Let’s see. A Dumpster; some busted bottles; two cars; a cement wall with a fence on top.
For you. For us, there’s a catpass precision, two Kongs, a running arm jump, and a step vault.
All I had to do was get some Parkour under my belt, they promised, and I’d see the world the same way. I’d look at a gnarly goat trail on a Mediterranean island, and the crashed trees and tumbled boulders would transform from stuff in the way into stuff to bounce off of. I’d handle the trail the way water handles a riverbed. I’d skip all day on olives and an onion.
That was the plan, at least. It seemed like a good one, so I threw myself into Parkour and followed it from that Pennsylvania parking lot back to a housing project in London, where an out-of-shape single mom was becoming one of the sport’s finest instructors. But now that I was on Crete, it seemed smarter to keep it to myself for a while. I didn’t want Chris and Pete worrying that I was about to walk into something I couldn’t walk out of—even though, as we squinted up at the snow packed into the high gorges, I was wondering about it myself. Theory, meet mountain.
We shouldered our packs and set off, following Chris across the slick stones above the black sand beach. “Harsh here,” Pete commented. “See the plants, all covered in thorns? That’s because goats eat everything. Only the prickliest survive.”
CHAPTER 9
PHILIP II, WARLORD OF MACEDON:
If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.
SPARTANS TO PHILIP II: If.
WHEN THE B AKER Jack Smith-Hughes got off the boat in Egypt after his escape from Crete, no one gave a hoot what happened to his boots. He was met by mysterious men from London who were intensely curious about two things: tongues and talent. As in: could the Cretans keep a secret? Were they just wild men with muskets, or could they unite into a serious fighting force? In other words, could Jack trust them with his life?
Because back in London, in a small townhouse on Baker Street with no name or number on the door, a new kind of fighting force was being organized. Officially, it was the Special Operatives Executive, but it was better known by its code name: the Firm. Rumor had it the Firm was authorized to carry out sinister ops like murder, kidnapping, safecracking, booby traps, and sex-for-secrets intrigues. According to one story, the Firm had already deployed fake French prostitutes to stock a German army brothel with condoms soaked in flesh-eating chemicals.
British officers, after all, were no strangers to sneak attacks; they’d learned from the bitter experience of their own body count just how effective black ops could be. For centuries, the King’s men had been ambushed by Scottish rebels, potshot by American revolutionaries, raided by Boer horsemen, castrated and beheaded by Pashtun tribes-men, sabotaged by Burmese jungle bandits, and bewildered by the IRA’s urban camouflage. Britain was the greatest imperial force on earth, but even giants are vulnerable to the thousand nicks of stealthy amateurs who know the terrain and ignore the rules. It was a lesson that a young cavalry officer named Winston Churchill had barely survived forty years earlier. Britain’s colonial force “can march anywhere, and do anything,” young Churchill realized as he galloped for his life from Pashtun sharpshooters, “except catch the enemy.”
Now—finally—Churchill was ready to steal a page from Britain’s underground enemies and put a dirty-tricks squad into the field.
Churchill got lucky. He found two British officers who loved the idea of a dirty-tricks squad so much, they came up with it before he did. Colin Gubbins and Jo Holland had been friends for more than twenty years, ever since they’d met as young officers in Ireland, dodging rooftop gunfire from Michael Collins’s IRA snipers. Nothing makes you appreciate a teacher more than the possibility that he’ll shoot you, so Gubbins and Holland became rapt students of “Mick” Collins’s approach to extraordinary warfare.
One thing that made the IRA so elusive was a neat trick that Michael Collins picked up from The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s classic espionage novel about bomb-throwing anarchists who avoid suspicion by acting exactly like bomb-throwing anarchists. “If you didn’t seem to be hiding,” Chesterton wrote, “nobody hunted you out.” So Mick taught his fighters to draw more attention to themselves, not less; the more visible they were, the less likely they’d be searched and questioned. Mick himself was Public Enemy No. 1, yet he cycled all over Dublin in a sharp gray suit, on an “ancient bicycle whose chain,” as guerrilla-warfare expert Max Boot notes, “rattled like a medieval ghost’s.”
To Gubbins and Holland, the IRA chieftain was as much a mentor as an enemy. “Forget the term ‘foul methods,’” Gubbins decided. “‘Foul methods,’ so called, help you to kill quickly.” They were so on fire with the possibilities of irregular tactics, they’d already spent years reading up on Apache warriors and Russian revolutionaries before Churchill approached them at the beginning of the war with the task of creating a dirty-tricks squad.
Every guerrilla band, they discovered, relied on the same cheap and devilishly effective weapon: doubt. Create enough uncertainty in your enemy and you can paralyze him. Officers will freeze when they should charge; soldiers will flinch when they should fire. “To inflict damage and death on the enemy and to escape scot-free has an irritant and depressing effect,” Gubbins realized. “The object must be to strike hard and disappear before the enemy can strike back.”
Okay, that’s fine if you’re a Comanche slipping through your native forest and trained from birth in silent stalking. But how—and this is where Churchill’s generals smelled disaster—how does a tweedy London gentleman pull off the same thing in some village in the Balkans?
Gubbins knew exactly where to begin. As soon as he was tapped to head Churchill’s new dream force, he went hunting for misfits. Combat vets and tough guys he didn’t need; anyone who looked like he could actually take care of himself was red meat for Gestapo spy hunters. When one candidate promised to “blow the head off the first German he sees,” he was immediately dumped. “We don’t want these sort of heroes,” a dirty-tricks trainer explained. “We want them to live and do actions.”
No, the type Gubbins wanted was … well, it wasn’t something you could put into words. “I say Class X because there is no definition for it,” explained Geoffrey Household, a traveling ink salesman who became one of Gubbins’s early agents and drew on his adventures to write Rogue Male, the classic thriller about a British sportsman who eludes Nazi pursuers by using only his wits and, in a pinch, a dead cat. Class X wasn’t about wealth, title, or power. “We are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent,” Household writes in Rogue Male. It was an invisible something, detectable only by ear. “Who belongs to Class X?” he continues. “I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice.”