Andros knew what he had to do. He looked Prestwick in the eye and, in a firm voice, said, “When do I go in?”
“Four days,” said Prestwick, who expressed no surprise at the decision. “In the meantime, we’re sending you to the Farm for some special advanced training.”
“‘The Farm?’”
“Our most elite school for spies,” Prestwick explained. “We’re bringing in an instructor especially for you, to prepare you for your mission. We won’t have much time, but hopefully, we can break some of the traditional military habits you’ve picked up here at West Point and teach you a few new tricks as well. Now the MP outside will escort you to your quarters to pack your belongings. You will speak to nobody.”
Andros rose to his feet. “You don’t waste any time.”
“At this point in the war, we can’t afford to,” said Prestwick, replacing his papers in his briefcase.
Andros nodded. “Then I’ll be going.”
Prestwick watched Andros walk up the aisle to the back of the chapel and disappear. He then closed his briefcase and went into the chaplain’s office, where Major General Francis B. Wilby was sitting with Andros’s official West Point file.
“He’s no spy,” said Wilby. “He’s a soldier, the best I’ve seen in years. That crazy outfit of yours is no place for a man like him.”
“Nonsense, Superintendent,” Prestwick replied, taking the file from Wilby. “He’s an accomplished liar and will serve us well.”
Prestwick struck a match, touched it to the corner of the file, and dropped it into the metal wastebasket. “The name of Chris Andros shall be struck from every record, Superintendent. West Point’s top cadet never existed.”
20
H is decision to drop out of Harvard and enroll in the United States Military Academy even before America entered the war would have shocked his American friends and relatives-had he told them. But Chris Andros felt it was his duty to uphold the honor of his family’s name, a name that to Greeks was synonymous with war and greatness.
Chris Andros was named after his great-great-grandfather, a legendary merchant skipper of the Greek islands during the war of independence. A master in the saltwater sport of fireboating, the old sea dog would approach Turkish warships at night in dispensable vessels packed with gunpowder, pitch, and sulfur. Once they were close enough, he and his crew would light the powder train, cast off in their longboat, and enjoy the fireworks from a distance. His end came at Missolonghi. Surrounded by Turks, he and the remaining defenders set fire to the ammunition stores and blew themselves up, taking their enemies with them. This act propelled an inspired Anglo-French fleet to sink the Turkish navy in the Battle of Navarino in 1827 and thus secure the birth of modern Greece.
Chris’s great-grandfather Byron and, later, his grandfather Basil built the Andros Shipping dynasty, chiefly through hard work and fortuitous marriages that consolidated some of Greece’s most prosperous shipping lines. On rare occasions they engaged in smuggling, not for money but on principle, sending arms to those who fought for freedom in various parts of the world. Eventually, his uncle Dimitri brought the family’s business to America, anchoring Andros Shipping West in Boston Harbor.
His father, Nicholas, however, chose a different path. He shunned the family trade altogether and, against the wishes of Basil, chose to train at the Kriegsakademie in Berlin as a military officer. Inspired by the idea of a greater Greece, he returned to Athens to take his commission in the Hellenic Royal Army. But to make peace with Basil, he announced that he would take Anastasia Rassious of the Rassious shipping family as his wife.
Chris Andros never knew his mother. At the time she was carrying him, the Great War had broken out across Europe. King Constantine, defying the Greek people and the Allies, decided to support his German brother-in-law, the kaiser. With the Greek government on the brink of collapse and civil war looming, Nicholas sent Anastasia to America to stay with Dimitri and his cousins. By the time Chris was born in 1917 in a Boston hospital, Greece had sided with America and the Allies against the Germans and was suffering the ravages of war. One month later, the ocean liner on which Chris and his mother were sailing was sunk by a German submarine. Anastasia died in the icy waters of the Atlantic, but Chris was plucked alive from the hungry waves.
God, how he hated the Germans.
After the Allied victory, he was returned to Greece-a grim reminder of his mother to his father, Colonel Nicholas Andros, and an answered prayer to Basil, who already had decided that Chris would one day take the helm of Andros Shipping in Greece.
Grandfather Basil made sure Chris’s education started early, bringing a British governess to the family’s estate in Kifissia. From Miss Robinson, he learned to read Shakespeare, Milton, and, in her weaker moments, American authors such as Mark Twain. Especially inspiring were the speeches of President Woodrow Wilson, whose call for a League of Nations captivated Chris’s young mind with its vision of a new world order governed not by violence but by an open understanding of the rights of all nations, the small as well as the mighty, to determine their own destinies. Above all, from Miss Robinson, he learned of the glory that was ancient Greece and of the country’s contributions to European civilization.
Even as a boy, he could sense that the modern Greek nation paled before its ancient glories. A simple drive from his northern suburb of Kifissia to the docks of Piraeus to see the family ships proved that much. Passing through the hot, winding, tortuous streets of Athens, he couldn’t help but notice the ramshackle storefronts, refugees, and street children, even though Nasos the driver took pains to stay on the main boulevards. As for Greece’s place in the world, Nicholas said the country was prized only for its strategic position in the Mediterranean and would forever remain the pawn of world powers unless it seized the initiative to become a great state.
Nicholas tried to do just that with what became known as the Great Idea-Greece’s ill-fated quest to invade Turkey and reestablish a new Byzantium, with Constantinople as its capital. The Hellenic Royal Army came within sixty miles of Ankara before the tide of battle turned and they were routed. It was only by the grace of God, Nicholas later said, that he and his troops eluded the bloodthirsty Hadji Azrael, whose legions of holy warriors decapitated thousands of Greek stragglers. The Great Idea thus became Greece’s greatest military defeat in centuries. Nicholas returned to Athens only to see the Greek prime minister, commander in chief, and other senior government officials tried and shot for their failure. His father barely escaped trial himself, and the country fell into political turmoil.
From then on, his father, now General Andros, was a nervous man, caught between coup and countercoup. Because Nicholas favored a Greek republic based on American-style democracy, he was accused by royalists of being a republican. Republicans in turn accused him of being a royalist because of his belief that the Greek people should first prove themselves capable of establishing a stable government, strong military, and modern economy before they spent endless hours debating the role of the king. “Better to make the monarchy irrelevant before we depose it,” Chris’s father used to tell him.
Chris didn’t much like King George II. The man wasn’t even Greek but a Dane, an unemployed European monarch whose royal family had been assigned to Greece by the Great Powers sixty years earlier. The Greeks had rejected their first monarch, young King Otto of the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach. Chris thought they should do the same with the House of Oldenburg. Greece was for the Greeks.