Thunderbolt from Navarone. Sam Llewellyn

      Jensen said, ‘Come out here, all of you,’ and marched into the corridor. Out there, he said, ‘You’ve got Carstairs whether you like him or not. I want you on this mission. I’m ordering you to take him along.’

      ‘And wipe his nose.’

      ‘Also his shoes, if necessary.’ Jensen’s eyes were bright chips of steel.

      ‘Under my command,’ said Mallory.

      ‘I know about rockets,’ said Miller. ‘I know as much about rockets as anyone. We don’t need this guy. He’ll get in the way. We’ll wind up carrying him, he’ll–’

      ‘We would be fascinated to hear your views,’ said Jensen in a freezing voice. ‘Some other time, though, I think.’

      ‘So who needs this guy?’

      ‘If you mean Captain Carstairs, the Admiral wants him. And that, gentlemen, is that. Now get back in there.’

      They knew Jensen.

      They got back in there.

      The Admiral said, ‘Captain Carstairs will be a separate unit, taking his orders directly from me.’

      Carstairs smiled a smooth, inward-looking smile. Technically, Mallory was his superior officer. All the Admiral was doing was muddying waters already troubled. They stood wooden-faced, potential disasters playing like newsreels in their minds.

      ‘Last but not least,’ said Jensen. ‘Local support. Lieutenant.’

      Robinson stood up, spectacles gleaming. ‘There is Resistance activity on the island,’ he said. ‘But we want your operation kept separate. Civilian reprisals, er, do not help anyone.’ Andrea’s face was dark as a thundercloud. He had found the bodies of his parents on a sandbank in the River Drava. They had been lashed together and thrown in to drown. He knew about reprisals: and so did the Germans who had done the deed, once he had finished with them. Robinson continued, ‘We will be landing you in Parmatia. There is a gentleman called Achilles at three, Mavrocordato Street in Parmatia. He will provide you with motor transport up the island to the Acropolis. We’ll have a submarine standing by at a position you will be given at midnight on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’re there, hang up a yellow fishing lantern as a signal. If not … well, he’ll wait until 0030 on Saturday, then you’re on your own. Got it?’

      ‘Got it.’

      ‘But avoid all other contact. We’d like you to be a surprise. A thunderbolt of a surprise. That’s what this operation is called, by the way. Operation Thunderbolt.’

      ‘After the weather forecast?’ said Miller.

      ‘How did you guess?’ said Jensen.

      ‘You did it last time,’ said Miller.

      Jensen did not seem to hear. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The detail.’

      For the next two hours, in the company of the geologist and a man from SOE, they studied the detail.

      ‘All right,’ said Jensen, as they folded away their maps. ‘Armoury next.’

      The armoury was the usual harshly-lit room with racks of Lee Enfields. The Armourer was a Royal Marine with a bad limp and verbal diarrhoea. ‘Schmeissers, ‘e said you wanted,’ said the Marine, pulling out boxes. ‘Quite right, quite right, don’t want those bloody Stens, blow up on you as soon as Jerry, go on, ‘ave a look, yes, Corporal? Oh, I see you are the more discriminating type of customer, grenades, was it?’ But even his flow of talk could not hold up over the grim silence that filled that little room. Mallory and Andrea sat down on the bench and disassembled a Schmeisser each, craftsmen assessing the tools of a deadly trade. The hush filled with small, metallic noises. Andrea rejected two of the machine-pistols before he found one to his liking, then another. Miller, meanwhile, was in a corner of the room, by a cupboard the size of a cigar humidor. He had a special pack, lined with wood and padded. Into this he was stowing, with a surgeon’s delicacy of touch, buff-coloured bricks of plastic explosives, brightly-coloured time pencils, and a whole hardware store of other little packets and bottles.

      Mallory reassembled his second Schmeisser. ‘For you, Carstairs,’ he said.

      Carstairs looked languidly up from the sights of a Mauser. ‘Never touch ‘em, old boy.’

      ‘You’ll need one.’

      ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Carstairs, tapping a Turkish cigarette on a gold case. A silenced Browning automatic lay across his knees. ‘Stand off is my motto. Works with impala. Works with Germans. Now look here, Sergeant, have you got a hard case for this?’ He held up the Mauser carbine and a Zeiss 4X sniperscope. Several Mausers would be going to Kynthos – they were rugged carbines essential for long-range work. But the sniperscope was delicate as a prima ballerina’s tutu – nothing to do with the kind of knockabout you could expect if you were storming a hollow mountain full of rockets.

      As they left the armoury, Andrea fell in beside Mallory. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

      ‘I think we should keep our eyes open.’

      ‘Exactly, my Keith.’ They walked on in silence. ‘And what is this Nanga Parbat?’

      ‘A mountain. In the Himalayas. There was an expedition to climb it in 1938.’ Mallory paused. He hated what came next. ‘A German expedition.’

      ‘There was no war in 1938.’

      ‘No.’

      But all of a sudden Mallory’s stomach was a tight ball. There was something wrong with this. It was the same feeling he had had on the south icefield of Mount Cook, watching his right boot go up and forward, watching the weight go on, but because of that feeling, not committing himself. Which had been just as well. Because when it felt the weight of that boot – brownish-black leather, new-greased, criss-cross laces in the lugs, that boot – the world crumbled and slid away, and what had been smooth ice had turned into a cornice over a ravine, a cornice that had crumbled under him and was swallowing him up.

      Except that he had taken warning from that knot in the stomach, and kept his weight back, and walloped his ice axe behind him at the full reach of his arm, felt it bite, and hauled himself out of the jaws of death and back on to clean ice. And climbed the mountain.

      The knot in the stomach was not fear, or at least not only fear. It was a warning. It needed listening to.

       TWO

       Tuesday 1000-Wednesday 0200

      Al-Gubiya Bay is a small notch in the coast west of Benghazi. That morning, it contained a group of khaki tents, a concrete jetty, and one and a half billion flies. Alongside the jetty an MTB crouched like a grey shark. Her commander, Lieutenant Bob Wills, was sitting on the forward port-hand torpedo tube. The sun balanced on his head like a hot iron bar, and the flies were driving him crazy, but not as crazy as the orders he had received. He wondered what the hell they were dropping him in this time.

      A three-ton lorry clattered on to the quay, stopped, and stood snorting in its cloud of Libyan dust. The canvas back of the lorry twitched and parted. Four men got down.

      Three of them walked together, silent, closed-faced. Their faces were gaunt and sunburned. They looked at the same time exhausted and relaxed, and under their heavy equipment they walked with a steady, mile-devouring lope. Ahead of the three was a slenderer man. He was dressed like them in battledress without badges of rank. But his walk had more of a strut in it, as if he thought someone might be watching, and at the same time he moved uneasily in the straps of his pack. This and a certain finicky neatness in his uniform made the Lieutenant think that he was not completely at home.

      The neat man had quick