Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 9

PHILIP II, WARLORD OF MACEDON:

If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.

SPARTANS TO PHILIP II: If.

WHEN THE B AKER Jack Smith-Hughes got off the boat in Egypt after his escape from Crete, no one gave a hoot what happened to his boots. He was met by mysterious men from London who were intensely curious about two things: tongues and talent. As in: could the Cretans keep a secret? Were they just wild men with muskets, or could they unite into a serious fighting force? In other words, could Jack trust them with his life?

Because back in London, in a small townhouse on Baker Street with no name or number on the door, a new kind of fighting force was being organized. Officially, it was the Special Operatives Executive, but it was better known by its code name: the Firm. Rumor had it the Firm was authorized to carry out sinister ops like murder, kidnapping, safecracking, booby traps, and sex-for-secrets intrigues. According to one story, the Firm had already deployed fake French prostitutes to stock a German army brothel with condoms soaked in flesh-eating chemicals.

British officers, after all, were no strangers to sneak attacks; they’d learned from the bitter experience of their own body count just how effective black ops could be. For centuries, the King’s men had been ambushed by Scottish rebels, potshot by American revolutionaries, raided by Boer horsemen, castrated and beheaded by Pashtun tribes-men, sabotaged by Burmese jungle bandits, and bewildered by the IRA’s urban camouflage. Britain was the greatest imperial force on earth, but even giants are vulnerable to the thousand nicks of stealthy amateurs who know the terrain and ignore the rules. It was a lesson that a young cavalry officer named Winston Churchill had barely survived forty years earlier. Britain’s colonial force “can march anywhere, and do anything,” young Churchill realized as he galloped for his life from Pashtun sharpshooters, “except catch the enemy.”

Now—finally—Churchill was ready to steal a page from Britain’s underground enemies and put a dirty-tricks squad into the field.

Churchill got lucky. He found two British officers who loved the idea of a dirty-tricks squad so much, they came up with it before he did. Colin Gubbins and Jo Holland had been friends for more than twenty years, ever since they’d met as young officers in Ireland, dodging rooftop gunfire from Michael Collins’s IRA snipers. Nothing makes you appreciate a teacher more than the possibility that he’ll shoot you, so Gubbins and Holland became rapt students of “Mick” Collins’s approach to extraordinary warfare.

One thing that made the IRA so elusive was a neat trick that Michael Collins picked up from The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s classic espionage novel about bomb-throwing anarchists who avoid suspicion by acting exactly like bomb-throwing anarchists. “If you didn’t seem to be hiding,” Chesterton wrote, “nobody hunted you out.” So Mick taught his fighters to draw more attention to themselves, not less; the more visible they were, the less likely they’d be searched and questioned. Mick himself was Public Enemy No. 1, yet he cycled all over Dublin in a sharp gray suit, on an “ancient bicycle whose chain,” as guerrilla-warfare expert Max Boot notes, “rattled like a medieval ghost’s.”

To Gubbins and Holland, the IRA chieftain was as much a mentor as an enemy. “Forget the term ‘foul methods,’” Gubbins decided. “‘Foul methods,’ so called, help you to kill quickly.” They were so on fire with the possibilities of irregular tactics, they’d already spent years reading up on Apache warriors and Russian revolutionaries before Churchill approached them at the beginning of the war with the task of creating a dirty-tricks squad.

Every guerrilla band, they discovered, relied on the same cheap and devilishly effective weapon: doubt. Create enough uncertainty in your enemy and you can paralyze him. Officers will freeze when they should charge; soldiers will flinch when they should fire. “To inflict damage and death on the enemy and to escape scot-free has an irritant and depressing effect,” Gubbins realized. “The object must be to strike hard and disappear before the enemy can strike back.”

Okay, that’s fine if you’re a Comanche slipping through your native forest and trained from birth in silent stalking. But how—and this is where Churchill’s generals smelled disaster—how does a tweedy London gentleman pull off the same thing in some village in the Balkans?

Gubbins knew exactly where to begin. As soon as he was tapped to head Churchill’s new dream force, he went hunting for misfits. Combat vets and tough guys he didn’t need; anyone who looked like he could actually take care of himself was red meat for Gestapo spy hunters. When one candidate promised to “blow the head off the first German he sees,” he was immediately dumped. “We don’t want these sort of heroes,” a dirty-tricks trainer explained. “We want them to live and do actions.”

No, the type Gubbins wanted was … well, it wasn’t something you could put into words. “I say Class X because there is no definition for it,” explained Geoffrey Household, a traveling ink salesman who became one of Gubbins’s early agents and drew on his adventures to write Rogue Male, the classic thriller about a British sportsman who eludes Nazi pursuers by using only his wits and, in a pinch, a dead cat. Class X wasn’t about wealth, title, or power. “We are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent,” Household writes in Rogue Male. It was an invisible something, detectable only by ear. “Who belongs to Class X?” he continues. “I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice.”

The gentle voice? Yes: the tone of someone who, when asked to do and die, would quite like to know the reason why. Geoffrey Household and his generation were young enough to escape the trenches of the last war, but old enough to witness the terror and carnage that comes when countries throw millions of bodies with bayonets at one another. For this new kind of warfare—and this new kind of warrior—there would be no Light Brigade charges into the jaws of death. Class X was all for service, but not for suicide. If you wanted their bodies, their brains were part of the bargain.

Gubbins knew that trying to transform these skeptical, gentle-voiced intellectuals into icy cold operators was going to be tricky, especially since he couldn’t expect much help from the military. “We’ve only fought decently in the British Army,” one disgusted general sniffed in response to Gubbins’s desire to teach “silent killing.” When the Firm sent out feelers to Edward Shackleton, an air force lieutenant (and son of Ernest, the fabled Antarctic explorer), Shackleton asked his squad commander what it was all about. “Don’t touch it,” the commander warned him. “They’re not the sort of people you want to be mixed up with.”

So Gubbins bypassed the army and instead looked for help from “the Whore of the Orient”—Shanghai, where the world’s dirtiest gutter fighters did battle in the world’s most dangerous city. Shanghai in the 1930s was ruled by jungle law, to the extent that jungle creatures specialized in gambling, sex slaves, dope dealing, and gang warfare. As Asia’s busiest port, Shanghai bustled with so many addicts, pirates, and waterfront hustlers that by 1936 it could comfortably support an estimated 100,000 criminals. Even its name meant trouble: get “shanghaied” and you’d wake up with a bad headache and a worse surprise, often a few miles out to sea as free labor on a merchant ship. One crime boss bragged that he’d fed a troublesome girlfriend to his pet tiger; another dealt with rivals by slitting their arm and leg tendons and heaving them, alive but helpless, into the middle of a busy street.

Into this madness strode Bill Sykes and William Fairbairn, the Heavenly Twins. Fairbairn was originally a Royal Marine who arrived in 1907 after answering a worldwide recruiting call by the beleaguered Shanghai police. His welcoming gift was a beating so savage he had to be hauled to the hospital in the back of a rickshaw; during foot patrol along the waterfront, a gang of hoodlums nearly pummeled and booted him to death. During his long recovery, Fairbairn ruefully reflected that none of the training he’d ever gotten—not as a boxer, not even as a frontline soldier—was of any use in the panicky, ferocious chaos of a real street brawl. So once he was back on his feet, Fairbairn began to immerse himself in the science of true gutter fighting. He began by apprenticing himself to “Professor Okada,” a jiu-jitsu expert who trained the Japanese emperor’s security force. Fairbairn gradually became such a skilled knifeman and sharpshooter that his innovations are still in use by Special Forces a half-century later.

Fairbairn’s turnaround was so dramatic that he was picked to head the Shanghai Riot Squad. During his thirty years along the water-front, Fairbairn survived more than six hundred fights, including the time a Chinese bandit’s bullet scorched by his face and singed his eyebrows. His favorite sidekick was Bill Sykes, a slight, friendly gent who looked like he’d be happiest with a quiet pipe and a couple of grandkids. Sykes was a true oddity in Shanghai, partly because his real name was Eric A. Schwabe but mostly because he was an amateur hobbyist in a city of professional badasses. Sykes insisted he was nothing more than a sales rep who liked to hang around cops, and only went by a fake name because the real one sounded too German. Maybe. But whispers of spy service are hard to deny when you go through life with an alias and a talent for stabbing men to death with a sheet of newspaper. (Just fold it diagonally until it tightens into a point, Sykes would shrug, then drive it in right under the chin. Simple, really.)

By the time World War II began, Sykes and Fairbairn were nearly sixty years old; their hair had gone white, and their sharpshooting eyes now needed spectacles. Still, Gubbins wanted his first class of dirty-trickster recruits to see the old-school stuff in action, so he invited Sykes and Fairbairn to a training camp he’d set up at a hidden estate deep in the Scottish Highlands. “We were taken into the hall of the Big House, and suddenly at the top of the stairs appeared a couple of dear old gentlemen,” recalled a recruit, R. F. “Henry” Hall. The recruits watched, aghast, as their would-be mentors stumbled and fell, “tumbling, tumbling down the stairs” … and then sprang to their feet in a battle crouch, each with a dagger in his left hand and a .45 in his right. The “dear old gentlemen” had gotten the drop on an entire roomful of aspiring secret agents. Pit-pit-pit—a few squeezes of the trigger and the room would be full of corpses.

“A shattering experience for all of us,” Hall admitted.

The Heavenly Twins, so dubbed for their saintly demeanor when not demonstrating how to claw a man’s testicles while dragging a bootheel down his shin, got right to work. They demonstrated thirty-six ways to knock someone cold with an open hand and nifty tricks for turning office supplies into weapons. “A clipboard for example,” said Henry Hall. “You can strike somebody with it across the side of the neck, on the head, on the nose, under the nose, you can hit him in the parts, you can hit him in the solar plexus….”

The Twins even introduced their own weapons: the icicle-thin Fairbairn-Sykes Commando Knife, which slides in and out of a man’s heart as neatly as a hypodermic needle, and the swordlike “smatchet,” a Bronze Age throwback that can crush through your rib cage and split you to the groin. “We were to be gangsters,” commented new dirty trickster Robert Sheppard. “But with the behavior, if possible, of gentlemen.”