‘Well, my Keith,’ said Andrea. ‘I think we must take up yachting.’
So it was that an intelligent owl would have seen a little straggle of men, heavily camouflaged with mud, deploy across the fields of young corn, and start to jog purposefully towards the bay on the northern shore of the Acropolis. They moved in a loose curve, using cover as and when they found it, a clump of oleanders here, a field-shed there. But the focus of their movement was the expanse of hard-packed gravel and mud with the long pier and deep-water jetty, connected to the water gate of the Acropolis by a mile of road.
An hour later, the sky was turning grey, and the island was emerging from the anonymity of the night. Mist hung caught in the olive groves on the slopes of the western massif, and drooled from the notches of invisible hammocks in the high Acropolis. A smear of peach-coloured cloud hung like a banner past the north-eastern capes. Miller was lying in the rough grass by the edge of the road. To the right, the Acropolis loomed in the half-dark. To the left, the shed by the jetty stood dark against the shifting sea. The road connected the two. ‘The morning after the ball,’ he said.
Mallory blinked his gritty eyes. ‘First,’ he said, ‘the telephone line. Then we move in.’
Miller looked down the road towards the sheds. There were other shapes. Concrete shapes, squat and bulbous. Machine-gun posts, if they were lucky. Eighty-eights, if they were not.
He sighed, rolled over, and cut the telephone line. Then he bustled around, making his preparations.
Up and about the Germans might be. But to Dusty Miller, there was a feeling almost of homecoming. This was the old life, the Long Range Desert Group life, crouching in a ditch in flat land, waiting for the convoy.
Miller had always been a great believer in subtlety. During Prohibition, when others had run booze across from Canada in heavily-armed trucks with supercharged engines, Miller had been a master bootlegger. Having disposed of his principal competitors by persuading them to ram a bargeful of unstable nitroglycerine, he had bought himself a railroad wagon. This railroad wagon he had attached to various trains. It left Thunder Bay loaded with Canadian rye, was shunted into a siding north of Duluth, and unloaded into a private ambulance, whose uniformed driver did the rounds of his discriminating clientele. While others shot each other to bits for the sake of fancifully-labelled cleaning fluids, Dusty’s product had been of impeccable quality, and arrived as regularly as the tide. Miller had made a hundred and ten thousand dollars in very short order. Good business was good business, and nothing to do with fast cars and machine guns. It was not his fault that the gold mine he had bought with the profits contained less gold than the average three-year-old child’s teeth. Subtlety, thought Miller, dry grass up his nose. Subtlety was everything –
The first truck of the convoy passed. The second was opposite. Miller clicked the switch in his hand. A sun-bright flash appeared under the truck’s fuel tank. The truck slewed sideways, blocking the road. Thick smoke billowed from the wreck, composed partly of burning truck and partly of the smoke powder Miller included in his patent traffic reduction bombs. There was very little wind.
The smoke settled in a pyramid over the road, blocking it. Someone somewhere was shooting, but Miller could hear no bullets. By the sound of it, Andrea and Mallory were making space for themselves in the front. Miller went to his allotted place in the rear of the lead truck, shooing Carstairs and Spiro ahead of him. The truck picked up speed. The pall of smoke dwindled behind, covering the still forms sprawled on the road. By the swerve and judder, at least two of the tyres were blown. Spiro’s eyes were spinning in his head. Carstairs was stroking his moustache. ‘Nice engines, these trucks,’ said Miller, looking at his watch. ‘Terrible ride, though. Oh, look. They left us a machine gun.’
The truck entered the jetty compound crab-wise, with a tearing roar and a cloud of dust. Faces behind the windows of the harbourmaster’s office hut looked pale and nervous. The telephones were dead, and something had happened on the road, there was no way of telling what. Still, it seemed as if the reinforcements had arrived.
A huge man in a Wehrmacht helmet climbed down from the truck. The men in the hut relaxed. This guy was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when things looked doubtful. Thank God, they thought, he’s one of ours.
‘Morgen,’ said the big man, smiling a huge white smile; Andrea was famous for the size and whiteness of his smile. ‘Telephone’s down.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said the under-harbourmaster. ‘What the hell’s going on up there?’
‘Bit of fuss in the camp,’ said Andrea. ‘SS man found fornicating with a goat. The Greeks didn’t like it.’
‘Poor bloody goat,’ said the harbourmaster, wrinkling his nose.
‘We’re taking a boat,’ said Andrea. ‘Checking the aerodrome perimeter.’
‘Nice day for it,’ said the harbourmaster. ‘Coffee later?’
‘Maybe,’ said Andrea, and loped off. The harbourmaster yawned. It was a lonely life out here on the dusty quay, now that the ships had stopped arriving. All you got was the occasional shipload of stores, and fuel, alcohol and oxygen for the factory, and aviation stuff to be barged across the shallow bay to the airfield landing. Otherwise, the gun crews were getting a tan, and everyone was getting hot, fly-mad and bored. They said there was going to be a rocket firing sometime today. Maybe that was what all the fuss was about –
The big man and his four companions were already on the quay. One of the men seemed to be a civilian. There was something wrong with their boots, but that was none of the harbourmaster’s business. They already had the harbour launch started up, and were climbing aboard. Someone cast off the shore lines. The boat puttered off the quay and into the ink-blue bay that lay between the jetty and the aerodrome. It shrank, heading for the aerodrome fuel jetty. Goodness, thought the harbourmaster, yawning, again. They’re in a hurry.
That was when the motor cycle and sidecar combination clattered out of the smoke. The man in the sidecar hung limp over his machine gun. The rider climbed off and started banging on the harbourmaster’s door, shouting. It took the harbourmaster a good three minutes to get any sense out of him. When he did, he almost wished he had not bothered.
‘Awfully sorry,’ said Carstairs, ‘but how exactly do you propose to get through the fence?’
‘I guess we’ll think of something,’ said Miller. Miller was sitting in the bottom of the boat, the wooden pack open beside him, pushing time pencils into his little buff bricks of plastic explosive. Spiro was looking away, like a child, knowing life was horribly dangerous, but not wanting to admit to himself the full scale of the horror.
‘Get us a plane,’ said Mallory.
‘Of course,’ said Carstairs.
‘What?’ said Spiro, no longer able to deny the evidence of his own ears. ‘You steals plane?’
‘Steal one. Buy one. Borrow one. Who can tell?’ He held out his cigarette case to Spiro. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that.’
‘I spits on your Turkish,’ said Spiro, mechanically. ‘No smoke. Much explodibles here.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Carstairs, applying the gold Ronson to a Muratti. ‘You can eat that stuff.’
‘No!’ roared Spiro. ‘You want explosion in belly, you eats it! Not Spiro —’