Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

The lorry lurched forward and crashed through the door. Suddenly, he was in the courtyard and could see the moon through the windshield. He shifted to high gear and headed straight for Theo’s taverna.

Stavros and Erin were upstairs in the parlor over Theo’s when the door burst open and Theo entered. “SS paratroopers,” he said breathlessly. “They’re downstairs!”

Stavros moved to the window overlooking the town square and lifted the curtain. Several armored cars, troop carriers, and Kubelwagen appeared in the platia, and armed soldiers were converging on the taverna.

“The Baron’s Death’s Head battalion!” Stavros cried. “The ones I said we don’t want to meet.”

“Any ideas?” asked Erin, standing beside him.

Stavros dropped the curtain. “The alley,” he said. “If we can cut through the kitchen.”

They had started down the stairs when they heard the rumble of heavy boots coming up.

“This way,” said Erin, ducking into another bedroom.

They closed the door as the jackboots moved past them toward the parlor they had just vacated. They stood before the open window facing the alley, garbage strewn out below in the darkness.

Erin said, “We’ll have to jump.”

“You can’t be serious!” said Stavros.

But the pounding on the door followed by the heavy shout “Raus! Schnell!” outside in the hallway convinced him otherwise. The two crawled out the window and were hanging on to the sill by their fingers when the Germans crashed through the door.

Breathlessly, they hung outside in the darkness while the Germans overturned the room. Suddenly, Stavros was aware of voices below. He looked down and saw the helmets of SS men searching the piles of garbage in the pool of light from the kitchen. Had they simply looked up, they would have beheld the strange sight of a big priest and a young woman hanging in the air.

As it was, fed up with the stench and finding nothing outside, the Germans disappeared into the kitchen. But before Stavros could relax, he heard a rumble down below and the screech of brakes as a shadow moved in the dark.

“It’s the lorry with Andros,” whispered Erin. “Let go and we’ll drop onto the sacks of grain in back.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Let go, I tell you. The sacks of grain will break the fall.”

Before Stavros could respond, the window above them slid open, and he looked up into the disfigured face of an SS officer who stared down at them like the devil with a crooked smile.

Before the German could make a sound, Stavros felt Erin slip her hand into his cassock, remove a dagger from his belt, and hurl it into the SS officer’s chest with such speed that all Stavros saw was the flash of the blade and the German lurching forward. Erin reached up, grabbed the German’s uniform, and disappeared as she pulled the dying German down with her into the darkness below.

Stavros clenched his teeth and released his grip. He landed with a thud among the sacks, just as Erin had said. He could see her removing his dagger from the dead German and hiding the corpse behind a sack of grain.

She wiped the blade clean against the rough sackcloth. “Better that his friends don’t find him at all than find him dead,” she said, handing Stavros’s dagger back to him, handle first. Then she called to Andros in the cab, “We’re in!”

The lorry lurched forward. Stavros looked behind at the dark alley and saw a German poke his head outside the taverna window, look about curiously, and then, seeing nothing, disappear.

“It’s not over yet,” Erin warned as they turned the corner.

The platia was ablaze with searchlights trained on the taverna as Andros rolled by in the lorry. The SS had sealed off the entire square and were searching every house and assembling all the men between sixteen and sixty in the street, holding the crowd in check with armored cars and automatic weapons.

Andros drove past the town hall and rounded a corner. At the checkpoint on the edge of town, several armored cars and SS men were waiting.

“I hope this pass works,” Andros muttered to himself as he slowed down. He called back to Stavros and Erin in the rear, “Get down!” He braked to a halt while a young SS captain approached with his pistol. With him was a Greek policeman.

“Identification, please,” the SS officer demanded.

Andros pulled out the identification card Eliot had given him back at Theo’s and handed it to the German. “What’s going on?”

“Communists.”

“Oh, I see.”

The SS officer eyed him closely. “What’s your name?”

“Troumboulas.”

The German turned to the Greek gendarme. “Check that name against our list of popular pseudonyms used by British agents.”

The gendarme did as he was told and shook his head to indicate there was no match.

Still the German wasn’t satisfied. He flashed his light in Andros’s face. “Where are you going?”

“Kalamata,” Andros answered. “Grains for shipment. I’m late, you know.”

“It is not my concern if you spend too much time at the taverna, you lazy pig,” said the German. “It will cost you two sacks.” He turned to the gendarme, with whom Andros presumed he split the black-market proceeds. “Does that sound right?”

The gendarme nodded nervously. Meanwhile, three German guards walked around to the back of the lorry and poked their flashlights among the sacks. Andros watched them disappear in the rearview mirror and froze in his seat, expecting the worst. Instead he heard a voice say in German, “Carry on.”

Andros started the engine. It was only when the lorry moved toward the gate that Andros looked again in his rearview mirror and realized there was nobody behind the truck. The German guards were gone. Only the SS captain and the Greek gendarme stood in the street, equally bewildered, until the German realized what had happened and pulled his gun. “Stop them!” he shouted to the guardhouse, and had started firing when a burst of machine-gun fire from the back of the lorry cut him and his Greek friend to the ground.

Andros took his eyes off the rearview mirror in time to see the swing bar dropping in front of the windshield. He hit the accelerator and crashed through. Suddenly they were out of Sparta and in the open foothills.

His Majesty’s submarine the Cherub slowly made its way beneath the surface of the Mediterranean en route to its rendezvous with the OSS agent code-named Sinon, off the southwestern coast of the Greek Peloponnese.

For Lieutenant Commander Eric Safire, its captain, things had been touch and go for several hours, ever since the submarine’s radio operator had picked up word that a Luftwaffe air strike had decimated the National Bands base in Greece. But under a half hour ago, Orestes in Sparta had radioed that Sinon had survived and was on his way to the rendezvous as planned. Or rather, almost as planned. That was what worried Safire, but he had said nothing about it yet because he had learned not to question his orders.

A young man of medium height, the twenty-six-year-old captain wore his straight brown hair long enough to tuck behind his ears. He would have resembled a girl were it not for the three-day growth on his face. He had said good-bye to his razor blade back in port because at sea they had to conserve their fresh water, and shaving with salt water packed too much of a sting.

This mission was his third in a remarkable series of special operations. First came the North Africa landings, Operation Torch, when he was an officer aboard the submarine HM Seraph and they had slipped General Mark Clark ashore to secretly contact the French before the Allied invasion. Next came Operation Mincemeat, when they dropped the body of “Major Martin” off the coast of Huelva, Spain.