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Post by Strigus on Sept 1, 2018 15:18:48 GMT
The guerilla company collectively shivered as a hauntingly cold breeze moved through their current base of operations. Morale was low- so low, in fact, that for the past week or so one man would desert each night.
In fairness, it was easy to see why they had gotten cold feet. It had been an anxious week, having arrived and hunkered down near an artery into Athens. Despite their best efforts and an initial intensity, resistance in the capital itself had only simmered, and not erupted as they so desperately needed it to. And so the Democratic Army had sent his merry band of soldiers in close to Athens, with a plan to raid a supply caravan that would be moving out to some rural areas where the DSE proved difficult to root out. The hope was that a strike against this caravan would serve many tasks. Not only would it disrupt the supply lines moving out, but it would also resupply and, by extension, improve the morale of the communists. If they were lucky, it would also concern the Greek Government Army that guerillas were in deeper than anticipated and that make them divert more forces to defense.
All in all, it was an important task. The most difficult part had been evading detection as they moved deeper toward the capital. Strange, then, that the nightly desertions had only started once the easy part of waiting had begun. Perhaps not, though, as waiting has a way of making anxieties stronger. As strong as his resolve was, Alexander was relieved when Sergeant Leandros shed some light on their situation.
"Alright, I know everyone's on edge, but the caravan moves through tomorrow morning. Everyone knows what to do. We may have a few less men than expected, but we still have surprise, and more than enough to handle this. Everyone get to your places above the road, and instead of dealing with the trucks just focus all initial fire on any soldiers guarding it. That'll more than make up for the numbers, and we'll have to hope that the block in the road we set up is enough to keep the trucks down. Everyone set?"
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Post by Alexander Zervas on Sept 6, 2018 15:33:38 GMT
There would be no fire for them that night. The Attican landscape featured only a handful of hills and even less mountains, and any sign of movement in the wilderness would be seen from a mile away. Zervas meticulously twisted a wooden brush against the dark liquid contained in a tin box and then applied its substance on his boots. These damned, calf-high boots had gotten him mingled with the Democratic Army to begin with.
He had been a clerk working in an imports-exports company before the war. A gentile man with a career, Alexander made 18.ooo drachmas a year. 20 dollars, American. By 1941, he returned from the war and assumed his post. By 1942 he was being paid a couple billion drachmas. And when his shoes finally gave out, torn in a hundred different places, walking all the way from Albania to the streets of Athens in his search for food, he made it his mind to buy a new pair. But his billions weren’t enough for the trillions the shoe-maker had asked. Whenever he had labored hard to amass the required amount, a German retreat in Africa soared the price even more. And when he was despairing about his shoes, Rommel had the allies on the run again and his shoes weren’t such an impossible feat anymore. He started following the news with the same interest as a general. And depending on the skirmishes in Africa, he envisioned his shoes sunken in the Nile or far away in places as exotic as El Alamein or Tobruk.
He looked around from under his dark green woolen cloak, military issue, which he had wrapped tight around his body in an attempt to stay off the cold. His comrades were equally wet, dirty, hungry and miserable as him. He knew some of them from Albania. Others from his neighborhood in Kaisariani, men and women he had known virtually all his life.
‘Malaka, do you have a cigarette?’ the man next to him asked.
Instinctively, his fingers were already unbuttoning the front pocket in the side of his heart and out stuck a hand from the woolen cloak, holding a red-and-white package. He flicked the carton box open with his index finger and inside a few cigarettes rolled aimlessly from the movement.
He knew Panos, a young man of twenty-six with a beard as long as his belly button and worry lines on his forehead that looked unnatural for a man his age. The Hunger Winter had claimed his elderly parents leaving him and his two younger sisters orphans. When he carried the bodies of his parents to the local church in the plaza and asked the bishop to perform a funeral, the elderly man had asked for a modest sum for the service and the undertakers an extortionate sum for digging the graves. Crying, Panos had buried his parents on his own away from the church and before finishing the task, he had relieved the corpses off their food stamps. Another survivor.
Together, they had heard of a profiteer operating from the basement of a barbershop on the end of Makriyianni Street. He traded in coffee, sugar, flour, some medicine, maybe even some meat once or twice a month. When Panos had come round to his house and pleaded with him to go together to the profiteer, to find something to feed his sisters, Alexander couldn’t refuse. They waited in his house until nightfall and the curfew, counting the billions they had between them until the sound of the half-trucks patrolling their neighborhood had died out. Carefully they made their way from the back alleys until they had reached the barbershop, and once they had bribed the barber to let them in, they walked down the stairs to the basement. They hadn’t seen so many goods gathered in one place for over a year. Shelfs and shelfs of canned food, sacks of flour propped against the walls like sandbags, a cabinet brimming with morphine and other medicine under a small red cross. And under the desk by the door, boxes and boxes stacked with a pair of black leather German infantry boots shining on display.
The profiteer, a huge man with a fashionable mustache and a three-piece suit was carefully unpacking the few pieces of meat he had managed to salvage. “Horse?”, Panos had asked examining with interest one of the pieces. Alexander still remembered how miserable the profiteer had looked when he replied, ‘dog’. He had blocked out the rest of the discussion, his eyes focusing on the much desired boots. Moments later Panos was tucking the piece of dog meat in the pocket of his torn suit, anxiously pulling Alexander by the arm to go. Perhaps if he had gone then he wouldn’t be here on the mountains now. But Alexander held in place, turned to the profiteer and started haggling for the boots, unwilling to budge until he had acquired them.
The door had suddenly burst open and the barber had tumbled down before four armed men and women run down the flight of stairs. Holding the profiteer under gun point, the leader of the group had instructed them to take what they wanted; the Provisional Government of Greece, the Mountain Government, had sentenced this man to die for crimes against his own people. The barber was also being held down by a man while a woman had held a gun to his head. The second woman had set down a backpack and nervously had started filling it up with canned food. Alexander had known her. Lambrini, a girl living two streets above his house. Her father was a Union man exiled by Metaxas in ’34 to the Devil’s Island, and her brother had been exiled a year later for participating in a strike. The young girl had spent the years leading to the war visiting her family in various prisons across the country. In the end, her father had died in prison and her brother had been executed a week before the Germans had left Athens.
The sound of the rifle going off had ricocheted around the room as the profiteer sunk to his knees, a hole where his face was supposed to be. A second fire, much less in intensity, sent the barber down to join his master. ‘Quickly,’ the leader of the squad had barked, ‘the Germans will have heard that and will be investigating. I don’t know you two but tonight you are working for the Resistance; grab these bags and start filling them up.’ They had done as they were told. Did they have a choice? Perhaps, by they were not the ones with the guns or the ones calling the shots. Alexander had emptied the medical cabinet, throwing everything inside his backpack with two thorough sweeps of his hand and tied the backpack so tightly on his back that the straps chaffed at his shoulders over his suit. Without thinking, he picked up the German boots under his armpit and started running after the others.
They almost got caught four times. Half-trucks were rolling past the Athenian streets left and right of them, and men on foot were running and barking something behind them. Navigating their way inside the alley ways, jumping fences and crouching through the low walls of the houses proved thrilling for Alexander. By the time they had crashed into the Resistance lair, an old café-bar with the half-wiped sign that read The American, Alexander was enthralled enough to pledge to aid the Resistance from then on. It wasn’t an entirely selfish desire; it was true that he had sold off most of what he owned, and more of what his parents had owned to survive through the Famine, and now he possessed more food than he had seen in many months. But when the next night the squad broke into houses and left canned food for the starving Athenians, he realized the Resistance was alright in his book.
It was three years back. The Germans had moved out, only to be replaced by the British. When the British fleet anchored in Piraeus they had all celebrated their independence, but soon London had seen the Resistance as dangerous; the port had been blockaded again and thousands begun starving once more. People again were sent into exile. Almost eighty thousand had been imprisoned. But when the British let the collaborators keep their arms and houses, houses they had bought for a sack of flour during the occupation, and refused to try them for treason and even appointed the worse of them in the new government - it had been the last straw. The call had been heard and once more a new Resistance was formed in the mountains. That was last year.
The hunting and starving and general misery had thinned their ranks, it was true. But those fleeing were young men and women who were too young to really realize what the country before the Occupation was like. Around him Alexander could still see those who were fighting the Germans, those who fought the Italians in Albania, and a couple who had been crying out against the evils of the bourgeoisie even before that. The end of the Occupation had taught them a hard lesson: nothing would change unless they made it so. And, Alexander took heart, the squad from that night on the basement were still firm believers.
Panos was smoking carefully not to set his luscious beard alight, keeping the cigarette inside the barrel of his gun. Lambrini was sleeping, her head resting on a rock a few feet away, her chin tucked inside the woolen cocoon she had made for her bed. Yianna sat on a rock beside her, damping a cloth in a metal oil container before she proceeded to clean some weathered blood off her bayonet. Romanos, a former lieutenant from the royal army who had fought in Albania, had turned coat a few months previously; he had followed the remnants of the army to Africa, only to see his men placed in internment camps by the British because they had refused to accept the King who had abandoned them. Dangerous communists, they had branded them, and detrimental to morale and the war effort on the African theatre. They had sat out the fight scant miles away from El Alamein. He was playing a tune in a rusty harmonica, a tune so badly performed - but none had the guts to tell him to quit it. Lastly there was sergeant Leandros, whom they called the Phantom because the Germans had twice captured him and twice he had escaped his execution; the man who had executed the profiteer.
Alexander felt relief when the Phantom started speaking in that rasping voice of his, telling them why they were there. ‘Alright, I know everyone's on edge, but the caravan moves through tomorrow morning. Everyone knows what to do. We may have a few less men than expected, but we still have surprise, and more than enough to handle this. Everyone get to your places above the road, and instead of dealing with the trucks just focus all initial fire on any soldiers guarding it. That'll more than make up for the numbers, and we'll have to hope that the block in the road we set up is enough to keep the trucks down. Everyone set?’
Panos licked his tumb and index finger and proceeded to put out the cigarette. Slapping his knees, he stood up and gestured at Yianna to wake up Lambrini. ‘We better stick together,’ he told Alexander, ‘I know the safest place to be is next to you. These green pisses will shoot me by accident but they are better shots than you.’
‘When I do it won’t be by accident.’
Lambrini stretched and yawned and looked around her in that disheveled mess her red hair was. Resting besides her was an MP-40 she had taken off a German she had killed, which she investigated to find in working order. Picking up two ammo canisters from her back she slid the bullets in her belt and followed the rest of them. ‘Is the Monarchist coming with us?’ she teased Romanos.
‘Shut up, you slut.’ Romanos replied her.
‘Yes, Lieutenant, sir.’ She said back, tongue in cheek.
‘Lets set up over there,’ Alexander pointed towards a rock overlooking the road with one tree by its side. Beneath them they could see the road stretching for miles and in the distance the lights of Athens could be seen.
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Post by Strigus on Sept 7, 2018 8:15:21 GMT
"Right," Leandros barked, cutting off the small chatter that had begun developing among the company. "Let's pair off and see this thing through. With any luck, we'll snag their trucks and be back home for dinner. Proper dinner, with the rations these trucks are sure to have." The mention of food piqued everyone's hunger, but also reminded them of the severity of the situation.
Zervas moved to the rock he had pointed out, with Panos not far behind. After handing off a cigarette to Zervas, he lit up a smoke himself. "I wonder if they'll have any good cigarettes on the trucks. They might say morale's low 'cuz there's no food, but I think these shit smokes are what's really doing us in."
Romanos moved to another overlook on the other side of the road, ignoring Lambrini. Though he kept silent, he body language was very loud in conveying his annoyance, and perhaps for that reason she paired with him, continuing to snip at him like a pup trying to evoke a reaction from an older but larger dog.
"At least they'll keep each other awake," the Sergeant muttered. It was hard to tell if it was in jest or not, from how stolid he remained. Pairing with Yianna, still groggy from having just awoken, they moved low instead of high, where a particularly thick patch of forest gave them good cover, both from sight and from incoming fire.
Panos exaggeratedly looked through his scope down the road. "You see them, Alex? They're coming! In another few hours. Glad we spent all that time waiting for this moment right now. It was good practice for waiting until morning."
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Post by Alexander Zervas on Sept 7, 2018 21:49:29 GMT
Zervas moved to the rock he had pointed out, with Panos not far behind. After handing off a cigarette to Zervas, he lit up a smoke himself. "I wonder if they'll have any good cigarettes on the trucks. They might say morale's low 'cuz there's no food, but I think these shit smokes are what's really doing us in."
The rest of the company split up in teams of 2-4 people, taking their respective places. There was some commotion for a while but soon enough the mountain was again dead silent. Panos and Alexander hurdled closer together in a naturally made foxhole, a slight sinking of the ground by the rock with the single tree overlooking the road.
A little further down, Romanos had moved to another overlook on the other side of the road, visibly ignoring Lambrini. Though he kept silent, his body language was very loud in conveying his annoyance, and perhaps for that reason she paired with him, continuing to snip at him like a pup trying to evoke a reaction from an older but larger dog.
Panos’ eyes followed the movement on the other side of the road until a head wobbled for a second and then disappeared behind the bushes. A second later the second head was lost to their line of sight as well. ‘D’you think they…?’, his voice trailed off, letting his question unfinished. He took instead a heavy puff of his cigarette. ‘Damn this is shit.’
‘At least they'll keep each other awake,’ the Sergeant muttered. It was hard to tell if it was in jest or not, from how stolid he remained. Pairing with Yianna, still groggy from having just awoken, they moved low instead of high, where a particularly thick patch of forest gave them good cover, both from sight and from incoming fire.
A few moments later they too were lost from their sight.
‘Yeah,’ Zervas didn’t find the cigarettes not to his liking, but then again he wasn’t as heavy a smoker as his friend. But he didn’t have the same life to require this habit either. ‘I hope they have American; the British are shit, too.’
Panos exaggeratedly looked through his scope down the road. "You see them, Alex? They're coming! In another few hours. Glad we spent all that time waiting for this moment right now. It was good practice for waiting until morning."
Alexander tugged at his own pair of binoculars and adjusted the roll to clear the image. There were trees, rocks, more trees… His head moved slowly from left to right until he had seen the road. And far, far, far on the distance he could just make out the lights coming off from what looked like jeeps or trucks. Four, maybe five in a row. ‘I see ‘em.’ His index finger played at the roll, trying to clear up the image more but it ended up screwing the whole view. ‘Damn these, worthless, god damn, useless…’ he kept swearing a little under his breath until he managed to fix the screens again to depict the environment decently well.
Forgetting his irritation, Alexander started scouring the opposite bank of the road again, making a mental image of all the creeks and crevasses he could make out with his binoculars. ‘Hey Panos,’ he said, ‘better we scout around from our position to see where we can fall back to if the bastards pack more punch than the Phantom is telling us.’
‘Nah, we can ‘weep out at ‘em and ‘ave em.’ Panos replied confidently, a cigarette butt lodge between his lips as he looked on through his own scopes.
‘Check all the same. For luck.’
‘If you insist…’
OOC: Alex wants to look around using his binoculars to see if there’s anything useful to use on his fight tomorrow, or any place where he can fall back to if things go awry.
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Post by Strigus on Sept 8, 2018 2:47:17 GMT
Rolling Perception (2) + Alertness (1), and I'll drop it to Difficulty 5 because of the binoculars: o0M3kOqLp_p_p_ Two successes
Scanning the area around him, Zervas saw one of the rocky overhangs that precariously loomed over the road had a deep crack running through. With a little encouragement, say from a small explosive, he suspected they could get a rockslide to crash down on the caravan.
He also found what looked to be a small footpath running through the woods behind them in a meandering fashion. It wouldn't be a good place to fall back, but if the situation called for outright retreat, he and Panos could use it move unhindered through the woods, while the trees would still afford them some protection. Where it eventually led was unclear, but they weren't any big towns in the immediate area, so it seemed unlikely to accidentally retreat into an enemy strongpoint.
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