From the top of the Samaría Gorge, Chris White took aim for the hilltop village of Lakki.
By map it was only a few miles off, but that meant nothing on an island where geography is measured by degree of difficulty rather than distance. We found a faint footpath, but when it climbed into the rocky highlands and disappeared, we seized on a free guide service: goats. Goats head back to the fold as it gets dark, and since there was nothing else between us and Lakki, all we had to do was follow the coppery clong of their bells and they’d lead us right to the village.
“Wait wait WAIT!” Chris threw his arms wide to stop us. He was staring down at a long drop a few inches from his feet and remembering a crucial detail we’d forgotten: goats have a much different approach to risk management. Our guides had bounded right over the edge, hopping along a staircase of tiny perches that was impossible to follow without hooves or ropes. We had to back up and bushwhack a new route; which failed; so we reversed course; tried again; failed again….
By the time we got off the cliff, the bells were long gone. We found a dry creek bed and decided to stick with it, clambering over driftwood jams and rock washes until, just before nightfall, we reached the last hill below Lakki. Thank heaven. Fourteen hours of hard trail were coming to an end.
An hour later, Lakki was no closer.
The village was right there. We could see it; we could smell it as the woodsmoke from evening fires drifted down. But. We. Could. Not. Get. There. We’d pushed our way through brambles and climbed rock walls, but every route we tried was a dead end or a semicircle, dropping us right back in the creek bed. The stinking hill was bewitched.
To hell with it. Pete dropped to his belly and began to claw his way straight up, kneeing and pulling himself along like a man escaping quicksand. Chris and I watched, knowing he wouldn’t get far before he hit an unclimbable cliff and gave up. Then we shrugged, dropped to our bellies, and followed. Stupid movement seemed better than no movement at all. Instead of a cliff, Pete came to an ancient stack of lava rock, wedged nicely into the hill like a climbing wall, and on the far side, a muddy pen behind a lonely farm house. We crawled up and sploshed through and came out to find the road.
You pull any stunts out there, I thought as we trudged under the early-evening moon into the tiny village, you better know what you’re doing. We were filthy, exhausted, and shivering. It was hard to fathom sleeping a few hours in a cave and setting off to do it again—or racing up that hill, with a hostile German general in tow, to save our own lives.
CHAPTER 22
[Xan] Fielding had a plan to kidnap the GERMAN commanding officer … and hold him as a hostage.
—OFFICIAL BRITISH REPORT OF THE CRETAN RESISTANCE,
1941–1945
LET’S GET THE BUTCHER.
The idea was insane, but once it took hold in Paddy’s mind, it refused to let go.
Let’s make the Butcher … disappear.
If Paddy could learn what the Clown knew, he might just be able to pull it off. It would be a masterpiece of street magic, the perfect crime perpetrated on one of the world’s worst criminals—a man protected by five divisions of German troops suddenly vanishing without a trace. George Psychoundakis liked to tell the British secret agents he’d teach them the Cretan art of sheep stealing so they could go home after the war with a practical skill. Well, this was his chance. They’d bring the rules of the shepherd to the battlefield.
But for a romantic poet, Paddy had a hard-nosed side. He’d lived by his wits during his years on the road and understood the difference between striving and surviving. Getting the Butcher wasn’t the biggest problem; the biggest problem would be getting away. As far as Paddy knew, no one had even thought of kidnapping a general before. Colin Gubbins had written an entire “Art of Guerrilla Warfare” manual for SOE agents after Churchill put him in charge of training, but nothing in there related to sneaking a general through enemy lines and off a fortified island. Nothing, that is, except Gubbins’s motto:
To inflict damage and death on the enemy and to escape scot-free has an irritant and depressing effect…. The object must be to strike hard and disappear before the enemy can strike back.
And in a peculiar way, John Pendlebury was proving it. About the time Paddy arrived in June, information was surfacing from Cretans who’d been with Pendlebury during the invasion. Bit by bit, it was beginning to sound as if he’d never made it to the White Mountains at all. In fact, Pendlebury may have been killed while Allied troops were still being evacuated from the island. Fragments of the story were still coming together, but if true, then for nearly a year the Germans had been chasing a dead man. Even in death, Pendlebury was still in the fight.
Maybe that was the best Paddy and George could hope for. “I had read somewhere that the average life of an infantry officer in the First World War was eight weeks, and I had no reason to think that the odds would be much better in the Second,” Paddy acknowledged. He was even more at risk as a sabotage agent—and if a mountain-hardened, Crete-savvy outdoorsman like Pendlebury couldn’t make it, what chance did Paddy have? Likewise, George knew he was a marked man. German storm troopers had already tried to trap him once in his village. They’d be back. The noose was tightening.
So why not die a hunter, rather than the hunted? When the Germans captured Athens, they ordered the old flag keeper at the Acropolis to lower the Greek flag and replace it with the swastika-emblazoned Reichskriegsflagge. Konstandinos Koukidis obediently took down the Greek flag—then wrapped himself in it and dived headfirst from a battlement. The Germans raised the Reichskriegsflagge over his corpse, but a few nights later, two Greek teenagers snuck behind the guards, cut it down, and ran for it. The Gestapo issued a death order for the two boys and anyone harboring them, but months afterwards, they were still on the loose. At a time when no force on earth seemed powerful enough to defy the Nazis, two boys electrified Europe by honoring an old man’s sacrifice and snatching Hitler’s flag. Imagine snatching one of his generals.
There was one chance of pulling it off, Paddy figured: they’d have to become as strong and wily as the Clown. They’d have to master the art of survival in those “merciless mountains,” as Paddy called them, and rely on whatever it was the Clown did out there—running, climbing, dodging, conniving, foraging on the fly. They’d have to go places the Germans couldn’t, and move faster and more nimbly than anyone thought possible.
They’d have to follow in the footsteps of Odysseus, that other inventive and unstoppable Greek—and try to forget that, out of all his crew, only Odysseus made it home alive.
Oddly, both Paddy and Xan had come up with the same idea on their own. Before Paddy told Xan about his plan to snatch the Butcher, Xan was already mulling the possibility of grabbing a general to protect the villagers from German attacks.
We grab the bugger, tie him up, and tell the Jerries whatever they do to a Cretan, we do to him. It was an idea worth considering, but first Xan would have to endure a different ordeal. George led him through the night to a tiny village in the mountains—and there, ready to celebrate Christmas, were Paddy and Tom Dunbabin, another Oxford archeologist, who’d been sent to replace Monty Woodhouse.