In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell,

wouldn't depend on one man to cope with five. So" "Signals," Andrea finished for him. "They must have some way of letting the others know. Perhaps flares" "No, not that," Mallory disagreed. "Give their position away. Telephone. It has to be that. Remember how they were in Cretemiles of field telephone wire all over the shop?" Andrea nodded, picked up the dead man's torch, hooded it in his huge hand and started searching. He returned in less than a minute. "Telephone it is," he announced softly. "Over there, under the rocks." "Nothing we can do about it," Mallory said. "If it does ring, I'll have to answer or they'll come hot-footing along. I only hope to heaven they haven't got a bloody password. It would be just like them." He turned away, stopped suddenly. "But someone's got to come sometimea relief, ser geant of the guard, something like that. Probably he's supposed to make an hourly report. Someone's bound to comeand come soon. My God, Andrea, we'll have to make it fast!" "And this poor devil?" Andrea gestured to the huddled shadow at his feet. "Over the side with him." Mallory grimaced in distaste. "Won't make any difference to the poor bastard now, and we can't leave any traces. The odds are they'll think he's gone over the edgethis top-soil's as crumbly and treacherous as hell.. . . You might see if he's any papers on himnever know how useful they might be." "Not half as useful as these boots on his feet." Andrea waved a large hand towards the scree-strewn slopes. "You are not going to walk very far there in your stocking soles." Five minutes later Mallory tugged three times on the string that stretched down into the darkness below. Three answering tugs came from the ledge, and then the cord vanished rapidly down over the edge of the overhang, drawing with it the long steel-cored rope that Mallory paid out from the coil on the top of the cliff. The box of explosives was the first of the gear to come up. The weighted rope plummetted straight down from the point of the overhang, and padded though the box was on every side with lashed rucksacks and sleeping-bags it still crashed terrifyingly against the cliff on the inner arc of every wind-driven swing of the pendulum. But there was no time for finesse, to wait for the diminishing swing of the pendulum after each tug. Securely anchored to a rope that stretched around the base of a great boulder, Andrea leaned far out camera digital hp m407 over the edge of the precipice and reeled in the seventy-pound deadweight as another man would a trout. In less than three minutes the ammunition box lay beside him on the cliff-top: five minutes later the firing generator, guns and pistols, wrapped in a couple of other sleeping-bags and their lightweight, reversible tentwhite on one side brown and green camouflage on the otherlay beside the explosives. A third time the rope went down into the rain and the darkness, a third time the tireless Andrea hauled it in, hand over hand. Mallory was behind him, coiling in the slack of the rope, when he heard Andrea's sudden exclamation: two quick strides and he was at the edge of the cliff, his hand on the big Greek's arm. "What's up, Andrea? Why have you stopped?" He broke off, peered through the gloom at the rope in Andrea's hand, saw that it was being held between only finger and thumb. Twice Andrea jerked the rope up a foot or two, let it fall again: the weightless rope swayed wildly in the wind. "Gone?" Mallory asked quietly. Andrea nodded without speaking. "Broken?" Mallory was incredulous. "A wire-cored rope?" "I don't think so." Quickly Andrea reeled in the remaining forty feet. The twine was still attached to the same place, about a fathom from the end. The rope was intact. "Somebody tied a knot." Just for a moment the giant's voice sounded tired. "They didn't tie it too well." Mallory made to speak, then flung up an instinctive arm as a great, forked tongue of flame streaked between the cliff-top and unseen clouds above. Their cringing eyes were still screwed tight shut, their nostrils full of the acrid, sulphurous smell of burning, when the first volley of thunder crashed in Titan fury almost directly overhead, a deafening artillery to mock the pitiful efforts of embattled man, doubly terrifying in the total darkness that followed that searing flash. Gradually the echoes pealed and faded inland in diminishing reverberation, were lost among the valleys of the hills. "My God!" Mallory murmured. "That was close. We'd better make it fast, Andreathis cliff is liable to be lit up like a fairground any minute... . What was in that last load you were bringing up?" He didn't really have to askhe