MACLEAN, Alistair

Where Eagles Dare

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'It's the witches on their broomsticks,' von Brauchitsch laughed. The commandant hasn't caught them yet, but give him another few years and you never know. All those poor souls you saw being hauled out of the armoury are now probably poking about the eaves or climbing up the flagpoles. You never know where spies get to nowadays.' 'You seem to treat the possibility lightly enough,' Mary said.

'I'm a Gestapo officer. I'm paid and trained to use my head, not an overheated imagination,' he said curtly, then squeezed her arm and apologised. 'Sorry, that tone of voice was aimed at someone else, not you.' He halted abruptly, peered out a window into the courtyard and said: 'Now that is strange.'

'What's strange?'

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There was certainly, he had to admit, plenty to be seen and under more auspicious circumstances it would have done his heart good. The courtyard scene was as frenzied as the earlier glimpse they had had from the passage, but this time the action was much more purposive and controlled. Shouting, gesticulating figures were supervising the unrolling of hoses, the coupling-up of hydrants, the relays of men carrying extinguishers and buckets of sand. The main gates stood open and unguarded, even the sentries must have been pressed into action: not that the unguarded doors offered any warmly beckoning escape route. Only a suicide would have tried making his escape through a courtyard crowded with sixty or seventy scurrying Alpenkorps troops.

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The Guns of Navarone

Mallory felt the grey bitterness of defeat wash through him in an almost tangible wave, he could taste the sourness of it in the back of his mouth. For a brief, heart sickening second he allowed himself to think of what must now inevitably happen and as soon as the thought had come he thrust it savagely away. Everything, every action, every thought, every breath must be on the present. Hope was gone, but not irrecoverably gone: not so long as Andrea lived. He wondered if Casey Brown had seen or heard them coming, and what had happened to him: he made to ask, checked himself just in time. Maybe he was still at large.

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All day long they lay hidden in the carob grove, a thick clump of stunted, gnarled trees that clung grimly to the treacherous, scree-strewn slope abutting what Louki called the „Devil‘s Playground“. A poor shelter and an uncomfortable one, but in every other way all they could wish for: it offered concealment, a first class defensive position immediately behind, a gentle breeze drawn up from the sea by the sun-baked rocks to the south, shade from the sun that rode from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky—and an incomparable view of a sundrenched, shimmering Aegean

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