The 34th Degree

64

T hat night in the Parnon Mountains, situated some two hundred miles south of Athens, fifteen Greek andartes and their British liaison officer left their secret base on horseback and headed toward the designated dropping zone. The andartes, drawn from the ranks of the rivaling right-wing EDES and left-wing ELAS, wore rags for uniforms and sheepskin caps with the initials EOE, which stood for National Bands of Greece. Their liaison officer to the Middle East GHQ, Colonel James Doughty, rode at the head of the line.

The crack signal that was broadcast by the BBC on the radio back at the National Bands base told them to expect three Royal Air Force planes to pass over at 0100 hours.

It was ten minutes past the hour already, and Stavros Moudjouras of ELAS could still hear the thunder of German Junkers 88s in the distance, bombing the fires they had lit on dummy dropping grounds earlier.

“Go ahead, blast away, you Boche!” Doughty shouted at the night sky. “There’s nothing there!”

The tough New Zealander always amused Stavros, but Stavros never forgot that Doughty served the interests of the British, not those of the Greek people. The same was true, Stavros was beginning to suspect, of the National Bands of Greece, which he had joined in the first place because he would rather fight Germans than Greeks.

The NZ initials on Doughty’s cap, in particular, reminded Stavros of his enemy General Napoleon Zervas, the head of EDES. In his younger days as a senior army officer, Zervas had made his money playing cards and gambling. Whenever he found himself short of money, he would threaten a revolution in the army to shake the financial markets. After the exchanges took a dive, he would call off the revolution and split the proceeds of the rising market with the financier who worked with him. Such antics incensed Stavros, mostly because he never grasped the concepts of capitalism and distrusted a system that made blackmailers like Zervas rich-and honest, hardworking Greeks like his father poor.

The presence of EDES colonel Alexander Kalos, riding next to Doughty in his British-supplied battle dress uniform, boots, and pearl-handled pistols, did little to ease Stavros’s fears. Kalos was a Zervas bootlicker with ambitions of his own, a Cretan and former cavalry officer who controlled the Peloponnese for EDES. He had secured his reputation with the Greek Resistance through his part in the destruction of the Gorgopatomos Railway six months earlier. The railway had been providing 80 percent of Rommel’s supplies to North Africa, and its destruction was undoubtedly the highest achievement of the Resistance thus far. Kalos was only a captain in the Greek army back then, like me, thought Stavros, but Zervas had taken the unauthorized liberty of promoting him to full colonel before promoting himself to general. Now, in the eyes of the British in Cairo, Kalos was the highest-ranking Greek army officer in the integrated National Bands of Greece.

What supplies Cairo was dropping tonight was anybody’s guess. But Stavros’s younger brother, Michaelis, offered that whatever they might be, he had bad feelings about the rendezvous. This prophecy did not surprise any of the older andartes, least of all Stavros, who looked at his youngest brother and saw a slight, nervous, and sickly figure riding beside him.

“You have bad feelings about everything,” Stavros said. “‘I think we’ll drown in that canal,’ or ‘We’ll fall off this cliff if we try to climb it,’ or ‘The rocks will fall on us.’” Stavros adjusted the Sten submachine gun slung over his shoulder and grunted. “We have girls who are stronger partisans!”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Michaelis insisted.

As far as Stavros was concerned, that was the problem. His brother had abandoned the discipline of school life to join the free and wild atmosphere of the andartes in the mountains six months ago. Michaelis had become violently ill the day after the British had made a supply drop to partisans outside their family’s village in northern Greece. It turned out he had eaten the new gelatin explosive known as plastique, thinking it was toffee. Stavros blamed the British and insisted they provide medical attention and keep him out of harm’s way. With things heating up between EDES and ELAS, the family sent both of them to the National Bands in the Peloponnese.

Now Stavros never saw Michaelis do anything but work the soft putty of plastic explosives from recent supply drops into manageable ten-pound blocks. This was his eternal chore, not studying for school or playing with other boys or building the “better life” the Communist Party had promised, but making bombs. Over time the stuff had managed to work its way under Michaelis’s nails and into his skin, and Stavros blamed that for his brother’s headaches. Or maybe he blamed himself and the Party. Looking at his little brother, he wondered what he was fighting for. Deep doubt and a gnawing sense of guilt rose within him. He tried to suppress his misgivings with dialectic Marxism, but the superstitions and fears of his home village still had a powerful hold on his psyche.

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.”