Soon, Jasper was head of “The Magic Gang,” a band of tricksters who dreamed up everything from button-sized spy gadgets to battalion-strength optical illusions. One of their first triumphs was adapting one of Jasper’s grandfather’s routines to make an entire harbor disappear. “In a burst of smoke, he’d appear to fly off the stage right up to the great chandelier, where he’d perch and answer questions from the audience,” Jasper explained when he first unfolded his scheme. His grandfather’s secret, Jasper said, was substitution: a dummy dressed exactly alike was hoisted by wire under cover of the smoke cloud. “I think we can adapt that principle to this situation,” Jasper proposed.
The Magic Gang built a replica of Alexandria Harbor in a useless bay a few miles away, then rigged it with gunpowder-packed shacks and floats that would explode like fuel depots and cargo ships. With klieg lights, they cast false moonlight shadows, which threw off the bomber pilots’ depth perception and made small-scale models look like full-size warships. As a final touch, the Magic Gang decorated the real Alexandria Harbor with artificial rubble and phony ship wreckage so German recon planes the following day would believe the harbor had really been hit.
Billy and Paddy prowled around Jasper’s lab, loading up on exploding goat droppings and fountain-pen guns. “The air of sorcery,” Billy marveled, “emanated from every shelf in that dim cell.” Even though Jasper was now an army major, he still looked more mystical than military, with his showman’s sleeked-back hair and lady-killer’s mustache. “Do you want some more toys?” he’d offer, before adding, “I’m terribly glad I’m not going with you.”
“GO!” the jump commander shouted.
Paddy was first out of the plane, tumbling into the dark. “The snow-covered ranges of Crete were glittering in the moonlight below, looking aloof, beautiful and dangerous,” he noted. It was insanity: this was Paddy’s first real parachute drop, and he was attempting to (a) thread a needle between mountaintops, (b) at night, (c) in fierce winds, (d) between German gun posts. But at least he’d taken some lessons. Billy hadn’t bothered, figuring he’d wing it rather than risk injury during training. “I’ll be all right on the night,” Billy had shrugged.
Paddy pinwheeled toward the ground, “like somersaulting into a very fast stream.” Somehow he got his feet under him and yanked the rip cord, hoping for the best. Miraculously, the gusts blew him in perfectly, gliding Paddy between the cliffs and right down toward the target fires in a sheep pasture. Guerrillas came tearing out of their hiding places, helping Paddy yank off his chute and bury it. Then they got ready for Billy. They looked up and …
Kept on looking. The plane passed once, twice, then veered over the mountains and disappeared. Nerves? Paddy had to wonder. Or weather? German patrols must be scrambling by then, so Paddy and the guerrillas slunk off to hide. They returned to the forbidden zone the next night, and the next, but even though a plane buzzed each time, no olive-drab puff ever mushroomed down. Damn! What was going on up there? That was Billy’s last chance to jump; enemy patrols were now so thick in the mountains, they’d begun popping each other. The guerrillas only got away one night because gunfire erupted ahead of them on the traiclass="underline" a German squad had walked into a German ambush, killing two in the friendly-fire shooting.
No Billy, no kidnapping. Paddy couldn’t see any other way around it. Paddy needed a real fighting man by his side, someone who could be counted on to kill in a pinch and knew soldierly stuff like Morse code; once, Paddy almost botched an escape-boat rendezvous because he couldn’t figure out how to signal it in from shore. Billy looked kind of phony in a German uniform—too much like a Brit pretending to be German, Paddy thought—but he was way better than Xan. Put short, wiry, sun-browned Xan in a dress, cassock, or shepherd’s pantaloons and he was invisible. Put him in anything cut from Wehrmacht field gray and he was begging for a bullet. Xan was back in Cairo at the moment, taking a breather at Tara after a furious few months of sabotage missions, seventy-two-hour escape hikes, and a shootout that killed six Germans and left Xan with a bullet graze across his forehead. But even if he were immediately available, Paddy didn’t want him anywhere near the general’s headlights. Xan could help the escape, but for the grab, Paddy wanted tall and blond.
Plus … well, it was ugly to say but impossible to deny: Billy was expendable. Xan and Tom were now high-value assets: during their months in the mountains, they’d mastered Cretan dialect, disguise, and smugglers’ routes, making them hard to replace. Billy, for all his brains and nerve and imagination, was still just another tough guy with a gun. Tom Dunbabin had recently tripped up Rommel with a sharp bit of spying, figuring out from his sources near the airfield when an air convoy was due to leave Crete so British warplanes could shoot it down before it reached North Africa. Rommel was thundering so quickly across Egypt that Allied staff were preparing to flee Cairo in a panic, but without fuel, food, and repair parts, Rommel’s tanks were dead in the desert. Tom was up for a Distinguished Service Order medal for that nifty bit of espionage, so there wasn’t much appetite for putting him in front of the most dangerous prey on the island.
It had to be Billy. Except there was no Billy.
Paddy spent so many nights watching the sky, he could look at Orion and identify “the starry giant’s private parts.” Time was running out, fast. Xan had been in a similar situation, Paddy knew, and it cost him his operation. Xan had wanted to grab General Alexander Andrae, commander of the island before the Butcher, but Andrae was replaced before Xan could finalize his plan. A fresh target meant fresh recon; Xan would have to start over, taking weeks to assess the new general’s security detail and tracking his travel and work routine. There was no time for that, Cairo decided, not with other sabotage missions pending. Xan’s kidnapping was called off.
Finally, word came from Cairo: cloud cover and rough winds kept stymieing Billy’s jump, but they weren’t giving up: he was on his way, this time by boat. Nearly three months after Paddy’s landing, a leaky rubber raft hissed into shore. Billy stepped out and found himself surrounded by “hirsute, piratical faces.”
“You friend Paddy?” one of the bearded pirates asked.
Yes, Billy replied.
“Paddy with Germans.”
The shock could have stopped Billy’s heart. He’d been risking the skies and seas for weeks, only to get there and find Paddy was captured? Then an unmistakable swagger approached through the dark from farther down the beach. Rather than being taken prisoner, Paddy had taken four of his own. Well, deserters, actually, but certainly a tasty little addition to Paddy’s witchcraft campaign. Paddy had just finished arranging for them to be ferried off to Cairo on the same boat that brought Billy, leaving the Germans with four more mysterious disappearances to wonder about.
Billy was just as surprised as Xan had been by the change that came over Paddy once he was back on the Sliver. This was the same hungover “Lord Rakehell” last seen slumped in his underwear in a Cairo bathroom? In his place was “a sort o’ duke,” as Paddy himself put it, giving orders to a bunch of bearded cutthroats and striding around in “a wine-coloured cummerbund into which were thrust an ivory-handled revolver and a silver dagger.” Even in the dark, Billy was impressed by Paddy’s physique. Whatever he’d been eating in those Cretan caves, whatever he’d been doing, it had turned Paddy into a dynamo. “He was looking extremely fit,” Billy marveled. “A little plumper in the face, but radiantly healthy.”