What about our leaflet drop? Paddy asked.
Canceled, Billy replied. Too much cloud cover for our planes to get through.
Billy and Paddy were still absorbing the bad news when worse arrived. The guerrillas escorting the general’s driver showed up—without the driver. Germans are everywhere, the guerrillas reported. There were full-scale drives, the Cretans told Paddy, launched in every direction, and they themselves had only just escaped capture.
Okay. But where’s the driver?
Andoni sliced a finger across his throat.
Paddy was heartsick. Their chances for escape had just plummeted, and his dream of a bloodless, Magic Gang–style triumph was over. As soon as the driver’s body was discovered, the Butcher would go berserk. He’d have to assume General Kreipe was dead as well, which meant he no longer had to worry about getting a hostage back alive. Instead of a rescue operation, it would be total war. The Butcher’s only objective now would be vengeance for the murder of a brother officer.
Time to get moving. Ahead lay Mount Ida, sprawling across a quarter of the island and climbing to over eight thousand feet. The general was still complaining about his injured leg, so they helped him up on the donkey and moved out, following a nearly invisible goat track into the woods. “It was vital for us to get into the mountains and among friends,” Paddy decided, “away from the enemy-infested plain and in the right direction for escape by sea, at high speed.”
Wait. By sea? The guerrillas were doubtful. Why don’t we fly him out, Wolf style?
Ugh. Wasn’t the sky already dark enough without that name coming up? Otto Skorzeny: “Hitler’s Wolf.” The evil genius with a dueling scar down his cheek and a specialty in killing anyone, anywhere, and disappearing without a trace. Whenever a job seemed impossible, the Wolf was called in. He led a special force of Jagdkommandos—“Hunting Warriors”—who were said to “live off the land, think for themselves and never be daunted by the disastrous mess they often found themselves in.” A year earlier, Skorzeny and his Hunters had snuck into a fortified Italian castle high on a mountain and broken Benito Mussolini out of prison. Mussolini had been overthrown in a coup, but Hitler was determined to rescue “Italy’s greatest son, our dear friend and close ally,” and restore him to power. Skorzeny landed by glider at night with a small attack squad, then forced the two-hundred-man guard detail to surrender. Skorzeny spirited Mussolini to an escape plane in a nearby field, and before long Il Duce was back in command. To prevent Hungary’s leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy, from surrendering to the Soviets, Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son, rolled him into a carpet, and snuck him off to a concentration camp, where he was held hostage until the end of the war.
A few months later, as the story goes, the Wolf parachuted into Iran intent on assassinating Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt with a single blow. The Wolf and his Hunters crept closer as the Big Three Allied leaders were meeting in Tehran to discuss war strategy. Just in time, a Russian spy exposed Operation Long Jump and many of the Hunters were captured. But Skorzeny got away, reemerging in an American uniform and jeep far behind enemy lines as he atomized from place to place, sabotaging Allied troops and getting so close to Supreme Headquarters that for days at a time, General Dwight Eisenhower had to be hidden in a guarded location. Skorzeny is “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Eisenhower fumed. “Public Enemy No. 1.”
“We couldn’t evacuate our prisoners by air, in Skorzeny style,” Paddy told the disappointed Cretans. “The Germans had put all the big mountain plateaux out of action for long-range aircraft by forcing labour-gangs to litter them with cairns of stones.” But the burning question wasn’t whether they could follow in the Wolf’s footsteps; it was whether the Wolf was following theirs. Rather than flail around in pursuit of the kidnappers, why wouldn’t the Butcher call in Skorzeny and put the Hunters on their trail? It made perfect sense. As an outlaw himself, Skorzeny would know exactly what Paddy was planning. Instead of chasing the kidnappers, he’d think ten moves ahead and be waiting in ambush.
So the faster Paddy and his crew ran, the closer they could be getting to the Wolf.
CHAPTER 31
It makes people rub their eyes in amazement that this proverbial home of individuality, lawlessness and revolt should unite, when the need came, in this durable harmony.
But so it was.
—PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
CHRIS AND I ARRIVED in Anogia about the time of day Paddy would have been slipping out, pulling ourselves up the last terrace as the sun went down. At the entrance to town was an iron signpost so ominous, it looked more like a warning than a welcome. When we got closer, we discovered why: once the Butcher discovered his suspicions about Anogia were true, he erupted in a Hitler-like fury. What he did next was engraved on that grim memoriaclass="underline"
Order of the German Commander of the Garrison of Crete:
Since the town of Anogia is a centre of the English espionage in Crete, since the Anogians carried out the murder of the sergeant of the Yeni-Gavé garrison, since the Anogians carried out the sabotage at Damasta, since the andartes of various Resistance bands find asylum and protection in Anogia, and since the abductors of General Kreipe passed through Anogia, using Anogia as a stopping place when transporting him, we order its RAZING to the ground and the execution of every male Anogian who is found within the village and within an area of one kilometre round it.
Chania, 13-8-44.
The Commander of the Garrison of Crete
H. Müller
The Butcher’s troops surrounded the village and penned everyone inside. More than a hundred people were dragged to the town square and murdered. The survivors fled into the mountains while everything they had—their homes, their food, their clothing and blankets—went up in flames behind them. Two elderly sisters were too afraid to leave their home; they were burned to death inside. The Butcher was unrelenting; for three weeks, his men pounded away at the little town, dynamiting buildings and searching the hills for any Anogian men who escaped the dragnet. By the time the Butcher’s rage subsided, there was nothing left of the nine-hundred-year-old city on the hill except rotting corpses and smoldering rubble.
Chris and I got a glimpse of the aftermath in a taverna off the town square. A mural filled the entire side wall, and depicted the valley Chris and I had just climbed up from. Two German soldiers have their hands in the air, and a third has dropped to his knees. They’re surrounded by Anogian freedom fighters about to open fire. It’s a strange and awful image to stare at over a glass of raki and a plate of spanakopita, but it explains why Anogia exists again today. Guerrilla sniping became so common that for the rest of the war and afterwards, the area around Anogia would be known as “the Devil’s Triangle.” “I saw Germans crying,” one Anogian would recall. “I saw it when they shuffled into our ambush like sheep and didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.”