The sun, rime-ringed and palely luminous behind the drifting cloud-wrack, was far beyond its zenith and dipping swiftly westwards to the snow-limned shoulder of the mountain when Andrea lifted the edge of the tent, pushed it gently aside and peered out warily down the smooth sweep of the mountainside. For a few moments he remained almost motionless behind the canvas, automatically easing cramped and aching leg muscles, narrowed, roving eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the white glare of the glistening, crystalline snow. And then he had flitted noiselessly out of the mouth of the tunnel and reached far up the bank of the gully in half a dozen steps; stretched full length against the snow, he eased himself smoothly up the slope, lifted a cautious eye over the top.
Far below him stretched the great, curved sweep of an almost perfectly symmetrical valley – a valley born abruptly in the cradling embrace of steep-walled mountains and falling away gently to the north. That towering, buttressed giant on his right that brooded darkly over the head of the valley, its peak hidden in the snow clouds – there could be no doubt about that, Andrea thought. Mt Kostos, the highest mountain in Navarone: they had crossed its western flank during the darkness of the night. Due east and facing his own at perhaps five miles’ distance, the third mountain was barely less high: but its northern flank fell away more quickly, debouching on to the plains that lay to the north-east of Navarone. And about four miles away to the north-north-east, far beneath the snowline and the isolated shepherds’ huts, a tiny, flat-roofed township lay in a fold in the hills, along the bank of the little stream that wound its way through the valley. That could only be the village of Margaritha.
Even as he absorbed the topography of the valley, his eyes probing every dip and cranny in the hills for a possible source of danger, Andrea’s mind was racing back over the last two minutes of time, trying to isolate, to remember the nature of the alien sound that had cut through the cocoon of sleep and brought him instantly to his feet, alert and completely awake, even before his conscious mind had time to register the memory of the sound. And then he heard it again, three times in as many seconds, the high-pitched, lonely wheep of a whistle, shrill peremptory blasts that echoed briefly and died along the lower slopes of Mt Kostos: the final echo still hung faintly on the air as Andrea pushed himself backwards and slid down to the floor of the gully.
He was back on the bank within thirty seconds, cheek muscles contracting involuntarily as the ice-chill eyepieces of Mallory’s Zeiss-Ikon binoculars screwed into his face. There was no mistaking them now, he thought grimly, his first, fleeting impression had been all too accurate. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty soldiers in all, strung out in a long, irregular line, they were advancing slowly across the flank of Kostos, combing every gully, each jumbled confusion of boulders that lay in their path. Every man was clad in a snow-suit, but even at a distance of two miles they were easy to locate: the arrow-heads of their strapped skis angled up above shoulders and hooded heads: startlingly black against the sheer whiteness of the snow, the skis bobbed and weaved in disembodied drunkenness as the men slipped and stumbled along the scree-strewn slopes of the mountain. From time to time a man near the centre of the line pointed and gestured with an alpenstock, as if co-ordinating the efforts of the search party. The man with the whistle, Andrea guessed.
‘Andrea!’ The call from the cave mouth was very soft. ‘Anything wrong?’
Finger to his lips, Andrea twisted round in the snow. Mallory was standing by the canvas screen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his blood-shot eyes. And then he was limping forward in obedience to the crooking of Andrea’s finger, wincing in pain at every step he took. His toes were swollen and skinned, gummed together with congealed blood. He had not had his boots off since he had taken them from the feet of the dead German sentry: and now he was almost afraid to remove them, afraid of what he would find … He clambered slowly up the bank of the gully and sank down in the snow beside Andrea.
‘Company?’
‘The very worst of company,’ Andrea murmured. ‘Take a look, my Keith.’ He handed over the binoculars, pointed down to the lower slopes of Mt Kostos. ‘Your friend Jensen never told us that they were here.’
Slowly, Mallory quartered the slopes with the binoculars. Suddenly the line of searchers moved into his field of vision. He raised his head, adjusted the focus impatiently, looked briefly once more, then lowered the binoculars with a restrained deliberation of gesture that held a wealth of bitter comment.
‘The WGB,’ he said softly.
‘A Jaeger battalion,’ Andrea conceded. ‘Alpine Corps – their finest mountain troops. This is most inconvenient, my Keith.’
Mallory nodded, rubbed his stubbled chin.
‘If anyone can find us, they can. And they’ll find us.’ He lifted the glasses to look again at the line of advancing men. The painstaking thoroughness of the search was disturbing enough: but even more threatening, more frightening, was the snail-like relentlessness, the inevitability of the approach of these tiny figures. ‘God knows what the Alpenkorps is doing here,’ Mallory went on. ‘It’s enough that they are here. They must know that we’ve landed and spent the morning searching the eastern saddle of Kostos – that was the obvious route for us to break into the interior. They’ve drawn a blank there, so now they’re working their way over to the other saddle. They must be pretty nearly certain that we’re carrying a wounded man with us and that we can’t have got very far. It’s only going to be a matter of time, Andrea.’
‘A matter of time,’ Andrea echoed. He glanced up at the sun, a sun all but invisible in the darkening sky. ‘An hour, an hour and a half at the most. They’ll be here before the sun goes down. And we’ll still be here.’ He glanced quizzically at Mallory. ‘We cannot leave the boy. And we cannot get away if we take the boy – and then he would die anyway.’
‘We will not be here,’ Mallory said flatly. ‘If we stay we all die. Or finish up in one of those nice little dungeons that Monsieur Vlachos told us about.’
‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ Andrea nodded slowly. ‘That’s how it has to be, has it not, my Keith? The greatest number. That is what Captain Jensen would say.’ Mallory stirred uncomfortably, but his voice was steady enough when he spoke.
‘That’s how I see it, too, Andrea. Simple proportion – twelve hundred to one. You know it has to be this way.’ Mallory sounded tired.
‘Yes, I know. But you are worrying about nothing.’ Andrea smiled. ‘Come, my friend. Let us tell the others the good news.’
Miller looked up as the two men came in, letting the canvas screen fall shut behind them. He had unzipped the side of Stevens’s sleeping-bag and was working on the mangled leg. A pencil flashlight was propped on a rucksack beside him.
‘When are we goin’ to do somethin’ about this kid, boss?’ The voice was abrupt, angry, like his gesture towards the sleep-drugged boy beside him. ‘This damned waterproof sleeping-bag is soaked right through. So’s the kid – and he’s about frozen stiff: his leg feels like a side of chilled beef. He’s gotta have heat, boss, a warm room and hot drinks – or he’s finished. Twenty-four hours.’ Miller shivered and looked slowly round the broken walls of the rock-shelter. ‘I reckon he’d have less than an even chance in a first-class general hospital … He’s just wastin’ his time keepin’ on breathin’ in this gawddamned ice-box.’
Miller hardly exaggerated. Water from the melting snow above trickled continuously down the clammy, green-lichened walls of the cave or dripped directly on to the half-frozen gravelly slush on the floor of the cave. With no through ventilation and no escape for the water accumulating at the sides of the shelter, the whole place was dank and airless and terribly chill.
‘Maybe he’ll