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The frenetic stammering of the machine-guns stopped abruptly and in unison, the sound sheared off as by a guillotine. The sudden silence was curiously oppressive, louder, more obtrusive than the clamour that had gone before. The gravelly earth beneath his elbows grated harshly as Mallory shifted his weight slightly, looked at the two men to his right, Andrea with his impassive face empty of all expression, Louki with the sheen of tears in his eyes. Then he became aware of the low murmuring to his left, shifted round again. Bitter-mouthed, savage, the American was swearing softly and continuously, oblivious to the pain as he pounded his fist time and again into the sharp-edged gravel before him.
«Just one more, Gawd.» The quiet voice was almost a prayer. «That's all I ask. Just one more.»
Mallory touched his arm. «What is it, Dusty?»
Miller looked round at him, eyes cold and still and empty of all recognition, then he blinked several times and gri
«Jus' daydreamin', boss» he said easily. «Jus' daydreamin'.» He shook out his pack of cigarettes. «Have one?»
«That inhuman bastard that sent these poor devils up that hill,» Mallory said quietly. «Make a wonderful pietare seen over the sights of your rifle, wouldn't he?»
Abruptly Miller's smile vanished and he nodded.
«It would be all of that.» He risked a quick peep round one of the boulders, eased himself back again. «Eight, mebbe ten of them still down there, boss,» he reported. «The poor bastards are like ostriches — trying to take cover behind stones the size of an orange… . We leave them be?»
«We leave them be!» Mallory echoed emphaticaliy. The thought of any more slaughter made him feel almost physically sick. «They won't try again.» He broke off suddenly, flattened himself in reflex instinct as a burst of machine-gun bullets struck the steep-walled rock above their beads and whined up the gorge in vicious ricochet.
«Won't try again, huh?» Miller was already sliding his gun around the rock in front of him when Mallory caught his arm and pulled him back.
«Not them? Listen!» Another burst of fire, then another, and now they could hear the savage chatter of the machine-gun, a chatter rhythmically interrupted by a weird, half-human sighing as its belt passed through the breech. Mallory could feel the prickling of the hairs on the nape of his neck.
«A Spandau. Once you've heard a Spandau you can never forget it. Leave it alone — it's probably fixed on the back of one of the trucks and can't do us any harm… . I'm more worried about these damned mortars down there.»
«I'm not,» Miller said promptly. «They're not firing at us.»
«That's why I'm worried… . What do you think, Andrea?»
«The same as you, my Captain. They are waiting. This Devil's Playground, as Louki calls it, is a madman's maze, and they can only fire as blind men—»
«They won't be waiting much longer,» Mallory interrupted grimly. He pointed to the north. «Here come their eyes.»
At first only specks above the promontory of Cape Demirci, the planes were soon recognisable for what they were, droning in slowly over the Aegean at about fifteen hundred feet. Mallory looked at them in astonishment, then turned to Andrea.
«Am I seeing things, Andrea?» He gestured at the first of the two planes, a high-winged little monoplane fighter. «That can't be a PZL?»
«It can be and it is,» Andrea zuuuunred. «An old Polish plane we had before the war,» he explained to Miller. «And the other is an old Belgi
«Me too,» Mallory said. «Must have patched up some bits and pieces. Ah, they've seen us — begi
«I don't know and I don't care,» Miller said rapidly. He had just taken a quick look round the boulder in front of him. «These damned guns down there are just linin' up on us, and muzzle-on they look a considerable sight bigger than telegraph poles. Fragmentation bombs, you said! Come on, boss, let's get the hell outa here!»
Thus the pattern was set for the remainder of that brief November afternoon, for the grim game of tipand-run, hide-and-seek among the ravines and shattered rocks of the Devil's Playground. The planes held the key to the game, cruised high overhead observing every move of the hunted group below, relaying the information to the guns on the coast road and the company of Alpenkorps that had moved up through the ravine above the carob grove soon after the planes reported that the positions there had been abandoned. The two ancient planes were soon replaced by a couple of modern Henschels — Andrea said that the PZL couldn't remain airborne for more than an hour anyway.
Mallory was between the devil and the deep sea. Inaccurate though the mortars were, some of the deadly fragmentation bombs found their way into the deep ravines where they took temporary shelter, the blast of metal lethal In the confined space between the sheering walls. Occasionally they came so close that Mallory was forced to take refuge in some of the deep caves that honeycombed the walls of the canyons. In these they werу safe enough, but the safety was an illusion that could lead only to ultimate defeat and capture; in the lulls, the Alpenkorps, whom they had fought off in a series of brief, skirmishing rearguard actions during the afternoon, could approach closely enough to trap them Inside. Time and time again Mallory and his men were forced to move to widen the gap between themselves and their pursuers, following the indomitable Louki wherever he chose to lead them, and taking their chance, often a very slender and desperate chance, with the mortar bombs. One bomb arced into a ravine that led into the interior, burying itself in the gravelly ground not twenty yards ahead of them, by far the nearest anything had come during the afternoon. By one chance in a thousand, it didn't explode. They gave it as wide a berth as possible, almost holding their breaths until they were safely beyond.
About half an hour before sunset they struggled up the last few boulder-strewn yards of a steeply-shelving ravine floor, halted just beyond the shelter of the projecting wall where the ravine dipped again and turned sharply to the right and the north. There had been no more mortar bombs since the one that had failed to explode. The six-inch and the weirdly-howling Nebeiwerfer bad only a limited range, Mallory knew, and though the planes still cruised overhead, they cruised uselessly; the sun was dipping towards the horizon and the floors of the ravines were already deep-sunk in shadowed gloom, invisible from above. But the Alpenkorps, tough, dogged, skilful soldiers, soldiers living only for the revenge of their massacred comrades, were very close behind. And they were highly-trained mountain troops, fresh, resilient, the reservoir of their energies barely tapped: whereas his own tiny band, worn out from continuous days and sleepless nights of labour and action… .
Mallory sank to the ground near the angled turn of the ravine where he could keep look out, glanced at the others with a deceptive casualness that marked his cheerless assessment of what he saw. As a fighting unit they were in a pretty bad way. Both Panayis and Brown were badly crippled, the latter's face grey with pain. For the first time since leaving Alexandria, Casey Brown was apathetic, listless and quite indifferent to everything: this Mallory took as a very bad sign. Nor was Brown helped by the heavy transmitter still strapped to his back — with point-blank truculence he had ignored Mallory's categorical order to abandon it. Louki was tired, and looked it: his physique, Mallory realised now, was no match for his spirit, for the infectious smile that never left his face, for the panache of that magnificently upswept moustache that contrasted so oddly with the sad, tired eyes above. Miller, like himself, was tired, but, like himself, could keep on being tired for a long time yet. And Stevens was still conscious, but even in the twilit gloom of the canyon floor his face looked curiously transparent, while the nails, lips and eyelids were drained of blood. And Andrea, who had carried him up and down all these killing canyon tracks — where there had been tracks — for almost two interminable hours, looked as he always did: immutable, indestructible.