Kidnap in Crete (16 page)

Through a crack in the outside door Rendel watched the patrol move through the orchard, two of them carrying a heavy machine gun. They vanished and the abduction team
emerged from hiding. On the back of the certificate they left their own commendation, praising the Archimandrite for hiding them and possibly saving their lives.

 

Several days later, on the night of 4 April 1944 Rendel and a crowd of people waited on a beach near Tsoutsouros on the south coast of the island to rendezvous with a Royal Navy motor launch. Among them were members of the resistance who needed to be evacuated as their lives were in immediate danger; and others who were being sent to Egypt for parachute training. One of the former group was a brave woman named Antonia Mathioudaki, who had been working as a typist and interpreter at the German headquarters in Chania, where she had access to secret documents. Through her brother she kept a stream of information flowing to Tom Dunbabin's radio near Anogia. Eventually she was discovered and forced into hiding. If captured she faced torture, deportation to a concentration camp or execution. Dunbabin, now in charge of Force 133 SOE operations on the island, decided that for her own safety Antonia must leave Crete. There were also four German prisoners of war, captured a few days earlier in the area between Heraklion and Chania. They had been taken from wireless station to wireless station and each time had seen British officers and NCOs all wearing local disguise. Rendel imagined that the prisoners must think every other Cretan was an infiltrated Allied agent; in their four days of captivity they had met almost every SOE operative on the island.

This time the captain of the motor launch was New Zealander Brian Coleman, by now an old hand at secret rendezvous. A half-moon hovered in the sky over the dead calm sea. Standing with Captain Coleman on the bridge of the motor launch were Giorgios Tyrakis and Manolis Paterakis, anxious to set foot again on their home soil; next to them was Billy Moss who had christened the pair ‘Man Thursday' and ‘Man Friday'. They were two miles off the coast, the mountains of Crete towered in the distance and even at that distance they could smell the wild thyme scenting the warm night air.

The party on the foredeck included the heroic Kapitan Yannis Katsias, a guerrilla fighter who had been active in the Rethymnon area of north-west Crete; he was accompanied by two of his men.

As they neared the coast the Cretans began to speculate in loud voices about where, exactly, they were. Coleman ordered them to pipe down. Silence fell, broken only by the low pounding of the powerful engines. Coleman headed east, running parallel to the coast, trying to spot the flashing torch. He knew that there were German guardposts three-quarters of a mile to the west of the landing beach and a mile to the east.

Coleman sent a seaman forward to watch for rocks. In the bows a sailor swung a leaded line, calling back the depth soundings in a low voice. Everyone else was silent. Then on the bridge a lookout called, ‘Flashing light sir! . . . And another.' Through his binoculars Coleman saw the irregular flashing; Moss described it as ‘a sudden prick in a huge mountainous back cloth'. Coleman ordered the engines to half speed and asked the radio operator to come to the bridge, wanting to be sure that this was not a trap. The radio operator stared through his binoculars, silently mouthing the Morse code that flashed from the shore. After a moment he turned to Coleman. ‘That's them alright, signal's correct.'

The launch nosed towards the shore and Coleman could make out the blurry shapes of men and women on the beach, surrounded by the rocks of a small cove. The Cretans on the deck heaved their packs on to their backs and swung their Marlin sub-machine guns on to their shoulders, talking excitedly. Paterakis and Tyrakis hummed a Cretan song. When they were fifty yards offshore a dinghy was lowered, attached to a line that had been made fast to the launch. The sailors rowed towards the beach with short rapid strokes against the soft swell of the sea. Another dinghy was lowered and made fast to the tow line. Soon it was loaded with guns, ammunition and kitbags; then the shore party clambered down a rope ladder, jumped aboard, and the dinghy was pulled towards the beach.

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 down 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.'