Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 36

THE BUTCHER, DAY 8 OF THE ABDUCTION:

Cretans, beware! The edge of the German sword will strike down every one of the guilty men and all the bandits and all the henchmen and hirelings of the English.

CRETAN SHEPHERD TO PADDY:

He’d better look out or we’ll capture him too.

I RUMBLED OVER ROCKS, sliding out of control, until I was able to brake to a stop with my heels. I was still trying to figure out what happened and how badly banged up I was when footsteps thundered past close to my head.

“YOU OKAY?” Chris White shouted as he galloped by.

“Yeah,” I called.

“GOOD! CAN’T STOP!”

Chris looked like a nervous kid at his first ice rink, with his back all stiff and his arms wide and slightly flappy as he braced for the wipe-out he knew was coming. Loosen up, I was about to shout, but decided to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want to distract him, plus the guy sprawled in the dirt wasn’t really the one to be giving out pointers. And as awkward as Chris seemed to me, it was working. He’d probably look just fine to Dr. Schleip, the fascia research specialist who demonstrated human elastic recoil by clipping his keys to a spring and letting them sproing up and down. Your body works the same way: as long as your movement is rhythmic and your center is stacked—head over shoulders over hips over knees, as erect as a boxer in the ring or a girl on a pogo stick—you can bounce along indefinitely. But when you break tempo or fall off-balance, you short out all that free energy from your rubbery tendons and connective tissue. That’s what happened to me; I’d gotten a little fancypants with my tiny bit of Parkour and my Erwan jungle training and began adding quick-cuts and leaps. I was forcing it; Chris was flowing.

He’s a marvel, I thought, then realized I was wrong: he’s exactly what I should have expected. Chris is the natural born hero I’ve been looking for, the one that Georges Hébert and Teddy Roosevelt and the Heavenly Twins were certain was lurking in all of us. That’s why Chris was mastering this stuff while I kept bumbling. I’d tried to data-dump it all into my system over the course of three years, but in his own instinctive way, Chris had been absorbing the art of the hero for six decades. As with all true heroes, his starting points were compassion and curiosity. He became his own Camp Half-Blood: instead of searching for instructors in London housing projects and lonely Arizona outposts, he’s hiked and sailed and wandered about on his own, getting in over his head and finding a way back out again. His backyard cabin was full of maps and memoirs, making it a window into the minds of the people he was trying to understand. As a psychologist, he listened for a living, and on his adventures he’d turn that same encouraging attention on an old farmer telling a story in a language that Chris doesn’t speak, and before he knew it he was being served a tasty dish he’d never heard of or being led to a cave that no other historian could find. In his own natural way, Chris had become the bond that united Erwan and Plutarch, Phil Maffetone and Paddy, Norina Bentzel and the Heavenly Twins: wherever Chris went, he was useful.

I was struggling to get there myself. I’d made a lot of right steps: instead of half-assing around with weights for a strength workout, I now climbed the twenty-five-foot rope I hung from a tree limb in my backyard. I practiced Steve Maxwell’s personal invention, the “Traveling Maxercist,” a functional fitness drill that takes three minutes and challenges just about every conceivable body movement. I followed Erwan and Shirley Darlington’s lead and turned many of my afternoon runs into trouble-quests: I focused less on speed and distance and more on challenges, like scrambling up hills on all fours, sprinting from tree to tree, rolling under fences and vaulting over guardrails. Useful stuff.

But the key, as Chris was demonstrating in his mad contortions down the mountain, was forgetting about everything except the mountain. The reason I crashed, I had to admit, was because I’d been thinking about getting to the bottom first and staying ahead of Chris. I was trying to win, instead of trying to learn. Chris didn’t care what he looked like; much the way Mark Allen only conquered Ironman after he stopped looking at every workout as a competition and instead submitted to Phil Maffetone’s agonizingly slow fat-as-fuel method, Chris had absorbed enough of the heroic ideal to understand that the payoff comes after you stop grabbing for it. Learn the skills, and when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

Watching him now as he learned on the fly how to Cretan Bounce down an Alpine descent was like watching Paddy and Xan Fielding and John Pendlebury in action. Chris was an unqualified man on an improbable mission, and so far he was succeeding brilliantly. He’d gotten us nearly as far as Paddy had gotten himself, and even though we’d started at eight thousand feet, Chris looked like he’d run out of mountain before he ran out of wind.

I hustled to my feet before he dropped out of sight. As I began to run, a tiny cluster of rooftops appeared below: the village of Nivathris.

“What are you doing here, boys?” Andoni Zoidakis exclaimed when Paddy and his band arrived at the bottom of Mount Ida near Nivathris. “You ought all to be dead!” Andoni touched his fingers to his forehead and belly, over and over, in the sign of the cross.

Then he paused, puzzled. But why did you ignore my warning?

After helping Paddy with the abduction and then killing the general’s driver, Andoni had crossed Mount Ida ahead of the band to scout an escape route. What he found was terrifying. Troops were already linked in an unbroken chain and marching up the slope in a total comb-out. Columns of dust were heading toward Mount Ida from all directions with reinforcements, while observation planes were blanketing the southern villages with leaflets offering a choice between cash rewards and blood revenge.

Andoni scrawled an urgent message to Paddy and put it in the hands of a runner who knew where the band was hiding. In the darkness of a slit cave, Paddy flicked on his flashlight just long enough to read:

“In God’s name come tonight!”

Tonight? Why on earth would Andoni tell them to leave the cave when Germans were all around them? They were in an excellent hideout, deep and dark, with only the thinnest crack of an entrance shrouded by thick brambles. You could pass within inches and never see a thing—and that was exactly what the Butcher’s men were doing. Outside, shouts and stomping boots were everywhere. “I personally think that the airplane spotted us on the treeless expanse,” Scuttle George would surmise. “The search parties were hunting the valleys inch by inch, firing off flares—and bullets too—and shouting, ‘KREIPE! SPEAK UP! DON’T BE AFRAID!’ ”

The general grew smug as he heard his troops approaching. “Perhaps,” he told Paddy, “you and your company will soon be my prisoners.”

Scuttle George watched Paddy stare the general down. Paddy spoke, slowly and deliberately, and Scuttle George finally saw the leader he’d been counting on. “You will never escape these men,” Paddy told the general. “They’re ready to kill you right now. No matter how close your troops get, don’t even dream of opening your mouth.”

The general went silent. And long after dark, Paddy decided to swallow his doubts and trust Andoni’s judgment. Leaving the cave seemed foolish, but Paddy and Manoli had both been struck by how “urgent and precise” the message had been. Andoni didn’t suggest they come at once; he all but promised they were dead if they didn’t. As the band crept out of the cave, it began to rain, then sleet. Warily, they felt their way through the dark and icy trees. Somehow, they arrived at Andoni’s meeting place—a little clump of oaks with the watering trough cut from a fallen log—but Andoni wasn’t there.

For two hours they shivered in the dark, growing more nervous as the sky lightened. Finally, they couldn’t wait anymore. The Cretans led Paddy and Billy down the slope to the edge of Andoni’s home village, where they crawled into a gully covered by a thick bed of thyme and myrtle. Poor Andoni, Paddy thought. First Tom Dunbabin disappeared, now him. Only a bullet would have stopped Andoni, Paddy knew. Only a bullet or …

Paddy dug out the slip of paper. He and Manoli pulled a coat over their heads to hide the flashlight beam, and with their heads pressed together they read the message again:

“In God’s name come tonight!” Right. Exactly as they’d—

Wait a second. After “name,” the paper was creased and a little soggy. Paddy spread the note flat, and as he smoothed out the wrinkle, two letters emerged: hu. Somehow they’d missed the single most important word in the entire message:

“In God’s name don’t come tonight!”

Good Lord. Andoni must have seen the troops moving out and realized they were marching shoulder-to-shoulder straight toward Paddy’s cave. He’d implored Paddy to lie low until the Germans passed, but instead the band set off on a collision course straight at them—and passed through to the other side. “God exists!” Andoni exclaimed in amazement later that morning, after one of the Georges retrieved him from the village and brought him to the band’s hiding place. “You ought all to build churches. What churches—cathedrals! How did you get through? The whole place was full of them. Hundreds, especially where you came down.”

In a flash, Paddy understood what happened. “The Germans nearly always stuck to the main paths; when they wandered away from them, they usually got lost,” he’d learned. “Everything ahead was a looming wilderness of peaks and canyons, and in the rougher bits it would be impossible for a large party to keep formation, or even contact, except at a slow crawl which could be heard and seen for miles.” On a dark night over icy ground, the Butcher’s men would have instinctively bunched together near the trail and not strayed off alone toward a deadly enemy in the dark, leaving narrow corridors for Paddy’s band to slip through.

Where were the Germans now? Paddy asked.

“All gone up Mount Ida, after you and the General,” Andoni exulted.

Paddy was ecstatic, but not for long. Andoni had more to say. Remember those two secret coves you were counting on as escape points? Both were blown. The Butcher had troops guarding them around the clock. Even the Preveli monastery, on the extreme edge of the island, was under surveillance, and the monks were being questioned by the Gestapo. “Our way of escape from the island was blocked,” Paddy realized. “We had to begin all over again.” They had outrun the Butcher, but they’d run out of island.

One hope remained: Paddy’s favorite outlaw, the unstoppable George Psychoundakis, was on his way. George suspected that Paddy would need his help, so he raced across the northern mountains and found his way to the hideout. Beside him was “a great tough, free-booting giant,” as Paddy put it, who’d slash the throat of anyone who even looked at the Clown crossways. Paddy knew why; this was the father of the little girls George had saved by carrying them to safety on his back. Yanni Katsias was a sheep thief and murderer with a price on his head and twenty corpses to his credit, but he became bonded for life to the little sprite by his side on the day George risked his life to save Yanni’s children from a German attack.

With George and his arch-criminal blood brother there to help, Paddy began brainstorming a fresh plan. Paddy had stashed his Cretan costume in a village about five hours away. Could George retrieve it and come right back?

“Don’t worry,” George replied.

Good. Then Paddy would go full undercover, disguising himself as a goatherd and joining the Clown to scout the coastline. Somewhere along that rocky smugglers’ shoreline, there had to be some forgotten nook where a British boat could slip in. Billy would stay behind and keep the general hidden, despite the handicap of speaking no Greek or German and barely knowing where he was. But nearby was a wild maze of a ravine where Billy and the general could go underground, and in the neighboring village of Patsos was a good man who could bring them a donkey and join them on the run. Yiorgos Pattakos was a young country boy, but among the guerrillas he was already known as “a determined and fearless palikari”—a true hero.

“Mr. Yiorgos Pattakos?” the voice said. “You are looking for Yiorgos Pattakos?”

Chris White and I had trudged into Patsos and shucked our sweat-soaked packs on the front porch of the village café—and by “village,” I mean a handful of homes packed so tightly together at the bottom of a grotto, it seemed its most fervent civic wish was to never be noticed. The fog helps; as we were hiking toward Patsos across an endless boggy moor, we got lost in a fog that rolled so creamily off the sluggish horseshoe of a river, it felt like we were high in the Andes. We had to keep circling and backtracking, mucking through our own bootprints, until finally the sun cut through and we caught a glint of windows in the distance.

At the café, Chris showed his paper to the elderly woman behind the counter. She held up a finger: Wait. She dialed the wall phone, then handed Chris the receiver.

“You are interested in Mr. Yiorgos?” the crackly voice asked.

“Yes, we’re hoping to—”

“I’m two hours away. I’ll be there in ninety minutes.”

Chris and I sat down to eat, tucking into giant Greek salads and a plateful of cheese. Before we’d finished, a black SUV roared down the thin slash of road and screeched to a stop in front of us. A bruiser of a man stepped out, big-armed and thick-chested with a jaw that looked like it could crack walnuts. He pulled off his wrap-arounds and scowled up at the café, pivoting his head like a tank turret from table to table until he locked in on us. His face split in a grin.

“Chreestopher!”

“So good to see you, Vasilios.”

“A man of his word. You came back. I couldn’t hear you on the phone.”

Chris met Vasilios the previous year when he and Pete had gone in search of—and ultimately discovered—one of the more vexing of the kidnappers’ hideouts, a narrow gash beneath a cliff which Billy Moss had described as being close to a shrouded waterfall that was so enticing, even the general stripped down to bathe. After being led to the falls by a shepherd, Chris and Pete trekked on to Patsos, where they got to know Vasilios, a Greek Special Forces combat diver and paratrooper whose mother owns the café. Vasilios liked the White brothers immediately and enjoyed telling them what he knew about his little village’s commitment to the Resistance. Chris had promised to return, but it was evident from Vasilios’s reaction that few visitors to Patsos ever found their way back.

“Mr. Yiorgos,” Chris said. “Is he still alive?”

“Alive?” Vasilios asked, perplexed. “He’s right here.”

We turned and for the first time noticed an old gentleman in a gray beret sitting against the wall, his hands and chin on his walking stick as he gazed out at the hills. Vasilios squatted beside him and spoke quietly, then beckoned us over. We pulled our chairs close as this remarkable survivor began to speak, bringing us back to the nightmare he endured and the day he was asked to choose between his family and his country.

“There was only one mule in the village,” Vasilios translated. “And it belonged to the Kourkoulas family….”

When the Hunters first appeared in the sky above Crete, Yiorgos was still a teenager. Somehow, he and the Kourkoulases’ four-legged livelihood both survived the bombings and the burnings, the mass executions and the body-snatching raids by German troops hunting slave labor for their work crews. In a mountain village like Patsos, a mule is a life-support system, the only emergency-response vehicle that can carry a hurt child to the doctor and haul food across the peaks to the stranded and starving. The entire village depended on that one animal, so when a whisper arrived from the hills that a British soldier was hurt and needed a mule to outrun a German manhunt, the only smart response was to keep your mouth shut and head down.

Instead, the mule’s owner grabbed a harness and turned the mule over to Yiorgos. “They told us the officer was British,” Yiorgos explained, “because they knew we’d never give the mule to a German.” Yiorgos made his way down to the hiding place, accompanied by his sister with a basket of food. Ten guerrillas were waiting, along with a portly older man in a dark overcoat. “My sister passed around a bottle of raki and gave everyone some cheese,” Yiorgos said. “One said, ‘Don’t forget our cousin, the policeman.’ That was their nickname for the general, because of his long coat. When the general took it off to piss, a boy who came with us saw the medals on his chest and was so scared, he ran away. Until we saw it with our eyes, we couldn’t believe they really captured a German general.”

When it was time to move out, Yiorgos helped the general mount. “We led the party right this way,” Yiorgos told us, pointing to the lane in front of the café. “Everyone in Patsos saw him, and no one in Patsos told a soul.”

“We never betray a secret!” Vasilios thundered, slapping the table.

“Never,” Yiorgos agreed. “That’s why the Germans never burned us. No betrayers, so they never knew.”

Once past the village, the band started up a rocky slope into the mountains. “In a flash,” Yiorgos said, “the mule jumped and threw the general, injuring his shoulder.” Yiorgos helped the general back up, but the mule threw him again, this time so badly the general needed a sling for his arm. “He didn’t like Germans,” Yiorgos shrugged. To this day, the Midnight Payback of the Patsos Mule is commemorated on Crete by the expression Tou strati gá to perasma—“A general can fall into your lap,” meaning “Even big shots get cut down to size.”

For the next three days, Yiorgos was the general’s personal escort as the band scrambled just out of reach of the search parties. The same night the kidnappers left Patsos, the Butcher’s men surrounded the village. “They searched it, and though they found nothing, they took 40 villagers hostage,” Yiorgos’s cousin, George Harokopos, would recall. “Fortunately, they were all released five weeks later after exhaustive but fruitless interrogation.” The Germans were getting dangerously close, but even more worrying, they were getting dangerously smart. Since the beginning of the war, Cretan men had been sleeping in the woods at night to avoid being surrounded in their villages before dawn. The ploy had been nearly foolproof—until the Germans, desperate to find the general, grew more cunning.

“The raiders used a new system,” Harokopos explained. “They hid at key points among the trees, in the cornfields and up trees. They even let the unsuspecting villagers leave with their animals in the morning to work in the fields and the village. When they approached, the Germans leaped out at them.” Every time the band thought it had a little breathing space, a scout arrived with a fresh warning. One night, the kidnappers were just tucking into a thickly wooded hollow when a shepherd burst from the trees.

“My friends, get up quickly!” he panted.

More than a hundred troops were heading right at them, storming down the dirt road from the mountains in trucks. Yiorgos and George Harokopos grabbed Billy Moss and the general and hurried them into a slit cave in the side of a ravine. The rest of the band scattered into the trees. Within minutes, machine-gun fire and grenades were exploding just west of their hiding place. Yiorgos and his cousin readied their weapons, but instead of drawing closer, the shooting drifted away. Local Resistance fighters had been shadowing the kidnap gang as an invisible escort, and as the troop convoy approached, they opened fire, creating a diversion and drawing the Germans in the wrong direction.

“Yasou,” Yiorgos said not long after they emerged from hiding. “Farewell.” He’d reached the limit of the countryside he knew, so it was time for a fresh mount and guide to take over. “Yiorgos Pattakos left to return east with the Kourkoulases’ wonderful mule, which had made our journey so much faster in spite of the General’s accident,” recalled his cousin, who remained on with the kidnappers. Within a few days Yiorgos had retraced his stealthy steps back through the German patrols and arrived home.

“If I can ask a question,” I said. “Would you do it again? Now that you’re ninety-one years old, looking back—the Germans were murdering entire villages. Was it wise to put your family at risk?”

Vasilios began translating, but erupted before he finished. “Everyone from this village was a patriot!” he simmered, outraged I’d suggest otherwise. But Yiorgos quietly raised a hand.

“It’s a good question,” Yiorgos said, and then gave an answer which stayed with me for a long time and, the more I thought about it, kept extending further and further—from the four of us around the table to the ends of that tiny village, all the way across this embattled island and back to my own home and family. “When you live in a place like this—small, by itself—you’re brought up to give help, not wait for it,” Yiorgos began. When your neighbor needs something, he needs you. The person he knows. Not the army. Not the police. You. And if you’re not there, someday you’ll have to look him in the face and explain.

Vasilios was listening so intently, Chris had to prompt him to translate. “The Germans didn’t know us, and they believed they could not lose,” Yiorgos continued. “They believed they’d never have to look anyone in the face and explain. They’d never have to pay for what they did. And I believe that is why we defeated them.” Because we have to answer to one another, and they did not.

Even Kreipe, who barely escaped the Russian front with his life and was now a prisoner in the wilderness, was still convinced Hitler would come out of this a winner. Kreipe told his captors exactly that: when Yiorgos’s cousin joked that Kreipe was the last general they’d have to kidnap, since the Allies were on their way to victory, Kreipe responded—quite sincerely—that Germany was unbeatable. “The ‘Wall of the Atlantic’ was unbreakable,” Kreipe said. “If the Allies tried to land in France or the Low Countries, they would be crushed.” Germany might get pushed back, but eventually the Allies would wear out and negotiate for peace—just the way the Butcher, at that moment, was wearing out Paddy and his kidnap band.

Certainly, Paddy and his Cretan friends had their moment of glory—“This Husarenstück,” as Kreipe called it, a “show-off’s prank”—but playtime was coming to an end. Every day, the Butcher’s men were getting closer. German soldiers were streaming down the mountains, they were lying in wait along the coastline, they had just missed rescuing Kreipe twice in the past few days alone. Kreipe could see Paddy was breaking down, and Paddy knew it himself. (“My right arm felt stranger and stranger; it was quite painless, but I found I could neither straighten it nor raise it very high,” Paddy discovered). The kidnappers were outgunned and outmanned, and it was only a matter of time until they were out of options. This little heroic fantasy, Kreipe knew, was about to come to its painful and inevitable finale.

It was around that time, Yiorgos said—around the very day we were talking, in fact, May 10—that Paddy returned from his undercover recon mission. Yiorgos’s cousin was there, and he could tell at a glance that something was up. “Late at night, Leigh Fermor himself arrived, astonishingly lively despite the distance of over 100 kilometers he had to cover in the last three days,” George Harokopos would recall. Paddy always knew how to make an entrance, and this time he had a reason.

Yasou, koumbaroi. We’re back, god brothers. And we may have something.