"And I 'm ready with my bow."

more slowly up and down in a minutely provocative inspection as disdainful as it was prolonged. "Well?" he asked truculently in the slow speech of the islands. "What the hell do you want?" Even in the deepening dusk he could see the knuckles whitening in the stock of the carbine, and for an instant Mallory thought he had gone too far. He knew he was in no dangerall noise in the engine-room had ceased, and Dusty Miller's hand was never far from his silenced automaticbut he didn't want trouble. Not just yet. Not while there were a couple of manned Spandaus in that watch-tower. With an almost visible effort the young soldier regained his control. It needed little help from the imagination to see the draining anger, the first tentative stirrings of hesitation and bewilderment. It was the reaction Mallory had hoped for. Greekseven half-drunken Greeksdidn't talk to their overlords like thatnot unless they had an overpoweringly good reason. "What vessel is this?" The Greek was slow and halting but passable. "Where are you bound for?" Mallory tilted the bottle again, smacked his lips in noisy satisfaction. He held the bottle at arm's length, regarded it with a loving respect. "One thing about you Germans," he confided loudly. "You do know how to make a fine wine. I'll wager you can't lay your hands on this stuff, eh? And the swill they're making up above"the island term for the mainland"is so full of resin that it's only good for lighting fires." He thought for a moment. "Of course, if you know the right people in the islands, they might let you have some ouzo. But some of us can get ouzo and the best Hocks and the best Moselles." The soldier wrinkled his face in disgust. Like almost every fighting man he despised Quislings, even when they were on his side: in Greece they were very few indeed. "I asked you a question," he said coldly. "What vessel, and where bound?" "The caique Aigion," Mallory replied loftily. "In ballast, for Samoa. Under orders," he said significantly. "Whose orders?" the soldier demanded. Shrewdly Mallory judged the confidence as superficial only. The guard was impressed in spite of himself. "Herr Commandant in Vathy. General Graebel," Mallory said softly. "You will have heard of the Herr General before, yes?" He was on safe ground here, Mallory knew. The reputation of Graebel, both as a paratroop commander and an iron disciplinarian, had spread far beyond these islands. Even in the half-light Mallory could have sworn that the guard's complexion digital cameras slr with pictures turned paler. But he was dogged enough. "You have papers? Letters of authority?" Mallory sighed wearily, looked over his shoulder. "Andrea!" he bawled. "What do you want?" Andrea's great bulk loomed through the hatchway. He had heard every word that passed, had taken his cue from Mallory: a newlyopened wine bottle was almost engulfed in one vast hand and he was scowling hugely. "Can't you see I'm busy?" he asked surlily. He stopped short at the sight of the German and scowled again, irritably. "And what does this haifling want?" "Our passes and letters of authority from Herr General. They're down below." Andrea disappeared, grumbling deep in his throat. A rope was thrown ashore, the stern pulled in against the sluggish current and the papers passed over. The papersa set different from those to be used if emergency arose in Navaroneproved to be satisfactory, eminently so. Mallory would have been surprised had they been anything else. The preparation of these, even down to the photostatic facsimile of General Graebel's signature, was all in the day's work for Jensen's bureau in Cairo. The soldier folded the papers, handed them back with a muttered word of thanks. He was only a kid, Mallory could see nowif he was more than nineteen, his looks belied him. A pleasant, open-faced kidof a different stamp altogether from the young fanatics of the S.S. Panzer Divisionand far too thin. Mallory's chief reaction was one of relief: he would have hated to have to kill a boy like this. But he had to find out all he could. He signalled to Stevens to hand him up the almost empty crate of Moselle. Jensen, he mused, had been very thorough indeed: the man had literally thought of everything. . . . Mallory gestured lazily in the direction of the old watch-tower. "How many of you are up there?" he asked. The boy was instantly suspicious. His face had tightened up, stified in hostile surmise. "Why do you want to know?" he asked stiffly. Mallory groaned, lifted his hands in despair, turned sadly to Andrea. "You see what it is to be one of them?" he asked in mournful complaint.

Was weeping on the way.

There are too many dead men. I'm goin' to kill you, Panayis, and I'm goin' to kill you now." Miller dropped his cigarette, ground it into the floor of the hut. "Nothin' at all to say?" And he had nothing at all to say, the hate, the malignity of the black eyes said it all for him and Miller nodded, just once, as if in secret understanding. Carefully, accurately, he shot Panayis through the heart, twice, blew out the candles, turned his back and was half-way towards the door before the man had crashed to the ground. "I am afraid I cannot do it, Andrea." Louki sat back wearily, shook his head in despair. "I am very sorry, Andrea. The knots are too tight." "No matter." Andrea rolled over from his side to a sitting position, tried to ease his tightly-bound legs and wrists. "They are cunning, these Germans, and wet cords can only be cut." Characteristically, he made no mention of the fact that only a couple of minutes previously he had twisted round to reach the cords on Louki's wrist and undone them with half a dozen tugs of his steel-trap fingers. "We will think of something else." He looked away from Louki, glanced across the room in the faint light of the smoking oil-lamp that stood by the grille door, a light so yellow, so dim that Casey Brown, trussed like a barnyard fowl and loosely secured, like himself, by a length of rope to the iron hooks suspended from the roof, was no more than a shapeless blur in the opposite corner of the stone-flagged room. Andrea smiled to himself, without mirth. Taken prisoner again, and for the second time that dayand with the same ease and surprise that gave no chance at all of resistance: Completely unsuspecting, they had been captured in an upper room, seconds after Casey had finished talking to Cairo. The patrol had known exactly where to find themand with their leader's assurance that it was all over, with his gloating explanation of the part Panayis had played, the unexpectedness, the success of the coup was all too easy to understand. And it was difficult not to believe his assurance that neither Mallory nor Miller had a chance. But the thought of ultimate defeat never occurred to Andrea. His gaze left Casey Brown, wandered round the room, took in what he could see of the stone walls and floor, the hooks, the ventilation ducts, the heavy grille door. A dungeon, a torture dungeon, one would have thought, but Andrea had seen such places before. A castle, they called this place, but it was really only an old keep, no more than a manor house built round the crenelated towers. And the long-dead vivitar digital mini camera drivers Franldsh nobles who had built these keeps had lived well. No dungeon this, Andrea knew, but simply the larder where they had hung their meat and game, and done without windows and light for the sake of . . . The light! Andrea twisted round, looked at the smoking oil lamp, his eyes narrowing. "Louki!" he called softly. The little Greek turned round to look at him. "Can you reach the lamp?" "I think so. . . . Yes, I can." "Take the glass off," Andrea whispered. "Use a clothit will be hot. Then wrap it in the cloth, hit it on the floorgently. The glass is thickyou can cut me loose in a minute or two." Louki stared at him for an uncomprehending moment, then nodded in understanding. He shuffled across the floorhis legs were still boundreached out, then halted his hand abruptly, only inches from the glass. The peremptory, metallic clang had been only feet away, and he raised his head slowly to see what had caused it. He could have stretched out his hand, touched the barrel of the Mauser that protruded threateningly through the bars of the grille door. Again the guard rattled the rifle angrily between the bars, shouted something he didn't understand. "Leave it alone, Louki," Andrea said quietly. His voice was tranquil, unshadowed by disappointment "Come back here. Our Mend outside is not too pleased." Obediently Louki moved back, heard the guttural voice again, rapid and alarmed this time, the rattle as the guard withdrew his rifle quickly from the bars of the door, the urgent pounding of his feet on the flagstones outside as he raced up the passage. "What's the matter with our little friend?" Casey Brown was as lugubrious, as weary as ever. "He seems upset." "He is upset." Andrea smiled. "He's just realised that Louki's hands are untied." "Well, why doesn't he tie them up again?" "Slow in the head he may be, but he is no fool," Andrea explained. "This could be a trap and he's gone for his friends." Almost at once they heard a thud, like the closing of a distant door, the sound of more than one pair of feet running down the passage, the tinny rattling of keys on a ring, the rasp of a key against the lock, a sharp click, the squeal of rusty hinges and then two soldiers were in the room, dark and

Detach'd thee from my breast for ever.

It was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stovecurio collectors paid fancy prices for what they True, she has forced thee from my breast, imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough. "Aeroplane," he announced casually. "Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again." "Indeed, no, Dr Mason." The blue eyes, so incongruously at

Then Robin Hood took the Bishop by the hand,

to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw's pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes. "He's found him?" I asked Jackstraw. Jackstraw nodded silently. "Let's bring him in." Balto led us there, but we didn't bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn't have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I'd seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn't matter now. But he had been a man. How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw's torch. It was exactly four o'clock in the morning. I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake -1 was pretty sure he'd never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakeningand Zagero was stirring. That theyand Iwould survive, I didn't doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene's seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as her sole anchor in an alien sea.... I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde. "They don't look so hot to me." sony cybershot dsc-t20 digital camera Zagero, too, was studying them. "What's their chances', Doc?" "I just don't know," I said wearily. "I don't know at all." "Don't take it to heart, Doc. It's no fault of yours." Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. "Your dispensary ain't all that well stocked." "No." I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. "Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end's coming pretty close. Ordinarily I'd say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don't knowhe's got the will to live,sheer guts,his beliefs-the lot.. . . But in twelve hours he'll be dead." "And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?" I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice. "Good lord, you've come to!" I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. "This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?" "How do you think I feel?" she said with a flash of her old spirit. "Don't try to put me off, Peter. How long?" "About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi." The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. "Seriously, the fact that you've recovered consciousness is a good sign." "I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can't think of any dramatic words." I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. "You're a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?" "Certainly," I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. "We'll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoonthis afternoon, rather. It can't be more than twenty miles from here." "Twenty miles!" Zagero interjected. "In this little lot?" He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard. "It won't last, Mr Zagero," Jackstraw put in. "These williwaws always blow themselves out in a short time. This already has gone on longer than most and it's easing a lot. Tomorrow will be clear and calm and cold." "The cold will be a change,"

Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold

you, she said and walked past him into the corridor. Well? She swung round to face a throng of very confused people. Will no one escort me to my quarters? This farce was beginning to pall. The corridor, too, had its occupants, mostly in the universal green garb of the medical profession. Therefore, the young man, clad in a dark tunic, his bronzed legs bare to the soft leather ankle boots, stood out among them. Lanzecki might swear that the Ballybran spore did not confer any psychic enhancement but Killashandra was entertaining severe doubts on that score. She had definitely caught conflicting emotional emanations from Mirbethan, from the other worthies, and now, from this young man a curious flash of green, annoyance, interest, and anticipation far too strong to be the casual reaction to a visitor. And flash was all it could be, for Thyrol and Pirinio bore down on her, all apologies for their discourtesies real and imaginary. Mirbethan firmly took her place at Killashandras right, edging the three men out of position and motioning their guest down the hall. When Killashandra was able to glance back to the young man, he was striding down a side corridor, head down, shoulders sagging as if weighed down by some burden. Guilt? Then she was swept into the lift, down to the guest level, and into the most sumptuous quarters which had ever been allotted to her. Having agreed to descend to the reception as soon as she had changed gave her time for only the most cursory examination of the apartment. Shed been guided through a large, elegant reception room suitable for formal affairs. A smaller room was evidently to be used as a studio or office. They hurried past two bedchambers, one of them quite modern, before she was ushered into a main room so vast that she had to stifle a chuckle. Mirbethan indicated the toilet and the slightly open closet panel where her clothes had been hung. Then the woman withdrew. Stripping off the torn garment, Killashandra flicked open one of the Beluga spider-silk kaftans which ought to be suitable for any reception: certainly a foil against the predominantly white or pale colors which the Optherians seemed to prefer. Except for that brooding young man. Killashandra dwelt briefly on him as she washed hastily. Then she couldnt resist a peek into the other hygiene rooms. One contained a variety of tubs, massage table, and exercise equipment while the third boasted a radiant-fluid tub and several curious devices which Killashandra had never before encountered but which left an camera canon digital i impression of obscenity. Back in the bedchamber, she heard a soft rapping at the door. Im ready, Im ready, she cried, masking irritation with a lilt in her voice. Chapter 5 That protocol had become an art form on Optheria told Killashandra quite clearly that if there were no rebellious spirits then the entire population had stagnated. At the reception, every faculty member, their subordinates, then every student, all in order of their rank and scholastic standing, filed past her. Mercifully, handshaking was no longer a part of the ritual. A nod, a smile, a mumbled repetition of the name sufficed. After fifty nods, Killashandra felt her smile fixed in her cheeks and her face stiffened into that mode. With her everfaithful quartette, she stood at the top of a massive double staircase, whose white marble nights curved down into a marbled hall below. The ceiling of the vast reception chamber was so high that the murmuring of the assembled crowd was absorbed. Killashandra had had a glimpse of tables, laden with patterns of plates whose contents were as precisely placed as the plates were, and with beakers of colored liquids. The assembled scrupulously kept their eyes from the direction of the refreshments. Killashandra guessed that they all knew too well the taste and texture of the reception repast. There were curious patterns, too, in the reception. Five people would take the right-hand staircase, the next five would descend on the left. Killashandra wondered if a steward in some distant anteroom ticked the people off for left and right. There were never more than ten people waiting to be introduced, yet the flow down the hallway was steady despite its apparent randomness. Abruptly no more people were making their way to the reception line and Killashandra let her cheeks relax, rotating her head on her neck, wriggling her lips and nose in a very undignified manner in order to ease the muscles. One never knows when ones early training as a singer is going to prove useful, she thought, just as she heard a concerted intake of breath from her quartette. Reorganizing her expression, she glanced up the hall in time to observe the ceremonial approach of dignitaries. The seven figures who processed and that was the correct verb to describe their advance were not differently garbed from the other highly placed

Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

It was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stovecurio collectors paid fancy prices for what they I shall lie hidden in a hut imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough. "Aeroplane," he announced casually. "Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again." "Indeed, no, Dr Mason." The blue eyes, so incongruously at

Altho he was proper and tall,

desperate attempt to overcome this double fear that he had devoted himselfthis in his late teensto crag and mountain climbing: in this he had ultimately become so proficient, developed such a reputation, that father and brothers had come to treat him with respect and as an equal, and the ridjcule had ceased. But the fear had not ceased; rather it had grown by what it fed on, and often, on a particularly difficult climb, be had all but fallen to his death, powerless in the grip of sheer, unreasoning terror. But this terror he had always sought, successfully so far, to conceal. As now. He was trying to overcome, to conceal that fear now. He was afraid of failingin what he wasn't quite sureof not measuring up to expectation: he was afraid of being afraid: and he was desperately afraid, above all things, of being seen, of being known to be afraid. . . . The startling, incredible blue of the Aegean; the soft, hazy silhouette of the Anatolian mountains against the washed-out cerulean of the sky; the heart-catching, magical blending of the blues and violets and purples and indigoes of the sun-soaked islands drifting lazily by, almost on the beam now; the iridescent rippling of the water fanned by the gentle, scent-laden breeze newly sprung from the south-east; the peaceful scene on deck, the reassuring, interminable thump-thump, thump-thump of the old Kelvin engine. . . . All was peace and quiet and contentment and warmth and languor, and it seemed impossible that anyone could be afraid. The world and the war were very far away that afternoon. Or perhaps, after all, the war wasn't so far away. There were occasional pin-pricksand constant reminders. Twice a German Arado seaplane had circled curiously overhead, and a Savoia and Fiat, flying in company, had altered course, dipped to have a look at them and flown off, apparently satisfied: Italian planes, these, and probably based on Rhodes, they were almost certainly piloted by Germans who had rounded up their erstwhile Rhodian allies and put them in prison camps after the surrender of the Italian Government. In the morning they had passed within half a mile of a big German caiqueif flew the German flag and bristled with mounted machine-guns and a two-pounder far up in the bows; and in the early afternoon a high-speed German launch had roared by so closely that their caique had rolled wickedly in the wash of its passing: Mallory and Andrea had shaken their fists and cursed loudly and fluently at the grinning sailors on deck. But there had been no attempts playing digital camera movies to molest or detain them: neither British nor German hesitated at any time to violate the neutrality of Turkish territorial waters, but by the strange quixotry of a tacit gentlemen's agreement hostilities between passing vessels and planes were almost unknown. Like the envoys of warring countries in a neutral capital, their behaviour ranged from the impeccably and frigidly polite to a very pointed unawareness of one another's existence. These, then, were the pin-pricks-the visitations and bygoings, harmless though they were, of the ships and planes of the enemy. The other reminders that this was no peace but an illusion, an ephemeral and a frangible thing, were more permanent. Slowly the minute hands of their watches circled, and every tick took them nearer to that great wall of cliff, barely eight hours away, that had to be climbed somehow: and almost dead ahead now, and less than fifty miles distant, they could see the grim, jagged peaks of Navarone topping the shimmering horizon and reaching up darkly against the sapphired sky, desolate and remote and strangely threatening. At half-past two in the afternoon the engine stopped. There had been no warning coughs or splutters or missed strokes. One moment the regular, reassuring thump-thump: the next, sudden, completely unexpected silence, oppressive and foreboding in its absoluteness. Mallory was the first to reach the engine hatch. "What's up, Brown?" His voice was sharp with anxiety. "Engine broken down?" "Not quite, sir." Brown was stifi bent over the engine, his voice muffled. "I shut it off just now." He straightened his back, hoisted himself wearily through the hatchway, sat on deck with his feet dangling, sucking in great draughts of fresh air. Beneath the heavy tan his face was very pale. Mallory looked at him closely. "You look as if you had the fright of your life." "Not that." Brown shook his head; "For the past two-three hours I've been slowly poisoned down that ruddy hole. Only now I realise it." He passed a hand across his brow and groaned. "Top of my blinkin' head just about lifting off, sir. Carbon monoxide ain't a very healthy thing." "Exhaust leak?" "Aye. But it's more than a leak now." He pointed down at the engine. "See that stand-pipe