he was not a goat cheese enthusiast, in his present frame of mind he would have cheerfully eaten the goat, horns and all. And by the time he had finished eating, there had been stirrings behind some of the doors. At the Cognac stage, his glass had been filled by a dark girl in a red silk nightdress, and Miller was beginning to be reminded that while occupied France might be occupied, it was still France.

He lay back in his chair, and listened to the rattle of French and Basque from the maquisards, and sipped his Cognac. A corner of his mind was on the girl in the red nightdress. But most of it was out there in the square, patrolling the darkness under the trees and in the corners. Soon the village’s eyes would start opening and its tongues would start wagging. It was time they were out of here. The girl in the red nightdress ran her fingers through his crewcut. Miller grinned, a lazy grin that to anyone who did not know him would have looked completely relaxed. Which in a way, he was. Because Mallory thought it was okay to be here. So it was okay. In a life that had contained about ten times more incidents than the average citizen’s, Miller had never met a man he trusted more than the New Zealander.

He was not so sure about the Frenchmen. Jaime was sitting in a corner, coffee cup between his hands. Jaime seemed at least to know his way around. Now he was watching Hugues, who was fussing round Lisette. A lifetime spent in places where personality carried more weight than law had made Miller acutely sensitive to the way people got along. Miller had the distinct feeling that Jaime did not have a lot of time for Hugues.

Miller had his own doubts about Hugues. Sure, he knew his way round the Resistance. But he was an excitable guy. Lotta fuss that guy makes, thought Miller. And a lotta noise, too much noise. Lisette, now. They were stuck with Lisette. She was slow; she carried too much weight. But she was one tough cookie -

Jesus.

Lisette had been removing her outer clothing. She had been wearing an overcoat, two shawls, and a couple of peasant smocks of some kind. They had made her look like a football on legs. Dressed up like that, she had bicycled up a steep valley road without lights, climbed a vertical cliff and force-marched fifteen precipitous miles without sleep.

What dropped Miller’s jaw on his chest was not what she had done. It was the fact that she was just about the same shape without the winter clothes as with them. Face it, thought Miller. If you were Hugues, and Lisette was your girl, you would maybe feel a tad over-protective yourself.

Because the reason Lisette looked like a gasometer on legs was that she was at least eight months pregnant.

Somewhere a telephone rang, the tenuous ring of a hand-cranked exchange. Down the hall someone answered it, and started shouting in frantic Basque. Miller became suddenly completely immobile, listening. The voices had stopped. Cocks were crowing. Otherwise there was silence.

But behind the silence were engines. Lorry engines, a lot of them.

In the French frontier zone at this particular time in history, there was only one group of people who had a lot of lorries, and the fuel to run them.

Miller grabbed his Schmeisser and yanked the cocking lever. The girl in the red nightdress seemed suddenly to have vanished. Marcel the baker was standing up, smiling from a face suddenly grey and wooden. The engines were in the square now: four trucks with canvas backs. The trucks stopped. Soldiers were pouring out of the backs, soldiers with coal-scuttle helmets and field-grey uniforms, their jackboots grinding the wet cobbles of the square.

A staff car rolled into the square. A tall, black-uniformed officer got out, said something, and pointed at Marcel’s lorry. Two soldiers bayoneted the tyres. The lorry settled on its rims.

As Mallory put his head out of the SAS man’s door, Andrea’s hand went out and grabbed Marcel by the shoulder. Marcel was a big man, but Andrea held him at arm’s length with his feet off the ground. He said, ‘What are these troops doing here?’

Marcel’s face was a mask of horror. ‘I don’t know … I was assured …’

In Mallory’s mind, gears rolled smoothly and a conclusion formed. ‘It’s an SS brothel,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

Marcel’s face turned a dull, embarrassed purple. ‘It is a cover,’ he said. ‘A good cover. Now, gentlemen …’

Andrea dropped him. Marcel rubbed his shoulder. He said, ‘Follow me, please.’ His voice was calm and urbane: the voice of the perfect host. Already the girls had cleared away the traces of the breakfast. He pointed into the SAS man’s room. One of the girls was holding open the door of the wardrobe. The wardrobe had no back. Instead, a flight of steps led down into darkness.

Mallory trusted Marcel. But someone had betrayed them.

Who?

Andrea went to help the SAS man off the bed. The SAS man pushed him away, reached for his makeshift wooden crutch and hauled himself moaning to his feet. As Miller brought up the rear, he could hear the battering of rifle butts on the cafe’s front door.

More rats in more traps, he thought. And all for a cup of coffee and a girl in a red nightdress.

Maybe the coffee had been worth it, at that.

The back of the wardrobe slammed behind them. They went downstairs and out into a small yard, wet and empty under the sky. At the back of the yard was a shed, the lintel of its door blackened by smoke. There was a powerful smell of baking bread.

From over the wall came guttural shouts, and the barking of dogs. ‘Vite,’ said Marcel, shooing them into the shed.

The shed was a bakehouse. There were two bread ovens. The one on the left was shut. The one on the right was open. In front of the oven door was a big stone slab. On the slab lay a metal tray, six feet long by four feet wide. A small, one-eyed man in a dirty apron did not even glance at them. ‘On the tray,’ said Marcel. ‘Two at a time.’

‘Where are the others?’ said Mallory.

‘In the brothel. They speak French, bien entendu. Their papers are good. Vite.’

Miller jumped up onto the tray, and lay with his boxes on the big wooden paddle. Mallory climbed up beside him. ‘When the tray stops, roll off,’ said Marcel. ‘Cover your faces.’

Mallory could hear German voices. A trap, he thought. Another, smaller trap. After this trap, absolutely no more -

He was lying on the tray with his pack on his stomach. He covered his face with his hands. Someone shoved the paddle. A ferocious heat beat on the backs of his hands. He thought of the parabolic brick roof of the oven, smelt burning hair. The ammunition, he thought.

But the heat was gone, and they were shuffling off the paddle and onto a stone surface that was merely warm. Mallory raised his head. It was dark, black as ink. After six inches his forehead hit the roof. There seemed to be air circulating.

The tray returned, bearing Andrea and the SAS man. The SAS man was breathing hard and tremulous as Andrea shoved him off the tray. Somewhere, stones grated. That’s it, thought Miller. You’ve got your bread oven, circular, made out of bricks. And there’s a little door in the back of it, and we’ve been pushed through, and now they’ve closed the door -

Scraping noises emanated from the oven.

- and now they are going to bake a little bread.

He tried to raise his head, to see where the air was coming from. He hit the ceiling. Eighteen inches high, he thought. And nothing to see. Buried alive.

He put out his hand, touched his brass-bound boxes. On the way, his hand touched Mallory’s arm.

The arm was rigid, vibrating with what must have been fear.

No. Not Mallory. Mallory was cool as ice. Mallory had scaled the South Cliff at Navarone, when Miller had been mewing with terror at its base.

All right, thought Miller. But down in the middle of every human being there is a place kept locked tight, and in that place lives the beast a person fears most. But sometimes the locks go, and the beast is out, raging in the mind, taking over all its corners.

Mallory’s beast was confined spaces.

Dusty Miller stared at the invisible ceiling six inches above his nose, and listened to the sounds coming through the brick wall of the oven. There was a brisk crackling, and a sharp whiff of smoke. They had lit a fire in there, to heat the oven for the next batch of baking. How long do we have to stay in here? he thought. What if Mallory can’t take it?

He began to sing. He sang softly, ‘Falling in loaf with loaf is like falling for make-believe-’

‘Shut up,’ hissed the SAS man.

This is not well bread of you,’ said Miller.

‘For Christ’s sake-’

‘I’m oven a lovely time,’ said Miller. ‘And you’re baking the spell-’

Mallory knew it was the torpedoing all over again: the little metal room with four men jammed together, the thunder of the terrible blue Mediterranean pouring into the hull, four faces in six inches of air under the steel ceiling, the air bad, hot, unbreathable - and Mallory was going to die, of suffocation, certainly, but first of terror …

Someone seemed to be talking. Talking complete drivel, in a soft Chicago drawl. Beyond the drawl, far away, there were other voices. German voices.

Miller.

The terror went. Mallory found himself thinking that there were worse things than small spaces. Dusty Miller’s puns, for instance.

Miller felt Mallory’s hand prod him sharply in the side. He shut up. Mission accomplished.

Suddenly a dog was barking close at hand. Much closer than the far side of the fire in the oven. The compartment where the four men were hiding filled with the scritch of claws on stone. The air holes, thought Miller. There must be air holes, and the goddamn dog’s smelt us through them.





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