The next loud blast that he did give,

during the darkness of the night. Due east and facing his own at perhaps five miles' distance, the third mountain was barely less high: but its northern, flank fell away more quickly, debouchbig on to the plains that lay in the northeast of Navarone. And about four miles away to the north-northeast, far beneath the snowline and the isolated shep herds' huts, a tiny, flat-roofed township lay in a fold in the hills, along the bank of the little stream that wound its way through the valley. That could only be the village of Margaritha. Even as he absorbed the topography of the valley, his eyes probing every dip and cranny in the hills for a possible source of danger, Andrea's mind was racing back over the last two minutes of time, trying to isolate, to remember the nature of the alien sound that had cut through the cocoon of sleep and brought him instantly to his feet, alert and completely awake, even before his conscious mind had time to register the memory of the sound. And then he heard it again, three times in as many seconds, the high-pitched, lonely wheep of a whistle, shrill peremptory blasts that echoed briefly and died along the lower slopes of Mt. Kostos: the final echo still hung faintly on the air as Andrea pushed himself backwards and slid down to the floor of the gully. He was back on the bank within thirty seconds, cheek muscles contracting involuntarily as the ice-chill eyepieces of Mallory's Zeiss-Ikon binoculars screwed into his face. There was no mistaking them now, he thought grimly, his first fleeting impression had been all too accurate. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty soldiers in all, strung out in a long, irregular line, they were advancing slowly across the flank of Kostos, combing every gully, each jumbled confusion of boulders that lay in their path. Every man was clad in a snow-suit, but even at a distance of two miles they were easy to locate: the arrow-heads of their strapped skis angled up above shoulders and hooded heads: startlingly black against the sheer whiteness of the snow, the skis bobbed and weaved in disembodied drunkenness as the men slipped and stumbled along the scree-strewn slopes of the mountain. From time to time a man near the centre of the line pointed and gestured with an alpenstock, as if co-ordinating the efforts of the search party. The man with the whistle, Andrea guessed. "Andrea!" The call from the cave mouth was very soft. "Anything wrong?" Finger to his lips, Andrea twisted round in the snow. Mallory was stinding by the canvas digital camera multimedia card screen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his bloodshot eyes. And then he was limping forward in obedience to the crooking of Andrea's finger, wincing in pain at every step he took. His toes were swollen and skinned, gummed together with congealed blood. He had not had his boots off since he had taken them from the feet of the dead German sentry: and now he was almost afraid to remove them, afraid of what he would find.. . . He clambered slowly up the bank of the gully and sank down in the snow beside Andrea. "Company?" "The very worst of company," Andrea murmured. "Take a look, my Keith." He handed over the binoculars, pointed down to the lower slopes of Mt. Kostos. "Your friend Jensen never told us that they were here." Slowly, Maliory quartered the slopes with the binoculars. Suddenly the line of searchers moved into his field of vision. He raised his head, adjusted the focus impatiently, looked briefly once more, then lowered the binoculars with a restrained deliberation of gesture that held a wealth of bitter comment. "The W.G.B.," be said softly. "A Jaeger battalion," Andrea conceded. "Alpine Corpstheir finest mountain troops. This is most inconvenient, my Keith." Mallory nodded, rubbed his stubbled chin. "If anyone can find us, they can. And they'll find us." He lifted the glasses to look again at the line of advancing men. The painstaking thoroughness of the search was disturbing enough: but even more threatening, more frightening, was the snail-like relentlessness, the inevitability of the approach of these tiny figures. "God knows what the Alpenkorps is doing here," Mallory went on. "It's enough that they are here. They must know that we've landed and spent the morning searching the eastern saddle of Kostosthat was the obvious route for us to break into the interior. They've drawn a blank there, so now they're working their way over to the other saddle. They must be pretty nearly certain that we're carrying a wounded man with us and that we can't have got very far. It's only going to be a matter of time, Andrea" "A matter of time," Andrea echoed. He glanced up at the sun, a sun all but invisible in a darkening sky. "An hour, an hour and a half at the most. They'll be here before the sun goes down. And we'll