Kidnap in Crete Read online

  During the morning Skoutello arrived. Leigh Fermor ordered him to go at once to the hideout of Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi, who Pendlebury had codenamed ‘Selfridge’, and ask him to bring reinforcements. Selfridge’s hideout was four hours away, further up the mountain. When Selfridge received Leigh Fermor’s request he set off at once, taking with him five units of men. Confusingly each group was led by men with the same name: ‘Yiorgi’. Selfridge’s men would act as guards to the kidnappers as they moved across Mount Ida. Skoutello described how ‘the men turned into swallows, they seized their guns and were like ibexes leaping over the rocks and took up positions all along the hills of the watershed.’ These were tough mountain fighters – shepherds who knew every stone, slope, path, ravine and peak of the route.

  Leigh Fermor sent Antonis Zoidakis ahead with orders to check that the way was free of Germans and to light fires showing the kidnappers the safe route over the crest of the mountain and down its southern slopes Two runners accompanying him were to keep contact with the main party, who had until dawn to reach the next rendezvous, a village called Nithavri, the highest habitation on Mount Ida’s southern slopes. Skoutello asked Selfridge to try to persuade Leigh Fermor to change his route and go through the village of Vorizia instead, which the Germans had already destroyed. The kapitan shook his head saying, ‘You don’t know the British. Once they have made their minds up they won’t change them.’

  The group set off in daylight. They moved in single file, cheered on their way by the guerrillas and the British agents. The general travelled in state, astride his mule; as they left, Corporal Lewis whistled in accompaniment the Al Jolson song ‘Going to Heaven on a Mule’. The route to Nithavri took them straight over the summit of Mount Ida. On the way, a branch whipped back and hit Kreipe in the arm making him swear loudly; some of the Cretans thought he was exaggerating to cause a fuss and slow down progress. The general’s state of mind was not helped by the behaviour of one of the guerrillas, Manolis Tsikritsis, a small, wizened man wearing a sort of red fez like a deacon’s cap; Tsikritsis spent a lot of time staring fiercely at Kreipe. On the day of his capture Kreipe had left his home, dressed for work in his office followed by a game of bridge with his staff officers. Six days later, in the same clothes, he was over 7,000 feet above sea level, toiling up one of the most difficult climbs in the Mediterranean, surrounded by people who hated him.

  The climb to the summit of Mount Ida took them along paths covered in slippery loose scree that proved too much for the mule carrying Kreipe. The creature kept sliding and falling; the general had to dismount and it was led off. On the way the party found an old leaflet that had been dropped the year before by the British. It ridiculed ‘the Hun’ with a picture of German soldiers begging for food from two village housewives. Tsikritsis showed the leaflet to Kreipe and grinned at him. The general turned to Leigh Fermor and said in German: ‘Don’t leave me with these people, they frighten me.’

  Progress slowed to a snail’s pace. Even the fittest men found the climb exhausting. Kreipe stopped every ten minutes or so to catch his breath, or smoke a cigarette. Tempers frayed and the Cretans muttered that the general was malingering; they nagged the British officers to make the prisoner go faster, making sinister throat-cutting motions with their hands. As they climbed the general noticed Selfridge’s men watching over them from the heights and asked how many there were. Skoutello said he did not know the exact numbers but there were a lot.

  The party crossed the snow line, leaving the last of the ilexes and cedars below them. The temperature dropped, it began to drizzle and a freezing wind blew the sleet into their faces, scouring their cheeks like sandpaper. The world turned into an icy white hell where every footstep might lead to a bone-shattering fall on to the rocks or a lethal plunge into a deep gorge. One of the Yiorgis went in front, followed by the general, a forage cap on his head and wearing Stratis’s gendarme jacket against the bitter temperatures. Leigh Fermor brought up the rear, carrying a curved-topped mountain walking stick. From time to time Paterakis and Tyrakis stood to one side watching progress, their Marlin sub-machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. The sun sank in the west and Bill Moss took a photograph of the group as they ploughed on into the failing light.

  The mist cut visibility at the summit down to less than a few hundred yards. Paterakis worried that German patrols, some of whom were trained mountain troops, might have already climbed the south face and be waiting to ambush them. The group came to a ruined shepherd’s hut, roofless with only two walls left standing. They huddled in its shelter, not daring to go on until they got word from Antonis’s runners or could see the signal fires. The mood darkened. Even Tyrakis and Paterakis became antagonistic towards Kreipe, who could not fail to understand the murderous tone of their grumbling.

  Thousands of feet below, at the foot of the mountain, where the sun was setting on a balmy evening, lorries full of German soldiers crawled across the landscape heading for the villages. Frightened men, women and children peered from their homes wondering what hell the invading soldiers were about to unleash. The lorries arrived and the villagers heard the crashing of tailboards followed by the sound of hundreds of steel-shod feet kicking up clouds of dust. NCOs shouted commands at nervous soldiers, bullying them into formation before marching them off, weapons clinking, up the mountain.

  Above the snow line the abduction team shivered in the hut. They had not eaten for twelve hours. Leigh Fermor and Moss foraged in the mist for the bitter, edible, mountain dandelions which everyone wolfed down, even though they had nothing with which to wash down the grey leaves.

  They had been on the run for six days. Twice in the last twenty-four hours the BBC had broadcast the item stating that the general was being ‘taken off the island’. The leaflets that Leigh Fermor had asked to be dropped over the island’s main cities never materi­alised: flying conditions had made any such expedition too difficult.

  Night fell. Selfridge’s guides peered into the darkness, straining for Antonis Zoidakis’s fires. Enemy patrols moved slowly up towards them. Nearly two thousand men had been trucked into the area with orders to throw a cordon round the south-west side of the mountain. The soldiers did not like leaving the safety of the tracks and the protection of each other, fearing that ambush and death lay waiting for them in the craggy, frightening corners of the steep landscape. To keep up their morale they fired flares into the air and their weapons into the undergrowth.

  At last the mist cleared and a fire was spotted on a distant ridge; the time had come to move on. For the first two hours the descent was very steep, and the snow-covered ground treacherous. Once back below the snow line barren rock gave way to vegetation and cedars so exposed to the prevailing winds that they grew as streaks of wood almost parallel to the rocks. They made their way down slowly, not helped by whipping branches slapping them in the face, thorns ripping at their clothes and slashing into the skin on their hands. The andartes grew more and more hostile to the General, muttering threats of violence and death in a way that only a Cretan knows how. Leigh Fermor and Moss began to worry that they would lose control and be unable to guarantee Kreipe’s safety.

  They went down hand over hand, trying to support Kreipe’s weight as they slithered and slipped down the steep ilex- and thorn-tangled rock faces. Before long they lost sight of the signal fire. They realised they were not going to reach Nithavri before daylight. The guides knew that somewhere nearby lived a shepherd, a trusted man, well known to the guerrilla band. They could hear the jangling of sheep bells and sometimes came across the animals themselves huddling in groups. Then at last they found the shepherd who greeted them like old friends. The peasant chatted away in Greek, telling them that it would be an honour to have them all in his hut, his only refuge and shelter in the long days tending the sheep on the hills.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when the exhausted band reached the sheepfold. The shepherd ushered the freezing men into his hut and soon they sat around the fire t
rying to dry their clothes, their eyes running from the smoke. He offered them all he had: water, stale bread and hard cheese. At dawn, after a few hours’ sleep, the men filed out of the hut like zombies and followed the shepherd to their hiding place for the next day: a cave, the mouth of which was tiny and hidden by ilex trees. They fell to their knees and crawled through the branches to find themselves in a huge cavern. The shepherd told them that it had been used as a hideout in the war against the Turks and it had enough room to hide hundreds of men. The walls dripped with water. They dragged in logs and lit a fire which filled the air with more smoke than heat. Then they covered the entrance with branches and bracken and tried to sleep, one of the Yiorgis always awake, his gun ready in case the snoring Kreipe tried to escape.

  Outside, a mountain storm raged. The thunder echoed inside the cave as though they had stirred the anger of the mountain gods. Paterakis, Tyrakis, Kreipe and the two British officers huddled together and slept as best they could while far below the general’s men prowled the foothills, moving inexorably towards the hideout.

  The next day they gathered more wood and lit a second fire. Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss scrambled through an opening ‘no bigger than a coal hole’ and discovered a tunnel that led to a huge cathedral-like chamber dropping away from them for storey after storey. The bottom was strewn with rushes and animals’ skulls. This led to an even bigger chamber ‘thickly speared with stalactites and stalagmites [we] had the impression of standing at the end of some vast and colonnaded hall’. Moss wondered if this was the mythical cave where the Goddess Rhea hid her new-born son Zeus from the fury of his father Cronus.

  They crawled back through the tunnels to find Kreipe shivering in the cold, despite wearing Stratis’s gendarme jacket and, now, Leigh Fermor’s coat. The English major joked to Kreipe that if they were captured they would both be shot for impersonating the enemy.

  Inside the cave they could just hear the noise of the spotter plane droning overhead and the occasional sound of soldiers shouting to each other as they combed the mountainside. The abduct­ors had no choice but to wait. They had been cut off from the outside world for a week. No message had reached them and they had no idea if GHQ Cairo even knew that they were holding the general prisoner. They ate their last ration of bread and cheese – they had run out of water. Leigh Fermor found the day very stressful, one of the worst he had experienced. Kreipe sat silent and depressed, lost in his own thoughts.

  In the afternoon, a runner arrived with a message from Antonis Zoidakis. Paterakis unfolded the damp, thin paper and read out the barely legible Greek. Zoidakis reported that more and more lorries were pouring into the villages round the foothills, bringing reinforcements. The Germans were preparing to sweep the slopes en masse and would start a major search the following morning. They should leave the cave at once and head for the south. Paterakis read out the important words: ‘For God’s sake come tonight, a mule waits for you.’

  Moss asked the general what he thought about another night march. Kreipe shrugged and said that physically he would be alright, but mentally he was feeling very down. Moss wrote in his diary that the general ‘smiled as he spoke – a hopeless sort of smile – in a way that made one feel a kind of sympathy for the mental anguish from which he was so obviously suffering’. The guerrillas were very worried about leaving the safety of the hideout; they were surrounded and knew that the soldiers in the cordon must hold all the key points on the descent. It would, they argued, be safer to wait for two or three days. In the end they bowed to Leigh Fermor’s insistence that they must get the general off the island as soon as possible. The Cretans worried that if they refused to go on, Leigh Fermor would think they were cowards.

  They slipped out of the cave just before sunset and moved down the mountain, freezing rain water from the cedar trees dripping on them, soaking their heads and shoulders. They found Antonis Zoidakis waiting with a mule and a guide, another mountain man called Panagos. The animal had a comfortable padded saddle and coloured blankets and had been borrowed from Antonis’s mother. Round its neck it wore a string of blue beads from which was slung a bell that the guides muffled with cloth. Like most of the other mules used by the andartes, the mule’s vocal cords had been cut to stop it braying and giving away their position.

  They planned to head down the south side of Mount Ida in the direction of Nitharvi. Zoidakis would again go ahead to reconnoitre the route. On the way they came to a crossroads where the roads from four villages joined. The place was dangerous and Germans could be seen moving about the tents they had pitched in the area. The guide Panagos suddenly disappeared and the group became anxious. Leigh Fermor held a quick conference. He suggested they head for the village of Agia Paraskevi: ‘there’s a deep stream there covered with myrtles, we’ve hidden there before’. Skoutello was impressed by the Englishman’s firm leadership.

  Agia Paraskevi was Zoidakis’s home village in the Amari valley. For centuries the valley had been a sanctuary from the armies that had invaded Crete. It was twenty miles long, with olive groves, vineyards and shady ravines lined with walnuts and figs. Drifts of poppies streaked the green patches of young wheat. Its gushing springs were studded with derelict mills, Turkish bridges and white-walled villages where the guerrillas came to hide from the enemy.

  As they moved through the darkness they could see the glow of searchlights around the hugely expanded airfield at Timbaki. The lights were aimed out to sea and were working in conjunction with coastal probing batteries, placed to fire on any British ship that might try and approach the beaches at Agia Galini or Sahtouria. Every now and then the sky above them was lit by flares fired by the searching soldiers, and echoing German voices shouted, ‘Kreipe, Kreipe, speak up, don’t be afraid!’

  Soon the ladder-sided steepness of the mountain gave way to the gentler slopes of the Amari valley and paths free from the treacherous scree. Progress was much faster than it had been the previous night; they marched for the first three hours non-stop, sloping past the high fastness of Nithavri and on towards Agia Paraskevi. At midnight, they reached the rendezvous, a tree, hollowed out for animals to drink from. There was no sign of Zoidakis. Leigh Fermor thought they must have mistaken the route or come to the wrong place. Paterakis and Tyrakis went to scour the area for other groves. For half an hour they searched, whistling and making owl hooting noises, but returned empty-handed. The team wondered if Zoidakis had been captured and had been forced to reveal where they were; perhaps the Germans were all around, waiting to pounce on them as soon as the sun rose. They decided to press on. It began to drizzle, a cold penetrating rain, which quickly turned into a downpour soaking through their already wet clothes. Paterakis muttered that the weather was good for the olives if not for the kidnappers. Eventually, somewhere near the village, they flopped down into a ditch, inches deep in water, sodden and forlorn.

  Leigh Fermor had another look at the letter, holding it under his coat to hide the light of his torch. To his horror he realised that what the letter said was the reverse of what Paterakis had read out in the cave. Antonis had written: ‘For God’s sake DON’T come tonight.’ The letter had been heavily folded and was wet, the ‘DON’T’ had been obscured in one of the folds.

  At dawn Tyrakis set off for the village in the hoping that he could track down Antonis. The others could do nothing but wait in the cover of the ditch as it slowly filled up with water. They felt abandoned. Kreipe was the most dejected of all, sitting with a blanket over his head, water running down his face.

  The sun rose and at mid-morning Tyrakis arrived with Antonis Zoidakis carrying baskets of food. When he saw the bedraggled abductors Antonis exclaimed: ‘What are you doing boys, you ought to be dead! How did you get through? There are hundreds of Germans crawling all over the mountains, especially where you came down.’ He made the sign of the cross and said: ‘God exists and you ought all to build churches, – No! cathedrals! You are lucky to be here my children.’

  In the dark, they had somehow
slipped through the cordon. They were shaken by the narrow escape and the near-fatal blunder. German search parties were now high above them and the voices of the soldiers calling ‘Kreipe, Kreipe, Generaloberst Kreipe!’ still echoed round the mountains, bouncing from peak to peak.

  Antonis distributed the food, and served Kreipe first with exaggerated deference. Then he passed the food round to the others, handing round the cheese fritters and announcing: ‘White flannel vests all round.’ After which he pulled a gallon jar of dark mulberry raki from the basket, saying: ‘Next, red overcoats for all!’ Even Kreipe was amused by Zoidakis’s antics, although as he ate he muttered in German: ‘I wish I had never come to this accursed land, it was supposed to be a nice change from the Russian Front.’

  See Notes to Chapter 19

  20

  Marooned

  The following day more lorries rumbled down the primitive dusty roads that followed the broad sweep of the beaches below Sahtouria, dropping over two hundred soldiers along the route. The infantry set up defensive positions with mortars and heavy machine guns, while engineers ran out miles of telephone cable linking the pos­itions, cutting off the approaches to the beaches from both the land and the sea, including the one that Cairo had designated for the rendezvous, Cape Melissa.

  At the same time Ilias Athanassakis and Micky Akoumianakis clambered aboard an ancient bus in Heraklion, and travelled south to try and track down the abductors. They had much to report, especially the fact that so far there had been no reprisals. After nearly three hours bouncing south they left the bus and began to walk, heading for where they thought the abduction party would be. They were both wearing very light shoes, suitable for the city but not for the rough hill areas where they were headed. It was another hour before they arrived, with torn shoes and blistered feet, to be reunited with the kidnappers.