Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

touched his arm. "What is it, Dusty?" Miller looked round at him, eyes cold and still and empty of all recognition, then he blinked several times and grinned, a cut and bruised hand automatically reaching for his cigarettes. "Jus' daydreamin', boss" he said easily. "Jus' daydreamin'." He shook out his pack of cigarettes. "Have one?" "That inhuman bastard that sent these poor devils up that hill," Mallory said quietly. "Make a wonderful pietare seen over the sights of your rifle, wouldn't he?" Abruptly Miller's smile vanished and he nodded. "It would be all of that." He risked a quick peep round one of the boulders, eased himself back again. "Eight, mebbe ten of them still down there, boss," he reported. "The poor bastards are like ostrichestrying to take cover behind stones the size of an orange. . . . We leave them be?" "We leave them be!" Mallory echoed emphaticaliy. The thought of any more slaughter made him feel almost physically sick. "They won't try again." He broke off suddenly, flattened himself in reflex instinct as a burst of machine-gun bullets struck the steep-walled rock above their beads and whined up the gorge in vicious ricochet. "Won't try again, huh?" Miller was already sliding his gun around the rock in front of him when Mallory caught his arm and pulled him back. "Not them? Listen!" Another burst of fire, then another, and now they could hear the savage chatter of the machine-gun, a chatter rhythmically interrupted by a weird, half-human sighing as its belt passed through the breech. Mallory could feel the prickling of the hairs on the nape of his neck. "A Spandau. Once you've heard a Spandau you can never forget it. Leave it aloneit's probably fixed on the back of one of the trucks and can't do us any harm. . . . I'm more worried about these damned mortars down there." "I'm not," Miller said promptly. "They're not firing at us." "That's why I'm worried. . . . What do you think, Andrea?" "The same as you, my Captain. They are waiting. This Devil's Playground, as Louki calls it, is a madman's maze, and they can only fire as blind men" "They won't be waiting much longer," Mallory interrupted grimly. He pointed to the north. "Here come their eyes." At first only specks above the promontory of Cape Demirci, the planes were soon recognisable for what they were, droning in slowly over the Aegean at about fifteen hundred camera digital minolta x1 feet. Mallory looked at them in astonishment, then turned to Andrea. "Am I seeing things, Andrea?" He gestured at the first of the two planes, a high-winged little monoplane fighter. "That can't be a PZL?" "It can be and it is," Andrea zuuuunred. "An old Polish plane we had before the war," he explained to Miller. "And the other is an old Belginn planeBreguets, we called them." Andrea shaded his eyes to look again at the two planes, now almost directly overhead. "I thought they had all been lost during the invasion." "Me too," Mallory said. "Must have patched up some bits and pieces. Ah, they've seen usbeginning to circle. But why on earth they use these obsolete death trap5 "I don't know and I don't care," Miller said rapidly. He had just taken a quick look round the boulder in front of him. "These damned guns down there are just linin' up on us, and muzzle-on they look a considerable sight bigger than telegraph poles. Fragmentation bombs, you said! Come on, boss, let's get the hell outa here!" Thus the pattern was set for the remainder of that brief November afternoon, for the grim game of tipand-run, hide-and-seek among the ravines and shattered rocks of the Devil's Playground. The planes held the key to the game, cruised high overhead observing every move of the hunted group below, relaying the information to the guns on the coast road and the company of Alpenkorps that had moved up through the ravine above the carob grove soon after the planes reported that the positions there had been abandoned. The two ancient planes were soon replaced by a couple of modern HenschelsAndrea said that the PZL couldn't remain airborne for more than an hour anyway. Mallory was between the devil and the deep sea. Inaccurate though the mortars were, some of the deadly fragmentation bombs found their way into the deep ravines where they took temporary shelter, the blast of metal lethal In the confined space between the sheering walls. Occasionally they came so close that Mallory was forced to take refuge in some of the deep caves that honeycombed the walls of the canyons. In these they wer? safe enough, but the safety was an illusion that could lead only to ultimate defeat and capture; in the lulls, the Alpenkorps, whom they had fought off in a series of brief, skirmishing rearguard actions during the afternoon, could approach closely enough to trap them Inside. Time and time again Mallory and his men were forced to