CHAPTER 14
Θά πάρωμεν Τ’ άρματα νά Φύγωμεν στά Μαδάρα..
TRANSLATION: “We will take our arms and flee to the White Mountains.”
—JOHN PENDLEBURY,
in a last letter to his wife before the German invasion
XAN’S BOOTS scraped pebbly sand, then a wave cracked and sent him tumbling. He stumbled to his feet, and together with Turrall he struggled through the surf and up onto the beach. There was no sign of Guy Delaney.
“Something must have gone wrong,” Turrall said.
“But he signaled OK.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing. The Germans may have intentionally let him make his signal before nabbing him, in the hope of nabbing us as well.”
Xan knew Turrall was right. Their original plan was to come ashore a few miles away and rendezvous with another British agent in a hidden cove, but rough seas had forced them farther down the coast. More than likely, they’d landed near a German lookout, which meant Guy was a goner. Delaney would be lucky if the Germans didn’t open fire the instant they spotted his light, thanks to that whole Operation Flipper fiasco: a few weeks earlier, a British commando assault team using the same rubber rafts as Xan and Turrall and launching from the same sub came ashore on another Mediterranean beachfront, this one in Libya. They were hunting Erwin Rommel, “the Desert Fox,” whose unstoppable Afrika Korps panzers were threatening to overrun Cairo. The Brits burst through Rommel’s bedroom door with grenades flying and guns blazing … except Rommel, famous for his Fingerspitzengefühl—“fingertip feel,” or sixth sense—had already moved base. But the fact that Allied raiders got within pistol range of a top general’s bed, even an empty one, left a lasting impression of what to expect from strangers in the night in rubber rafts.
The storm; that’s what must have saved Xan and Turrall. They must have blown past the sentries, who couldn’t spot their gray raft in the dark chop. They had to get to cover—fast—but where do you run when you don’t know where anyone is? Xan saw a faint strip of light in the distance. Let’s crawl in for a look, Turrall urged. It was risky, but shrewd: they could at least figure out where not to go, and hopefully confirm Guy’s whereabouts.
Xan pulled his pistol and slipped off the safety. “I started creeping up the beach towards the light, which as I approached revealed itself as a gap in a shuttered window.” Xan inched closer and picked up a snatch of conversation. He listened intently, then got to his feet. “Be ready to give me covering fire,” he whispered to Turrall. “I’m going in.” Before Turrall could grab him, Xan charged. “I kicked open the door, at the same time flourishing my pistol and flashing on my torch.” And there, “sitting by a twig fire in steaming long-legged underwear,” was Guy Delaney, drying his clothes and chatting with the fisherman who owned the hut.
“You’ve been bloody slow getting here,” Delaney grumbled.
Xan had recognized Delaney’s voice and understood the fisherman’s Greek, so he’d only mock-attacked, to get Turrall’s goat. Delaney was just as relieved; he’d been chilled to the bone on the beach and finally had to get warm or risk hypothermia. Even the fisherman was delighted; he wanted to call the whole village to arms, and was just a bit crestfallen when Xan explained that the three midnight guests were alone and not the advance team of a full Allied invasion. Only Turrall was in a foul mood—he’d been through too much in his life, not to mention that night alone, to tolerate any more of Xan’s shit.
But the fisherman had a little gift to cheer him up: a prisoner!
“There’s a German here in Tsoutsouros!” A deserter had turned up a few days ago and kept hanging around, hoping to find someone he could surrender to. He couldn’t have wandered into better luck: that little cove was too barren and inaccessible for the Germans to bother with, so Xan and his team were the only outsiders anyone had seen for weeks. Crap was supposed to surface again the following night to offload rifles for the Cretans and supplies for the British agents, so Turrall could paddle the forlorn German out to the sub and notch himself a capture.
By the time Xan dried and warmed himself, dawn was breaking. He’d only seen Crete through the sub’s periscope, so as the sun rose, he went outside for his first good look. You’d expect to be dazzled by sea views on a skinny sausage of an island like that—161 miles long and 37 wide at its thickest, 12 at its thinnest—but even those turquoise shimmers are overshadowed by the startling explosion of mountains. From the beach it all looks so easy, so summery, Alpine and inviting. It’s only when you push into the hills and find yourself twisting through gorges and smacking into sheer rock faces hidden by trees that you discover why there was no coast-to-coast road and why a two-mile trek could take four hours and leave you where you started.
No wonder Crap’s sub was able to come within a mile of the beach without being spotted: all that elevation meant Xan was nicely hidden by a giant stone fence. Most of Crete’s mountains run right through the middle of the island, creating a jagged belt separating the Germans in the north from the rebels in the south. Just east of Xan, ablaze in the early-morning sun, was the skyscraping prenatal unit of the world’s first guerrilla fighter: Zeus, greatest of the Greek gods.
Zeus wasn’t born to the throne; he scrapped his way there, Cretan style. Zeus’s father was Kronos, the Titan who ruled the earth and swallowed his children so they wouldn’t overthrow him. When Kronos’s wife was pregnant with Zeus, she snuck away to Psychro Cave, in Crete’s easternmost Dikti Mountains. After giving birth, she returned home and fooled Kronos into swallowing a stone wrapped in a baby’s blanket, while the infant—“safe in Crete, strong of limb and crafty”—was raised by Diktynna, the cunning and elusive goat-nymph. A tribe of mountain warriors, the Kouretes, guarded the baby and performed a shield-clanging war dance so Kronos wouldn’t hear him crying. When Zeus was big enough, he cut his brothers and sisters free from Dad’s belly and led them in bringing down the tyrant.
Some insist Zeus’s birth cave was farther west of Xan on Mount Ida, Crete’s highest peak, which made a lot of sense. Ida is snow-crowned and glorious, home to golden eagles and the kri-kri, the rare and magnificent Cretan ibex. Sure enough, searchers located a palatial cave on Ida overlooking the Amari, Crete’s lushest valley. Buried inside this natural throne room were ancient offerings: bracelets, Egyptian pottery, bronze knives. Pythagoras was even said to have made a pilgrimage to the Idaean Cave, and Euripides mentioned “Idaean Zeus” in his play The Cretans. The Idaean Cave is majestic enough for a king—but the infant Zeus was a fugitive with a death sentence. That’s one reason why, in 1901, the British archeologist D. G. Hobarth decided to take another look at Psychro.
The Dikti range is dark and rough, exactly the kind of place where a wild child could disappear from the world and be raised by a band of loyal mountain men and a mystical she-goat. Hobarth pushed deep into the rocked-off recesses of Psychro. Blasting his way with dynamite into an “abysmal chasm,” he discovered a treasury of other devotional gifts, including Cretan double axes, believed to be a sacred emblem of Zeus—far more than the trinkets discovered in the Idaean Cave, but more important, far older. “The Cave of Ida, however rich it proved in offerings when explored some years ago, has no sanctuary approaching the mystery of this,” Hobarth wrote. Visitors assumed regal Mount Ida was the place for a god, but true Cretans knew the Dikti is where a hunted man would hide.