Small Wars by Sadie Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

correctly – and would do anything to drive them out of Cyprus. He was in a camp up in the Troodos, and rumour was that he was with Axfentiou, but he couldn’t say for sure. He had another uncle, though, the black sheep of the family, a sort of cousin of an uncle, in fact, and the British were after him, too. Photographs were brought. Andreas identified him in the booklet handed out to every British officer of EOKA’s ‘most wanted’. General Grivas and Axfentiou, EOKA’s leaders, were at numbers one and two, and Andreas’s uncle was there too, down the list, at number thirty-four. Andreas described a farmhouse in the foothills near Kaminaria where he knew they were storing weapons and where this man was hiding. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of his questioners, he gave places and names; they were all good friends. Andreas himself had nothing against the British, and was keen to point that out, but he had been persuaded that fighting for Greece was a fine thing to do, and he regretted it now.
    ‘Davis, tell him if he behaves himself, we won’t tell the whole village he’s a toad and he won’t get his throat cut.’
    ‘Andreas, we will take you home. We won’t betray you to your village, if you don’t betray us. We are all trying to stop more violence. Yes?’
    Andreas was to do one more thing for them before his release: he was to show them exactly where the farmhouse was. He agreed immediately to this, and it crossed Davis’s mind that the boy could lead a hundred soldiers into an ambush very easily and be a hero. It was impossible to tell from his dark face what he was really thinking.
    SIB briefed Colonel Burroughs about Andreas’s black sheep of an uncle, whose name was Loulla Kollias, and Burroughs briefed Hal. Hal devised a plan, his first, with particular care, and then – like a schoolboy having his prep inspected – went over it with Burroughs, who was thorough and helpful and questioned everything.

    Loulla Kollias’s photograph also hung in Colonel Burroughs’s office, in his rogues gallery and opposite his picture of the Queen. It showed a middle-aged man who could have been a shepherd or a farmer, with a large black moustache, thick eyebrows and a frayed and faded sweater with a neck that stood up. The photograph had been taken for EOKA propaganda. In it, he was squinting manfully into a wind, with his hair blowing up from his head and the camera at a low angle. The only thing distinguishing him from any other Greek man between the ages of twenty-five and forty was the bullet belt slung diagonally over his body and the nose of his rifle, which could be seen poking up from behind his shoulder. He was responsible for the death of an American government official in a car bombing. He organised roadside ambushes and riots. He was close to General Grivas, and a chief recruiter for EOKA. He was a man who believed in a Cyprus independent of British rule and took his army straight from school, transforming romantic Greek schoolboys into soldiers – or terrorists, depending on your point of view.

    Three hours before dawn, three days after Andreas’s capture, Hal left Clara pretending to be asleep in their brand-new bedroom on Lionheart Estate and joined Kirby and a convoy of trucks and Land Rovers, which left the garrison, heading north into the Troodos. Andreas was in the Land Rover behind Hal’s, flanked by soldiers, with the interpreter, Davis, sitting in front, very nervous.
    It was still dark. The trucks crawled slower and slower, the drivers keeping to the hard-packed centre of the road, looking for disturbed ground where mines might be hidden, and the soldiers stopped talking and stayed quiet and watchful. There was no protection in being in a vehicle; they would rather have been out of them and on foot, where they could listen better and move more carefully and the ground away from the road had no mines hidden in it.
    There had been burns casualties from a roadside ambush in the hills the week