Ch6: Like a Rolling Wave

Jason Grace was terrified.
He would never admit it to his comrades, nor to those he trusted the most implicitly for well over a year after the event, but yes, the golden boy of the 82nd, the man who left home to fight in a faraway land, Jason Grace was well and truly fearing for his life at this point.

It was to be expected, one might say, for even the best, the bravest among them would baulk in fear of the monstrosity that was the Tiger Tank. Jason had even set himself with the idea that this would, in fact, be the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. It was huge. Bigger than anything the American Army and thir British allies had brought, the Sherman and the Vickers each being a medium tank as opposed to the heavy machine the Wehrmacht had chosen to bring to this fight.

Alongside it, as if a Tiger wasn't terrifying enough, were Panther Medium tanks, each packing a significant punch on their own, though of course nothing compared to the Tiger, the King of the Jungle, and now of the field of war.
In all, the Germans had brought a force consisting of ten main battle tanks, reinforced by infantrymen, riding in their Half Tracks and troop transports.
The worst thing?
Jason couldn't do a single thing.
Well, in all fairness, that was something of an exaggeration - he was not entirely powerless in this scenario, it was merely a bit of a downer that he was in charge of the Vanguard - he was here to initiate the trap, and then close the lid.

The German armour took their leisurely time going by, unopposed, as the plan dictated, and the infantry followed, the Wehrmacht soldiers laughing and joking boisterously amongst themselves.
Jason snarled, a low growl that was barely audible over the grinding sound of caterpillar tracks and toiling petrol engines. The fools were about to learn the price of their negligence.
As the last tank passed by, their plan began to take shape. In a series of resounding bangs, like gunshots, the tyres of the front three Half Tracks blew out, stopping them in their paths, leaving the troops within them floundering, unable to discern how exactly their vehicles had lost movement.
The drivers hopped out, ignoring the annoyed yells of the drivers of the vehicle behind them, the first bending down to inspect his blown out tyres.
"Ah, Spikes in the road," The man explained in his native German, to much complaining and gesticulation from the infantrymen.

This was their chance. Three gunshots rang out, masked by the equally loud Bangs of bursting tyres. Jason smiled. The Germans infantry now had no means of hasty retreat, the men wary of caltrops on the road and their troop transports stuck. Even more importantly, the tanks were isolated - cut off from the vital infantry support which was meant to accompany them and prevent them from being ambushed from all sides. After all, as formidable as a main battle tank could be in the field of war, the militaries of the greatest powers in the world had found a way in which this weapon of wanton destruction could be upended, the too by a mere infantryman on the ground.

The SS Infantrymen had a new priority - to catch up with their Armour, lest their entire company be wiped out by this strategy of divide and conquer.

The SS Obersturmfuhrer recognised this. He also recognised that he had been cleverly trapped by his foe - after all, it was not just anyone who made it into the Waffen SS; the Schutzstaffel, led by the Fuhrer himself. His company could only succeed if they are together. It was impossible to succeed were they not to be reunited with the tanks, and the tanks were doomed to a horrible fate should they be left alone. It was better, therefore, to take their chances against the gauntlet that was the forest, and reinforce their advancing tanks, the drivers blissfully ignorant of the loss of their infantry support.

Jason watched in barely hidden glee as the Waffen SS Infantry advanced into their trap. Yes, the tanks would have protection from their infantry escort, but they were certainly not counting for what Captains Jackson and Bairstow had prepared.
The trap was sprung, the scene set. Giving a sharp signal to follow, Jason began stalking his German foes, like a panther hunting its prey.

His men followed as they should, rifles primed and ready, the two indispensable PIAT Anti-Tank guns up and ready to wreak havoc among the enemy armour. The two companies didn't have many between them, and so for Jason's force to have two was huge, both tactically and for the morale of the troops. If Jason's men failed, then the men in the hamlet in the valley below were well and truly screwed. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Frank Zhang, on the other side of the road in the forest, was just as terrified as he had been these past two days of combat - one would assume that you'd get used to the feeling of slowly settling dread before a fight, the dreaded jitters, and that horrible trickle down his spine, like someone had slid an ice cube down the back of his battledress. Still, here he was, three day into the hellish wasteland that the Northern coast of France had become, shaking like a leaf in a storm and yet as ready as he had ever been to fight for his life.

The Canadian platoon had been the ones setting the traps along the road - nothing much more complicated than what the French had done prior, merely with the best possible tools to do so, and much more intimate knowledge, in Frank's humble opinion, on making things go boom.
The road, once a mere dirt track into the densely forested hills leading further inland, was now a dangerous path, though this was nearly indiscernible to the untrained eye.
On closer inspection, one might begin to pick out details.

A little cluster of leaves in the centre of the road hid an improvised bear trap, an ingenious bit of innovation from one of Frank's men, who had grown up close to Ontario, close to the lakes. It was honestly a terrifying prospect, and Franks was almost hopeful that it would fail, or perhaps the unfortunate German who trod on it would be lucky enough to avoid its horrifying steel teeth when it eventually triggered. The trap itself was made up of horribly twisted steel, the remnants of an exploded shell. The results would be too horrifying to stomach.
Or perhaps they would be so lucky as to trigger a pitfall? The hole wasn't deep as such, but it made up for any such deficiencies by virtue of the rather horrifying barbed wire hidden inside. It was nearly mediaeval in its execution, and yet if it fulfilled the results they desired, it would be more than enough.

Hurrying along, Frank and his little section of Canadians, all having survived the three days since the Sixth, began to tail the German troops, their French allies staying further to the first, so as to swing around and cut off any escape, forming a cordon of hellfire and brimstone for any fleeing enemy soldiers.
Now, Frank had listened to the radio since the start of the war, and he had gained something of a first impression of the SS - those men didn't sound like the type who might run away scared. If they did, it certainly didn't sound like they would be taken prisoner all that easily by the French peasants they had subjugated four years prior, let alone allow themselves to be defeated by them in a fight.
Still, Frank had faith in the Captain's plan, and now, since the most difficult phase was completed, it was merely a case of winning the fight.

Perseus Jackson, Thalia Grace and Annabeth Chase were outside in the glaring sun of the Norman morning, rushing about to make a final inspection of the defences when the explosions started.
The first three were sharp, ringing out like gunshots. Jackson smiled, a predatory grin reminiscent of a wolf plastered across his handsome face.
Thalia noticed this, a devilish smirk of her own spreading across her face. The trio made their way briskly into cover, ducking down behind one of the stone walls that marked the edge of a section of farmland, and where they knew Sergeant Grace and Corporal Zhang's men would be making their rendezvous.
All was quiet for a few moments, before the fighting broke out in earnest.

Rapid chattering bursts of Machine Gun fire rang out from the trees, the sound echoing through the trees and impacting the ground, kicking up puffs of dust from the dry earth of the French Countryside.
They heard more shots now, this time from their own troops, the Brens within the first farmhouse waking up and tearing through the unaware first line of the infantry escort, bogged down by the rough dirt road, and winded from the run on which they had been forced to embark in the searing heat in order to catch up with their Armour.

Five SS soldiers fell immediately, before their comrades sprung into action, taking cover behind the first tank - the Tiger itself.
Jackson and his companions, now a section of ten Yorkshiremen, hurried across to one of the points closer to the main road across which the tanks advanced, one of their precious PIATs ready to be let loose.
On the Tiger came, the Panthers accompanying it rumbling ominously behind, 7.5 cm guns sweeping about in order to ascertain targets. Little did they know, of course, that the enemy was right under their noses.

They waited, this little group of allied soldiers, until the tank had come to point blank range - a mere ten metres away. An untrained civilian would be able to hit the target from here, for a battle-hardened soldier this was child's play.
The anti-tank missile struck the behemoth on its weak point - the tracks used to move it, causing a huge explosion. Bits of shrapnel were thrown from the point of contact, chain links from the track belt of the Panzer thudding forcefully into the stone of the wall and the belt itself flopping uselessly to the floor. The tank stopped, motionless, as the SS infantry began firing their response to the ambush.

As though Murphy's law was not sufficiently ingrained into Jackson's brain by now, disaster struck once more, this time on a much more personal level than it had ever been on the beaches of Normandy a few days prior. Two rounds thudded into Jackson's shoulder, causing him to scream out in shock, eyes flying open in agony as white-hot pain tore through his right side. Cursing loudly at his incompetence, he switched shoulder, shrugging of the pain so that he could raise his rifle to fire left-handed, right eye squeezed shut so as to focus on his target through his left eye.

His injured right shoulder screamed in protest as he fired once, twice, thrice, recoil thudding into his left shoulder and jerking his body back, taking a deep breath to set himself against this terrifying pain.
He knew now that to win, he had to fight, and fight hard.
To survive, he knew that he had to retreat.
The zone of possibility in the middle was slim. Very slim indeed.
Therefore, fighting it was.

The music in his ears was faltering, a stuttering melody interrupted by the screams of his pain, and that certainly didn't help in his efforts to win a fight, the motions of aiming and firing a rigorous, gruelling task, despite the familiarity of the motion of reloading and firing that had been almost second nature since his youth. This, however, was something terrifying.
There had always been a rhythm - a melody he could use to blank out the screams, to shield his ears from the pounding of the massive guns of a battleship, a means through which he had been able to keep his cool in his long, distinguished military career. He had transported his mind to a place in which he felt safe, away from the screeching of ripping steel, away from the clamour and noise of the men around him, young ratings who had never seen battle before screaming as shells threw up pillars of water around them.
He moved his mind away from all such noise and distraction, and into the one place where, as a child, he had felt truly comfortable. Into his Grandfather's study, the man himself studying some schematic or another, his HMV Gramophone playing a piece from one of the greats, his Grandfather humming along, and explaining to the enraptured boy the significance of the composer and the piece.

Now, however, it was something different entirely. As Percy looked around, he saw the destruction, the blood, the gore, just as he normally did. However, alien to him in the last ten years were the sounds.
He heard every shot, every scream of pain, every order given by an NCO to their men. As he fired once more, striking down an unfortunate SS infantryman. The man's life was gone, the spark vanishing from his eyes, in so little time.
It was a truly terrifying prospect, Captain Perseus Jackson realised, that he held the power of life and death over a living, breathing being with a life perhaps just like his own. Life on a boat made the violence an objective thing. They were not shooting at humans, merely at this hunk of steel that threatened their country. Battles were fought at a range of 20 kilometres, their enemy a mere speck on the horizon, marked out by the plume of smoke belched out by the chimneys of the ship.

Killing such an enemy was not a matter of looking him in the eye and firing a piece of metal, rather it was numbers and angles and timings. It was impersonal and detached.
Here, however, it was laid out bare for him to see. Every bullet he fired cost a life, every time his finger squeezed that little piece of metal he called a trigger, a human being's life would be lost, a family would be ripped apart.

Then he remembered what it was that he was fighting for.
He had his own family, his own friends back home, cowering in their country, lives wrecked by the tyrant for whom these men fought, and for whom he would gladly give up his own life.
A greater service to King and Crown, of course, would be to fight and live another day.
And so he did.

With a rallying cry, Jackson fired off the final two rounds of his third clip, hurling the spent one into the eyeline of a Waffen SS soldier and ending his life with the next shot from his Enfield Rifle.
A burst of automatic fire gave him the opportunity he had been searching for, causing the German solider to flinch as he hurled a hand grenade into the path of the next tank, trying desperately to blank out the screaming protests of his injured shoulder.

Molotov cocktails, those ingenious inventions of the Finns in the year just gone by against the Allies' Russian friends, named for a Russian politician in order to spite the Communist aggressors, flew from open windows, the petrol splashing out from within the bottles which cracked on impact with the road, and burning on the road.
The fearsome 'whoosh' sound of two PIAT missiles hung over the sound of battle as the rear two tanks of the column exploded in a blast of shrapnel and fire, effectively decimating the Germans' firepower.

All that remained now was one functional Panther, though unable to move as a result of the tank carcasses around it, a Tiger, unable to move and yet unbroken in spirit, its secondary armament still rattling out machine gun fire as the wounded beast defiantly struggled to turn the tide of the battle, the Tank Commander within showing commendable composure under the undeniable pressure that had been placed on his shoulders.
The final Panther Medium Tank was crippled by the final PIAT at their disposal, the vehicle itself exploding in a violent fireball, the heat so strong that many of those present would discover at the end of the fighting that the hairs on their arms had been burned off, several losing eyebrows, and one unfortunate Frenchman finding himself blind from the bright light of the combusting fuel tank of the Panzer.

A fresh burst of defensive machine gun fire removed the Obersturmfuhrer and one of his Sergeants, driving the remaining men of the SS Panzerspahcompanie - Armoured Scout Company - into full retreat.
Five were cut off in the hills, a further twelve reaching the forests on the seaward side before being captured by the French Resistance rearguard.
Jackson gave his companions a pleased smile, the colour dropping from his face due to blood loss, and the adrenaline from the battle slowly wearing off, and promptly passed out, barely breathing.

Thalia Grace could not contain her shock - they had driven off an attack of this magnitude, possibly a crucial point in the push for Normandy, cutting off the Germans from the coast altogether. Nearly all the allied ordnance, armour and troops would be ashore by now, Thalia knew, and the advance would continue into the centre of France, striking out to Paris in order to reclaim the French capital.
Of course, that was when the moron who organised the entire thing chose to pass out.

Thalia was about to pick her idiot of a friend up herself and carry him to the church in which the medic had set themselves up, when the Yorkshireman, Captain Bairstow sprinted over, face pale and brows creased in concern.
"Captain Grace!" he exclaimed, picking her out from among her comrades, "Where is Jackson?"
Thalia gestured at her unconscious friend, becoming ever more concerned by the urgency of the man's tone. This wasn't a reaction to an impressive win, not at all.
"The moron got himself shot twice in the shoulder, and chose not to fall back to the church," she explained, gesturing at the Captain. "What's happened now?" she demanded, voice harsh and sharp as a leader's should be.
"This was the scout company, Thalia." he said, face expressionless and voice dull in acceptance that he would die in the coming battle.

Thalia swore violently, sending a runner up to Jason and Corporal Zhang, still up in the hills and entirely unaware of the scenario they had just found themselves in. They found themselves now, down on numbers through injury and fatality, without anti-tank weaponry against a full battalion of hostile heavy armour.
Their 'mighty' force was now roughly three hundred and fifty fit fighters, half of which were civilians and thoroughly untrained in the scope of anti-tank warfare.
To make matters worse, of their Senior Officer staff, they were left with only Captain Charlie Bairstow, an excellent soldier himself, but instead of the prodigious Perseus Jackson, they had Thalia Grace, a Captain by virtue of her ability to spy and pass on information, not by virtue of her leadership.
First Lieutenant John Brook had fallen in the fighting to the mighty primary armament of the Tiger, leaving only Harry Norman and Stephen Jenkins of the Naval company with any true experience in the field of leadership, though Bairstow's Lieutenants had fortunately survived this first engagement.

A fine situation indeed.
At least the weather was good, she mused to herself, chuckling darkly at her cynical, all too English optimism.

The runner sent to warn the men in the hills returned, panting heavily from the exertion of his sprint up the hills to Jason's position, clutching a piece of paper in one hand, which he handed to Thalia before immediately collapsing, a bullet wound in his stomach.
More gunshots rang out in the afternoon sun, the sky devoid of clouds and the sun giving the now weary allied troops little respite from the harrowing combat into which they were being thrown once more.

Thalia steeled her nerves, letting out a deep breath and squaring her shoulders before snatching up her rifle. "Get to the houses, and if the situation is dire, retreat into the forest, understand?" she asked firmly, addressing the fifty or so soldiers gathered around her. Seeing a lack of a reaction, she merely shook her head, hoping that she could have saved at least one life through this bit of advice. The situation was not good at all, and their troops would nearly certainly experience losses. Jason and his Canadian companions in the hills, from Jason's bloodstained note, were already pulling back into the forest and hoping for the best, enemy infantry in full pursuit.
Percy was down for the count, and it'd be a miracle if he woke up to see the next morning, or at least as a free man. Even Annabeth, her friend of three years, for all her tactical excellence, had never been in a combat situation until just now, and if she left the church, she would surely die.

Annabeth Schafer didn't think that she would ever end up in such a situation. She had been a little girl, growing up in her Grandfather's house in Dresden, Saxony. She had lost her mother early in life, the woman having been a student in the School of Science at the University of Technology in Dresden and having left due to a familial commitment shortly after Annabeth's birth never to return.

Here she was, having joined Friedrich in his travels to France, having left her grandfather at home despite the man's old age, and now she was tending to a British Infantry Captain - a soldier for the enemies of her home nation.
She might've laughed, but she certainly wasn't laughing when the shooting started again.
Making sure that a medic was on hand to tend to the injured Officer, the German woman snatched up a gun - a discarded Sten submachine gun, its simplistic design making all obvious, and she rushed to the open window of the church, the once-beautiful stained glass now a mess of shattered shards on the floor, and leaving a clear line of fire into both the main road and the edge of the forests, should they be encircled.

The sight that greeted her was a terrifying one - a force much larger than any she had previously seen. The remaining four companies of the Armoured Reconnaissance unit burst through the trees, armoured cars and tanks firing from all cylinders and destroying two of the makeshift barricades put up by the Allied defenders in the blink of an eye.
It made sense that they would refrain from firing on the buildings, the prisoners now held within being too valuable to sacrifice in such a way, let alone the British soldiers who would doubtlessly possess crucial intelligence on the Allied offensive.

The Germans did not do what made sense.
The mighty Waffen SS, the pride of her homeland, was reduced to butchers. Indiscriminate killers who merely went for victory, no matter the cost. A tear slipped from the eye of the German lady, her faith in the humanity of those her father so dearly supported shaken to its very core.
Annabeth had joined the resistance, not out of spite nor through any desire to cause lasting harm to the Germans stationed in the town, but to undermine the authority of the Fuhrer, to see if the man and his ideals were so strong that the conscripted boys raised up through the Hitlerjugend scheme could be capable of individual thought, to leave their posts in France, to escape the tyranny of the Nazis in power.

Her grandfather had explained the situation to her in intricate detail before she had left alongside her father - 'novice' and 'foolish', he had described Friedrich as being, and he had proceeded to explain the policies of Otto von Bismarck, and then the tremendous failings of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been the ruler as Annabeth was a child. He had also gone into detail on the policies of the silly failed Austrian artist who claimed to be capable of ruling the world under the banner of his Third Reich.
This was not what her homeland stood for, no.
This was wrong, plain and simple.
For the first time in her life, Annabeth Schafer took the life of a fellow German.
It would not be the last life of a compatriot she took.

A/N

Another cliffhanger, yes, hooray for me, etc. etc.
I was actually planning on introducing the second phase of this story in the coming chapter, and then I miraculously came up with this beautiful idea, not only to set something up, but to get out yet another chapter of action, no matter how much i decide to focus on the characters' emotions and thoughts as it happens - I certainly find it easier to write.
I'd just like to apologise to that one Guest reviewer who was hoping for a Perlia just before I posted the chapter detailing their relationship - no, it won't be Perlia, it's currently between two possible pairings if I feel like introducing romance of any kind into the story, and there'll be a nice little hint at one next chapter - you can probably guess which reference to canon it'll be since Percy is in a hospital, fairly obvious I'd hope.

Good day to you all, and I'll be back next Saturday with more,
Sol
REVISED 04/04/2023