"MacLean, Alistair - The Guns of Navaronne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

"It is impossible, you say?" Jensen persisted. "This is terribly important."
"So's my life. So are the lives of all these jokers." Torrance jerked a big thumb over his shoulder. "It's impossible, sir. At least, it's impossible for us." He drew a weary hand down his face. "Maybe a Dornier flyingboat with one of these new-fangled radio-controlled glider-bombs might do it and get off with it. I don't know. But I do know that nothing we've got has a snowball's chance in hell. Not," he added bitterly, "unless you cram a Mosquito full of T.N.T. and order one of us to crash-dive it at four hundred into the mouth of the gun cave. That way there's always a chance."
"Thank you, Squadron Leader--and all of you." Jensen was on his feet. "I know you've done your very best, no one could have done more. And I'm sorry. Commodore?"
"Right with you, gentlemen." He nodded to the bespectacled Intelligence officer who had been sitting behind them to take his place, led the way out through a side door and into his own quarters.
"Well, that is that, I suppose." He broke the seal of a bottle of Talisker, brought out some glasses. "You'll have to accept it as final, Jensen. Bill Torrance's is the senior, most experienced squadron left in Africa to-day. Used to pound the Ploesti oil wells and think it a helluva skylark. If anyone could have done to-night's job it was Bill Torrance, and if he says it's impossible, believe me, Captain Jensen, it can't be done."
"Yes." Jensen looked down sombrely at the golden amber of the glass in his hand. "Yes, I know. I almost knew before, but I couldn't be sure, and I couldn't take the chance of being wrong. . . . A terrible pity that it took the lives of a dozen men to prove me right . . . There's just the one way left, now."
"There's just the one," the commodore echoed. He lifted his glass, shook his head. "Here's luck to Kheros!"
"Here's luck to Kheros!" Jensen echoed in turn. His face was grim.
"Look!" Mallory begged. "I'm completely lost. Would somebody please tell me--"
"Kheros," Jensen interrupted. "That was your cue call, young man. All the world's a stage, laddie, etcetera, and this is where you tread the boards in this particular little comedy." Jensen's smile was quite mirthless. "Sorry you've missed the first two acts, but don't lose any sleep over that. This is no bit part: you're going to be the star, whether you like it or not. This is it. Kheros, Act 3, Scene 1. Enter Captain Keith Mallory."


Neither of them had spoken in the last ten minutes. Jensen drove the big Humber command car with the same sureness, the same relaxed efficiency that hallmarked everything he did: Mallory still sat hunched over the map on his knees, a large-scale Admiralty chart of the Southern Aegean illuminated by the hooded dashboard light, studying an area of the Sporades and Northern Dodecanese heavily squared off in red pencil. Finally he straightened up and shivered. Even in Egypt these late November nights could be far too cold for comfort. He looked across at Jensen.
"I think I've got it now, sir."
"Good!" Jensen gazed straight ahead along the winding grey ribbon of dusty road, along the white glare of the headlights that cleaved through the darkness of the desert. The beams lifted and dipped, constantly, hypnotically, to the cushioning of the springs on the rutted road. "Good!" he repeated. "Now, have another look at it and imagine yourself standing in the town of Navarone--that's on the almost circular bay on the north of the island? Tell me, what would you see from there?"
Mallory smiled.
"I don't have to look again, sir. Four miles or so away to the east I'd see the Turkish coast curving up north and west to a point almost due north of Navarone--a very sharp promontory, that, for the coastline above curves back almost due east. Then, about sixteen miles away, due north beyond this promontory--Cape Demirci, isn't it?--and practically in a line with it I'd see the island of Kheros. Finally, six miles to the west is the island of Maidos, the first of the Lerades group. They stretch away in a north-westerly direction, maybe fifty miles."
"Sixty." Jensen nodded. "You have the eye, my boy. You've got the guts and the experience--a man doesn't survive eighteen months in Crete without both. You've got one or two special qualifications I'll mention by and by." He paused for a moment, shook his head slowly. "I only hope you have the luck--all the luck. God alone knows you're going to need it."
Mallory waited expectantly, but Jensen had sunk into some private reverie. Three minutes passed, perhaps five, and there was only the swish of the tyres, the subdued hum of the powerful engine. Presently Jensen stirred and spoke again, quietly, still without taking his eyes off the road.
"This is Saturday--rather, it's Sunday morning now. There are one thousand two hundred men on the island of Kheros--one thousand two hundred British soldiers--who will be dead, wounded or prisoner by next Saturday. Mostly, they'll be dead." For the first time he looked at Mallory and smiled, a brief smile, a crooked smile, and then it was gone. "How does it feel to hold a thousand lives in your hands, Captain Mallory?"
For long seconds Mallory looked at the impassive face beside him, then looked away again. He stared down at the chart. Twelve hundred men on Kheros, twelve hundred men waiting to die. Kheros and Navarone, Kheros and Navarone. What was that poem again, that little jingle that he'd learnt all these long years ago in that little upland village in the sheeplands outside Queenstown? Chimborazo--that was it. "Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, you have stolen my heart away." Kheros and Navarone--they had the same ring, the same indefinable glamour, the same wonder of romance that took hold of a man and stayed with him. Kheros and--angrily, almost, he shook his head, tried to concentrate. The pieces of the jig-saw were beginning to click into place, but slowly.
Jensen broke the silence.
"Eighteen months ago, you remember, after the fall of Greece, the Germans had taken over nearly all the islands of the Sporades: the Italians, of course, already held most of the Dodecanese. Then, gradually, we began to establish missions on these islands, usually spear-headed by your people, the Long Range Desert Group or the Special Boat Service. By last September we had retaken nearly all the larger islands except Navarone--it was too damned hard a nut, so we just by-passed it--and brought some of the garrisons up to, and beyond, battalion strength." He grinned at Mallory. "You were lurking in your cave somewhere in the White Mountains at the time, but you'll remember how the Germans reacted?"
"Violently?"
Jensen nodded.
"Exactly. Very violently indeed. The political importance of Turkey in this part of the world is impossible to over-estimate--and she's always been a potential partner for either Axis or Allies. Most of these islands are only a few miles off the Turkish coast. The question of prestige, of restoring confidence in Germany, was urgent."
"So?"
"So they flung in everything--paratroopers, airborne troops, crack mountain brigades, hordes of Stukas--I'm told they stripped the Italian front of dive-bombers for these operations. Anyway, they flung everything in--the lot. In a few weeks we'd lost over ten thousand troops and every island we'd ever recaptured--except Kheros."
"And now it's the turn of Kheros?"
"Yes." Jensen shook out a pair of cigarettes, sat silently until Mallory had lit them and sent the match spinning through the window towards the pale gleam of the Mediterranean lying north below the coast road. "Yes, Kheros is for the hammer. Nothing that we can do can save it. The Germans have absolute air superiority in the Aegean. . . ."
"But--but how can you be so sure that it's this week?"
Jensen sighed.
"Laddie, Greece is fairly hotching with Allied agents. We have over two hundred in the Athens-Piraeus area alone and--"
"Two hundred!" Mallory interrupted incredulously. "Did you say--"
"I did." Jensen grinned. "A mere bagatelle, I assure you, compared to the vast hordes of spies that circulate freely among our noble hosts in Cairo and Alexandria." He was suddenly serious again. "Anyway, our information is accurate. An armada of caiques will sail from the Piraeus on Thursday at dawn and island-hop across the Cyclades, holing up in the islands at night." He smiled. "An intriguing situation, don't you think? We daren't move in the Aegean in the daytime or we'd be bombed out of the water. The Germans don't dare move at night. Droves of our destroyers and M.T.B.s and gunboats move into the Aegean at dusk: the destroyers retire to the South before dawn, the small boats usually lie up in isolated islands creeks. But we can't stop them from getting across. They'll be there Saturday or Sunday--and synchronise their landings with the first of the airborne troops: they've scores of Junkers 52s waiting just outside Athens. Kheros won't last a couple of days." No one could have listened to Jensen's carefully casual voice, his abnormal matter-of-factness and not have believed him.
Mallory believed him. For almost a minute he stared down at the sheen of the sea, at the faery tracery of the stars shimmering across its darkly placid surface. Suddenly he swung around on Jensen.
"But the Navy, sir! Evacuation! Surely the Navy--"
"The Navy," Jensen interrupted heavily, "is not keen. The Navy is sick and tired of the Eastern Med. and the Aegean, sick and tired of sticking out its long-suffering neck and having it regularly chopped off--and all for sweet damn all. We've had two battleships wrecked, eight cruisers out of commission--four of them sunk-- and over a dozen destroyers gone. . . . I couldn't even start to count the number of smaller vessels we've lost. And for what? I've told you--for sweet damn all! Just so's our High Command can play round-and-round- the-rugged-rocks and who's the-king-of-the-castle with their opposite numbers in Berlin. Great fun for all concerned--except, of course, for the thousand or so sailors who've been drowned in the course of the game, the ten thousand or so Tommies and Anzacs and Indians who suffered and died on these same islands--and died without knowing why."
Jensen's hands were white-knuckled on the wheel, his mouth tight-drawn and bitter. Mallory was surprised, shocked almost, by the vehemence, the depth of feeling; it was so completely out of character. . . . Or perhaps it was in character, perhaps Jensen knew a very great deal indeed about what went on on the inside.
"Twelve hundred men, you said, sir?" Mallory asked quietly. "You said there were twelve hundred men on Kheros?"
Jensen flickered a glance at him, looked away again.
"Yes. Twelve hundred men." Jensen sighed. "You're right, laddie, of course, you're right. I'm just talking off the top of my head. Of course we can't leave them there. The Navy will do its damnedest. What's two or three more destroyers--sorry, boy, sorry, there I go again. . . . Now listen, and listen carefully.
"Taking 'em off will have to be a night operation. There isn't a ghost of a chance in the daytime--not with two-three hundred Stukas just begging for a glimpse of a Royal Naval destroyer. It'll have to be destroyers-- transports and tenders are too slow by half. And they can't possibly go northabout the northern tip of the Lerades--they'd never get back to safety before daylight. It's too long a trip by hours."
"But the Lerades is a pretty long string of Islands," Mallory ventured. "Couldn't the destroyers go through--"
"Between a couple of them? Impossible." Jensen shook his head. "Mined to hell and back again. Every single channel. You couldn't take a dinghy through."
"And the Maidos-Navarone channel. Stiff with mines also, I suppose?"
"No, that's a clear channel. Deep water--you can't moor mines in deep water."
"So that's the route you've got to take, isn't it, sir? I mean, they're Turkish territorial waters on the other side and we--"
"We'd go through Turkish territorial waters to-morrow, and in broad daylight, if it would do any good," Jensen said flatly. "The Turks know it and so do the Germans. But all other things being equal, the Western channel is the one we're taking. It's a clearer channel, a shorter route--and it doesn't involve any unnecessary international complications."
"All other things being equal?"