But General Angelo Carta, the Italian commander, was secretly offered a back door. Word was passed by the underground that if he was willing to cooperate with Allied forces, a British operative would find a way to spirit him off the island. Carta agreed, and Paddy got the assignment. Just before setting off, however, Paddy received a strange warning: a band of Cretan Communists threatened to betray Paddy if he got up to any funny business with the Italians. The Communists weren’t battling the Germans just so the British could take over, so they wanted Paddy to steer clear of the Italian zone. They were supposed to be fighting the same enemy, but the Communists weren’t above a little treachery if they suspected the British and the non-Communist Resistance fighters were gaining too much power.
Paddy’s friends, meanwhile, were causing even more trouble than his rivals. Manoli Bandouvas, Crete’s most ferocious guerrilla chieftain, was ecstatic when he got news of the Italian pullback and decided it was the time to go for the Germans’ throats. Without making sure his allies had his back, Bandouvas and his three-hundred-strong band called for a mass uprising and went on the attack. They wiped out two garrisons and killed more than thirty Germans, which was just enough to infuriate General Müller but not enough to convince Bandouvas that he had a prayer of actually winning. The Butcher lashed out with a spree of retaliation, murdering five hundred civilians and incinerating six entire villages. More than two thousand troops stormed into the mountains with one order: bring back the head of Bandouvas. Somehow, the rebel chief slipped away and showed up at Tom Dunbabin’s hideout looking for help. As long as Paddy was taking the Italian general off the island, couldn’t he take Bandouvas as well? Just till the heat died down?
Wonderful. Paddy’s getaway route was now swarming with fire teams. Instead of one hot target to transport he had two, and instead of one blood enemy, he might be running from three: the Germans, the Communists, and the revenge-seeking clan of poor Yanni. Paddy forged ahead anyway, and emerged from the shadows on September 16 for his rendezvous with General Carta. Just before they left, Paddy was hissed to one side by Lieutenant Franco Tavana, Carta’s chief of intelligence.
Don’t lose this, Tavana whispered, pushing a satchel into Paddy’s hands. And don’t let the general know you have it. Tavana had stuffed it with classified documents. Now everything we know about German operations, you know. Tavana had already won a reputation among his enemies as honorable, brave, and apparently on their side. He had never pulled his trigger on a Cretan; whenever he caught a guerrilla, Tavana would just order him to move along into the German zone. Tavana despised the situation the Germans had gotten him into, and he was about to prove it: given the chance to escape with Carta, he decided to stay and join the Resistance.
Tavana learned very quickly how dangerous that would be. The Butcher was shrewd, and it didn’t take him long to connect the dots. Bandouvas wouldn’t suddenly go wild on his own; no, he must have spotted an opportunity because he knew the Italians were up to something. The Butcher and an armored security squad raced toward Carta’s base but arrived a few hours too late; Paddy and the general had already disappeared into the piney snarls of the snow-capped Dikti Mountains, while Tavana was climbing toward the Resistance’s caves with a load of Italian weapons.
No mercy, the Butcher fumed: he wanted Carta dead or alive. To entice the Cretans to turn him in, the Butcher offered a thirty-million-drachma reward, a fortune for a starving farm family. Spotter planes buzzed the mountains, searching for the missing general and scattering reward notices. One leaflet fluttered down at Carta’s feet as he and Paddy were slinking through the woods. “Thirty pieces of silver,” Carta mused. “A contract of Judas.” If he made it to Egypt, he decided, he’d have to send the Butcher a nice letter in return.
Bandouvas and Tom Dunbabin caught up with Paddy during the final push toward the coast, and together they crept down to a hidden cove. A week earlier, General Carta and the rebel chieftain would have shot each other on sight; now, they took a seat on the beach, shuffled a deck, and dealt cards while Paddy and Tom scanned the dark horizon. Long after midnight, a rubber dinghy purred to shore. Tom was going to accompany Bandouvas to Cairo and take some long overdue leave, but first Paddy wanted to ferry Carta out so he could personally put the secret-documents satchel in the skipper’s hand. Before Tom could point out that he was just as capable of carrying the bag, Paddy was off.
That’ll have to do, the skipper said when Paddy and Carta reached the boat. Time to go. The sea was rough and threatening to throw them up on the rocks. Tom and Bandouvas watched in dismay from shore as Paddy—the only one of the four who wasn’t supposed to leave—remained onboard as the rescue boat faded into the night and headed back to Egypt. Carta settled in for the journey and must have already been composing his reply to the Germans, because shortly after he docked, Crete was hit with a new wave of leaflets wafting down from the sky.
“I am in Egypt,” Carta wrote back to the Butcher. “Be sure that there are a great many Cretans who would only be too happy to kill you for no reward at all!”
Once in Cairo, Paddy returned to “Tara,” the vacation house nicknamed after the stronghold of ancient Irish kings, that Paddy shared with Xan Fielding and a few other secret agents. Paddy was greeted by Countess Zofia “Sophie” Tarnowksa, a twenty-six-year-old Polish heiress in exile who’d arrived in Egypt with little more than an evening gown, a swimsuit, and two pet mongooses. Sophie became Tara’s live-in hostess, a job that demanded rare skills: at various times, Sophie was called upon to replace chandeliers blown apart as sharpshooting targets; use the bathtub to brew prune-and-vodka liqueurs; repair furniture smashed during an indoor bullfight; and find a place for the piano stolen from the Egyptian Officers’ Club. Tara became such a notorious hot spot, it even attracted royalty: one night, Sophie opened the door to find King Farouk waiting with a case of champagne and an eye for action.
Paddy’s nickname at Tara was “Lord Rakehell,” and he wasted no time living up to it after his unexpected return from Crete. He found himself in a nightclub with Billy Moss, a Coldstream Guardsman who’d been so eager to enlist at the beginning of the war that he hunted up a private yacht to bring him home from Sweden, across the squally and U-boat-infested North Sea.
Nice work getting Carta off Crete, Billy said when Paddy told him about his scheme to snatch the Butcher. But could you pull it off with a general who doesn’t want to go?
Paddy had two answers. “It could be done,” he liked to say, “with stealth and timing in such a way that both bloodshed, and thus reprisals, would be avoided.”
Then there was the truth: “I had only a vague idea how.”
But in Tara’s bathroom, a rough plan began forming. Paddy and Billy ended up there one bleary morning after a long night out, and as they lounged and chatted, a couple of Tara housemates wandered in to find out what was going on. Billy McLean and David Smiley had just pulled off some cracking operations in Albania, so Paddy sketched a map of Crete on the steamy bathroom tiles, and the four men were soon diagramming ambush spots.
Next up: toy shopping. Paddy and Billy Moss went to visit the War Magician in his secret Cairo lab. “He was Jasper Maskelyne, the famous conjurer whose magical transformations, in his theatre in Regent Street, had enchanted me as a child,” Paddy would explain. Jasper was a third-generation magician whose father had trained sleight-of-hand spies for Lawrence of Arabia and whose grandfather founded the legendary Magic Circle society. During one of Jasper’s shows, he was in the midst of drinking a glass of razor blades when he spotted an army captain working his way down the aisle. Suspecting something was up, Jasper turned a red flower into a puff of smoke, took his bows, and exited to find the officer waiting backstage with a question: Could Jasper work his magic on the battlefield and bewilder enemy soldiers?