By dawn, they’d reached an overlook above the beach. Billy pulled out his binoculars and saw gray-green uniforms everywhere. “Just below us, within full view, is a German coastal post,” he noted. “There are a further forty Germans stationed less than one mile to the west, and since these positions are linked by telephone we have been careful to keep out of sight behind the rocks.” At the moment, though, one of Billy’s biggest worries was his partner. “Paddy is walking very stiffly and his cramp seems to be getting much worse,” Billy realized. “He doesn’t know what is wrong with him, and says he has never had anything like this before.”
But soon after, Billy and the bandits were delighted to see Paddy and the general creep into camp. “It had taken them less than thirteen hours,” Billy marveled. “Only five hours slower than our own break-neck rush.” Somehow, the playboy poet who’d barely survived officer training and had a life expectancy of about three weeks when he first ventured behind enemy lines was now strong and adaptable enough—even with his right arm seizing up—to march a prisoner over the mountains all night through razor-sharp rocks. Paddy and Billy might never make it across that last bit of sand to safety, but it wouldn’t be from any lack of hero schooling from the Cretan underground.
It was their own army training, in fact, that let them down in the end.
“How do you spell S.B. in dots and dashes?” Billy whispered on the beach that night.
“Haven’t a clue,” Paddy whispered back. “I thought you knew how to do it.”
“Not I.”
“Sure?”
“I know how to do SOS.”
“God forbid!”
Through the deep fog hanging over the sea, the muffled throb of engines approached. Billy and Paddy knew at least one letter, so maybe they could fake the other. They flashed three crisp dots for S, then a few hopeful blinks before starting over with three more dots. The boat engines came closer, slowed—and then began fading away. Paddy and Billy were staring into the mist, heartsick and helpless, when someone called their names from the rocks. Dennis Ciclitira, a British agent filling in for Xan Fielding, had just arrived over the mountain with a German deserter and two prisoners he wanted to ship out with the general.
“Do you know the Morse code?” Paddy and Billy hissed.
Dennis grabbed the flashlight and began blinking.
S … B …
S … B …
S … B …
Dennis kept flashing, hoping the light would cut through the fog to the departing boat yet remain invisible to the Germans down the beach. After half an hour, the only reply was hissing surf. Billy was trying so hard to will the boat back, he could hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears—and then he realized the thudding was approaching through the waves. A black shadow detached from the dark and drifted toward shore.
Billy’s outlaws hugged him hard and scraped his cheeks with good-bye kisses. In return, Billy and Paddy yanked off their tattered boots and presented them to the sheep thieves and shepherds, the Clowns and the killers, who were staying behind to carry on the fight. Billy and Paddy helped the general into the dinghy, then pulled themselves aboard. Soon they were gliding into the darkness. Paddy kept staring at the beach, watching as the men who transformed him slowly disappeared.
“Crete is always difficult to leave,” Paddy sighed. “It was especially so now.”
THE AFTERMATH
All at once I heard shouts and music and cheers,
and realizing the entry had begun, I ran toward the shouting as fast as my legs would carry me.
—GEORGE PSYCHOUNDAKIS, on the day Crete was liberated
BILLY MOSS enjoyed kidnapping generals so much, he went back for another one.
Six weeks after delivering General Kreipe to Cairo, Billy returned to Crete to snatch Kreipe’s replacement. This time, the plan was a little messier. There was no chance of another roadside abduction, since all German officers were now traveling with heavily armed escorts—so Billy’s scheme was to creep right into the general’s bedroom and pull him out by force. Billy and a small band of Cretans managed to sneak up to the edges of Ano Arkhanais, a remote village that the new general had fortified into his stronghold, but at the last moment they received a warning that eight hundred troops were speeding their way. The local Communists, unhappy with Britain’s influence in Greece, had tipped off the enemy to Billy’s plot.
Billy escaped and decided to give up bedeviling generals in order to focus his attention on, basically, every other German he could find. He masterminded ambushes across the island, at one point crawling through the middle of a firefight to blow up a tank by chucking a grenade down the hatch. Billy returned to Egypt at the end of the war to enjoy what should have been a hero’s reward: he married Countess Sophie Tarnowska, the beautiful Polish refugee who ran the Cairo party house, and wrote two popular memoirs of his adventures on Crete. But danger and adventure continued to tempt him, and it wasn’t long before Billy abandoned his family to party and sail the Pacific. Drinking heavily, he died in Jamaica at just forty-four years old.
The mystery of Tom Dunbabin’s disappearance was solved only after Paddy and Billy arrived in Cairo with General Kreipe. A severe relapse of malaria, it turned out, had flattened Tom just when Paddy and Billy were moving into position by the side of the road in their German uniforms. It was a dire situation: Tom was growing too weak to escape a German manhunt, and he knew the names, locations, and support network of every British operative on the island. So rather than jeopardize the entire Resistance, Tom had to vanish. He dispatched his radio operator to help Paddy and then dragged himself off to a secret hiding place. He didn’t let anyone know where he was, or even what happened, for fear of being discovered.
Tom later recovered and returned to the fight. While trekking across the mountains, he and Paddy’s loyal and extraordinarily courageous sidekick Andoni Zoidakis were locked in a gun battle with a German patrol. Tom shot his way out, but Andoni fell wounded. The Germans chained him by the feet, alive, to the back of a truck and gunned it, dragging him for miles across the rocky roads. His mangled corpse was dumped on the outskirts of a village as a Dark Ages warning to other rebels.
“I tried to persuade Andoni to come with us; he wavered a moment and then decided against it,” a heartsick Paddy lamented. “I wish he had.”
George Psychoundakis also remained on Crete and was rewarded for his years of danger and self-sacrifice by being chucked in jail.
George was awarded the British Empire Medal for gallantry, but in a cruel bit of irony, his work with clandestine forces meant the Greeks had no record of his military service. George was arrested as a deserter and “locked up in cells,” as he’d later tell Paddy, “with brigands and Communists and all the dregs of the mainland.” George began jotting down his recollections of the war while he was in prison and kept at it after his release, working by day as a road laborer and writing by candlelight at night in the cave where he slept. When Paddy returned to Crete years later, George had filled five student notebooks. Paddy was astonished to discover that this poor mountain shepherd who’d barely attended grade school had composed one of the finest accounts of the Resistance ever written. Paddy translated it himself, then persuaded his publisher to bring it out in English as The Cretan Runner.