Alistair Maclean - Guns Of Navarone - bzelbublive.info

himself easily aboard. Grinning down from his great height, he shook himself like some shaggy mastiff and reached outa hand for a convenient wine bottle."No need to ask how things went, eh?" Mallory asked, smiling."None at all. It was just too easy. They were only boys, and they never even saw me." Andrea took another longswig from the bottle and grinned in sheer delight. "And I didn't lay a finger on them," he went on triumphantly. "Well,maybe a couple of little taps. They were all looking down here, staring out over the parapet when I arrived. Held themup, took their guns off them and locked them in a cellar. And then I bent their Spandaus--just a little bit."This is it, Mallory thought dully, this is the end. This is the finish of everything, the strivings, the hopes, the fears,the loves and laughter of each one of us. This is what it all comes to. This is the end, the end for us, the end for athousand boys on Kheros. In unconscious futility his hand came up, slowly wiped lips salt from the spray bulleting offthe wind-flattened wave-tops, then lifted farther to shade bloodshot eyes that peered out hopelessly into thestorm-filled darkness ahead. For a moment the dullness lifted, and an almost intolerable bitterness welled through hismind. All gone, everything-- everything except the guns of Navarone. The guns of Navarone. They would live on,they were indestructible. Damn them, damn them, damn them! Dear God, the blind waste, the terrible uselessness of italitThe caique was dying, coming apart at the seams. She was literally being pounded to death, being shaken apart bythe constant battering shocks of wind and sea. Time and time again the poop-deck dipped beneath the foam-streakedcauldron at the stern, the fo'c'sle rearing crazily into the air, dripping forefoot showing clear; then the plummettingdrop, the shotgun, shuddering impact as broad-beamed bows crashed vertically down into the cliff-walled troughbeyond, an explosive collision that threw so unendurable a strain on the ancient timbers and planks and gradually torethem apart.It had been bad enough when they'd cleared the creek just as darkness fell, and plunged and wallowed their waythrough a quartering sea on a northward course for Navarone. Steering the unwieldy old caique had become difficult inthe extreme: with the seas fine on the starboard quarter she had yawed wildly and unpredictably through a fifty degreearc, but at least her seams had been tight then, the rolling waves overtaking her in regular formation and the windsettled and steady somewhere east of south. But now all that was gone. With half a dozen planks sprung from thestem-post and working loose from the apron, and leaking heavily through the stuffing-gland of the propeller shaft, shewas making water far faster than the ancient, vertical handpump could cope with: the wind-truncated seas wereheavier, but broken and confused, sweeping down on them now from this quarter, now from that: and the wind itself,redoubled in its shrieking violence, veered and backed insanely from south-west to south-east. Just then it was steadyfrom the south, driving the unmanageable craft blindly on to the closing iron cliffs of Navarone, cliffs that loomedinvisibly ahead, somewhere in that all-encompassing darkness.Momentarily Mallory straightened, tried to ease the agony of the pincers that were clawing into the muscles of thesmall of his back. For over two hours now he'had been bending and straightening, bending and straightening, lifting athousand buckets that Dusty Miller filled interminably from the well of the hold. God only knew how Miller felt. Ifanything, he had the harder job of the two and he had been violently and almost continuously seasick for hours onend. He looked ghastly, and he must have been feeling like death itself: the sustained effort, the sheer iron willpower todrive himself on in that condition reached beyond the limits of understanding. Mallory shook his head wonderingly."My God, but he's tough, that Yank." Unbidden, the words framed themselves in his mind, and he shook his head inanger, vaguely conscious of the complete inadequacy of the words.Fighting for his breath, he looked aft to see how the others were faring. Casey Brown, of course, he couldn't see.Bent double in the cramped confines of the engine-room, be, too, was constantly sick and suffering a blindingheadache from the oil fumes and exhaust gases still filtering from the replacement stand-pipe, neither of which couldfind any escape in the unventilated engineroom: but, crouched over the engine, he bad not once left his post sincethey had cleared the mouth of the creek, had nursed the straining, ancient Kelvin along with the loving care, theexquisite skill of a man born into a long and proud tradition of engineering. That engine had only to falter once, tobreak down for the time in which a man might draw a deep breath, and the end would be as immediate as it was violent.Their steerage way, their lives, depended entirely on the continuous thrust of that screw, the laboured thudding ofthat rusted old two-cylinder. It was the heart of the boat, and when the heart stopped beating the boat died too,slewed broadside on and foundering in the waiting chasms between the waves.For'ard of the engine-room, straddle-legged and braced against the corner pillar of the splintered skeleton that wasall that remained of the wheelhouse, Andrea laboured unceasingly at the pump, never once lifting his head, obliviousof the crazy lurching of the deck of the caique, oblivious, too, of the biting wind and stinging, sleet-cold spray thatnumbed bare arms and moulded the sodden shirt to the hunched and massive shoulders. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, hisarm thrust up and down, up and down, with the metronomic regularity of a piston. He had been there for close on threehours now, and he looked as if he could go for ever. Mallory, who had yielded him the pump in complete exhaustionafter less than twenty minutes' cruel labour, wondered if there was any limit to the man's endurance.He wondered, too, about Stevens. For four endless hours now Andy Stevens had fought and overcome a wheelthat leapt and struggled in his hands as if possessed of a convulsive life and will of its own--the will to wrench itselfout of exhausted hands and turn them into the troughs: be had done a superb job, Mallory thought, had handled theclumsy craft magnificently. He peered at him closely, but the spray lashed viciously across his eyes and blinded himwith tears. All he could gather was a vague impression of a tightly-set mouth, sleepless, sunken eyes and little patchesPage 24