Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

By the time they arrived at the dropping zone, the rumbling of the Junkers had faded and a gray mist had settled upon the hillside. They waited in the scrub near the edge of the small clearing.

A few minutes later, Stavros could hear the distinct roar of a B-24 Liberator, closely followed by two more.

Doughty shouted, “Now!”

Two andartes scrambled into the clearing to light the signal fire.

When the planes passed overhead, they dropped their stores, each container popping off a small white parachute. The squadron leader tipped his wing in signature fashion before turning around and leading the others back to sea.

Michaelis pointed to the squadron leader and cried, “It’s him! It’s him! Did you see the wing, Stavros? Did you see?”

“I saw,” Stavros answered without enthusiasm. The pilot was some daredevil named MacDonald, who advertised his exploits by planting notes inside the stores he dropped to the Resistance. Apparently, he wasn’t getting much recognition back home.

As the containers fell gently to earth like snowflakes in the night, Colonel Doughty shouted with joy, “Manna from heaven!”

When the stores hit the ground one by one, the andartes rushed forward, eager to open them and find out what was inside. One of the canisters contained a complete radio outfit. Another had enough plastic explosives to blow up Mount Olympus.

Stavros secretly hoped that in addition to rifles, machine guns, ammunition, and explosives, he would find at least some chocolate and whiskey in his container. What he found instead was a strange uniform with the English initials SF on the shoulder and an American flag patch.

“That’s for my friend,” observed a strange voice from behind. “He’s coming later.”

Stavros turned. Stepping into the dim light of the clearing, dragging her white chute behind her, was a woman. A woman in a jumpsuit and boots with a sidearm strapped to her leg.

“Hello there,” she said with a smile, extending her hand to the bewildered Greek. “I’m Theseus, Captain, Royal Marines.”

T he stars shined brightly over the treetops as Erin Whyte and the andartes ambled through the hills back toward the base. The landscape was bleaker than she had imagined, wild and undeveloped. Outside of an occasional forest of firs and pines, such as the one they were passing through, the rugged interior of Chris’s homeland seemed remote and forbidding, one steep, sterile mountain range after another. For the Nazis, this must be hell, she thought, and for the Greeks a heaven-sent playground, because even in the darkness, the andartes seemed to know every cave and crag in the barren world.

“So this is Free Greece,” she said to Doughty, who was riding next to her. “Rather desolate country.”

“Stone Age,” Doughty said. “Perfect for our purposes. There isn’t a soul around for miles, only a few native Tzakonians our wide patrols run into every now and then, but they don’t cause any problems.”

Erin looked up toward the front of the line in the moonlight. She had counted fifteen andartes ahead of them in their rags and sheepskin caps. They had stashed half the stores in a nearby cave, which they kept as a secret munitions dump. The rest they strapped to their backs.

Leading the way back to base was the big one they called Stavros, wearing an old Greek army officer’s tunic under the four bandoleers of ammunition that crisscrossed his massive chest. He was a fiery-looking man, Erin thought, big and swarthy, with a rough beard. As soon as he saw her back at the dropping zone, his dark eyes betrayed a hot temper with a spontaneous flash. He obviously wasn’t pleased with her or the Middle East GHQ.

“What’s the word on Stavros?” she asked Doughty in a whisper. “He looks like the revolutionary leader of some banana republic.”

“We found him with his friends roaming the country, looking for trouble with the enemy,” Doughty explained. “At night they sabotaged the railway lines, blowing up the trains that the Germans were using to bring in more reinforcements and supplies. Experienced in the use of heavy-infantry weapons. Regularly knocked out German trains by firing bazooka shells into locomotives with unerring accuracy and spraying the rest of the armored trains with equally murderous machine-gun fire.”

“I see,” said Erin. “And what does he do for fun?”

“Spends his off nights raiding Wehrmacht warehouses and ammunition dumps,” Doughty replied. “Once he ran into a German convoy that included a panzer division and held it up for over thirty-six hours. In the process he managed to knock out several tanks and capture a German mountain artillery gun with ammunition.”

“A regular one-man army,” she remarked. “You’ve trained him well.”

“Unfortunately, that privilege was Moscow’s.”

Erin remembered Churchill’s suspicions about a Soviet mole and said, “He’s a Communist, then?”

“A kapetanios, to be more precise,” the New Zealander explained. “A guerrilla chieftain for ELAS who is more at home in the mountains, with his elite Black Bonnets, than at any Party plenary. In fact, some of the Party fanatics call him a prodhotes. It means traitor.”

“A traitor?” Erin repeated. “Why is that?”

“He signed a Metaxas confession when he was in jail in ’thirty-nine.”

“A confession?”

“A fascist form of inquisition devised by Metaxas’s minister of security, Maniadakis, after the Fourth of August regime came to power,” Doughty told her. “By renouncing their communism and signing a public ‘declaration of repentance,’ political prisoners could obtain their release. Copies of the declaration were sent to the authorities in the home villages of the ‘penitents,’ thus sowing seeds of distrust in the various Communist Party organizations and ensuring a life of misery for those released.”

Erin looked at Stavros again. He didn’t strike her as a man who would break under pressure, even under the refined police interrogation techniques of Maniadakis. “What induced him to sign?”

Doughty shrugged. “The rumors vary, but it seems that the Metaxas police were torturing his younger brother, Michaelis, and threatened to kill him unless Stavros renounced his communism.”

Erin looked at Michaelis, riding behind his brother. The boy didn’t look a day older than fourteen. His straight black hair, which needed to be cut, hung over his large, animated eyes. Whenever he looked back at her, which he often did because he was either curious or smitten, she noticed his shy smile. “Why, he’s just a schoolboy.”

“A little pyromaniac, that’s what he is,” corrected Doughty. “Quite adept with explosive and demolition accessories-fuses, timers, caps, and other items required to detonate everything from dynamite to half-pound blocks of TNT and plastique. Young enough to waltz into any taverna, leave the bomb behind, and walk out under the noses of the Nazis. After the explosion, there are never any witnesses left to identify him. He’ll do anything to be like his brother.”

At that moment Colonel Alexander Kalos, who had been at the rear of the line, rode up alongside her and Doughty. With the keeneyed expression of a hunter, he said, “If I were Michaelis, I would do anything not to be like my brother.”

“Theseus, meet Colonel Kalos,” said Doughty. “He served a distinguished role under Napoleon Zervas in the destruction of the Gorgopatomos Railway viaduct last November.”

“I’m impressed, Colonel.”

“So you should be,” said Kalos, taking her aback with his smug demeanor.

Erin watched him ride to the head of the line to relieve Stavros, who turned his horse around to go to the back of the line.