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Slowly, painfully, dazed by the sheer physical shock and the ear-shattering proximity of the twin explosions, Mallory pushed himself off the wooden deck and stood shakily on his feet. His first conscious reaction was that of surprise, incredulity almost: the concussive blast of a grenade and a couple of lashed blocks of T.N.T., even at such close range, was far beyond anything he had expected.
The German boat was sinking, sinking fast. Miller's home-made bomb must have torn, the bottom out of the engine-room. She was heavily on fire amidships, and for one dismayed instant Mallory had an apprehensive yision of towering black columns of smoke and enemy reco
With a conscious effort of will, Mallory turned slowly to look to his own ship and his own men. Brown and Miller were on their feet, staring down in fascination at where the caique had been, Stevens was standing at the wheelhouse door. He, too, was unhurt, but his face was ashen: during the brief action he had been a man above himself, but the aftermath, the brief glimpse he'd had of the dead lieutenant had hit him badly. Andrea, bleeding from a gash on the cheek, was looking down at the two Schmeisser gu
«Dead?» he asked quietly.
Andrea inclined his head.
«Yes.» His voice was heavy. «I hit them too bard.»
Mallory turned away. Of all the men he had ever known, Andrea, he thought, had the most call to hate and to kill his enemies. And kill them he did, with a ruthless efficiency appalling in its single-mindedness and thoroughness of execution. But he rarely killed without regret, without the most bitter self-condemnation, for he did not believe that the lives of his fellow-men were his to take. A destroyer of his fellow-man, he loved his fellow-man above all things. A simple man, a good man, a killer with a kindly heart, be was for ever troubled by his conscience, ill at ease with his i
«Anybody else hurt?» Mallory's voice was deliberately brisk, cheerful. «Nobody? Good! Right, let's get under way as fast as possible. The farther and the faster we leave this place behind, the better for all of us.» He looked at his watch. «Almost four o'clock — time for our routine check with Cairo. Just leave that scrapyard of for a couple of minutes, Chief. See if you can pick them up.» He looked at the sky to the east, a sky now purply livid and threatening, and shook his head. «Could be that the weather forecast might be worth bearing.»
It was. Reception was very poor — Brown blamed the violent static on the dark, convoluted thunderheads steadily creeping up astern, now overspreading almost half the sky — but adequate. Adequate enough to hear information they had never expected to hear, information that left them silenced, eyes stilled in troubled speculation. The tiny loudspeaker boomed and faded, boomed and faded, against the scratchy background of static.
«Rhubarb calling Pimpernel! Rhubarb calling Pimpernell» These were the respective code names for Cairo and Mallory. «Are you receiving me?»
Brown tapped an acknowledgment. The speaker boomed again.
«Rhubarb calling Pimpernel. Now X minus one. Repeat, X minus one.» Mallory drew in his breath sharply. X — dawn on Saturday — had been the assumed date for the German attack on Kheros. It must have been advanced by one day — and. Jensen was not the man to speak without certain knowledge. Friday, dawn — just over three days.
«Send 'X minus one understood,'» Mallory said quietly.
«Forecast, East Anglia,» the impersonal voice went on: the Northern Sporades, Mallory knew. «Severe electrical storms probable this evening, with heavy rainfall. Visibility poor. Temperature falling, continuing to fall next twenty-four hours. Winds east to south-east, force six, locally eight, moderating early tomorrow.»
Mallory turned away, ducked under the billowing lug-sail, walked slowly aft. What a set-up, he thought, what a bloody mess. Three days to go, engine u. s. and a first-class storm building up. He thought briefly, hopefully, of Squadron Leader Torrance's low opinion of the backroom boys of the Met. Office, but the hope was never really born. It couldn't be, not unless he was blind. The steep-piled buttresses of the thunderheads towered up darkly terrifying, now almost directly above.
«Looks pretty bad, huh?» The slow nasal drawl came from immediately behind him. There was something oddly reassuring about that measured voice, about the steadiness of the washed-out blue of the eyes enmeshed in a spider's web of fine wrinkles.
«It's not so good,» Mallory admitted.
«What's all this force eight business, boss?»
«A wind scale,» Mallory explained. «If you're in a boat this size and you're good and tired of life, you can't beat a force eight wind.»
Miller nodded dolefully.
«I knew it. I might have known. And me swearing they'd never get me on a gawddamned boat again.» He brooded a while, sighed, slid his legs over the engineroom hatchway, jerked his thumb in the direction of the nearest island, now less than three miles away. «That doesn't look so hot, either.»
«Not from here,» Mallory agreed. «But the chart shows a creek with a right-angle bend. It'll break the sea and the wind.»
«Inhabited?»
«Probably.»
«Germans?»
«Probably.»
Miller shook his head in despair and descended to help Brown. Forty minutes later, in the semi-darkness of the overcast evening and in torrential rain, lance-straight and strangely chill, the anchor of the caique rattled down between the green walls of the forest, a dank and dripping forest, hostile in its silent indifference.