Andrea glowered at him and Mallory moved in! hastily.
'You're coming, then.'
'Of course I'm coming,' Andrea said irritably. He surveyed without enthusiasm the guests now swarming into the hall and brushing unceremoniously by as they headed, like the camel for the oasis, towards the bottle-laden tables. 'Somebody's got to look after you two.'
Mallory looked at his watch. 'Three and a half hours yet before that plane is due. We're dead on I our feet, Andrea. Where can we sleep — a safe place to sleep. Your perimeter guards are drunk.'
They've been that way ever since the fortress blew I up,' Andrea said. 'Come, I'll show you.'
Miller looked around the islanders, who, amid a loud babel of cheerful voices, were already quite exceptionally busy with bottles and glasses. 'How about your guests?'
'How about them, then?' Andrea surveyed his compatriots morosely. 'Just look at that lot. Ever known a wedding reception yet where anybody paid any attention to the bride and groom? Come.'
They made their way southwards through the outskirts of Mandrakes to the open countryside beyond. Twice they were challenged by guards, twice a scowl and growl from Andrea sent them back hurriedly to their ouzo bottles. It was still raining heavily, but Mallory's and Miller's clothes were already so saturated that a little more rain could hardly make any appreciable difference to the way they felt, while Andrea, if anything, seemed even more oblivious of it. Andrea had the air of a man who had other things on his mind.
After fifteen minutes' walk, Andrea stopped before the swing doors of a small, dilapidated and obviously deserted roadside barn.
'There's hay inside,' he said. 'We'll be safe here.' Mallory said: 'Fine. A radio message to the Sirdar to send her CE message to Cairo and — ' 'CE?' Andrea asked. 'What's that?' 'To let Cairo know we've contacted you and are ready for pick-up… And after that, three lovely hours' sleep.'
Andrea nodded. 'Three hours it is.' Three long hours,' Mallory said meditatively. A smile slowly broke on Andrea's craggy face as he clapped Mallory on the shoulder.
'In three long hours,' he said, 'a man like myself can accomplish a great deal.'
He turned and hurried off through the rain-filled night. Mallory and Miller looked after him with expressionless faces, looked at each other, still with the same expressionless faces, then pushed open the swing doors of the barn.
The Mandrakos airfield would not have received a licence from any Civil Air Board anywhere in the world. It was just over half a mile long, with hills rising steeply at both ends of the alleged runway, not more than forty yards wide and liberally besprinkled with a variety of bumps and potholes virtually guaranteed to wreck any undercarriage in the aviation business. But the RAF had used it before so it was not impossible that they might be able to use it at least once again.
To the south, the airstrip was lined with groves of carob trees. Under the pitiful shelter afforded by one of those, Mallory, Miller and Andrea sat waiting. At least Mallory and Miller did, hunched, miserable and shivering violently in their still sodden clothes. Andrea, however, was stretched out luxuriously with his hands behind his head, oblivious of the heavy drips of rain that fell on his upturned face. There was about him an air of satisfaction, of complacency almost, as he gazed at the first greyish tinges appearing in the sky to the east over the black-walled massif of die Turkish coast.
Andrea said: 'They're coming now.'
Mallory and Miller listened for a few moments, then they too heard it — the distant, muted roar of heavy aircraft approaching. All three rose and moved out to the perimeter of the airstrip. Within a minute, descending rapidly after their climb over the mountains to the louth and at a height of less than a thousand feet, ú squadron of eighteen Wellingtons, as much heard as seen in the light of early dawn, passed directly over the airstrip, heading for the town of Navarone. Two minutes later, the three watchers both heard the detonations and saw the brilliant orange mushrooming of light as the Wellingtons unloaded their bombs over the shattered fortress to the north. Sporadic lines of upward-flying tracers, obviously exclusively small-arm, attested to the ineffectuality, the weakness of the ground defences. When the fortress had blown up, so had all the anti-aircraft batteries in the town. The attack was short and sharp: less than two minutes after the bombardment had started it ceased as abruptly as it had begun and then there was only the fading dying sound of desynchronized engines as the Wellingtons pulled away, first to the north and then the west, across the still-dark waters of the Aegean.
For perhaps a minute the three watchers stood silent on the perimeter of the Mandrakes airstrip, then Miller said wonderingly: 'What makes us so important?'
'I don't know,' Mallory said. 'But I don't think you're going to enjoy finding out.'
'And that won't be long now.' Andrea turned round and looked towards the mountains to the south. 'Hear it?'
Neither of the others heard it, but they did not doubt that, in fact, there was something to hear. Andrea's hearing was on a par with his phenomenal eyesight. Then, suddenly, they could hear it, too. A solitary bomber — also a Wellington — came sinking in from the south, circled the perimeter area once as Mallory blinked his torch upwards in rapidly successive flashes, lined up its approach, landed heavily at the far end of the airstrip and came taxiing towards them, bumping heavily across the atrocious surface of the airfield. It halted less than a hundred yards from where they stood: then a light started winking from the flight deck.
Andrea said: 'Now, don't forget. I've promised to be back in a week.'
'Never make promises,' Miller said severely. 'What if we aren't back in a week? What if they're sending us to the Pacific?'
Then when we get back I'll send you in first to explain.'
Miller shook his head. 'I don't really think I'd like that.'
'We'll talk about your cowardice later on,' Mallory said. 'Come on. Hurry up.'
The three men broke into a run towards the waiting Wellington.
The Wellington was half an hour on the way to its destination, wherever its destination was, and Andrea and Miller, coffee mugs in hand, were trying, unsuccessfully, to attain a degree of comfort on the lumpy palliasses on the fuselage floor when Mallory returned from the flightdeck. Miller looked up at him in weary resignation, his expression characterized by an entire lack of enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure.
'Well, what did you find out?' His tone of voice made it abundantly clear that what he had expected Mallory to find out was nothing short of the very worst. 'Where to, now? Rhodes? Beirut? The flesh-pots of Cairo?'
'Termoli, the man says.'
'Termoli, is it? Place I've always wanted to see.' Miller paused. 'Where the hell's Termoli?'
'Italy, so I believe. Somewhere on the south Adriatic coast.'
'Oh, no!' Miller turned on his side and pulled a blanket over his head. 'I hate spaghetti.'
CHAPTER TWO
The landing on Termoli airfield, on the Adriatic coast of Southern Italy, was every bit as bumpy as the harrowing take-off from the Mandrakes airstrip had been. The Termoli fighter airbase was officially and optimistically listed as newly-constructed but in point of fact was no more than half-finished and felt that way for every yard of the excruciating touchdown and the jack-rabbit run-up to the prefabricated control tower at the eastern end of the field. When Mallory arid Andrea swung down to terra firma, neither of them looked particularly happy: Miller, who came a very shaky last, and who was widely known to have an almost pathological loathing and detestation of all conceivable forms of transport, looked very ill indeed.