Force 10 from Navarone Read Online Free Page A

heard the detonations and saw the brilliant orange mushrooming of light as the Wellingtons unloaded their bombs over the shattered fortress to the north. Sporadic lines ofupward-flying tracers, obviously exclusively small-arm, attested to the ineffectuality, the weakness of the ground defences. When the fortress had blown up, so had all the anti-aircraft batteries in the town. The attack was short and sharp: less than two minutes after the bombardment had started it ceased as abruptly as it had begun and then there was only the fading dying sound of desynchronized engines as the Wellingtons pulled away, first to the north and then the west, across the still-dark waters of the Aegean.
    For perhaps a minute the three watchers stood silent on the perimeter of the Mandrakos airstrip, then Miller said wonderingly: ‘What makes us so important?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Mallory said. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to enjoy finding out.’
    ‘And that won’t be long now.’ Andrea turned round and looked towards the mountains to the south. ‘Hear it?’
    Neither of the others heard it, but they did not doubt that, in fact, there was something to hear. Andrea’s hearing was on a par with his phenomenal eyesight. Then, suddenly, they could hear it, too. A solitary bomber – also a Wellington – came sinking in from the south, circled the perimeter area once as Mallory blinked his torch upwards in rapidly successive flashes, lined up its approach, landed heavily at the far end of the airstrip and came taxiing towards them, bumping heavily across the atrocious surface of the airfield.It halted less than a hundred yards from where they stood: then a light started winking from the flight deck.
    Andrea said: ‘Now, don’t forget. I’ve promised to be back in a week.’
    ‘Never make promises,’ Miller said severely. ‘What if we aren’t back in a week? What if they’re sending us to the Pacific?’
    ‘Then when we get back I’ll send you in first to explain.’
    Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t really think I’d like that.’
    ‘We’ll talk about your cowardice later on,’ Mallory said. ‘Come on. Hurry up.’
    The three men broke into a run towards the waiting Wellington.
    The Wellington was half an hour on the way to its destination, wherever its destination was, and Andrea and Miller, coffee mugs in hand, were trying, unsuccessfully, to attain a degree of comfort on the lumpy palliasses on the fuselage floor when Mallory returned from the flightdeck. Miller looked up at him in weary resignation, his expression characterized by an entire lack of enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure.
    ‘Well, what did you find out?’ His tone of voice made it abundantly clear that what he had expected Mallory to find out was nothing short of the very worst. ‘Where to, now? Rhodes? Beirut? The flesh-pots of Cairo?’
    ‘Termoli, the man says.’
    ‘Termoli, is it? Place I’ve always wanted to see.’ Miller paused. ‘Where the hell’s Termoli?’
    ‘Italy, so I believe. Somewhere on the south Adriatic coast.’
    ‘Oh, no!’ Miller turned on his side and pulled a blanket over his head. ‘I
hate
spaghetti.’

TWO

Thursday

1400–2330
    The landing on Termoli airfield, on the Adriatic coast of Southern Italy, was every bit as bumpy as the harrowing take-off from the Mandrakos airstrip had been. The Termoli fighter airbase was officially and optimistically listed as newly-constructed but in point of fact was no more than half-finished and felt that way for every yard of the excruciating touchdown and the jack-rabbit run-up to the prefabricated control tower at the eastern end of the field. When Mallory and Andrea swung down to terra firma, neither of them looked particularly happy: Miller, who came a very shaky last, and who was widely known to have an almost pathological loathing and detestation of all conceivable forms of transport, looked very ill indeed.
    Miller was given time neither to seek nor receive