Paddy readied himself to kick open the door and run for it. They were outgunned and outnumbered, true, but they’d also been trained in the Cretan mountains. “There was a maze of alleyways, walls one could jump, drainpipes to climb, skylights, flat roofs leading from one to another, cellars and drains and culverts,” Paddy was thinking, “of which the Germans knew nothing.” Billy cocked his automatic and put it in his lap. Paddy’s pistol was already in his hand. Three Marlin guns clicked back behind them. Billy crawled the car forward, waiting for the signal to floor it. Paddy rolled down his window.
“Generals Wagen!” he shouted. No general would ever shout like that but, well … “GENERALS WAGEN!”
Billy hit the gas. The sentry leaped out of the way. The soldiers scattered, barely dodging the Opel’s bumper. Billy braced for gunfire but instead heard Paddy. “Gute Nacht,” Paddy was hollering. Billy couldn’t resist a quick glance back. All the soldiers and sentries were saluting.
They left Heraklion behind and drove on into the countryside, rolling up and down the dark coastal foothills. Billy lit a cigarette, “the best I had ever smoked in my life.” He handed the pack around to Paddy and the Cretans and—
Wait, stop! Stratis blurted. Wrong way. Billy had veered off the road to Rethymno and was instead barreling along to Rogdia—a dead end with a German garrison in the middle. Billy wrenched the Opel around in a U-turn and began driving right back toward the city they’d just escaped, praying the alarm hadn’t been raised and a pursuit team wasn’t coming at them. After a few nail-biting minutes, Stratis spotted the cutoff and got them back on the right road.
They hummed along in solitude, the snowcap of Mount Ida glowing above in the moonlight. Billy and Paddy burst into “The Party’s Over.” The three Cretans sang along, joyfully and nonsensically. The general got up off the floor. Paddy handed him back his hat.
Twenty miles past Heraklion, Billy pulled over and got out. Manoli and Stratis pulled General Kreipe out of the backseat. Paddy and George remained in the car, Paddy at the wheel. Paddy fought with the hand brake and accidentally blew the horn instead of pressing the starter, but eventually he figured out how to grind the car into bottom gear. Paddy and George pulled away, swerving uncertainly down the road, while Billy and the Cretans began marching the general into the mountains.
When Paddy reached the shoreline, he and George parked the car on the beach. They littered it with a British Raiding Forces beret, a handful of Player’s cigarette butts, and an Agatha Christie novel, then chucked a Cadbury milk chocolate wrapper on the ground, going a little overboard in their attempt to make it look like a solo operation by Great Britain’s messiest commandos.
Paddy checked the time. Already past 11 P.M. Time to move.
Off we go, George said. Anthropoi tou Skotous! Men of Darkness! German propaganda coined the term to blacken the name of the sneaky Cretans, not realizing the sneaky Cretans loved it and began singing it out as a rallying cry before night missions. Paddy had one thing left to do. The night before, he and Billy had written a letter and marked it in hot wax with their signet rings. Paddy pulled it out and pinned it to the front seat:
To the German Authorities in Crete, April 23, 1944 Gentlemen,
Your Divisional Commander, General Kreipe, was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH Raiding Force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to Cairo. We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans and the only guides used were serving soldiers of HIS HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us.
Your General is an honourable prisoner of war and will be treated with all the consideration owing to his rank. Any reprisals against the local population will thus be wholly unwarranted and unjust.
Auf baldiges wiedersehen!
P. M. Leigh Fermor
Maj., O.C. Commando
C. W. Stanley Moss
Capt. 2/i.c.
P.S. We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful motor car behind.
Paddy and George yanked the general’s flags off the hood as souvenirs—“We couldn’t resist it,” Paddy would say—and together they began the lung-aching climb to catch up with the rest of their team. Maybe the Butcher would fall for it. Maybe he’d believe a sub had already come and gotten them and they were now long gone.
Maybe. Because if not, at dawn all hell would break loose.
CHAPTER 26
We lost the general.
—GERMAN RADIO TRANSMISSION, MAY 1944, intercepted by British intelligence
CHRIS WHITE was true to his word: a few months after refusing to show me Paddy’s escape route, he agreed to show me Paddy’s escape route.
“You think I can handle it?” I asked.
“I’m sure Paddy wondered the same thing,” Chris replied, or something to that effect; I didn’t jot it down because I was already hurriedly clicking through the calendar to see how much prep time I had. On the one hand I was relieved; it meant I must have passed the White Brothers’ selection process during our first hike across the island three months earlier. On the other, I knew we’d be pushing into tougher and more remote terrain than anyplace they’d taken me before. That was Paddy’s game plan from the start; his only hope of pulling off the abduction was to run and hide through no-man’s-land, going places where German troops, even Alpine forces, wouldn’t think to follow.
Chris was eager to get back on Paddy’s trail, because he was starting to believe he knew where Paddy went better than Paddy did. That actually made sense. Paddy and Billy were fleeing through the dark, led by outlaws to places only outlaws knew. It would have been tricky enough if the escape had gone well, but from the moment the general stepped out of his car, things began going wrong. From that point on, every day was an exercise in improvisation. Any route Paddy had in mind had to be scrapped and reinvented, instantly and on the fly, to dodge the Butcher’s pursuit. Paddy once got so turned around that later, when he described peeking out of a cave as sunrise lit a mountain, he named the wrong mountain. It wasn’t surprising; when you’re being chased by seventy thousand armed men and a war criminal nicknamed the Butcher, you’re more worried about who’s behind than what’s ahead.
Chris had done an extraordinary job of connecting the lost dots, thanks in no small part to help from Tim Todd, the retired Oxford detective turned Sherlockian war historian, and two adventurers with a unique hobby: Christopher Paul, a London attorney, and Alun Davies, a retired Welsh Regiment major, who specialize in retracing wartime escapes. One winter, they churned across the North Sea to follow in the footsteps of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian commando of We Die Alone who swam through Arctic waters, cut off nine of his own gangrenous toes, and survived snowblindness, frostbite, and starvation to finally escape the Germans and make it to freedom in Sweden. In 2003, Christopher and Alun were on a similar re-creation in Iran when an avalanche swept them hundreds of meters down the mountain. Battered and freezing, they survived the night by breaking into a hut for shelter. The following year they were hit by another avalanche, this time in Turkey on Mount Ararat. Alun and his climbing partner disappeared beneath tons of snow. Their teammates began frantically probing and digging. After twenty minutes, they managed to locate Alun and pull him out alive. His Scottish expedition mate, Alasdair Ross, wasn’t so lucky.