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

And whatten penance will ye drie for that?

could that accomplice be? It was not until then that the chilling, frightening thought struck me that, because two guns had been used in the plane, I had assumed all along that there were only two criminals. There wasn't a shadow of evidence to suggest why there should not be more than two: why not three? Why not Corazzini, Zagero and Levin all in the conspiracy together? I thought over the implications of this for some minutes, and at the end I felt more helpless than ever, more weirdly certain of ultimate tragedy to come. Forcibly, almost, I had to remind myself that all three were not necessarily working together; but it was a possibility that had to be faced. About three o'clock in the morning, still following the flag trail that stretched out interminably before us in the long rake of the headlights, we felt the tractor slow down and Jackstraw, who was driving at the time, change gear as we entered on the first gentle slope of the long foothills that led to the winding pass that cut the Vindeby Nunataks almost exactly in half. We could have gone round the Nunataks, but that would have wasted an entire day, perhaps two, and with the ten-mile route through the hills clearly marked, it was pointless to make a detour. Two hours later, as the incline perceptibly steepened, the tractor treads began to slip and spin on the frozen snow, but by off-loading almost all the petrol and gear we carried on the tractor sled and stowing it inside the tractor cabin, we managed to build up enough weight to gain a purchase on the surface. Even so, progress was slow and difficult. We could only make ground by following a zigzag pattern, and it took us well over an hour to cover the last mile before the entrance to the pass. Here we halted, soon after seven o'clock in the morning. The pass was lined on one side by a deep crevasse in the ice that ran its entire length, and although not particularly treacherous the trail was difficult and dangerous enough to make me determined to wait for the two or three brief hours' light at the middle of the day. While breakfast was being prepared, I looked at Mahler and Marie LeGarde. The steady rise in temperatureit was now less than -SOThad done nothing to help either of them. Marie LeGarde looked as if she hadn't eaten in weeks, her face, pock-marked with sores and frostbite blisters, was appallingly thin and wasted, and the once sparkling eyes lack-lustre, pouched and filled and rimmed with blood. She hadn't spoken a word in ten hours, just sat there, in her increasingly rare moments of waking, digital prices slim search camera shivering and staring ahead with sightless eyes. Theodore Mahler looked in better case than she, but I knew when his defences went down they would do so in a matter of hours. Despite all that we -or, rather, Margaret Rosshad done for him, the insidious talons of frostbite had already sunk deep into his feet, he had developed a very heavy coldrare indeed in the Arctic, the seeds of it must have been sown before he had left New Yorkand he had neither the energy nor reserves to fight either that or the boils that were beginning to plague him. His breathing was difficult, the sweet ethereal odour of acetone very strong. He seemed wide awake and rational enough, superficially a much better going concern than Marie LeGarde, but I knew that the collapse, the preliminary to the true diabetic coma, might come at any time. At eight o'clock Jackstraw and I moved out on to the hillside, and again made contact with Hillcrest. My heart sank when I heard the grim news that they'd hardly progressed a couple of miles in the previous twelve hours. In that bitter cold, it seemed -and where they were temperatures were all of thirty degrees lower than they were with usheating up an eight gallon drum of petrol, even using stoves, blow-lamps and every means at their disposal, to the point of boiling was a heartbreakingly slow job, and the Sno-Cat gobbled up in a minute all the pure fuel they could distil in thirty times that. Beyond that, there was no news: Uplavnik, which they had contacted less than an hour previously, had still nothing fresh to report. Without a word, Jackstraw and I packed up the equipment and made our way back to the cabin of the tractor. Jackstraw's almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness was at the lowest ebb I had ever seen, he seldom spoke now and even more rarely smiled. As for me, I felt our last hope was gone. We started up the tractor again at eleven o'clock and headed straight into the pass, myself at the wheel. I was the only person left in either the driving compartment or the cabin behind: Mahler and Marie LeGarde, vanished under a great mound of clothing, rode on the dog-sled while the others walked. The tractor was wide, the trail narrow and sometimes sloping outwards and downwards, and with a sideslip into the gaping crevasse that bordered our path nobody inside the cabin would have had any chance of escape. The first part was easy. The trail, sometimes not more than eight or nine feet broad, more often than not opened

Hoping some praise, or fearing some disgrace.

pointed ends of his black moustache. "A brave man and a foolish one, I would saybut I suppose we cannot call a man a fool when he only obeys his orders." His eyes left the large drawing lying before him on the table and sought Jensen's impassive face. "Is there no other way, Captain?" he pleaded. Jensen shook his head slowly. "There are. We've tried them all, sir. They all failed. This is the last." "He must go, then?" "There are over a thousand men on Kheros, sir." Vlachos bowed his head in silent acceptance, then smiled faintly at Mallory. "He calls me 'sir.' Me, a poor Greek hotel-keeper and Captain Jensen of the Royal Navy calls me 'sir.' It makes an old man feel good." He stopped, gazed off vacantly into space, the faded eyes and tired, lined face soft with memory. "An old man, Captain Mallory, an old man now, a poor man and a sad one. But I wasn't always, not always. Once I was just middle-aged, and rich and well content. Once I owned a lovely land, a hundred square miles of the most beautiful country God ever sent to delight the eyes of His creatures here below, and how well I loved that land!" He laughed self-consciously and ran a hand through his thick, greying hair. "Ah, well, as you people say, I suppose it's all in the eye of the beholder. 'A lovely land,' I say. 'That blasted rock,' as Captain Jensen has been heard to describe it out of my hearing." He smiled at Jensen's sudden discomfiture. "But we both give it the same nameNavarone." Startled, Mallory looked at Jensen. Jensen nodded. "The Vlachos family has owned Navarone for generations. We had to remove Monsieur Viachos in a great hurry eighteen months ago. The Germans didn't care overmuch for his kind of collaboration." "It washow do you saytouch and go," Vlachos nodded. "They had reserved three very special places for my two sons and myself in the dungeons in Navarone. . . . But enough of the Viachos family. I just wanted you to know, young man, that I spent forty years on Navarone and almost four days"he gestured to the table"on that map. My information and that map you can trust absolutely. Many things will have changed, of course, but some things never change. The mountains, the bays, the passes, the caves, kodak easyshare cx 7430 digital camera the roads, the houses and, above all, the fortress itselfthese have remained unchanged for centuries, Captain Mallory." "I understand, sir." Mallory folded the map carefully, stowed it away in his tunic. "With this, there's always a chance. Thank you very much." "It is little enough, God knows." Viachos's fingers drummed on the table for a moment, then he looked up at Mallory. "Captain Jensen informs me that most of you speak Greek fluently, that you will be dressed as Greek peasants and will carry forged papers. That is well. You will bewhat is the word?self-contained, will operate on your own." He paused, then went on very earnestly. "Please do not try to enlist the help of the people of Navarone. At all costs you must avoid that. The Germans are ruthless. I know. If a man helps you and is found out, they will destroy not only that man but his entire villagemen, women and children. It has happened before. It will happen again." "It happened in Crete," Mallory agreed quietly. "I've seen it for myself." "Exactly." Vlachos nodded. "And the people of Navarone have neither the skifi nor the experience for suecessful guerrilla operations. They have not had the chanceGerman surveillance has been especially severe in our island." "I promise you, sir" Mallory began. Vlachos held up his hand. "Just a moment. If your need is desperate, really desperate, there are two men to whom you may turn. Under the first plane tree in the village square of Margarithaat the mouth of the valley about three miles south of the fortressyou will find a man called Louki. He has been the steward of our family for many years. Louki has been of help to the British beforeCaptain Jensen will confirm thatand you can trust him with your life. He has a friend, Panayis: he, too, has been useful in the past." "Thank you, sir. I'll remember. Louki and Panayis and Margarithathe first plane tree in the square." "And you will refuse all other aid, Captain?" Vlachos asked anxiously. "Louki and Panayisonly these two," he pleaded. "You have my word, sir. Besides, the fewer the safer for us as well as your people." Mallory was surprised at the old man's intensity. "I hope so, I hope so." Viachos sighed heavily. Mallory stood up, stretched out

But nane sall ken whar he is gane:

made rapid progress in the direction the brewer had indicated. She had just reached the next parallel road when she heard the sound of air brakes engaging and considerable shouting. She ducked around the corner and was on another deserted block. When she heard the pounding of booted feet, she realized that she might not have time to explain her possession of the illegally brewed beer if she was caught out on the streets. The first door she approached was locked and her quick rap met with no response. The second door was jerked open just as she got to it. She needed no urging to step into the sanctuary. Indeed, not a moment too soon for the searchers came pounding around the corner and stormed past the door. That was a bit foolish, if you ask me, said the woman beside her in a hoarse accusation. You may be an alien but that wouldnt matter to them did they apprehend you down here. She gestured for Killashandra to follow her to the rear of the little house. You must have some thirst to go roaming about Gartertown in search of quenching. There are places which legally serve drink, you know. I didnt, but if you could tell me Not that the hours you can drink are that convenient, and our brews superior to anything out of the Bascum. The water, you know! This way. Killashandra paused because a crate of the illegal bottling was sitting in the middle of the floor of the rear room, right by a section of flooring which had been removed. Give me a hand, would you? They might do a house-to-house if theyre feeling particularly officious. Killashandra willingly complied and, when the crate was stored, the section replaced, the hiding place was indistinguishable. Dont like to rush a bodys enjoyment of a brew, but Killashandra would have preferred to savor the second bottle, but she downed it in three long swallows. The woman took the empty and chucked it toward the disposal. With a loud crunch the evidence was disposed of. Killashandra drew her fingers down the corners of her mouth, and then belched yeastily. The woman took a position by her door, ear to the panel, listening intently. She jumped back just as the door swung in wide enough to admit a fall figure. They were recalled, the man said. And theres some sort of search going on in the City He broke off then because he had turned and caught sight of Killashandra standing in the doorway. She was as motionless with surprise as he for she recognized digital camera stores in spokane wa him, by garb and stance, as the young man from the infirmary corridor. He recovered first while Killashandra was considering the advisability of dissembling. Youre making this far too easy, he said cryptically, striding up to her. Surprised, she saw only his fist before a stunning blackness overcame her. She roused the first time, aware of a stuffy atmosphere, the soreness of her jaw, and that her hands and feet were tied. She groaned, and before she could open her eyes, she felt a sudden pressure on her arm and her senses reeled once more back into unconsciousness. She was still tied when she woke the second time, with an awful taste in her mouth and the tang of salt in her nostrils. She could hear the hiss of wind and the slap of water not far from her ears. Cautiously she opened her eyes a slit. She was on a boat, all right, in an upper berth in a small cabin. She was aware of another presence in the room but dared not signal her consciousness by sound or movement. Her jaw still ached though not, she thought, as much as on her previous awakening. Whatever drug they had given her was compounded with a muscle relaxant, for she felt exceedingly limp. So why did they bother to keep her bound? She heard footsteps approaching the cabin and controlled her breathing to the slow regularity of the sleeper just as an outer hatch was flung open. Spray beaded her face. A warm spray so that her muscles did not betray her. No sign? No. See for yourself. Hasnt moved a muscle. You didnt give her too much, did you? Those singers have different metabolisms. The inquisitor snorted. Not that different, no matter what she said about alcoholic intake. Amusement rippled in his voice as he approached the bed. Killashandra forced herself to remain limp though anger began to boil away the medically induced tranquillity as she reacted to the fact that she, a member of the Heptite Guild, a crystal singer, had been kidnapped. On the other hand, her kidnapping seemed to indicate that not everyone was content to remain on Optheria. Or did it? Strong fingers gripped her chin, the thumb pressing painfully on the bruise for a moment, before the fingers slid to the pulse-beat in her throat. She kept her neck muscles lax to permit this handling. Feigning unconsciousness might result in unguarded explanations being exchanged over her inert body. And she needed some before she made her move. That was some

"O what's the matter?" quoth William Stutely;

stumbled on the poor bastard in the dark and had to kill him. Local colour. Louki was there, remember, and he couldn't have Louki gettin' suspicious. He would have blamed it on Louki anyway. The guy ain't human. . . . And remember when he was flung into Skoda's room in Margaritha along with Louki, blood pourin' from a wound in his head?" "High-grade ketchup. Probably also from the commandant's kitchen," Miller said bitterly. "If Skoda had failed by every other means, there would still have been the boy-friend here as a stool-pigeon. Why he never asked Louki where the explosives were I don't know." "Obviously he didn't know Louki knew." "Mebbe. But one thing the bastard did knowhow to use a mirror. Musta heliographed the garrison from the carob grove and given our position. No other way, boss. Then sometime this morning he must have got hold of my rucksack, whipped out all the slow fuse and fixed the clock fuse and detonators. He should have had his hands blown off tamperin' with them fulminates. Lord only knows where he learnt to handle the damn' things." "Crete," Mallory said positively. "The Germans would see to that. A spy who can't also double as a saboteur is no good to them." "And he was very good to them," Miller said softly. "Very, very good. They're gonna miss their little pal. Iscariot here was a very smart baby indeed." "He was. Except to-night. He should have been smart enough to know that at least one of us would be suspicious" "He probably was," Miller interrupted. "But he was misinformed. I think Louki's unhurt. I think Junior here talked Louki into letting him stay in his placeLouki was always a bit scared of himthen he strolled across to his pals at the gate, told 'em to send a strong-arm squad out to Vygos to pick up the others, asked them to fire a few shotshe was very strong on local colour, was our loyal little palthen strolls back across the square, hoists himself up on the roof and waits to tip off his pals as soon as we came in the back door. But Louki forgot to tell him just one thingthat we were goin' to rendezvous on the roof of the house, not inside. So the boy-friend here lurks away for all he's worth up top, waiting to signal his Mends. Ten to one that he's got a torch in his pocket." Mallory picked up Panayis's coat and examined it briefly. "He has." "That's it, then." Miller lit another cigarette, watched the match burn down slowly to his fingers, then looked impact memory cards digital camera up at Panayis. "How does it feel to know that you're goin' to die, Panayis, to feel like all them poor bastards who've felt just as you're feeling now, just before they diedall the men in Crete, all the guys in the sea-borne and air landings on Navarone who died because they thought you were on their side? How does it feel, Panayis?" Panayis said nothing. His left hand clutching his torn right arm, trying to stem the blood, he stood there motionless, the dark, evil face masked in hate, the lips still drawn back in that less than human snarl. There was no fear in him, none at all, and Mallory tensed himself for the last, despairing attempt for life that Panayis must surely make, and then he had looked at Miller and knew there would be no attempt, because there was a strange sureness and inevitabifity about the American, an utter immobility of hand and eye that somehow precluded even the thought, far less the possibility of escape. "The prisoner has nothin' to say." Miller sounded very tired. "I suppose I should say somethin'. I suppose I should give out with a long spiel about me bein' the judge, the jury and the executioner, but I don't think I'll bother myself. Dead men make poor witnesses. . . . Mebbe it's not your fault, Panayis, mebbe there's an awful good reason why you came to be what you are. Gawd only knows. I don't, and I don't much care. There are too many dead men. I'm goin' to kill you, Panayis, and I'm goin' to kill you now." Miller dropped his cigarette, ground it into the floor of the hut. "Nothin' at all to say?" And he had nothing at all to say, the hate, the malignity of the black eyes said it all for him and Miller nodded, just once, as if in secret understanding. Carefully, accurately, he shot Panayis through the heart, twice, blew out the candles, turned his back and was half-way towards the door before the man had crashed to the ground. "I am afraid I cannot do it, Andrea." Louki sat back wearily, shook his head in despair. "I am very sorry, Andrea. The knots are too tight." "No matter." Andrea rolled over from his side to a sitting position, tried to ease his tightly-bound legs and wrists. "They are cunning, these Germans, and wet cords can only be cut." Characteristically, he made no mention of the fact that only a couple of minutes previously he had twisted round to reach the cords on Louki's wrist and undone them with half a dozen tugs of his steel-trap fingers. "We will think of something

I love the look, austere, immaculate,

before now: less than two months previously I had had to send our tractor mechanic, a completely broken youngster who had lost all contact with the last shadow of reality, back to our Uplavnik base. The wind had done that to him. Tonight its desolate threnody boomed and faded, boomed and faded in the lower registers of sound with an intensity which I had seldom heard, while its fingers plucked at the tightly strung guy ropes of the radio antenna and instrument shelters to provide its own whistling obbligato of unearthly music. But I was in no mood then to listen to its music, and, indeed, that sepulchral wailing was not the dominant sound on the ice-cap that night. The throbbing roar of big aero engines, surging and receding, as the wind gusted and fell away, like surf on some distant shore, was very close now. The sound lay to windward of us at that moment, and we turned to face it, but we were blind. Although the sky was overcast, there was no snow that nightat any time, heavy snowfalls, strangely enough, are all but unknown on the Greenland ice-capbut the air was full of millions of driving, needle-pointed ice spicules that swept towards us out of the impenetrable darkness to the east, clogging up our goggles in a matter of seconds and stinging the narrow exposed area of my face between mask and goggles like a thousand infuriated hornets. A sharp, exquisite pain, a pain that vanished almost in the moment of arrival as the countless sub-zero spicules dug deep with their anaesthetising needles and drove out all sensation from the skin. But I knew this ominous absence of feeling all too well. Once again I turned my back to the wind, kneaded the deadened flesh with mittened hands till the blood came throbbing back, then pulled my snow-mask higher still. The plane was flying in an anti-clockwise direction, following, it seemed, the path of an irregular oval, for the sound of its motors faded slightly as it curved round to north and west. But within thirty seconds it was approaching again, in a swelling thunder of sound, to the south-westto the leeward of us, that wasand I could tell from Jackstraw's explosive ejaculation of sound, muffled behind his mask, that he had seen it at the same moment as myself. It was less than half a mile distant, no more than five hundred feet above the ice-cap, and during the five seconds it remained inside my line of vision I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thud heavily in my chest. No SAC bomber this, nor a Thule met. plane, both with crews highly trained in the grim craft olympus fe 190 digital camera of Arctic survival. That long row of brightly illuminated cabin windows could belong to only one thinga trans-Atlantic or trans-polar airliner. "You saw it, Dr Mason?" Jackstraw's snow-mask was close to my ear. "I saw it." It was all I could think to say. But what I was seeing then was not the plane, now again vanished into the flying ice and drift, but the inside of the plane, with the passengersGod, how many passengers, fifty, seventy?sitting in the cosy security of their pressurised cabin with an air-conditioned temperature of 70 F, then the crash, the tearing, jagged screeching that set the teeth on edge as the thin metal shell ripped along its length and the tidal wave of that dreadful cold, 110 degrees below cabin temperature, swept in and engulfed the survivors, the dazed, the injured, the unconscious and the dying as they sat or lay crumpled in the wreckage of the seats, clad only in thin suits and dresses. . . . The plane had completed a full circuit and was coming round again. If anything, it was even closer this time, at least a hundred feet lower, and it seemed to have lost some speed. It might have been doing 120, perhaps 130 miles an hour, I was no expert in these things, but for that size of plane, so close to the ground, it seemed a dangerously low speed. I wondered just how effective the pilot's windscreen wipers would be against these flying ice spicules. And then I forgot all about that, forgot all about everything except the desperate, urgent need for speed. Just before the plane had turned round to the east again and so out of the line of our blinded vision, it had seemed to dip and at the same instant two powerful lights stabbed out into the darkness, the one lancing straight ahead, a narrow powerful beam glittering and gleaming with millions of sparkling diamond points of flame as the ice-crystals in the air flashed across its path, the other, a broader fan of light, pointing downwards and only slightly ahead, its oval outline flitting across the frozen snow like some flickering will o' the wisp. I grabbed Jackstraw's arm and put my head close to his. "He's going to land! He's looking for a place to put down. Get the dogs, harness them up." We had a tractor, but heaven only knew how long it would have taken to start it on a night like this. "I'll give you a hand as soon as I can." He nodded, turned and was lost to sight in a moment. I turned too, cursed as

"I'll be judge, I'll be jury",

jacket and braided waistcoat even more sodden and saturated than his trousers. It didn't make sense. But there was no time for questions. "Did you hear the phone ringing just now?" he asked. "Was that what it was? Yeah, I heard it. "The sentry's phone. His hourly report, or whatever it was, must have been overdue. We didn't answer it. They'll be hot-footing along any minute now, suspicious as hell and looking for trouble. Maybe your side, maybe Brown's. Can't approach any other way unless they break their necks climbing over these boulders." Mallory gestured at the shapeless jumble of rocks behind them. "So keep your eyes skinned." "I'll do that, boss. No shootin', huh?" "No shooting. Just get back as quickly and quietly as you can and let us know. Come back in five minutes anyway." Mallory hurried away, retracing., his steps. Andrea was stretched full length on the cliff-top, peering over the edge. He twisted his head round as Mallory approached. "I can hear him. He's just at the overhang." "Good." Mallory moved on without breaking step. "Tell him to hurry, please." Ten yards farther on Mallory checked, peered into the gloom ahead. Somebody was coming along the clifftop at a dead run, stumbling and slipping on the loose gravelly soil. "Brown?" Mallory called softly. "Yes, sir. It's me." Brown was up to him now, breathing heavily, pointing back in the direction he had just come. "Somebody's coming, and coming fast! Torches waving and jumping all over the placemust be running." "How many?" Mallory asked quickly. "Four or five at least." Brown was still gasping for breath. "Maybe morefour or five torches, anyway. You can see them for yourself." Again he pointed backwards, then blinked in puzzlement. "That's bloody funny! They're all gone." He turned back swiftly to Mallory. "But I can swear" "Don't worry," Mallory said grimly. "You saw them all right. rye been expecting visitors. They're getting close now and taking no chances. . . . How far away?" "Hundred yardsnot more than a hundred and fifty." "Go and get Miller. Tell him to get back here fast." Mallory ran back kodak disposable camera digital along the cliff edge and knelt beside the huge length of Andrea. "They're coming, Andrea," he said quickly. "From the left. At least five, probably more. Two minutes at the most. Where's Stevens? Can you see him?" "I can see him." Andrea was magnificently unperturbed. "He is just past the overhang . . ." The rest of his words were lost, drowned in a sudden, violent thunderclap, but there was no need for more. Mallory could see Stevens now, climbing up the rope, strangely old and enfeebled in action, hand over hand in paralysing slowness, half-way now between the overhang and the foot of the chimney. "Good God!" Mallory swore. "What's the matter with him? He's going to take all day . . ." He checked himself, cupped his hands to his mouth. "Stevens! Stevens!" But there was no sign that Stevens had heard. He still kept climbing with the same unnatural over-deliberation, a robot in slow motion. "He is very near the end," Andrea said quietly. "You see he does not even lift his head. When a climber does not lift his head, he is finished." He stirred. "I will go down for him." "No." Mallory's hand was on his shoulder. "Stay here. I can't risk you both. . . . Yes, what is it." He was aware that Brown was back, bending over him, his breath coming in great heaving gasps. "Hurry, sir; hurry, for God's sake!" A few brief words but he had to suck in two huge gulps of air to get them out. "They're on top of us!" "Get back to the rocks with Miller," Mallory said urgently. "Cover us. . . . Stevens! Stevens!" But again the wind swept up the face of the cliff, carried his words away. "Stevens! For God's sake, man! Stevens!" His voice was low-pitched, desperate, but this time some quality in it must have reached through Stevens' fog of exhaustion and touched his consciousness, for he stopped climbing and lifted his head, hand cupped to his ear. "Some Germans coming!" Mallory called through funnelled hands, as loudly as he dared. "Get to the foot of the chimney and stay there. Don't make a sound. Understand?" Stevens lifted his hand, gestured in tired acknowledgment, lowered his head, started to climb up again. He was going even more slowly now, his movements fumbling and clumsy. "Do you think he understands?" Andrea was troubled. "I think so. I don't know." Mallory stiffened and caught Andrea's arm. It was beginning to rain again, not heavily yet, and