Or have they robbed any virgin,

by-passed itand 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-estimateand 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 everythingparatroopers, airborne troops, crack mountain brigades, hordes of StukasI'm told they stripped the Italian front of dive-bombers for these operations. Anyway, they flung everything inthe lot. In a few weeks we'd lost over ten thousand troops and every island we'd ever recapturedexcept 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. . . ." "Butbut 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 olympus stylus verve digital camera can't stop them from getting across. They'll be there Saturday or Sundayand 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 offand all for sweet damn all. We've had two battleships wrecked, eight cruisers out of commissionfour 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 youfor 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 concernedexcept, 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 islandsand 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 destroyerssorry, 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

For the sword outwears its sheath,

approached silently, neither legs nor arms breaking water, until he saw the vague shape of a man standing on the poop, just aft of the engine-room hatchway. He was immobile, staring out in the direction of the fortress and the upper town: Mallory slowly circled round the stern of the boat and came up behind him, on the other side. Carefully he removed his hat, took out the gun, caught the low gunwale with his left hand. At the range of seven feet he knew he couldn't possibly miss, but he couldn't shoot the man, not then. The guard-rails were token affairs only, eighteen inches high at the most, and the splash of the man falling into the water would almost certainly alert the guards at the harbour mouth emplacements. "If you move I will kill you!" Mallory said softly in German. The man stiffened. He had a carbine in his hand, Mallory saw. "Put the gun down. Don't turn round." Again the man obeyed, and Mallory was out of the water and on to the deck, in seconds, neither eye nor automatic straying from the man's back. He stepped softly forward, reversed the automatic, struck, caught the man before he could fall overboard and lowered him quietly to the deck. Three minutes later all the others were safely aboard. Mallory followed the limping Brown down to the engine-room, watched him as he switched on his hooded torch, looked around with a professional eye, looked at the big, gleaming, six-cylinder in line Diesel engine. "This," said Brown reverently, "is an engine. What a beauty! Operates on any number of cylinders you like. I know the type, sir." "I never doubted but you would. Can you start her up, Casey?" "Just a minute till I have a look round, sir." Brown had all the unhurried patience of the born engineer. Slowly, methodically, he played the spotlight round the immaculate interior of the engine-room, switched on the fuel and turned to Mallory. "A dual control job, sir. We can take her from up top." He carried out the same painstaking inspection in the wheel-house, while Mallory waited impatiently. The rain was easing off now, not much, but sufficiently to let him see the vague outlines of the harbour entrance. He wondered for the tenth time if the guards there had been alerted against the possibility of an attempted escape by boat. It seemed unlikelyfrom the racket Andrea was making, the Germans would think that escape was the last thing in their minds. ... He leaned forward, touched Brown on the shoulder. "Twenty past eleven, Casey," he murmured. "If these destroyers come through fuji f40fd digital camera reviews early we're apt to have a thousand tons of rock falling on our heads." "Ready now, sir," Brown announced. He gestured at the crowded dashboard beneath the screen. "Nothing to it really." "I'm glad you think so," Mallory murmured fervently. "Start her moving, will you? Just keep it slow and easy." Brown coughed apologetically. "We're still moored to the buoy. And it might be a good thing, sir, if we checked on the fixed guns, searchlights, signalling lamps, life-jackets and buoys. It's useful to know where these things are," he finished deprecatorily. Mallory laughed softly, clapped him on the shoulder. "You'd make a great diplomat, Chief. We'll do that" A landsman first and last, Mallory was none the less aware of the gulf that stretched between him and a man like Brown, made no bones about acknowledging it to himself. "Will you take her out, Casey?" "Right, sir. Would you ask Louki to come hereI think it's steep to both sides, but there may be snags or reefs. You never know." Three minutes later the launch was half-way to the harbour mouth, purring along softly on two cylinders, Mallory and Miller, still clad in German uniform, standing on the deck for'ard of the wheelhouse, Louki crouched low inside the wheelhouse itself. Suddenly, about sixty yards away, a signal lamp began to flash at them, its urgent clacking quite audible in the stillness of the night "Dan'l Boone Miller will now show how it's done," Miller muttered. He edged closer to the machine-gun on the starboard bow. "With my little gun. I shall . . ." He broke off sharply, his voice lost in the sudden clacking from the wheelhouse behind him, the staccato off-beat chattering of a signal shutter triggered by professional fingers. Brown had handed the wheel over to Louki, was morsing back to the harbour entrance, the cold rain lancing palely through the ifickering beams of the lamp. The enemy lamp had stopped but now began flashing again.. "My, they got a lot to say to each other," Miller said admiringly. "How long do the exchange of courtesies last, boss?" "I should say they are just about finished." Mallory moved back quickly to the wheelhouse. They were less than a hundred feet from the harbour entrance. Brown had confused the enemy, gained precious seconds, more time than Mallory had ever thought they could gain. But it couldn't last. He touched Brown on the arm. "Give her

It's good habit that makes a man.

It was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stovecurio collectors paid fancy prices for what they With a link a down and a down, imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough. "Aeroplane," he announced casually. "Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again." "Indeed, no, Dr Mason." The blue eyes, so incongruously at