The Guns of Navarone. Alistair MacLean

heard of us and why the hell haven’t we all been shot dead?’ Mallory looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘I’d say we have at least half an hour.’

      ‘And meantime we all sit around with our little bits of paper and pencil and write out our last wills and testaments.’ Miller scowled. ‘No percentage in that, boss. We gotta do somethin’.’

      Mallory grinned.

      ‘Don’t worry, Corporal, we are going to do something. We’re going to hold a nice little bottle party, right here on the poop.’

      

      The last words of their song – a shockingly corrupted Grecian version of ‘Lilli Marlene’, and their third song in the past few minutes – died away in the evening air. Mallory doubted whether more than faint snatches of the singing would be carried to the watch-tower against the wind, but the rhythmical stamping of feet and waving of bottles were in themselves sufficient evidence of drunken musical hilarity to all but the totally blind and deaf. Mallory grinned to himself as he thought of the complete confusion and uncertainty the Germans in the tower must have been feeling then. This was not the behaviour of enemy spies, especially enemy spies who know that suspicions had been aroused and that their time was running out.

      Mallory tilted the bottle to his mouth, held it there for several seconds, then set it down again, the wine untasted. He looked round slowly at the three men squatting there with him on the poop, Miller, Stevens and Brown. Andrea was not there, but he didn’t have to turn his head to look for him. Andrea, he knew, was crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, a waterproof bag with grenades and a revolver strapped to his back.

      ‘Right!’ Mallory said crisply. ‘Now’s your big chance for your Oscar. Let’s make this as convincing as we can.’ He bent forward, jabbed his finger into Miller’s chest and shouted angrily at him.

      Miller shouted back. For a few moments they sat there, gesticulating angrily and, to all appearances, quarrelling furiously with each other. Then Miller was on his feet, swaying in drunken imbalance as he leaned threateningly over Mallory, clenched fists ready to strike. He stood back as Mallory struggled to his feet, and in a moment they were fighting fiercely, raining apparently heavy blows on each other. Then a haymaker from the American sent Mallory reeling back to crash convincingly against the wheelhouse.

      ‘Right, Andrea.’ He spoke quietly, without looking round. ‘This is it. Five seconds. Good luck.’ He scrambled to his feet, picked up a bottle by the neck and rushed at Miller, upraised arm and bludgeon swinging fiercely down. Miller dodged, swung a vicious foot, and Mallory roared in pain as his shins caught on the edge of the bulwarks. Silhouetted against the pale gleam of the creek, he stood poised for a second, arms flailing wildly, then plunged heavily, with a loud splash, into the waters of the creek.

      For the next half-minute – it would take about that time for Andrea to swim underwater round the next upstream corner of the creek – everything was a confusion and a bedlam of noise. Mallory trod water as he tried to pull himself aboard: Miller had seized a boathook and was trying to smash it down on his head: and the others, on their feet now, had flung their arms round Miller, trying to restrain him: finally they managed to knock him off his feet, pin him to the deck and help the dripping Mallory aboard. A minute later, after the immemorial fashion of drunken men, the two combatants had shaken hands with one another and were sitting on the engine-room hatch, arms round each other’s shoulders and drinking in perfect amity from the same freshly-opened bottle of wine.

      ‘Very nicely done,’ Mallory said approvingly. ‘Very nicely indeed. An Oscar, definitely, for Corporal Miller.’

      Dusty Miller said nothing. Taciturn and depressed, he looked moodily at the bottle in his hand. At last he stirred.

      ‘I don’t like it, boss,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘I don’t like the set-up one little bit. You shoulda let me go with Andrea. It’s three to one up there, and they’re waiting and ready.’ He looked accusingly at Mallory. ‘Dammit to hell, boss, you’re always telling us how desperately important this mission is!’

      ‘I know,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘That’s why I didn’t send you with him. That’s why none of us has gone with him. We’d only be a liability to him, get in his way.’ Mallory shook his head. ‘You don’t know Andrea, Dusty.’ It was the first time Mallory had called him that: Miller was warmed by the unexpected familiarity, secretly pleased. ‘None of you know him. But I know him.’ He gestured towards the watch-tower, its square-cut lines in sharp silhouette against the darkening sky. ‘Just a big, fat, good-natured chap, always laughing and joking.’ Mallory paused, shook his head again, went on slowly. ‘He’s up there now, padding through that forest like a cat, the biggest and most dangerous cat you’ll ever see. Unless they offer no resistance – Andrea never kills unnecessarily – when I send him up there after these three poor bastards I’m executing them just as surely as if they were in the electric chair and I was pulling the switch.’

      In spite of himself Miller was impressed, profoundly so.

      ‘Known him a long time, boss, huh?’ It was half question, half statement.

      ‘A long time. Andrea was in the Albanian war – he was in the regular army. They tell me the Italians went in terror of him – his long-range patrols against the Iulia division, the Wolves of Tuscany, did more to wreck the Italian morale in Albania than any other single factor. I’ve heard a good many stories about them – not from Andrea – and they’re all incredible. And they’re all true. But it was afterwards I met him, when we were trying to hold the Servia Pass. I was a very junior liaison lieutenant in the Anzac brigade at the time. Andrea’ – he paused deliberately for effect – ‘Andrea was a lieutenant-colonel in the 19th Greek Motorised Division.’

      ‘A what?’ Miller demanded in astonishment. Stevens and Brown were equally incredulous.

      ‘You heard me. Lieutenant-colonel. Outranks me by a fairish bit, you might say.’ He smiled at them quizzically. ‘Puts Andrea in rather a different light, doesn’t it?’

      They nodded silently but said nothing. The genial, hail-fellow Andrea – a good-natured, almost simpleminded buffoon – a senior army officer. The idea had come too suddenly, was too incongruous for easy assimilation and immediate comprehension. But, gradually, it began to make sense to them. It explained many things about Andrea to them – his repose, his confidence, the unerring sureness of his lightning reactions, and, above all, the implicit faith Mallory had in him, the respect he showed for Andrea’s opinions whenever he consulted him, which was frequently. Without surprise now, Miller slowly recalled that he’d never yet heard Mallory give Andrea a direct order. And Mallory never hesitated to pull his rank, when necessary.