Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 29

May God deliver you into the hands of the Greeks.

—A CORSICAN CURSE PADDY LIKED TO QUOTE

PADDY HAD A FEW TRICKS up his own sleeve. He had a pretty good notion of what to expect from the Butcher, and so he’d schemed accordingly. The Butcher was vicious but cautious, preferring to hit a target he knew wouldn’t hit back. He wouldn’t storm into the mountains after he discovered General Kreipe was missing; no, he’d make a move only when he knew what was going on. So first he’d fan out his spies and ransack the coastal villages, and that would lead him right to General Kreipe’s staff car, with the note inside and the phony British commando clues scattered around.

And by that point, Paddy’s last two bits of Magic Gang trickery would be in play: as soon as SOE headquarters got word they’d made the snatch, BBC Radio would broadcast a news flash saying the general was off the island and en route to Cairo. At the same time, British planes would letter-bomb Crete with leaflets saying British commandos had delivered the general to Egypt.

The Butcher would be furious, but he wasn’t crazy. With no blood on the ground, he wouldn’t launch a manhunt if there was no man to hunt. He’d probably triple-down his attempts to root out rebel nests, but those attacks would be localized and concentrated on specific targets; unless he absolutely had to, there’s no way he’d risk any more abductions by scattering his men across the mountains. That would take the heat off a little, giving Paddy and his gang enough breathing space to dart out in the open and get the general up and over stony Mount Ida and then down to the real embarkation point, on the southern coast.

All around, it was a lovely plan. For about six hours.

Paddy had split his band into three teams. Billy was up front, leading the general to the first rendezvous point. Paddy was catching up from the west after ditching the car on the beach. Andoni Zoidakis and his crew were coming from the east with Alfred Fenske, the general’s driver. Fenske was really slowing them down; he was still so wobbly from that crack across the skull Billy Moss gave him that he could barely walk. With sunup approaching, Zoidakis decided to take cover and let Fenske rest until dark. They wouldn’t have to worry about search parties until noon, maybe midafter—

Zoidakis froze. He poked his head out for a look, then yanked it back. Impossible. The Germans were on the hunt already? It was still night. How could they even know the general was gone? But there they were, fanned out in a search sweep just three hundred yards or so behind them. Zoidakis had to decide, fast, if they could slip away, with Fenske stumbling all over the place. Zoidakis must have looked worried, because the German driver got curious and stood up to see what was going on. Zoidakis slashed Fenske’s throat before he could open his mouth.

Almost immediately, Zoidakis regretted it. Fenske hadn’t actually done anything wrong. And Paddy was going to be so upset….

Which reminded him: they had to get word to Paddy right away. For some reason, the hunt was already on.

Destination 1 was a cave just outside the village of Anogia. The closer Billy and his team got, the more trouble they had with the general. As soon as Kreipe felt confident he wouldn’t be executed, he slowed down to a grumbling trudge. He was thirsty and really hungry, he complained; they’d grabbed him on his way home for supper. And his leg was killing him. Why’d they have to drag him out of the car like that? And where was his Knight’s Cross? Had anyone seen his medal? Billy kept pushing him along, finally making it to the cave in a cliff face. They pushed the general up, one handhold at a time, then slipped inside and disguised the mouth with torn branches. One of the gang slipped off to Anogia to rustle up some food and ask around for news.

Paddy and George Tyrakis weren’t far behind. But instead of going directly to the rendezvous, Paddy slipped into Anogia. He needed to get a messenger to Tom Dunbabin right away, and then sit tight for Tom’s reply. Tom was the last, crucial part of Paddy’s Magic Gang plan: Paddy was counting on him to make radio contact with Cairo and coordinate the letter bombing, the BBC broadcast, and the pickup boat.

As Paddy and George entered Anogia, doors and windows slammed shut around them. “All talk and laughter died at the washing troughs, women turned their backs and thumped their laundry with noisy vehemence; cloaked shepherds, in answer to greeting, gazed past us in silence,” Paddy observed. “In a moment we could hear women’s voices wailing into the hills: ‘The black cattle have strayed into the wheat!’ and ‘Our in-laws have come!’ ”

So this is what it’s like for the Germans, Paddy realized. Good! Many of the most effective Cretan freedom fighters—the andartes—were sons of Anogia. So deep was the villagers’ loathing for the Germans that even though Paddy was a well-known friend, all they could see was the uniform he was wearing. Even when he knocked up at the house of his good friend, the rebel priest Father Charetis, he wasn’t allowed through the door.

“It’s me, Pappadia!” he whispered to the priest’s wife. He gave her his code name: “It’s me: Mihali!”

“What Mihali?” she replied innocently. “I don’t know any Mihali.” Then she took a closer look. Only when she recognized the familiar gap between Paddy’s teeth did she let him inside. Paddy didn’t explain what he was doing there or why he was dressed like a German corporal, and everyone knew better than to ask. Father Charetis simply sent a boy off with Paddy’s message to Tom Dunbabin, then laid out food.

Paddy was still resting and waiting for Tom’s reply when leaflets began fluttering down over the village. Excellent! The runner must have made it to Tom’s hideout in record time. Paddy got one and read:

TO ALL CRETANS:

LAST NIGHT THE GERMAN GENERAL KREIPE WAS ABDUCTED BY BANDITS. HE IS NOW BEING CONCEALED IN THE CRETAN MOUNTAINS. HIS WHEREABOUTS CANNOT BE UNKNOWN TO THE POPULACE …

Wait. What happened to Paddy’s leaflets?

IF THE GENERAL IS NOT RETURNED WITHIN THREE DAYS, ALL VILLAGES IN THE HERAKLION DISTRICT WILL BE BURNED TO THE GROUND. THE SEVEREST MEASURES OF REPRISAL WILL BE BROUGHT TO BEAR ON THE CIVILIAN POPULATION.

Damn. Either way you looked at it, it didn’t make sense. If the Germans had found the car already, how did they know the general was in the mountains and not on a boat? And if they hadn’t found the car, why were they searching?

Paddy’s calculations turned out to be very right and very wrong. As he expected, the Butcher didn’t tear off in a rage and start burning villages. He was taking his time, asking questions, and circling the trail. But instead of falling for Paddy’s ruse, the Butcher was getting dangerously close to the truth.

The Butcher first became suspicious after one of the sentries radioed the fortress to ask about the general’s whereabouts. The Butcher always ranted that the Cretans were brutes and the Brits were harmless pests, but privately, he suspected there was a lot more going on in the mountains than he could see. Air convoys were swarmed within moments of leaving Crete, German sergeants left their rooms for an hour and returned to find them ransacked, an Italian general vanished from under the Butcher’s nose and popped up in Cairo … and now a commanding general goes on a nighttime joyride? No, something was up.

So this time the Butcher went to the maps and began thinking like a bandit. If General Kreipe were dead, they’d know it by now. His corpse was too valuable as a shock tactic, and attacking German morale was a key Resistance tactic; the Butcher couldn’t prove it, but he had to suspect it was bandits, not German soldiers, who were chalking walls with graffiti-like scheisse Hitler (“Hitler is a shit”) and Wir wollen nach haus! (“We want to go home!”).

So where do you hide a German officer on an island full of Germans? The general’s car was definitely spotted in Heraklion; it never arrived in Chania; the northern shore was too exposed for boats; the coastal villages had too many turncoats. That left …

Anogia. High in the hills, bristling with patriotic fever, gateway to Mount Ida and a single night’s hike from the road to Heraklion. That had to be it. They’d kidnapped him and fled to Anogia. The Butcher sent out the order: by first light he wanted thirty thousand troops on the march and plane crews ready to scramble. Search the hills around Heraklion, he commanded. Get aerial photos of all the footpaths leading out of Heraklion. But our priority is Anogia.

By dawn, the Butcher had seized back the advantage. The kidnappers wouldn’t expect anyone to confirm the general’s disappearance until morning. By then, they’d be surrounded.

Paddy expected a pretty hot response at Father Charetis’s house when they discovered what kind of a jam he’d gotten them into, and he was right. “The room was convulsed with incredulity, then excitement and finally by an excess of triumphant hilarity,” Paddy observed. “We could hear feet running in the street, and shouts and laughter.” The entire village was facing destruction, but instead of cowering, they were erupting with joy.

“Eh!” Paddy heard one old man say. “They’ll burn them all down one day. And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks; let the Germans burn it down for a fifth! And they killed scores of my family, scores of them, my child. Yet here I am! We’re at war, and war has all these things. You can’t have a wedding feast without meat. Fill up the glasses, Pappadia.”

They loved Paddy’s plot because it was more than an act of war: it was a tribute to them, personally, as Cretans. Nothing is more Cretan—or more Greek—than pulling off an impossible hustle. Greek heroes were always stealing stuff, the bigger and weirder and more impossible the better. Sticky fingers are so important to Greek theology, it’s hard to find a myth that doesn’t involve someone pulling a fast one. Half of Hercules’ Twelve Labors were heists, including snatching an Amazon’s girdle and a team of man-eating horses. Prometheus made off with the gods’ fire; Jason grabbed the Golden Fleece; Theseus was constantly dragging off women who caught his eye, namely a warrior queen and a Cretan princess. The Iliad and the Odyssey are a pair of true-crime classics; nothing gets done in either one until someone gets sneaky.

And that someone is usually Odysseus, whose rogue’s eye made him the greatest of the Greek heroes. Breaking into Troy by hiding inside a hollow horse was Odysseus’s idea, and he warmed up for it by first sneaking behind enemy lines and making off with a rival king’s armor and prized warhorses. Odysseus was a born thief, the descendant of a long line of light-fingers: his dad was Laertes, one of the Fleece-seizing Argonauts, although his true biological father was rumored to be Sisyphus, famous for robbing houseguests. His granddad was the Thief Lord, Autolycus, and his great-granddad was Hermes, god of thieves.

But for all their shenanigans, you don’t see the heroes piling up a mountain of loot. They’re not in it for gold; given a choice, Odysseus would be happier farming at home with his wife. Stealing wasn’t his job; it was a calling, an art, a way of making the impossible possible and the imaginary real. Pulling off a clever heist is as close as humans can come to magic, allowing something in your mind’s eye to suddenly appear in your hand. Other religions condemn thieves as sinners and outcasts, but the ancient Greeks shrugged and decided, Eh, let’s give ’em their own god. Because who else will teach us that our stuff doesn’t really matter? That our possessions are fleeting, forgettable, and that anything you have someone else can take? What you’ll be remembered for isn’t your wealth and power, but your creative imagination—your mêtis.

The brazen mêtis of a thief—that was the animating spirit of ancient Greek, and it sparked an explosion of creativity unrivaled in intellectual history. The Olympics, the Acropolis, democratic government, trial by jury, the dramatic rules of comedy and tragedy, Pythagorean and Archimedean geometry, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, the predictive cycles of astronomy and the humanitarian principles of medicine—it all came careening out of a tiny island nation so small and thinly populated, it was as if the dominant force on Western thought for more than three thousand years was the state of Alabama.

What fueled it all was a kind of Outlaw Outlook: Instead of relying on laws passed down from some god or a king, let’s think like outlaws. Let’s think for ourselves. An outlaw outlook calls on every citizen to create, not conform; to decide what is right and wrong and act on it, not just baa along with the rest of the herd. Outlaws have to be poised, smart, and independent; they have to cultivate allies, assess risk, and keep their antennae fine-tuned to everyone and everything around them. Outlaws focus on what people can do, not what they shouldn’t. In Athens, the outlaw outlook worked so beautifully, it became a civic responsibility. The Athenians still had laws, but they were proposed by average citizens, not imperial rulers. Anyone who started acting too bossy—who thought he knew what was best for everyone else—was marched to the border and sent into exile under Athens’s steely “No Tyrants” policy.

Not even gods had the final say: instead of one Almighty there were a dozen, all divvying up the work and jockeying for position. Zeus was the big dog, but he was constantly being one-upped and second-guessed. One of his biggest worries was being outsmarted by his first wife—whose name, of course, was Mêtis. She was an alluring Titan known for her “magical cunning” and close friendship with that master thief Prometheus. Zeus managed to muster a little cunning of his own and con Mêtis into briefly transforming herself into a fly, giving him a chance to grab and swallow her—forever uniting, in the eyes of the ancient Greeks, the bond between imagination and immortality: the spirit of resourcefulness was now buzzing inside a god who would never die.

Not that everyone was on board. An outlaw outlook meant freedom, which put it at odds with biê—“brute force.” Biê was for kings and conquerors, the mighty and the muscle-bound; mêtis was power to the people, especially the weak and poor who had no other options. Achilles was bursting with biê and sneered at the schemes of Odysseus, who was “equal to Zeus in mêtis.” Too late, Achilles discovered that even a golden warrior can be taken out by a nobody with a good idea; an idea like, say, infuriating your enemy so much he forgets to cover his vulnerable heel. Achilles’ cousin, Ajax, was just as much of a raging bull and learned the same lesson: when he wrestled Odysseus, he was twisted around and thumped down on his back before he saw it coming.

“It is with mêtis rather than biê that a woodcutter is better,” the ancient warrior Nestor coaches his son in the Iliad. “It is mêtis that lets a pilot on the wine-dark sea keep a swift ship on course when a gale strikes. And mêtis makes one charioteer better than another.”

For young Brits like Xan and Paddy, brute force was everything they were trying to escape. Biê was boarding school beatings, Victorian prudishness, the blind obedience to the dogma of “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die” that sent their fathers and brothers marching into machine-gun fire during the Great War. Weirdly, religion had a lot to do with it. Once the Greek myths were replaced by Christianity, the raucous tribe of Olympians were replaced by just one God. Instead of becoming our own heroes, we were given a list of commandments and told to follow the rules, bend our knees, and wait for a savior.

Not on Crete, though. The Island of Heroes still followed the ancient code, and when Xan and Paddy and Billy Moss arrived, they discovered a whole new level of outlaw thinking.

“Klepsi-klepsi—translatable into English as ‘swiping’ or ‘pinching’ but hardly stealing—is something of a Cretan sport,” Billy learned after being awakened with a cold splash of outlaw thinking when his bedroll and warm clothes were nicked by a fellow rebel. “Sympathy is usually on the side of the ‘pincher’ rather than of the loser. If you allow someone to steal from you, it is you who are the mug, he the clever fellow.”

Crete had been under the heel of invaders for so long that stealing had become the job of patriots. Sheep rustling was the only way for Resistance fighters to survive during the Turkish occupation, so heroic struggle became synonymous with banditry. They’re even the same word: in Cretan dialect, rebels and robbers are both klephts. “It’s one of the most important Greek lessons you could learn,” George Psychoundakis told a new SOE recruit, urging him to steal some grapes. “As your teacher, I insist on it!” To survive on Crete, you had to think and act like an old-time hero.

Which is exactly what Paddy had done. He’d gone into the Minotaur’s lair and not only defeated the monster but snuck it out on a leash.

The roar of trucks brought an end to the merriment. A German convoy was grinding up the mountain road and pouring into the Anogia town square. Within minutes, soldiers were hopping down and scurrying into formation.

Up, up, the Cretans told Paddy. You’ve got to get out of here. The Germans could surround the village at any moment and begin the house-to-house ransack. Paddy and George scrambled their gear and headed toward the door. Could someone guide them to Billy’s hideout? And was there a donkey they could bring along for the general?

Yes, yes, their host replied. Whatever you need. But hurry.

“You’ll see!” Paddy promised as he went out the door. “Those three days will go by and there won’t be any villages burnt or even shooting!” Privately, however, he wasn’t feeling so bully. “I prayed that urgency would lend wings to the messengers’ heels,” he thought to himself, “and scatter our counter leaflets and the BBC News of the General’s departure from the island.”

The town square was teeming with troops as Paddy and George cautiously worked their way through the streets. Paddy couldn’t figure out how the Butcher got his men to Anogia so quickly, but he was even more perplexed by why they were still standing around. The Butcher had the drop on them, so why didn’t he snap shut the trap? If the Germans had circled Anogia as soon as they arrived, Paddy and Billy might be in chains by now. So what were they waiting for?

The Butcher was frozen by a chilling thought: What if it’s a feint?

The bandits were smart, so smart that the Butcher hadn’t managed to lay his hands on a single Brit the entire time he’d been on Crete. Every time he got close, they were one jump ahead. So could trapping them really be so easy this time? Or did they want to be chased? The bandits had to know that nothing would outrage the Germans more than kidnapping a general from right under the nose of the Gestapo. Thousands of German foot soldiers would be hot on their trail, racing into the mountains and drawing fleets of fighter planes into the backcountry … leaving Fortress Crete and the capital exposed!

So that was their game. Maybe, the Butcher thought, Kreipe’s abduction was an Allied ploy to make him move large forces towards the mountains, thereby allowing them to land on the plains while the andartes and commandos attacked from the rear. He wasn’t going to fall for it. The Butcher sent word to Anogia: Bring one company back to Heraklion immediately. He ordered the reconnaissance planes back to base and the leafleting postponed till further notice. Before scattering his troops all over the mountains, the Butcher needed to be ready for invasion.

By nightfall, the coast was secure. The hunt for General Kreipe was ready to resume at full force—but Paddy and his crew had already slipped back into the wilderness.