‘Quiet,’ said Mallory. He was looking back at the shore with his glasses. Men were swarming in the vehicle park by the harbourmaster’s shed. There was activity in the 88’s gun-pit, too, alongside where they had left the lorry parked. The boat chugged across the quiet blue surface of the bay. They were half-way. Not far enough. ‘Left a bit,’ he said.
Andrea pushed the tiller with his hip. The boat yawed. In the gun-pit, the muzzle of the 88 flashed. The report came at the same time that the shell kicked water and yellow high explosive smoke in the air eighty feet to the right.
‘Right a bit,’ said Mallory.
Another bang. This time the shell roared past with a sound like a train, clipped the surface of the bay, ricocheted and blew a hole in the beach. Nobody cheered. They were in a little wooden boat in the middle of a little blue bay, feeling very naked indeed.
‘This is it,’ said Carstairs. He was pale now. ‘The next one. Christ, what are we doing here? Like fish in a barrel —’
‘Tchah!’ said Spiro. ‘Coward! Be a mans!’
The 88 spoke again. This time the shell burst close enough to shower them with chemical-tasting spray. Another shell came, made a smaller splash, skipped, burst on the shore.
‘Hah!’ said Spiro, who had worked himself into a sort of frenzy. ‘Missed again! Bloody square-head fools!’
‘Shut up.’ Carstairs’ composure had cracked. ‘We’re dead. What the hell possessed me to —’
A huge explosion sounded from beside the harbourmaster’s hut. A mighty tree of black smoke grew in the sky.
‘Left a bit,’ said Mallory.
Carstairs climbed up from the bottom boards, and gaped at the shore. As the smoke cleared it was apparent that the 88 had been blown out of its pit. It now lay on the edge of a vast crater, a mass of twisted metal. As for the lorry, it had vanished clear off the face of the earth.
‘What was that?’ he said.
Miller gazed at him with blue and innocent eyes. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that I must have left a bomb in the truck. Very careless.’
Carstairs swallowed. He did not reply. The boat chugged on. The far shore was coming nearer. Finally, he said, ‘Why aren’t the machine guns firing?’
Mallory kept his eyes outside the boat. ‘It’s all that petrol,’ he said.
‘Petrol?’
Miller pointed a kindly finger at the land ahead. The shore consisted of a strip of white beach with a jetty. Above the jetty was a sun-scorched grass bank. On top of the jetty and the green bank were small, coloured objects. ‘Oil drums,’ he said. ‘Gas cans.’ He pointed over the stern, directly behind them.
‘There’s your guns,’ he said. Then he turned, and pointed straight ahead. ‘And there’s your aerodrome fuel dump. So if they miss us and take a ricochet, up goes the whole caboodle. They have a problem, my man.’
Carstairs thought for a moment of pointing out that it was not only the Germans who would find an aviation fuel dump a problematic place to be in a hail of bullets. Given what he knew of the present company, he kept his mouth shut. It would soon be over.
One way or another.
There were no guard towers along the seaward side of the aerodrome — this far out in the Aegean, the designers of the defences could be forgiven for not expecting shallow-water sea-borne attacks. But as the boat came to within a couple of hundred yards of the shore, a lorry roared down the buff-green strip of vegetation between the security fence and the beach. Andrea gave the tiller to Mallory, sighted down the barrel of the Spandau he had commandeered from the truck, and opened fire. The lorry swerved suddenly and crashed on to the beach. Andrea kept hosing down the little figures that crawled out of the back. Soon none of them was moving. Just to make sure, he loosed a burst at the drums on the jetty. They felt the blast of the flat, oily explosions, smelt the sweetish reek of the black smoke that rolled off the burning drums. Then they were ashore, low, crawling to the fence. There was no time for delicacy. Mallory opened the decompression valve on the boat’s engine, unscrewed the lever, and put it in his pocket. Miller shoved a brick of plastic explosive against the bottom of the wire and snapped the time pencil. ‘Down!’ he yelled.
Thirty seconds later, a roar and a fountain of sand announced that the fence was now metal rain. Odd shots were coming in from the wreckage of the lorry. The Thunderbolt squad used the explosion crater as cover, hauling themselves and the Spandau up the sparse, burned slope of the berm. On the other side, fenced in by a mound of earth, was a half-acre field of oil drums, and a bowser.
‘Well,’ said Miller. ‘They’re not going to do a whole lot of shooting in here, I guess.’
Spiro could not speak.
Mallory had sized up the situation. Now he took control. ‘They won’t do anything to endanger their fuel dump,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold it here. Carstairs, how about you?’
‘Transport,’ said Carstairs. He was looking white about the lips and pinched about the nose. He took out his cigarette case. ‘Turkish this side, Vir —’
‘Not here,’ said Mallory, mildly. ‘Now you get over there with Miller’ — he pointed to the dumpy fuel bowser parked by the entrance — ‘and he’ll hot-wire it for you, and you and I will go and steal an aeroplane, and then we will come back and get everyone.’
‘Piece of cake,’ said Carstairs.
Five minutes later Carstairs came back in the bowser and Mallory climbed in. They rolled out of the fuel dump and across the aerodrome. Andrea gave quiet orders to Miller, who trotted over to the far end of the dump. When he returned, there were two people with him: Clytemnestra and Wills.
‘Good morning,’ said Andrea, with old-world courtesy.
‘Morning,’ said Wills. Clytemnestra was holding his hand.
‘You found your way.’
‘Been here most of the night,’ said Wills. They walked back to an above-ground firefighting pond. Beside it, lying casually in the dirt, was a polished mahogany box with a webbing handle.
‘Yais,’ said Spiro. ‘Yais, this is the damn bloody machine that will make us all killed. I spit on him’ — he spat — ‘and curse him to hell.’
‘Sure,’ said Miller.
‘Better take cover,’ said Andrea, shoving rounds into the magazine of the Mauser. ‘Here.’ He handed the rifle to Wills, and said to Clytemnestra, ‘Do you want one?’
‘What do you think?’ Her eyes flashed dark fire.
Andrea shrugged. ‘Cover me,’ he said, and gave his orders.
Miller and Clytemnestra went to the top of the grassy earthwork protecting the fuel. The surface of the aerodrome stretched away under the sun, a yellow-dun billiard table shot with shining patches of wind-flattened grass. And on that billiard table, small figures were advancing.
Andrea had been busy. He had rolled two fifty-gallon drums of aviation fuel to the top of the bank, siting them six feet apart. Between the drums, he set up the Spandau. Miller kept working, rolling the barrels up the slope, placing them along the crest of the earthwork.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Wills, whitening somewhat beneath the peeling mahogany of his face. ‘It’s an Aunt Sally.’
‘What does that mean?’ Clytemnestra was scowling down the sights of her rifle. The nearest soldier was four hundred yards away.
‘If the Germans shoot at us,’ said Wills in a dazed voice, ‘they stand a good chance of hitting one of those drums. If they hit one of those drums, they stand a good chance of knocking it down and setting it on fire, and rolling it down into a lot of other drums, and blowing up their principal fuel dump. Their supply ship has been sunk. This is precious stuff. They won’t want to lose it.’
‘So?’ said Clytemnestra, shrugging her broad shoulders. ‘They won’t shoot. This is good, no?’