by Ian Blake
He had made some himself.
If he made one now the submarine would be sitting waiting for contact from the shore which would never come, because they would be waiting in the wrong place. And as everyone aboard was, for the first time, under the orders of some highly secret outfit in Cairo, he was doubly determined that there should be no avoidable errors.
He began checking the chart methodically against his memory of what he had just seen through the periscope. He saw for the first time that to the right of the sandy beach the chart marked a small chapel and cursed himself for not noticing it before. It could easily be an enemy observation post.
‘I need one more quick look,’ he said to Woods, who nodded reluctantly.
The rays of the sun, now almost touching the horizon, glinted on the rocks, sending sparks of light through the periscope. Ayton swore under his breath.
‘I need to identify a building for verification,’ he told Woods, ‘but sunlight is refracting through this and I can’t see a bloody thing.’
‘What do you want me to do? Go in further, or wait until morning?’
‘Go in,’ said Ayton unhesitatingly. An alternative rendezvous had been made for the following night, but Ayton knew that this only increased the odds that something might go wrong.
‘Course, Pilot?’
‘Two-eight-five, sir. That should alter the angle sufficiently.’
They stood in silence until the navigator looked at his watch after some minutes and said quietly: ‘That should do it, sir.’
Ayton immediately saw the chapel, or rather its ruined remains, lit by the glow of the evening sun. Only part of one wall still stood, not enough protection for it to be used as an OP.
‘Down periscope.’
‘Satisfied?’
Ayton nodded.
‘Take over, Number One. We’ll lie one mile offshore until it’s time to go in.’
‘Shall I wake our two sleeping beauties, sir?’ Maitland asked as the submarine slid back into the depths.
‘I think we should,’ Ayton agreed. ‘They’ll not be getting much sleep once they’re ashore, but they should have some grub inside them before we land.’
Their passengers were members of the secret organization called the Special Operations Executive, which had ‘hired’ Ayton to get their men ashore, and the two SBS men had then been ordered to tag along as extra fire-power.
The tempo and type of operations had changed since Pountney had returned home to recruit and train a second SBS section. Beach reconnaissance and coastal sabotage had become too risky for the submarines involved, so such operations been replaced by small-scale assault raiding on enemy-occupied islands, and there were now more clandestine missions such as dropping agents ashore – and picking them up again if they were lucky. So the mission to occupied Crete to deliver, and then work with, two members of Cairo’s Special Operations Executive had come as no great surprise.
The two passengers, escorted by Maitland, were ushered into the tiny wardroom. They were both tall men, rugged and deeply tanned by the desert sun. With a stab of surprise Ayton saw that they were dressed in German desert army uniforms complete with the spread wings of the Nazi eagle over their right breast pockets and Afrika Korps cuff titles on their right sleeves. One wore the chevrons of a Stabsgefreiter, or senior staff corporal, on his upper arms; the other the braided silver shoulder straps and collar insignia of an infantry major. Both men had tucked under their epaulettes the floppy forage cap with its pronounced peak that all German soldiers wore in the desert.
The infantry major saw the look on Ayton’s face and, with a grin, snapped to attention and raised his right arm in a Nazi salute.
‘Heil Hitler!’
‘Jesus, Tom,’ said Ayton, ‘I’ve delivered some odd customers in my time, but nothing like you two.’
‘Wait till you see our reception party,’ Tom Brotherton’s sidekick, Bill Mainwaring, replied cheerfully. ‘Half the andartes on Crete will be there if I know my friend Manali. Now they are odd customers.’
‘Very odd,’ Brotherton agreed.
‘Andartes?’ Ayton had not heard the word before.
‘Guerrillas, my friend, Greek guerrillas. I swear the Cretan variety are brigands to a man. They take positive pleasure in cutting a man’s throat, particularly if he is a Kraut.’
‘Ear to ear,’ Mainwaring added. ‘They get plenty of practice – that’s how they kill their sheep.’
‘What’s this all about, exactly?’ said Ayton.
The two men looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean Cairo didn’t tell you?’
‘Only that we were to deliver you on to a certain beach and then work with you until the sub picked us up.’
Brotherton and Mainwaring exchanged glances, then Brotherton shrugged and said: ‘It’s a kidnapping caper.’
‘Kidnapping?’ Said Ayton. Now he had heard it all.
‘Why not? We’re going to kidnap the commander of the Crete garrison.’
‘What the hell for?’
Mainwaring grinned a grin that reminded Ayton of a shark opening its mouth for a particularly delicate morsel. ‘Your guess is as good as ours, old boy.’
‘Does it matter?’ said Brotherton.
‘What do we do with him once we’ve kidnapped him?’
‘Take him back to Alexandria, of course.’
‘Dead or alive.’
‘Preferably alive.’
Again the shark’s grin. ‘In our game the preferable option isn’t always open to us.’
‘Timber knows he might have to take back a dead German general?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Haven’t actually told him he might be dead. Must look on the bright side.’
‘Now, how about checking us over?’ said Brotherton, making a poor effort at a mannequin’s twirl. ‘We were told you’re an expert on German uniforms.’
Ayton inspected them closely, knowing their lives might depend on the authenticity of their appearance. They looked faultless to him, and they went away to change back into civilian clothes. When they reappeared they were wearing nondescript sweaters and trousers tucked into knee-high boots. Brotherton was also sporting a trilby.
They were joined in the wardroom by Woods and after they had eaten breakfast they whiled away the time playing poker for matchsticks. Brotherton, Ayton noticed, played with an icy, calculated calm, whereas Mainwaring bluffed outrageously. It seemed to fit their characters.
When it was time to make the rendezvous Woods went to the control room and gave his orders for the submarine to re-enter the bay. The lights were dimmed. As soon as they had surfaced, Ayton was called on to the bridge. It was a cloudless, moonless night. A slight haze covered the myriad of stars. Ayton waited for his eyes to become fully accustomed to the dark before raising his binoculars in the direction in which Woods was pointing.
‘See it?’
At first he didn’t, but then the prick of light flicked on and off in a regular rhythm.
‘It’s an “R”’, Ayton said.
Woods grunted. ‘That’s a grass-line job, then. I wonder how many we’ll get this time.’
‘Not many,’ Ayton replied. ‘They must nearly all be in the bag by this time.’
It had become standard practice for submarines on patrol off Crete to exfiltrate any Allied troops who had managed to stay at liberty after the fall of the island to the German airborne invasion the previous summer. This was done by sending ashore a ‘grass line’, a coir rope. Made from coconut fibre, this was light enough to float and guide swimmers to the submarine.
‘Trim up,’ Woods ordered into the voice pipe. ‘Gun crews, close up.’
The submarine’s forecasing slowly emerged above the surface and water streamed in cascades off the huge swellings of the main ballast tanks. The gun crews appeared from below and two ratings with a Bren gun came with them. The gun was positioned on the landward side of the bridge. Two more seamen emerged from below and descended on to the foreca
sing to open the torpedo hatch so that the two folbots could be fed through it.
When they saw their craft were ready, Ayton and Maitland went on to the forecasing to make a last check and to supervise their lowering into the water. After the folbots had been secured alongside the submarine, Woods ordered the two passengers on deck. Moments later Mainwaring and Brotherton appeared, carrying their German uniforms in small waterproof rucksacks.
The long ‘grass line,’ as thick as a man’s arm, was fed up the torpedo hatch and one of the ratings coiled it down neatly on the deck. When it was all on deck the rating expertly attached a much thinner heaving line to one end and ran the heaving line through his hands to make sure there were no knots or snags in it. Then he coiled that down, too, beside the coir rope. When he came to the Turk’s Head knot at the end of it he handed the cricket-ball sized lump to Ayton, who was standing by his folbot, and Ayton tucked it under his belt.
The SBS men helped their passengers into the rear cockpits of their folbots, then stepped in themselves. Ayton unhitched the Turk’s Head and wound the heaving line around the small towing post that protruded above the rubberized canvas deck in front of him. So long as the rating fed out the heaving line smoothly it would not impede the folbot’s progress.
The canoeists cleared the bulbous sides of the submarine with a quick sweep of their paddles, and made directly for the signal still winking at them from the shore. The smell of thyme, faint at first, but then strong and distinct, was wafted towards them by the gentle offshore breeze. The sea was flat, the waves lapping gently on to the beach, and moments later they grounded on to the sand.
The SBS men swung themselves out of their folbots and steadied them while their two passengers scrambled ashore. Out of the dark, figures began to emerge. Instinctively, Ayton pulled out his Welrod and levelled it at the nearest, but the man began waving his arms and protesting in Greek. Brotherton put his hand on Ayton’s arm. ‘It’s only Manali.’
Ayton let the muzzle drop and Manali, a rock of a man with an outsize moustache, flung his arms around Brotherton, lifted him off the sand in a bear hug, then, with loud greetings in Greek, kissed him on both cheeks. Brotherton untangled himself and slapped the big man on the back. ‘The best and bravest andarte on Crete,’ he said to Ayton. The Cretan grasped the SBS man’s hand with both his. ‘You welcome,’ he said in broken English. Then he stepped forward and threw his arms around Ayton. The moustache rasped uncomfortably across his face, but it was the man’s smell, quite indescribable, which made him flinch.
Other andartes were now gathered around the four men, all talking at what seemed the top of their voices.
‘Hadn’t we better get off the beach?’ Ayton said to Brotherton.
‘No worry,’ boomed Manali. ‘No German post for ten mile.’
‘They must send out patrols.’ Ayton objected.
‘Bah!’ Manali dismissed the idea.
‘Not at night,’ Brotherton explained. ‘They would get their throats slit before they had gone a mile.’
One of the andartes had unhitched the heaving line from Ayton’s canoe and was being helped by two others to haul in the grass line. When it appeared, snaking across the smooth surface of the bay, one of the guerrillas turned inland and waved while the other two continued to haul in the rope until it was taut.
From the darkness three figures appeared, then two more. They were all dressed in British Army battledress in various degrees of disintegration, and they all carried weapons.
Before wading into the water the soldiers unlaced their boots and left them on the sand, where they were quickly pounced upon by the andartes.
‘All British troops being taken off by grass line leave their boots behind,’ Brotherton explained. ‘There is such an acute shortage of them on the island.’
One by one the soldiers grabbed the floating line and began hauling themselves out to the submarine while the andartes holding the rope dug their heels into the sand as if they were in a tug-of-war team. When all the escapees had reached the submarine, the andartes let go of the line, which snaked slowly away from them across the water.
A lone figure now approached them from the back of the beach. Brotherton introduced him to Ayton as Major Paddy Marne.
Paddy was short and wiry, and dressed in the same curious mixture of clothing as the andartes: a cloth wound round his head rather like a flattened turban, a black waistcoat and the traditional Greek baggy black trousers – nicknamed ‘crap catchers’ by the British – tucked into high boots. A pistol and a pearl-handled knife were tucked beneath a wide cummerbund and some kind of automatic weapon was slung over his shoulder.
The andartes carried the two folbots off the beach and hid them in a crevice between two large rocks. Then the whole group, Manali leading, set off in single file straight towards the ridge of mountains which cut the skyline in half ahead of them. Soon after they left the beach the ground began to rise sharply, and they began to follow a narrow goat track which wound its way up into the mountains. They walked for two hours, rested for twenty minutes, then walked for another hour. It was bitterly cold.
Just as the first light of dawn began showing in the east the track flattened out and ran into a broad gully surrounded by a horseshoe of rocky outcrops on three sides and trees and bushes on the fourth. No one challenged them as they entered the camp, but in the slowly growing light Ayton could see several bodies wrapped in blankets sleeping under the trees to which were tethered a number of mules.
A fire was lit, and Ayton and Maitland were handed blankets. Paddy passed them a water bottle full of raki with the comment that the local poison was an excellent inducement to sleep. Thirst made them drink deeply and the raki, fermented from the skins and stones of raisins, scorched their throats. But it warmed them, too, and they settled down to get what rest they could.
Ayton was awakened, not by the shaft of sunlight which lay across his face but by the bleating of a goat nearby, quickly followed by a strange, unnerving sound not unlike water draining with a gurgle from a bath. He opened his eyes and, rolled over, to see Manali wiping his knife on the goat’s carcass as its lifeblood pumped out of its throat and seeped into the dry earth.
Manali grinned at him. ‘Breakfast,’ he said.
He slashed open the dead animal’s underbelly and worked away with his knife. He cut out bits of entrail, kidney, liver and genitals and threw them into the embers of the fire. Then, with the tip of his knife, he gouged out the goat’s eyeballs and tossed them in, too.
Ayton looked away. He stood up and stretched, then lit a cigarette. Maitland was already up and was watching Manali’s preparations with interest. He handed the raki to Ayton, who took a deep draught. Manali bent over the fire and, with the end of a stick, began picking out pieces of the goat, now covered in white ash, and handing them round.
Paddy came up to them and said: ‘Meze . . . appetizers. They taste better than they look.’
‘They’d better,’ said Ayton, taking a piece gingerly between his fingers and dropping it in his mouth. It was warm, but it tasted of ash and very little else.
‘We’d better kit you out,’ said Paddy. ‘You’ll need proper clothes.’ The two SBS men followed him to a cave half hidden by gorse bushes. Inside, the floor was covered with dried grass and leaves which crackled under their feet. Paddy shone his torch on a pile of boots, then on a line of weapons propped up against the wall. Most of them were the standard British infantryman’s rifle, the .303 Lee Enfield, but there were several automatic weapons and even a two-inch mortar, though Paddy said they had no mortar bombs for it. Maitland picked up what looked like a cross between a carbine and a tommy-gun. It had twin magazines underneath it – something Ayton had never seen before.
‘A 9mm Marlin,’ said Paddy. ‘It’s a Yank automatic weapon. Fast rate of fire, but I’m told it’s inclined to jam.’
There was a heap of clothing from which they were able to find replacements for their uniforms, as Paddy insisted they wore civ
ilian clothes. ‘News spreads like wildfire on this island,’ he said, ‘and not all Cretans are loyal. If the rumour gets about that soldiers are working with the andartes the Germans might pay too much attention to us.’
Ayton chose ‘crap catchers’, puttees and a shirt which felt like cardboard, while Maitland opted for some ancient corduroy breeches and a ragged black jacket. When they had dressed, Paddy led them to a nearby spring, where they washed. As they dried themselves the smell of cooked meat drifted in their direction, and when they returned to the fire Manali was carving hunks of meat off the goat, which had been roasted over a makeshift spit, and handing round the slices on the tip of his knife. Washed down with raki, it was one of the best breakfasts Ayton could remember.
When they had all eaten their fill, and drained the water bottle of raki, Paddy explained his plan to the three other officers. He spread out a map on the ground. The others bent over it and watched him trace a path with a stick to a village called Kastamonitsa.
‘This is where we stay tonight,’ he said.
The stick moved on northwards towards the coastal town of Heraklion, which Paddy tapped significantly with the tip of his stick. ‘German headquarters. That’s where the General drives to every day from his villa and back in the evening.’
‘And where’s his villa? Brotherton asked.
‘Here.’ Paddy tapped the map some fifteen miles inland. ‘Villa Paratsa, it’s called. It’s in the foothills, which makes it cooler and more pleasant in the summer than Heraklion.’
‘Do we take him in the villa?’ Mainwaring asked.
Paddy shook his head. ‘Not a chance. It’s surrounded by an electrified fence and there are dog patrols night and day. The andartes have been stirring things up all over the island and the Krauts aren’t going to take any chances with their precious general.’
Ayton looked again at the map. There was only one road northwards towards Heraklion, snaking down what, judging from the map’s contours, was a fairly steep mountainside.
‘An ambush somewhere here, then. On his way into Heraklion.’