He’s a marvel, I thought, then realized I was wrong: he’s exactly what I should have expected. Chris is the natural born hero I’ve been looking for, the one that Georges Hébert and Teddy Roosevelt and the Heavenly Twins were certain was lurking in all of us. That’s why Chris was mastering this stuff while I kept bumbling. I’d tried to data-dump it all into my system over the course of three years, but in his own instinctive way, Chris had been absorbing the art of the hero for six decades. As with all true heroes, his starting points were compassion and curiosity. He became his own Camp Half-Blood: instead of searching for instructors in London housing projects and lonely Arizona outposts, he’s hiked and sailed and wandered about on his own, getting in over his head and finding a way back out again. His backyard cabin was full of maps and memoirs, making it a window into the minds of the people he was trying to understand. As a psychologist, he listened for a living, and on his adventures he’d turn that same encouraging attention on an old farmer telling a story in a language that Chris doesn’t speak, and before he knew it he was being served a tasty dish he’d never heard of or being led to a cave that no other historian could find. In his own natural way, Chris had become the bond that united Erwan and Plutarch, Phil Maffetone and Paddy, Norina Bentzel and the Heavenly Twins: wherever Chris went, he was useful.
I was struggling to get there myself. I’d made a lot of right steps: instead of half-assing around with weights for a strength workout, I now climbed the twenty-five-foot rope I hung from a tree limb in my backyard. I practiced Steve Maxwell’s personal invention, the “Traveling Maxercist,” a functional fitness drill that takes three minutes and challenges just about every conceivable body movement. I followed Erwan and Shirley Darlington’s lead and turned many of my afternoon runs into trouble-quests: I focused less on speed and distance and more on challenges, like scrambling up hills on all fours, sprinting from tree to tree, rolling under fences and vaulting over guardrails. Useful stuff.
But the key, as Chris was demonstrating in his mad contortions down the mountain, was forgetting about everything except the mountain. The reason I crashed, I had to admit, was because I’d been thinking about getting to the bottom first and staying ahead of Chris. I was trying to win, instead of trying to learn. Chris didn’t care what he looked like; much the way Mark Allen only conquered Ironman after he stopped looking at every workout as a competition and instead submitted to Phil Maffetone’s agonizingly slow fat-as-fuel method, Chris had absorbed enough of the heroic ideal to understand that the payoff comes after you stop grabbing for it. Learn the skills, and when the time comes, you’ll be ready.
Watching him now as he learned on the fly how to Cretan Bounce down an Alpine descent was like watching Paddy and Xan Fielding and John Pendlebury in action. Chris was an unqualified man on an improbable mission, and so far he was succeeding brilliantly. He’d gotten us nearly as far as Paddy had gotten himself, and even though we’d started at eight thousand feet, Chris looked like he’d run out of mountain before he ran out of wind.
I hustled to my feet before he dropped out of sight. As I began to run, a tiny cluster of rooftops appeared below: the village of Nivathris.
“What are you doing here, boys?” Andoni Zoidakis exclaimed when Paddy and his band arrived at the bottom of Mount Ida near Nivathris. “You ought all to be dead!” Andoni touched his fingers to his forehead and belly, over and over, in the sign of the cross.
Then he paused, puzzled. But why did you ignore my warning?
After helping Paddy with the abduction and then killing the general’s driver, Andoni had crossed Mount Ida ahead of the band to scout an escape route. What he found was terrifying. Troops were already linked in an unbroken chain and marching up the slope in a total comb-out. Columns of dust were heading toward Mount Ida from all directions with reinforcements, while observation planes were blanketing the southern villages with leaflets offering a choice between cash rewards and blood revenge.
Andoni scrawled an urgent message to Paddy and put it in the hands of a runner who knew where the band was hiding. In the darkness of a slit cave, Paddy flicked on his flashlight just long enough to read:
“In God’s name come tonight!”
Tonight? Why on earth would Andoni tell them to leave the cave when Germans were all around them? They were in an excellent hideout, deep and dark, with only the thinnest crack of an entrance shrouded by thick brambles. You could pass within inches and never see a thing—and that was exactly what the Butcher’s men were doing. Outside, shouts and stomping boots were everywhere. “I personally think that the airplane spotted us on the treeless expanse,” Scuttle George would surmise. “The search parties were hunting the valleys inch by inch, firing off flares—and bullets too—and shouting, ‘KREIPE! SPEAK UP! DON’T BE AFRAID!’ ”
The general grew smug as he heard his troops approaching. “Perhaps,” he told Paddy, “you and your company will soon be my prisoners.”
Scuttle George watched Paddy stare the general down. Paddy spoke, slowly and deliberately, and Scuttle George finally saw the leader he’d been counting on. “You will never escape these men,” Paddy told the general. “They’re ready to kill you right now. No matter how close your troops get, don’t even dream of opening your mouth.”
The general went silent. And long after dark, Paddy decided to swallow his doubts and trust Andoni’s judgment. Leaving the cave seemed foolish, but Paddy and Manoli had both been struck by how “urgent and precise” the message had been. Andoni didn’t suggest they come at once; he all but promised they were dead if they didn’t. As the band crept out of the cave, it began to rain, then sleet. Warily, they felt their way through the dark and icy trees. Somehow, they arrived at Andoni’s meeting place—a little clump of oaks with the watering trough cut from a fallen log—but Andoni wasn’t there.
For two hours they shivered in the dark, growing more nervous as the sky lightened. Finally, they couldn’t wait anymore. The Cretans led Paddy and Billy down the slope to the edge of Andoni’s home village, where they crawled into a gully covered by a thick bed of thyme and myrtle. Poor Andoni, Paddy thought. First Tom Dunbabin disappeared, now him. Only a bullet would have stopped Andoni, Paddy knew. Only a bullet or …
Paddy dug out the slip of paper. He and Manoli pulled a coat over their heads to hide the flashlight beam, and with their heads pressed together they read the message again:
“In God’s name come tonight!” Right. Exactly as they’d—
Wait a second. After “name,” the paper was creased and a little soggy. Paddy spread the note flat, and as he smoothed out the wrinkle, two letters emerged: hu. Somehow they’d missed the single most important word in the entire message:
“In God’s name don’t come tonight!”
Good Lord. Andoni must have seen the troops moving out and realized they were marching shoulder-to-shoulder straight toward Paddy’s cave. He’d implored Paddy to lie low until the Germans passed, but instead the band set off on a collision course straight at them—and passed through to the other side. “God exists!” Andoni exclaimed in amazement later that morning, after one of the Georges retrieved him from the village and brought him to the band’s hiding place. “You ought all to build churches. What churches—cathedrals! How did you get through? The whole place was full of them. Hundreds, especially where you came down.”