So Pendlebury strolled about, pretending to be a diplomat while carrying an innocent-looking walking stick with a sword inside, which he judged perfect for skewering paratroopers. No matter what happened, he decided, he wasn’t leaving. “He felt himself a Cretan and in Crete he would stay until victory was won,” recalled Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge don who’d been one of Pendlebury’s archeology students and came to Crete to join his special operations force. For extra secrecy, but mostly to show off, Pendlebury and Hammond encoded their conversations by speaking to each other in their specialty dialects, Cretan versus Epirotic.
Hammond and Pendlebury teamed up with a swashbuckling boat captain, the gold-earringed Mike Cumberlege, who growled into Crete at the wheel of a combat-ready fishing boat called the Dolphin. Together, the three men hatched a scheme to glide by night out to the Italian-held island of Kasos and kidnap some Italian soldiers they could haul back to Crete and sweat for information about the looming German invasion. Just to be safe, Cumberlege decided to take Hammond with him on a last recon trip across the channel to Kasos. They tucked in beside an offshore island to hide until dark … and then the engine refused to start. While Cumberlege struggled to fix it, German warplanes suddenly began thundering overhead. Bomb bursts flashed across the water from Crete, followed by mushroom puffs of parachutes.
While his gang was marooned offshore during the invasion, Pendlebury threw off his diplomat’s disguise and joined the street fighting alongside Satan, the Cretan guerrilla leader. When it became clear that Allied forces had given up and were ready to abandon the island, he and Satan strode into the British command cave and volunteered to cover the retreat. “I was enormously impressed by that splendid figure,” recalled Paddy Leigh Fermor, who’d been deployed to Crete just before the invasion. “He had a Cretan fighter with him, festooned with bandoliers, and John Pendlebury himself made a wonderfully buccaneer and rakish impression.”
Paddy was in awe, not least because, as every other Allied soldier was scrambling toward the evacuation beach, “the one-eyed giant,” as Paddy called him, refused to follow. “His single sparkling eye, his slung guerrilla’s rifle and bandolier and his famous swordstick brought a stimulating flash of romance and fun into the khaki gloom.” Paddy managed to escape Crete, and he was still hearing about Pendlebury’s adventures long after he made it back to Cairo. “The German SS got to know of Pendlebury,” Paddy would say. “They called him ‘der kretische Lawrence’—the Cretan Lawrence—and rumours spread amongst Pendlebury’s hillmen that Hitler could not rest until he had Pendlebury’s glass eye on his desk in Berlin.”
Two days into the invasion, the Dolphin fired back to life, and Cumberlege steered stealthily into a hidden cove near Heraklion. Hammond and Cumberlege’s cousin, Cle, each grabbed a Mauser rifle and crept ashore. Dead and dying soldiers were tumbled together in the streets of Heraklion, while bullets whizzed from house-to-house firefights. Hammond and Cle realized they had no chance of finding Pendlebury, so they slunk back to the boat and pushed off toward safety in North Africa.
The Dolphin never made it. Cle was killed by fighter-plane fire, and Mike Cumberlege was wounded, surviving only because another captain came to his rescue. Three weeks later, Cumberlege was recovering in Egypt when he tuned in to a radio broadcast from Berlin. “The bandit Pendlebury,” Cumberlege heard, “will be caught and he can expect short shrift when he is found.”
Thank goodness! That still left Cumberlege a chance to find him first. As soon he could get to his feet, he secured another boat and was off, threading his way through German patrol ships to search for his friend. The trouble was, Pendlebury could be anywhere. During his thousands of miles of archeological hikes, he’d learned the mountains “stone by stone,” as he liked to say. He’d been a whirlwind of preparation before the invasion, setting up weapons stashes and hideouts in places only he and the canniest old shepherds could ever find. He’d even made a mountain more mountainous, persuading a small army of Cretan volunteers to trek to Mount Ida and, “with Herculean efforts,” as Antony Beevor reports, “they shifted boulders down to its smooth areas to prevent aircraft landings.”
So where was he now?
“There were persistent tales of an Englishman who had been seen at Hagia Galini, a village on the south coast near Tymbaki,” Dilys Powell would learn. “What was more, it was an officer who had lost an eye.” Three months after the evacuation of Crete, Britain’s chief of military intelligence in Cairo personally told Churchill, “We also tried to drop a wireless set by parachute to Pendlebury, who at the moment is largely controlling guerrilla activities in the Cretan hills.”
But if anyone knew how to actually find Pendlebury and his Thugs, they weren’t talking. No matter where Cumberlege looked, Pendlebury always seemed tantalizingly close, yet nowhere to be found. The champion of heroic myths was turning into one himself.
CHAPTER 17
David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.
—MALCOLM GLADWELL, “How David Beats Goliath”
THE LAST, BEST SIGHTING had Pendlebury heading toward Mount Ida—bandit country. Hard to get in, easy to get lost. Same place where, after sleeping under wet bushes all day after his long night hike through the rain with Costa, Xan Fielding was waking up to a double dose of good news.
The German search parties had moved on, so he and Delaney could crawl out of hiding for a while and stretch their aching bodies. And instead of having to scrabble another eighty miles to the radio operator’s mountain hideout, word arrived that the radio operator was coming down to them. Xan was thrilled, since he could finally kick back for a night after three hectic days on the move since splashing ashore from the sub, but then he grew apprehensive. Why was the radioman suddenly out of his hole and on the move after he’d been safely hidden for months?
Soon enough, Ralph Hedley Stockbridge hiked into camp in the worst Cretan costume Xan had ever seen. The only thing more British than his overcoat—seriously, an overcoat?—were his horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike every Cretan male past puberty, he had no mustache, and instead of shepherd’s boots, he was still in shoes. “In no way did he look like a peasant,” Xan thought. And that, it gradually dawned on him, was Ralph’s sly genius: Ralph looked exactly like a Greek trying not to look Greek. It was a stunt right out of The Man Who Was Thursday, and it worked brilliantly. Once, Ralph strolled right through a German checkpoint while the real Cretan beside him was grabbed and questioned. “They must have been blind not to see me trembling,” Ralph would recall. During another close encounter, he blurted, “Gosh, sorry!”—in English—after bumping into a German soldier, and he still didn’t attract a second look.
But the audacity of Ralph’s no-disguise disguise was brutal on his nerves. Like Xan, Ralph wasn’t much of a soldier. He was notorious in the War Office for making a fuss about having to wear puttees—wool wraps that twine up from the ankle and tuck in at the knee—and then quitting the Officers’ Training Corps because he felt his superior officers were acting too superior. Despite or maybe due to this obsessive contrariness, Ralph was recruited by “Mike”—MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Mike was James Bond’s outfit, but unlike 007, real MI6 agents kept their flies zipped and gadgets holstered. Their job was to live in the shadows, eavesdropping in cafés and building webs of civilian spies. That often put them at odds with the dirty tricksters of Xan’s unit, the Firm, because the last thing any Mike agent wanted was a bar of soap blowing up in a brothel they had under surveillance.