And whatten penance wul ye drie, for that,

looked across the passage at the fair-haired, boyish figure gazing out eagerly beneath the gleaming white wing of he Sunderland. Lieutenant Andy Stevens, R.N.V.R., had been chosen for this assignment for three reasons. He would navigate the craft that was to take them to Navarone: he was a firstclass Alpinist, with several outstanding climbs to his record: and, the product of the classical side of a redbrick university, he was an almost fanatical philheliene, fluent in both Ancient and Modern Greek, and had spent his last two long vacations before the war as a tourist courier in Athens. But he was young, absurdly young, Mallory thought as he looked at him, and youth could be dangerous. Too often, in that island guerrilla warfare, it had been fatal. The enthusiasm, the fire, the zeal of youth was not enough: rather, it was too much, a positive handicap. This was not a war of bugle calls and roaring engines and magnificent defiance in the clamour of battle: this was a war of patience and endurance and stability, of cunning and craft and stealth, and these were not commonly the attributes of youth. . . . But he looked as if he might learn fast. Mallory stole another glance at Miller. Dusty Miller, he decided, had learnt it all a long, long time ago. Dusty Miller on a white charger, the bugle to his lipsno, his mind just refused to encompass the incongruity of it. He just didn't look like Sir Launcelot. He just looked as if he bad been around for a long, long time and had no illusions left. Corporal Miller had, in fact, been around for exactly forty years. By birth a Californian, by descent three parts Irish and one part Central European, he had lived and fought and adventured more in the previous quarter a century than most men would in a dozen lifetimes. Silver-miner in Nevada, tunneler in Canada and oil-fire ihooter all over the globe, he had been in Saudi Arabia when Hitler attacked Poland. One of his more remote maternal ancestors, some time around the turn of the century, had lived in Warsaw, but that had been affront enough for Miller's Irish blood. He had taken the first available plane to Britain and lied his way into the Air Force, where, to his immense disgust, and because of his age, he was relegated to the rear turret of a Wellington. His first operational flight had been bis last. Within ten minutes of taking off from the Menidi airfield outside Athens on a January night in 1941, engine failure had brought them to an ignominious though weli-cushioned end in a paddy field some miles 2000 camera coolpix digital nikon uk north-west of the city. The rest of the winter he had spent seething with rage in a cookhouse back in Menidi. At the beginning of April he resigned from the Air Force without telling anyone and was making his way north towards the fighting and the Albanian frontier when he met the Germans coming south. As Miller afterwards told it, he reached Nauplion two blocks ahead of the nearest panzer division, was evacuated by the transport Slamat, sunk, picked up by the destroyer Wryneck, sunk, and finally arrived in Alexandria in an ancient Greek caique, with nothing left him in the world but a fixed determination never again to venture in the air or on the sea. Some months later he was operating with a long-range striking force behind the enemy lines in Libya. He was, Mallory mused, the complete antithesis to Lieutenant Stevens. Stevens, young. fresh, enthusiastic, correct and immaculately dressed, and Miller, dried-up; lean, stringy, immensely tough and with an almost pathological aversion to spit and polish. How well the nickname "Dusty" suited him: there could hardly have been a greater contrast Again, unlike Stevens, Miller had never climbed a mountain in his life and the only Greek words he knew were invariably omitted from the dictionaries. And both these facts were of no importance at all. Miller had been picked for one reason only. A genius with explosives, resourceful and cool, precise and deadly in action, he was regarded by Middle East Intelligence in Cairo as the finest saboteur in southern Europe. Behind Miller sat Casey Brown. Short, dark and compact, Petty Officer Telegraphist Brown was a Clydesider, in peacetime an installation and testing engineer in a famous yacht-builder's yard on the Garelock. The fact that he was a born and ready-made engine-room artificer had been so blindingly obvious that the Navy had missed it altogether and stuck him in the Communications Branch. Brown's ill luck was Mallory's good f ortune. Brown would act as the engineer of the boat taking them to Navarone and would maintain radio contact with base. He had also the further recommendation of being a first-class guerrilla fighter: a veteran of the Special Boat Service, he held the D.C.M. and D.S.M. for his exploits in the Aegean and off the coast of Libya. The fifth and last member of the party sat directly behind Mallory. Mallory did not have to turn round to look at him. He already knew him, knew him better