Storm Force from Navarone

But the Albemarle roared up and over. Something slapped the deck under his feet. Then the tree was gone, and the aircraft was banking steeply to port, into the next valley.

Mallory got up and closed the door. There were some things it was not necessary to see. Pine trees were, what? A hundred feet high? Maximum. Mallory decided if he was going to be flown into a mountain, he did not want to see the mountain coming.

It went on: the howl of the wind, the bucket of the airframe, the bellow of the engines. Mallory fell asleep.

Next thing he knew the racket was still there, and someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt terrible: head aching, thoughts slow as cold oil. The Albemarle’s bomb-aimer was pushing a cup of tea in his face. Benzedrine, he thought. No. Not yet. This is only the beginning.

He had woken into a different world: the sick-at-the-stomach world of dangerous things about to happen. He badly wanted a cigarette. But there would be no time for cigarettes for a while.

A dim yellow light was burning in the fuselage. Bulky camouflage forms swore and collided, struggling into their parachutes and rounding up equipment.

‘Five minutes,’ said the bomb-aimer with repellent cheerfulness, when he had finished checking the harnesses. ‘Onto the trench.’

‘Trench?’ said Miller.

The bomb-aimer indicated a long slot in the floor of the aircraft. ‘Get on there,’ he said. ‘Stand at ease, one foot either side.’ He pointed at a pair of light bulbs. ‘When the light goes green, shun!

‘Gee, thanks,’ said Miller, and shuffled into position. The first light bulb flicked on: red.

Hugues was behind him. Hugues’ mind would not stay still. It kept flicking back over the past two years, with the weary insistence of a stuck gramophone record. After the SS had done what they had done to his family, he had not cared if he lived or died. Then Lisette had come along. And in Lisette, he had found a new reason for living …

On a night like this, a reason for living was the last thing you needed. Remember what they taught you in school, he thought. Keep it buttoned up. Don’t let anything show -

Lisette. When shall I see you again?

Fear prised his mind apart and climbed in. Fear became terror. His bowels were water, and icy sweat was pouring down him. First, there was the parachute descent, and of course it was possible that the parachute would not open. Then, even if the parachute did open, that big thin man Miller had two boxes balanced in front of him - attached to him, for the love of God! - full of explosives. So they were all dropping out of this plane, six humans and a land mine, in a lump. Jesus. He would be all over the landscape. He would never see Lisette -

Underfoot, he felt a new vibration, like gears winding. The trench opened. The night howled in, black and full of wind. He felt stuck, trapped, cramped by this damned harness, Schmeisser, pack, equipment.

A hand landed on his shoulder. He looked round so fast he almost overbalanced.

It belonged to the big man who did not speak, the bear with the moustache. The big face was impassive. A reflection of the little red bulb swam in each black eye. One of the eyes winked. Jesus, thought Hugues. He knows what I’m thinking. What will he think of me?

But surprisingly, he found that the fear had lessened.

Jaime was not comfortable either, but for different reasons. He had the short legs of the mountaineer. In his mind, he had been tracking their route: up the Valle de Tena, then north, across the Col de Pourtalet. He had walked it himself, first with bales of cigarettes, then with mules bearing arms for the Republican cause in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He reckoned that now they would be coming down on Colbis. He did not like the feel of the weather out there. Nor did he like the fact that they were flying in cloud down a fifty-degree hillside at two hundred miles an hour. Feet on the ground were safe. Mules were safer. He wanted to get back on the ground, because his legs were aching, straddled over the trench, and he could feel the fear radiating from Thierry, slung about with his radios, straw hat stuffed in his pack, his big face improbably healthy in the red light -

Thierry’s face turned suddenly green.

Shun.

Six pairs of heels crashed together. The static lines ran out and tautened. The hold was empty.

Through the bomb doors the bomb-aimer glimpsed points of yellow light forming a tenuous L. He said into the intercom, ‘All gone.’ The pilot hauled back on the stick, and the clouds intervened. The Albemarle banked steeply and set its nose for Italy.

The ground hit Mallory like a huge, wet hammer. There were lights looping in his eyes as he rolled. A rock made his ears ring. He got rid of the parachute, invisible now in the dark, flattened himself against the ground, and worked the cocking lever of the Schmeisser, taut as an animal at bay. For a moment there was the moan of the wind and the feel of grit on his cheek. Then a voice close at hand said, ‘L’Amiral.’

‘Beaufort’ he said.

There was shouting. Then more lights - a lot of lights, a ridiculous number - in his eyes. He levelled the Schmeisser. The lights wavered away, and someone shouted, ‘Non! Non! L’Amiral Beaufort. Welcome to France, mon officier.’

Unnecessary hands pulled him to his feet. He said, ‘Where are the others?’

‘Safe.’ A flask found his hand. ‘Buvez. Drink. Vive la France!’ He drank. It was brandy. It drilled a hole in the cold and the rain. People were lighting cigarettes. There was a lot unmilitary of noise, several bottles. A dark figure materialised at his side, then another.

Miller’s voice said, ‘Any minute now someone is going to start playing the goddamn accordion.’

‘All here?’ There were grunts from the darkness. There were too many people, too much noise, not enough discipline. ‘Hugues.’

‘Sir.’

‘Tell these people to put the bloody lights out. Where’s Jules?’

There was a conversation in French. Hugues replied, his voice rising, expostulating. ‘Merde,’ he said finally.

‘What is it?’

‘These idiots. These goddamn Trotskyite sons of-’

‘Quick.’ Mallory’s voice brought him up sharp as a choke-chain.

‘Jules is held up in Colbis. There was an incident with your forces last week. The Germans are nervous.’

That would have been the SAS, thought Mallory, charging around like bulls in a china shop.

‘But Colbis is only in the next valley. We will take you there, when we have transport. There is a problem with the transport. They don’t know what. A lorry will come soon, they say. Franchement,’ said Hugues, his voice rising, ‘I do not believe these people. They are like the Spanish, always mañana-’

‘Ask them how soon.’ And calm them down, thought Mallory. Calm them down.

They say to wait,’ said Hugues, not at all calm. ‘It is seven miles to the village. There may be patrols. There is a cave they know. It is dry there, and German patrols do not visit it. They say it will be a good place to wait. The lorry will come to collect you, in one hour, maybe two.’

Mallory looked at his watch. Raindrops blurred the glass. Just after midnight. Monday already. And they were being told to wait on a mountain top in the rain, and the Werwolf pack was leaving at noon on Wednesday.

He said, ‘Where’s this cave?’

‘I know it,’ said Jaime’s voice.

Mallory sighed. Patience. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Andrea appeared at his side. Mallory felt the comfort of his gigantic presence. ‘This is not good,’ said the Greek, under the babble of excited talk from the escort.

‘We will make it better,’ said Mallory. ‘Hugues. Tell these people to be quiet.’

Hugues started shouting. The crowd fell silent. They started to walk in the lashing rain.

Jaime set a cracking pace up the valley, towards Spain, following a track that wound through a field of tea chest-sized boulders which had fallen from the valley’s sides. The map had been right; those sides were not so much slopes as cliffs. From the rear, Mallory could hear Hugues’ voice, speaking French, raised in violent argument with someone. Mallory was beginning to worry about Hugues. Staying alive behind enemy lines meant staying calm. It was beginning to sound as if Hugues was not a calm person. He called softly, ‘Shut up.’

Hugues shut up. The procession became quiet.

Mallory said to Miller, ‘What was that about?’

‘He was looking for someone. Someone who’s not around.’

In ten minutes the valley floor had narrowed to a hundred yards, and the sides had become vertical walls of rock, undermined at their base, hidden in inky shadows. ‘Here,’ said Jaime’s voice from the dark. A flashlight beam illuminated a dark entrance.

Andrea materialised at Mallory’s side. ‘Bad place,’ he said. The cave had no exit except into the valley. And the valley was more a gorge than a valley. It felt bad. It felt like a trap. ‘Hugues,’ said Mallory, without looking round. ‘Tell these people that this is no good.’

Mallory turned. ‘Hugues,’ he said. ‘Tell these people-’

He stopped. There were no people. Hugues was a solitary dark figure against the paler grey of the rocks.

Hugues said, ‘They have left.’

‘Left?’ said Mallory.

‘Gone to look for the transport. Also, there was a … person I wished to see who did not arrive. That was why I had a discussion - yes - an acrimonious discussion.’ His voice was rising. ‘These people are frankly peasants-’

Andrea said, ‘Enough.’

Hugues stopped talking as if someone had flipped a switch. Mallory said to Andrea and Miller, ‘We’re stuck with this. We need the transport. If we move, they’ll lose us. We’ll have to wait. Take cover.’

Andrea and Miller were already fading into the dark, taking up positions not in the cave, but among the rocks on the valley floor.

The night became quiet, except for the sigh of the wind and the swish of the rain, and the drowsy clonk of a goat bell from inside the cave.

This is all wrong, thought Mallory. We have been inadequately briefed, and we are dependent on a Resistance organisation that seems completely disorganised. It sounds as if the SAS have already compromised us. If the enemy comes up the valley there is no way out, except into an internment camp in Spain.

Mallory lay and strained his ears into the wet dark rain, wind, goat bells -

And another sound. A mechanical sound, but not a motor. The sound of metal on metal, gears turning. The sound of a bicycle.

There was a sudden crash. The old sounds returned, with behind them the noise of a back wheel spinning, ticking to a stop.

Mallory waited. Then he heard the brief, otherworldly bleep of a Scops owl.

Mallory had as yet heard no Scops owls in the Pyrenees. But there had been plenty in Crete, where he had served his time with Andrea.

Something moved at his shoulder: something huge, blacker than the night. Andrea said, ‘I found this,’ and dropped something on the gritty ground beside him, something that drew breath and started to croak.

Mallory allowed the muzzle of the Schmeisser to rest gently in the hollow under the something’s ear. He said, ‘Quiet.’

The something became quiet.

Mallory said, ‘I am a British officer. What do you want?’

The something said, ‘Hugues.’

‘Good God,’ said Mallory.

The something was a woman.

The woman got her voice back. She batted at Mallory with her hands. She was strong. She said, ‘Laisse-moi,’ in a voice both vigorous and tough.

Out in the dark and the rain, Hugues’ voice said, ‘Bon Dieu!’ Mallory thought he could hear something new in it: shock, and awe. He heard the uncoordinated stumble of Hugues’ boots in the dark. ‘Lisette!’ cried Hugues.

‘Hugues!’ cried the woman. ‘C’est bien toi?

Then Hugues was embracing her. The fear was gone now. All the terrible things were gone. All Hugues’ life, people had taken what he loved away from him, for reasons that seemed excellent to them but incomprehensible to him. They had taken away his parents and sent him to a stupid English school. They had taken away Mireille and the children because he was a saboteur. And then he had met Lisette, in the Resistance, and become her lover. When SOE had flown him out in the Lysander, he had thought that that had been the end of Lisette, too.

But here she was. In his arms. As large as life, if not larger.

‘My darling,’ he said.

She kissed him on the cheek, murmuring what sounded like pet names. Then Mallory heard her tone change. She sounded frantic about something.

‘Merde,’ said Hugues, in his new, firm voice. ‘We must leave. Now.’

Mallory said, quietly, ‘Who is this?’

‘Lisette,’ said Hugues. ‘A friend. A résistante.’

‘Is she the person you wanted to see who did not arrive?’

‘Yes. She is an old friend. She knows the people on the ground in the region. It is an excellent thing that she has found us. Providential. She says there are sixty Germans coming up the valley.’

‘Three lorries,’ she said. Her accent was heavy, but comprehensible. ‘The ones who reached Jonzère told me they caught two of your reception committee, found them with parachutes.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Half an hour,’ said Lisette. ‘At the most. They told me to warn you.’

Mallory’s stomach felt shrivelled like a walnut. One and a half hours in France, and the operation was as good as over. He pushed the thought into the back of his mind. ‘Jaime!’ he said.

Jaime appeared out of the night. ‘Lisette,’ he said, without surprise.

‘Bonjour, Jaime.’

Briskly, Mallory explained the position.

Jaime said, ‘We must go to Spain. It is over. Finished.’

In his mind Mallory saw a soldier, pack on his back, seasickness in his belly and fear in his soul, squashed against the steel side of a ship by a thousand other soldiers. And suddenly, without warning, something stove in the side of that ship, smashed the soldier like an egg, and the cold green water poured in.

Once Mallory had been in a little steel room on a ship in the Mediterranean, checking grenades. There had been a bang. Someone had said, ‘Torpedo.’ Then the room had started to fill up with water, and the ship with screams, quickly cut off. Mallory had been one of four survivors. Four out of three hundred.

If the Werwolf pack got out intact, there could be a thousand such ships.

Mallory said, ‘No other way?’

‘None.’ Jaime seemed to hesitate. ‘Except the Chemin des Anges.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing. A goat track, no more. It runs from Jonzère, at the bottom of the valley, up the ridge, in the manner of the old roads. The pilgrims used to use it, the men with the cockle shells in their hats, bound for Santiago de Compostela, when there were bandits in the mountains. It is a dangerous road. It killed almost as many pilgrims as the bandits did.’

‘Where is it?’

Against the dark sky Jaime’s small shoulders appeared to shrug. He pointed upwards. ‘On the spine of the hill. Here it runs three hundred metres above the valley. Above the cliff. Then it turns over the mountain and down to Colbis. There were pilgrims’ inns in Colbis. But we can’t go to Jonzère, to the start of the track. It’ll be full of Germans-’

‘We’ll go up the cliff,’ said Mallory, as if he were proposing a walk in the park.

There was a second’s silence. Then Jaime said, ‘To join the Chemin des Anges here? That is not possible.’

Mallory said, ‘It is necessary.’

The chill of his voice silenced Jaime for a moment. Then he said, ‘But you do not understand. Nobody can climb those cliffs.’

‘That is what the Germans will think. Miller?’

Miller had been sitting on a boulder. He knew what Mallory was going to say, and he found the knowledge depressing. ‘Yep?’

‘Round up the people. Andrea and I are going up the cliff. We’ll do a pitch, belay and drop you a fixed rope. Make sure everyone comes.’

Miller pushed his SS helmet back on his head and looked up. For a moment it was like being in a tunnel. Then, far overhead, clouds shifted, and there appeared between the two cliff-masses a thread-fine crack of sky. The wind was blowing up the valley. He could hear no lorries. The dark bulk that was Mallory slung a coil of wire-cored rope over his shoulder and walked towards the cliff. Wearily, Miller rounded up Hugues and Lisette, and Jaime, and Thierry the radio operator, and assembled the stores, and the radio, and the two wooden boxes of explosives, under the cliff. Mallory and Andrea seemed to vanish into the solid rock. The group at the cliff foot sat huddled against the icy rain. From above came the infrequent sound of a low word spoken, the clink of hammer on spike, the scuff of nailed boot on rock. The sounds receded quickly upwards. Human goddamn flies, thought Miller, gloomily. Personally, he had no suckers on his feet, and no plans to grow any. He stood up, cocked his Schmeisser and moved fifty yards down the valley in the rain. Someone had to stand sentry, and the only person on the valley floor Miller trusted was Miller.

Fall in with bad companions and what do you get?

I tell you what you get, he told himself, settling into a natural embrasure in the rock and preparing for the first of the sixty Germans to come round the corner.

You get problems.

There had been times in Mallory’s life when he would have enjoyed a good crack at a limestone cliff in the dark. On a cold morning, perhaps, in a gorge in the Southern Alps, when you had got up at one in the morning, the stars floating silver and unwinking between the ice-white peaks of the range.

This was not one of those times.

This was a vertical slab of rock he could barely see. This was climbing by Braille, running fingers and feet over the smooth surface looking for pockmarks and indentations, tapping spikes into hair-cracks, standing with the tip of a boot-toe balanced on a foothold slim as a goose-quill.

But Mallory knew that there is a greater spur to climbing a cliff in the dark than a wish to dwell in the white Olympus of the high peaks. It is to get you and your comrades away from three lorry loads of Germans.

So Mallory climbed that sopping wall until his fingernails were gone, and the sweat stung his eyes, and the breath rasped in his tobacco-seared throat. And after fifty feet, he found a chimney.

It was a useful chimney, the edge of a huge flake of rock that would in a few hundred years separate from the face of the cliff and slide into the gorge. Mallory made a belay, called down to Andrea, and went up the chimney as if it had been a flight of stairs.

At first the chimney was vertical. After thirty feet it started to trend leftward. Then suddenly there was a chockstone, a great boulder that had rolled down the cliff and jammed in the chimney. It formed a level floor embraced on two sides by buttresses of rock, invisible from the bottom of the valley. It was more than Mallory had dared hope for. Fifty people could have hidden up there while the Germans rumbled up the valley and flattened their noses against the Spanish border. Over which they would assume the Storm Force had fled -

Mallory felt a sensation he hardly recognised.

Hope.

Don’t count your chickens.

Jaime was the first to arrive. He was carrying the bulky, square-edged radio pack. Jaime was a useful man on a mountain. There was a pause, and Andrea came up, carrying the second rope. ‘All at the base of the chimney,’ he said. ‘Stores too.’

‘Good,’ said Mallory, belaying the rope and letting the end go.

Now that there were two ropes, things started to move fast. Thierry came up one, breathing in a high, frightened whimper, his straw hat crammed over his eyebrows. The second rope seemed to be taking a long time. ‘It’s the woman,’ said Andrea. ‘She doesn’t have the strength in her arms.’ Mallory saw his huge back dark against the sky as he bent to the rope. She was a big woman; there were not many fat people in wartime France, but she was one of them. She must have weighed ten stone. But Andrea hauled her up as if she had been a bag of sugar, set her on her feet, and dusted down her bulk.

‘Merci,’ she said.

Andrea’s white teeth flashed under his moustache. He had the smile of a musketeer, this Greek giant. Even now, with the rain lashing down and Germans in the valley, Lisette felt enveloped in a protective cloak of courtesy and understanding. Andrea bowed, as if she had been a lady of Versailles, not a shapeless bundle of overcoats crouched on a cliff ledge. Then he let the rope go again.

Hugues came up, too breathless to complain, and went to Lisette’s side. Mallory had a nagging moment of worry. Hugues’ priorities had to be with the operation, not his girlfriend. Mallory did not know enough about this woman. And he did not know enough about Hugues. For the moment, if her information was good, she had saved their bacon. But if Mallory’s instincts were right, she was going to be a distraction. And distractions had no place on an operation like this. On this operation there was a single priority: find and destroy the Werwolf pack.

Hugues would need watching.

Mallory turned away, and hauled up the boxes of explosives and a couple of packs. The rain was turning even colder, developing a grainy feel. Mallory thought, soon it will be snowing. His hands were cracked and sore, and the plaster had peeled off the reopening wounds. God knew how Andrea must be feeling. But the stores were up, stacked on the edge of the boulder, and Miller was on his way up, but with no rope yet. Must get a rope to him; Miller was no climber.

The wind moaned and died. Andrea said, ‘Listen.’

There was a new sound in the raw, snow-laden air. Lorry engines.

All the way up the bottom forty feet of the cliff, Miller had been feeling the void snapping at his heels. The wind was freezing, but inside his uniform a Niagara of hot sweat was running. His knees felt weak, his hands shaky. Miller had been raised on the flatlands of the American Midwest. One hold at a time, he told himself. Don’t look down. Don’t think of the sheer face down there -

Miller patted the cliff above his head, groping for chinks and crevices. Mallory must have found some. But as far as Miller was concerned he might as well have been trying to climb a plate glass window. Both ropes were in use …

Hurry, please, thought Miller politely. For forty feet down, things were happening. On the wind from the valley came the sharp whiff of exhaust. He looked up.

The cold, slushy rain battered his face. What he could see of the cliff was black and shiny, the chimney a dark streak rising to the chockstone. He had seen Mallory in a chimney, his shoulders one side, his heels the other, gliding his way skyward with that weightless fluency of his. Miller’s limbs were too lanky for that, and his body wanted to plaster itself against the rock, not sit out over the emptiness as Mallory did, applying weight where it was needed, on fingers and toes -

Without a rope there was no way of getting to the chimney.

He pressed his face into the rock. The earthy smell of wet stone filled his nostrils. There was a lightening of the walls. Headlights down the valley.

He moved his hands again. The rock was rough, but there was nothing you could hold on to. Not unless you were a human fly like Mallory. Can’t go up, thought Miller. Can’t go down. So you just stand here, and hold on, and try not to follow that voice in your head that is telling you to shout and scream and keel gently out and back and plummet into space.

There were lights under his feet, and the gorge was churning with engines. A voice above him said, ‘Rope coming!’

The lorries were directly below him now. By the grind of their engines they were moving at a slow, walking pace. Searching. Nobody looks up. It is fine. Nobody ever looks up. Particularly not up sheer cliffs.