It worked.
Carstairs crashed to the ground, grabbing for his dagger. Mallory stamped on his hand and let him look down the black tube of the machine pistol’s muzzle.
The man on the bed said, ‘Jesoos.’
‘Shut up!’ hissed Carstairs.
‘Hold your tongue,’ said Mallory.
The man on the bed was small and stout, with curly black hair and a thick black moustache and a very bad colour. ‘Don’ kill me,’ he said. ‘Don’ kill me. For why you want to kill me?’
Mallory looked at Carstairs, then at the black-haired man. He said, in English, ‘What happened to you?’
The small man’s eyes narrowed. He said, in German, ‘Why are you speaking English?’
Mallory lay wearily back in the chair. Carstairs was spluttering like an unexploded bomb on the floor. ‘Because I’m English,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’
‘Shut your bloody mouth,’ said Carstairs, frantic. ‘I forbid you to speak.’
‘So,’ said the short man, indignation getting the better of suspicion. ‘I answer your damned question, and you tries to suffocate me. And now there is another German SS who talk English and want to know. Is it for this that I swim, I paddle, I bring —’
‘Start at the beginning,’ said Carstairs, wearily. ‘Go on.’
‘How do I know who you are?’ said the Greek.
Mallory offered the man a cigarette, lit one himself, closing his mind to the idea that outside that door was bandit country, crawling with people who would kill him as quick as blow their noses. Carstairs had had orders from Admiral Dixon to assassinate this man. Mallory had countermanded them. There would be trouble in England, too. Wearily, he took off his helmet.
The Greek made a sound half-way between a gasp and a squeak. ‘Mallory!’ he said. ‘Is no possible.’
Mallory looked at him, one eyebrow up.
‘Mount Cook,’ said the Greek. ‘My cousin Latsis he went to New Zealand for the farm. But the farm no work out good so he get work with expedition, because he know how make food in fire far from roof. He cook with you. He send me photograph, newspaper story. You and Latsis. You remember? My cousin Latsis. Sure you remember. Yes, yes, you remember.’
Mallory remembered, all right. He remembered the Mount Cook expedition, the first and last major expedition he had led in the Southern Alps, after his lone climbs. He remembered far too many people, far too much organization: the green New Zealand sky over the white prisms of the mountains, the crisp new air, the sound of too many voices; the taste of burned beans. He remembered a charming Greek with a huge nose, a ready smile, and absolutely no talent in the kitchen.
‘Big nose,’ said Mallory.
If there had been wine in the little hospital room, someone would have opened it. As it was, the Greek seized Mallory’s right hand in both of his and shook it furiously. ‘I am Spiro,’ he said. ‘And I must tell you what I told your … this man.’ Here he narrowly failed to spit on Carstairs. ‘I have got the machine.’
‘The machine?’
Carstairs said, ‘Now look here —’
‘The seven-rotor Enigma,’ said Spiro. ‘Of course.’
‘What is the seven-rotor Enigma?’ said Mallory.
‘Nothing,’ said Carstairs. ‘Spiro, I should warn you —’
‘Shut the mouth,’ said Spiro. ‘I am tired. So bloody tired you would not believe. Always I keeps my mouth shut —’
‘A little longer,’ said Mallory. ‘First, we must get you out of here.’
‘So let’s get out,’ said Spiro. ‘And then I show you machine.’
‘Show us?’ said Carstairs. ‘You don’t really mean you’ve got it?’
‘Yes,’ said Spiro. ‘What did you think?’
Carstairs’ face had gone a nasty shade of grey. ‘They told me you knew about it,’ he said. ‘That you had been sent to steal it. But that there was no hope, what with the shipwreck. I was to … silence you before you were tortured. If I’d known …’
‘Of courses,’ said Spiro, nastily. ‘First murder, then asking questions. Fool.’
Carstairs gave him a sickly smile. ‘Awfully sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure you understand, what? Now, then. This is marvellous. Exactly where is it?’
Spiro turned upon him a puffed and hostile gaze. ‘I tell your friend when we are out,’ he said. ‘Just for now, it is in a safe place. Okay?’
‘Where?’
‘Out first,’ said Spiro. ‘Where later.’
Miller found the workshops most impressive. In the lava bubbles of the cold volcano, the Germans had built a fair-sized factory. There were machine shops and an assembly line staffed by brown-coated engineers, with Greek slave labourers in blue boiler suits wheeling racks of parts and tools. The air was full of the limey reek of wet concrete. Someone somewhere was building something. Miller found an abandoned trolley and loaded in the explosives pack. They trundled it along the lines of benches, through tunnels into new caverns, with curved alloy castings and cylindrical motors of huge complexity with nozzles and no driveshafts, fuel and lubricant tanks, steel doors marked with skull-and-crossbones stencils, until at the end they came to a series of concrete baffles built out across the passage. Standing in front of the baffles was an SS man with a Schmeisser. Above his head, a large sign said: Eingang Verboten.
‘Looks like it,’ said Miller. ‘Plan?’
Andrea did not answer. But Miller saw from the corner of his eye the huge Greek’s right hand go to the place on his belt occupied by his knife. And not before time: from behind, there was the sound of shouting and running feet. The confusion by the lift seemed to have sorted itself out.
Somewhere ahead, a field telephone rang. The SS man picked up the receiver and gave what must have been a password. Then his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his mouth opened and no sound came out, because Andrea had walked straight up to him and slammed his knife between his fourth and fifth ribs and into his heart, and as he slid to the ground had plucked the telephone from the dead fingers. ‘Bitte?’ said Andrea.
‘Intruders,’ said the voice. ‘Two men.’ The voice gave a fair description of Andrea and Miller. ‘Shoot on sight,’ it said. ‘Tell Hauptmann Weiss.’
‘Zu Befehl,’ said Andrea. He put the telephone down and tore the wire out of the junction box.
Miller had dragged the corpse out of sight. They walked round the baffles, and found themselves confronted by a huge steel door. Andrea rapped on it with his gun-butt. ‘Hauptmann Weiss!’ he said.
A slider on the door went back. ‘Who wants him?’
‘Wolf. Immediately.’
There was the sound of grumbling. A wicket opened in the steel door. A man in SS uniform started through. The silenced Browning jumped in Miller’s hand. The SS man fell back. The two men ran in, and shut the door behind them. Two SS privates were hauling their Schmeissers into firing position. Miller shot both of them.
‘Christos,’ said Andrea.
It was the first time Miller had ever heard him blaspheme. But he could see why.
They were on the concrete floor of an enormous yard. There were very few people. In the middle of the area, a hundred yards away, stood a cylindrical object painted in a black and white checkerboard pattern that gave it the look of an obscene toy made for the children of giants.
But it was not a toy. It was a rocket — a rocket so much bigger than any other rocket Andrea or Miller had ever seen that it removed the breath from their lungs.
It was standing in a framework of gantries. High above, a roof of camouflage netting billowed gently in the night breeze. From connection points on its bulging flanks, hoses snaked away to doors behind blast-deflection baffles in the sides of the … hole, was what it was, thought Miller; not a crater, but a hole left by the parting of the ways of three magma streams in three different directions.