Long time the manxome foe he sought -

singers, except that they heal quickly and indulge in an unusual profession. You? Erutown snorted contemptuously. Youd probably drown yourself thinking up more theories. When I initiate a session of theoretical thinking, I take the precaution of seating myself in some secure and secluded spot, Theach said in amiable reprimand. An island would suit me very well indeed. Youd starve! No one can starve on a polly island. Theach turned for confirmation to Lars, who nodded. You have to work at it, though, Lars amended. For at least a few hours every day. Despite a misapprehension current about my absent-mindedness, I have found that intense thought stimulates an incredible appetite. Since eating replenishes both body and the mechanics of thought, I do pause now and again in my meditations to eat! If I have to gather the food myself, I shall also have had that beneficial exercise. Yes, Lars, and Theach smiled at the islander, I begin to think that an island residence would provide me with all I require: seclusion, sustenance, and sanctuary! He sat back in the chair, beaming at his circle of friends. How many know you and Erutown are in the islands? Lars asked seriously. Nahia has been working very hard lately, Lars, Hauness said. She was granted a leave of absence: I took my annual holiday and announced our intention of cruising the coast. There are friends who will vouch for our presence in mainland waters. Besides, who would expect us to brave a hurricane? We boarded the jet from the seaside without being seen the night before she sailed, Erutown added. What Elder would suspect Nahias involvement with renegades? If they had any sense whatever, Nahia said in a crisp tone that surprised Killashandra with its suppressed anger, how could they fail to realize that I sympathize deeply with repressions, frustrations, and despairs which I cannot avoid feeling! With injustices not all the empathy in the world will ease. A moment of silence followed. Is your woman to be trusted with any of this, Lars? Hauness asked quietly. Suppressing a flare of guilt at her duplicity, Killashandra decided that it was time to join the group before Lars perjured himself. Here, this should satisfy, Lars, she said, approaching the others with a purposeful stride. She set before him a generous plate of sandwiches and hot tidbits which she had found in the food storage. Youre sure I cant get digital video cameras for cheap anything for you? she asked the others as she began to gather up the used plates and cups. Erutown gave her a sour glance, then turned to watch the rolling cloud formations of the approaching storm. Theach smiled absently, Hauness shook his head and settled back next to Nahia who had leaned back in the couch, eyes closed, her beautiful face relaxed. When Killashandra returned with her own serving, Lars and Hauness were absorbed by the satellite picture of the approaching hurricane, displayed on the vdr. It would be a substantial blow, Killashandra had to admit, but not a patch on what Ballybran could brew. Storm watching could be mesmerizing, certainly engrossing. Theach was the first to break from the fascination. He reseated himself at a small terminal and began to call up equations on the tiny screen. There was a tension to the line of his back, the occasional rattle of the keys that proved he was still conscious, but there were long intervals of total silence from his corner during the next few hours. Its not going to be a long one at its current rate, Lars remarked when he had finished eating. The eyell be on us by night. Is it likely to make the mainland? No. That is, after all, eight thousand kilos off. Itll blow itself out over the ocean as usual. You only get our storms when they make up in the Broad, not from this far south. So, Killashandra thought, she was in the southern hemisphere of Optheria, which explained the switch in seasons. And it explained why this group felt themselves secure from Mainland intervention and searches. Even with the primitive jet vehicles, an enormous distance could be traversed in a relatively short time. It struck Killashandra that if Nahia, Hauness, and the others could travel so far, so could the Elders, especially if they wanted to implicate islanders. Or was that just talk? If, as Lars had admitted, Torkes had set him up to assault her in order to verify her identity and was using that assault now to implicate the islanders, would it not be logical to assume that some foray into the islands would be made by officialdom? If only to preserve their fiction? Killashandra closed her mouth on this theory for she had gleaned it from information she had overhead surreptitiously. Well, shed find a way to warn Lars, for she had a sudden premonition that a warning was in order. From what she had seen of the

Of the mail-cover'd Barons, who proudly to battle

ceased to function, drugged by the last stages of exhaustion, crushed by the utter, damnable tiredness that held his limbs, his whole body, in leaden thrall. He did not know it, but fifty feet below he had struck his head against a spur of rock, a shaip, wicked projection that had torn his gaping temple wound open to the bone. His strength drained out with the pulsing blood. He had heard Mallory, had heard something about the chimney he had now reached, but his mind had failed to register the meaning of the words. All that Stevens knew was that he was climbing, and that one always kept on climbing until one reached the top. That was what his father had always impressed upon him, his brothers too. You must reach the top. He was half-way up the chimney now, resting on the spike that Mallory had driven into the fissure. He hooked his fingers in the crack, bent back his head and stared up towards the mouth of the chimney. Ten feet away, no more. He was conscious of neither surprise nor elation. It was just there: he had to reach it. He could hear voices, carrying clearly from the top. He was vaguely surprised that his friends were making no attempt to help him, that they bad thrown away the rope that would have made those last few feet so easy, but he felt no bitterness, no emotion at all: perhaps they were trying to test him. What did it matter anywayhe had to reach the top. He reached the top. Carefully, as Mallory had done before him, he pushed aside the earth and tiny pebbles, hooked his fingers over the edge, found the same toehold as Mallory had and levered himself upwards. He saw the flickering torches, heard the excited voices, and then for an instant the curtain of fog in his mind lifted and a last tidal wave of fear washed over him and he knew that the voices were the voices of the enemy and that they had destroyed his friends. He knew now that he was alone, that be had failed, that this was the end, one way or another, and that it had all been for nothing. And then the fog closed over him again, and there was nothing but the emptiness of it all, the emptiness and the futility, the overwhelming lassitude and despair and his body slowly sinking down the face of the cliff. And then the hooked fingersthey, too, were slipping away, opening gradually, reluctantly as the fingers of a drowning man releasing their final hold on a spar of wood. There was no fear now, only a vast and heedless indifference as his hands slipped away and he fell like a stone, twenty vertical feet into the cradling bottleneck at the foot of the using digital camera as a webcam chimney. He himself made no sound, none at all: the soundless scream of agony never passed his lips, for the blackness came with the pain: but the straining ears of the men crouching in the rocks above caught clearly the dull, sickening crack as his right leg fractured cleanly in two, snapping like a rotten bough. CHAPTER 6 02000600 The German patrol was everything that Mallory had fearedefficient, thorough and very, very painstaking. It even had imagination, in the person of its young and competent sergeant, and that was more dangerous still. There were only four of them, in high boots, helmets and green, grey and brown mottled capes. First of all they located the telephone and reported to base. Then the young sergeant sent two men to search another hundred yards or so along the cliff, while he and the fourth soldier probed among the rocks that paralleled the cliff. The search was slow and careful, but the two men did not penetrate very far into the rocks. To Mallory, the sergeant's, reasoning was obvious and logical. If the sentry had gone to sleep or taken ill, it was unlikely that he would have gone far in among that confused jumble of boulders. Mallory and the others were safely back beyond their reach. And then came what Mallory had fearedan organised, methodical inspection of the cliff-top itself: worse stifi, it began with a search along the very edge. Securely held by his three men with interlinked armsthe last with a hand hooked round his beltthe sergeant walked slowly along the rim, probing every inch with the spotlit beam of a powerful torch. Suddenly he stopped short, exclaimed suddenly and stooped, torch and face only inches from the ground. There was no question as to what he had foundthe deep gouge made in the soft, crumbling soil by the climbing rope that had been belayed round the boulder and gone over to the edge of the cliff. . . . Softly, silently, Mallory and his three companions straightened to their knees or to their feet, gun barrels lining along the tops of boulders or peering out between cracks in the rocks. There was no doubt in any of their minds that Stevens was lying there helplessly in the crutch of the chimney, seriously injured or dead. It needed only one German carbine to point down that cliff face, however carelessly, and these four men would die. They would have to die. The sergeant was stretched out his

But it glanced in two or three.

without you on the reception committee." Turzig's gaze followed the broad retreating back. "Captain Skoda was right. I still have much to learn." There was neither bitterness nor rancour in his voice. "He fooled me completely, that big one." "You're not the first," Mallory reassured him. "He's fooled more people than I'll ever know. . . . You're not the first," he repeated. "But I think you must be just about the luckiest." "Because I'm still alive?" "Because. you're still alive," Mallory echoed. Less than ten minutes later the two guards at the gates had joined their comrades in the back room, captured, disarmed, bound and gagged with a speed and noiseless efficiency that excited Turzig's professional admiration, chagrined though he was. Securely tied hand and foot, he lay in a corner of the room, not yet gagged. "I think I understand now why your High Command chose you for this task, Captain Mallory. If anyone could succeed, you wouldbut you must fail. The impossible must always remain so. Nevertheless, you have a great team." "We get by," Mallory said modestly. He took a last look round the room, then grinned down at Stevens. "Ready to take off on your travels again, young man, or do you find this becoming rather monotonous?" "Ready when you are, sir." Lying on a stretcher which Louki had miraculously procured, he sighed in bliss. "First-class travel, this time, as befits an officer. Sheer luxury. I don't mind how far we go!" "Speak for yourself," Miller growled morosely. He had been allocated first stint at the front or heavy end of the stretcher. But the quirk of his eyebrows robbed the words of all offence. "Right then, we're off. One last thing. Where is the camp radio, Lieutenant Turzig?" "So you can smash it, I suppose?" "Precisely." "I have no idea." "What if I threaten to blow your head off?" "You won't." Turzig smiled, though the smile was a trifle lopsided. "Given certain circumstances, you would kill me as you would a fly. But you wouldn't kill a man for refusing such information." "You haven't as much to learn as your late and unlamented captain thought," Mallory admitted. "It's not all that important. . . . I regret we have to do all this. I trust we do not praktica digital luxmedia camera meet againnot, at least, until the war is over. Who knows, some day we might even go climbing together." He signed to Louki to fix Turzig's gag and walked quickly out of the room. Two minutes later they had cleared the barracks and were safely lost in the darkness and the olive groves that stretched to the south of Margaritha. When they cleared the groves, a long time later, it was almost dawn. Already the black silhouette of Kostos was softening in the first feathery greyness of the coming day. The wind was from the south, and warm, and the snow was beginning to melt on the hills. CHAPTER 11 Wednesday 14001600 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 skyand an incomparable view of a sundrenched, shimmering Aegean. Away to their left, fading through diminishing shades of blue and indigo and violet into faraway nothingness, stretched the islands of the Lerades, the nearest of them, Maidos, so close that they could see isolated fisher cottages sparkling whitely in the sun: through that narrow, intervening gap of water would pass the ships of the Royal Navy in just over a day's time. To the right, and even farther away, remote, featureless, back-dropped by the towering Anatolian mountains, the coast of Turkey hooked north and west in a great curving scimitar: to the north itself, the thrusting spear of Cape Demirci, rock-rimmed but dimpled with sand coves of white, reached far out into the placid blue of the Aegean: and north again beyond the Cape, haze-blurred in the purple distance, the island of Kheros lay dreaming on the surface of the sea. It was a breath-taking panorama, a heart-catching beauty sweeping majestically through a great semi-circle over the sunlit sea. But Mallory had no eyes for it, had spared it only a passing glance when he had come on guard less than half an hour previously, just after two o'clock. He had dismissed it with one quick