Kidnap in Crete (21 page)

Before going back to Dr Lignos he wrote a letter to the EOK, which he hoped would confuse them about the timing of the kidnap, making them think that the abduction was not going to happen for at least another twenty-four hours. Then he trudged up the gulley to the house and spoke to the doctor, spinning him the same story. Lignos went away satisfied. Leigh Fermor gambled that they would capture Kreipe that night, before his letter reached Heraklion.

After the departure of the doctor, two figures came crawling up the gorge, Stratis, the policeman and Ilias, both hotfoot from watching the general’s movements. He had not left the Villa Ariadne all day. In the last three days his routine had changed dramatically, making it even more likely that the Germans had discovered the plot. The group tensed, expecting to hear the grinding gears of lorries moving along the hill, disgorging soldiers armed with machine guns, grenades and rifles. If they were attacked the small band of kidnappers would not have a chance.

They resolved to do nothing until dark, to stay under cover and not move about. The slightest sign that there were men in hiding in the area might bring the German army down on their heads. Darkness fell, Leigh Fermor drew an outline of the car in the dust, and made the team rehearse the ambush for the hundredth time. The two torch men stood in for the general and his driver. The group mimed dragging them out of an imaginary vehicle, spraying sub-machine-gun bullets at an imaginary escort, flinging themselves into imaginary ditches. At last they stopped for the night.

Tired and depressed, the two British officers lay on their backs, talking, smoking, staring at the stars and singing softly. It looked as though the whole enterprise might come to nothing. They decided to give the operation another twenty-four hours before abandoning it.

The next day dawned lonely for the kidnap team. Leigh Fermor wrote later: ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasmal or hideous dream.’ No one knew whether there was German activity in the area. No one seemed to know anything for certain; rumours were everywhere, unsettling the small band. To pass the time Leigh Fermor recited snippets of Shakespeare which he had taught himself to say in German.

Around noon it began to rain and Pavlos Zografistos again rushed up the gorge saying they must move at once. Down in the valley they could hear the raised voices of men, women and children, hunting for snails, heading straight towards them. The team scrambled on up the hill, dragging their weapons and equipment. Their next hideout was a damp, chalky cave, its walls running with rainwater, soaking their clothes. They wondered whether General Kreipe had taken a good lunch and was now speeding back to his headquarters in the comfort of his staff car. Leigh Fermor kept spirits up with pep talks in Greek. Manolis Paterakis and Giorgios Tyrakis worried that Pavlos and his sister were losing their nerve. They thought it might be safer if Pavlos joined the kidnappers. The two men agreed that if he was with them he would be a sort of hostage, he would not be tempted to talk to anyone and neither would his sister.

Without warning, Yanni, the guide, began convulsing: frothing at the mouth, gibbering, moaning. He started to hallucinate, grabbing Moss’s foot and banging the toecap with a cigarette tin. Next he tried to fling away his boots, ripping his socks off and holding them up in front of his eyes, chattering incoherently. Finally he lay on the ground in the pouring rain making strange clicking noises. The group dragged him into the shelter of a rock, where he lay, refusing to stand up. They were going to have to abandon him and leave him lying among the myrtle bushes with the rain dripping off the end of his nose. Moss hoped that the snail-hunters would not find him, or, if they did, that he would be too deranged to tell them anything. Stratis, the policeman, was deputed to take over to guide them to Anogia; he assured them he knew the route. The rain stopped, the snail hunters’ voices trailed away into the distance.

In the morning Ilias appeared with the news that General Kreipe had left for his headquarters; he was back in his old routine. Calm descended on the group, ‘as though everything was out of our hands’. Leigh Fermor and Moss changed into their German uniforms and sat smoking, tense and silent as they waited for dusk.

See Notes to Chapter 15

16

The Trap Springs

That evening, in the officers’ mess at the German garrison in Archanes, Kreipe’s aide-de-camp asked him if he would care to join him in a game of cards. Kreipe accepted the invitation and asked his ADC to telephone the Villa Ariadne to say he would be late: he would dine later, at half past nine rather than eight.

In his hideout above Anogia, Tom Dunbabin was running a fever. His radio was the only link the kidnappers had with GHQ and it was protected by Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi and his andartes. Dunbabin told his radio operator that he was going to retreat to the Amari valley until he recovered and would be out of contact. The operator would have to make sure that any news was sent to Cairo. Access to his radio was vital to the success of the kidnap. Dunbabin did not know that he was in the early stages of malaria.

The sun set and the abductors walked through the darkness towards the ambush area, Point A. There were others out that night, shadows slinking through the dark, poachers and sheep rustlers. Leigh Fermor grunted at them in German, scaring them off. When they reached Point A, the team were surprised at how steeply the road from Archanes dropped to the junction; neither Ilias nor Stratis had warned them of this and the British agents had not spotted it on their first recce. Moss worried that if the chauffeur stopped without using the handbrake, the heavy Opel could roll forward, giving the general a chance to escape; he was also concerned that if they pulled the driver out of the car it might roll down the road and crash into one of the ditches, leaving them without a getaway vehicle. There was nothing they could do, it was too late to change the plan.

For a full list of the kidnap team see p. 255.

The team split up and moved into their positions. Micky and Stratis ran towards Archanes, disappearing into the dark, heading for the positions where they could relay Ilias’s torch signals to the main group at the junction. Leigh Fermor and Moss took up their positions on the junction itself, Antonios Papaleonidas, Grigorios and Manolis, their guns slung over their shoulders, slid into place beside them; on the other side of the road, the driver’s side, Nikos Komis, Antonis Zoidakis and Giorgios scrambled into the ditch. Mitsos Tzatzas ran across the junction towards Heraklion to watch for traffic coming towards Archanes; neither Leigh Fermor nor Moss knew that he had Pavlos Zografistos with him.

Leigh Fermor checked his red torch and Moss balanced the police paddle against the side of the ditch, ready to pick up when the time came to run into position. The noise of feet crunching on stones stopped. For a moment there was silence, then low whistles signalled that everyone was in place.

In Archanes, Ilias leant on his bicycle, hidden in the shadows, staring at the entrance to the German headquarters, waiting for the general’s car to appear.

In the ditches, the kidnappers heard the sound of a vehicle travelling fast. A Kübelwagen, the Volkswagen version of a light jeep, bucketed round the bend, the engine revving as the driver changed down, slowing towards the junction. Hidden by scrub, the kidnappers saw that the vehicle had its hood up, making it impossible to see who was in it. The Kübelwagen drove on, silence returned to the junction. Then another Kübelwagen travelling from the oppos­ite direction swung right, heading towards Archanes its headlights sweeping over the bushes hiding the crouching figures.

After a long wait the grinding gears and revs of heavily laden lorries echoed across the rocky landscape, coming from the direction of Archanes. The headlight of a motorcycle combination lit up the road, the vehicle roared round the bend, the driver changed down and braked hard to a halt at the junction; in the sidecar next to him sat a machine-gunner. The two men peered about, the driver glanced back over his shoulder. The gunner traversed his MG34 Spandau across the unseen men in the ditches. The weapon was capable of firing 1,500 rounds a minute, faster than any other machine gun in the world. The powerful BMW engine ticked over while the driver waited, pulled up his goggles, and again squinted back into the darkness. The noise of the heavy engines got louder, two lorries ground into sight, the motorcycle driver slipped his goggles back over his eyes, revved his engine and drove on, the gunner leaning expertly into the bend as they swung left towards the Villa Ariadne,

The lorries lumbered after them, their big black wheels passing close to the kidnappers, spraying them with grit, diesel fumes belching from the exhausts. In the back, troops sat motionless, their steel helmets and shoulders silhouetted against the night sky, unaware that nine pairs of eyes were watching them like foxes. They jiggled and swayed as the vehicles, followed the motorcycle. A lit cigarette end landed in the road in front of Paterakis and rolled into the ditch at his feet, still glowing red. Further up the road Mitsos and Pavlos Zografistos hunched into their ditch as the vehicles rumbled past.

Billy Moss, who had fought with the Coldstream Guards in the desert war, found that the experience reminded him of night patrols near enemy trenches when he could hear careless German soldiers talking or whistling quietly, and even see them lighting their cig­arettes, hunched over the flame, trying not to give their position away. He and Leigh Fermor shivered in their German uniforms, which were too thin to protect them from the night wind blowing across the hills. The general was an hour behind schedule.

At 21.15, Heinrich Kreipe was still immersed in the card game. Glancing at his watch he said he was sorry but he must return to his residence where dinner would be waiting. The other players looked disappointed, Kreipe stood, told them to finish the game and follow on in another car with the ADC. The officers clambered to their feet, saluting as Kreipe left the room and headed for the front door where his driver, Alfred Fenske, waited with the car. From his hiding place in the shadows, Ilias heard the starter motor run and the staff car’s engine kick into life. The shiny black sedan purred up to the orange and white security barrier. The guards came to attention; a soldier swung open the barrier, holding the counterweight in one hand, and saluted with the other as the second most senior officer on Crete passed by on his way home. Fenske nodded to the guards; they were his friends and he had been chatting with them earlier. Kreipe settled into the leather front passenger seat, talking to Fenske, asking him if he thought his instruction to put a security barrier on the junction between the Archanes and the Houdetsi roads had been followed. If he was going to be kidnapped, he said, that would be where it was going to happen; he admitted to Fenske that he had a strange feeling about it. The car disappeared into the night.

Ilias was certain it was the general: he had seen the number plate which he had memorised days before: WH 563 850. He jumped on his bicycle and pedalled as hard as he could towards his signal point. At the junction Leigh Fermor asked Moss the time: it was 21:30 hours. They wondered whether their quarry was already home, a passenger in one of the Kübelwagens that passed earlier in the evening. Then, from Micky’s position on the hillock, came a torch flash: the car was on its way, unescorted.

Leigh Fermor and Moss heaved themselves out of the ditch, grabbing the red torch and the tin traffic signal, and sprinted to the centre of the road, brushing grit and leaves from the fronts of their uniforms. Each had a cocked Colt automatic pistol tucked into the back of the ‘
Gott Mit Uns
’ leather belts. Moss had a ten-inch steel cosh hidden up his sleeve, the bulbous metal end wrapped in plaited leather, its strap twisted round his wrist.

In the distance they heard the noise of a car changing down. The two men tensed, stood bolt upright and tried to look as official and military as possible. Ahead lights lit up the bend; they hoped that the signalling system had worked and that they were not about to confront a German convoy.

A car swept round the corner and the other kidnappers got ready to spring. Ilias was right: in spite of the slitted blackout cowls the headlamps were dazzlingly bright. Leigh Fermor and Moss screwed up their eyes against the glare. Moss held up the tin sign, red side towards the car; Leigh Fermor flashed the red torch and held up his hand, shouting ‘
Halt!
’, his voice almost drowned out by the sound of the engine.

In the car, Kreipe was pleased to see his orders about the secur­ity barrier had been obeyed. Fenske slowed down, the synchromesh gearbox revving hard as it braked the vehicle. Fenske applied the footbrake and the Opel Kapitän purred to a halt. He pulled on the handbrake and, just as he had been trained, left the engine idling so that he could drive his way out of trouble if anything unexpected happened. Through the windscreen General Kreipe saw the two policemen walking towards him, one on each side of the car, moving past the stiff metal pennants out of the glare of the lights. Fenske did not recognise them. Kreipe got ready to congratulate the men on their efficiency. The driver and passenger windows wound down to reveal the general in a peaked cap, red and gold trim on his uniform collar. Fenske was bare-headed. The two SOE men drew level with the windows, blocking the view of the other kidnappers. Leigh Fermor pulled the automatic from behind his back; Billy Moss let the tapered leather grip of the heavy ‘life preserver’ slide into the palm of his hand.