The 34th Degree

65

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.

Doughty explained, “They switch off every so often so each can play the leader.”

“Kalos is quite a cowboy,” she observed, finding this bid for supremacy amusing. “Have you ever seen him use those pearl-handled Colts he’s packing?”

“You noticed them, did you?” Doughty smiled. “Seems he saw a lot of American westerns before the war and fancies himself marshal in the mountains when it comes to Communists. When he’s not on a horse, he swaggers around in riding breeches, boots, and spurs. But don’t let his swagger fool you. He’s a born leader of men. He’s also the best shot I’ve ever seen.”

“Really?” asked Erin. “Dare I ask how the cowboy from EDES and the kapetanios from ELAS get along?”

“They don’t, as you can see,” Doughty answered. “The brutalities of men like Stavros Moudjouras have given the Greek Resistance a rather bloodthirsty image. That’s why we’ve checked him with a man like Kalos, equally quick with the trigger, just in case Stavros gets it in his head to try something to redeem his name in the eyes of the Communist Party.”

“You think he would?” Erin asked, realizing that Stavros was no longer simply a suspected mole but a mole with a motive.

Doughty shrugged. “Overall, I think his personal ambitions are pure, even if his movement’s are not. Fully devoted to his mission.”

“Which is?” Erin persisted.

“Oh, the usual party line,” Doughty replied. “The liberation of Greece, no less.”