Kidnap in Crete Page 12
By now some of the reception committee were up to their waists in the sea, pulling on the line and shouting ‘Trava, Trava!’ ‘Pull, Pull!’ The dinghy ground on to the sand of the beach, bobbing in the swell. Billy Moss was not prepared for his first island encounter with the Cretans. When he jumped off the dinghy and splashed through the surf to the shore he fell into the arms of what he thought was a group of over-made-up actors from The Pirates of Penzance. Men with heavy moustaches, turbaned heads; black, threadbare patched clothes; high boots; others in bare feet. The air was fetid with the smell of unwashed bodies and clothing. A filthy, unshaven Cretan dressed in rags came up to him and said, in an educated English voice, ‘Hello Billy. You don’t know me. Paddy will be along in a minute.’ It was Sandy Rendel, who explained to the young captain: ‘I haven’t washed for six months, a man of the people, that’s me.’
The young man Moss met next looked like an English public schoolboy. He grabbed Moss’s gun and said: ‘Paddy with Germans.’ Then to Moss’s horror he began to fiddle with the sub-machine gun: ‘Tommy gun! Boom-boom’, then he pointed along the beach saying, ‘Here come Paddy.’
Moss was excited to see his friend. (‘I saw Paddy and ran towards him, I can’t describe how wonderful it was to see the old son of a gun again.’)
In contrast to the filthy appearance of Rendel, apart from his moustache Leigh Fermor was clean-shaven with neat hair flattened under a turban, although he too looked as though he was in a comic opera. His clothes included a bolero, a maroon cummerbund which held to his waist an ivory-handled pistol and dagger. His corduroy breeches were tucked into long black riding boots. He told Moss that ‘Xan [Fielding] and I like the locals to think of us as sort of dukes’.
Moss had made similar mistakes of identity on the boat. He had thought that Yannis Katsias and his henchmen were sheep-stealers. In fact they came from Sfakia, a part of the island which for hundreds of years had produced the fiercest guerrilla fighters and where sheep stealing set off family vendettas that went on for years and could only be stopped by revenge killing . Katsias’s family were in the middle of one such feud. He had to keep moving to avoid becoming a victim himself.
Part of the disguise Moss had brought with him included a Swiss ski-ing sweater. He began to wonder whether he had made the right choice.
Leigh Fermor took immediate command of the beach party. ‘I saw him go off,’ said Moss, ‘And watched him as he gave orders, commanded men to do this and that . . . He seemed to have the whole situation at his fingertips and was capable of coping with anything.’
The equipment from the motor launch now lay on the beach, including each man’s kitbag. The men piled it all onto the backs of mules – explosives, weapons, ammunition. When the job was at last done, Leigh Fermor produced gold coins to reward the members of the reception committee who had been especially recruited for the job. Every night for the past two weeks they had moved through the forbidden zone to the beach, hoping for the arrival of the launch. Now it was here their job was done and they could stand down, freed from the stress and the danger. After embraces and bristly kisses the reception committee disappeared into the darkness.
It was about midnight when they moved off, first up the steep, rocky gulley of the cove, after which they faced a hard climb to the top of the scarp. They trudged uphill through reddish rocky terrain, slippery underfoot and dotted with scrubby bushes. It took them over half an hour of breathless, sweaty scrambling to reach the top of the scarp face. Below them the sea appeared to get wider and wider as they gained height and could see more of the horizon. The moon hung behind them, its light glittering on the sea, showing the way home to Africa. Moss thought it was like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. He asked Rendel if all the hills in Crete were like this: Rendel’s reply was to laugh. Moss thought that ‘Crete appeared to be one big rock. I was sweating Cairo from every pore and hating it.’ Once out of the gulley, they saw the impassive, craggy hills of the Asterousia Mountains, rising above them in silent challenge.
The team were heading for Kastamonitsa in the vicinity of Archanes, a town about fifteen miles south of Heraklion and where General Kreipe had his headquarters, and also not far from the Villa Ariadne. Kastamonitsa was the home of Kimonas Zografakis, a shepherd and trusted resistance fighter. Kimonas and his family had promised to provide a base where the abductors could hide and from which they could operate. It was Kimonas who helped guide the commando raiding party that had attacked the airfield at Kasteli. Only a few months earlier, Kimonas’s elder brother had been arrested and executed.
At the top of the slope the men paused to get their breath back. After a few minutes they set off again. The going was easier, although still slippery from the chippings of rock underfoot.
The party had to cross a ridge which forced the men into silhouette against the moonlit sky. In the distance, in full view, was a manned German outpost. The previous month a group of guerrillas, returning through the area after acting as reception committee to another motor-launch landing, had been ambushed and their leader, Mihalis Eftaminitis, killed.
They ran bent double, hugging the skyline, heaving on the plodding mules. An Alsatian dog belonging to the German patrol loped by, inexplicably ignoring the men who were intent on bringing chaos to its masters.
After four hours’ hard walking they reached the place where they were to hide for the rest of the night and all of the following day. The mules were unloaded and led off to a hiding place about an hour away. The men needed to sleep. They were young fit men but had found the route exhausting, as did the donkeys, stumbling under the heavy loads of equipment. They settled in the bed of a dried-up river, surrounded on three sides by rock and made invisible by trees and thickets of scrub. Leigh Fermor still had the fleece-lined suit in which he had parachuted onto the Omalos plateau; it made a perfect bed, blanket and mattress all in one. Silence fell and a slight drizzle began to fall.
They awoke the next morning to the bleating of two goats being slaughtered for breakfast. This was Moss’s first experience of Cretan hospitality; one goat would have been enough, the second was in celebration of the arrival of the abduction team. Before breakfast the men washed in a nearby spring of freezing cold mountain water.
While the goats were being cooked some of Sandy Rendel’s team arrived to escort him back to his headquarters on the Lasithi plateau, about a three-day trek away. They brought with them a water bottle full of raki which they drank from empty bully beef tins. For an hors d’oeuvre the shepherds plucked from the white-hot ashes of the fire the entrails, genitals, eyeballs, livers and kidneys. Moss had some American army ‘K’ rations in his rucksack which were added to the feast.
It had taken them a long time to reach the first hideout and they knew that at the present rate it would take them another two days to get to Kastamonitsa. Before he left, Rendel advised them to break the next night’s march at Skinias, where a shepherd was expecting them and would be offended if the team did not accept his hospitality.
The party which had landed on the beach began to break up. Kapitan Yannis Katsias headed off with his fighters for a destination to the west, travelling with only their sub-machine guns and what they could carry on their backs. Rendel planned to set off back to his headquarters that evening. This would leave only the abduction team, Leigh Fermor, Billy Moss, Paterakis, Tyrakis, Zahari Zografakis and Antonios Papaleonidas, a stevedore from Heraklion. The ISLD agent John Stanley had joined them for part of the journey. The British officers passed the morning drinking, smoking and talking about old friends in Cairo and the goings on at Tara. Moss had brought with him cigars, two bottles of whisky and some kümmel, which they drank along with more raki and the local wine served for their lunch. Moss remembers that, ‘At lunch time we ate very little and drank a great deal.’ John Stanley passed out.
By now Moss had changed into his ‘disguise’ of ski jersey and trousers; next to Rendel and Leigh Fermor he felt he looked like ‘an Englishman do
wn on his luck’. To Moss, Rendel looked more Cretan than the Cretans: he drank wine from the bottle, the liquid trickling down his unshaven chin and splashing onto the ragged black coat, which he had acquired fourth-hand when he arrived; his breeches and puttees were filthy and covered in mud; he wore a black turban on his head and the soles of his boots had come away from the uppers.
After lunch they all slept, fuzzy-headed in the hot afternoon sun. At about five o’clock they roused themselves and Rendel set off with his escort. Moss watched Rendel walking away, a gnarled stick in his hands, his pace measured and the soles of his shoes flapping time with his steps: the sometime correspondent of The Times looking for all the world ‘like Old Nod the shepherd’.
Leigh Fermor and Moss passed another hour waiting for the mules to come back. The mules arrived at 6.30 that evening and were loaded up, and the small party set off in daylight for Skinias, where they were to spend the next day. When they left, John Stanley was still asleep in the place where he had collapsed at lunchtime. As they passed his inert figure Leigh Fermor commented: ‘See what a year in Crete does to one.’
The route to the sheepfold was much easier than it had been the day before. Instead of going up every peak they followed the contour lines. The shepherd showed no surprise when he was introduced to them and Moss thought that the whole area must know of their presence, if not their mission. The old man welcomed them with milk in a communal glass and mizithra, a soft unsalted cheese with a pungent aroma and mild flavour, stored in a basket hanging, dripping from the ceiling of his tiny stone hut. After a short rest they moved on. In every village they passed, the dogs sensed their presence and began to bark. Leigh Fermor’s solution to the problem was to draw attention to themselves, shouting orders in a loud voice and in German, and singing German military songs including ‘Bomber über England’, ‘Lili Marlene’ and the unofficial German national anthem so loved by Hitler, the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. Moss was introduced to one of the Cretan methods of judging distance – how many cigarettes could be smoked before the next rendezvous was reached.
As they got nearer to Skinias the danger of discovery grew. One of the mule handlers warned them that a few months earlier the Germans had set up an ambush on a bridge which they would soon have to cross and that even the track they were on was regularly patrolled. Another of the muleteers went ahead to check that all was clear; the others waited in a ditch until they heard him whistle, the signal that they could go on in safety. They walked along the deserted streets of the village, the noise of their boots echoing off the walls. Ahead, in the moonlight, they saw two uniformed men. Manolis Paterakis recognised them: they were part of the local gendarmerie, the force to which he had belonged before the invasion. He decided to lead the group straight past them, warning, ‘Don’t say anything, don’t catch their eye.’ The kidnappers walked on, single file, heads down, faces hidden. The two gendarmes took no notice of them, dragging on their cigarettes and chatting quietly, as though the band of desperadoes did not exist.
At the end of the village they reached the house where they were to have supper before moving on. Their arrival was the cue for another display of Cretan hospitality. The house was owned by a shepherd called Mihalis, who lived there with his elder sister. The party was immediately offered glasses of raki and Mihalis insisted they stay with him until the following night as they had no chance of getting to Kastamonitsa in the remaining hours of darkness. He would not take no for an answer and said he had already made the arrangements.
Then dinner was prepared, a feast in spite of the wartime shortages: mutton, chopped up and cooked in olive oil. Then lentils, also prepared in oil, creamed goat’s cheese and hard-boiled eggs, washed down with Cretan red wine. Moss says that ten people sat down to the meal and, ‘I was introduced to the Cretan custom of making a toast not only for each round of drinks, but also as often as anyone at the table lifted his glass to his lips. With ten people present our eating was so punctuated by glass-raising that the meal seemed to continue for hours.’
After the meal a stream of visitors visited the house, all wanting to set eyes on the strange men who had arrived from the sea. Soon the small room was filled with smiles and noisy enthusiasm for the resistance team. Two of the callers were the gendarmes they had so recently passed in the square. The officers were greeted like long-lost brothers.
It was nearly dawn when the party ended. The next day they were served a breakfast of eggs, goats’ milk, wine and more raki. Moss came to realise that ‘wine takes the place of one’s morning cup of tea and one often drinks a liberal quantity before brushing one’s teeth’. After breakfast more visitors arrived, each one subjected to a charade of mock security with the door half open and whispered passwords. The most important visitor was Kapitan Anastasios Boutzalis. Originally from Anatolia, Boutzalis looked like a kindly Cretan uncle. He sported a thick moustache and was six foot tall with broad shoulders and a comfortable paunch. His gentle aspect concealed a man who was a great patriot to Crete and an enormously useful ally to the British agents on the island. Like Manolis Paterakis, he had distinguished himself in the battle for Crete and then became one of the first resistance fighters in the mountains, taking part in the battle of Viannos. He struck Moss as something of a Falstaff: he used a dagger to eat the mutton; seeing that Billy Moss was looking at him he suddenly spiked a sheep’s eyeball and offered the delicacy to him. Moss found he was unable to accept the gift. Boutzalis shrugged and popped the orb into his own mouth. Moss watched him chew in fascination. ‘I could see its shape like a skinned golf ball riding in his cheek.’
Another visitor was a young woman carrying a baby who turned out to be Leigh Fermor’s god-daughter. She had been christened ‘England Rebellion’ in a hilltop ceremony some months before. The child’s father had been wounded and evacuated to Cairo, the mother was now in hiding with the infant in the mountains. To be a godfather to a Cretan child is an honour and a solemn undertaking; the role is binding and as deep as a blood tie. The responsibilities last until death. Leigh Fermor presented the child with a gold sovereign. Another person at the lunch was an old man who had been ejected by the Germans from his house in Chania and was now taking refuge with his relatives. He was dressed like a priest and looked to be in his mid-seventies. He claimed to have worked in a restaurant in Los Angeles and his conversation was peppered with phrases like ‘Hot dog’ and ‘Goddam son of a bitch’. The two policemen who had seemed so menacing in the moonlight made a return visit. They were eager to help with the next stage of the journey and were full of helpful suggestions.
After so much social activity the small team was grateful when, as darkness fell, they headed off into the rain on the last leg of the trek to Kastamonitsa. A surreal moment came when, ahead of them, they saw what appeared to be fireflies dancing on the mountain slopes; the lights turned out to be the lanterns of villagers foraging for snails, which crawl out from under rocks after rain, and which are fried or roasted with wild rosemary to make a popular Cretan dish, and a necessity in a time when food was being stolen from them by the German army.
Just before dawn on the morning of 7 April, on the brow of the next hill, the tired walkers saw the village of Kastamonitsa. In three nights’ tough trekking they had covered little more than sixteen miles. Billy Moss now knew what they were in for and how demanding the mountain country could be. He regretted wearing hobnail-studded boots and wished that he had the rubber, Vibram soles that had been developed by the Italians for mountaineering and adopted by the British commandos.
As they arrived at the Zografakis house, Kimonas decided to split the team up. He sent the guerrillas who had guided the abduction team across the mountains to shelter in a disused building. Leigh Fermor, Moss, Paterakis and Tyrakis were to stay in the main house. The family were not well-to-do but they were prosperous by Cretan mountain standards, living in a two-storey building with a living room, bedroom and kitchen. The family had often sheltered Allied agents, despite the astonishing risks:
there was a German garrison and military hospital in the village; and off-duty German soldiers were in the habit of just wandering into islanders’ houses demanding food and drink.
By day the brothers and sisters of the house kept lookout, coming in to warn them when soldiers were loitering nearby or even walking towards the front door; the men were told to keep well away from the windows. Nearby was a dried riverbed full of trees, bushes and large rocks which provided a hiding place where the kidnap team could hide if they had enough warning. Zografakis’s wife, whose son had been murdered only months before, found the ordeal of concealing the SOE men distressing. Zografakis himself appeared to be unmoved. He was a handsome, silent man, unsmiling but with an honest, open face, white hair and sparkling bright eyes. He moved over the rough terrain with a nimbleness given only to men who have spent their lives farming on mountain slopes.
Later, the women of the family, Kimonas’s wife and two daughters, prepared a banquet for the group. Again many toasts were made, including some swearing revenge for the death of Kimonas’s son. By the time they were allowed to climb the rickety ladder up to the bedroom, the team were drunk and half asleep. They slipped gratefully into beds that had been prepared with clean sheets, falling immediately into a deep stupor, oblivious to the fleas that crawled all over them. The first phase of the mission was over: they had landed and reached the base that was to be their headquarters while they finalised the details of the kidnapping.
See Notes to Chapter 13
14
First Base
The next day they woke late to find ‘pretty plump girls’ bringing their lunch and waiting on them hand and foot. As they ate the four men discussed their next move. The plan was to break into the Villa Ariadne, overpower Kreipe’s guards and spirit him away. First they needed to make a study of the villa, the guards, the route in and how they were going to escape with their prisoner.