Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 35

If you really attack a fire, you put it out. But if you attack it cautiously and fearfully, you get burned.

—GREEK PHILOSOPHER DIO CHRYSOSTOM,

the “Golden-Tongued”

I WASN’T counting on snow, though.

It was early May, the same time of year that Paddy was on the run, when Chris White and I began tracking his escape route. Springtime on Crete is like high summer anywhere else, so we’d spent the first few days sweating under a blazing sun. It was so hot as we crossed the Lasithi range that when we stumbled across a natural spring trickling into a stone sheep trough, we tore off our clothes and plunged in for a naked soak. For the rest of the day, we kept one eye on the trail and the other scanning for more heaven-sent plunge pools.

Mount Ida was a different story. At daybreak, we stood at its base and realized that high overhead, the gorge leading to the peak was still choked with snow. There was no getting around it: the only way Chris and I could cross the mountain would be to drop into that gully and hope the snowpack was solid enough to hold our weight as we crunched our way up to the top. If we were going to try, we had to go now; the higher the sun rose, the deeper we’d sink if we crashed through the crust.

“How high are we looking?” I asked Chris.

“High,” he said. “Nearly three thousand meters.” Chris glanced over his shoulder at the sun cresting the peaks behind us. We were starting at nearly sea level, so we had a long vertical ascent ahead before sunset. “Shall we?”

We shouldered our packs and began climbing, sidestepping through a long wash of crumbly scree as we traversed in an uphill diagonal toward the gorge. We were still on stone when the pitch suddenly veered upward, steepening so aggressively that I had to press my chest into the rock and climb with my hands to keep my pack from pulling me over backwards. The footing was so thin and crumbly, it was a relief two hours later to finally reach that long finger of snow-pack. We dropped into the gorge and were delighted—It’s frozen! Easy walking!—until we crashed through and sank up to our hips.

The only way out was belly first. We clawed with our hands until we pulled ourselves far enough out to free our legs a little. Then, lying flat on the snow, we kicked and swam until we got ourselves back out and up on our feet—only to drop back in a few steps later. We foundered along, mastodons in a tar pit, until we hit a steep stretch frozen into a glassy sheet. This was even trickier; if we lost our footing, we’d slide backwards and rocket all the way down the slope until we crashed to a stop on the rocks. I was glad to have a few months of Erwan training under my belt to fall back on, but as usual, Chris knew what to do instinctively. He dropped to all fours and I copied him, kicking in with my toes and gripping as best I could with my hands as we inched along.

“Now,” Chris panted. “Try this in the dark.”

When Paddy and Billy eyed Mount Ida from the mouth of their cave, the sun worried them more than the snow. There was no way they could get the general across the mountain in a single night, which meant that no matter what time they started, at some point dawn would break and they’d be stuck out there in full daylight. The worst place was high above tree line—“the shaved scalp,” as Billy called it—where they’d have nowhere to hide from planes and nowhere to run from pursuers.

So they dashed for it. After a recon plane passed in midafternoon, Paddy and his band slipped out of the cave and went on the move. They’d attack the lower slope immediately, then duck for cover before the planes circled back at dusk. They’d wait for the high roar of the engines to fade away, then set off again, crossing the snow in the dark before making the last hard push off the mountain before dawn. It was a gamble, especially because the general would be on his own two feet.

“The steepness and irregularity of the track were too much for the mule,” Paddy observed. “Back it had to go and the General, to his despair and ours, had to continue on foot up a slippery and collapsing staircase of loose boulders and shale and scree.” But if they’d timed it right, it was their best chance to stay alive.

Waiting for Paddy at the foot of the mountain were the Five Georges: five shepherds, all named George, who’d been sent by the local rebel leader as guides and bodyguards. The Georges quickly fanned out, some taking point while others trailed behind to keep an eye on the prisoner. They led Paddy’s band along spidery goat paths, zigzagging them up the steep stone until, just before dark, they reached snow line. “The last stunted mountain cedar vanished, leaving us in a stricken world where nothing grew and a freezing wind threatened to blow us off our feet. Then deep snow turned every step into torment,” Paddy would say. “Mist surrounded us and rain began to fall. We stumbled on, bent almost double against the blast; no breath or energy was left even for objurgation.”

Frozen and soaked to the skin, they fought through the snow at eight thousand feet, desperate for a warm sun but doomed if it came up. Paddy’s plan, they all knew, had failed. They’d never make it off that mountain before dawn. So shortly before sunrise, the Five Georges improvised a Plan B.

The Georges led the band to an old shepherd’s hut, a tumbled-down stone ruin with a collapsed roof that would give them a little shelter from the wind but not enough to draw attention. From the air, it would look like a pile of rubble and conceal them enough to wait for night to fall again. Paddy and Billy slunk back outside on a quick forage, hunting among the icy rocks until they spotted those familiar gray-leafed weeds. “Mountain dandelions,” explained Billy, who’d grown to savor their “pleasant, bitter taste.”

The two Brits brought breakfast back to the hut, where they found the Five Georges muttering and glaring at the general. “I think he must have sensed the atmosphere of antagonism,” Billy observed, “for he kept very quiet and sat by himself in a corner, not speaking.”

You’ve got a pistol, the Georges told Paddy. Use it.

The general was dragging his heels on purpose, they suspected. He knew they were vulnerable on the mountain, so he was playing a waiting game, dawdling along to keep them up there as long as he could. The Georges weren’t going to be captured because Paddy was a nice guy. It was time to put a gun to the general’s head and give him a choice: Move or die.

You’re right, Paddy agreed. But that will only work once. We need to reserve it as a last resort.

Which, it turned out, was just a few hours away.

At nightfall, the band slipped out of the hut and began their descent. Going down, Billy soon discovered, was scarier than going up. The moon faded behind clouds, forcing them to grope their way blindly. If any one of them fell, he could tenpin the rest of the group and send them on a long slide into the teeth of a boulder field. “It took us two hours to reach the bottom of the snow belt,” Billy said. And then it got worse.

“The mountain steepened to the tilt of a ladder,” Paddy would recall. “It was channelled and slippery with rain and each footfall unloosed a landslide of shifting stones. We were descending, hand over hand, through what seemed, in the dark and the wind, to be a jungle of hindering branches, spiked leaves, and vindictive twigs.” Every step was an act of faith; if the Georges accidentally led them off a dead drop, Paddy and Billy wouldn’t know until they were falling through the air. Below, the rebels were supposed to signal all’s-clear by lighting fires. Paddy and his band strained their eyes, searching the distance for pinpoints of flame, as Billy had to ask himself the only question that really mattered:

Why?

Why were they still pushing toward the coast, when the only ones who knew they were heading that way were the Germans? Did the British even know they were alive? How could they, when the one man they were counting on to coordinate their escape was still missing? There was still no word about Tom Dunbabin’s mysterious disappearance, and Paddy’s attempts to improvise backup communication to Cairo were becoming deadly: a Cretan runner carrying a message to a wireless operator on the far side of the mountain was intercepted by Germans and shot to death, while two others barely got away. “They brought us ugly news,” the rebel fighter Scuttle George would recall. “The Germans were hunting along the coast and up all the valleys. It was hopeless to go there. They also said it would be impossible for the English ship we were waiting for to approach the shore.”

What was the point, then? Why cross this mountain when they had no idea if a boat could ever meet them on the other side?

But if the Five Georges felt any doubt, it wasn’t slowing them down. They flowed down the back side of Mount Ida, sure-stepping along crumbling trails no wider than their feet and pivoting around boulders that suddenly loomed ahead in the dark. Keeping Billy and Paddy alive was the test of a true hērōs—a true protector—and there was only one way to pull it off: the Cretan way. They’d been raised to run farther, adapt faster, and survive on less than the men trying to kill them. All they had to do was find a donkey for the general, and they could stay on the move and fade back into the wilderness.

But first they had to get off that mountain.

From the top of Mount Ida, Chris White and I looked down and considered our options.

Off-trail, there was a skinny snake of a route that was somehow free of snow, but parts of it were too steep to walk and the rest was a crazy obstacle course of boulders and scree patches and sudden mini-cliffs where rocks had sheared from the mountain face. Or we could stick to the wandering thread of switchbacks, except they were so crosshatched by snowpack that we’d constantly be sidestepping on a forty-five-degree angle across frozen sliding boards.

“I’ve got an idea,” I called over to Chris. “But you might hate it.”

“I hate this,” he said, kicking at the ice. “What’ve you got?”

I told him about Parkour, and my apprenticeship in drugstore parking lots and London housing projects. I filled him in on the way Shirley bounded over walls, and the fact that the Yamakasi believed elastic recoil was the secret of effortless movement in the new urban jungle. I’d even asked Dan Edwardes specifically about Crete, and he wasn’t surprised that newcomers like Xan and Paddy and Billy Moss could learn to adapt. “The same thing we do in the city, they do in mountain terrain,” Dan had said. “That ‘Cretan Bounce’ you were asking about? That comes from precision. When you hit a rock and bounce off, it’s because you hit it square. You can’t brake or doubt. You have to trust your body and go.”

“So,” I asked Chris White. “Do you want to try?”

“What, running down the mountain?”

“More like bouncing.”

Chris toed the snowpack, then cinched his backpack tight. “After you.”

I yanked in my waist strap and glanced down to check my boot laces. Strip away conditioning and return to an innate, effortless way of moving that utilizes the entire body, I recalled one Parkour disciple urging. The elusive “flow state.” I jumped into the scree, sliding sideways down the steepest part of the slope until I got my balance and began to run, my feet stutter-stepping faster than my brain could process. I ran right off the edge of a mini-cliff, landing in a crouch so deep my butt almost hit the ground, and surged right back into a careening sprint.

“YES!” Chris was shouting behind me. “IT REALLY—”

My feet went out and I crashed, missing the rest.