Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 24

With patience first and patience last, and doggedness all through, A man can think the wildest thoughts, and make them all come true.

—GEORGE PSYCHOUNDAKIS, improvising a mantinada poem in Paddy’s honor

DURING BILLY’S DELAY, a grocer’s kid from West Virginia wandered into the middle of their plot.

Nearly four years prior, Nicholas Alexander had taken his wife and three kids to visit their relatives in Greece. Nicholas immigrated to the United States in 1919, and because he’d been working and scrimping to buy his own grocery store in Wheeling, West Virginia, he hadn’t been back since. June 1940 wasn’t the best time for a family trip to Europe, but Nicholas realized it could be the last. America was still neutral, and Greece was doing everything possible to stay out of the war, even swallowing hard when an Italian sub fired three torpedoes toward the holy site of Tinos and sank a Greek cruiser sitting peacefully at anchor, so before the world erupted and his children moved on with their own lives, Nicholas wanted to take the chance for a family reunion. The Alexanders set sail for Crete.

Taking that trip was Nicholas’s first mistake. Forgetting to register with the U.S. embassy in Athens was his second. Tangling with the Turk was his last.

When the German invasion stranded the Alexanders on Crete, Nicholas and his family holed up in his parents’ home in the port city of Rethymno. Nicholas hung an American flag in front of the house and draped another on the roof, hoping that would protect them from bombers and Gestapo. Surprisingly, it seemed to work. So well, in fact, that Nicholas agreed to hide two Australian soldiers left behind by the evacuation. One night, a Gestapo team burst into the house and went directly to the trapdoor hiding a secret room. Nicholas tried to block them, arguing they had no right to search the home of an American citizen. The Turk shot him to death, then dragged the two Australians and Nicholas’s seventeen-year-old son, John, off to prison.

A few months earlier, John had been a high school senior looking forward to another slow summer in Wheeling. Now he was scared and starving behind razor wire in a German POW camp on an island in the Mediterranean. Unlike the captured Allied soldiers, John was a skinny kid and no threat to run off, so he was tapped for death detail: hauling decomposing bodies outside camp on a hand-cart and burying them in a mass pit. He and two young Cretans were so harmless-looking, in fact, that only one guard was assigned to accompany them. They smashed him in the back of the head with a shovel, and together the three ran for their lives into the White Mountains.

A rifle in the ribs woke John up on only their second morning of freedom. At gunpoint, the three fugitives crawled from their hiding place—and met George Psychoundakis. The Clown was passing through to deliver a message for the Resistance when friends in a nearby village warned him that three strangers had been spotted in the vicinity. Wanderers in the woods meant trouble; for his own sake, George had to track them down and find out what they were up to in case they attracted German search teams. George shared his food with the fugitives, then veered from his own mission to lead them over the mountains and into the hands of the heroic monks at the Preveli monastery. John wanted to return to Rethymno for his mother and two sisters, but the abbot persuaded him that showing his face would only guarantee their deaths. Instead, on August 20, the American teenager was led down to the beach and onto a sub bound for Egypt.

John’s tenacity, fluency in Greek, and firsthand knowledge of the Cretan mountains made him a natural for Special Forces. He enlisted in the British Army, and after six months of combat training, John was on his way to joining the Firm. The SOE had the perfect assignment: they needed someone to accompany a sabotage squad to Crete on a quick, in-and-out mission to blow up German planes at the Heraklion airfield. The mission was a success, but rather than return to England for a fresh assignment, John remained with the Resistance. Through the guerrilla grapevine, John got news that his mother and sisters were safe in a relative’s home deep in the mountains. Then he received another tip: the guerrillas knew a way into the Turk’s private residence. Schubert didn’t know it, but like many homes built on the waterfront during the Turkish occupation, the one he chose had a secret escape tunnel. John was given a hand-drawn floor plan and shown where the tunnel could be accessed by way of a bamboo screen in the rear garden. Then he was sent off to fulfill the Cretan code and avenge his father’s death.

After midnight on a moonless night, John slipped into Rethymno. He found the tunnel’s hidden entrance and squirmed inside. Unlike many others that had caved in or were converted to root cellars, this one was still clear. John crawled through the dark until he reached a trapdoor. He pried it open and emerged in an empty bedroom. Down a short hallway, someone was working by lamplight at a desk. John readied his pistol, tiptoed down the hall … and discovered he’d stalked the wrong man. With John’s pistol in his face, the startled Gestapo officer told him the Turk had just moved. As John would later tell the story, he couldn’t bring himself to murder a stranger in cold blood, so he cracked the Gestapo officer across the temple with his pistol and fled back out through the tunnel.

John would later discover that, unlike Rommel, the Turk hadn’t needed a tingle of Fingerspitzengefühl sixth sense to let him know he was in danger. One of the Turk’s own commanders had recently warned him that his brutality was on the verge of igniting a powder keg. Cruelty had to be calibrated; if the Turk and the Butcher pushed the Cretans too far, the entire island could erupt in waves of suicide attacks. Already the Resistance was a handful—imagine it without a shred of survival instinct. Any urge the Turk felt to argue was soon extinguished when eight members of his elite strike force—the Jagdkommando Schubert—were ambushed and killed by Communist guerrillas near the village of Meskla. So hated were Schubert’s men that the entire village dug up its hidden weapons and prepared to fight to the death if the Turk came gunning for retribution.

Instead, he gave up. Schubert must have gotten an inkling that peril was closing in when his commanders decided to leave Meskla be. “The Germans evidently concluded that the gangsters were not worth supporting, and left their deaths unrevenged,” British intelligence reported. The Jagdkommando Schubert was disbanded, and its leader bolted for the capital, where he hid himself like “a medieval despot,” according to British intelligence, “living in a house blocked up like a watch tower and never moving without a bodyguard.” In January, soon after John Alexander’s assassination attempt, Schubert left Crete for Athens.

Maybe Paddy should have seen the next move coming. After all, there was only one man the Cretans wanted to kill more than the Turk, and nearly every day that man was driven in plain sight down a lonely road to his private residence. A residence, incidentally, that in the eyes of the Cretans belonged to their adored and adopted son, John Pendlebury. If Müller’s goal was to choose a house that would equally infuriate all his enemies at once, he couldn’t have done better than the Villa Ariadne and its neighboring palace of Knossos. The Cretans revere Knossos as the birthplace of world culture; the British consider it a jewel of national achievement. But on a more heartfelt level, stealing Ariadne was like robbing the grave of Pendlebury—“a golden man,” as the Cretans called him, whose final words were pure Greek battle cry.

An eyewitness who’d seen him die was finally discovered. Pendlebury had been wounded fighting his way out of Heraklion, and two women had cared for him in their home. He was discovered by German paratroopers, who dragged the women off to prison. A neighbor, Calliope Karatatsanos, saw the paratroopers bring Pendlebury outside and order him to attention. Three times, the Germans shouted a question at him; Calliope believed it was about the location of English forces. Three times, while facing men who would decide if he’d live or die, Pendlebury shouted the reply that had been a Greek anthem since the beginning of the war:

“No!”

Bullets ripped into his chest and stomach. The paratroopers buried Crete’s golden man in a pit by the side of the road, then returned later to carve the glass eye from his skull.

“For the Cretans, it was the loss of an ally and a friend with a status close to that of Ares or Apollo,” Paddy would reflect. “John Pendlebury had spent 12 years in Crete. In this time he had become a mythical figure on the island, famous for his energy and enthusiasm, his dedication and his toughness.”

Now the Butcher was sleeping in his bed. Until suddenly, he wasn’t.

“One item of news, late in March, came as a shock,” Paddy would report: Müller had abruptly abandoned the isolated Villa Ariadne. The SOE thought the Butcher had left the island for good, just like the Turk, but then discovered he was still there; he’d transferred his base to the safety of “Fortress Crete,” the German coastal stronghold.

Paddy was staggered. There was no way they could get Müller out of the Fortress, and a roadside abduction would be impossible on Chania’s narrow and hectic streets. Paddy had to face it: at the last moment, the Butcher had slipped out of their grasp. Taking the Butcher’s place in Heraklion was a new commander, an unknown officer whose only offenses so far were wearing an Iron Cross around his neck and moving into the Villa Ariadne:

Major General Heinrich Kreipe, fresh from the Russian front.

So what are we going to do? Billy asked.

Paddy had been on Crete long enough to know that sometimes you just had to grab a hunk of hair. One of the island’s special gods is Kairos, the speedy little sprite who was Zeus’s last-born child. Kairos was young and wing-footed and forever gorgeous, despite having no hair except a single shock over his forehead. Kairos is the god of golden opportunities and guardian of outlaws, and he could work wonders for you if you were quick enough to grab him by the forelock. But once he flashes past, he’s gone for good. Naturally, the god of grabbing-what-you-can-when-you-can was beloved on an island where tyrants had created generations of outlaws. Kairos is the inspiration for the Cretan chestnut “Opportunity makes thieves.” What matters is the timing, not the target—seize any opportunity, even if it’s not the one you planned.

Paddy put it more bluntly: one general is as good as another. But they’d have to move fast; any more delays and the operation could be called off, same as it had been for Xan. Even extra recon put them at tremendous risk; Paddy had to disperse his first team of guerrilla accomplices because locals spotted them slipping in and out of the hideout and began gossiping about what the armed strangers were up to. They’d need a quick and easy plan, something that didn’t depend on heavy manpower or tricky timing. Paddy had just the ticket. All they had to do was hop over the wall at Villa Ariadne, grab Kreipe in his bedroom, bundle him into his staff car, and blaze off to the coast. Rendezvous with a sub and they’re on their way.

Paddy ran it by his band. The Cretans came from a rich tradition of body snatching—grabbing sheep, Turks, and elope-able girlfriends have long been honored island pastimes—so it was easy for them to assess Paddy’s proposition and recognize it as autoktonia: suicide. The moment they were in Ariadne’s courtyard, all it would take was an alert watchdog or a muffled sneeze and they’d be cornered. “The triple barriers of wire, one of which was said to be electrified, the size of the guard and the frequency of patrols offered too many chances for mishap,” Paddy had to concede. “Besides, to avoid all excuse or pretext for reprisals on the Cretans, I was determined the operation should be performed without bloodshed.” Paddy was firm on that point: any plan with the possibility of a shoot-out was off the table.

Even if they did figure out how to disappear the general from under the nose of his bodyguards, they’d need a sizable head start to stand any chance of getting him off the island. There were too many warships in the harbor and too many rocks near the capital to bring any kind of escape craft close to the northern coast. That meant heading south, on foot, up and over the toughest natural obstacle in southern Europe, with seventy thousand soldiers in hot pursuit. Paddy had also lost the one advantage he’d counted on from the start: instead of being in their clutches, the Butcher would be on their heels.

There was only one way to pull this off, in other words: the hard way.