‘Most impressive,’ he said.
Andrea just shook his head.
Behind them, someone was hammering on the steel door.
Miller rubbed his hands. They had now entered his area of special expertise. The gentle art of destruction, of which Miller was one of the world’s great exponents.
‘Now listen here,’ said Corporal Miller to Colonel Andrea, and opened the big wooden pack. Andrea listened. After a couple of minutes, he stowed four packages in his haversack, walked across the concrete to the gantry. Whistling, he trotted up the steps until he came to the level just below what he presumed was the business end. Here he paused, and moulded the putty-like explosive to the surface, leaving a thickness in the middle. Into the thickness he pushed an eight-hour time cartridge, crushed the tube, and withdrew the tag.
When he turned, a scientist was staring at him. ‘Monitoring,’ said Andrea. ‘Telemetry.’
The man pointed at the charge, mouthing. ‘Oh, all right,’ said Andrea, and kicked the man off the platform and on to the concrete. Then he started down.
Miller was nowhere to be seen.
He had strolled across to the baffles in front of the place where the pipes came out of the wall. Brennstoff, said stencilled letters. Fuel. He unlatched the door. There were no guards: nobody except another engineer in a brown coat, who simply nodded at him as he let himself into the chamber.
It was a squared-off cave, lit with harsh fluorescent lights. On the concrete floor, rank after rank of huge steel tanks lay like sleeping pigs. Half of them were thick-walled, pressurized: liquid oxygen. The rest were of riveted steel. Miller felt a momentary gloom at the thought of all that good alcohol going to waste. Then he sighed, took a little toolkit out of his pocket, and followed the hoses to their starting point. There were two tanks, one of oxygen, one of alcohol, the one next to the other. As he had hoped, their contents were indicated by ordinary Luftwaffe-pattern flow gauges downstream of the outlet valve. Humming, Miller pulled a tub of grease from the pocket of his overall. He unscrewed the cover of the valve, scooped some of the tub’s contents out with a wooden spatula, and greased the innards heavily.
‘Wer da?’ said a voice at his shoulder.
Miller turned to see an SS man pointing a machine pistol at him.
‘Maintenance,’ he said.
‘Vas?’
Miller shoved the grease under his nose. ‘Slippery stuff, cretin,’ he said. ‘Feel.’
But the soldier, thinking perhaps about the cleanliness of his uniform, said, ‘Nein,’ and pushed the tub away.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Miller, under whose arms the sweat was falling like rain. ‘Only twenty more to do.’
The soldier grunted. The rifle muzzle dropped. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he said.
‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ said Miller.
‘Someone’s stolen some uniforms in the showers,’ said the SS man. ‘So they’re all going crazy. Now the telephones are dead.’ He yawned. ‘So they panic, these Wehrmacht bastards. Some of us have got work to do. No time to panic.’
Miller grunted, took himself along to the next tank, unscrewed the gauge cover, smeared on the paste from his tub: his own patent paste, compounded of carborundum powder, magnesium, iron oxide and powdered aluminium. When the gauges started to spin, the carborundum would heat up. When it reached the right temperature, the magnesium would ignite and start the aluminium powder reacting with the iron oxide: an exothermic reaction, they called it, meaning that it got hot as hell, hot enough to melt iron and burn concrete. Certainly enough heat to ignite alcohol. And if by any chance an oxygen tank should rupture, well, the structural integrity of the entire V4 plant would be severely compromised. If not destroyed.
Personally, Miller was betting on destruction.
He did a couple more valves, for luck. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled, whistling, out of the fuel store.
Andrea was standing by the door, Schmeisser at the ready, as if on guard. ‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘You!’
Andrea snapped to attention.
‘Follow me!’ Miller started up the wall of the crater. He marched quickly, though his leg muscles were suddenly cracking with weariness, the blood pounding in his skull and his breath rasping in his throat. They scrambled from rock to rock, pushed under the edge of the roof of tarpaulins and camouflage nets. Behind them, the crater glowed under its blue floodlights. They began to scramble over the rocks towards the rendezvous.
Outside the hospital, the corridor was an ants’ nest. Nobody paid any attention to two SS men with a stretcher. Mallory and Carstairs carried Spiro down two flights of steel stairs. The shift was changing. Greek workers were shuffling down a corridor Mallory had not previously visited. There were few light bulbs, and a smell of cheap rice cooking, and latrines badly cleaned. A hundred yards later they rounded a corner and came to a wire-mesh fence with a gate, beside which stood a bored-looking SS man. ‘Throw it into the sea,’ said the sentry, when he saw the stretcher.
‘First, it has work to do,’ said Mallory. The sentry laughed. ‘We’ll be a while.’
‘Long as you like,’ said the sentry, heaving the gate open. ‘Don’t touch the women, though. They’ll claw it off.’
Mallory could feel Spiro’s shivering transmitted along the handles of the stretcher. He walked on.
The camp was no more nor less than the old village of the Acropolis, cordoned off from the rest of the island by a wire fence, so the precipices and fortifications that had once kept out the Turk now served to hold prisoner the Greek. It was a depressed, ruinous place, harshly lit by the floodlights set in the cliff face above. They carried the stretcher into the shadows of Athenai Street, and set it down.
Mallory lit a cigarette, drawing the harsh smoke into his lungs. In the blue-white streets, black-overalled figures came and went. There was no curiosity. A village without curiosity, thought Mallory, is a village that is dead: and for a moment he felt a pure, clear disgust for the men who had killed it.
Then he said, ‘This machine.’
‘Po!’ said Spiro. ‘Po, this machina!’ The words began to pour out of him in a torrent.
‘Steady,’ said Mallory.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Only when they have you in this place, you keep your eyes shut one, two days, breathe slow, they say Ach Gott he sleeps still, they stick in you pins and needles, you do not twitching, wait for you do not know what, then when you think, well, now I will have to be awake but when I awake I will be fear and tell them all about everythings and they will kill me real slows real slows, the hell with it I will rather die than sleep no more, then sudden you get the angels down flap flap.’ Here he cast himself upon Carstairs and began to cover his face with wet kisses.
‘Ugh,’ said Carstairs.
Mallory watched with some enjoyment as Carstairs disentangled himself. ‘So what’s the story?’ he said.
‘The machina —’
‘From the beginning.’
‘Yais,’ said Spiro. ‘Give me cigarette.’
‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ said Carstairs automatically, proffering his case.
‘I spit on your Turkish,’ said Spiro.