“Ah,” the driver responded when Xan gave him the address. “You mean ‘the secret house.’” The Firm might be invisible to the rest of the world, but not to Cairo cabbies; whatever the organization was up to, it was attracting so many mysterious visitors that the cab ranks had marked the address as an eerie but profitable fare. Xan found the building, and was shown into a back room. There he met Jack Smith-Hughes, who was already in charge of finding recruits for the Firm to send to Crete.
“Have you any personal objection to murder?” Jack began.
Xan had to admit the only time he had come close to acting like a hero—the only time he’d come close to a fight—was when he tried to stop a gang of drunk Australians from bullying a Jewish family. One of the Aussies grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him off his feet, snarling, “Whose side are you on, Galahad?” That did it for Xan’s chivalry.
To be honest, Jack was okay with that. The army didn’t make him a hero; the army made him a baker. It was only when Jack was abandoned, when he was on the run and in the hands of the Cretans, that he turned into a force to be reckoned with. And that gave Jack an idea….
In Scotland, Fairbairn and Sykes were trying to reconstruct the art of the hero and pass it along to their students. But on Crete, Xan could skip the middlemen and learn the same ancient skills directly from the source. If Xan put himself in the hands of Beowulf and that canny young shepherd George Psychoundakis, maybe he would learn more in action than he would at any school. He’d get pankration from the source. He’d discover how shepherds climbed mountains all night on a starvation diet, and learn instinctive shooting from shepherds and bandits who could split a man’s skull from a quarter-mile away without any sights on the rifle.
Jack knew it could be done, because one man had already done it. John Pendlebury was a British archeologist who’d come to Crete well before the war. Pendlebury was missing an eye, had never served in the military, and was nearly twice Xan’s age, so of course he had to get off the island as soon as Hitler pivoted toward the Mediterranean. Except Pendlebury stayed put. “It required more resolution in an Englishman to stay behind voluntarily and be submerged by the German tide than to return later,” reflected Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge archeologist and one of Pendlebury’s friends. “But for John the choice did not exist.” Before long, the Oxford academic had been transformed into a legend whose name would send Hitler into a rage.
That’s because strange things can happen on that island, Jack discovered—fierce, audacious, brilliant things that no one should be expected to pull off, least of all a baker and a one-eyed archeologist. That tiny rock in the sea had made Hitler bleed, and it changed the Third Reich’s military strategy forever: never again would the Hunters from the Sky lead an invasion. “Crete has always been a theatre for strange and splendid events,” Paddy would later agree, marveling at Crete’s “indestructible old men” and their “extremely handsome” sons, the way “their eyes kindle and their grins widen at the suggestion of any rash scheme.”
“Especially,” he added, “if the scheme involves danger.”
Two weeks later, Xan poked his head out of a submarine hatch and into a howling gale. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. “The shriek of the wind,” he realized, “drowned every other sound.” Waves smashed against the side of the sub, shattering and sinking a collapsible canoe—the canoe Xan was supposed to be in.
Instead of four months of round-the-clock training at SOE school, Xan had spent three days blowing up abandoned trains. “The knowledge that no railway existed in Crete did not dampen my immediate ardour for demolition work,” he’d comment. “Those daily explosions in the sand represented all the training I received before being recalled to Cairo a few days after Christmas.”
As soon as Xan got back from his bomb-blasting holiday, he was told to pack a duffel and get to the waterfront. First they set off toward Crete in a camouflaged navy trawler, but twice fierce seas forced them to turn around and return to Egypt. Finally, sub commander Anthony “Crap” Miers offered to bring them in beneath the waves. They got within sight of the island, but just as they launched the first man in his canoe, a storm blew in and swirled him off into the darkness.
After that … nothing. For half an hour they scanned the churn, hoping for a sign he was still alive and afloat.
Crap couldn’t linger any longer. Bad business, he finally said. Your man is either dead, adrift, or surrounded by Ger—
A pinprick of light flashed. Good old Guy! He and his canoe had made it. Guy Delaney was an Australian staff sergeant in his fifties with bushy eyebrows and bristling whiskers, a survivor of the Fallschirmjäger invasion who, like Jack Smith-Hughes, had managed to hide for months in the mountains and escape by way of the Preveli monastery. If a battered piece of army surplus like Guy Delaney could survive that surf, Xan figured, so could he. The sailors quickly readied another canoe, but the waves crushed it, then the next one. Xan and his partner had one last chance of making it to shore, Crap told them: a rubber raft would swamp if they sat inside, but they might be able to straddle it like a rodeo bronco, clutching it between their thighs as they thrashed like hell with their paddles.
Three sailors fought to hold the raft as it lunged alongside the sub like “a grey monster-fish cavorting in and out of the surf,” as Xan put it. “Not courage, I think, but fear prompted the decision,” Xan continued; he dreaded the thought of cramming himself back inside the stifling sub. He threw himself onto the raft, followed by a man he’d recently met and already hated. Captain Guy Turrall was even older than Delaney; he was a World War I vet who’d spent the years since then pip-pipping around the British tropics in a pith helmet. Turrall was driving Xan nuts, trying to speak to Greek crewmen in his colonial français and constantly repeating, “You see, I’ve lived so long in the bush …” and “offering advice that was more applicable to a peace-time safari than a clandestine naval operation.” True to form, Turrall had shown up for the undercover mission with a pack stuffed with pajamas and an enamel washbasin. He was also in full military uniform and his pith helmet, which Xan chucked overboard as soon as Turrall wasn’t looking.
The sailors released the rope, and the current sucked the raft away and began spinning it in circles. And at that moment, as the raft twirled “like a buoyant saucer trapped in a whirlpool,” Xan and Turrall achieved a kind of perfection: the two novice secret agents were the perfect expression of everything that Churchill’s generals told him was foolish about his plan. This was going to stop Hitler—Capt. Right-Ho splashing around the Mediterranean with some smart-ass slacker, an obnoxious little “artist” whose first order of business as a member of an ultrasecret force behind enemy lines was to prank the only man who could cover his back? Face it; Turrall might be handy with explosives and had a drawerful of dusty medals, but how was he going to infiltrate hostile territory when he kept forgetting that in Greece they don’t speak French?
Xan and Turrall chopped at the water with their paddles and finally managed to stop spinning. Crap’s sub submerged behind them and disappeared, leaving them adrift on a squishy raft in a sea as dark as the sky. Guy Delaney, bless his bristly Aussie mug, was still flicking his flashlight on the beach. Xan and Turrall spotted him through the waves and began digging toward shore. For half an hour they paddled through the surf, slowly getting closer to Delaney’s light—until suddenly it went black.
Was that a pistol shot they heard? A shout? Impossible to tell. Xan and Turrall waited, floating … but the light never reappeared. With no other choice, they pushed on toward the beach.