The killers were coming for Xan, too. German troops may have spotted the sub and could already be closing in, so the longer he lingered in Tsoutsouros, the more he risked himself and everyone in the village. He now had to search for Monty Woodhouse, the other British agent stationed on the island. Luckily, the solution soon appeared, high on a ridge behind him.
Trotting down the rock slope came two Cretan highlanders, both dressed in black shirts and old-time shepherd’s breeches, with the knee-length crotch for easy running. The highlanders hurried into Tsoutsouros with news: they could lead Xan to Monty, but they had to leave at once. Xan had been on the move for nearly two full days by that point and eaten little more than bread crusts, but rested or exhausted, fed or famished, go-time for a guerrilla is non-negotiable. Xan set off behind one of the highlanders and got his first taste of the Cretan Bounce.
“As soon as we reached the foothills and started climbing he was in his element at once,” Xan noted, “bounding from stone to stone with a speed and precision which defied our breathless attempts to emulate him.” Monty’s man was patient but relentless, slowing his uphill rock hopping long enough to keep Xan in sight but pushing steadily through the afternoon and into the evening. Finally, at nightfall, Xan trudged out of the mountains and into a bizarre dream world.
“Through the open door of the village coffee shop I saw a horde of frenzied giants in tattered khaki and slouch hats,” he observed. “The chorus of Waltzing Matilda filled the dusk.” More than a dozen drunk Australian soldiers were sloshing about, guzzling Cretan moonshine. After months on the run, the fugitive Aussies had heard that Crap was on the way and came out of hiding to slip down to the beach. When they discovered Crap had come and gone without them, their determination to remain invisible gave way to desperate drinking. For one night at least.
Xan slunk past, head down. “The sight of them reminded me of the last time I had to deal with drunken Australians,” he’d remark, recalling his quick surrender when he tried to defend a Jewish family from some Aussie bullies. Xan was led to a small house and entered to find his boss: a twenty-four-year-old Oxford classics scholar who not only looked like a college boy on spring break, but not long ago was. Montgomery Woodhouse was tall and gawky, so blond and pink-cheeked in that roomful of ferocious stubble that he almost looked albino.
Still, Monty had style. Xan had to admire the “superb shepherd’s cloak” Monty had chosen for his disguise. “Clandestine life came easily enough to me,” Monty would explain. “My Greek was good enough to deceive the enemy, though my appearance was against me. Of course no Greek was ever deceived either by my accent or my disguise, but that was an asset, because as soon as I was recognized a spontaneous conspiracy sprang up to protect me.”
Seven weeks behind enemy lines had also hard-sharpened him, so Monty got straight down to business. Hitler suspects Crete is his Achilles’ heel, Monty explained; Xan’s job was to convince him. Only four or five thousand troops should be necessary to secure an island of Crete’s size, but the Resistance had done such a superb job of making Hitler nervous that more than eighty thousand Germans were still stationed there. Hitler desperately needed that manpower in North Africa and the Russian front, but he couldn’t risk shifting them if it meant that an underground army would overthrow his Mediterranean base.
Which makes you, Monty told Xan, the master of mayhem in the middle. Clans and villages across the island had turned themselves into small guerrilla forces, each under the leadership of its own chieftain. And every Cretan who wasn’t carrying a gun was still armed with eyes and ears: no German plane could leave the island without being spotted, and no German soldiers could board a troop ship without being counted. Xan would be the spider in the center of the web. He’d have to race back and forth across the island, bringing in weapons by parachute for Cretan bandits and radioing German plane coordinates for British fighter pilots.
Every day that Xan could stay alive, Monty told him, was another day that Field Marshal Rommel’s panzers might have to wait for fuel, Russian fighters could hold out in Leningrad, and entire German regiments would be lost in the Cretan mountains in pursuit of a few dozen invisible men. But for now, Xan would have to do it alone. Monty was heading back to the mainland, so Xan would basically be on his own until a new man could be recruited.
And his first challenge, Monty warned, could be his last. Xan’s only contact with the outside world would be his radio operator, who was in a hideout on Mount Ida. Between them lay some of the most treacherous terrain on the island: the Messara Valley, which led right to the Germans’ main airbase. To establish radio contact with Cairo, Xan would have to trek across a hundred some miles of mountain and slip through crisscrossing German patrols.
If he could do that, then it was on to even trickier territory: the White Mountains, a favorite lair for bandits, rebels, and John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury, the one-eyed archeologist who’d become one of the great enigmas of the war. No one on Crete was more hated by the Germans or more hunted. Stories had spread beyond the island of “Pendlebury’s Thugs,” a band of Allied evaders led by a tall, pale man with a patch over one eye and a silver dagger in the sash around his waist.
“The small force of British, New Zealand, and Australian troops who evaded capture in Crete and are conducting vigorous guerrilla warfare against the Germans,” Reuters news agency reported, “are commanded by a British officer well known to the islanders.” In broadcasts from Berlin, the German military fumed, “It is undoubtedly to be attributed to Pendlebury’s activities that large numbers of the population turned guerrilla.”
The Thugs were said to fight like desperadoes—sniping from the dark with deadly aim, taking no prisoners. If Pendlebury’s exploits were real, Churchill and those two old Shanghai hands, Fairbairn and Sykes, would be delighted; it meant at least one swashbuckling Brit had come up with a way to give Hitler a taste of total war. The Führer was reportedly so intent on seeing Pendlebury killed that he demanded the glass eye be plucked from Pendlebury’s skull and sent to him as a war prize. Greek prisoners were forced to search through piles of corpses, poking their fingers into eye sockets. But as of Xan’s arrival on Crete in December, Pendlebury’s whereabouts were still unknown.
Monty finished his briefing. Xan was desperately tired and needed a solid meal and a good rest before making his attempt on Mount Ida. On the other hand, there were those Australians….
“Since I felt no particular urge to remain in Akendria,” he judged, “I decided to set off at once.”
CHAPTER 15
The friend of wisdom is also a friend of the myth.
—ARISTOTLE
HORRIBLE IDEA.
“Had we known what was to come,” Xan complained, brushing by the fact that he’d been warned exactly what was to come, “we would never have started out immediately after two consecutive days with little rest or food.” Still, maybe Monty could have been more specific about the weather. Xan and Delaney hadn’t gotten far from Akendria when it started to rain, building to a downpour that continued all night. Finally, after hours of stumbling in the dark on wet stones and pulling his boots out of gluey mud, Xan gave up. If he was caught, so be it.
“Even the threat of capture and its inevitable outcome, the firing squad, were not sufficient to induce us to keep walking,” he’d recall. “I found myself longing for the sudden appearance of a German patrol to put an end to our increasingly unbearable muscular fatigue and sleeplessness.”