‘But in principle you would do it if the reason was right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. It may come to committing murder and I do like to forewarn those upon whose shoulders such an onerous duty might be placed. Now we’ve established that, let me tell you a little more. Force 133 is the cover name for our office here in Cairo. We are part of something called the Special Operations Executive. All very hush-hush, but the gist of it is that we have been tasked with placing highly motivated men into enemy occupied territory to harass the other side as effectively as we can. The more troops we tie down, the less we have to face on the battlefield, the more likely it is that we bring forward our victory over the enemy. Do you see? Jolly good.’
‘And where do I come into this, sir?’
‘Since we’re getting on so famously, please call me Johnny. All right?’ Huntley took a cautious sip from his cup and made an appreciative noise. ‘Ah, Watkins makes a fine cup of coffee . . . Now, to cases. We recently landed a small team on your home island. An officer and a radioman to be precise. Together with some weapons and kit for the
andartes
. However, the officer was injured during a disagreement with one of the local
kapetans
and had to be evacuated. We would like to send in a replacement and who could be better than a Greek officer? Better still, an officer who knows the ground and the people. If you accept then your job will be to coordinate the resistance and take the war to the Italian garrison. I want you to make them feel like they are living under the shadow of a knife. Every time they leave their barracks they will fear that every street corner, every rock, every tree on the island is concealing a member of the resistance lining them up for a shot. Inevitably they will call in more men, better men, in order to take you on. I’ll warn you now, Andreas, when that happens the conflict is going to get very dangerous and bloody indeed and there’s every chance that you will be killed, or captured, tortured and then shot.’ He leaned back in his chair and regarded the young Greek shrewdly. ‘It is normal to give a chap a chance to think it over, but that’s not how we operate in SOE. We need our people to be decisive. So, I’ll require your answer now. Are you prepared to be trained by us and infiltrated on to Lefkas to fight the enemy? Yes or no?’
Thoughts tumbled through Andreas’s head as he hurriedly considered the offer. Here was the chance to escape the tedium of Alexandria, to fight the enemy, to avenge the suffering they had visited on his country and his people. And also a chance to go home. To see Eleni once again. To protect her.
‘Yes.’
Huntley grinned. ‘That’s what I knew you’d say. Welcome to the Special Operations Executive. We’ll start your training as soon as we can. You’ll be returning to Lefkas as soon as you are ready.’
Huntley stood up and stuck out his hand again. Andreas smiled as they shook on it. ‘What now?’
‘You go back to your hotel. Paddy’s arranged to take you out to celebrate. The real work begins tomorrow. Good luck and God go with you, Andreas Katarides.’
Chapter Nineteen
Near Haifa, Palestine
‘Narkover’, as the special school was known by its staff and students, was referred to in official documents as ‘Establishment ME102’. In keeping with the secret nature of what went on there, the nomenclature was meaningless, functioning only to hide its true purpose. The school was in a large white building set in sprawling grounds on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Barbed wire had been set up along the boundary wall to deter the curious or malicious and two military policemen manned the barrier at the main gate. They checked the papers of those who came and went but had no more idea about what went on within ME102 than anyone else who lived nearby. Occasionally the sound of gunfire or the loud thud of an explosion disturbed the peace but since it was wartime such noises were to be expected and so the inmates of the Special Operations Executive’s school for saboteurs provoked little more than passing curiosity from those beyond the walls.
Colonel Huntley had been true to his word and Andreas was plucked from his hotel in Cairo and flown to Palestine to begin his training two days after he had accepted the offer to join the organisation. He was assured that his absence would be squared with the Greek government in exile and his personal effects would eventually be forwarded from his quarters in Alexandria.
On arrival Andreas found the school appeared more like a hotel than a military base. The rooms were clean and comfortable, there was a well-stocked bar and the mess was staffed by good cooks with ready access to the best ingredients that could be obtained. Unusually, there was no distinction between officers and other ranks, or indeed civilians, and all ate at the same tables and drank together without deference to rank. Besides the British contingent there were others from France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece, the last group being second in size to the British. Andreas felt some comfort at training alongside fellow countrymen but the instruction was nearly always in English and he often had to translate for some of the others with a less ready grasp of the alien tongue.
At the same time, the British trainees were keen to perfect their Greek in order to attempt to pass as natives when they were eventually deployed to Crete, the other islands and the mainland. Their chief difficulty was that someone in the hierarchy of the SOE had decided that knowledge of ancient Greek would serve as excellent preparation for learning the modern language. Andreas found himself wincing at the consequences and wondered what his countrymen would make of these finely educated Englishmen descending upon them and attempting to converse with Homeric idioms and rhythm.
The comfortable surroundings of Narkover belied the hard work that was demanded of the students. They were woken before dawn to stumble into the pallid light to do an hour’s fitness training before breakfast. After that the learning began. Every possibly relevant skill was taught by experts in their fields. On the first day Andreas and the other new recruits were taken to the courtyard to begin basic weapons training. One corner of the courtyard had been covered with rush mats and a powerfully built man with a finely trimmed moustache was waiting for his class. He stood erect as he twirled a double-edged dagger and regarded his trainees with a practised eye.
‘Come on, you lazy lot! Them as is keen gets fell in previous! Move yourselves!’
The class hurried over and formed up around the mats. When the last was ready, the instructor drew a breath and began, loudly.
‘Welcome, gentlemen. I ’ave the honour of introducing you to the art of killing quietly with a blade.’
He flipped the knife in his hand and offered the blade to the nearest recruit, a shepherd from Crete, who took the weapon and examined it curiously as the instructor continued addressing them.
‘It is a skill that is often overlooked in this day and age, sadly. However, for the type of fighting the SOE has in mind, it is a fundamental requirement. You will most likely ’ave occasion to dispose of a troublesome sentry in the course of your trade. Some of you, especially the young gentlemen who ’ave joined us from posh schools, like young Master Moss there, may find the idea of cutting a man’s throat distasteful. I tell you now, you ’ad better get used to the nasty little gurgle and splutter of surprise that cannot find its way out of a cut throat. It’s a messy business, but this is war, not sport, and the object of the school is to teach you the necessary lethal and efficient methods required to carry out your job. Do you all understand?’
There was some nodding and Andreas translated for some of his fellow Greeks before the instructor pointed to a tall, fair-haired Englishman.
‘Mr Moss, sir. If you’d help me out. Over here, in the middle.’
The student smiled eagerly and stepped forward as the instructor continued. ‘Mr Moss is about the size of a jerry. They tend to be big bastards but they fall just as easily as any other man. The trick of it is to take ’em down quickly and violently like so.’
He stepped up behind Moss, snapped one arm round his neck. ‘There are three movements to the basic kill. The first is to choke off any cries from your victim, like this. Then pull ’im back, using your ’ip to brace the victim, so.’ Moss’s back arched as he struggled for breath in the powerful grip of the instructor. ‘The third movement is to bring up your knife under his ribs.’ He punched his fist into the soft flesh under the Englishman’s sternum, causing Moss to gasp. ‘Stick the blade in hard and work it about so you carve up ’is ’eart. Now it will take a moment for ’im to bleed out and the more damage you do, the quicker it’ll be over. Then you can lower him to the ground, nice and gentle, so he don’t make a sound.’ He guided Moss on to the mat, held him there a moment longer as he looked up at the rest of the class. ‘One thing. Make sure your jerry or your eyetie ’as actually croaked. If not, he might yet give off a warning. And then, lads, your goose is cooked.’
He released his grip and helped the Englishman up. Moss struggled to recover his breath. ‘Thank you, Mr Moss.’
The young officer returned to his place, rubbing his neck, while the instructor placed his hands on his hips. At the same time Andreas took the knife from his neighbour to examine it. He could see that the long, sharp blade would do plenty of damage inside a man’s chest, while the rubber handle would provide a secure grip. It was clearly designed to kill and for no other purpose.
‘Of course, it is best if there are two men for the job. One to deal with the man, the other to catch ’is weapon as it falls. A poorly set safety catch can cause a weapon to be discharged. Even the sound of it hitting the ground might be sufficient to alert the enemy. So, if possible, use two men. Nah then, pair off and practise the technique on each other, and then later on we’ll have a look at slitting throats and scrambling brains with the blade before we break for lunch.’
After they had mastered the knife skills, they were passed on to another instructor who trained them to shoot handguns and demonstrated how to break down a weapon and conceal the parts in such a way that they would be missed in a casual body search. Unlike the pistol training that Andreas had experienced at the naval academy, the teacher at Narkover, a former member of the Shangai police force who had been used to fighting the ruthless gangs of that city, showed them to fire in bursts of two shots from a crouched position. He taught them to shoot aggressively, firing instinctively, without wasting time to settle into a formal position and take aim.
Once they had mastered pistols, the instructor turned to larger weapons, the Sten, Bren and the Marlin, a sub-machine gun that had a foregrip like a Tommy gun but with a double magazine as opposed to the round one that Andreas had seen in the subtitled gangster movies in Athens. Over several days they were taught to strip the weapons, conceal them, reassemble them, and then again blindfolded. They fired them in the school’s range, becoming used to their individual quirks. Andreas became familiar with the rattle of the Stens and the deeper bark of the Marlins and Bren guns. The students were also introduced to silenced weapons in the strange atmosphere of shooting on the range when the usual din was replaced by the sharp hissing noise of the single shots that had to be fired when using the device on a Sten.
Having mastered conventional weapons, the students were then trained in unarmed combat with the same ruthless intent: kill and win at any cost, by any means. At first Andreas was unsettled by the emphasis on targeting his opponent’s eyes, testicles and windpipe, and the manifest ways in which an incapacitated enemy could be swiftly and silently finished off. But he quickly came to accept the necessity of it – even the virtue of it – in a war that was being fought in the face of the brutal forces of a dark ideology that threatened to extinguish every human value that he cherished. There was no doubt in his mind. The enemy had proved themselves to be malignant and it was hard to conceive of any evil that they had not yet committed.
The long hours of training and study demanded of the students made the days pass quickly. The instructors moved on to teaching them the intricacies of using explosives. RDX was the type favoured by the Special Operations Executive because it was stable and easily mouldable and therefore easy to hide and use. Andreas soon grew adept at setting charges and selecting the correct coloured fuse sticks for the desired delay before detonating the explosives. He also learned how to set booby traps and lay small charges just large enough to puncture the tyre of a vehicle driving over the device. The wider applications of sabotage were also covered: how to introduce grit in to the fuel tank of vehicles so that they would grind to a halt hours later. How to render machinery useless and difficult, if not impossible, to repair. Then they were trained to operate radios and learn the correct procedures for their use. Messages were to contain no more than six hundred characters in code and transmissions were to last no more than five minutes in order to defeat the attempts of the enemy to trace the signal back to the transmitter. It was also important to regularly move the radio set from one hiding place to another for the same reason.
Despite the long days, there was still time at the end of the day to relax in the school’s mess. Andreas joined the other Greeks to drink the local wine and raki and talk and sing late into the night when they would become sentimental about their homeland and their families and all would join in to sing ‘When will the sky grow clear’ before the evening ended with them trudging off to their beds. Not all evenings were so harmonious. Some of the Greeks from the mainland were inclined to voice their contempt for the king and his ministers who had abandoned their people rather than remain in Greece and lead them against the fascists. These were the same Greeks who had opposed General Metaxas in the years when he had ruled the country with an iron fist and Andreas felt sympathy for the grievances of the National Liberation Front, the communist party, to which they belonged. However, there were other Greeks at the school who supported the rival National Republican Greek League, a more authoritarian political party dedicated to right-wing policies. When the discussion occasionally turned to politics the Greeks divided along party lines and the exchanges became bitter and soured the mood in the mess.
On one such night Andreas was approached by the tall officer who had been used to demonstrate the killing of an enemy sentry. They had spoken on many occasions and got drunk together, and an easy going friendship had been established. William Moss exemplified the kind of Englishmen who were accepted for the SOE: uncomfortable with authority, energetic and the sort who would do anything to avoid a dull life.
‘I say, what’s the problem with your chaps tonight?’ Moss said quietly as he nodded towards the furious altercation taking place on the other side of the mess. Andreas had been too fatigued by the day’s training to join his comrades and was drinking by himself at a corner table. Moss shook his head as he continued. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d swear they were about to wring each other’s necks.’
‘It may yet come to that,’ Andreas replied wearily. ‘From what I understand, the Liberation Front have wide support back in Greece. They’ll not take kindly to the restoration of the government in exile when we’ve driven the fascists out.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ Moss raised his whisky glass. ‘When, not if. Though I shouldn’t be too concerned about the Liberation Front if I were you. I don’t give much for their chances of wielding any influence when the game’s over.’
Andreas frowned. ‘Oh? Why is that?’
‘Churchill hates the left. Always has. During the General Strike back in twenty-six, he wanted to order the troops to shoot down the trade unionists. And before that, he was behind sending our forces into Russia to fight the Bolsheviks. Don’t think for a moment that he would be happy to hand Greece over to the Liberation Front when the war is over. He’ll be content to support them against the enemy for now, but that will change the moment the Germans and the Italians are on the back foot. Still, that’s not an issue that need concern us, eh?’
‘It will concern me, my friend.’ Andreas smiled.
Moss pursed his lips. ‘That rather depends on whether you survive or not. Do you think it’s healthy to look to the future? In our line of work I am not so sure.’
Andreas regarded him with a surprised expression. ‘Surely you fight for a purpose?’
‘Of course. I trust that we will win one day. I just don’t expect to be there to join in the celebrations, that’s all. If a man worries about surviving then there is a danger that it takes the edge off his fighting ability. Don’t you think? Better that he resigns himself to death so he can devote his attention to the task immediately in front of him. That’s how I see it.’ He knocked back his whisky and turned to the barman to raise his glass and indicate he needed a refill. Turning to Andreas, he shrugged. ‘We live outside history, my friend. There is no future for us and therefore we need not think about the past. Only the present matters. It is all we can expect to have.’