The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  Houseman was reassured when, as the engines of the motor launch thrummed back to life in the distance, the party finally moved out toward the cave where they would spend the night, a journey of roughly an hour and a half, according to one of the Cretans. It was in “true Hemingway style” that they mounted the cliffs leading up from the beach, Houseman felt. All along the way he could hear Leigh Fermor’s calls of encouragement and the muleteers urging their animals along, “and after three hours of most terrible mountaineering we slid into our first cave for the night.” Moss, feeling spoiled by the high life he had been living in Cairo, put the trip at more like four hours. Either way, it taught him that a Cretan’s estimate of the duration of an impending journey must always be multiplied. The only question was by how much.

  As they bedded down in the shallow cave perched at the top of a mountain gully, a light rain began to fall. Moss had brought along the down-filled jumpsuit he had never had the opportunity to use as it was originally intended. Now he found it made an excellent sleeping bag. He noticed that Paddy had made the same discovery. As he drifted off to sleep, the sixteenth-century poem he had discovered in A Farewell to Arms wound itself into his thoughts—the small rain down can rain. Back at Tara, Sophie was no doubt snug in her bed.

  9

  The Intersection

  EARLY THE NEXT morning the men at the cave launched into the feast they had been too exhausted to put on the night before. Moss, Manoli, and George had finally reached Crete, two months to the day after Leigh Fermor’s drop, and this happy end to an interminable string of disappointments called for celebration. By eight o’clock two goats were roasting in the coals of their campfire and a water bottle filled with raki made its way from hand to hand around the cave. Before breakfast, Moss, who had come ashore in uniform, changed into black plain clothes that had seemed shabby in Cairo, before he laid eyes on Sandy Rendel in his Cretan disguise.

  “I haven’t washed for six months,” Rendel told Moss, scratching himself proudly as he said it. “A man of the people, that’s me.”

  Leigh Fermor hastened to explain that he himself took the opposite tack. “Xan and I like them to think of us as sort o’ dukes.”

  Between them they staked out the extremes of Cretan fashion. Moss would have fallen somewhere in the middle, had he not been betrayed by a Swiss ski sweater that peeked out from under his black woolen shirt. The sweater, that is, and his matinee-idol looks.

  Leigh Fermor and Moss spent the morning planning their first move. It seemed to Paddy that they should set up their headquarters outside Kastamonitsa, one or two nights’ march to the north. A base there would give them security while putting them in striking distance of Heraklion.

  Around lunchtime the drinking began in earnest. Moss broke out the whiskey and cigars he had brought from Cairo. He had even packed a bottle of kümmel, so Paddy could drink a toast in the same style as on the night they left Tara. They drank, smoked, and talked until the middle of the afternoon, when the men began drifting to shady spots and dozing off. By the time the others woke up, Rendel was bustling around the campsite, gathering his equipment. At six o’clock he set off down the trail toward his hideout near Males. A party of Cretans who had come over on the launch followed not long after.

  As the camp cleared out, Leigh Fermor and Moss settled down on some nearby rocks to wait for dusk, when fresh mules were due to arrive for the journey to Kastamonitsa. The delay gave them a chance to catch up. Paddy was anxious to hear the news from Tara, and they both had stories to swap about the nights they had spent in February and March just missing each other on the Katharo plateau. The big news, of course, was Müller. Leigh Fermor explained that the general they had come to capture had been replaced as commander of the Twenty-second Sevastopol Division. The new man was named Kreipe. He was in his forties, a career soldier since the First World War. His most recent command had been on the Russian front. Rumor had it that he was looking forward to a restful time on Crete after escaping the meat grinder of Stalingrad. He might well be in for some R & R, Paddy quipped, but in Cairo.

  “It was a pity,” Moss admitted, “that we had lost the opportunity of catching Müller, for he was a tyrant much loathed by the islanders, but as far as the ultimate effect of our plan was concerned we supposed that one general was as good a catch as another.” Leigh Fermor agreed. Nothing would have pleased the Cretans more than the capture of Müller, who had more than earned his sour reputation on the island. But whoever this Kreipe turned out to be, his removal would strike a blow at German morale.

  When nightfall came, they set off with four loaded mules heading roughly northward along the ridgeline. In addition to Leigh Fermor, Moss, Manoli, and George, the band now included two new men. One was Zahari Zographakis, the well-turned-out young fellow who had taken so much interest in Moss’s Marlin gun on the night of the landing. The other was a Cretan by the name of Antoni Papaleonidas, who had been on the launch from Cairo. Moss had already decided he was “a gay rogue, full of fun and storytelling.” The ten years he had spent at sea were evident in a swashbuckling kind of swagger. To Leigh Fermor and Moss he looked exactly like the American actor Wallace Beery, who had played Long John Silver in Treasure Island ten years earlier. Before the night was out, that’s what they were calling him—Wallace Beery.

  The party arrived at a small village called Skoinia sometime after midnight, and since there were not enough hours of darkness left to reach Kastamonitsa, they stopped at the house of a friendly man who fed them lentils and boiled eggs. Before they left the next evening, Leigh Fermor met with a string of visitors, including a local andarte chieftain named Athanasios Bourdzalis, an enormous, barrel-chested ruffian with an equally oversized personality. Bourdzalis commanded a band that was part of Bo-Peep’s network, and Paddy imagined that their firepower might come in handy in the ensuing days. There were other visitors too. A young mother who had heard Leigh Fermor was visiting also dropped by with her baby daughter. The child was Anglia Epanastasis—England Revolution—the baby Paddy had christened at Bandouvas’s mountain camp the previous August. Leigh Fermor was able to assure the mother that her husband, who was one of the two wounded men he had helped aboard the motor launch, would by now be receiving medical care in Cairo.

  Sometime after nine o’clock the band was on the trail again, marching through a light rain. Paddy’s step was noticeably uncertain after entertaining visitors all day in the expected Cretan fashion. Moss was having trouble too, but less from drink than from the slippery, rain-wet rocks that lined the path. At dawn they reached Zahari’s house in Kastamonitsa. Their only encounters along the way were with dogs, who announced their passing at each village, and the odd party of snail gatherers, whose lamps they saw dancing on the hillsides as they slipped past.

  Zahari’s parents gave the party a warm welcome. His father was an old friend of the Resistance who had helped in the raids on the Kastelli airfield in 1942 and again the previous summer, when Lieutenant Lamonby had been killed.

  Minoan Mike—Leigh Fermor’s chief agent in Heraklion—arrived after lunch the next day to escort Paddy into the city to have a look at the layout of the nearby German headquarters and the general’s residence. On the morning of the eighth, Leigh Fermor set about transforming himself into what Moss called a Heraklion “gadabout.” His aim was to look like a shepherd on a visit to the city. He put on a clean suit, stuffed his light hair under a cap, and darkened his mustache with a little burned cork, then presented himself to Moss, who thought he looked like a new man. After supper he and Mike struck out down the mountainside to catch the bus headed toward the city the following morning. They would scout the situation at the Villa Ariadne while Moss and the others set up their headquarters two or three miles above Kastamonitsa.

  That night, with Zahari’s father leading the way and his mother crying softly at the doorstep, Moss’s party set out with the mules on the three-hour climb to the cave that would be their base of operations. Just before dawn, the Cretan �
��Wallace Beery” stopped them, saying they would need daylight to find their way to the entrance. After sunup they moved on and soon reached a small, completely hidden cave. For the next week, Moss was content to wait there for Leigh Fermor’s return.

  PADDY AND MINOAN MIKE rattled into Heraklion by bus the next day and then backtracked a few miles south toward Knossos. They soon arrived at Mike’s house, which would serve as their base of operations for a few days. It sat adjacent to the Villa Ariadne, which Kreipe, like Müller before him, had commandeered as his residence. Leigh Fermor knew that he was walking in the footsteps of his forerunner on Crete. Knossos and the villa had been John Pendlebury’s bailiwick before the war, and would be still, if the man he had seen brandishing his sword stick that day in a cave outside Heraklion had had his way. It was strange now to think that this symbol of his legacy had fallen into the hands of the Germans. Minoan Mike had his own ghosts here too. His father, Pendlebury’s right-hand man, had also been killed during the invasion, while Mike was himself fighting the Italians in Albania.

  Mike led Leigh Fermor to a window from where they could observe the layout of the compound. Leigh Fermor took it all in, “the guards, the barbed wire, the German flag … and the General’s villa.”

  It was Easter Sunday by the Western calendar, and that evening Leigh Fermor and Mike made their way to a neighboring villa to attend a party put on by a Greek officer by the name of Sergiou. General Sergiou’s daughter Kyveli, a trim twenty-two-year-old with a light complexion and a mass of black hair, was one of Tom Dunbabin’s most important agents. In her work as a translator at the Germans’ Heraklion headquarters, she had been able to intercept sensitive German military documents, which were then photographed and funneled to Dunbabin’s headquarters. Cairo considered her one of the best agents in the Heraklion network, and it was known that “the risks which she took to obtain information were truly amazing.” More to the point, she had helped Mike track General Kreipe’s movements in order to work out his schedule.

  When Leigh Fermor and Minoan Mike arrived at the Sergiou villa and were shown into the large open room where the party was under way, they were at first unsettled to see that the guests included a trio of German sergeants. But the convivial atmosphere soon put them at ease. There was dancing and bright talk. Leigh Fermor found that the three Germans made charming companions. In fact, as the wine flowed, Mike became a little too comfortable in their company. Late in the evening, hoping he might pick up a crumb of useful information, he found himself talking and laughing with the German soldiers. Without thinking, he fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and was in the process of shaking one out for his new friends when he realized he was holding a pack Moss had brought from Cairo. Drunk as they were, the Germans still noticed the English brand and wanted to know where he had acquired them. Mike did not miss a beat. He had bought them on the black market, he admitted. The vendor had hinted that they had been diverted from a stock captured by the Germans in their recent victories over the British in the Dodecanese. It was just the kind of flattery that worked wonders on the enemy. Before long the tension evaporated, and when the evening came to an end, the Germans embraced Paddy and Mike as they said their farewells.

  A LITTLE WORSE for wear, the two spies were back on the job first thing the next morning. From watching the comings and goings next door, Mike was convinced that a raid on the villa itself was out of the question, as Leigh Fermor already suspected. Although the Resistance had one or two friends working inside the compound, it was still simply too well defended. Paddy counted three rows of razor wire around the perimeter. And it was patrolled by a veritable army of sentries. The security measures at the villa made the defenses he and Manoli had run up against at Heraklion harbor the previous year look soft by comparison.

  But that did not mean that Kreipe was never vulnerable. Mike and his second in command in the Heraklion intelligence network, Elias Athanassakis, had worked out that Kreipe left the villa in the morning shortly after eight thirty; he was at work at his headquarters in Archanes by nine o’clock, and he returned to the villa just after one o’clock for lunch. Sometime before four o’clock he traveled back to headquarters and worked as late as eight thirty, before being driven back to the villa for the night. By that time the sun was down, and it might be possible to waylay the car without drawing much attention.

  Over the next several days, Mike and Leigh Fermor scouted the area. They drove out to the intersection where the Archanes road joined the main road running between Heraklion and Choudetsi. Here a car traveling from Archanes was forced to make a sharp turn to continue in the direction of the villa. The general’s car would slow almost to a stop at a point where a steep bank skirted the road. It looked tailor-made for an ambush, except that heavy traffic could be expected to pass by on the main road. Still, at night it might work. When a car approached the intersection as they stood looking over the turn, it gave them a chance to see just how much a vehicle would slow. It was only as it rattled to a rolling stop and then motored off that they realized they had just waved to General Kreipe himself.

  As Leigh Fermor and Mike gathered intelligence about their quarry in Heraklion and around the Villa Ariadne, Paddy began to piece together a clearer sense of the difficulties he faced. It would be trickier than his housemates had foreseen in the bath at Tara. There were a few evident obstacles to consider. Since it was necessary to conduct the operation at night, to avoid observation from the busier Heraklion road, it might prove difficult to distinguish the general’s staff car from any other vehicles that happened up the Archanes road that night. And other vehicles could be a problem even once Kreipe’s car had been flagged down. In the case of a truck loaded with soldiers, the threat was obvious, but even a passing driver or motorcyclist, if allowed to get away, could alert others. One difficulty in particular would remain even if the mission went off without a single hitch: reprisals.

  When he left the Villa Ariadne, Leigh Fermor spent two further days meeting with contacts in Heraklion. One was Minoan Mike’s man Elias Athanassakis. A student before the war—and ostensibly a student still—Elias had now made the Germans his field of study. He had memorized the markings that distinguished each unit deployed on Crete and could track their movements with the precision of a scientist. He also had some technological tricks up his sleeve that might come in handy in the coming ambush.

  On his last day in Heraklion, Leigh Fermor was joined by Manoli, and together they went over the facts he had picked up at the Villa Ariadne. By the time they left, Leigh Fermor had come to think that the first two problems—identifying the general’s car and subduing anyone else who might stumble into the ambush—could be overcome with some clever planning. How to avoid reprisals would require more careful deliberation.

  On April 15 Leigh Fermor, Elias, and Manoli returned to Kastamonitsa, and the next morning, Easter Sunday in the Greek Orthodox calendar, they made the three-hour climb up to the cave, where, around noon, they found Moss and the others waiting. Moss was happy to have Leigh Fermor back. He had spent the intervening days reading—Mallarmé and The Travels of Marco Polo—and getting to know the rest of the party. But he was anxious to get on with the mission.

  In his absence the band had grown in numbers, Moss told Paddy. Two days earlier, Moss and George Tyrakis had climbed down from the cave to investigate a shepherd’s unlikely report that two escaped Russian prisoners had been spotted nearby. It turned out to be true. On the strength of the Russian he had learned from his mother, Moss was able to gather that they were soldiers captured in the Crimea and that they had been brought to Crete nearly a year earlier and put to work on a road gang at the Kastelli air base. A third companion had been killed as they made their escape, and these two—Ivan from the Caucasus and a Ukrainian named Vassily—were weak from exposure and hunger. Moss brought the men back to the cave. “We have given them all our spare clothing and fed them like fighting cocks,” he explained. They were making a speedy recovery, and now in t
he evenings the cave resounded with Vassily’s Ukrainian songs, the singer himself resplendent in a dress uniform jacket Moss had not worn since he left London.

  Another new face belonged to an older Cretan named Grigori Chnarakis, who had joined the band just as Leigh Fermor left for Heraklion. He had arrived, fresh from Cairo, with Paddy’s recommendation as an old hand at raids against the Germans. Moss had been struck by the strange mishmash of clothing he wore—riding breeches, blue serge jacket, pinstripe shirt, and an army beret poised on the very top of his head. The older man’s habit of spitting indiscriminately and breaking wind under one’s nose had at first rubbed Moss the wrong way. But Grigori’s determination to fight the Germans had quickly won his respect.

  By the time Leigh Fermor and Manoli reached the cave, Moss and the Cretans already had a lamb roasting. And the Easter celebration was soon in full swing. This was done in Cretan fashion, with colored eggs, gallons of wine, and plenty of gunplay. In a letter posted by a runner from Heraklion, Paddy had warned Moss what to expect out of the paschal celebration, in the event he did not himself make it back in time. “Christ is risen—Bang!” the letter said. “He is truly risen—Bang! again.”

  As the afternoon wore on, the spirited shooting soon played itself out, but the drinking went on well into the evening. It was sometime after midnight when Moss and Leigh Fermor polished off the last of the Cairo whiskey and went to bed. The next day the two of them sat down with Manoli, Elias, and George Tyrakis to discuss the facts the recent reconnaissance mission had turned up at the villa. After Leigh Fermor had laid out what he knew about the villa’s defenses and Kreipe’s comings and goings, Moss had no trouble anticipating the very difficulties Leigh Fermor had himself foreseen.