The Sabotage Diaries by Katherine Barnes

Author:Katherine Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The villagers didn’t just know the target. They knew the details. This despite the fact that no one was supposed to be in on our plans.

We could do nothing about the reprisals. We knew that, and we had to go ahead anyway. It was our duty. But now we realised that there was effectively no security in the mountains. What the andartes knew, everyone would know soon enough.

We left for the Kaloyirou op after night had fallen, Harry Evans and I, with a train of mules carrying our explosives, prime among them our German bomb. All the time we were looking over our shoulder in case the enemy knew our plans and was watching for us.

I was thinking about the descent to Gorgopotamos as I went. How dark it had been, how we had slipped and slithered in the mud, how scared I’d felt, but how full of anticipation at the same time. How nothing turned out the way we thought it would, but how we scraped through anyway. Then, I hadn’t known what to expect. This time wasn’t a whole lot better, except that I had faith in Agoros and his men. At Gorgopotamos, the andartes had been an unknown quantity.

The enemy used the Arta – Filippiada road day and night. The farming area we had to cross to reach our destination was uncomfortably close to the road, and we had to steal along.

Without warning, a flurry of clucking broke out from a henhouse. We were badly startled. Nothing doing, though. We kept going.

The two bridges, Kaloyirou and Stravinas, had to be attacked simultaneously — we couldn’t afford to have one attack give the other away. Neither bridge had a permanent guard. By night they were the responsibility of sentries from the military unit stationed in Filippiada, less than half a mile away, with a few machine guns and a couple of tanks. Arta, where there was a larger military presence, was two miles away. We should be able to get away with the preparatory explosions but there would be no hiding the big one, and we could expect a quick response from the Italians.

Zero hour was 11.30 pm. We met Captain Chalimas on the job — everything was in order. He went to his post on the first hills to the west. 11.10. Time to lay the first charges.

Agoros, I knew, would be in position on the mountain immediately above us. One of his officers was in the farmland between the two bridges. Another was in Arta. HQ was a mountain peak about half a mile to the north-east of Stravinas.

Our own target, the Kaloyirou bridge, was on the Louros River.

Harry and I crept forward to lay the first of the charges in absolute silence. Nothing from Filippiada nearby. Not a single glimmer from a cigarette to betray the presence of the waiting andartes.

We laid beehive charges first, in the abutment that supported the bridge from the side. Beehives could blast more than two feet into reinforced concrete, leaving a two and a half inch hole into which we would pack the main charges.

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