What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt's King

suspidons, none at all: in the circumstancesthe near darkness, the pouring rain, the German-clad soldier speaking perfect German, the obvious truth that there was a gunbattle being fought near-handit would have been remarkable had he shown any signs of doubt "Idiot!" Mallory screamed at him. "Dummkopf! What is there to guard against here? The English swine are in the Street of Steps. They must be destroyed! For God's sake, hurry!" he shouted desperately. "If they escape again it'll be the Russian Front for all of us!" Mallory had his hand on the man's shoulder now, ready to push him on his way, but his hand fell to his side unneeded. The two men were already gone, running pell-mell across the square, had vanished into the rain and the darkness already. Seconds later Mallory and Miller were deep inside the fortress of Navarone. Everywhere there was complete confusiona bustling purposeful confusion as one would expect with the seasoned troops of the Alpenkorps, but confusion nevertheless, with much shouting of orders, blowing of whistles, starting of truck engines, sergeants running to and fro chivvying their men into marching order or into the waiting transports. Mallory and Miller ran too, once or twice through groups of men milling round the tailboard of a truck. Not that they were in any desperate hurry for themselves, but nothing could have been more conspicuousand suspiciousthan the sight of a couple of men walking calmly along in the middle of all that urgent activity. And so they ran, heads down or averted whenever they passed through a pool of light, Miller cursing feelingly and often at the unaccustomed exercise. They skirted two barrack blocks on their right, then the powerhouse on their left, then an ordnance depot on their right and then the Abteilung garage on their left. They were climbing, now, almost in darkness, but Mallory knew where he was to the inch: he had so thoroughly memorised the closely tallying descriptions given him by Vlachos and Panayis that' he would have been confident of finding his way with complete accuracy even if the darkness had been absolute. "What's that, boss?" Miller had caught Mallory by the arm, was pointing to a large, uncompromisingly rectangular building that loomed gauntly against the horizon. "The local hoosegow?" "Water storage tank," Mallory said briefly. "Panayis estimates there's half a million gallons in theremagazine flooding in an emergency. The magazines are directly below." He pointed to a squat, box-like, concrete structure a vivitar 5105s digital camera little farther on. "The only entrance to the magazine. Locked and guarded." They were approaching the senior officers' quarters nowthe commandant had his own flat on the second story, directly overlooking the massive, reinforced ferro-concrete control tower that controlled the two great guns below. Mallory suddenly stopped, picked up a handful of dirt, rubbed it on his face and told Miller to do the same. "Disguise," he explained. "The experts would consider it a bit on the elementary side, but it'll have to do. The lighting's apt to be a bit brighter inside this place." He went up the steps to the officers' quarters at a dead run, crashed through the swing doors with a force that almost took them off their hinges. The sentry at the keyboard looked at him in astonishment, the barrel of his sub-machine-gun lining up on the New Zealander's chest. "Put that thing down, you damned idiot!" Mallory snapped furiously. "Where's the commandant? Quickly, you oaf! It's life or death!" "HerrHerr Kominandant?" the sentry stuttered. "He's leftthey are all gone, just a minute ago." "What? All gone?" Mallory was staring at him with narrowed, dangerous eyes. "Did you say 'all gone'?" he asked softly. "Yes. II'm sure they're . . ." He broke off abruptly as Mallory's eyes shifted to a point behind his shoulder. "Then who the hell is that?" Mallory demanded savagely. The sentry would have been less than human not to fall for it. Even as he was swinging round to look, the vicious judo cut took him just below the ear. Mallory had smashed open the glass of the keyboard before the unfortunate guard bad bit the floor, swept all the keysabout a dozen in alloff their rings and into his pocket. It took them another twenty seconds to tape the man's mouth and hands and lock him in a convenient cupboard; then they were on their way again, still running. One more obstacle to overcome, Mallory thought as they pounded along in the darkness, the last of the triple defences. He did not know how many men would be guarding the locked door to the magazine, and in that moment of fierce exaltation he didn't particularly care. Neither, he felt sure, did Miller. There were no worries now, no taut-nerved tensions or nameless anxieties. Mallory would have been the last man in the world to admit it, or even believe it, but this was what men like Miller and himself had been born for. They had their

Were patchd from knee to wrist;

location of her island on the planets surface. In her first days, she had prowled the islands perimeter ceaselessly, for there were neighboring ones tantalizingly visible even though they were also small. Hers at least boasted a bubbling spring that flowed from its rocky source mid-island into the lagoon. And, if she could trust her judgment, hers was the largest in the cluster. Before she immersed herself in polly tree studies, she had swum to the nearest of the group. Plenty of polly trees but no water. And beyond that islet more were scattered in careless abundance across the clear aquamarine sea some large enough to support only a single tuft of polly trees so she had returned to her island, the best of a bad lot. Working with her hands and for a varied diet did not prevent Killashandra from endless speculations about her situation. She had been kidnapped for a purpose to force an investigation of Optherian restrictions. The FSP, much less her own Guild, would not tolerate such an outrage. If and here her brief knowledge of the Optherians let her down the Optherians admitted to FSP and the Heptite Guild that she had been abducted. Still, the Elders needed an operative organ by the time of the Summer Festival, and to do that they needed a crystal singer to make the installation. The crystal they had, but surely they wouldnt attempt such a delicate job. Well, it wasnt that delicate, Killashandra knew, but the crystal would prove difficult if not handled properly. So, grant that the Optherians would be searching for her, would they think to search on the islands? Would the islanders be in contact with the Ruling Elders about the terms of her ransom? If so, would the extortion be successful? Probably not, Killashandra thought, until the Ruling Elders had abandoned any hope of finding her within the next two months. Of course, that could throw their timetable off. It would take nearly three months for a replacement Guild Member to reach Optheria, even if the Optherians admitted the loss of the one already dispatched to them. On her own part, shed be stark raving lunatic if she was left on this island for several months. And if the Optherians acquired another singer to install their wretched white crystal, that didnt mean that theyd continue their efforts to find her! After much deliberation, silent as well as vocal, Killashandra decided that the smart thing to do was rescue herself. Her kidnapper had overlooked a few small points, the most important of which was that she happened to be a very strong swimmer with jvc digital video camera gr-d270u manual lungs well developed from singing opera and crystal. Physically, too, she was immensely fit. She could swim from island to island until she found one that was inhabited, one from which she could be rescued. Unless all the islanders were in on this insidious kidnap scheme. The hazards that she must overcome were only two: lack of water was one, but she felt that she could refresh herself sufficiently from the polly fruit the tree flourished on all the islands she could see. Too, the larger denizens of the sea constituted a real problem. Some of them, cruising beyond her lagoons, looked deadly dangerous, with their pointed, toothy snouts, or their many wire-fine tentacles which seemed to have an affinity for the same yellowback fish she favored. She had spent enough time watching them to know that they generally fed at dawn and dusk. So, if she made her crossings at midday, when they were dormant, she thought she had a fairly good chance to avoid adding herself to their diet. Three weeks on the island was long enough! She had a few of the emergency food packets left and they would be unharmed by a long immersion. Following the directions in her useful little pamphlet, she had made several sturdy lengths of rope from the coarse fiber of the polly tree, with which she could secure the hatchet to her body. Her original clothing was down to shreds which she sewed with lengths of the tough stem into a halter and a loin cloth. By then she had become as tan as her abductor and was forced to use some of the oilier fishes to grease her hide for protection. She would coat herself thoroughly before each leg of her swim to freedom. Having made her decision, Killashandra implemented it the next day at noon, swimming to her first destination in less than an hours time. She rested while she made up her mind which island of the seven visible would be next. She found herself constantly returning to the one farthest north. Well, once there, none were far away if she decided shed overshot the right line to take. She made that island by mid-afternoon, dragging herself up onto the narrow shore, exhausted. Then she discovered some of the weak points in her plans: there werent many ripe polly fruits on the island; and fish wouldnt bite on her hook that evening. Because she found too few fruits, she was exceedingly thirsty by morning and chose her next point of call by the polly population. The channel between was dark blue, deep water, and twice she

And neither of them would give way;

knew, also, that Stevens had eyes for him alone. "Criminal, unforgiveable folly," he went on quietly, "and I'm the man in the dock. I'd suspected you'd lost a lot of blood on the boat, but I didn't know you had these big gashes on your forehead. I should have made it my business to find out." He smiled wryly. "You should have heard what these two insubordinate characters had to say to me about it when they got to the top. . . . And they were right. You should never have been asked to bring up the rear in the state you were in. It was madness." He grinned again. "You should have been hauled up like a sack of coals like the intrepid mountaineering team of Miller and Brown. . . . God knows how you ever made itI'm sure you'll never know." He leaned forward, touched Stevens's sound knee. "Forgive me, Andy. I honestly didn't realise how far through you were." Stevens stirred uncomfortably, but the dead pallor of the high-boned cheeks was stained with embarrassed pleasure. "Please, sir," he pleaded. "Don't talk like that. It was just one of these things." He paused, eyes screwed shut and indrawn breath hissing sharply through his teeth as a wave of pain washed up from his shattered leg. Then he looked at Mallory again. "And there's no credit due to me for the climb," he went on quietly. "I hardly remember a thing about it." Mallory looked at him without speaking, eyebrows arched in mild interrogation. "I was scared to death every step of the way up," Stevens said simply. He was conscious of no surprise, no wonder that he was saying the thing he would have died rather than say. "I've never been so scared in all my life." Mallory shook his head slowly from side to side, stubbled chin rasping in his cupped palm. He seemed genninely puzzled. Then he looked down at Stevens and smiled quizzically. "Now I know you are new to this game, Andy." He smiled again. "Maybe you think I was laughing and singing all the way up that cliff? Maybe you think I wasn't scared?" He lit a cigarette and gazed at Stevens through a cloud of drifting smoke. "Well, I wasn't. 'Scared' isn't the wordI was bloody well terrified. So was Andrea here. We know too much not to be scared." "Andrea!" Stevens laughed, then cried out as the movement triggered off a crepitant agony in his boneshattered leg. For a moment Mallory thought he had lost consciousness, but almost at once he spoke again, his voice husky with pain. "Andrea!" he whispered. "Scared! I don't believe it!" "Andrea was afraid." The big Greek's voice was very gentle. "Andrea is digital camera quick flash afraid. Andrea is always afraid. That is why I have lived so long." He stared down at his great hands. "And why so many have died. They were not so afraid as L They were not afraid of everything a man could be afraid of, there was always something they forgot to fear, to guard against. But Andrea was afraid of everythingand he forgot nothing. It is as simple as that." He looked across at Stevens and smiled. "There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to diethat takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer. Or sometimes ten minutes, or twenty minutesor the time it takes a man sick and bleeding and afraid to climb a cliff." Stevens said nothing. His head was sunk on his chest, and his face was hidden. He had seldom felt so happy, seldom so at peace with himself, He had known that he could not hide things from men like Andrea and Mallory, but he had not known that it would not matter. He felt he should say something, but he could not think what and he was deathly tired. He knew, deep down, that Andrea was speaking the truth, but not the whole truth; but he was too tired to care, to try to work things out. Miller cleared his throat noisily. "No more talkin', Lieutenant," he said firmly. "You gotta lie down, get yourself some sleep." Stevens looked at him, then at Mallory in puzzled inquiry. "Better do what you're told, Andy," Mallory smiled. "Your surgeon and medical adviser talking. He fixed your leg." "Oh! I didn't know. Thanks, Dusty. Was it verydifficult?" Miller waved a deprecatory hand. "Not for a man of my experience. Just a simple break," he lied easily. "Almost let one of the others do it. . . . Give him a hand to lie down, will you, Andrea?" He jerked his head towards Mallory. "Boss?" The two men moved outside, turning their backs to the icy wind. "We gotta get a fire, dry clothing, for that kid," Miller said urgently. "His pulse is about 140, temperature 103. He's rnnnin' a fever, and he's