The Secret Rescue by Cate Lineberry

Author:Cate Lineberry [LINEBERRY, CATE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316220231
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Exhausted after a day of grueling hiking, the weary party arrived at Sheper, a village of about one hundred stone houses and roughly fifteen miles north of the border with Greece. Like every place they had been to, the threat of danger was always present. Just six months later, a bomb splinter at Sheper killed Maj. Philip Leake, head of SOE’s Albania desk at the time, when two German fighter planes bombed and machine-gunned the village. The attack occurred the day Leake was supposed to head for the coast and return to Italy.

The group was soon greeted by forty-five-year-old Maj. Bill Tilman, the stocky and bristly mustached leader of the mission at Sheper, who found “the nurses in good heart and looks, the orderlies—big, stalwart men—tired, bedraggled, and depressed.” The oldest SOE man sent into Albania, Tilman was also a world-famous mountaineer who had been a part of three Mount Everest expeditions and was a decorated veteran of World War I known for being able to walk faster and farther than almost anyone. A fellow officer wrote, “Once his mission had been established he climbed the local mountains every morning before breakfast, to the great discomfiture of his partisan guards who had been given strict orders to accompany him everywhere and not let him out of their sight.”

Tilman and his men had created an organized life at Sheper, which, for a man who craved adventure, was rather “dull and placid” when they weren’t receiving drops of weapons, clothing, and boots for the partisans. “We ate our three good meals a day, ciphered signals, visited neighbouring villages, showed the partisans how to use explosives, and argued more or less amiably with various people who came to see us,” he wrote.

Given Tilman’s expertise in the area and in climbing, Duffy spoke to him about the location of the sea evacuation and his planned route. Expecting another supply drop, Tilman tried to get Duffy to stay in Sheper for the next few days, but Duffy declined because he wanted to get to the coast as soon as possible.

Before the party was split into two for the evening and the medics left for the next village, Tilman announced that they had about a twenty-five-mile hike ahead of them the following day. It would be their longest walk yet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.