Hit-and-Run

Iraklion, Crete, 1942

Wagner backs the hijacked Wehrmacht lorry onto a narrow patch of tree-shaded ground alongside a Greek Orthodox Church holding evening services. Inside the airless cab the three are pressed thigh-to-thigh—Petrakis crushed in the middle, the commander to his right. The rest of the unit—eleven British commandos in all, disguised in stolen Nazi uniforms—hunker down inside the trailer.

More fat-bellied pheasants roar overhead, swastikas on the tail, black-on-white crosses on the underbelly—a pair of Nazi bombers—Junker 88s. Wagner lurches toward the windshield, striking a leg of the cabaret dancer dangling from a chain on the rear view mirror. She is lifting the hem of a red skirt above lace-topped black stockings and a bare arse. His cheek sets the doll spinning.

Wagner looks skyward. The bombers tear through the dying light. One ace dives straight down, flicking his wing—a showy display of skill or a signal to the ground of another score—before he circles back for landing. “Jerry’s celebrating.”

“Not for bloody long.” The commander speaks in clipped, hard-edged sounds, the consonants clear and precise. His mustache is neat and trim, his face scored with bluish veins, faint, like old ink tracings. Petrakis gave him the secret nickname Joe Gargery, from Great Expectations, for “doing his duty with a strong hand, a quiet tongue and a gentle heart.”

Wagner scans the sprawling port of Iraklion, searching for signs of life. Where the ruins of the old market—once a maze of cobbled lanes with open stalls—meet the stone pier, whitewashed trees with snapped-off limbs stand guard in a neighborhood so laid waste from air attacks that the rubble looks a stone yard covered in caustic dust. Only the church still stands, pale yellow with twin bell towers, the bells tolling in mourning for the first Good Friday of the occupation.

Worse than being jammed inside the cab is breathing enemy sweat from the folds of the stolen uniforms. When they had piled inside the cab, Petrakis said he didn’t know if the stink was German, British, American, or Greek. Sweat is sweat. Wagner set him straight. Said it was crotch sweat. Germans never change their underwear. He should know—his father was Anglo-German.

“By the time they built the Czech pavilion, the country no longer existed.” Petrakis says it aloud, as if Wagner and the commander know what he’s thinking.

Petrakis had told Wagner that back in the States he worked one summer at the World’s Fair. Since then Wagner often asked about the “Frozen Alive Girl” show. He’d seen posters of showgirls lined up in bathing suits and said it looked like a carnie.

“Where’d you say you worked?” Wagner asks.

Petrakis says nothing.

Wagner gives him a poke. He recalls how nervous he was on his own maiden mission. He needs to pull Petrakis away from the quicksand of fear.

“Medicine and Public Health. I guarded the chicken heart.”

“Just the heart?” the commander asks.

“It was a machine that kept an isolated chicken heart beating,” Petrakis says.

The chatter will help. Wagner remembers waiting for that first mission more than a year ago, his mind a tangle of wounds and fright.

Petrakis clears his throat.

“If you keep pulling at that ear it’ll be off by the time Jerry comes,” Wagner says to Petrakis.

“Don’t think there’s any man on earth not frightened when he’s heading into an operation.” The commander squares his shoulders as if at attention.

The commandos in back had complained that taking on Petrakis would add more risk. “I was killing Germans before your number was dry,” Webster had said. Petrakis isn’t even British. He’s Greek American, a colonial as the commander calls him. He had enlisted in the British army in Crete when he got stuck here with his parents on a visit. He began as an interpreter seven months before Uncle Sam entered the war. When the idea was first raised that the Brits needed more...