“Ah!” There’s a shout from somewhere inside the brambles, then a hand jerks up like it’s hailing a cab. “Come toward me.”
Chris White remains rooted in place, his arm high so I can find him and his eyes pinned on whatever he’s spotted. I heave my backpack over my shoulders and begin fighting my way toward him, thorns tearing at my clothes. No one alive knows more about what happened to General Kreipe than Chris White, which is odd, because there’s no reason Chris White should know anything about what happened to General Kreipe. Chris isn’t a scholar or a military historian. He doesn’t speak Greek or German, and as a lifelong pacifist he has no real taste for war stories. By day, Chris is a social worker who manages care for the elderly and the mentally disabled in the quiet English city of Oxford. But at night and on weekends, he’s buried in a stack of topographical maps and out-of-print books in a little wooden shack behind his country cottage. In the great tradition of British amateur obsessives, Chris has spent the past ten years piecing together the mystery the Butcher faced on the morning of April 24, 1944: how do you make a German general disappear on an island swarming with German troops?
It was a magical idea. That’s what Chris White loved about it. The scheme was so perfectly, defiantly un-Nazi: instead of force and brutality, the plan was to trip Hitler up with ingenuity and finesse. There would be no bullets, no blood, no civilians in the middle. Killing the general would have made him just another casualty of war, but not killing him would flip the tables and inflict a touch of fear in the men who were terrorizing Europe. The sheer mystery would make the Nazis crazy and plant an itch of doubt in every soldier’s mind: if these phantoms could get the most protected man on a fortified island, then who was safe?
But getting him was only the beginning. The Butcher would throw everything he had into the manhunt, and what he had was a lot. He’d have troops combing the woods, attack dogs searching for scent, recon planes buzzing the mountains and clicking photos of goat trails for ground scouts to later follow on foot. The Gestapo would offer bribes and rewards and activate its network of local traitors. The Butcher had more than one soldier for every four civilians, giving him a tighter security ratio than you’d find in a maximum-security prison. And that’s what Crete had become: a prison fenced in by the sea. Crete had never been an ordinary island in the first place, at least not in Hitler’s eyes. The Führer counted on Crete as a crucial transit point for German troops and supplies heading to the Russian front, and he intended to keep it safe as a bank vault. The slightest hint of any Cretan resistance, Hitler had ordered, should be crushed with eine gewisse brutalität—“a good bit of brutality.”
And to make it clear what he meant by brutalität, Hitler put the island in the hands of his dream warrior: General Müller, a seventeen year veteran with a Knight’s Cross for extreme bravery whose ruthlessness soon earned him the nickname “the Butcher of Crete.” The Butcher’s chief henchman was a Gestapo sergeant named Fritz Schubert, a Middle East–born German better known as “the Turk.” With his walnut skin and fluency in Greek and English, the Turk was able to disguise himself as a shepherd and sniff out information by hanging around cafés and village squares. His favorite trick was putting on a British uniform, then pulling a Cretan with a death sentence from the dungeon and offering him freedom if he introduced the Turk around his village as a British commando who’d come to help the Resistance. “They were very skillful, well used to deceiving guileless people,” one Cretan survivor would recall.
But maybe the Butcher was the sucker this time. Maybe the kidnappers deliberately overdid it with the rubbish around the general’s car because they wanted to toy with the Butcher and make him wonder if the general was still on the island. Then he’d fan out his troops all across those mountains … only to wheel around and discover Allied troops were storming the beaches. If so, then bravo—the Butcher had to applaud their cunning.
Crete, that remote little island, was secretly one of Hitler’s constant anxieties. “A fear that Greece and Crete would be invaded arose in January 1943,” explained Antony Beevor, the British military historian whose father served with wartime intelligence. “The innermost German terror was of a Cretan uprising in the rear.” Hitler’s forces were already stretched dangerously thin, occupying more than a dozen countries while locked in vicious fighting across Russia and North Africa. A stab in the back in Crete could be a disaster. Either way, the Butcher had to wrap this mess up fast. The longer the general was missing, the more the Butcher looked weak and vulnerable—both to his enemies and to his own men.
So by noon of that first morning, the Butcher came up with a plan to trap the rats. His planes were soon in the air and snowing down leaflets over Heraklion, the coastal city that would become Crete’s capitaclass="underline"
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.
The clock was ticking. The Butcher had plenty of brave soldiers; what he needed was frightened civilians. Let’s see how far those bandits get once everyone on the island turns against them.
Chris White parted the brambles and pointed. In the dirt, a thin scuff led to a low tunnel through the brush. It wasn’t much of a scuff, but it was the best we’d seen all morning.
“They went this way,” Chris said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 3
CHRIS TOOK POINT. Brambles twined across the trail like netting and the footing was a loose jumble of scrabbly stone. The scuff kept twisting places it shouldn’t—veering back on itself, disappearing into overgrown gullies—but Chris was unstoppable. Whenever the trail seemed to die for good, Chris would disappear in the mess until eventually, his hand shot back up:
“AH!”
No, my gut kept telling me. This is all wrong. Why would anyone blaze a trail that runs smack into a boulder? Or in and out of a gully instead of alongside it? I had to remind myself we were steering by goat logic; on Crete, goats break the trail and goatherds follow, adapting themselves to the animals’ feel for the landscape. And once I stopped doubting the goat logic, I noticed the slickness of the stones and remembered something else: water only travels in one direction. No matter how weirdly these washouts twisted us around, we had to be gaining altitude. Imperceptibly, we were wormholing our way up the cliff.
“Doesn’t it take your breath away?” said Chris. “Before we came, it’s possible no one had walked through here since the German occupation. It’s like going into an ancient tomb.”
Soon Chris and I were beetling along at a steady clip. Well, Chris beetled and I followed. He broke the trail and ranged ahead while I focused on just keeping pace. I’m ten years younger than Chris and I thought in much better shape, so it was humbling to face the fact that this sixty-year-old social-services administrator who never works out and looks like he’s best suited for a comfy chair and a Sunday paper could shame me with his endurance and uphill agility.
“It must come naturally.” Chris shrugged.