Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 17

David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

—MALCOLM GLADWELL, “How David Beats Goliath”

THE LAST, BEST SIGHTING had Pendlebury heading toward Mount Ida—bandit country. Hard to get in, easy to get lost. Same place where, after sleeping under wet bushes all day after his long night hike through the rain with Costa, Xan Fielding was waking up to a double dose of good news.

The German search parties had moved on, so he and Delaney could crawl out of hiding for a while and stretch their aching bodies. And instead of having to scrabble another eighty miles to the radio operator’s mountain hideout, word arrived that the radio operator was coming down to them. Xan was thrilled, since he could finally kick back for a night after three hectic days on the move since splashing ashore from the sub, but then he grew apprehensive. Why was the radioman suddenly out of his hole and on the move after he’d been safely hidden for months?

Soon enough, Ralph Hedley Stockbridge hiked into camp in the worst Cretan costume Xan had ever seen. The only thing more British than his overcoat—seriously, an overcoat?—were his horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike every Cretan male past puberty, he had no mustache, and instead of shepherd’s boots, he was still in shoes. “In no way did he look like a peasant,” Xan thought. And that, it gradually dawned on him, was Ralph’s sly genius: Ralph looked exactly like a Greek trying not to look Greek. It was a stunt right out of The Man Who Was Thursday, and it worked brilliantly. Once, Ralph strolled right through a German checkpoint while the real Cretan beside him was grabbed and questioned. “They must have been blind not to see me trembling,” Ralph would recall. During another close encounter, he blurted, “Gosh, sorry!”—in English—after bumping into a German soldier, and he still didn’t attract a second look.

But the audacity of Ralph’s no-disguise disguise was brutal on his nerves. Like Xan, Ralph wasn’t much of a soldier. He was notorious in the War Office for making a fuss about having to wear puttees—wool wraps that twine up from the ankle and tuck in at the knee—and then quitting the Officers’ Training Corps because he felt his superior officers were acting too superior. Despite or maybe due to this obsessive contrariness, Ralph was recruited by “Mike”—MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Mike was James Bond’s outfit, but unlike 007, real MI6 agents kept their flies zipped and gadgets holstered. Their job was to live in the shadows, eavesdropping in cafés and building webs of civilian spies. That often put them at odds with the dirty tricksters of Xan’s unit, the Firm, because the last thing any Mike agent wanted was a bar of soap blowing up in a brothel they had under surveillance.

But on Crete, where the tiny band of Brits depended on one another for survival, the rival spies split the work and got along like brothers. Which, biology aside, they basically were. Like Xan and Monty, Ralph was another of Geoffrey Household’s Class X “rogue males”; he’d fight for his country, think for himself, and try not to hurt anyone in the process. Ralph was brainy and bookwormish, and more than a little bewildered that he’d ended up fiddling with a wireless radio set up in a Mediterranean cave. He’d studied classics at Cambridge, which meant his ability to chat with Cretans was hampered by his two-thousand-year-old vocabulary. And if you can’t have a good natter, he warned Xan, undercover life was torture.

To be honest, that’s why he was rambling the mountains instead of staying put at his station. He could handle hiding in the dark for days at a time, getting his drinking water from stalactite drips and eating nothing but tough seedling potatoes washed down with gulps of boiled orange-peel tea. But the conversation—that’s what finally broke him. Ralph was holed up with Colonel Andreas Papadakis, the old ex-army officer who’d helped Jack Smith-Hughes during his escape and put Jack in the expert hands of George Psychoundakis, the young shepherd turned super-messenger. Since then, Colonel Papadakis had gone mad with imaginary power; with Ralph as his captive audience, he spent his days yammering about how he and his “Supreme Committee of Cretan Struggle” would clean house once he figured out how to get rid of the Germans. Finally, Ralph couldn’t take it anymore. He threw his radio set onto a mule and took to the hills.

After a few days, Ralph discovered he hadn’t calculated one thing: Papadakis’s wind-battered hilltop turned out to be the only place he could get decent transmission strength. When Ralph heard Xan had arrived and needed a safe house, he figured he’d save his pride by using Xan as an excuse to return.

“Ah, so you’re back again,” Papadakis sneered when Xan and Ralph approached the door. Xan knew the old colonel had risked his life and shared his own meager food to aid the Resistance, but he couldn’t help being repelled by a voice that “oscillated between arrogance and plaintiveness” or noticing the way “his hard black eyes glittered with peasant cunning and his general expression could best be described by the American term of ‘sour puss.’” Between the three of them, the atmosphere in Papadakis’s little hut was primed for an explosion—and it only got worse when Guy Turrall arrived.

Turrall’s talent for making himself swiftly and universally disliked as he worked his way across the island was as remarkable as Guy Delaney’s knack for spontaneous adoration. On the long trek up to Papadakis’s home, the Cretan guide who offered to carry Turrall’s pack couldn’t figure out why it kept getting heavier—until he discovered that Turrall, an amateur geologist, was loading it with rock samples. Another Cretan guide got so fed up with Turrall that he violated his xenía duties by storming off and abandoning Turrall when they were still a half-mile outside a village. Turrall marched in alone and got lucky: the villagers only ignored him, instead of beating the tar out of him and turning him over to the Germans. Many islanders had been executed after being tricked by Germans masquerading as Allied fugitives, so in retaliation, they’d come up with a wickedly clever response whenever they smelled a rat: they’d play dumb and attack the “Brit,” getting their boots into him good before innocently dragging him off to the nearest German outpost. To a wary Cretan, nothing would look more German than a bossy stranger wearing a British captain’s uniform and speaking French. Turrall never knew how close he came to a beating and a bullet.

Once in Papadakis’s hut, Turrall immediately set everyone’s teeth on edge. He kept up the French and bustled about every hour heating water for another pot of boiled orange-peel tea. He argued bitterly with Papadakis about how and when they should set off to plant bombs on German ships in the harbor, even though neither he nor Papadakis had any clue what the other was saying.

“This madman wants to destroy us all!” Papadakis complained. Ralph and Xan were trapped between them; with snow threatening and bitter winds blowing, it was too risky to attempt further recon in the mountains, so they were stuck inside playing endless games of gin rummy.

So this is what it’s like being a rebel fighter? Xan had to wonder. Huddling over a twig fire while two old lunatics squabble all day?

Luckily, bad news came along to save him. Word came up from the lowland villages that German search teams were on the way. The old colonel and the Brits would have to separate and scramble—immediately. As radioman, Ralph drew the short straw and would head into the wild with Colonel Papadakis to establish a new base in a cave. For Turrall and Delaney, the time was right to pack it in. The only way to survive on Crete was to learn from the Cretans, and that was as impossible for these two regular army soldiers as it was for the British commanders who’d lost the invasion. Turrall was still grumbling about “the natives” even as one of them guided him out of the hills a few nights later and into a secret cove where an escape boat was waiting.

Xan was now on his own, and after months of being cooped up, he was aching for action. The real hot spots were down at the German bases along the waterfront, and Xan felt he was ready for a closer look. One of Papadakis’s friends led him out of the mountains and down to a safe house near Rethymno, a northern port thick with Germans. Xan didn’t dare venture out by day, but by night, he’d put on his disguise and slip off for tentative walks though the village.

During his weeks in Papadakis’s hut, Xan had worked at mastering his new identity. He’d trained himself to answer to “Aleko” and to knot his black headkerchief so it tilted over his eye just so. His mustache was finally as credible as his cloak and high black boots, and his elfin face presented all kinds of interesting possibilities: powder the hair, crinkle the brow, and the young shepherd turned into his own grandfather. Super-close shave, sling on a head scarf and skirt, and voilà: the teenage girls had some competition.

But from the chin down, Xan still had work to do. “My wastefully energetic manner of moving over uneven ground,” Xan admitted, “would give me away at a distance of a mile.” Until he figured out how the Cretans got those springs in their legs, he came up with a temporary fix: dementia. Whenever they ran into someone on the trail, Xan’s guide would sigh and explain that, yes, his friend was kind of a klutz, but what do you expect from a poor fellow who’s deaf and deranged? Xan was so convincing, he hurt his own feelings. “Without wishing to flatter myself,” Xan felt compelled to clarify, “posing as a deaf-mute imbecile did not come naturally to me. It was the hardest performance I have ever undertaken and I had to keep it up for over a fortnight.”

After two weeks of fooling even native Cretans into believing he was a brain-damaged brother, Xan had all the encouragement he needed to get himself into trouble. He was intrigued by a rumor that the burly old mayor of Chania, Crete’s then-capital, might be willing to go undercover for the guerrillas. The mayor’s prestige and daily contact with German officers would make him a tremendous recruiter and a valuable spy; with intel and contacts like that, Xan could get down to some serious dirty trickery. So instead of waiting for the mayor to come to him, Xan decided to try sneaking into Chania. German sentries surrounded the city, but Xan’s guide noticed that solitary travelers were scrutinized a little more closely than groups. If Xan rode in the back of a crowded bus and kept his mouth shut, he might get past with just a quick glance at his fake papers.

A few days later, Mayor Nicolas Skoulas was in his office when three German officers paid a call. By midmorning the Germans had wrapped up their business and were heading out the door when they ran into a little traffic jam: two shepherds were trying to get in without an appointment. Charitably, the mayor agreed to see them, although one of the shepherds was clearly a little slow. The Germans noticed nothing, but the mayor quickly saw through Xan’s disguise and “looked aghast,” Xan would say. “He hardly expected to see a British agent in his own office in the Town Hall in the middle of the morning.”

As soon as they were alone, the mayor heard Xan out and agreed to become his eyes and ears in Chania. Xan slipped out of the city that afternoon, eventually arriving safely at his stifling little hideout. Unbelievable, Xan thought. He’d just walked into the heart of German operations—he’d brushed chests with three German officers!—and enlisted a top asset right under their noses. Churchill was right: Xan really did have a fighting chance of turning Hitler’s greatest weapon—fear—against him.

All Xan needed was some help. Not help exactly. What he needed was …