Andrea said, ‘Get behind me.’ The German had a face that Miller did not like. He seemed to be swearing. Andrea’s mighty forearm tensed. The squashed-pumpkin skull turned purple under the thistledown hair. ‘Now,’ he said.
Miller took Carstairs’ Schmeisser gently away from him, and gave it to Mallory, just in case. They moved towards the mouth of the alley, crossing the wide floodlit spaces of the square. It felt horribly exposed out here. But none of the SS would shoot for fear of hitting their commanding officer –
A man flicked into view behind the church, wearing field grey, not camouflage, lifting a rifle to his shoulder. Miller put the bead of the Schmeisser’s sight on the man’s chest and squeezed off a four-round burst. The man crashed back into the shadows.
‘Thank you,’ said Mallory.
‘Don’t mensh,’ said Miller. But beneath the grin was something they all knew. Wolf’s soldiers might not like to shoot their colonel. But the regular Wehrmacht garrison would not be bothered one way or the other. With the amount of noise and fuss coming out of the Greek village, it stood to reason that reinforcements would start arriving soon. And that this time, they would do the job properly.
The mouth of the alley closed around them. Ahead, two lines of houses jostled each other on either side of a strip of cobbles. Then the houses on the left-hand side gave way to a blank walclass="underline" a wall with steps of ancient stone rising to battlements.
‘Up,’ said Andrea.
They went up. Behind them, the village was suddenly quiet as the dead under its lights. Mallory peered down the walkway behind the battlements. There was a guard tower, but as far as he could see, no guards.
‘Over,’ said Andrea.
Mallory unlimbered his pack, tossed the silk climbing rope over the edge. ‘Spiro,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Spiro. ‘I no go. I stays. High places, bullets, very bads.’
‘You go,’ said Mallory. ‘Rope round your neck, round your waist, all the same to me.’
‘But sea down there,’ said Spiro. ‘Very bad, wets, no swim good.’
‘Fields,’ said Andrea. ‘Not sea. Get in a ditch. Now go.’
He grabbed the fat man’s wrists. Mallory tied a bowline round the barrel chest and tipped him, still struggling, between the battlements. He and Miller lowered him into the dark until a sound floated up, more a squeak than a shout. Spiro had arrived.
Still the village lay quiet.
Wolf said, ‘You’re crazy. Give up now.’
‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory. ‘Go.’
Carstairs took hold of the rope and launched himself over the edge.
‘Miller,’ said Mallory.
The lights blazed off the cliff. The houses of the village stood bone-white and still. But the world was changing. Outside the orbit of the lights, the sky seemed paler. And from the gates came the sound of nailed jackboots, running.
TEN
Friday 0300–Saturday 0030
As Miller put his foot over the wall, the first grey uniforms came round the corner. He flung himself to the ground, put the Schmeisser to his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. Two men went down. The others fell back.
‘Go,’ said Mallory.
Miller would have hesitated, but he knew that when Mallory spoke in that tone of voice you did what he said. He grasped the rope and went down hand over hand. He could hear a voice shouting in German. Andrea’s voice. Shouting something about Hauptmann Wolf.
Miller’s boots hit the ground. ‘Where?’ he said.
‘Here,’ said Spiro, in a terrified squeak. Thank Gods you come.’
‘Now hear this!’ Andrea shouted, in German. ‘I have with me Hauptmann Wolf, a name known to you all. The Hauptmann is in great danger. Hold your fire.’
The noise of boots had stopped. The alley below the wall was empty. Silence had fallen. But it was not an empty silence. It was the silence of a village full of Greek labourers holding their breath; the silence of a platoon of Wehrmacht, waiting for Andrea to blink. A silence like the silence between the last tick of the timer and the detonation of the bomb.
Then a voice from the alley gave a curt order.
‘Nein!’ yelled Wolf.
But the order had been given by a serving officer of the Wehrmacht, and was not to be countermanded by an SS man in enemy hands. Half the platoon laid down covering fire. The other half began the advance.
Andrea felt Wolf’s body jump in his arms as the first salvo hit. A bullet scorched a track across the skin of his forearm. The body went limp. He dropped it, rolled back, his uniform wet with blood. Mallory was already over the edge. Andrea yanked the pin from a grenade, laid it carefully under the battlement round which the climbing rope hung noosed, grasped the rope and went over the edge.
He slid in silence through the night, rope crooked in his elbow, braking with the sole of one boot on the instep of the other. Against the sky — much paler seen from the thick blackness down here — he saw a head lean over, two heads, heard covering fire from below, finished counting, hoped the ground was close now –
And from above there came the great flat clang of the grenade detonating in the angle between wall and stone floor. The rope became immediately slack, the noose cut by the explosion. There were yells from above, yells Andrea scarcely heard because the ground had rushed twenty feet up to meet him and hit him with a bang, and he was rolling, once, twice, away from the wall, and behind him there were two crashes as the bodies blown over the wall hit the ground, but by that time he was on his feet, running away from the dark loom of the wall.
And a voice said, ‘Over here.’
Mallory’s voice.
Two more steps, and Andrea was in something that from the evil smell of its bottom and the steepness of its sides must be a drainage ditch. Now that his eyes were accustoming themselves to the dark, he saw that his head was on a level with a flat plain, more of the small fields that covered every horizontal square inch of this island.
‘Here,’ said Mallory again.
Andrea put his head down and began to run. There was tracer overhead. In its lurid flicker he could see reeds, blades of grass, the deep footprints of the rest of the party in the mud ahead. As he ran, his mind went back to a time when he had had a pack, equipment, maps.
Particularly maps.
Andrea was a deadly fighting machine, but fighting ability alone was not enough to make you a colonel. What made you a colonel was tactical sense, the ability to read from a map the features of any given terrain that a force could use to ensure the achieving of an objective.
The objective now was the aerodrome. Between here and the aerodrome, the marsh was at its broadest and stickiest. To the south was the causeway with the road, which would be heavily guarded. To the north, the fields ran up to the beach, and the jetty. According to the briefing, the jetty was heavily guarded too, but less heavily than the road.
It had been obvious for some time that the jetty was the only option.
He caught up with Mallory, who was limping along, bundling the little Greek Spiro along the bottom of the ditch: good man, Spiro, lot of noise of course, but very brave to have got this far. They paused to take stock.
At the base of the Acropolis cliffs, the high walls of the village stood out stark and black. Every now and then a burst of tracer whipped from the battlements into the fields. The shooting seemed to be directed in a northerly direction, towards the causeway. It looked like the spastic twitchings of a military force without a head — twitchings that both Andrea and Mallory knew would not last long. Soon, the superb military organization would reassert itself, and the marshes would be combed, blade of grass by blade of grass, and there would be no escape, for them or the Enigma machine.