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Riordan’s fantasy of a hero school actually does exist—in bits and pieces, scattered across the globe. The skills have been fragmented, but with a little hunting, you can find them all. In a public park in Brooklyn, a former ballerina darts into the bushes and returns with a shopping bag full of the same superfoods the ancient Greeks once relied on. In Brazil, a onetime beach huckster is reviving the lost art of natural movement. And in a lonely Arizona dust bowl called Oracle, a quiet genius disappeared into the desert after teaching a few great athletes—and, oddly, Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—the ancient secret of using body fat as fuel.

But the best learning lab of all was a cave on a mountain behind enemy lines—where, during World War II, a band of Greek shepherds and young British amateurs plotted to take on 100,000 German soldiers. They weren’t naturally strong, or professionally trained, or known for their courage. They were wanted men, marked for immediate execution. But on a starvation diet, they thrived. Hunted and hounded, they got stronger. They became such natural born heroes, they decided to follow the lead of the greatest hero of all, Odysseus, and attempt their own version of the Trojan horse.

It was a suicide mission—for anyone, that is, who hadn’t mastered a certain ancient art.

CHAPTER 4

When Hitler came to power Churchill didn’t use judgement but one of his deep insights…. That was what we needed.

—C.P. SNOW,

scientist and wartime spymaster, in his 1961 Harvard lecture

“Science and Government”

FOUR YEARS EARLIER, England was doomed. That’s the reality Winston Churchill faced when he took over as prime minister in 1940.

“We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles,” Churchill announced. At that very moment, in fact, tank commander Erwin Rommel was bearing down on the Channel with his fabled “Ghost Division,” so known because it blasted through enemy territory with such supernatural speed—once thrusting nearly two hundred miles in a single day—that Rommel could be storming into London within twenty-four hours of rumbling up on British shores.

Clearly, surrender was England’s only hope. For every British plane, Hitler had three; for every British soldier, Hitler had two. U-boat wolf packs and magnetic mines had turned the Channel into a death trap, crippling all but eleven of the Royal Navy’s forty destroyers. British soldiers were bloodied and barely armed; tens of thousands had been captured or killed, and the survivors had ditched their guns and gear in the rush to escape. German troops, by contrast, were so disciplined, ferocious, and euphoric, Hitler actually wanted them to ease up and not overextend themselves by advancing so fast.

“Gentlemen, you have seen for yourself what criminal folly it was to try to defend this city,” Hitler said while touring the smoking remains of Warsaw, which had been bombed into a nightmare landscape of rubble and rotting corpses as its mayor was dragged off to Dachau. “I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all of Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war.”

But Churchill knew the real meaning of Hitler. During the chaotic early months of the Nazi onslaught, few were as quick as Churchill to pierce the Third Reich’s gun smoke and pageantry and see into the heart of the man behind it all. If you think you’re dealing with a fellow statesman, Churchill warned Parliament, or an empire builder, or even a run-of-the-mill megalomaniac, you’re making a terrible mistake. War wasn’t Hitler’s means to something greater; it was the greatest thing he knew.

“Nazi power,” Churchill said, “derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution.” Fear and pain were an erotic thrill for “these most sinister men.” By Hitler’s own telling, the most wonderful day of his young life was one of the darkest in history: he was “overcome with rapturous enthusiasm” when he heard that World War I had broken out. “I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven from an over-flowing heart.” As a soldier, Corporal Hitler adored the ghoulish world of frontline fighting; he resisted evacuation from the trenches when his thigh was torn up with shrapnel, and on his first night back after recovering, he was too excited to sleep and stalked around with a flashlight, spearing rats with his bayonet, until someone hit him with a boot and told him to knock it off.

“When we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays,” Churchill warned, “we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver.”

So Churchill came up with a novel maneuver of his own. This was a new kind of fight, so Churchill wanted a new kind of fighter: lone phantoms with the inventiveness and self-reliance to test “the unwritten laws of war,” as Churchill put it, and execute whatever havoc they could dream up. The British Army was outgunned and outnumbered, but maybe this way they could even the odds by tying up entire German regiments in pursuit of a single man. Or a single woman. Or a single woman who, in one recruit’s case, was actually a man. Anytime a German soldier tried to close his eyes and sleep, Churchill wanted him plagued—and trailed—by lethal shadows.

He couldn’t use seasoned soldiers for an operation like that; anyone fit enough to fight was needed on the battlefield. Instead, Churchill’s new operation began recruiting poets, professors, archeologists—anyone who’d traveled a bit and knew his or her way around foreign countries. Two middle-aged professors were so electrified when they got wind of Churchill’s scheme that they reversed their conscientious objector status and decided to fight instead. For British academics, this was their fantasy world come to life. The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordinary individuals.

Hold on. British high command was appalled. Was Churchill really going to pit these oddballs against the most ruthless killers on the planet? The Nazis had just ripped apart the armies of nine European nations, and Churchill’s counterpunch was … this? They’re not commandos, Churchill’s general argued; they’re calamities. If their fake passports and ludicrous accents don’t betray them, the villagers will; as soon as these misfits are dropped behind enemy lines, they’ll have to depend for food and hideouts on the very people most likely to give them away. Why wouldn’t a farmer with a storm trooper’s gun in his face trade a British life for his own? Churchill’s adventurers will have no escape if pursued and no hope if they’re caught: by the code of combat, no uniform means no mercy. They won’t be marched into camps and visited by the Red Cross, like other prisoners of war; they’ll be beaten and tortured till they scream out every secret they know, then executed on the spot.