Free The Dark Side of the Island by Jack Higgins

looked surprisingly young to me."
     
     
"Twenty-seven," Van Horn said. "Badly wounded at Stalingrad and evacuated just before the Russians closed the circle. He's got the Knight's Cross besides all the usual things and they don't give that away, you know."
     
     
"He sounds formidable," Lomax said. "Did you have any difficulty when you went into town?"
     
     
Van Horn shook his head. "Alexias had only arrived at The Little Ship about twenty minutes before we did. They got him up to bed and I had a look at his leg."
     
     
"Is it bad?"
     
     
"Bad enough. I've set the bone, given him sulfa drugs.
     
     
He should be all right if he rests for a week or two. He certainly won't be able to play an active part in your operation."
     
     
"Is there any message?"
     
     
"Only that he hopes to arrange a meeting with various people tomorrow afternoon. Katina will be up to let us know when."
     
     
"So he's included you in?"
     
     
"I'm afraid so." He poured himself another gin. "Katina was telling me you're here to do something about the radar station they've set up in the main tower at the monastery."
     
     
"It isn't radar," Lomax told him. "It's a little gadget that selects a target electronically. All their planes or E-boats have to do is follow the beam and they can't go wrong. They've been doing a lot of damage to our shipping lately."
     
     
"But is it all that important? I thought they were losing the war anyway, particularly since the landings in Normandy last month."
     
     
"There's a faint chance of an invasion of Crete in the near future in which case this installation on Kyros could be a nuisance, but the Aegean is only a sideshow now, if that's what you mean. I don't think anything that happens here can affect the ultimate course of the war one iota." He grinned wryly and swallowed some of his gin. "On the other hand, they've got to keep us busy, haven't they?"
     
     
"Now I find that rather an interesting observation," Van Horn said. "What were you doing before the war?"
     
     
"University, a little journalism," Lomax shrugged. "Nothing very much."
     
     
"And then the war came along with an easy answer to all your problems." He nodded at the medal ribbons on Lomax's tunic. "It would appear you've had an active time of it since."
     
     
"I suppose you could say that,"
     
     
"Have you enjoyed it?"
     
     
Lomax grinned reluctantly. "In my own twisted way."
     
     
"The willingness to kill. Very important in a soldier." Van Horn sighed. "Funny how the same word can mean something different. For me, war was the trenches. Mud and filth, brutality and death on an incredible scale. A whole generation wiped out At times I feel like an anachronism."
     
     
"And for me?"
     
     
"A landing under cover of darkness, action by night, a chase through the mountains." Van Horn shrugged. "A week from now you'll be sitting in the main bar at Shep-heard's having a drink to celebrate another bar to your MC. I strongly suspect that the day the war finishes, you won't know what to do with yourself."
     
     
"One slight point you've omitted to mention," Lomax said. "All Special Service officers are automatically shot when captured. That's a direct order from the German High Command and it's been in force for two years now. It adds a certain element of risk."
     
     
"And so it should," Van Horn said. "Life is action and passion: therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his times at peril of being judged not to have lived." He grinned suddenly and sat back hi his chair. "There I go getting emotional again. It's the writer in me taking control. In any case, Oliver Wendell Holmes said it first."
     
     
"I was hoping to be a writer myself one day," Lomax told him, "That's why I was so keen to meet you."
     
     
"Of arms and the man I sing, eh?" Van Horn got to his feet. "You should get something out of the war then, if only a book. Let's have a last cigarette on the north terrace. I