Strength didn’t explain it—it was as if the Cretans were drawing on something else, a martial art of energy mastery. Under any kind of pressure, physical or mental, they seemed to become more pliable. Near Jack’s hiding place, for instance, a teenage boy who’d blown up a German plane by sticking a burning rag into the gas tank turned himself in when the Germans threatened to murder his family. George Vernadakis was beaten and starved, then dragged naked into the village square to be executed. Dazed and weak, he had a last request: could he please wet his lips with a glass of wine and sing a farewell song? The wine was produced, and George’s hands were unchained. He drank it down and took off, darting naked from lane to lane through the village. George not only got away but kept on fighting; the next time his family saw him, he was in an air force uniform.
After five months in hiding, Jack was introduced to George Psychoundakis, a young shepherd with frenzied hair and impish eyes. George thought he knew a way to get Jack off the island and to safety in Egypt. It was risky, but if Jack was willing to trust him, they could give it a try. Jack figured they’d slink invisibly through the backcountry and rendezvous with some patriotic fisherman in a hidden cove. Instead he found himself the main attraction of a bizarre parade. The two men were escorted by fifteen armed shepherds, and every time they passed through a village, more eager rebels rushed out to join them.
“Wherever we went, the villagers, seeing us carrying arms, almost exploded with joy,” George would later recall. “Everyone thought something important was afoot and prepared to take up their guns and follow us. We calmed them down and told them they would be warned in time when the moment came.”
Despite nearly inciting insurrection, Jack and his gang managed to dodge German patrols and make it to the Preveli monastery, a stone sanctuary on a cliff tended by monks since the Middle Ages. A few weeks earlier, the monks were in the middle of High Mass when a British submarine commander with a pirate’s gold hoop in his ear burst through the door. He’d been prowling the coast for stranded soldiers, and when he spotted an SOS beacon flashing from a bluff near the monastery, he came ashore personally to check it out. Word soon spread along the Cretan whisper network: any Brit on the run who could make it to Preveli—fast—had a chance of escape.
A few nights later, Jack Smith-Hughes was being paddled out toward the sub in a rubber raft. Watching from the beach were George Psychoundakis and other descendants of the world’s first heroes, waiting for Jack—and any other Brits who dared to join them—to return.
CHAPTER 8
We were totally amateurish, totally one hundred per cent amateurish, and it couldn’t have been otherwise.
—BASIL DAVIDSON, one of Churchill’s original “dirty tricksters”
WAIT. George is still alive?
Chris White hung up the phone, stunned. It was the summer of 2004, and Chris had just gotten a call from a friend whose son was a journalist in Greece. Her son had gone to Crete in search of World War II survivors, Chris’s friend said, and there, among the backcountry villages, he came across the old Resistance runner himself, still roaming the high mountain ranges.
Good Lord. How was that even possible? The odds of survival in the dirty tricks squad was appalling. Half of the recruits were captured or killed in the first year alone, and of all their assignments, none was riskier than George Psychoundakis’s. Other Resistance fighters spent a good deal of their time in hiding, but runners lived in the red zone, zigzagging through enemy patrols while carrying documents that guaranteed a death sentence if discovered. Runners were an especially high-value target for the Gestapo, who knew they rarely carried weapons and could lead them directly to nearly every guerrilla hideout. Two other shepherds from George’s valley became runners along with him; they were soon captured, tortured, and shot. “The job of a war-time runner in the Resistance Movement was the most exhausting and one of the most consistently dangerous,” observed Patrick Leigh Fermor, who relied on them during his own tour of duty on Crete as a dirty trickster.
So George somehow made it through not just one bloodbath but two, first enduring four years of relentless manhunts and then the vicious civil war that engulfed Greece immediately after the German occupation. Every decade since then, some fresh killer had swept across the island—famine, drought, epidemic disease—yet George survived them all, not to mention the constant Cretan peril of vendetta attacks. (Even Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose wartime derring-do made him one of Crete’s most beloved adopted sons, was startled to discover he’d barely escaped the crosshairs of a sniper rifle after a friend’s nephew swore a blood oath of vengeance against him for an accidental death.)
For Chris White, the news of George’s survival couldn’t have come at a better time. Because the more he learned about George’s life, Chris had discovered, the better he felt about his own.
Chris lived in Oxford, and although the city, with its ancient university and cozy cottages, looked utterly tranquil, it attracted an unusual number of homeless. Chris worked with the unstable and depressed, and the despair he dealt with every day had begun to infect him. “The backdrop of any Monday or end of holiday would be hearing that someone you’d been working with was dead,” Chris says. “I’d say ‘Hi’ to my secretary and she’d say ‘Hi, Chris!’ and then tell me about what we call ‘incidents’—someone killed themselves or tried to kill one of your staff.”
By the time he turned fifty-six, Chris had been managing mental-health services in Oxford for eight years. He lived in a charming farmhouse just outside town with his wife and their eight-year-old twins. He had a gang of pals he joined for sailing expeditions and a great friendship with his twenty-two-year-old son from a previous relationship and a little log cabin he’d built out back for his books and sailing charts and music. Chris was easygoing and fun-loving, and utterly baffled when he began going through something of a dark period. He needed to make a change, and took time off work to consider what that could be.
During the time at home, Chris focused on a peculiar story he’d first heard years before. An elderly friend had asked him to trim some of her overgrown trees, and as a thank-you she’d given Chris a book about the strange adventures of Patrick Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Paddy. Paddy was Chris’s kind of adventurer—gallant, literary, madcap, merry. Chris dug around for more and soon learned about Paddy’s daffy scheme to kidnap a German general.
“I’ve always been a man who’s had projects, always tunneling into something,” Chris says. Paddy’s saga was just the thing to get him drilling. The extreme adventure was intriguing, but what really hooked him was the surreal gentleness.
“It was the kindest, most bloodless scheme you’d ever encounter in military history,” Chris marveled. In the midst of carnage and cruelty, “everyone in this operation was trying to be brave, kind, diplomatic.” Chris couldn’t help feeling a pang of kinship. The cheery hopelessness of Paddy’s plot reminded him of his own job, of the challenge of helping people he knew were headed for ruin. When you’re doomed to fail, how do you avoid living in doubt and despair? By living, not doubting.
Living and not doubting had always been Chris’s navigational star. Back when he was a first-year student at Durham University in the seventies, Chris wrote a story about psychiatry for the school paper. It earned him a spot on the features staff and just enough credibility, Chris felt, to make a ridiculous request: he contacted Harold Evans, editor of Britain’s prestigious Sunday Times, and asked if maybe Evans had any unused stories lying around? Something Chris could print in the Durham University Palatinate?