SBS, page 16
The door handle turned and Duffy entered the room and, catching sight of Hunter, instantly froze, staring, wide-eyed. ‘Good God. Is that you, sir?’
‘Certainly is. What d’you think?’
‘Well, it’s good. Damned good. I’d forgotten how bloody good those uniforms were. You almost had me for a moment, sir. Think it’ll fool the Nazis?’
‘We can only hope, Duffy. Hope and pray. Want to try yours on?’
He pointed over to the pile of clothes in the corner. ‘It’s all there. Go ahead.’
Not waiting to be told twice, Duffy stripped of his own shirt and trousers and donned the other officer’s uniform. Like Hunter’s, it fitted him perfectly. He finished it off with the cap and belt and turned to Hunter. ‘What d’you think, sir?’
‘It’s good. As you say. Bloody good. You definitely look the part. We make a right pair of Nazis.’
It was only natural that Hunter and Duffy should be playing the officers. Their German was nothing less than superb. But it was not just that. Both of them had that air of assured self-confidence, bordering on arrogance that was all too easy to assume when you had been through two of the country’s finest public schools. Hunter had always suspected that his expensive education would come in useful somewhere.
Knox, Russell, Phelps and Martin would, of course, be playing the other ranks. Russell’s German was passable and had an amusing origin. While he had been working as a barman in a certain nightclub in Soho, Russell had been befriended by a German countess named Olga, a refugee from Hitler’s new regime, who, terrified that her mother’s Jewish roots would condemn her in her homeland, had abandoned her riches and her schloss when she had fled the Third Reich. In London she had been reduced to working as a high-class tart, but even that did not supply the one thing she craved. Lovely Olga had an insatiable passion for Martinis. She craved a well-made Martini. And if there was one thing that Russell could do well, it was make one of the finest Martinis in London.
And so they came to an arrangement. He would give her Martinis and she would give him her ample favours. Only Russell didn’t really enjoy sex with her. He wasn’t of a different ‘persuasion’ it was just that she was so, well Teutonic. And so, instead, they would lie in her bed and she would teach him German. The arrangement lasted for six blissful months, in which he served her with hundreds of free drinks and she taught him rudimentary German, along with a bit of extra street language. She had told him he was a born linguist. Said he was a natural. All went well until the missing gin was discovered by the manager of the bar where Russell worked and he was fired. And that was that. So he had robbed the bar’s safe, taken all that week’s takings and scarpered. But he still had his command of German and here at last was a chance to use it.
Martin, with his fluent German, his tiny camera, his photographic memory and his eye for detail, was an obvious choice, along with Phelps, the codebreaker. And Knox, well, he was just the safe-cracker.
*
As it so happened, Russell was the first of the main body of the raiding party to enter the room. Seeing Hunter and Duffy, he stopped dead. ‘Shit. I mean Christ, it’s you, sir. Blimey you had me going. Bloody hell, you really had me going. I didn’t know whether to shoot you or shit myself.’
Knox and Martin appeared at the doorway, closely followed by Woods.
Knox let out a wolf whistle. ‘Bloody hell, sir. You’re a dead ringer for Rommel.’
Woods grinned. ‘Well done, Jim. Bloody good effort.’
Hunter laughed. ‘So, Herr Russell. And now perhaps you will put on your own uniform?’
One by one, the others got dressed, laughing at each other as they did so. The other ranks’ tunics were most certainly not quite as flattering as the officers, but by the time they were dressed they all looked the part. Except of course for their beards. Hunter pointed at them, and put a hand to his own. ‘They’ll all have to go, I’m afraid.’
‘Sir?’
‘Your beards. Your moustaches, the lot. They’ll all have to come off. We might allow it, but in the German army facial hair is most definitely “verboten”. It’s just not very, well, “Aryan”.’
They all cast glances at one another. He was right, of course.
*
As if to answer his own order, Hunter took off his German tunic and filled a bowl with water from the little freshwater stream, which flowed from a spring, down the hillside outside the house. Then, with great care, he began to shave off the moustache and beard that he had grown in the past two weeks. It was not much, nothing when compared to the full growths sported by Leigh Fermor and Ffinch, not to mention most of the Greeks. But it had given him the necessary talisman of character and machismo that was needed to be able to mix with the andartes and gain their respect.
In a few strokes of the razor that was gone and he was suddenly the other side of the coin. A clean-shaven outsider. As un-Cretan and non-Greek as any of the strutting master race teeming over the island. He thought it somewhat ironic that, while none of his new Greek friends would now recognise him, his old friends in Cairo would not have known him with a beard.
The others were following suit now. Filling any bowl they could lay their hands on with water from the stream and shaving while there was still sufficient light to do so. There were a few stray cuts; a few oaths, but soon the job was done.
*
Woods had not shaved. It wasn’t needed and he was pleased not to have to lose his beard. His Greek was good, but his German was not as strong as the other members of the party and so he would remain with the perimeter group. In any case, it also made sense not to send in two officers. Woods would keep two of the men with him, Fletcher and White, and an arsenal of weapons that could be deployed if things began to look a bit hairy.
Hunter and Duffy were going to walk into the camp carrying nothing more than a pistol each and the others of the raiding party were each taking one of the Schmeissers. They would take no grenades, no TNT. All that would either be back at the cave or with Woods and his men by the perimeter. Just in case.
One man would be needed to remain behind at the cave with the radio, an HMG and the bulk of the explosives. Miller got the job, albeit accompanied by the moody Andros.
‘Miller, you know what to do if we don’t show. Tell me again.’
‘I’m to give you twenty-four hours from the time you go in. That’s a full day after zero hour, which is 2000 hours tomorrow night. If none of you are back here by then, then I make for the boat, taking whatever I can. I radio Captain Gorringe on the caique and tell him the op was a washout…’
Hunter interrupted him, ‘What’s the code word for failure?’
‘Medusa. It’s Medusa, sir.’
‘That’s it. Quite right. Go on.’
‘I tell Gorringe the op was a washout and to stand by. Then I destroy the radio set. I leave the explosives and any spare weapons with the Greeks. I get down to the boat and we offload four two-man folboats and leave them hidden in the cave down there with some field rations, water and extra ammo. Just in case any of you manage to get away…’
He went suddenly silent and looked at Hunter, his eyes filled with doubt. ‘It will work, sir… Won’t it?’
‘Yes of course, Miller. Of course it’ll work. We just have to make provision for the worst. You know that. Now carry on.’
‘Then we push off and get back to Cairo.’
‘Fine. So that’s the emergency plan. But it’s not going to come to that, is it?’
He looked at them. ‘Is it?’
They all murmured a ‘no’ and shook their heads. Hunter carried on, ‘Right. Good. So we leave this evening. There will be a poacher’s moon tonight, so we should at least be able to move more quickly. Grigori tells me it’ll take us nine hours or thereabouts to reach the place where we need to lie up. It’s a little church. Very high up above Heraklion airfield. Very safe, he says. So we rest up there all day tomorrow and we go in at 2000 tomorrow night. We’re in and we’re out and then we scarper back. Almost the way we came, but a little lower, avoiding the church unless we need to go there. Means we can move faster. And then we leave the airfield to Captain Wilson and his mob. Right?’
*
The time had finally come for them to move off. They made a curious group. There were Hunter and Duffy, the two German officers, with their four men. Woods, in his characteristic battledress and service beret, topped off with a shepherd’s scarf, and White and Fletcher, also in their variation of British uniform and with them, eyes and ears, Ffinch and Grigori.
They set off at nine o’clock that evening, moving off down the gorge that ran below the cave that had been their home for the last five days. Hunter felt somehow elated. More so than he had done since arriving there five days earlier. This was it. At last. The operation they had all been working towards. Months of training. Hard, painful, brutal training. All those miles of loaded runs across the hills, the assault training, the endless lectures in fieldcraft and espionage and everything from housebreaking to how to cut a man’s arteries and where best it was to stab him with your fighting knife. And how many seconds he would take to die when you did. And, of course, that bloody interrogation. And now it was time.
And if they carried it off, then the way was open for them to do it again. But next time, if there was a next time, they would be on their own. They moved in single file, with Grigori and Ffinch leading the way, with Woods and Hunter next. Then Russell and Martin. Hunter had deliberately placed Phelps in the centre of the line, with Fletcher, White and Duffy behind him, the two big men carrying between them a case of ammunition and explosives. They couldn’t afford to stop, for whatever reason. They would first of all have to come down out of the hills and then climb up again and then gradually down as they moved towards the north coast and the sea, until they reached the level of their new hideout. That, he knew, would be the hardest part and they would already have been going for five hours by then.
They continued their descent now, dropping down the hills, lined with olive groves and lemon trees, with increasing speed. More streams could be heard now to their right and left, babbling away noisily in the silent night, which was heavy with the scent of lemons and punctuated by the chirruping of the few nocturnal cicadas.
They had practised just this sort of cross-country mountain march more times than Hunter could recall, in the foothills of the Carmel Mountains, above the castle at Athilt and he thanked God for all that now. There was a method to it. You got into a rhythm, so that your legs were almost operating independently. And then you just carried on. After they had been marching in this way for some four hours Hunter began to realise that he was no longer actually thinking about it. That he had indeed gone into a sort of trance-like state. Grigori, who clearly had grown up walking the hills in just this way, would make them halt at regular intervals, almost every hour. But always it would be only for a few minutes. Just enough time to compose themselves and regain some of their strength, before starting again. And every time they began again Grigori would tell them, grinning, ‘One more hour, sirs. Just one more hour, please.’
Their route had been designed specifically not to take them through any villages, which, while obviously necessary given their strange appearance, made the going all that harder as, from time to time Grigori would whisper, ‘village’, and they would have to detour off the path before rejoining it.
Typically, every third or fourth step someone would miss their footing and would be lucky to stay upright. The shale just fell away underfoot and it was pointless looking down as, despite the moonlight, the ground was far too dark to see your feet. The grass when encountered was slippery too. It was hell. But Grigori’s exhortation had a clever purpose and sure enough, if you just thought to yourself that it might be only one more hour to go, it was possible to carry on.
Their hideout was to be in a church just to the north of Heraklion, about an hour’s march away from the airfield. As they approached what Hunter had reckoned would be the last two hours of the march across the island, Ffinch found Woods and Hunter. ‘Righto, chaps. I’m off to find the andartes. Good luck.’
They thanked him and watched him go. Ffinch turned and vanished into the night. Part of him wished that he was staying with them and taking part in the mission. But he knew that he was of more value to the bigger picture by doing what he did so well, liaising with the andartes and keeping them all sweet. It was not as he would have wished it, or indeed as he had planned it, when he had volunteered for SOE. His thoughts then had been to get into action, to put himself in danger. And, if he was to tell the truth, to get himself killed. For behind that polished, almost comical façade lay another, very different man. A man broken by loss and despair.
At the outbreak of war, Ffinch and his young French wife and their one child, a daughter, had been living in Normandy where he had worked as a writer and translator, making extra money as a farmhand. It had been all that he had ever wanted: to be surrounded by his books, by nature and by his family. But then the war had come. He had of course volunteered and was soon commissioned. He had been stationed at Aldershot, awaiting the arrival in England of Madeleine and little Sophie when the news had reached him of their death in a refugee column strafed by Stukas near Le Havre.
In that single instant everything had changed. It was not merely revenge that had motivated him to volunteer for the new unit, but a mix of a desperate need for vengeance, a need for something new and absorbing on which to focus his hopelessly damaged mind and a total disregard for his own safety, which had brought him to the War Department and ultimately here, to this beautiful island on which he knew he must surely, at some time, meet his own end.
But not before he had avenged the slaughter of his wife and child. And so, walking once again from another chance to do just that, Ffinch made his way through the darkness in search of the andartes and waited for his moment.
*
Back on the narrow path that led to their hideout, Woods and Hunter were still staring into the night after Ffinch when Grigori approached them. ‘This now very dangerous part of march, sirs. We need to be very careful and also very, very fast. Please tell your men.’
They passed the word and with a superhuman effort, the little group managed to somehow increase their speed.
*
Woods and his party, White and Fletcher, were to remain in the church with the reserve of explosives and ammunition. Grigori was to go with Hunter and the others to show them the path down to the base. Once they were there, he would retreat back into the hills but remain watching and when they emerged would drop down and guide them up through the new escape route.
Gradually the land had changed from hillside with its slippery, loose rocks to a gentle terrain, with lush vegetation and olive groves. Nonetheless it still seemed barren and inhospitable. When at last their destination came into view, it was a revelation. And so it must have seemed to generations of all those travelling on this path, who had passed by here. This after all was the reason for its existence. The chapel of Agios Nikolaos had been built some one thousand years ago, in the ninth or perhaps even eighth century by a benevolent order of monks whose doctrine was the care of weary travellers. It might have been made with Hunter and his men in mind.
Seeing it, Grigori suddenly became very excited and began to point towards what to Woods and Hunter looked no more than a charming ruin, or perhaps just a pile of stones. But as they drew closer, he saw that it had a shape. A proper form. It was a single-storey, gabled building with just one low wall, made up of large stones, brown and purple mostly in colour. Above the doorway was a slightly ruinous bell tower, missing its cross. It was really just a rising flat wall topped with a pantiled roof and with a place for a bell, which of course was also long gone. The church was crowned to the rear with a circular dome with four tiny arched windows and a conical pantiled roof, part of which had fallen in.
‘There. There it is, Kapitan. The church of Saint Nicholas. That is where we hide this morning. This very safe place. Very holy place.’
Hunter and Woods exchanged glances. It did not, for one thing, seem to Hunter at first sight to appear particularly safe. The little chapel stood on top of a shelf of rock among a number of olive groves and looked as if it might be open to view from a number of directions. He turned to Grigori. ‘You are quite sure that it’s safe?’
‘Of course, sir. Quite sure. It is perfectly safe. It is almost not known to most of the Germans. They no longer patrol here. They believe all the local stories.’
Woods raised an eyebrow. ‘Stories? What stories?’
‘The stories that the chapel is haunted, Kapitan.’
Woods smiled. ‘Oh, is that all. Got a few ghosts has it? The Jerries really lap it all up then?’
Grigori shook his head and gave Woods a knowing look. ‘Do not be so doubting, Kapitan. The Germans started out by sending out patrols round here. Last year, when they first took the island. They were looking for escaping British and Aussies. But soon their men came back to camp with tales of strange noises and apparitions and floating mists and clouds and they were shaking with fear. So very soon the patrols began to make excuses to move around it and since then they have kept well clear. Very, very far away. They are very, very superstitious, the Germans.’
Woods smiled. ‘Is that so? I’d never have guessed. Jolly useful for us though.’
Grigori looked at him. ‘You don’t believe in spirits, Kapitan?’
‘No. Not really. Anyway, I’m more worried about the real threat. I don’t want to get caught and if that means meeting a few old ghosts of monks then so be it.’
