In a flash, Paddy understood what happened. “The Germans nearly always stuck to the main paths; when they wandered away from them, they usually got lost,” he’d learned. “Everything ahead was a looming wilderness of peaks and canyons, and in the rougher bits it would be impossible for a large party to keep formation, or even contact, except at a slow crawl which could be heard and seen for miles.” On a dark night over icy ground, the Butcher’s men would have instinctively bunched together near the trail and not strayed off alone toward a deadly enemy in the dark, leaving narrow corridors for Paddy’s band to slip through.
Where were the Germans now? Paddy asked.
“All gone up Mount Ida, after you and the General,” Andoni exulted.
Paddy was ecstatic, but not for long. Andoni had more to say. Remember those two secret coves you were counting on as escape points? Both were blown. The Butcher had troops guarding them around the clock. Even the Preveli monastery, on the extreme edge of the island, was under surveillance, and the monks were being questioned by the Gestapo. “Our way of escape from the island was blocked,” Paddy realized. “We had to begin all over again.” They had outrun the Butcher, but they’d run out of island.
One hope remained: Paddy’s favorite outlaw, the unstoppable George Psychoundakis, was on his way. George suspected that Paddy would need his help, so he raced across the northern mountains and found his way to the hideout. Beside him was “a great tough, free-booting giant,” as Paddy put it, who’d slash the throat of anyone who even looked at the Clown crossways. Paddy knew why; this was the father of the little girls George had saved by carrying them to safety on his back. Yanni Katsias was a sheep thief and murderer with a price on his head and twenty corpses to his credit, but he became bonded for life to the little sprite by his side on the day George risked his life to save Yanni’s children from a German attack.
With George and his arch-criminal blood brother there to help, Paddy began brainstorming a fresh plan. Paddy had stashed his Cretan costume in a village about five hours away. Could George retrieve it and come right back?
“Don’t worry,” George replied.
Good. Then Paddy would go full undercover, disguising himself as a goatherd and joining the Clown to scout the coastline. Somewhere along that rocky smugglers’ shoreline, there had to be some forgotten nook where a British boat could slip in. Billy would stay behind and keep the general hidden, despite the handicap of speaking no Greek or German and barely knowing where he was. But nearby was a wild maze of a ravine where Billy and the general could go underground, and in the neighboring village of Patsos was a good man who could bring them a donkey and join them on the run. Yiorgos Pattakos was a young country boy, but among the guerrillas he was already known as “a determined and fearless palikari”—a true hero.
“Mr. Yiorgos Pattakos?” the voice said. “You are looking for Yiorgos Pattakos?”
Chris White and I had trudged into Patsos and shucked our sweat-soaked packs on the front porch of the village café—and by “village,” I mean a handful of homes packed so tightly together at the bottom of a grotto, it seemed its most fervent civic wish was to never be noticed. The fog helps; as we were hiking toward Patsos across an endless boggy moor, we got lost in a fog that rolled so creamily off the sluggish horseshoe of a river, it felt like we were high in the Andes. We had to keep circling and backtracking, mucking through our own bootprints, until finally the sun cut through and we caught a glint of windows in the distance.
At the café, Chris showed his paper to the elderly woman behind the counter. She held up a finger: Wait. She dialed the wall phone, then handed Chris the receiver.
“You are interested in Mr. Yiorgos?” the crackly voice asked.
“Yes, we’re hoping to—”
“I’m two hours away. I’ll be there in ninety minutes.”
Chris and I sat down to eat, tucking into giant Greek salads and a plateful of cheese. Before we’d finished, a black SUV roared down the thin slash of road and screeched to a stop in front of us. A bruiser of a man stepped out, big-armed and thick-chested with a jaw that looked like it could crack walnuts. He pulled off his wrap-arounds and scowled up at the café, pivoting his head like a tank turret from table to table until he locked in on us. His face split in a grin.
“Chreestopher!”
“So good to see you, Vasilios.”
“A man of his word. You came back. I couldn’t hear you on the phone.”
Chris met Vasilios the previous year when he and Pete had gone in search of—and ultimately discovered—one of the more vexing of the kidnappers’ hideouts, a narrow gash beneath a cliff which Billy Moss had described as being close to a shrouded waterfall that was so enticing, even the general stripped down to bathe. After being led to the falls by a shepherd, Chris and Pete trekked on to Patsos, where they got to know Vasilios, a Greek Special Forces combat diver and paratrooper whose mother owns the café. Vasilios liked the White brothers immediately and enjoyed telling them what he knew about his little village’s commitment to the Resistance. Chris had promised to return, but it was evident from Vasilios’s reaction that few visitors to Patsos ever found their way back.
“Mr. Yiorgos,” Chris said. “Is he still alive?”
“Alive?” Vasilios asked, perplexed. “He’s right here.”
We turned and for the first time noticed an old gentleman in a gray beret sitting against the wall, his hands and chin on his walking stick as he gazed out at the hills. Vasilios squatted beside him and spoke quietly, then beckoned us over. We pulled our chairs close as this remarkable survivor began to speak, bringing us back to the nightmare he endured and the day he was asked to choose between his family and his country.
“There was only one mule in the village,” Vasilios translated. “And it belonged to the Kourkoulas family….”
When the Hunters first appeared in the sky above Crete, Yiorgos was still a teenager. Somehow, he and the Kourkoulases’ four-legged livelihood both survived the bombings and the burnings, the mass executions and the body-snatching raids by German troops hunting slave labor for their work crews. In a mountain village like Patsos, a mule is a life-support system, the only emergency-response vehicle that can carry a hurt child to the doctor and haul food across the peaks to the stranded and starving. The entire village depended on that one animal, so when a whisper arrived from the hills that a British soldier was hurt and needed a mule to outrun a German manhunt, the only smart response was to keep your mouth shut and head down.
Instead, the mule’s owner grabbed a harness and turned the mule over to Yiorgos. “They told us the officer was British,” Yiorgos explained, “because they knew we’d never give the mule to a German.” Yiorgos made his way down to the hiding place, accompanied by his sister with a basket of food. Ten guerrillas were waiting, along with a portly older man in a dark overcoat. “My sister passed around a bottle of raki and gave everyone some cheese,” Yiorgos said. “One said, ‘Don’t forget our cousin, the policeman.’ That was their nickname for the general, because of his long coat. When the general took it off to piss, a boy who came with us saw the medals on his chest and was so scared, he ran away. Until we saw it with our eyes, we couldn’t believe they really captured a German general.”
When it was time to move out, Yiorgos helped the general mount. “We led the party right this way,” Yiorgos told us, pointing to the lane in front of the café. “Everyone in Patsos saw him, and no one in Patsos told a soul.”