The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  A week earlier Dunbabin had visited Bandouvas’s upland camp, hoping, in the wake of the Viannos massacres, to impress on the kapetan the understanding that his actions must henceforth be strictly defensive in nature. He found the usually audacious leader now “lean and chastened.” Bo-Peep seemed to have lost authority, not only in the villages that had suffered reprisals but also in his own camp, where orders were now being issued by committee. “The behaviour of this force,” Dunbabin felt, “was like that of a child which has been teasing a dog and is amazed to find that it bites.” They had no idea what to do next and, having lost the support of the villages, they were already running short on food. By the twentieth, Dunbabin had arranged for a supply drop. He then asked for a guide and struck out for Tsoutsouros to meet the boat.

  Along the way he had been intercepted by Bandouvas and his now much-diminished gang. Tipped off by the guide to the fact that a boat was due, the entire remaining band now wished to be evacuated to Cairo. Dunbabin knew that this would create no end of difficulties for headquarters. He pictured Bandouvas and his associates sitting in the Cairo cafés holding forth about their exploits in the Resistance. For the sake of security it would be necessary, he believed, to corral them in some out-of-the-way location. But in his view it would be worth the trouble to have the unpredictable kapetan out of the way. And the remnant of his gang was, though “picturesque,” of little real utility on the island, Dunbabin concluded. At least the andartes could provide security until the boat arrived that night.

  In the afternoon, while the cave resounded with the snores of sleeping men, one of Bandouvas’s sentries spotted a pair of German soldiers moving about near the beach. One was leading a riderless mule, which the sentry recognized as an animal the party had employed in crossing the mountains. Fearing that the abandoned mule would raise the patrol’s suspicions, the andartes quickly began organizing themselves for a fight. Just then a gendarme appeared at the cave entrance.

  Leigh Fermor and the other men were wary. Unlike Manoli Paterakis, who resigned from the gendarmerie when the Germans took control of the force, this man had apparently stayed on to work as a guide for the enemy. But he quickly reassured them. He had already learned of their approach, he claimed, and he intended to help steer the Germans off their trail. Leigh Fermor now made an effort to calm Bandouvas and his band, who were in favor of attacking the outnumbered German patrol. He then sent the gendarme back with a story to placate the two soldiers. The fiction he devised—that the mule must have wandered away from a peasant collecting salt on the nearby flats—might avert a potential disaster. When, not much later, the patrol withdrew, the group breathed a sigh of relief. Nonetheless, the Germans had, as Dunbabin noted, “arrested our mule.”

  After nightfall the men slipped out of the cave and crept out onto the heights above the beach. There they waited, listening for the sound of the motor launch and straining to catch sight of a signal light out on the windswept sea.

  OFFSHORE, SEVERAL MILES to the southeast, a motor launch skippered by a bearded Canadian lieutenant named Bob Young wallowed through increasingly choppy waters toward a hidden inlet near Tsoutsouros. The little ship had made a rough crossing from the Libyan port town of Derna, which served as a base for an unorthodox fleet of armed caïques and launches that ran covert operations throughout the Aegean. Now Young found the northerly breeze stiffening as the night wore on. He worried that the vessel would not make landfall in time to pick up what he had been warned might be a large evacuation party.

  Among the men on board was a new SOE officer named Sandy Rendel, who was going ashore with a radio operator to establish an outpost near the newly expanded German installation at Ierápetra, in the powder-keg Lasithi province. A fit, athletic man of thirty-three, Rendel was an old friend of Tom Dunbabin’s from Oxford, where both had studied classics. Rendel had gone on to become a solicitor while Dunbabin was busy building his career as an archaeologist.

  Since the war had broken out, they had been in touch only intermittently. After joining the army, Rendel had been sent to Northern Ireland for training. Then, leaving a wife and young son at home, he bounced through a series of what he called “soft jobs,” eventually winding up in a wing of the artillery command responsible for Persia and Iraq. By the spring of 1943, the unit had begun to feel like a backwater. That was when he ran into Dunbabin in North Africa.

  Rendel was surprised to see that his old friend cut such an intriguing figure even against the exotic backdrop of wartime Cairo. When they met for dinner at what was reputed to be the city’s finest French restaurant, Dunbabin turned up sporting a long black mustache that “wound itself with sickly bravado almost into a complete ring.” Watching him twist and tug at the peculiar mustache through the course of the evening, Rendel began to suspect that his old friend had seen more of war than he previously thought.

  Dunbabin had gone to work in the War Office, Rendel remembered, “in some intelligence job connected with the Albanian campaign.” That much made sense, given Tom’s fluency in modern Greek. It was what had happened next that puzzled Rendel. Dunbabin had taken up a staff job in Cairo, but when Rendel had received a letter from him recently, it was the sort of hastily scrawled note, “written in pencil in a spidery hand,” that seemed to come from the field. Even that was not unusual, Rendel knew; Dunbabin might well have been in transit.

  “There were plenty of letters being written just then on a man’s knee in the back of a lorry,” he told himself, “and I knew Tom’s handwriting was atrocious anyway.” The strange thing was that Dunbabin had recently been awarded a DSO—the Distinguished Service Order, Britain’s award for valor during active operations against the enemy. And you didn’t get those for filing papers in staff headquarters.

  By the time the entrée arrived that evening, Rendel could no longer contain his curiosity. He asked Dunbabin outright what kind of work he had been assigned in Cairo, but he got nowhere. Dunbabin revealed only that “at the moment” he found himself “doing nothing at all.”

  “You don’t mean to say they gave you a DSO for that?” Rendel prodded.

  Dunbabin remained reticent, twiddling the flamboyant mustache in a way that stoked Rendel’s already smoldering curiosity. He sensed that his friend was involved in something so secret he was in fact forbidden to discuss it, and he imagined that Dunbabin had been serving behind the lines, perhaps at El Alamein, as a commando of some kind.

  As his dissatisfaction with his own assignment mounted, Rendel had sometimes considered joining a parachute regiment or perhaps the commandos. He pictured himself “scrambling about at night” behind enemy lines. Now, having conjured up the idea that Tom had been doing something similar, he let his aspiration slip out.

  “Well I’d better tell you something more about it,” Dunbabin said when he heard this. He went on to explain that his was not precisely a commando unit. The commandos were by and large a raiding party. They made quick strikes behind enemy lines. In contrast, SOE officers disappeared into an occupied territory for months at a time. “We go with parties of Greeks in and out of Greece dressed as civilians.”

  This revelation shocked Rendel. “But Tom,” he said, “if you go in plain clothes, you’re a spy.”

  Dunbabin shrugged off his friend’s alarm. “Spy,” he said, “is an ugly word.”

  By this time, however, the tables were beginning to turn. It had dawned on Dunbabin that his old schoolmate could be of use in Crete, and his earlier reticence edged now toward recruitment. Before dinner was over, he had given Rendel what amounted to a crash course in SOE operations. And it was an earful.

  Gathering intelligence was part of the job, he said. In fact, he had himself climbed into a tree to make a sketch that was later used to plan a bombing raid on one of the island’s airfields. This at a time when Crete played a significant role in the war, because German aircraft based there were involved in the struggle for North Africa. But just as important, the SOE officers in Crete were there to help organize a
fifth column. In the event of an Allied invasion, they would mobilize Resistance units to fight the Germans. There were hardships involved in the work, of course. Food was sometimes hard to come by, especially while shuttling from one hideout to another. Isolation was a problem, since communication with headquarters in Cairo tended to be unreliable. So far the Germans had not offered much opposition. But the threat was real. If the enemy caught you, you’d be shot, at best. Rendel had already heard rumors about the brutal treatment spies received from the Germans. In one story captured intelligence agents had their hands slowly hacked off with a wooden ax.

  The Greeks themselves made the work worthwhile, it appeared to Rendel. It was wrong—“sentimental and unreal”—to make too much of the link between ancient Greece and the modern Greeks. But there was no denying the Greek people’s longing for independence and the fierce tradition of resistance they kept alive from the Turkish occupation.

  Perhaps the most significant result of SOE work, Rendel gathered, was the boost it gave to the morale of the Greeks, who felt less abandoned to their fate at the hands of the Germans when they saw British officers working covertly on the island. The Greeks’ passion for the Resistance was infectious. Tom mentioned that at that moment an SOE officer named Paddy Leigh Fermor had been undercover on Crete for more than a year and was enjoying himself so much he had refused to come out on leave. This man, Rendel thought to himself, “must be a person entirely different in make-up from myself.”

  To Rendel it all sounded “exhilarating,” but he also had concerns that were more practical in nature. “Didn’t you get covered in lice?” he asked. This, Dunbabin admitted, was indeed a problem. And his brusque reply—a clipped “I don’t like lice”—was underscored by the scowl that suddenly warped his face, “as if,” Rendel thought, “he had been contemplating lice objectively at some distance.”

  Lice or no lice, Rendel felt drawn to the romantic escapades his friend had described. Before the week was out, he had decided to get himself transferred to Dunbabin’s unit, “by hook or by crook.” By the middle of May, his request had gone through.

  NOW, BARELY FOUR months later, Rendel was fresh from training. In Haifa, where he had gone through the SOE school in what was termed “resistance warfare,” he had experienced a schoolboy thrill in learning demolitions, though like Xan Fielding he wondered how useful the training, with its focus on railway sabotage, would be on Crete, where there were no rail lines to be found. At the Haifa camp he met Sergeant Dudley Perkins, a New Zealander who had made a name for himself in the wake of the German invasion by escaping from the infamous prison camp at Galatas and guiding British stragglers to safety. Rendel was drawn by the Kiwi’s enthusiasm for the mission. “On the march,” he thought, “he looked just like a fox terrier quivering with eagerness.” But he seemed equally “reliable and imperturbable.”

  It was Perkins who schooled Rendel in the more practical affairs of undercover life on Crete: “How good the Cretans were to you. How one old man, whom he meant to see again, could always be relied on to give you a meal of potatoes even though he was desperately poor himself. How you could usually find potatoes to dig up.” This last point struck a chord in Rendel. “He was such a virtuous young man,” he thought of Perkins, “and it gave me a sudden odd glimpse of the makeshift life to think of him stealing potatoes from his allies in the dark.”

  After Haifa, Rendel had made one run to Crete as what SOE called a “conducting officer,” ferrying supplies to one of the missions already established on the island. “The supplies were usually clothes, arms, ammunition and food.” As the new man, Rendel had gone out of his way to put together “a really good consignment of stores.” He had sweated through several days in Cairo, buying or otherwise scrounging a bounty of canned food. When the shipment eventually reached Xan Fielding on Crete, the delicacies—asparagus in particular—had elicited more derision than delight. Fielding had fired back a snarky telegram asking, “What about the salad dressing?”

  Despite the catering fiasco, Rendel’s experience as a conducting officer on that occasion had at least left him with a good deal of confidence in the motor-launch skipper Bob Young’s abilities. On that earlier trip, Young had made a perfect landfall on Crete, and supplies and men had been ferried ashore smoothly. On the return to Derna, though, a flight of German floatplanes—three ungainly Arado 196s, probably based in Chania—had spotted the vessel and turned to attack. For ten or fifteen minutes the planes had circled the ship, dropping into strafing dives on each pass.

  On their second run, Rendel recalled, one of the Arados cut across the bow and the fire from the plane’s rear gun took aim on him. “It shot low and I saw the line of splashes scudding over the water towards us. That part of the burst, which was going to hit the ship, seemed on a line that would pass between myself and the forward gun. It showed that there were plenty of enemy bullets flying about somewhere in the air around us, and the thought that someone on that ugly enemy plane was trying to kill us—and might—made me feel anger and a personal urge to strike down the gunner, fiercer than any emotion which I had ever felt before.”

  When the German airplanes, no doubt running short on fuel, finally broke off the attack, Rendel looked around and began to take stock of what had happened. The motor launch was strewn with casualties. One gunner had taken a bullet in the thigh. Another crewman lay by the wheelhouse with a dangerous-looking stomach wound. One man had been hit in the chest, but the bullet seemed to have missed any vital organs.

  “Bob Young himself, looking as quiet as before, but older and grimmer, had been struck by a splinter above the left eye.” Rendel watched as blood trickled down the skipper’s face.

  Young asked Rendel to take a look at one of the most serious casualties, a gun loader whose foot had been ripped apart by an exploding cannon shell. He located the young man—“a tall, fair-haired boy of nineteen”—on the floor of the narrow companionway leading to the officers’ cabin. His foot was nearly torn free at the heel, and Rendel tried to shield the boy’s view as he carried him to a berth inside, “but he cried out hysterically, ‘I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it.’ ”

  Rendel quieted the boy and gave him a tablet of morphine. Then he lifted the dangling foot back into position and wrapped it with a field dressing. When the bleeding slowed, he went back on deck. He saw that the ship itself was riddled with bullet holes. In places cannon shells had torn sizable holes through the wooden decking. But the engine remained functional. As he made his way past one of the gun positions where a crewman had been wounded, Rendel lost his footing and surprised himself with a low inward laugh. “The old cliché about the deck slippery with blood was suddenly, and even for a moment amusingly, and then grimly, true.”

  Bob Young remained at the helm, piloting the vessel homeward. Less than half an hour after the attack ended, he had the steward serving mugs of sweet tea and bully beef sandwiches to the men. Later in the day the skipper discovered a fire in the transmission compartment, which he quickly extinguished. Eventually the ship reached the mouth of Derna harbor, where a second motor launch—alerted by radio of the casualties on board Young’s ship—awaited their return and now offered to board officers to relieve the wounded men. “Bob Young signaled that we could manage,” Rendel recalled, “and they left him to bring the ship in himself.

  NOW, APPROACHING CRETE for a second time, Rendel was outfitted to go ashore himself. He wore Greek secondhand clothes he had bought in Cairo, and he carried a fake identity card bearing a photograph intended to make him look “suitably down-at-heel.”

  Bob Young throttled down when the launch was a mile or so off the beach. Despite his concern about the weather, they had reached the inlet more or less on schedule. As the vessel glided shoreward, all eyes strained to catch sight of the signal from Leigh Fermor’s party, two prearranged letters of Morse code flashed at intervals. The only sounds on board were the muffled grumbling of the engine and Bob Young’s voice quietly relaying orders to the engine room. T
his tranquil prelude to a landing would always remind Rendel of a Joseph Conrad story. The moonless night was pitch black, and he could make out little of the coastline, but the mountains did not appear to rise as steeply from the shore here as he had seen to the west on his first trip. Those heights had “looked cold and distant,” he recalled, “and I wondered silently and lugubriously to myself, if before the war ended, my bones would be lying up there for good.”

  Such thoughts were soon cut short by the signal from shore, which could now be seen flickering repeatedly from the hillside ahead.

  ON THE BEACH, Leigh Fermor and Manoli had heard the diesel rumble of the motor launch in the distance and quickly flashed the appointed Morse signal. It was apparent that the crew of the launch had located them, but close to an hour passed without sign of the landing party. At last, a man struggled up onto the beach, dragging a rope. The choppy water had made it impossible to paddle the dinghy ashore. Now Leigh Fermor directed men onto the beach to tow it in. Soon Rendel, who was aboard the rubber dinghy, heard his English voice calling out instructions, which the Greeks responded to with shouts of “Trava, trava!”—Pull, pull!

  Onshore the two parties greeted each other. Dunbabin welcomed his old friend to Crete while a party of Cretans going ashore traded effusive bursts of news with members of Bo-Peep’s gang. Then, suddenly, Tom’s voice drowned out all the rest, letting loose a blistering string of curses in Greek. Rendel understood only snatches; “he called many times on ‘My all-Holy mother’—presumably urging her to rise up and smite.” Dunbabin had watched a young Greek officer, who happened to be the nephew of the prime minister, drop an empty sardine tin on the beach. The discarded container would provide a sure sign, should the Germans come across it, that a British landing had taken place. The tin was quickly reclaimed.