Ch5 - A Thinker, A Sailor, A Soldier and a Spy

Perseus Jackson had lived an interesting life, his childhood in particular. His parents were nearly always away working, and so he was raised for the most part by his proud old Grandfather, Bellerophon.
His Grandfather had taught him much of what he had grown up knowing, the likes of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, even going so far as to make sure that the young Perseus had a strong grounding in languages, such as French, German, even imparting some of his knowledge of Arabic and Hindi on the young boy.

Furthermore, it was near enough mandatory for a young gentleman to have a grounding in Greek and Latin, for how else would he go on to study the classics? One could never admire the brilliance of Homer, or Ovid, or perhaps Aristotle for afar, could they?

Percy's childhood had always been very much alone, until the age of six, when a girl had come to stay. 'Cousin Thalia', Grandmother Angelica had called her, that little girl of seven years with her black hair and striking blue eyes. In fact, if not for those eyes of hers, they could well have passed for twins, with their identical Mediterranean complexions, lithe frames and black hair.
The two cousins had become fast friends, almost fiercely protective of each other in all scenarios, and getting into much trouble on more than one occasion for thumping schoolyard bullies. Both remained in education into their twenties, attending Primary and Secondary schools together, before Thalia ran off to join the army.

It wasn't as though Percy didn't know - they had discussed their futures in great detail, and Thalia had made it very clear that this was her place - but it did break his heart that he could not follow, for just as the army called to Thalia, the Sea was in Percy's blood, and so these cousins, these closest of friends, split for the first time since their childhood.
Whenever both returned to their family home in London, Bellerophon Jackson was hard pressed to drag the two away from the shooting range as the two showed off their skills, and even harder pressed to prevent the two in their incessant research.

Both had known of Thalia's mother vanishing, her younger brother Jason being sent off to live with their father's side of the family, and yet the girl knew next to nothing about the Grace family.
That was, of course, until they found the Diary of Perseus Jackson, the first Baron Jackson, dating back to the 1750s - the first Jackson to join the Royal Navy, and the one who kicked off the tradition of naval officers. In fact, he was also Percy's namesake, as well as the Greek hero.

They discovered early on in their reading, that they weren't in fact cousins, or even related, to any close extent at least. In fact, the Jackson and Grace families most recently crossed in the time of the first Lord Jackson himself, when he and his cousins Thalia and Jason had travelled over to the then Thirteen Colonies, where they had owned land close to Albany, New York.

The story had been a thrilling one, with pirates, war between the great European powers of the time, and danger-fraught voyages across the Caribbean. They had eventually settled once more in Port Royal, where Lord Perseus had been based initially,
They had also discovered that the Grace family was now based in California, with young Jason a distinguished member of American society now, was based in San Francisco, California. The newspaper cutting which they had discovered one summer in the early 1930s didn't give them a photograph, and so they had hit a dead end.
Thalia had gone off on a deployment just before Percy had been placed on the Argo, and so neither would have known where the other was for a while.

The last place the duo had expected their reunion to be was in a holding cell in the basement of a house in a French Hamlet.

The lock of the cage fell away courtesy of a knife, and the prisoners came bursting out, disorganised and in a desperate horde, causing Jason to tut in distaste. That was, of course, all but three.
Percy, though, had eyes for only one.

Neither of the two ran towards each other. In fact, Jason would later insist that Captain Jackson and this mysterious girl floated towards each other, and they almost seemed to fall into the arms of the other. To anyone who didn't know them, they looked as though they were twins for certain - a detail that the two couldn't care less about. For all intents and purposes, Perseus Jackson and Thalia Grace were siblings by blood, no less.

They were left alone for a moment as the allied soldiers took their time checking the less recognisable prisoners, ensuring that their enemies hadn't planted anything untoward on the freed prisoners. They escorted the people who had been held in the basement upstairs, taking a headcount and names as they passed through. They numbered a little over a hundred in all, mostly men between the ages of 16 and 30 - those who had chosen to fight when the call went out.

Jason trudged back down the corridor in the basement once more, the narrow passageway seeming much more normal in the light, though the fresh bloodstains cast a dark shadow on such a sentiment. The scene he emerged to in the basement was reminiscent of a motion picture he had seen in a theatre not long ago, depicting Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Had he not heard better from his peers, the likes of Norman and Brook, he might have assumed that the two were lovers, with their hushed tones and gentle touches to make sure the other was safe and happy.

It was the new girl, Thalia, like his sister, Jason noted, who noticed Jason first, and she prodded Captain Jackson in the shoulder, causing him to turn around. Jackson nodded and beckoned him over, with a nod from this girl, whose eyes seemed to have taken a slight shine, from unshed tears.
"Sergeant Jason Grace, 82nd division US Airborne, meet Captain Thalia Grace, SOE, British Army, and the woman I would call my sister," Jackson introduced, the words seeming to weigh a tonne on his shoulders as he said them, "And I think she may well be your own by blood."

Suddenly, Jason seemed to feel the same weight that seemed to have settled on his Commanding Officer's shoulders had now settled upon his own.
His sister…Alive?
In France?
No, he just couldn't deal with this now, not after the day he'd just been through.

Jason left the room.

Thalia went to chase him, her heart crying out for the brother for whom she had searched so long, and she was just about at the door when she was caught in the arms of the man she was proud to call her brother. Such was her desperation that she tried to shrug Percy off her, scratching his arms and punching his chest as she scrambled to reach the one goal she had fought for for so long.
She didn't know how long it lasted, and she didn't know when the tears that had been threatening to fall made their appearance.

She didn't know when she fell asleep either, a mixture of the exhaustion of their ordeal in imprisonment those past few days, the physical strain of the fighting the other morning preceding their capture and now the emotional turmoil of rejection from her own flesh and blood. That familiar embrace of her closest friend since childhood, so warm and welcoming seemed to lull her into the realm of Morpheus.

She woke up in a sleeping bag on a hard wooden floor, a moderate heat and a bright sun permeating the building in which she slept. Stretching quickly, she took stock of her situation.

She had been in France for nearly three years by now, having left their family home in London not long after Percy set off once more on the Rodney. She had been stationed by the SOE, the British intelligence service, in Caen, one of the major cities on the Normandy coast, and from there she had been responsible for coordinating and arming the French Resistance against the German Occupation.

One of the things that had most irked her new comrades had been the apparent pledge of the French Government to serve Hitler and his regime of tyranny, Vichy France, they'd called it, surrendering the coastal regions to the German occupiers, and going on, living their merry lives.
This had been one of the first things she had needed to combat, this apparent mistrust of Monsieur De Gaulle, who appeared to have fled the country to the 'comfort' of the British Isles instead of standing and fighting for the values of the republic, of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Next, of course, had been finding the various groups of rebels. La Resistance, they had dubbed themselves, running about the countryside, blowing up train tracks and plastering their paraphernalia all over the sites. Subterfuge and sabotage were art forms to Thalia, an expert tracker and trapper herself. Many groups championed their own political agendas, some promoting ideals of communism, others flying the flag of reinstating a monarchy.
Others were simply anarchists, aiming to cause trouble to those in power.

All in all, Thalia had gathered about 200 Frenchmen and Frenchwomen to her crowd, flying the unified banner of freedom.
It didn't have to be huge explosions which lit up the night that qualified as sabotage, nor did it have to be something as simple as nicking a German officer's revolver in broad daylight.

It was the simple issues that Thalia most enjoyed causing, for they were what gave her the most information. Sending German supplies up in flames would make the Fuhrer angry, yes, and so the men would become more desperate, but they could easily resolve such an issue by fixing the rails and placing guards at closer distances. No information would reach the SOE back home, and so the task was a foolish one.

They had targeted roads along the routes which the Wehrmacht used as they transported men, artillery, armour and supplies. They didn't plant mines, instead they felled trees - always the heaviest oak, or perhaps trigger a landslide immediately after a rainstorm.
Winter was hardly safe for the Germans either, as innocuous snowdrifts would 'collapse' further down the road, potentially taking a soldier or two with them.
All the while, the lovely kind subservient French public would show out in their droves, digging the brave soldiers out from the snow, warning them kindly of the trouble one might find in the woodlands, or perhaps bringing along the local woodman's kit to cut the trees down to size, and to be stored away for later use.

Of course what the Germans didn't notice, of course, was that the mechanics repairing their blown out engines, or the peasants making pleasant conversation, or the hunters bringing back lost soldiers, were all members of Thalia's little cell of resistance fighters.
An unsuspecting mechanic might copy the measurements and capabilities of the German tanks, taking note of the pattern of the tracks and the model, so that the vital information could be ferried back home to Blighty.
The humble folk fixing the rails might have left a loose sleeper or two, or missed a rivet. After all, if something went wrong, The Germans could hardly blame the poor, 'unskilled' French townspeople for their inability to join rails now, could they?

Thalia smiled to herself as she remembered one particularly interesting week in which the garrison seemed to all catch a horrific stomach illness at the same time. Nobody could ever confirm, of course, that there hadn't been poisonous mushrooms in their soups or rotten potatoes in the stew specifically, because the soldiers were a part of the community, were they not? They were risking their lives so that the evil British could not colonise France just as they had done so many other countries in the world.

Some people were simply too easy to please.

She exited the little farmhouse to an unfamiliar scene - about four hundred men, all in a standard British Battledress, were setting up defences.
The hills were alive with men, working with the resistance fighters to pick out the best spots to place their positions, while potholes and caltrops - painful looking barbed spikes - were planted along the main road, designed to blow out the tyres of the German trucks.
Even better was the German traffic sign some of the Frenchmen had forged, fairly accurately, Thalia had to admit. The shape itself was nothing great an achievement, Lysander the carpenter would have had little to no trouble doing it this morning, but the sign of 'Achtung, Minen!' made the SOE agent laugh for sure.

One of the privates was busy ramming the stake into the ground by the side of the road while men laid out spent and repainted landmines along the cobbles of the road. The hesitation of the lead tank commander would prove to be fatal should he stop, due to the presence of the PIAT - Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank weapon would prove extremely useful.

Walking down the main street, Thalia noticed that the men bore the rose cap badge of the East Yorkshire Regiment, though there were some notable Canadians, and a gentleman who looked to be of Oriental descent. Each gave her a sharp salute, not judging her for being a woman in the army, not even casting a second glance to the rifle she had snatched up and was now carrying.

Pulling aside a Sergeant of the East Yorkshire Regiment, she found that the officers had set up shop in the church, with a gunner atop the tower, and so she made her way over, responding to each 'hullo' and ''morning' she received along the way.
All in all, the bustle of the little hamlet, unfamiliar as it was, did not seem as though it was being readied for a lethal assault from an armoured column, more akin to the day before the village fair, which made it all the more easy to manage with such a large number of villagers.

On her way to the church, she found one of the resistance fighters she most trusted. Ironically, her father had arrived as a German bailiff of sorts for the region, one Friedrich Schafer. His daughter Annabeth had followed, and her rebellious streak had come through in a big and rather unexpected way, as she seemed to think up strategies as though she had planned them before arriving. The girl, a tall blonde German, as most were these days, had a flawless grasp on French, and an impressive control over her English, only a slight hint of an accent seeping through on newer words, or as she read over long distances.

The duo had become firm friends, and Annabeth had become something of a ringleader among the resistance fighters - one became the planner, the other the executor of the plans. Furthermore, Annabeth's father was a very open person regarding their plans for the area, even going so far as to take his daughter's new friend on tours of the nearby sections of the seawall, since the girl seemed to show such interest in the ambitions of the Reich.

Needless to say, Thalia had jumped at every chance presented to her, sending information back in reams via her radio set and Morse tapper. In fact, she made use of her new companion in Annabeth as a tactical bounceboard, earning herself the codename 'Muse' among the higher-ups on the Twelve Committee.

The pair entered the church, Thalia wincing at the stained glass panes, many shattered or otherwise badly damaged from the fighting of the previous day. That church had been a beacon of hope to the people of Caen and the surrounding smaller towns such as this one, since Friedrich Schafer hadn't the heart to remove it, despite its prominence as a target and waymarker for enemy bombers.

It was truly a shame to see it as damaged as it was now, the building having stood up to years of the German occupation, only to be destroyed by those arriving to free it.

Annabeth herself was on tenterhooks. Thalia had told her in great detail of her best friend, making him out to be a hero - a man who always did the right thing, not that which would bring him success, necessarily. Such people, Annabeth knew, were instinctively distrusting of spies and double agents.

Annabeth, by her own luck, was both.

Thalia's face seemed to light up when they spotted a pair of men by the table, and so over they went, neither of them looking or acting like the grown women they were, Thalia looking like an overexcited little sister, and Annabeth certainly feeling like an abashed child in front of this formidable soldier.
As it so happened, Captain Jackson himself was locked in conversation with a tall, particularly broad Ginger man, with a moustache that would have made Annabeth's grandfather back home in Dresden proud. Of course, her grandfather wasn't ginger, nor was he quite as muscular as this gentleman - Bairstow, she heard Jackson refer to him as - due to her family's history of military scholars, who rarely went into the field. Their name may have been shepherd, but Rudi Schafer had shown those who doubted him exactly how much damage a shepherd's crook could truly do.

Captains Jackson and Bairstow did eventually rise from their intense conversation, though neither seemed to be satisfied with their progress on the planning. Warrant Officer Jenkins had, by this point, called over a Corporal who had been standing guard, handing the young Canadian a sheet of paper. The man gave it a quick read, before running off at full pelt in the direction of the hills, evidently carrying a message to the vanguard of resistance fighters and Yorkshiremen.

Jackson noticed them, his eyes widening for a moment and becoming slightly unfocussed before his lips drew up in a tight line, his eyebrows furrowing and shoulders tensing.
"Thalia!" he exclaimed, enthusiastic and welcoming like any good friend would be, before he turned to the female Captain slightly, "Who's the German spy?"
Thalia faltered slightly, and Annabeth's breath caught in her throat - the Brit couldn't have got it more right. After all, what else was a double agent but a liability to a military officer?
Thalia seemed to have lost all mental function at this point, stuttering lamely at her friend's rapid deduction. "Perce, h… how?" she managed to gasp out, eyes wide in shock at the pace at which Jackson had uncovered what no German soldier, even Annabeth's own father, had ever done.
"Simple, my dear Thals. She looked at every officer in this room in turn, tracked Jenkins across the room and then noted where Frank was off to in the blink of an eye, not to mention that I'm fairly sure your friend here," he pointed at Annabeth, "spotted Bairstow and myself before you did, sister dearest. You were quick enough, of course," he placated, "But only a habitual liar or a spy would do so as instinctively as this charming lady just did, among common French villagers."
"And the German bit?" Annabeth responded in English, head cocked in curiosity.
"I guessed," The Englishman deadpanned. "Captain Perseus Jackson, East Yorkshire Regiment, formerly of His Majesty's Royal Navy at your service, milady," he said with a most certainly dramatic flourish, causing Annabeth to recoil in slight shock. Was this some sort of English custom? How was she to respond? She already estimated herself to be on thin ice with this Englishman, for behind that gallant façade, there was most definitely a deep-rooted hatred of the people of her homeland.
Noticing her friend of three years' internal strife, Thalia slapped Captain Jackson lightly on the arm, laughing at his ridiculous antics. "No bloody wonder you're on the ground here with the 'uncultured gun wielders' eh, Perce?" she remarked, smirking in an attempt to change the topic, "I always knew you were made for the army, eh? You never did mention yesterday exactly how that came about."

Jackson grimaced, a slight look of wistfulness crossing his face that made Annabeth wish that Thalia had never asked the question. It was almost strained, as he attempted to keep his composure.
Such insignificant things as emotions were thrown out of the window as the Corporal from before, the Canadian, Annabeth remembered, burst back into the room, a sheet of paper clutched in his hand. Not even bothering to salute, he passed it straight to the Ginger Captain - Bairstow, Annabeth remembered - and doubled over panting.
Annabeth didn't even have to ask if it was good or bad - she already knew. In fact, she was sure anyone with a pair of eyes on their face could have deduced the situation at hand.
Of course, because apparently the military didn't bother with using brains, Jackson took it upon himself to explain what exactly was afoot.

"Armour column approaching from south side, 2 companies' worth of infantry accompanying. Tanks confirmed to be 12th SS Panzers, moving to flank the attackers at Caen." he stated, a grim tone to his voice. "If we hold them here, then the advance can continue as planned."
Bairstow nodded, leaving the church immediately to go forward and inspect the forward defences, set up by the men and women whom Thalia and Annabeth had led for so long, who might well meet their ends today.

Jackson placed the sheet of paper almost reverently on the desk, before he too left the church, shouting out a nearly indiscernible command to the men stationed in the steeple. The town descended once more into a state of nearly unbearable tension, like a string waiting to be snapped, and Annabeth could only hoe that when it did, they would not be the ones to suffer as a result.

Men rushed about the town like a horde of panicked buffaloes. Army, Navy, Civilian, French, English, Canadian, it didn't matter. Each man and woman present had a job, and every being within the village wanted to survive. The whirlwind of activity continued, as this little collection of houses in the French countryside prepared to become a warzone once more.

Boards went up over the windows of every house, rifle barrels poking out of little slits like snakes, ready to spit their poison on their foes, and creating overlapping zones of fire throughout the little hamlet. Every step an attacker took would have him fired upon by men and women desperate for him to die. Each inch a tank advanced along the road meant another inch closer to a PIAT Anti Tank weapon, primed and ready to blow it out.

Machine gun nests, too, had been commandeered by the French rebels, the German weapons and ammunition making little difference in the eyes of the farmers, workers and common folk. After all, the powers that resided above would not save a soldier if he were to be shot by a weapon of his own country's engineering.

When the Senior Officers of the two joint companies of the Yorkshire Regiment returned, they couldn't help but be impressed. Perseus Jackson had expected the town's preparation to mirror the readiness of the Germans prior to their own assault, which had in truth been difficult to take as it was due to the sturdy stone walls of the buildings and the wide, expansive main road which had allowed for little to no cover at any point in time. This, however, was a different prospect altogether. Nobody knew if the amour column had been given prior information regarding the recent British capture of this town, and Sergeant Grace's organisation of the vanguard's defences had been precious little short of genius.

The intricacy of the traps he and the French had set up was brilliant, with the mines and pitfalls further up the road, to the heavy machine gun emplacements hidden deep in the trees.

Gun platforms had been hastily put up in the trees, from where huntsmen could put their talents to use with their old RSC M1917 rifles - relics from the Great War brought home by fathers and grandfathers who had been lucky enough to return from the front. Incredibly, through a combination of British-supplied arms courtesy of Thalia's duties with the SOE, and other such salvaged arms, they had one hell of an arsenal at their disposal.

Each fighter had a weapon, at the very least.

The townspeople were tense, yes, but victory was certainly well within the realm of possibility, as long as the tanks weren't allowed anywhere near the town itself. The Tiger Tank, or its cousin the Panther, were both juggernauts of close to epic proportions. In fact, Jackson had heard rumours of tanks yet bigger than those - Tanks so big that Krupp artillery guns were mounted on it as the primary armament, so massive that it outclassed the Vickers Medium tank by a country mile, and those were mammoth on their own.

He knew that such a thing could only be tackled if it were put if front of them - there was little use in stressing unnecessarily about something they may never even come to face, if it truly did exist.

His musings were cut off by the ominous rumble of a tank's caterpillar tracks, and the first boom of a PIAT anti-tank.
The battle had begun in the forest, and it certainly wasn't going to stay quiet in the village long.
Captain Perseus Jackson breathed out, clearing his mind.
The spritely violin of Paganini's Caprice No.24 rang out in his mind, as he prepared for the destruction to follow.

A/N

Good day all, another chapter down, and five characters introduced, would you believe it?
Annabeth hasn't had all that much to do as of yet, but I've got big plans for next chapter, including a couple of things which did actually happen in the Normandy campaign, and five people all in different parts of an urban battle. A defence, I find, is going to be quite an assignment compared to the assaults I've written so far - much more of the mental side than the physical action. After all...
Well, you'll see what I mean, hopefully.

For those of you who happen to be slightly more perceptive, you will see that I actually do two A/Ns? The little bit with the orchestra and the chess players does typically reflect what I'm going for, either in the chapter just gone, or in chapters to come, like this one, for instance. Well done if you figure it out, if not, perhaps have a look and see what you think, armed with this new it of knowledge.

As always, I'll reiterate that PJO ain't mine, my writing would be a damn sight better if I were Rick Riordan.
Evening all,
Sol
REVISED 04/04/2023