Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 30

Where danger is,

Deliverance also beckons.

—FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, “Patmos”

CHRIS WHITE AND I began hunting Paddy’s trail as soon as the sun rose high enough for us to see the ground. We’d set off before daybreak from Heraklion, hopping a bus to the exact spot along the shore where, according to Chris’ calculations, Paddy had ditched the general’s car. Chris checked his bearings: Mount Ida straight ahead, rocky thumbnail of beach dead behind. Yup, we’d found the right meadow. But there was no hint of a path, nothing except a snarl of brambles leading straight to an unclimbable cliff.

“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Chris said. “It would have been just as wild when Paddy came through. You can just imagine the Germans looking at this and thinking, Well, they certainly didn’t go that way.”

Chris had been exploring on foot over the past two years with his brother, Pete, and exchanging notes with his fellow escape sleuths, Alun Davies and Christopher Paul and Tim Todd, so he was pretty sure he could now connect all the dots of the escape route. Except, that is, Dot #1. Pete would have been a huge help; his years of work in the New Forest had given him a flair for backcountry navigation, as I’d learned on our previous expedition, but he couldn’t make it this time. It was just Chris and I, and we were lost before we began.

Chris was unfazed. He scanned the thorny mess slowly, walking as far into the brambles as he could and dropping to a crawl when he couldn’t, working his way back and forth until his hand shot into the air and we were on our way. We followed the faint goat track high into the hills, climbing in and out of gullies until we emerged, just before noon, on a bluff overlooking a weird oasis: far below was a small cluster of stone buildings surrounded by tidy gardens.

We picked our way down and entered a silent cobblestone courtyard. Chris reached for the bell rope over the entrance, but before he could pull, a little Hobbit’s door creaked open.

“Kalos orisate,” we heard from somewhere in the darkness.

“Welcome.” We ducked inside the low door and found ourselves in a small, stone-floored kitchen. A monk with a chest-length black beard pressed a hand over his heart and gave a slight bow. He was Father Timothy Stavros, curator of the tiny Vossakou Monastery. How, he asked in halting English, could he be of service? Chris pulled out his letter, the one in Greek and English that explained our interest in the Kreipe kidnapping.

Father Timothy nodded. “Yes. They were here.”

He led us through the kitchen and outside to a porch overlooking the valley. Clay bowls full of foraged greens and spinach covered a shelf along the wall; hanging from nails in the beams overhead were mesh bags full of snails, airing for a few days as they purged themselves for cooking. Snails were freedom fighters’ food; you could harvest them on the run and they’d go dormant and keep fresh in your pockets until you were in the clear to cook. The Germans didn’t eat them, so villagers could gather them by the bushel without worrying they’d be seized and sneak them to guerrillas without fearing their food supplies would look suspiciously low. Kohli me stari has become one of my favorite meals on Crete—snails stewed in a broth of garlic and tomatoes and olive oil, with maybe an onion and some torn mint thrown in and a fistful of coarse cracked wheat added to thicken it into a paella-like porridge.

We sat down as another monk silently appeared with a pitcher of cold water and a plate of small, hard biscuits sprinkled with sesame seeds. Vossakou was built more than four hundred years ago, Father Timothy explained, but had been repeatedly destroyed by generations of invaders. “Eighteen of us were killed by the Turks,” he said. “Two of us were executed here”—he pointed a few yards away to a spot in the garden—“by the Germans. People who needed food came for help, so we helped. The Germans didn’t like that.” Father Timothy wasn’t here at the time; he’s only about fifty and had originally been a florist in Rethymno. For the past eight years, he’s been mostly alone at Vossakou. The older members of the order have all died off, leaving Father Timothy as one of the last living custodians of the monastery’s stormy history.

“The general spent about an hour here that night,” Father Timothy said, which baffled us until suddenly it made perfect sense. Billy and his prisoner had gotten out of the car past Vossakou, not behind, so it must have been Paddy in his German uniform the monks had seen. Paddy and George Tyrakis would have been parched and ravenous when they arrived here long after midnight; they’d had nothing to eat or drink since early in the evening and had been on a roller coaster of fighting and fleeing ever since. Their best hope for a place to refill their tanks was the monastery, so George would have banged on the door while Paddy lurked in the shadows. An hour was a long time to linger, but Paddy and George had to play it smart. They needed to gather their strength for the long climb to Anogia, and they wouldn’t want to carry anything that could be traced back to the monks if they were caught. They’d have taken the time to finish their biscuits and mutton. Then they were off.

Father Timothy pushed a bag of his hard, homemade biscuits into our hands as we got up to go. Chris and I trundled down the long slope into the valley, then followed a creek that knifed through a gorge with rolling foothills along both banks. By late afternoon, the monk’s biscuits were gone, my water pack had an ominously empty-sounding swish, and the foothills on our side of the gorge had sharpened into a sheer cliff. Across the creek, we faced a choice: pull ourselves up a long staircase of crop terraces carved into the mountain face, or gamble on a dirt road that might spiral all the way to Anogia if it didn’t dead-end in a pasture. The sun had sunk behind the mountain, leaving us only an hour of good light, but the terraces and dirt road were good signs that Anogia was right above us.

Chris pointed to the cliff rising at our backs. Only a Japanese painter could have loved that thing. It was snarled with prickly oak and so sheer it could have been cut from the mountain with a cleaver. “Somewhere in that mess, Billy stashed the general the first night,” Chris said. He and Pete had punished themselves searching for the cave on their last trip, but I could see why they’d gotten nowhere. Even if you knew where to go, you’d be at the mercy of prickers and dodgy handholds. Billy Moss described the cave as so painfully small and hard to reach that they only pushed inside as a last resort.

“Germans coming!” one of the guerrillas had warned him. “Plenty Germans in village!” Billy and his crew were right out in the open, taking a breather along the banks of the stream because Paddy had told them Anogia would be safe. “We hurriedly threw our kit on to our backs and made off along the bank of the stream,” Billy would recall. “Five minutes later, we reached a steep cliff face and up it we scrambled, heaving the General from foothold to foothold until we found ourselves at the entrance of a tiny cave.” All four squeezed into a space barely big enough for two, then screened the entrance with branches. They huddled there, listening to the rasp of their own breathing as a German search plane growled by so low that Billy could peek out and see one of the rear crewmen searching the valley through binoculars.

That evening, Billy and his crew led the general back down to the creek to meet up with Paddy. It was here, roughly where Chris and I were standing, that Paddy and Billy discovered that the man they were counting on most—Tom Dunbabin—might already have been captured.

How is it going? Paddy asked. Is the General putting up a fuss?

“Quite a pleasant catch” was Billy’s assessment. “Not the raving Nazi he might well have been.”

Have you heard anything from Tom? Paddy asked.

Nothing, Billy replied. His messenger had returned from Tom’s hideout dumbfounded. “He said he had searched the entire area for Tom, but had found no trace of him, nor had anyone in the district a notion of his whereabouts.” This was sad news. Tom’s radio operator turned up, but with a broken radio and no more idea than anyone else what happened to his boss. Tom Dunbabin wasn’t just their link to the outside world. He was supposed to be spearheading all clandestine ops on the island. That meant one man and one man alone knew the secret locations of the last two remaining wireless operators: Tom.

“He was the only Open Sesame to the other two stations,” Paddy realized. Without him, they could send messages only through a series of human firewalls, with each guerrilla knowing only the identity of the next man in the chain. Xan Fielding had as much credibility on Crete as “O Tom,” as Dunbabin was known, and could possibly tighten up communications, but Xan hadn’t made it back from Egypt yet. Were the Germans tightening the noose so quickly that Tom had to go into hiding? Or was he already in their hands? Paddy and Billy had both taken the precaution of using the human relay to send news of the kidnapping to another radio operator, but predictably, it arrived disastrously garbled: at that moment, the BBC was reporting that General Kreipe would be taken off the island, not was off.

What about our leaflet drop? Paddy asked.

Canceled, Billy replied. Too much cloud cover for our planes to get through.

Billy and Paddy were still absorbing the bad news when worse arrived. The guerrillas escorting the general’s driver showed up—without the driver. Germans are everywhere, the guerrillas reported. There were full-scale drives, the Cretans told Paddy, launched in every direction, and they themselves had only just escaped capture.

Okay. But where’s the driver?

Andoni sliced a finger across his throat.

Paddy was heartsick. Their chances for escape had just plummeted, and his dream of a bloodless, Magic Gang–style triumph was over. As soon as the driver’s body was discovered, the Butcher would go berserk. He’d have to assume General Kreipe was dead as well, which meant he no longer had to worry about getting a hostage back alive. Instead of a rescue operation, it would be total war. The Butcher’s only objective now would be vengeance for the murder of a brother officer.

Time to get moving. Ahead lay Mount Ida, sprawling across a quarter of the island and climbing to over eight thousand feet. The general was still complaining about his injured leg, so they helped him up on the donkey and moved out, following a nearly invisible goat track into the woods. “It was vital for us to get into the mountains and among friends,” Paddy decided, “away from the enemy-infested plain and in the right direction for escape by sea, at high speed.”

Wait. By sea? The guerrillas were doubtful. Why don’t we fly him out, Wolf style?

Ugh. Wasn’t the sky already dark enough without that name coming up? Otto Skorzeny: “Hitler’s Wolf.” The evil genius with a dueling scar down his cheek and a specialty in killing anyone, anywhere, and disappearing without a trace. Whenever a job seemed impossible, the Wolf was called in. He led a special force of Jagdkommandos—“Hunting Warriors”—who were said to “live off the land, think for themselves and never be daunted by the disastrous mess they often found themselves in.” A year earlier, Skorzeny and his Hunters had snuck into a fortified Italian castle high on a mountain and broken Benito Mussolini out of prison. Mussolini had been overthrown in a coup, but Hitler was determined to rescue “Italy’s greatest son, our dear friend and close ally,” and restore him to power. Skorzeny landed by glider at night with a small attack squad, then forced the two-hundred-man guard detail to surrender. Skorzeny spirited Mussolini to an escape plane in a nearby field, and before long Il Duce was back in command. To prevent Hungary’s leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy, from surrendering to the Soviets, Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son, rolled him into a carpet, and snuck him off to a concentration camp, where he was held hostage until the end of the war.

A few months later, as the story goes, the Wolf parachuted into Iran intent on assassinating Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt with a single blow. The Wolf and his Hunters crept closer as the Big Three Allied leaders were meeting in Tehran to discuss war strategy. Just in time, a Russian spy exposed Operation Long Jump and many of the Hunters were captured. But Skorzeny got away, reemerging in an American uniform and jeep far behind enemy lines as he atomized from place to place, sabotaging Allied troops and getting so close to Supreme Headquarters that for days at a time, General Dwight Eisenhower had to be hidden in a guarded location. Skorzeny is “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Eisenhower fumed. “Public Enemy No. 1.”

“We couldn’t evacuate our prisoners by air, in Skorzeny style,” Paddy told the disappointed Cretans. “The Germans had put all the big mountain plateaux out of action for long-range aircraft by forcing labour-gangs to litter them with cairns of stones.” But the burning question wasn’t whether they could follow in the Wolf’s footsteps; it was whether the Wolf was following theirs. Rather than flail around in pursuit of the kidnappers, why wouldn’t the Butcher call in Skorzeny and put the Hunters on their trail? It made perfect sense. As an outlaw himself, Skorzeny would know exactly what Paddy was planning. Instead of chasing the kidnappers, he’d think ten moves ahead and be waiting in ambush.

So the faster Paddy and his crew ran, the closer they could be getting to the Wolf.