Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 14

Θά πάρωμεν Τ’ άρματα νά Φύγωμεν στά Μαδάρα..

TRANSLATION: “We will take our arms and flee to the White Mountains.”

—JOHN PENDLEBURY,

in a last letter to his wife before the German invasion

XAN’S BOOTS scraped pebbly sand, then a wave cracked and sent him tumbling. He stumbled to his feet, and together with Turrall he struggled through the surf and up onto the beach. There was no sign of Guy Delaney.

“Something must have gone wrong,” Turrall said.

“But he signaled OK.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing. The Germans may have intentionally let him make his signal before nabbing him, in the hope of nabbing us as well.”

Xan knew Turrall was right. Their original plan was to come ashore a few miles away and rendezvous with another British agent in a hidden cove, but rough seas had forced them farther down the coast. More than likely, they’d landed near a German lookout, which meant Guy was a goner. Delaney would be lucky if the Germans didn’t open fire the instant they spotted his light, thanks to that whole Operation Flipper fiasco: a few weeks earlier, a British commando assault team using the same rubber rafts as Xan and Turrall and launching from the same sub came ashore on another Mediterranean beachfront, this one in Libya. They were hunting Erwin Rommel, “the Desert Fox,” whose unstoppable Afrika Korps panzers were threatening to overrun Cairo. The Brits burst through Rommel’s bedroom door with grenades flying and guns blazing … except Rommel, famous for his Fingerspitzengefühl—“fingertip feel,” or sixth sense—had already moved base. But the fact that Allied raiders got within pistol range of a top general’s bed, even an empty one, left a lasting impression of what to expect from strangers in the night in rubber rafts.

The storm; that’s what must have saved Xan and Turrall. They must have blown past the sentries, who couldn’t spot their gray raft in the dark chop. They had to get to cover—fast—but where do you run when you don’t know where anyone is? Xan saw a faint strip of light in the distance. Let’s crawl in for a look, Turrall urged. It was risky, but shrewd: they could at least figure out where not to go, and hopefully confirm Guy’s whereabouts.

Xan pulled his pistol and slipped off the safety. “I started creeping up the beach towards the light, which as I approached revealed itself as a gap in a shuttered window.” Xan inched closer and picked up a snatch of conversation. He listened intently, then got to his feet. “Be ready to give me covering fire,” he whispered to Turrall. “I’m going in.” Before Turrall could grab him, Xan charged. “I kicked open the door, at the same time flourishing my pistol and flashing on my torch.” And there, “sitting by a twig fire in steaming long-legged underwear,” was Guy Delaney, drying his clothes and chatting with the fisherman who owned the hut.

“You’ve been bloody slow getting here,” Delaney grumbled.

Xan had recognized Delaney’s voice and understood the fisherman’s Greek, so he’d only mock-attacked, to get Turrall’s goat. Delaney was just as relieved; he’d been chilled to the bone on the beach and finally had to get warm or risk hypothermia. Even the fisherman was delighted; he wanted to call the whole village to arms, and was just a bit crestfallen when Xan explained that the three midnight guests were alone and not the advance team of a full Allied invasion. Only Turrall was in a foul mood—he’d been through too much in his life, not to mention that night alone, to tolerate any more of Xan’s shit.

But the fisherman had a little gift to cheer him up: a prisoner!

“There’s a German here in Tsoutsouros!” A deserter had turned up a few days ago and kept hanging around, hoping to find someone he could surrender to. He couldn’t have wandered into better luck: that little cove was too barren and inaccessible for the Germans to bother with, so Xan and his team were the only outsiders anyone had seen for weeks. Crap was supposed to surface again the following night to offload rifles for the Cretans and supplies for the British agents, so Turrall could paddle the forlorn German out to the sub and notch himself a capture.

By the time Xan dried and warmed himself, dawn was breaking. He’d only seen Crete through the sub’s periscope, so as the sun rose, he went outside for his first good look. You’d expect to be dazzled by sea views on a skinny sausage of an island like that—161 miles long and 37 wide at its thickest, 12 at its thinnest—but even those turquoise shimmers are overshadowed by the startling explosion of mountains. From the beach it all looks so easy, so summery, Alpine and inviting. It’s only when you push into the hills and find yourself twisting through gorges and smacking into sheer rock faces hidden by trees that you discover why there was no coast-to-coast road and why a two-mile trek could take four hours and leave you where you started.

No wonder Crap’s sub was able to come within a mile of the beach without being spotted: all that elevation meant Xan was nicely hidden by a giant stone fence. Most of Crete’s mountains run right through the middle of the island, creating a jagged belt separating the Germans in the north from the rebels in the south. Just east of Xan, ablaze in the early-morning sun, was the skyscraping prenatal unit of the world’s first guerrilla fighter: Zeus, greatest of the Greek gods.

Zeus wasn’t born to the throne; he scrapped his way there, Cretan style. Zeus’s father was Kronos, the Titan who ruled the earth and swallowed his children so they wouldn’t overthrow him. When Kronos’s wife was pregnant with Zeus, she snuck away to Psychro Cave, in Crete’s easternmost Dikti Mountains. After giving birth, she returned home and fooled Kronos into swallowing a stone wrapped in a baby’s blanket, while the infant—“safe in Crete, strong of limb and crafty”—was raised by Diktynna, the cunning and elusive goat-nymph. A tribe of mountain warriors, the Kouretes, guarded the baby and performed a shield-clanging war dance so Kronos wouldn’t hear him crying. When Zeus was big enough, he cut his brothers and sisters free from Dad’s belly and led them in bringing down the tyrant.

Some insist Zeus’s birth cave was farther west of Xan on Mount Ida, Crete’s highest peak, which made a lot of sense. Ida is snow-crowned and glorious, home to golden eagles and the kri-kri, the rare and magnificent Cretan ibex. Sure enough, searchers located a palatial cave on Ida overlooking the Amari, Crete’s lushest valley. Buried inside this natural throne room were ancient offerings: bracelets, Egyptian pottery, bronze knives. Pythagoras was even said to have made a pilgrimage to the Idaean Cave, and Euripides mentioned “Idaean Zeus” in his play The Cretans. The Idaean Cave is majestic enough for a king—but the infant Zeus was a fugitive with a death sentence. That’s one reason why, in 1901, the British archeologist D. G. Hobarth decided to take another look at Psychro.

The Dikti range is dark and rough, exactly the kind of place where a wild child could disappear from the world and be raised by a band of loyal mountain men and a mystical she-goat. Hobarth pushed deep into the rocked-off recesses of Psychro. Blasting his way with dynamite into an “abysmal chasm,” he discovered a treasury of other devotional gifts, including Cretan double axes, believed to be a sacred emblem of Zeus—far more than the trinkets discovered in the Idaean Cave, but more important, far older. “The Cave of Ida, however rich it proved in offerings when explored some years ago, has no sanctuary approaching the mystery of this,” Hobarth wrote. Visitors assumed regal Mount Ida was the place for a god, but true Cretans knew the Dikti is where a hunted man would hide.

The killers were coming for Xan, too. German troops may have spotted the sub and could already be closing in, so the longer he lingered in Tsoutsouros, the more he risked himself and everyone in the village. He now had to search for Monty Woodhouse, the other British agent stationed on the island. Luckily, the solution soon appeared, high on a ridge behind him.

Trotting down the rock slope came two Cretan highlanders, both dressed in black shirts and old-time shepherd’s breeches, with the knee-length crotch for easy running. The highlanders hurried into Tsoutsouros with news: they could lead Xan to Monty, but they had to leave at once. Xan had been on the move for nearly two full days by that point and eaten little more than bread crusts, but rested or exhausted, fed or famished, go-time for a guerrilla is non-negotiable. Xan set off behind one of the highlanders and got his first taste of the Cretan Bounce.

“As soon as we reached the foothills and started climbing he was in his element at once,” Xan noted, “bounding from stone to stone with a speed and precision which defied our breathless attempts to emulate him.” Monty’s man was patient but relentless, slowing his uphill rock hopping long enough to keep Xan in sight but pushing steadily through the afternoon and into the evening. Finally, at nightfall, Xan trudged out of the mountains and into a bizarre dream world.

“Through the open door of the village coffee shop I saw a horde of frenzied giants in tattered khaki and slouch hats,” he observed. “The chorus of Waltzing Matilda filled the dusk.” More than a dozen drunk Australian soldiers were sloshing about, guzzling Cretan moonshine. After months on the run, the fugitive Aussies had heard that Crap was on the way and came out of hiding to slip down to the beach. When they discovered Crap had come and gone without them, their determination to remain invisible gave way to desperate drinking. For one night at least.

Xan slunk past, head down. “The sight of them reminded me of the last time I had to deal with drunken Australians,” he’d remark, recalling his quick surrender when he tried to defend a Jewish family from some Aussie bullies. Xan was led to a small house and entered to find his boss: a twenty-four-year-old Oxford classics scholar who not only looked like a college boy on spring break, but not long ago was. Montgomery Woodhouse was tall and gawky, so blond and pink-cheeked in that roomful of ferocious stubble that he almost looked albino.

Still, Monty had style. Xan had to admire the “superb shepherd’s cloak” Monty had chosen for his disguise. “Clandestine life came easily enough to me,” Monty would explain. “My Greek was good enough to deceive the enemy, though my appearance was against me. Of course no Greek was ever deceived either by my accent or my disguise, but that was an asset, because as soon as I was recognized a spontaneous conspiracy sprang up to protect me.”

Seven weeks behind enemy lines had also hard-sharpened him, so Monty got straight down to business. Hitler suspects Crete is his Achilles’ heel, Monty explained; Xan’s job was to convince him. Only four or five thousand troops should be necessary to secure an island of Crete’s size, but the Resistance had done such a superb job of making Hitler nervous that more than eighty thousand Germans were still stationed there. Hitler desperately needed that manpower in North Africa and the Russian front, but he couldn’t risk shifting them if it meant that an underground army would overthrow his Mediterranean base.

Which makes you, Monty told Xan, the master of mayhem in the middle. Clans and villages across the island had turned themselves into small guerrilla forces, each under the leadership of its own chieftain. And every Cretan who wasn’t carrying a gun was still armed with eyes and ears: no German plane could leave the island without being spotted, and no German soldiers could board a troop ship without being counted. Xan would be the spider in the center of the web. He’d have to race back and forth across the island, bringing in weapons by parachute for Cretan bandits and radioing German plane coordinates for British fighter pilots.

Every day that Xan could stay alive, Monty told him, was another day that Field Marshal Rommel’s panzers might have to wait for fuel, Russian fighters could hold out in Leningrad, and entire German regiments would be lost in the Cretan mountains in pursuit of a few dozen invisible men. But for now, Xan would have to do it alone. Monty was heading back to the mainland, so Xan would basically be on his own until a new man could be recruited.

And his first challenge, Monty warned, could be his last. Xan’s only contact with the outside world would be his radio operator, who was in a hideout on Mount Ida. Between them lay some of the most treacherous terrain on the island: the Messara Valley, which led right to the Germans’ main airbase. To establish radio contact with Cairo, Xan would have to trek across a hundred some miles of mountain and slip through crisscrossing German patrols.

If he could do that, then it was on to even trickier territory: the White Mountains, a favorite lair for bandits, rebels, and John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury, the one-eyed archeologist who’d become one of the great enigmas of the war. No one on Crete was more hated by the Germans or more hunted. Stories had spread beyond the island of “Pendlebury’s Thugs,” a band of Allied evaders led by a tall, pale man with a patch over one eye and a silver dagger in the sash around his waist.

“The small force of British, New Zealand, and Australian troops who evaded capture in Crete and are conducting vigorous guerrilla warfare against the Germans,” Reuters news agency reported, “are commanded by a British officer well known to the islanders.” In broadcasts from Berlin, the German military fumed, “It is undoubtedly to be attributed to Pendlebury’s activities that large numbers of the population turned guerrilla.”

The Thugs were said to fight like desperadoes—sniping from the dark with deadly aim, taking no prisoners. If Pendlebury’s exploits were real, Churchill and those two old Shanghai hands, Fairbairn and Sykes, would be delighted; it meant at least one swashbuckling Brit had come up with a way to give Hitler a taste of total war. The Führer was reportedly so intent on seeing Pendlebury killed that he demanded the glass eye be plucked from Pendlebury’s skull and sent to him as a war prize. Greek prisoners were forced to search through piles of corpses, poking their fingers into eye sockets. But as of Xan’s arrival on Crete in December, Pendlebury’s whereabouts were still unknown.

Monty finished his briefing. Xan was desperately tired and needed a solid meal and a good rest before making his attempt on Mount Ida. On the other hand, there were those Australians….

“Since I felt no particular urge to remain in Akendria,” he judged, “I decided to set off at once.”