Alistair Maclean - Guns Of Navarone - bzelbublive.info

ocks. Take the gear with you... . And if they look over and find Stevens we'll have to take the lot. No time for fancywork and to hell with the noise. Use the automatic carbines."Andy Stevens had heard, but he had not understood. It was not that he panicked, was too terrified to understand,for he was no longer afraid. Fear is of the mind, but his mind had ceased to function, drugged by the last stages ofexhaustion, crushed by the utter, damnable tiredness that held his limbs, his whole body, in leaden thrall. He did notknow it, but fifty feet below he had struck his head against a spur of rock, a shaip, wicked projection that had torn hisgaping temple wound open to the bone. His strength drained out with the pulsing blood.He had heard Mallory, had heard something about the chimney he had now reached, but his mind had failed toregister the meaning of the words. All that Stevens knew was that he was climbing, and that one always kept onclimbing until one reached the top. That was what his father had always impressed upon him, his brothers too. Youmust reach the top.He was half-way up the chimney now, resting on the spike that Mallory had driven into the fissure. He hooked hisfingers in the crack, bent back his head and stared up towards the mouth of the chimney. Ten feet away, no more. Hewas conscious of neither surprise nor elation. It was just there: he had to reach it. He could hear voices, carryingclearly from the top. He was vaguely surprised that his friends were making no attempt to help him, that they badthrown away the rope that would have made those last few feet so easy, but he felt no bitterness, no emotion at all:perhaps they were trying to test him. What did it matter anyway--he had to reach the top.He reached the top. Carefully, as Mallory had done before him, he pushed aside the earth and tiny pebbles, hookedhis fingers over the edge, found the same toehold as Mallory had and levered himself upwards. He saw the flickeringtorches, heard the excited voices, and then for an instant the curtain of fog in his mind lifted and a last tidal wave offear washed over him and he knew that the voices were the voices of the enemy and that they had destroyed hisfriends. He knew now that he was alone, that be had failed, that this was the end, one way or another, and that it hadall been for nothing. And then the fog closed over him again, and there was nothing but the emptiness of it all, theemptiness and the futility, the overwhelming lassitude and despair and his body slowly sinking down the face of thecliff. And then the hooked fingers--they, too, were slipping away, opening gradually, reluctantly as the fingers of adrowning man releasing their final hold on a spar of wood. There was no fear now, only a vast and heedlessindifference as his hands slipped away and he fell like a stone, twenty vertical feet into the cradling bottleneck at thefoot of the chimney.He himself made no sound, none at all: the soundless scream of agony never passed his lips, for the blackness camewith the pain: but the straining ears of the men crouching in the rocks above caught clearly the dull, sickening crack ashis right leg fractured cleanly in two, snapping like a rotten bough.CHAPTER 6Monday Night0200--0600The German patrol was everything that Mallory had feared--efficient, thorough and very, very painstaking. It evenhad imagination, in the person of its young and competent sergeant, and that was more dangerous still.There were only four of them, in high boots, helmets and green, grey and brown mottled capes. First of all theylocated the telephone and reported to base. Then the young sergeant sent two men to search another hundred yardsor so along the cliff, while he and the fourth soldier probed among the rocks that paralleled the cliff. The search wasslow and careful, but the two men did not penetrate very far into the rocks. To Mallory, the sergeant's, reasoning wasobvious and logical. If the sentry had gone to sleep or taken ill, it was unlikely that he would have gone far in amongthat confused jumble of boulders. Mallory and the others were safely back beyond their reach.And then came what Mallory had feared--an organised, methodical inspection of the cliff-top itself: worse stifi, itbegan with a search along the very edge. Securely held by his three men with interlinked arms--the last with a handhooked round his belt--the sergeant walked slowly along the rim, probing every inch with the spotlit beam of apowerful torch. Suddenly he stopped short, exclaimed suddenly and stooped, torch and face only inches from theground. There was no question as to what he had found--the deep gouge made in the soft, crumbling soil by theclimbing rope that had been belayed round the boulder and gone over to the edge of the cliff. . . . Softly, silently,Mallory and his three companions straightened to their knees or to their feet, gun barrels lining along the tops ofboulders or peering out between cracks in the rocks. There was no doubt in any of their minds that Stevens was lyingthere helplessly in the crutch of the chimney, seriously injured or dead. It needed only one German carbine to pointdown that cliff face, however carelessly, and these four men would die. They would have to die.The sergeant was stretched out his length now, two men holding his legs. His head and shoulders were over theedge of the cliff, the beam from his torch stabbing down the chimney. For ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, there was nosound on the cliff-top, no sound at all, only the high, keening moan of the wind and the swish of the rain in thestunted grass. And then the sergeant had wriggled back and risen to his feet, slowly shaking his head. MalloryPage 34