Читать онлайн «Natural Born Heroes»

Автор Кристофер Макдугл

CHRISTOPHER MCDOUGALL is the author of Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen and a former war correspondent for the Associated Press, covering wars in Rwanda and Angola. He now lives and write (and runs, swims, climbs, and bear-crawls) among the Amish farms around his home in rural Pennsylvania.

ALSO BY CHRIS TOPHER MCDOUGALL

Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners, and

the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen

The Lost Secrets of

Strength and Endurance

Christopher McDougall

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

First published in the United States of America in 2015 by

Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House

Map illustration by Robert Bull

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 933 0

To my parents, John and Jean McDougall.

“Anything which I have done

which you may consider worthwhile,”

as Howard Hughes once said,

“has been made possible

by the genius of my father. ”

Tradition carries a nasty wallop.

—JOURNALIST HEYWOOD BROUN,

as he watched an old boxer destroy a young challenger in 1922

CHAPTER 1

YOU’VE GOT TO PUT YOURSELF in the Butcher’s shoes.

You’re General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, one of two German commanders on the Greek island of Crete. Hitler is worried that something terrible is about to happen right under your nose, something that could severely damage the German offensive, but you’ve got it all under control.

The island is small and your manpower is huge. You’ve got 100,000 seasoned troops, with search planes prowling the mountains and patrol boats monitoring the beaches. You’ve got the Gestapo at your service, and you’re scary enough to be called the Butcher. No one is going to mess with you.

And then you wake up on the morning of April 24, 1944, to discover the other you is gone. Your fellow commander, General Heinrich Kreipe, has disappeared. There’s no hint of foul play: no shots fired, no bloodshed, no signs of a scuffle. Stranger yet, the general vanished from somewhere around the capital, the most heavily guarded corner of the island. Whatever happened, it happened right in front of the general’s own men. Kreipe was no toy soldier, either; he was a serious hard case, a Great War survivor with an Iron Cross who’d battled his way up through the ranks and just transferred in from the Russian front. He had a personal security force and an armed driver and a villa surrounded by attack dogs, razor wire, and machine-gun posts.