Ch12 - Into the Fire

The two simultaneous exclamations were met with a flurry of emotions all at once, and for several reasons.
There were, of course, at this moment, three teams of Allied soldiers here on the Italian-Austrian border, with the two newly freed hostages. Of this group, four understood any level of concern for an 'Annabeth', and a further three had perhaps some understanding of the issue.
This, of course, was further overshadowed by the shock of being issued with new orders so immediately after their success, albeit with the apparent loss of one of their comrades.
The situation required the presence of a leader.
Zoya El-Faouly stepped up.
What she had in front of her was a rabble; a mess of people with a mess of objectives, and that needed to change, sharpish.
"Lieutenant Underwood," She began, giving the man a firm look that allowed for nothing but respect. "We have prisoners - get them back to base; who knows, they might end up vaguely useful at some point."
The Canadian nodded, turning around and delegating to his subordinates, inciting a flurry of activity.
One group out of the way. One group less to deal with now.
Bloody Hell human beings are idiots.
The next team to deal with was her own, a team of four each alert and ready to contend with new orders, as she expected, though it was with a slight hint of disappointment that she noticed the nervous tick that Piper displayed whenever she was in a moment of indecision. Reyna too, seemed to be displaying her standard tells which tended to indicate some level of anxiety…
Did they feel…
Responsible…
For the loss of this Annabeth woman?
Zoya would have to watch them closely, for it would not do at all for her team to have any such things on their minds, not in a situation as delicate as this, hundreds of miles behind enemy lines and with a great deal further, if her assumption about this new assignment was of anything resembling accuracy.

Speaking of which…
"Mister Underwood, you said you had new orders; let's hear them," she asked, inviting the dark-skinned man, largely quiet thus far, to give them the new information which would dictate their next course of action. The man rummaged around in his pocket a couple of moments, his eyes lighting up when he grasped the relevant sheet of paper.
"OSS Agent Codename Selene captured, stop.
Intelligence contact in Vienna, Austria, stop
Maps unavailable, utilise Taurus radio interceptors, stop
Teams Hunter and Halfblood to initiate rescue mission, stop
Be advised of enemy Tank production within Germany, stop
Casualties expected, stop.
Message ends"

Once more, the group fell into silence.
Now, it was the turn of Thalia Grace to step up, setting aside shock, confusion, sadness and hurt to draw herself up, electric blue eyes seeming to spark in power, all of a sudden looking every inch the Army Captain that she was, an aura of sheer power seeming to exude from her very person.
She didn't know herself why she did so, and yet she took charge, sending a thankful look to the Egyptian Sergeant who had broken her out of her stupor, and began to speak.
"First Lieutenant Underwood," she began, looking to the man who was still fearfully clutching at the scrap of paper on which was written their fate, "I take it your team isn't exactly the most attuned to combat?"
"No, Ma'am," he replied, confirming her suspicion and setting her plan in stone.
"In that case, can I trust you and your men to get the captives out of here?" she asked, though every person present knew and understood that this was no request; orders were orders, no matter how they were phrased.

The Canadian nodded sharply, understanding both the gravity of the task and the risks associated with it. The drive in had been easy enough, but for how long could they keep the act up? Their safest bet would be to fall back to the South of Italy, where the Allies were slowly advancing, hampered by the fallout of the recent eruption of Vesuvius. The volcano may not have wrought the same havoc as in 79AD, but the Bay of Naples had been clouded in ash and smoke for weeks, if not months, and it had fallen upon the Allies to aid the Italian natives as they did battle with nature itself, creating huge gaps in the forests as they attempted to stem the flow of the lava, desperately throwing buckets of water onto the onrushing tide of molten rock in an effort to halt the slow-moving promise of destruction in its fiery tracks as it crawled through the countryside, ruining farmland and consuming all that stood in its path.
The Italians, of course, had surrendered the previous year, though Hitler had rather wisely chosen to reinforce his former allies' position, which was rather less appreciated by all but himself. After all, was it truly his right to dictate as to where the war was to be fought? What right did he have to decide that he could fight his war on the land of a country who had withdrawn from the conflict?
Even if one paid no mind to the intricacies of Geopolitics and the rights of former allies, it was entirely necessary for one to consider the single most important factor. Of course, in a world of democracy and voting, one would doubtlessly realise that the majority of the voters came from one individual grouping of human beings, the populace itself.
The people of Italy, innocent men, women and children had suffered under the yoke of the leader who called himself 'Il Duce', and now, even when Mussolini had thrown in the towel, they were stuck, unable to leave their homes in good presence of mind, due to the irrational fear of their own untimely demise, or perhaps returning to find their homes reduced to naught but a burnt out husk, the result of a stray shell.
And yet, quite probably in full knowledge of these rather telling facts, the two sides fought on, reducing the countryside to a quagmire and ending the lives of humans without so much as a second thought.

Grover Underwood knew that he would be in it for the long run, in near-constant danger, but he could only pray to the powers that be that he might be safely delivered to his destination behind Allied lines.
At this point, it was decided.
South they would go.
And yet, it seemed as though they would have one more companion.
"I take it you shall require a guide?" spoke a heavily accented voice, the 't' ever so slightly softer, the 'k' being produced at the back of the throat. The voice was raspy and hoarse, the result of weeks in captivity.
"Your name?" Underwood asked, a single eyebrow raised in curiosity at this young man. The Italian who Jackson had just freed now stepped forwards, sharing a look with his sister.
"Niccolò Di Angelo, Signor American"
Well, Canadian really…" the Officer replied, stammering over his words as the Italian man fixed him with a look of complete disinterest, "Certainly not American, y'know?" he clarified, shrugging somewhat helplessly when the Italian, Di Angelo, simply walked off towards the Canadian's truck; a Diamond T 968 and dropping the ramp on the back, before calmly rolling out the four bikes enclosed within. Each a Harley identical to the ones on which the group from the American Seventh Army had brought along, the fastest, most powerful two-wheelers available to an Allied soldier, and easily fast enough to outrun anything the Nazi foe could possibly throw their way.

Returning and clapping Jackson on the shoulder, the Italian whispered a few words in the Englishman's ear, words that he'd never forget.
"Signor il Capitano, you keep Bianca safe, and I shall not kill you."
Niccolò Di Angelo entered the back of the truck without another word, leaving the majority of those still outside entirely struck dumb.
The next few minutes were spent moving prisoners; a rather hit-and-miss process, Biana Di Angelo decided, as she spoke to many of her new comrades. She found very quickly that the English Captain, Thalia understood her language, as did the American, McLean and the Spanish girl, Reyna. Between the four of them, much conversation was made, and much was learned.

Bianca and Niccolo, or Nico as she and her mother addressed the boy; for he was truly not much more than that; had lived close to the entirety of their lives on the outskirts of Venezia, or as the Americans called it, Venice. Then, Signor Mussolini and his radical ideas of Fascismo had found their way into the minds of the common folk of Italy. The man had built up a political following, rogues and braggarts who couldn't be persuaded to work a day, and were hence seduced by Il Duce's grand promises of power and glory to the Italian people.
In fact, to her great shame, Bianca herself had found herself caught up in this ridiculous fairground carousel of politics and showmanship. After all, what else could the farce that Mussolini had championed be described as?
When the fighting had started, Maria Di Angelo had taken her children with her, fleeing to the countryside and showing her own true strength, her compassion and her willingness to give.
After all, who else would set up a field hospital of their own accord, in the middle of the countryside?
The fighting began in Greece and so the people came and mocked Maria, for doing as she did, calling her a fool and living their own lives in the lavish riches of the city of canals.
Then, the war took a poorer turn.
The Italian Army began to lose, to the mere civilians of Greece, a numerically inferior force which hid and shot from the mountains, wreaking havoc among the forces which claimed heritage from the legions of Rome.
The people saw this, heard it in their radio sets and read it in their newspapers, and therefore once again they came to Maria Di Angelo, and yet with no less malice or remorse in their black, bitter hearts.
They abused the Italian woman still, calling her a witch of the dark, whose endeavour had cursed the brave men of Italy, and doomed their heroic campaign to failure the moment she had set up her hospital.
In fact, it was a true rarity that Maria Di Angelo found a person arriving in her establishment without a bad thing to say.
Naturally, these people were the spies of the British and Americans.
In truth, it had sounded like an exceedingly bad decision to the idealistic children of Maria Di Angelo, and yet they went along with it, appreciating that, if their own people refused to see the value in their mother's endeavour, perhaps at least cater to those foreigners who deemed it worthy.
And so it went.
Even when Italian Armed forces began to pour in, using the place to stock up on supplies and take a moment's rest on their journeys, one could guarantee that there were at least some five or six Allied spies in the place right alongside them, chattering away in perfect Italian and having a laugh, while satisfying the wishes of their seniors.
It may well have gone on this way forever.

And then the Nazis arrived.
The Gestapo were fast, and even if the Allied spies were faster, they weren't fast enough to alert the Di Angelos to their plight, and therefore condemning the Venetians to the pain and suffering of the past year. Maria was killed quickly, in a desperate attempt by the Gestapo Captain to make the teenage Niccolo talk.

The lack of cooperation had infuriated them yet further, and off to Innsbruck they had been sent, or at least such was the plan. Daily beatings and torture sessions were to be expected, and the voice of the horrible, sadistic Herr Moritz would never leave the shadows of the siblings' memories.
For the two to separate, and that too to work for the people Nico went so far as to blame for the loss of their mother, was a big deal for the siblings, and Bianca sincerely hoped that some part of her new comrades would understand and appreciate the emotional turmoil through which Nico especially must be going.
It was, therefore, with an almost dreading last look back that Bianca Di Angelo kicked her bike into gear, accelerating to pace and dropping easily into the formation in which the team, now a hefty nine, were now travelling.
The journey had been smooth thus far, riding on roads in the heights of the Alpine forests, avoiding the German, or more accurately, Austrian, soldiers tasked with guarding the mountain passes. In fact, it had been almost eerily quiet, as though they were being allowed to enter this far into Austrian territory. They had travelled close to a hundred miles in their two hours of hard riding, though their progress towards their destination in Vienna was significantly less than that, a result of their particularly convoluted route.
Nightshade's team, Hunter, as it was designated, had been advised by Underwood that there were quite probably Wehrmacht designations in various different points, and so the tedious task of mapping them out had been done via a clever piece of technological innovation.
It was,
Well, it was a radio.
The recent interception of the Enigma book and code reel had brought the Allies a huge advantage in the 'information war' as it were, and so the rare radio messages shared between the troops in Berlin, Vienna and the various guard posts in the Alpine mountains were entirely fair game for their cleverly constructed radio interceptor sets. By tuning into the correct frequencies, they could intercept the morse-tapped messages, and the spies among the group, namely Thalia, Reyna and Piper were more than capable of using their own knowledge of the admittedly genius Nazi system of coding and decoding messages, using a notebook handed to them a few days ago now by one of Underwood's spies.
Bianca had tried to join them, peering over the shoulder of the American agent, McLean, and the lady had been more than accommodating, explaining the process used by the behemoth that was the Enigma machine. She pointed out how the groupings of the letters denoted which Enemy Service was sending this message, for example Luftwaffe, German Air Force communications were always sent in groupings of five characters, the gaps to be removed and the code to be translated from there.
Agent McLean had also explained several of the intricacies of the now legendary German encryption machine, with each of its wheels and buttons, which dictated the settings of the computer. She had further explained, in the words of their currently lost comrade, Annabeth Schafer, 'They are so sure that the Allies wouldn't even find out the correct settings, let alone decode the cipher'.
Of course, it had been some excellent codework in Bletchley Park, England, that had allowed the British not only to listen in on German communications, but to actively disrupt the enemy's raids, the likes of Turing and his team having to carefully handpick the targets so as to not disclose the secret.
It was ironic, Bianca thought, that the Allies had to keep secret their knowledge of Enigma, to the Germans, the makers of Enigma.
More helpful still was the use of their radio set to receive direction from the FOB, Forward Operating Base currently in Saint Raphael, from where Sergeant El-Faouly, PO3 Valdez and Agents McLean and Ramirez-Arellano had been sent. The messages were never long, and they could never respond, Bianca noticed, as she was never allowed to see the contents.
She would honestly have felt like something close to a burden, had she not been so knowledgeable of the Germans and their mannerisms. She had heard many of their protocols, and had intimate knowledge of how to enact them, to the extent that she was able to aid the American OSS Agents in a few disruption exercises, going so far as to divert an entire battalion from their objective before they stopped, conscious of giving away their position.
The Germans, though not as proficient in the art of Radio-based triangulation as the Brits or Americans, were no slouches, and so they could hardly dare to go much further than twenty minutes or so on any given attempt at sabotage.
The team made a halt an hour or so past sundown, making camp some ten miles away from Saalfelden, in a town called Leogang, setting up their bikes in an old discarded garage, not even taking a second look at the pathetic state of the thing. It was cold and dank, but nobody could honestly care less, the group of nine far too conscious of the storm rolling in.

The chance to get off the saddle was a good opportunity for one Agent Reyna Avila Ramirez-Arellano to cast her mind back to the events of earlier that day.
They had stopped some 40 kilometres into their ride, having made good time as they went North, keeping an ear to the ground for all and any information coming their way. Their target was the Western city of Innsbruck, located on the banks of the river Inn, along the banks of which the team now rode.
Reyna rode in silence, watching Nightshade and 'Captain Jackson' as the man introduced himself as they led the way, each rider's eyes scanning the horizon for any sign of activity.
This leg of the journey was only 40 kilometres, little under an hour's worth of travel at their pace, and it wouldn't theoretically be a long stop.
Jackson ahead of her seemed to perk up at the sight of something, and in the blink of an eye, nine people were on high alert, backs snapping ever so slightly straighter. Squinting into the distance, Reyna observed what had made the eagle-eyed Officer react in such a way.
Buildings.
Buildings meant people, and people meant enemy soldiers.
She barely reacted when Nightshade called out to those behind, pointing out that it was the outskirts of the town that marked their destination. Her mind had processed this already.
Rather more pressing in her mind, however, was the fact that they were about to enter significantly deeper into enemy territory than she had ever been.
To their North was Germany itself, the centre from which the entire Third Reich spiralled.
South took them into Austrian and Italian land, with the Allies now caught up against Nazi forces in the Boot of Europe.
East led into Austria and Hungary, both enemy strongholds, and despite the Russians' latest advance, there would be little respite gained.
West…
West led home.
Home, however, didn't do much good when they were separated by hundreds of miles of Swiss and French land.
It was, however, some small semblance of relief that there was in fact the buffer of Neutral Switzerland to one side, though it was doubtful that they could ever reach the Swiss Border in a situation involving any kind of chase. It was difficult for sure, and a poor solution at best, when one considered the doubtless volume of enemy troops which would be stationed up and down the route to Switzerland, which they had most certainly not considered in their plans, and which would even more certainly change in the time during which they were not on the saddle.
The time in which Reyna had thought all this had apparently flown, for the next thing she openly observed was the rather more prominent skyline of the town of Igls, overshadowed by the soaring peak that was Bergisel; a stark reminder that they were most certainly not out of the Alps. In fact, if she dared to look back from her position on her speeding bike, she would most certainly still be able to see the towering forms of Saile, a mountain stretching some 2400 metres above sea level, and to the opposite side of the city were yet more towering mountains, Vordere Brandjochspitze reaching as high as 2600 metres at its own peak.
More pressing than that, however, was the matter of the Austrian Checkpoint, separating them from the town of Mutters, a few miles short of Innsbruck.
This, Reyna knew, was the true test.
Getting into Mutters, and then subsequently Innsbruck, however, had proved uneventful, due to the Austrian guards being rather more lax than expected.
It was the events that followed their entry, however, that caused their problems.
The group had dismounted, wandering about the city in threes as they attempted to find anything of any particular use. Pubs and bars were typically rather useful in such endeavours, and so Reyna, Piper and Nightshade had made their way over to one such establishment.

Jackson, Zhang and Grace, the male one, Reyna noted, had gone off in another direction, with Valdez, Captain Grace and the Italian, Di Angelo, heading out towards one of the University buildings.
Each was equipped with a rather ingenious earpiece, the cutting edge of modern technology, Reyna noted, which would allow them to communicate with one another from as far as a stunning five kilometres.
Each hoped, of course, that the only purpose of such kit would be to report interesting observations and findings, but alas, it was not meant to be.

Perseus Jackson was tired, and he was annoyed, and he damn well hated himself to high heavens and back.
He had been the one to recruit Schafer, or Chase as he called her to wind her up, to his team, and he had been the idiot to make a ridiculous, thoughtless charge up the enemy's flank. He should've known that they wouldn't notice, and he should've damn well been aware of Annabeth being separated from the group in the enemy's retreat. He's even had the audacity to feel relieved that anything but his entire team had survived.
This time, nobody would get left behind.
Niccolo's threat rung loud in his ears as he headed off with Jason and Frank towards Universitat Innsbruck, one of the leading institutes in Europe still, and famous for Alumni the likes of Victor Francis Hess, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936 for his exceptional work in the discovery of Cosmic Rays.
The information he was after came rather easier than he initially expected, Jason and Frank tailing him silently as he crossed the Blasius-Hueber Strasse, ignoring the River Inn to his left and stalking straight towards the Tyrolean Police department.
His attention, however, was drawn by a Porsche-made state car made its way towards the main building of the police compound, a small detachment of soldiers scanning the area for hostiles.
Pressing himself to the wall, Percy motioned to his companions that the best course of action was to climb.
It was hardly a chore, but it took the trio some time to reach the level to which this shadowy dignitary had ascended, scrabbling away at nearly non-existent hand and foot holds in the brickwork as they fought to catch any snippet of the conversion happening within. Small metal claws fixed to their hands helped alleviate some of the difficulty, but their muscles screamed as they clung to the surface, straining in both body and mind as they went for what was nearly certainly their golden goose.
An open window, intentional or not, broadcast the conversation inside to the eagerly listening soldiers on the wall, though it was a mere snippet of conversation that they had caught.

Jackson shuddered as he recalled the short string of words he's caught, dangling there off the wall of one of the world's leading institutions, even now, separated from that spot by some seventy miles, and quite possibly having shaken off their tails.
'It is just as expected, My Lord. They have arrived in search of the spy Selene,' one voice had enunciated in a smooth Austrian dialect of German.
'Outside the window now?' a hoarse, raspy voice responded, a hint of amused curiosity present in the obviously male voice.
'Indeed they are, Sir.'
'Good day,' the raspy voice called out in slightly accented English, 'Captain Perseus Achilles Jackson'

A/N

Apologies for the time gap between chapters, but in my heart and mind it is entirely excusable. After all, it's not every day that life changes as extremely as this week or so just gone by.
It's been hard enough to write regularly with the pressures of moving out to a different city for university and all the consequences of that, but then there's the loss of the person who's been a pillar of my country for Seventy Years. There's a lot of people who reckon that the Royalty and the Constitution of the UK is a waste.
The crowds on the streets said entirely otherwise, queuing in true British fashion right from Westminster Hall to Tower Bridge and beyond. Three miles of an incredibly fast-moving line.
I'm not sure quite how to explain exactly what it is that I feel about this, and I think it's a similar issue with most people. In a matter of months it'll look like a whole new country. It's incredible, without even looking at all she's done outside the public eye for our own good, that HM Queen Elizabeth II was the shining example of everything it is to be British. Calm, stoic, level-headed in the worst of times, and yet with the ability to smile as though all is well in this world of ours. It's mad, and it's insane, and it's ridiculous and I think people are finally comprehending that, whether they agree or not with her role, she affected each and every one of us in some way or another.
The world has lost a truly good human being, a rare sort nowadays.
Rest in Peace, Your Majesty, and God Save the King.