River of Death. Alistair MacLean

      

      RIVER OF DEATH

      Alistair MacLean

       Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

      The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This eBook edition 2009

      First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1981 then in paperback by Fontana 1982

      Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1981

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021 Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey

      Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9780006164968

      Ebook Edition © MAY 2009 ISBN: 9780007289387

      Version: 2020-12-14

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Prologue

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       About the Author

       By Alistair MacLean

       About the Publisher

       PROLOGUE

      Darkness was falling over the ancient Grecian monastery and the first of the evening stars were beginning to twinkle in the cloudless Aegean sky. The sea was calm, the air was still and did indeed, as is so often claimed for it, smell of wine and roses. A yellow moon, almost full, had just cleared the horizon and bathed in its soft and benign light the softly rolling landscape and lent a magical quality to the otherwise rather harsh and forbidding outlines of the dark and brooding monastery which, any evidence to the contrary, slumbered on peacefully as it had done for countless centuries gone by.

      At that moment, unfortunately, conditions inside the monastery could hardly be said to reflect the dream-like outer world. Magic had taken wings, no-one slumbered, peace was markedly absent, darkness had given way to a score of smoking oil torches and there was little enough around in the way of wine and roses. Eight uniformed members of the Nazi S.S. were carrying oaken chests across the flagged hallway. The brass-bound boxes were small but so heavy that it required four men to carry one of them: a sergeant supervised their operations.

      Watching them were four men. Two of those were high-ranking S.S. officers: of those, one, Wolfgang Von Manteuffel, a tall, thin man with cold blue eyes, was a major-general, no more than thirty-five years old: the second, Heinrich Spaatz, a thick-set, swarthy man who had apparently elected to choose a scowl as his permanent expression in life, was a colonel of about the same age. The other two watchers were monks in cowled brown habits, old proud men but now with mingled fear and pride in their eyes, eyes that never left the oaken chests. Von Manteuffel touched the sergeant with the tip of his gold-handled malacca cane which could hardly have been regulation issue to S.S. officers.

      ‘A spot check, I think, Sergeant.’

      The sergeant gave orders to the nearest group who, not without difficulty, lowered their chest to the floor. The sergeant knelt, knocked away the retaining pins in the iron hasps and lifted the hinged lid, the screeching of the ancient metal being testimony enough to the fact that many years must have passed since this had last been done. Even in the wavering light of the malodorous oil torches the revealed contents glittered as if they were alive. The chest contained literally thousands of golden coins, so fresh and gleaming they could have been minted that same day. Von Manteuffel contemplatively stirred the coins with the tip of his cane, looked with satisfaction at the resulting iridescence, then turned to Spaatz.

      ‘Genuine, you would say, Heinrich?’

      ‘I am shocked,’ Spaatz said. He didn’t look it. ‘Shocked beyond words. The holy fathers traffic in dross?’

      Von Manteuffel shook his head sadly. ‘You can’t trust anyone these days.’

      With what appeared to be as much a physical effort as an exercise of will, one of the monks averted his fascinated gaze from the glittering chest and looked at Von Manteuffel. He was a very thin man, very stooped, very old - he must have been nearer ninety than eighty. His face was carefully expressionless, but there wasn’t much he could do about his stricken eyes.

      ‘These treasures are God’s,’ he said, ‘and we have guarded them for generations. Now we have broken our trust.’

      ‘You can’t take all the credit for that,’ Von Manteuffel said. ‘We helped. Don’t worry, we’ll look after them for you.’