Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 25

As I write now we are still in the cave,

and dare not move for fear of being seen.

—BILLY MOSS, scrawling in his diary before zero hour

A FEW HOURS before midnight on April 26, 1944, Paddy scrunched into a ditch by the side of the road and began scouring the darkness for a stab of light. He was dressed in the field-gray uniform of a German military policeman, pinched for him by a Cretan tailor who lived near the German base. By his side, also in a stolen uniform, was Billy Moss, who was about to discover if he could impersonate a German soldier without speaking any German.

There! In the distance, Paddy’s confederate began blinking out a flashlight code.

Blink: “General’s car.”

Blink blink: “Unescorted.”

Blink blink blink: “Action!”

“Here we go,” Paddy whispered. He and Billy scrambled out of the ditch as a black Opel sedan, each mudguard emblazoned with the generals’ Wehrmacht eagle insignia, swept around a bend and sped toward them down the dark road.

Paddy switched on a red signal lantern, and Billy held up a small stop sign. They took their positions at a hard-banking turn where the general’s car would have to slow to merge onto the main road. Were their disguises convincing? Was the general surrounded by edgy guards with cocked machine guns? Paddy had no idea.

Paddy raised his lantern and stepped into the full glare of the speeding headlights.

“Halt!” Paddy shouted.

The black car roared straight at them, then slowed. Paddy and Billy cocked the pistols hidden behind their backs, then split up to approach the side windows.

“Ist dies das Generals Wagen?” Paddy barked into the darkness of the passenger window.

“Ja, ja.”

Paddy could just make out a jutting chin, gold braid, a black Iron Cross. Kreipe was in the front passenger seat.

“Papier, bitte schön,” Paddy demanded. Papers, please.

Before the general could snap at these idiot soldiers to get out of his way, Paddy jammed his pistol into his chest.

“Hände hoch!” Paddy shouted. Hands up!

Paddy heard the general gasp. The chauffeur’s eyes were terrified but his right hand, Billy noticed, was sliding toward his automatic. Billy quickly cracked him across the head with his blackjack. A gang of Cretans burst from the brush alongside the road and yanked open the doors. The backseat was empty; instead of traveling with bodyguards, the general and his driver were alone. Billy and the Cretans pulled the stunned chauffeur into the road, but the general came out swinging, staggering Paddy with a sharp kick and a sock in the face. The Cretans quickly nixed that nonsense; one jammed a dagger under Kreipe’s chin while another snapped handcuffs on his wrists.

“Was wollen Sie in Kreta?” one of the Cretans screamed in Kreipe’s face. What are you doing in Crete?

Paddy pleaded with him to shush. Fury right then would get them killed.

“This was the critical moment,” Billy realized. “If any other traffic had come along the road we could have been caught.” Paddy could barely drive, so Billy slid behind the wheel, hoping he could figure out how to start the unfamiliar German sedan and get it into gear. Good news: “The engine of the car was still ticking over, the handbrake was on, everything was perfect.” There was even a full tank of gas. Three Cretans shoved the general into the backseat and climbed in beside him while Paddy, straightening the general’s hat upon his own head, slipped into the front. Two Cretans dragged the slumped and bloody chauffeur off with them into the brush.

Let’s go, Paddy said.

Headlights blasted their eyes. “A convoy was bearing down on us,” Paddy realized. “Two trucks full of soldiers sitting with their rifles between their knees, some in steel helmets, some in field caps.” A minute earlier and it would have been game over. But the truck squads rumbled past, oblivious, and Billy hit the gas.

“Where is my hat?” the General kept asking. My hat. Where is it?

Keep quiet, the Cretans in the backseat hissed. Then to Paddy: What’s he saying?

The chatter! Paddy had to snip it, quick. They were fast approaching the Villa Ariadne. Two sentries had already spotted them and snapped to attention. A third was opening the striped crossbar blocking the Villa’s entrance. Any commotion now and the sentries would shoot the tires out from under them.

I’ve got your hat, Paddy told General Kreipe. Paddy froze as they whizzed past the bewildered sentries, then wheeled around to face the general. If any of them were going to survive, including the general, he had to get something straight. “Herr General,” Paddy said. “I am a British major. Beside me is a British captain. The men beside you are Greek patriots. They are good men. I am in command of this unit, and you are an honorable prisoner of war. We are taking you away from Crete to Egypt. For you the war is over. I am sorry we had to be so rough. Do everything I say and all will be well.”

“You are really a British major?” General Kreipe said.

“Yes, really. You have nothing to fear.”

Then can I have my hat back?

“Checkpoint ahead,” Billy warned. Two German soldiers were in the road, waving a red stoplight.

I need your hat right now, Paddy said. You’ll get it back later.

Billy throttled back but kept driving straight at the soldiers. “HALT!” one shouted. Suddenly they leaped back and saluted, apparently catching sight of the general’s flags. Billy accelerated and sped past.

“This is marvelous,” Billy said, jamming his foot down on the gas.

“Herr Major,” General Kreipe asked. “Where are you taking me?”

Good Lord. Was he going to ask about the damned hat again, too? “To Cairo,” Paddy repeated.

“No, but now?”

“To Heraklion,” Paddy said.

“To HERAKLION?”

Yes, that was actually Paddy’s plan: to drive the general away from the safety of the mountains and straight into a city bustling with Germans.

A few weeks earlier, Paddy had ridden the bus into Heraklion, disguising himself as a farmer heading to market. Rather inconveniently, the best abduction route ran right from the general’s residence through the heart of Heraklion and into the hills beyond. But street access, Paddy discovered, was awful: every road was thicketed with checkpoints. There was only one way in and out, and all the side streets were dead-ended with razor wire and antitank blocks or guarded by troops. It was madness; no matter how well they forged their travel documents and drugged the general, driving directly past the front door of Gestapo headquarters with a conked-out German officer in the boot and standing up to the scrutiny of more than twenty-two armed control posts was far too risky.

As he walked around town, Paddy found himself repeatedly passing the Gestapo building, morbidly attracted to the torture den, “which,” he reflected, “had meant the doom of many friends.” These were the stakes he was playing for: if the abduction went sour, those doors would shut behind him and he’d never come out. Paddy pulled himself away and made his way south, heading three miles down the road to the Villa Ariadne. By sheer luck, Paddy’s best Cretan spy lived right next door. Micky Akoumianakis was the son of Villa Ariadne’s former caretaker, and he was still allowed to live in his father’s old quarters. And it was there, while Paddy and Mickey were pretending to chat with a shepherd tending his flock by the side of the road but really scoping out the security, that Paddy and General Kreipe first locked eyes.

The general’s sedan suddenly appeared, barreling toward them down the road. Through the windshield, Paddy spotted blue eyes and a chestful of medals. Without thinking, Paddy popped up his hand and gave the general a friendly wave. Startled, the general responded, gravely raising a gloved hand toward his … his …

Paddy had a flash of inspiration. The general’s hat! It was the one thing that made sentries stand down and roadblocks disappear. Who would bother to check the face beneath it? Who even knew what that face looked like? General Kreipe had been on Crete for barely five weeks, after two years on the Russian front. Few of his troops would recognize him, but they would instantly recognize—and respect—the gold-braided oak cluster and rampant eagle.

It was perfect. Rather than making the general vanish, they’d use him as their passport to a short cut right through the guts of German headquarters. “The results of a mishap in the town were too disastrous to contemplate,” Paddy knew, “but a plunge straight into the enemy stronghold with their captured commander would be the last idea to occur to them.”

Three generations of Maskelynes would have applauded. If Jasper and his Magic Gang could impersonate an entire harbor, Paddy was sure he could impersonate one man. Especially at night.

Unless that night was Saturday.

“It was truly unfortunate that we arrived in town at the moment,” Billy discovered. Billy tooted the horn, grinding through the mob clogging the street. The weekend movie had just gotten out, and Heraklion was jammed with idling troop buses and strolling soldiers. Paddy sank back into his seat while the three Cretans behind him pulled the general down on the floor. One clamped a hand over the General’s mouth and kept the dagger at his throat while the other two pointed their Marlin submachine guns up at the windows.

Paddy had put together a superb team, all of them icy under pressure. Manoli Paterakis was a goatherd and high-mountain hunter who’d been mentoring Paddy for much of the past year. George Tyrakis was a younger version of Manoli who’d instantly bonded with Billy even though they could communicate only with “grins and gestures,” as Paddy put it. Paddy’s last recruit, Stratis Saviolakis, was born and bred for this kind of operation: in regular life, Stratis was a cop from the southern rebel enclave of Sphakia, so he knew how to keep peace and raise hell.

German faces crowded around, passing just inches from the windows. Billy inched along, praying the car wouldn’t overheat or stall. “Tension,” Paddy noted dryly, “rose several degrees.” After what seemed like hours, they circled the central market roundabout and began the straight descent to the Canae Gate. Once past that thick stone arch, it was open road—but that’s when Billy knew they’d been discovered. Ahead of them, a sentry was standing fast in the middle of the road, red lantern held high. Behind him, extra manpower had massed. “There were not only the normal sentries and guards, but a large number of other soldiers in the gateway as well,” Paddy realized. “The one wielding the red torch failed to budge; it looked as though they were going to stop us.” Could they smash through? Doubtful; the passage had been narrowed with cement blocks and blocked with a thick wood barricade.

Paddy readied himself to kick open the door and run for it. They were outgunned and outnumbered, true, but they’d also been trained in the Cretan mountains. “There was a maze of alleyways, walls one could jump, drainpipes to climb, skylights, flat roofs leading from one to another, cellars and drains and culverts,” Paddy was thinking, “of which the Germans knew nothing.” Billy cocked his automatic and put it in his lap. Paddy’s pistol was already in his hand. Three Marlin guns clicked back behind them. Billy crawled the car forward, waiting for the signal to floor it. Paddy rolled down his window.

“Generals Wagen!” he shouted. No general would ever shout like that but, well … “GENERALS WAGEN!”

Billy hit the gas. The sentry leaped out of the way. The soldiers scattered, barely dodging the Opel’s bumper. Billy braced for gunfire but instead heard Paddy. “Gute Nacht,” Paddy was hollering. Billy couldn’t resist a quick glance back. All the soldiers and sentries were saluting.

They left Heraklion behind and drove on into the countryside, rolling up and down the dark coastal foothills. Billy lit a cigarette, “the best I had ever smoked in my life.” He handed the pack around to Paddy and the Cretans and—

Wait, stop! Stratis blurted. Wrong way. Billy had veered off the road to Rethymno and was instead barreling along to Rogdia—a dead end with a German garrison in the middle. Billy wrenched the Opel around in a U-turn and began driving right back toward the city they’d just escaped, praying the alarm hadn’t been raised and a pursuit team wasn’t coming at them. After a few nail-biting minutes, Stratis spotted the cutoff and got them back on the right road.

They hummed along in solitude, the snowcap of Mount Ida glowing above in the moonlight. Billy and Paddy burst into “The Party’s Over.” The three Cretans sang along, joyfully and nonsensically. The general got up off the floor. Paddy handed him back his hat.

Twenty miles past Heraklion, Billy pulled over and got out. Manoli and Stratis pulled General Kreipe out of the backseat. Paddy and George remained in the car, Paddy at the wheel. Paddy fought with the hand brake and accidentally blew the horn instead of pressing the starter, but eventually he figured out how to grind the car into bottom gear. Paddy and George pulled away, swerving uncertainly down the road, while Billy and the Cretans began marching the general into the mountains.

When Paddy reached the shoreline, he and George parked the car on the beach. They littered it with a British Raiding Forces beret, a handful of Player’s cigarette butts, and an Agatha Christie novel, then chucked a Cadbury milk chocolate wrapper on the ground, going a little overboard in their attempt to make it look like a solo operation by Great Britain’s messiest commandos.

Paddy checked the time. Already past 11 P.M. Time to move.

Off we go, George said. Anthropoi tou Skotous! Men of Darkness! German propaganda coined the term to blacken the name of the sneaky Cretans, not realizing the sneaky Cretans loved it and began singing it out as a rallying cry before night missions. Paddy had one thing left to do. The night before, he and Billy had written a letter and marked it in hot wax with their signet rings. Paddy pulled it out and pinned it to the front seat:

To the German Authorities in Crete, April 23, 1944 Gentlemen,

Your Divisional Commander, General Kreipe, was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH Raiding Force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to Cairo. We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans and the only guides used were serving soldiers of HIS HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us.

Your General is an honourable prisoner of war and will be treated with all the consideration owing to his rank. Any reprisals against the local population will thus be wholly unwarranted and unjust.

Auf baldiges wiedersehen!

P. M. Leigh Fermor

Maj., O.C. Commando

C. W. Stanley Moss

Capt. 2/i.c.

P.S. We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful motor car behind.

Paddy and George yanked the general’s flags off the hood as souvenirs—“We couldn’t resist it,” Paddy would say—and together they began the lung-aching climb to catch up with the rest of their team. Maybe the Butcher would fall for it. Maybe he’d believe a sub had already come and gotten them and they were now long gone.

Maybe. Because if not, at dawn all hell would break loose.