Though a tear dim his eye at this sad separation,

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 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 oregon scientific ds6618 digital camera software 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 supporting that big iron ball above the enginethe water-cooler? That pipe's as thin as paper, must have been leaking above the bottom flange for hours. Blew out a bloody great hole a minute ago. Sparks, smoke and flames six inches long. Had to shut the damned thing off at once, sir." Mallory nodded in slow understanding. "And now what? Can you repair it, Brown?" "Not a chance, sir." The shake of the head was very definite. "Would have to be brazed or welded. But there's a spare down there among the scrap. Rusted to hell and about as shaky as the one that's on. . . . I'll have a go, sir." "I'll give him a hand," Miller volunteered. "Thanks, Corporal. How long, Brown, do you

QUEEN ELEANOR'S CONFESSION

down at Stevens. "Ready to take off on your travels again, young man, or do you find this becoming rather monotonous?" "Ready when you are, sir." Lying on a stretcher which Louki had miraculously procured, he sighed in bliss. "First-class travel, this time, as befits an officer. Sheer luxury. I don't mind how far we go!" "Speak for yourself," Miller growled morosely. He had been allocated first stint at the front or heavy end of the stretcher. But the quirk of his eyebrows robbed the words of all offence. "Right then, we're off. One last thing. Where is the camp radio, Lieutenant Turzig?" "So you can smash it, I suppose?" "Precisely." "I have no idea." "What if I threaten to blow your head off?" "You won't." Turzig smiled, though the smile was a trifle lopsided. "Given certain circumstances, you would kill me as you would a fly. But you wouldn't kill a man for refusing such information." "You haven't as much to learn as your late and unlamented captain thought," Mallory admitted. "It's not all that important. . . . I regret we have to do all this. I trust we do not meet againnot, at least, until the war is over. Who knows, some day we might even go climbing together." He signed to Louki to fix Turzig's gag and walked quickly out of the room. Two minutes later they had cleared the barracks and were safely lost in the darkness and the olive groves that stretched to the south of Margaritha. When they cleared the groves, a long time later, it was almost dawn. Already the black silhouette of Kostos was softening in the first feathery greyness of the coming day. The wind was from the south, and warm, and the snow was beginning to melt on the hills. CHAPTER 11 Wednesday 14001600 All day long they lay hidden in the carob grove, a thick clump of stunted, gnarled trees that clung grimly to the treacherous, scree-strewn slope abutting what Louki called the "Devil's Playground." A poor shelter and an uncomfortable one, but in every other way all they could wish for: it offered concealment, a first-class defensive position immediately behind, a gentle breeze drawn up from the sea by the sun-baked rocks to the south, shade from the sun that rode from dawn to dusk in a cloudless skyand an incomparable view of a sundrenched, shimmering digital camera photography lessons Aegean. Away to their left, fading through diminishing shades of blue and indigo and violet into faraway nothingness, stretched the islands of the Lerades, the nearest of them, Maidos, so close that they could see isolated fisher cottages sparkling whitely in the sun: through that narrow, intervening gap of water would pass the ships of the Royal Navy in just over a day's time. To the right, and even farther away, remote, featureless, back-dropped by the towering Anatolian mountains, the coast of Turkey hooked north and west in a great curving scimitar: to the north itself, the thrusting spear of Cape Demirci, rock-rimmed but dimpled with sand coves of white, reached far out into the placid blue of the Aegean: and north again beyond the Cape, haze-blurred in the purple distance, the island of Kheros lay dreaming on the surface of the sea. It was a breath-taking panorama, a heart-catching beauty sweeping majestically through a great semi-circle over the sunlit sea. But Mallory had no eyes for it, had spared it only a passing glance when he had come on guard less than half an hour previously, just after two o'clock. He had dismissed it with one quick glance, settled by the bole of a tree, gazed for endless minutes, gazed until his eyes ached with strain atwhat he had so long waited to see. Had waited to see and come to destroythe guns of the fortress of Navarone. The town of Navaronea town of from four to five thousand people, Mallory judgedlay sprawled round the deep, volcanic crescent of the harbour, a crescent so deep, so embracing, that it was almost a complete circle with only a narrow bottleneck of an entrance to the north-west, a gateway dominated by searchlights and mortar and machine-gun batteries on either side. Less than three miles distant to the north-east from the carob grove, every detail, every street, every building, every caique and launch in the harbour were clearly visible to Mallory and ho studied them over and over again until he knew them by heart: the way the land to the west of the harbour sloped up gently to the olive groves, the dusty streets running down to the water's edge: the way the ground rose more sharply to the south, the streets now running parallel to the water down to the old town: the way the cliffs to the eastcliffs pock-marked by the bombs of Torrance's Liberator Squadron stretched a hundred and fifty sheer feet above the water, then curved dizzily out

And a very good woman was she.

are you going to do?" Zagero asked tightly. "Don't worry. The executioner will collect his fee. From now on you and Levin ride, with your feet tied, in the front of the tractor sledand with a gun on you all the time. . . . What is it, Miss LeGarde?" "Are you sure, Peter?" It was the first time she had spoken for hours, and I could see that even that tiny effort tired her. "He doesn't look like a murderer." The tone of her voice accurately reflected the expressions of consternation and shocked disbelief on half a dozen faces: Zagero had spared no effort to make himself popular with everyone. "Does anybody here?" I demanded. "The best murderers never do." I then explained to herand the othersall I knew and had suspected about everything. It shook them, especially the facts of the spiking of the petrol and of Hillcrest having been, at one time, only a few hours behind us: and by the time I was finished I could see that there was as little doubt in their minds about Zagero's guilt as there was in mine. Two hours later, well down the slope from the Vindeby Nunataks, I stopped and set up the radio gear. I reckoned that we were now less than a hundred miles from the coast, and for half an hour tried to raise our base at Uplavnik. We had no success, but I had hardly expected any: the radio shack at the base was manned only by one operator, he couldn't be expected to be on watch all the time, and obviously his call-up bell wasn't set for the frequency I was using. At four o'clock exactly I got through to Hillcrest. This time I hadn't bothered to move the radio out of hearing range -1 was actually leaning against the tractor cabin as I spokeand every word said, both by Hillcrest and myself, could be clearly heard. But it didn't matter any more. The first thing I did, of course, was to tell him that we had got our men. Even as I spoke, my own voice sounded curiously flat and lifeless. I should, I suppose, have been exultant and happy, but the truth was that I had suffered too much, both physically and psychologically, in the past few days, exhaustion lay over me like a smothering blanket, the reaction from the strain of those days was beginning to set in, the awareness was clearly with me that we weren't out of the wood by a long way yet, the lives of Marie LeGarde and Mahler were now the uppermost thoughts in my mind, and, to be perfectly honest, I also felt curiously deflated because I had developed a considerable liking for Zagero and the revelation of his true character digital camera canon a540 had been more of a shock to me than I would have been prepared to admit to anyone. Hillcrest's reactions, I must admit, were all that could have been wished for, but when I asked him about his progress the enthusiasm vanished from his voice. They were still bogged down, it seemed, and progress had been negligible. There was no word yet of passenger lists or of what the plane had carried that had been so important. The Triton, the aircraft-carrier, had insulin aboard and would fly it up to Uplavnik. A landing barge was moving into Uplavnik through an ice lead and was expected to arrive tomorrow and unload the tractor it was carrying, which would move straight out to meet us. Two ski-planes and two search bombers had been looking for us, but failed to locate us -we'd probably been traversing the Vindeby Nunataks at the time . . . His voice went on and on, but I hadn't heard anything he'd said in the past minute or so. I had just remembered something I should have remembered a long time ago. "Wait a minute," I called. "I've just thought of something." I climbed inside the tractor cabin and shook Mahler. Fortunately, he was only asleepfrom the look of him an hour or two ago I'd have said the collapse was due any minute. "Mr Mahler," I said quickly. "You said you worked for an oil company?" "That's right." He looked at me in surprise. "Socony Mobil Oil Co., in New Jersey." "As what?" There were a hundred things he could have been that were of no use to me. "Research chemist. Why?" I sighed in relief, and explained. When I'd finished telling him of Hillcrest's solution to his troublesdistilling the petrolI asked him what he thought of it. "It's as good a way as any of committing suicide," he said grimly. "What does he want to dosend himself into orbit? It only requires one weak spot in the can he's trying to heat.. . . Besides, the evaporation range of petrol is so wideanything from 30 degrees centigrade to twice the temperature of boiling water -that it may take him all day to get enough to fill a cigarette lighter." "That seems to be more or less the trouble," I agreed. "Is there nothing he can do?" "Only one thing he can dowash it. What size drums does your petrol come in?" Ten