The Georges led the band to an old shepherd’s hut, a tumbled-down stone ruin with a collapsed roof that would give them a little shelter from the wind but not enough to draw attention. From the air, it would look like a pile of rubble and conceal them enough to wait for night to fall again. Paddy and Billy slunk back outside on a quick forage, hunting among the icy rocks until they spotted those familiar gray-leafed weeds. “Mountain dandelions,” explained Billy, who’d grown to savor their “pleasant, bitter taste.”
The two Brits brought breakfast back to the hut, where they found the Five Georges muttering and glaring at the general. “I think he must have sensed the atmosphere of antagonism,” Billy observed, “for he kept very quiet and sat by himself in a corner, not speaking.”
You’ve got a pistol, the Georges told Paddy. Use it.
The general was dragging his heels on purpose, they suspected. He knew they were vulnerable on the mountain, so he was playing a waiting game, dawdling along to keep them up there as long as he could. The Georges weren’t going to be captured because Paddy was a nice guy. It was time to put a gun to the general’s head and give him a choice: Move or die.
You’re right, Paddy agreed. But that will only work once. We need to reserve it as a last resort.
Which, it turned out, was just a few hours away.
At nightfall, the band slipped out of the hut and began their descent. Going down, Billy soon discovered, was scarier than going up. The moon faded behind clouds, forcing them to grope their way blindly. If any one of them fell, he could tenpin the rest of the group and send them on a long slide into the teeth of a boulder field. “It took us two hours to reach the bottom of the snow belt,” Billy said. And then it got worse.
“The mountain steepened to the tilt of a ladder,” Paddy would recall. “It was channelled and slippery with rain and each footfall unloosed a landslide of shifting stones. We were descending, hand over hand, through what seemed, in the dark and the wind, to be a jungle of hindering branches, spiked leaves, and vindictive twigs.” Every step was an act of faith; if the Georges accidentally led them off a dead drop, Paddy and Billy wouldn’t know until they were falling through the air. Below, the rebels were supposed to signal all’s-clear by lighting fires. Paddy and his band strained their eyes, searching the distance for pinpoints of flame, as Billy had to ask himself the only question that really mattered:
Why?
Why were they still pushing toward the coast, when the only ones who knew they were heading that way were the Germans? Did the British even know they were alive? How could they, when the one man they were counting on to coordinate their escape was still missing? There was still no word about Tom Dunbabin’s mysterious disappearance, and Paddy’s attempts to improvise backup communication to Cairo were becoming deadly: a Cretan runner carrying a message to a wireless operator on the far side of the mountain was intercepted by Germans and shot to death, while two others barely got away. “They brought us ugly news,” the rebel fighter Scuttle George would recall. “The Germans were hunting along the coast and up all the valleys. It was hopeless to go there. They also said it would be impossible for the English ship we were waiting for to approach the shore.”
What was the point, then? Why cross this mountain when they had no idea if a boat could ever meet them on the other side?
But if the Five Georges felt any doubt, it wasn’t slowing them down. They flowed down the back side of Mount Ida, sure-stepping along crumbling trails no wider than their feet and pivoting around boulders that suddenly loomed ahead in the dark. Keeping Billy and Paddy alive was the test of a true hērōs—a true protector—and there was only one way to pull it off: the Cretan way. They’d been raised to run farther, adapt faster, and survive on less than the men trying to kill them. All they had to do was find a donkey for the general, and they could stay on the move and fade back into the wilderness.
But first they had to get off that mountain.
From the top of Mount Ida, Chris White and I looked down and considered our options.
Off-trail, there was a skinny snake of a route that was somehow free of snow, but parts of it were too steep to walk and the rest was a crazy obstacle course of boulders and scree patches and sudden mini-cliffs where rocks had sheared from the mountain face. Or we could stick to the wandering thread of switchbacks, except they were so crosshatched by snowpack that we’d constantly be sidestepping on a forty-five-degree angle across frozen sliding boards.
“I’ve got an idea,” I called over to Chris. “But you might hate it.”
“I hate this,” he said, kicking at the ice. “What’ve you got?”
I told him about Parkour, and my apprenticeship in drugstore parking lots and London housing projects. I filled him in on the way Shirley bounded over walls, and the fact that the Yamakasi believed elastic recoil was the secret of effortless movement in the new urban jungle. I’d even asked Dan Edwardes specifically about Crete, and he wasn’t surprised that newcomers like Xan and Paddy and Billy Moss could learn to adapt. “The same thing we do in the city, they do in mountain terrain,” Dan had said. “That ‘Cretan Bounce’ you were asking about? That comes from precision. When you hit a rock and bounce off, it’s because you hit it square. You can’t brake or doubt. You have to trust your body and go.”
“So,” I asked Chris White. “Do you want to try?”
“What, running down the mountain?”
“More like bouncing.”
Chris toed the snowpack, then cinched his backpack tight. “After you.”
I yanked in my waist strap and glanced down to check my boot laces. Strip away conditioning and return to an innate, effortless way of moving that utilizes the entire body, I recalled one Parkour disciple urging. The elusive “flow state.” I jumped into the scree, sliding sideways down the steepest part of the slope until I got my balance and began to run, my feet stutter-stepping faster than my brain could process. I ran right off the edge of a mini-cliff, landing in a crouch so deep my butt almost hit the ground, and surged right back into a careening sprint.
“YES!” Chris was shouting behind me. “IT REALLY—”
My feet went out and I crashed, missing the rest.
CHAPTER 36
THE BUTCHER, DAY 8 OF THE ABDUCTION:
Cretans, beware! The edge of the German sword will strike down every one of the guilty men and all the bandits and all the henchmen and hirelings of the English.
CRETAN SHEPHERD TO PADDY:
He’d better look out or we’ll capture him too.
I RUMBLED OVER ROCKS, sliding out of control, until I was able to brake to a stop with my heels. I was still trying to figure out what happened and how badly banged up I was when footsteps thundered past close to my head.
“YOU OKAY?” Chris White shouted as he galloped by.
“Yeah,” I called.
“GOOD! CAN’T STOP!”
Chris looked like a nervous kid at his first ice rink, with his back all stiff and his arms wide and slightly flappy as he braced for the wipe-out he knew was coming. Loosen up, I was about to shout, but decided to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want to distract him, plus the guy sprawled in the dirt wasn’t really the one to be giving out pointers. And as awkward as Chris seemed to me, it was working. He’d probably look just fine to Dr. Schleip, the fascia research specialist who demonstrated human elastic recoil by clipping his keys to a spring and letting them sproing up and down. Your body works the same way: as long as your movement is rhythmic and your center is stacked—head over shoulders over hips over knees, as erect as a boxer in the ring or a girl on a pogo stick—you can bounce along indefinitely. But when you break tempo or fall off-balance, you short out all that free energy from your rubbery tendons and connective tissue. That’s what happened to me; I’d gotten a little fancypants with my tiny bit of Parkour and my Erwan jungle training and began adding quick-cuts and leaps. I was forcing it; Chris was flowing.