A bag for bread, and a bag for beef,

heard them stumbling up the slope, for he had managed to burrow his way in behind the overhanging snowdrift that sealed off the space beneath a projecting ledge just above the rim of the gully. An almost perfect place of concealment, but his leg betrayed him: in the probing light of his torch Andrea's sharp eyes caught the tiny trickle of blood seeping darkly through the surface of the snow. He was already unconscious when they uncovered him, from cold or exhaustion or the agony of his shattered leg: probably from all three. Back in the cave again, Mallory tried to pour some ouzothe fiery, breath-catching local spiritdown Ste vens's throat. He had a vague suspicion that this might be dangerousor perhaps it was only dangerous in cases of shock, his memory was confused on that pointbut it seemed better than nothing. Stevens gagged, spluttered and coughed most of it back up again, but some at least stayed down. With Andrea's help Mallory tightened the loosened splints on the leg, staunched the oozing blood, and spread below and above the boy every dry covering he could find in the cave. Then he sat back tiredly and fished out a cigarette from his waterproof case. There was nothing more he could do until Dusty Miller returned with Panayis from the village. He was pretty sure that there was nothing that Dusty could do for Stevens either. There was nothing anybody could do for him. Already Louki had a fire burning near the mouth of the cave, the old, tinder-dry wood blazing up in a fierce, crackling blaze with hardly a wisp of smoke. Almost at once its warmth began to spread throughout the cave, and the three men edged gratefully nearer. From half a dozen points in the roof thin, steadily-increasing streams of water from the melting snows above began to splash down on the gravelly floor beneath: with these, and with the heat of the blaze, the ground was soon a quagmire. But, especially to Mallory and Andrea, these discomforts were a small price to pay for the privilege of being warm for the first time in over thirty hours. Mallory felt the glow seep through him like a benison, felt his entire body relax, his eyelids grow heavy and drowsy. Back propped against the wall, he was just drifting off to sleep, still smoking that first cigarette, when there was a gust of wind, a sudden chilling flurry of snow and Brown was inside the cave, wearily slipping the transmitter straps from his shoulders. Lugubrious as ever, his tired eyes lit up momentarily at the sight of the fire. Blue-faced and shuddering with coldno joke, Mallory thought digital camera that uses mini cdr grimly, squatting motionless for half an hour on that bleak and frozen hillsidehe hunched down silently by the fire, dragged out the inevitable cigarette and gazed moodily into the flames, oblivious alike of the clouds of steam that almost immediately enveloped him, of the acrid smell of his singeing clothes. He looked utterly despondent. Mallory reached for a bottle, poured out some of the heated retsimomainland wine heavily reinforced with resinand passed it across to Brown. "Chuck it straight down the hatch," Mallory advised. "That way you won't taste it." He prodded the transmitter with his foot and looked up at Brown again. "No dice this time either?" "Raised them no bother, sir." Brown grimaced at the sticky sweetness of the wine. "Reception was first classboth here and in Cairo." "You got through!" Mallory sat up, leaned forward eagerly. "And were they pleased to hear from their wandering boys to-night?" "They didn't say. The first thing they told me was to shut up and stay that way." Brown poked moodily at the fire with a steaming boot. "Don't ask me how, sir, but they've been tipped off that enough equipment for two or three small monitoring stations has been sent here in the past fortnight." Mallory swore. "Monitoring stations! That's damned handy, that is!" He thought briefly of the fugitive, nomad existence these same monitoring stations had compelled Andrea and himself to lead in the White Mountains of Crete. "Dammit, Casey, on an island like this, the size of a soup plate, they can pin-point us with their eyes shut!" "Aye, they can that, sir," Brown nodded heavily. "Have you heard anything of these stations, Louki?' Mallory asked. "Nothing, Major; nothing." Louki shrugged. "I am afraid I do not even know what you are talking about." "I don't suppose so. Not that it mattersit's too late now. Let's have the rest of the good news, Casey." "That's about it, sir. No sending for meby order. Restricted to code abbreviationsaffirmative, negative, repetitive, wilco and such-like. Continuous sending only in emergency or when concealment's impossible anyway." "Like from the condemned cell in these ducky little dungeons in Navarone," Mallory murmured. "I died with my boots on, ma." "With all respects, sir, that's not funny," Brown said morosely. "Their invasion fleetmainly caiques and

Robin Hood took his mantle from 's back,

side, you! Who is this?" "You need not fear from him," Mallory said quietly. "He is one of us but he is terribly injured. He is dying." "We will see," the officer said tightly. "Move to the back of the cave!" He waited until the three men had stepped over Stevens, changed his automatic rifle for a pistol, dropped to his knees and advanced slowly, torch in one hand, gun in the other, well below the line of fire of the two soldiers who advanced unbidden at his heels. There was an inevitability, a cold professionalism about it all that made Mallory's heart sink. Abruptly the officer reached out his gun-hand, tore the covers off the boy. A shuddering tremor shook the whole body, his head rolied from side to side as he moaned in unconscious agony. The officer bent quickly over him, the hard, clean lines of the face, the fair hair beneath the hood high-lit in the beam of his own torch. A quick look at Stevens's pain-twisted, emaciated features, a glance at the shattered leg, a brief, distasteful wrinkling of the nose as he caught the foul stench of the gangrene, and he had hunched back on his heels, gently replacing the covers over the sick boy. "You speak the truth," he said softly. "We are not barbarians. I have no quarrel with a dying man. Leave him there." He rose to his feet, walked slowly backwards. "The rest of you outside." The snow had stopped altogether, Mallory saw, and stars were beginning to twinkle in the clearing sky. The wind, too, had fallen away and was perceptibly warmer. Most of the snow would be gone by midday, Mallory guessed. Carelessly, incuriously, he looked around him. There was no sign of Casey Brown. Inevitably Mallory's hopes began to rise. Petty Officer Brown's recommendation for this operation had come from the very top. Two rows of ribbons to which he was entitled but never wore bespoke his gallantry, he had a formidable reputation as a guerrilla fighterand he had had an automatic rifle in his hand. If he were somewhere out there. . . . Almost as 'if he had divined his hopes, the German smashed them at a word. "You wonder where your sentry is, perhaps?" he asked mockingly. "Never fear, Englishman, he is not far from here, asleep at his post. Very sound asleep, I'm afraid." "You've killed him?" Mallory's hands clenched until his palms ached. The other shrugged his shoulder in vast indifference. "I really couldn't say. It was all too easy. One of my men lay in the gully and moaned. A masterly performancereally pitiablehe almost had panasonic lumix digital cameras me convinced. Like a fool your man came to investigate. I had another man waiting above, the barrel of his rifle in his hand. A very effective club, I assure you. . . ." Slowly Mallory unclenched his fists and stared bleakly down the gully. Of course Casey would fall for that, he was bound to after what had happened earlier in the night. He wasn't going to make a fool of himself again, cry "wolf" twice in succession: inevitably, he had gone to check first. Suddenly the thought occurred to Mallory that maybe Casey Brown had heard something earlier on, but the thought vanished as soon as it had come. Panayis did not look like the man to make a mistake: and Andrea never made a mistake; Mallory turned back to the officer again. "Well, where do we go from here?" "Margaritha, and very shortly. But one thing first." The German, his own height to an inch, stood squarely in front of him, levelled revolver at waist height, switched-off torch dangling loosely from his right hand. "Just a little thing, Englishman. Where are the explosives?" He almost spat the words out. "Explosives?" Mallory furrowed his brow in perplexity. "What explosives?" be asked blankly, then staggered and fell to the ground as the heavy torch swept round in a vicious half-circle, caught him flush on the side of the face. Dizzily he shook his head and climbed slowly to his feet again. "The explosives." The torch was balanced in the hand again, the voice silky and gentle. "I asked you where they were." "I don't know what you are talking about." Mallory spat out a broken tooth, wiped some blood off his smashed lips. "Is this the way the Germans treat their prisoners?" he asked contemptuously. "Shut up!" Again the torch lashed out. Mallory was waiting for it, rode the blow as best he could: even so the torch caught him heavily high up on the cheekbone, just below the temple, stunning him with its jarring impact. Seconds passed, then he pushed himself slowly off the snow, the whole side of his face afire with agony, his vision blurred and unfocused. "We fight a clean war!" The officer was breathing heavily, in barely controlled fury. "We fight by the Geneva Conventions. But these are for soldiers, not for murdering spies" "We are no spies!" Mallory interrupted. He felt as if his head was coming apart. "Then where are your uniforms?" the officer demanded. "Spies, I

"The first loud blast that he did blow,

operator as comfortably as our sledge did that night. It took us no more than five minutes to reach the cabin, and in three more minutes we were on our way again. They were a busy three minutes. Jackstraw lit the oil stove, oil lamp and Colman pressure lamp, while Joss and I put the injured man on a collapsible cot before the stove, worked him into my sleeping-bag, slid in half a dozen heat padswaterproof pads containing a chemical which gave off heat when water was addedplaced a rolled up blanket under his neck to keep the back of his head off the cot, and zipped the sleeping-bag shut. I had surgical instruments enough to do what had to be done, but it had to wait: not so much because we had others still to rescue, urgent enough though that was, but the man lying at our feet, so still, so ashen-faced, was suffering so severely from shock and exposure that to touch him would have been to kill him: I was astonished that he had managed to survive even this long. I told the stewardess to make some coffee, gave her the necessary instructions, and then we left her and the big young man together: the girl heating a pan over a pile of meta tablets, the young man staring incredulously into a mirror as he kneaded a frost-bitten cheek and chin with one hand, and with another held a cold compress to a frozen ear. We took with us the warm clothes we had lent them, some rolls of bandages, and left. Ten minutes later we were back inside the plane. Despite its insulation, the temperature inside the main cabin had already dropped at least thirty degrees and almost everyone was shivering with the cold, one or two beating their arms to keep themselves warm. Even the Dixie colonel was looking very subdued. The elderly lady, fur coat tightly wrapped around her, looked at her watch and smiled. "Twenty minutes, exactly. You are very prompt, young man." "We try to be of service." I dumped the pile of clothes I was carrying on a seat, nodded at them and the contents of a gunny sack Joss and Jackstraw were emptying. "Share these out between you and be as quick as you can. I want you to get out at oncemy two friends here will take you back. Perhaps one of you will be kind enough to remain behind." I looked to where the young girl still sat alone in her back seat, still holding her left forearm in her hand. "I'll need some help to fix this young lady up." "Fix her up?" It was the expensive young woman in the expensive furs speaking for the first time. Her voice was expensive as the rest of her hp digital camera service website and made me want to reach for a hairbrush. "Why? What on earth is the mattef with her?" "Her collar-bone is broken," I said shortly. "Collar-bone broken?" The elderly lady was on her feet, her face a nice mixture of concern and indignation. "And she's been sitting there alone all this timewhy didn't you tell us, you silly man?" "I forgot," I replied mildly. "Besides, what good would it have done?" I looked down at the girl in the mink coat. Goodness only knew that I didn't particularly want her, but the injured girl had struck me as being almost painfully shy, and I was sure she'd prefer to have one of her own sex around. "Would you like to give me a hand?" She stared at me, a cold surprised stare that would have been normal enough had I made some outrageous or improper request, but before she could answer the elderly lady broke in again. "I'll stay behind. I'd love to help." "Well" I began doubtfully, but she interrupted immediately. "Well yourself. What's the matter? Think I'm too old, hey?" "No, no, of course not," I protested. "A fluent liar, but a gallant one." She grinned. "Come on, we're wasting this valuable time you're always so concerned about." We brought the girl into the first of the rear seats, where there was plenty of space between that and the first of the rearward facing front seats, and had just worked her coat off when Joss called me. "We're off now, sir. Back in twenty minutes." As the door closed behind the last of them and I broke open a roll of bandage, the old lady looked quizzically at me. "Know what you're doing, young man?" "More or less. I'm a doctor." "Doctor, hey?" She looked at me with open suspicion, and what with my bulky, oil-streaked and smelly furs, not to mention the fact that I hadn't shaved for three days, I suppose there was justification enough for it. "You sure?" "Sure I'm sure," I said irritably. "What do you expect me to dowhip my medical degree out from under this parka or just wear round my neck a brass plate giving my consulting hours?" "We'll get along, young