Читать книгу Spandau Phoenix - Greg Iles - Страница 6

The North Sea lay serene, unusual for spring, but night would soon fall on a smoking, broken continent reeling from the shock of war. From the bloody dunes of Dunkirk to the bomb-shattered streets of Warsaw, from the frozen tip of Norway to the deserted beaches of the Mediterranean—Europe was enslaved. Only England, beleaguered and alone, stood against the massed armies of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and tonight London was scheduled to die.

By fire. At 1800 hours Greenwich time the greatest single concentration of Luftwaffe bombers ever assembled would unleash their fury upon the unprotected city, and over seven hundred acres of the British capital would cease to exist. Thousands of incendiary bombs would rain down upon civilian and soldier alike, narrowly missing St. Paul’s Cathedral, gutting the Houses of Parliament. History would record that strike against London as the worst of the entire war, a holocaust. And yet …

… all this—the planning, the casualties, the goliathan destruction—was but the puff of smoke from a magician’s gloved hand. A spectacular diversion calculated to draw the eyes of the world away from a mission so daring and intricate that it would defy understanding for generations to come. The man behind this ingenious plot was Adolf Hitler, and tonight, unknown to a single member of his General Staff, he would reach out from the Berghof and undertake the most ambitious military feat of his life.

He had worked miracles before—the blitzkrieg of Poland, the penetration of the “impassable” Ardennes—but this would be the crowning achievement of his career. It would raise him at last above Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. In one stunning blow, he would twist the balance of world power inside out, transforming his mortal foe into an ally and consigning his present ally to destruction. To succeed he would have to reach into the very heart of Britain, but not with bombs or missiles. Tonight he needed precision, and he had chosen his weapons accordingly: treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism—the most destructive forces available to man. All were familiar tools in Hitler’s hand, and all were in place.

But such forces were unpredictable. Traitors lived in terror of discovery; agents feared capture. Fanatics exploded without warning, and weak men invited betrayal. To effectively utilize such resources, Hitler knew, someone had to be on the scene—reassuring the agent, directing the fanatic, holding the hand of the traitor and a gun to the head of the coward. But who could handle such a mission? Who could inspire both trust and fear in equal measure? Hitler knew such a man. He was a soldier, a man of forty-eight, a pilot. And he was already in the air.

Two thousand feet above Amsterdam, the Messerschmitt Bf-110 Zerstörer plowed through a low ceiling of cumulus clouds and burst into clear sky over the glittering North Sea. The afternoon sun flashed across the fighter’s silver wings, setting off the black-painted crosses that struck terror into the stoutest hearts across Europe.

Inside the cockpit, the pilot breathed a sigh of relief. For the last four hundred miles he had flown a tiring, highly restricted route, changing altitude several times to remain within the Luftwaffe’s prescribed corridors of safety. Hitler’s personal pilot had given him the coded map he carried, and, with it, a warning. Not for amusement were the safety zones changed daily, Hans Bahr had whispered; with British Spitfires regularly penetrating Hermann Göring’s “impenetrable” wall of air defense, the danger was real, precautions necessary.

The pilot smiled grimly. Enemy fighters were the least of his worries this afternoon. If he failed to execute the next step of his mission perfectly, it would be a squadron of Messerschmitts, not Spitfires, that shot him into the sea. At any moment the Luftwaffe flight controllers expected him to turn back for Germany, as he had a dozen times before, test flying the fighter lent to him personally by Willi Messerschmitt, then returning home to his wife and child, his privileged life. But this time he would not turn back.

Checking his airspeed against his watch, he estimated the point at which he would fade from the Luftwaffe radar screens based on the Dutch island of Terschelling. He’d reached the Dutch coast at 3:28 P.M. It was now 3:40. At 220 miles per hour, he should have put forty-four miles of the North Sea behind him already. German radar was no match for its British counterpart, he knew, but he would wait another three minutes just to make sure. Nothing could be left to chance tonight. Nothing.

The pilot shivered inside his fur-lined leather flying suit. So much depended upon his mission: the fates of England and Germany, very possibly the whole world. It was enough to make any man shiver. And Russia, that vast, barbaric land infected by the cancer of communism—his Fatherland’s ancient enemy—if he succeeded tonight, Russia would kneel beneath the swastika at last!

The pilot nudged the stick, dipping the Messerschmitt’s left wing, and looked down through the thick glass canopy. Almost time. He looked at his watch, counting. Five … four … three … two …

Now! Like a steel falcon he swooped toward the sea, hurtling downward at over four hundred miles per hour. At the last instant he jerked the stick back and leveled out, skimming the wave tops as he stormed north toward Aalborg, the main Luftwaffe fighter base in Denmark. His desperate race had begun.

Fighting through the heavy air at sea level, the Messerschmitt drank fuel like water, but the pilot’s main concern now was secrecy. And finding the landing signal, he reminded himself. Two dozen training flights had familiarized him with the aircraft, but the detour to Denmark had been unexpected. He had never flown this far north without visual references. He was not afraid, but he would feel much better once he sighted the fjords of Denmark to starboard.

It had been a long time since the pilot had killed. The battles of the Great War seemed so vague now. He had certainly fired hundreds of rounds in anger, but one was never really sure about the killing. Not until the charges came, anyway—the terrible, bloody, heroically insane assaults of flesh against steel. He had almost been killed—he remembered that clearly enough—by a bullet in the left lung, one of three wounds he’d taken while fighting in the famous List regiment. But he had survived, that was the important thing. The dead in the enemy trenches … who knew, really?

He would kill tonight. He would have no choice. Checking the two compasses strapped to his left thigh, he took a careful bearing, then quickly returned his eyes to the horizon indicator. This close to the surface of the sea, the water played tricks on the mind. Hundreds of expert pilots had plowed into the waves simply by letting their concentration falter for a few moments. Only six minutes to Aalborg, he thought nervously. Why risk it? He climbed to one thousand feet, then leveled out and craned his neck to survey the sea below. Waveless, it receded before him with the gentle curve of the earth. Except … there … dead ahead. He could see broken coastline … Denmark! He had done it!

Feeling a hot surge of adrenaline, he scanned the clouds for fighter patrols. If one spotted him, he decided, he would sit tight, hold his course and pretend to be a straggler from an early raid. The hard, empty northern land flashed beneath him. His destination was a small ancillary strip just short of Aalborg air base. But where was it? The runway … his special cargo … where?

A thousand feet below, the red flash of railway flares suddenly lit up in parallel lines to his left. The signal! A lone green flare indicated the proper direction of approach. The pilot circled wide until he had come 180 degrees, then began nursing the Messerschmitt in. The strip was short—no margin for error. Altimeter zero. With bated breath he felt tentatively for the runway. Nothing … nothing … whump!—the wheels dropped hard onto concrete. The plane shuddered from the impact but steadied fast. Cutting his engines, the pilot rolled to a stop thirty meters beyond the last two flares.

Before he could unfasten his harness, two ground crewmen slid the canopy back over his head. Silently, they helped him with his straps and pulled him from the cockpit. Their rough familiarity startled him, but he let it pass. To them he was just another pilot—on a somewhat irregular mission perhaps, operating solo from a practically deserted strip south of the base—but just a pilot, all the same. Had he removed his flying helmet and goggles, the crewmen would have exhibited quite a different attitude, and certainly would not have touched him without permission. The pilot’s face was known to every man, woman, and child in Germany—indeed to millions across Europe and the world.

Without a word, he walked a little way off the strip and unzipped his suit to relieve himself. There were only the two crewmen, he saw, and they had been well briefed. From a battered tank truck one pumped fuel into the plane while the other toiled with special fittings beneath the Messerschmitt’s left wing. The pilot scanned the small runway. There was an old sock-type wind indicator, a pile of scrap parts left from pre-war days, and, several yards down the strip, a small wooden shack that had probably once housed some Danish mechanic’s tools.

It houses something quite different now, I’ll wager, he thought. Zipping up, he walked slowly toward the shack, alert for any sign of human occupation. The sleek black bonnet of a Daimler jutted from behind the ramshackle building, gleaming like a funeral hearse. The pilot slipped around the shack and peered through the windshield of the car. Empty. Remembering his instructions, he wound a long flying scarf around the lower half of his face. It made breathing difficult, but combined with his flying helmet, it left only his eyes visible to an observer. He entered the shack without knocking.

Darkness shrouded the interior, but the fetid air was pregnant with human presence. Someone, not the pilot, lit a lantern, and the room slowly revealed itself. A major wearing the smart black uniform of Himmler’s SS stood less than a meter from the pilot. Unlike most of his type, this representative of Himmler’s “elite corps” was quite fat. He looked more accustomed to the comforts of a soft billet like Paris than a battle zone. Behind him, a thinner man dressed in a leather flying suit sat rigidly in a straight-backed wooden chair. Like the pilot, his face was also draped by a scarf. His eyes darted nervously between the newcomer and the SS man.

“Right on time,” the SS major said, looking at his watch. “I’m Major Horst Berger.”

The pilot nodded, but offered no name.

“Drink?” A bottle appeared from the shadows. “Schnapps? Cognac?”

My God, the pilot thought. Does the fool carry a stocked bar about in his car? He shook his head emphatically, then jerked his thumb toward the half-open door. “I’ll see to the preparations.”

“Nonsense,” Major Berger replied, dismissing the idea with a flick of his bottle. “The crewmen can handle it. They’re some of the best from Aalborg. It’s a shame, really.”

It is, the pilot thought. But I don’t think you’re too upset about it. I think you’re enjoying all this. “I’m going back to the plane,” he muttered.

The man in the wooden chair stood slowly.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Major Berger barked, but the man ignored him. “Oh, all right,” Berger complained. He buttoned his collar and followed the pair out of the shack.

“They know about the drop tanks?” the pilot asked, when Berger had caught up.

“Ja.”

“The nine-hundred-liter ones?”

“Sure. Look, they’re fitting them now.”

Berger was right. On the far side of the plane, two ground crewmen attached the first of two egg-shaped auxiliary fuel containers to the Messerschmitt’s blunt-tipped wings. When they finished, they moved to the near side of the aircraft.

“Double-check the wet-points!” the pilot called.

The chief mechanic nodded, already working.

The pilot turned to Major Berger. “I had an idea,” he said. “Flying up.”

The SS man frowned. “What idea?”

“I want them to grease my guns before we take off.”

“What do you mean? Lubricate them? I assure you that the weapons are in perfect working order.”

“No, I want them to pack the barrels with grease.”

Behind Major Berger, the man in the flying suit stepped sideways and looked curiously at the pilot.

“You can’t be serious,” Berger objected. He turned around. “Tell him,” he said. But the man in the flying suit only cocked his head to one side.

“But that’s suicide!” Major Berger insisted. “One chance encounter with a British patrol and—” He shook his head. “I simply cannot allow it. If you’re shot down, my career could take a very nasty turn!”

Your career is over already, the pilot thought grimly. “Grease the guns!” he shouted to the crewmen, who, having fitted the empty drop tanks, now anxiously pumped fuel into them. The chief mechanic stood at the rear of the fuel truck, trying to decide which of the two men giving orders was really in charge. He knew Major Berger from Aalborg, but something about the tall, masked pilot hinted at a more dangerous authority.

“You can’t do that!” Major Berger protested. “Stop that there! I’m in command here!”

The chief mechanic shut off the fuel hose and stared at the three men at the edge of the runway. Slowly, with great purpose, the pilot pointed a long arm toward the crewman under the wing and shouted through his scarf: “You! Grease my guns! That’s a direct order!”

The chief mechanic recognized the sound of authority now. He climbed onto the fuel truck to get a grease gun from his tool box.

Major Berger laid a quivering hand on a Schmeisser machine pistol at his belt. “You have lost your mind, I believe,” he said softly. “Rescind that order immediately or I’ll put you under arrest!”

Glancing back toward the crewmen—who were now busy packing the Messerschmitt’s twenty-millimeter cannon with heavy black grease—the pilot took hold of his scarf and unwrapped it slowly from his head. When his face became visible, the SS man fell back a step, his eyes wide in shock. Behind him the man in the flying suit swallowed hard and turned away.

The pilot’s face was dark, saturnine, with eyes set deep beneath bushy black brows that almost met in the center. His imperious stare radiated command. “Remove your hand from that pistol,” he said quietly.

For several moments Major Berger stood still as stone. Then, slowly, he let his hand fall from the Schmeisser’s grip. “Jawohl, Herr … Herr Reichminister.”

“Now, Herr Major! And be about your business! Go!”

Suddenly Major Berger was all action. With a pounding heart he hurried toward the Messerschmitt, his face hot and tingling with fear. Blood roared in his ears. He had just threatened to place the Deputy Führer of the German Reich—Rudolf Hess—under arrest! In a daze he ordered the crewmen to speed their packing of the guns. While they complied, he harried them about their earlier maintenance. Were the wet-points clear? Would the wing drop tanks disengage properly when empty?

At the edge of the runway, Hess turned to the man in the flying suit. “Come closer,” he murmured.

The man took a tentative step forward and stood at attention. “You understand about the guns?” Hess asked.

Slowly the man nodded assent.

“I know it’s dangerous, but it’s dangerous for us both. Under certain circumstances it could make all the difference.”

Again the man nodded. He was a pilot also, and had in fact flown many more missions than the man who had so suddenly assumed command of this situation. He understood the logic: a plane purported to be on a mission of peace would appear much more convincing with its guns disabled. But even if he hadn’t understood, he was in no position to argue.

“It’s been a long time, Hauptmann,” Hess said, using the rank of captain in place of a name.

The captain nodded. Overhead a pair of Messerschmitts roared by from Aalborg, headed south on patrol.

“It is a great sacrifice you have made for your country, Hauptmann. You and men like you have given up all normality so that men like myself could prosecute the war in comparative safety. It’s a great burden, is it not?”

The captain thought fleetingly of his wife and child. He had not seen them for over three years; now he wondered if he ever would again. He nodded slowly.

“Once we’re in the plane,” said Hess, “I won’t be able to see your face. Let me see it now. Before.”

As the captain reached for the end of his scarf, Major Berger scurried back to tell them the plane was almost ready. The two pilots, enthralled in the strange play they found themselves acting out, heard nothing. What the SS man saw when he reached them struck him like a blow to the stomach. All his breath passed out in a single gasp, and he knew that he stood at the brink of extinction. Before him, two men with the same face stood together shaking hands! And that face! Major Berger felt as if he had stumbled into a hall of mirrors where only the dangerous people were multiplied.

The pilots gripped hands for a long moment, their eyes heavy with the knowledge that both their lives might end tonight over foreign soil in the cockpit of an unarmed fighter.

“My God,” Berger croaked.

Neither pilot acknowledged his presence. “How long has it been, Hauptmann?” Hess asked.

“Since Dessau, Herr Reichminister.”

“You look thinner.” Hess murmured, “I still can’t believe it. It’s positively unnerving.” Then sharply, “Is the plane ready, Berger?”

“I … I believe so, Herr—”

“To your work, then!”

“Jawohl, Herr Reichminister!” Major Berger turned and marched toward the crewmen, who now stood uncertainly against the fuel truck, waiting for permission to return to Aalborg. Berger unclipped his Schmeisser with one hand as he walked.

“All finished?” he called.

“Jawohl, Herr Major,” answered the chief mechanic.

“Fine, fine. Step away from the truck, please.” Berger raised the stubby barrel of his Schmeisser.

“But … Herr Major, what are you doing! What have we done?”

“A great service to your Fatherland,” the SS man said. “Now—step away from the truck!”

The crewmen looked at each other, frozen like terrified game. Finally it dawned on them why Major Berger was hesitating. He obviously knew something about the volatility of aircraft fuel vapor. Backing closer to the truck, the chief mechanic clasped his greasy hands together in supplication. “Please, Herr Major, I have a family—”

The dance was over. Major Berger took three steps backward and fired a sustained burst from the Schmeisser. Hess screamed a warning, but it was too late. Used with skill, the Schmeisser could be a precise weapon, but Major Berger’s skill was limited. Of a twelve-round burst, only four rounds struck the crewmen. The remainder tore through the rusted shell of the fuel truck like it was paper.

The explosion knocked Major Berger a dozen feet from where he stood. Hess and the captain had instinctively dived for the concrete. Now they lay prone, shielding their eyes from the flash. When Hess finally looked up, he saw Major Berger silhouetted against the flames, stumbling proudly toward them through a pall of black smoke.

“How about that!” the SS man cried, looking back at the inferno. “No evidence now!”

“Idiot!” Hess shouted. “They’ll have a patrol from Aalborg here in five minutes to investigate!”

Berger grinned. “Let me take care of them, Herr Reichminister! The SS knows how to handle the Luftwaffe!”

Hess felt relieved; Berger was making it easy. Stupidity was something he had no patience with. “I’m sorry, Major,” he said, looking hard into the SS man’s face. “I cannot allow that.”

Like a cobra hypnotizing a bird, Hess transfixed Berger with his dark, deep-set eyes. Quite naturally, he drew a Walther automatic from the forepouch of his flight suit and pulled back the slide. The fat SS man’s mouth opened slowly; his hands hung limp at his sides, the Schmeisser clipped uselessly to his belt.

“But why?” he asked quietly. “Why me?”

“Something to do with Reinhard Heydrich, I believe.”

Berger’s eyes grew wide; then they closed. His head sagged onto his tunic.

“For the Fatherland,” Hess said quietly. He pulled the trigger.

The captain jumped at the report of the Walther. Major Berger’s body jerked twice on the ground, then lay still.

“Take his Schmeisser and any ammunition you can find,” Hess ordered. “Check the Daimler.”

“Jawohl, Herr Reichminister!”

The next few minutes were a blur of action that both men would try to remember clearly for the rest of their lives—plundering the corpse for ammunition, searching the car, double-checking the drop tanks of the aircraft, donning their parachutes, firing the twin Daimler-Benz engines, turning the plane on the old cracked concrete—both men instinctively carrying out tasks they had rehearsed a thousand times in their heads, the tension compounded by the knowledge that an armed patrol might arrive from Aalborg at any moment.

Before boarding the plane, they exchanged personal effects. Hess quickly but carefully removed the validating items that had been agreed upon: three compasses, a Leica camera, his wristwatch, some photographs, a box of strange and varied drugs, and finally the fine gold identification chain worn by all members of Hitler’s inner circle. He handed them to the captain with a short word of explanation for each: “Mine, my wife’s, mine, my wife and son …” The man receiving these items already knew their history, but he kept silent. Perhaps, he thought, the Reichminister speaks in farewell to all the familiar things he might lose tonight. The captain understood that feeling well.

Even this strange and poignant ceremony merged into the mind-numbing rush of fear and adrenaline that accompanied takeoff, and neither man spoke again until they found themselves forty miles over the North Sea, arrowing toward their target. As the plan dictated, Hess had yielded the controls to the captain. Hess now sat in the radio operator’s seat, facing the twin tail fins of the fighter. The two men used no names—only ranks—and limited their conversation to the mechanics of the mission.

“Range?” the captain asked, tilting his head back toward the rear-facing seat.

“Twelve hundred and fifty miles with the nine-hundred-liter tanks,” Hess replied.

“I meant range to target.”

“The island or the castle?”

“The island.”

“Six hundred and seventy miles.”

The captain asked no more questions for the next hour. He stared down at the steadily darkening sea and thought of his family. Hess studied a sheaf of papers in his lap: maps, photographs, and mini-biographies secretly copied from SS files in the basement of the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. Ceaselessly, he went over each detail, visualizing the contingencies he could face upon landing. A hundred miles off the English coast, he began drilling the pilot in his duties.

“How much did they tell you, Hauptmann?”

“A lot. Too much, I think.”

“You see the extra radio to your right?”

“Yes.”

“You can operate it?”

“Yes.”

“If all goes well, you have only a few things to remember. First, the drop tanks. Whatever happens, you ditch them into the sea. Same with the extra radio. After my time is up, of course. Forty minutes is the time limit, remember that. Forty minutes.”

“Forty minutes I wait.”

“If you have not received my message within that time, the mission has failed. In that case—”

There was a sharp intake of breath from the pilot, quiet but audible. Hess knew what caused that sound—the unbanishable fear of death. He felt it too. But for him it was different. He knew the stakes of the mission, the inestimable strategic gain that dwarfed the possible loss of two human lives. Like the man in the pilot’s seat, Hess too had a family—a wife and young son. But for a man in his position—a man so close to the Führer—such things were luxuries one knew might be lost at any moment. For him death was simply an obstacle to success that must be avoided at all costs. But for the man in the pilot’s chair …

“Hauptmann?” Hess said, almost gently.

“Sir?”

“I know what frightens you now. I really do. But there are worse things than death. Do you understand me? Far worse.”

The pilot’s reply was a hoarse, hollow gurgle. Hearing it, Hess decided that empathy was not the proper motivator for this man. When he next spoke, his voice brimmed with confidence. “Dwelling on that is of no use whatsoever, Hauptmann. The plan is flawless. The important thing is, have you been studying?”

“Have I been studying!” The captain was obviously relieved to be talking about something else. “My God, some iron-assed SS Brigadeführer grilled me for two days straight.”

“Probably Schellenberg.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, Hauptmann. Better that you don’t know.”

Silence filled the cockpit as the pilot’s mind drifted back to the fate that awaited him should his special passenger fail. “Herr Reichminister?” he asked at length.

“Yes?”

“How do you rate your chances of success?”

“It’s not in my hands, Hauptmann, so I would be foolish to guess. It’s up to the British now.” My advice is to prepare for the worst, Hess thought bitterly. The Führer’s bankers have been since January. “Just concentrate on your part of the mission,” he said. “And for God’s sake, be sure to jump from a high enough altitude to destroy the plane. It’s nothing the British haven’t seen before, but there’s no need to make them a present of it. Once you’ve gotten my message, just jump and wait until I can get you released. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. If you don’t get the message—”

Verdammt! Hess cursed silently. There’s just no avoiding it. His next words cut with the brittle edge of command. “If you don’t get my message, Hauptmann, you know what must be done.”

“Jawohl,” the pilot murmured, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. He was sickeningly aware of the small, sticky cyanide capsule taped against his chest. He wondered if he could possibly go through with this thing that everyone but him seemed to consider simply business as usual.

“Listen to me, Hauptmann,” Hess said earnestly. “You know why your participation is necessary. British Intelligence knows I am coming to England …”

Hess kept talking, trying to fill the emptiness that would give the pilot too much time to think. Up here, with Germany falling far behind, the concept of duty seemed much more abstract than it did when one was surrounded by the reinforcing order of the army and the SS. The captain seemed sound—and Heydrich had vouched for him—but given enough time to consider his position, he might do anything. After all, what sane man wanted to die?

“Cut your speed!” Hess ordered, his voice quickening. “Hold at 180.”

The miles had melted away before the Messerschmitt’s nose. They were a mere sixty miles off the Scottish coast. On a clear evening like this, the RAF radar stations would begin to pick up reflections from the fighter at any moment. Hess tightened his parachute harness, then set aside his maps and leaned backward.

“Stay high and clear!” he shouted to the canopy lid. “Make sure they see us coming in!”

“Where are you going out?”

“We should make landfall over a place called Holy Island. I’ll jump there. Stay high over the mainland for a few miles, then dive and run like hell! They’ll probably scramble a whole squadron once they realize what you’re flying!”

“Jawohl,” the pilot acknowledged. “Herr Reichminister?”

“What is it?”

“Have you ever parachuted before?”

“Nein. Never.”

An ironic laugh cut through the drone of the twin engines.

“What’s so funny, Hauptmann?”

“I’ve never jumped either! That’s a pretty significant fact to have overlooked in the planning of this mission, don’t you think?”

Hess permitted himself a wry smile. “Perhaps that fact was taken into account, Hauptmann. Some people might even be counting on it.”

“Oh … my God.”

“It’s too late to worry about that now. We don’t have the fuel to make it back to Germany even if we wanted to!”

“What?” the pilot exclaimed. “But the drop tanks—”

“Are empty!” Hess finished. “Or soon will be!”

The pilot felt his stomach turn a somersault. But before he could puzzle out his passenger’s meaning, he spied land below.

“Herr Reichminister! The island! I see it!”

From sixty-five hundred feet Holy Island was a tiny speck, only distinguishable by the small, bright ribbon separating it from the mainland. “And … a flare. I see a flare!”

“Green or red?” Hess asked, his face taut.

“Red!”

“The canopy, Hauptmann! Move!”

Together the two men struggled to slide back the heavy glass. Parachuting from a Messerschmitt was not common practice—strictly an emergency measure—and quite a few aviators had died attempting it.

“Push!” the pilot yelled.

With all their strength the two men heaved their bodies against the transparent lid of the cockpit. Their straining muscles quivered in agony until all at once the frame gave way and locked in the open position. The noise in the cockpit was deafening now, the engines roaring, the wind a screaming, living thing that struggled to pluck the men from their tiny tube of steel. Above it all, the pilot shouted, “We’re over the gap now, Herr Reichminister! Go! Go!”

Suddenly Hess looked into his lap. Empty. He had forgotten to ditch his papers! No sign of them in the cockpit; they must have been sucked out the moment the canopy opened. He prayed they had found their way down to the sea, and not to the island below.

“Jump, Herr Reichminister!”

Hess struggled into a crouch and faced the lethal tail fins of the Zerstörer. The time for niceties had passed. He reached behind him and jerked the pilot’s head back.

“Hauptmann!” he shouted. “Heydrich only ordered those drop tanks fitted to make sure you came this far! They are empty! No matter what happens, you cannot turn back! You have no choice but to follow orders! If I succeed, your actions really won’t matter! But if I fail, you cannot! You know the price of failure—Sippenhaft! Never forget that! Sippenhaft binds us both! Now climb! Give me some draft!”

The Messerschmitt’s nose pitched up, momentarily creating a small space shielded from the wind. With a defiant yell Hess hurled himself up and backward. A novice, he pulled the ripcord the moment he cleared the plane. The tight-folded silk tore open with a ripping sound, then quickly blossomed into a soft white mushroom that circled lazily down through the mist toward the Scottish earth below.

Cursing, the pilot struggled to secure the canopy. Without help it was twice as difficult, but Hess’s final words had chilled him to the core. Only a sheet of curved glass could now separate him from the terrifying destiny he had been ordered to face. With the desperate strength of a condemned man, he slammed it shut.

He dipped his left wing and glanced backward. There was the descending chute, soft and distant and peaceful. Barring a catastrophic landing, the Reichminister would at least begin his mission safely. It heartened the pilot to know that a novice could actually clear the plane, but something deeper in him recoiled in dread.

They had tricked him! The bastards had lured him into a suicidal mission by letting him think he would have a way out! After all his training, they hadn’t even trusted him to carry out his orders! Empty auxiliary tanks. The swine! They had known he would have sole control of the plane after Hess jumped, and they had made sure he wouldn’t have enough fuel to turn back if the mission went bad. And as if that weren’t enough … Hess had threatened him with Sippenhaft!

Sippenhaft! The word caused the pilot’s breath to come in quick gasps. He had heard tales of the Nazis’ ultimate penalty for betrayal, but he hadn’t really believed them. Sippenhaft dictated that not only a traitor’s life but the lives of his entire family became forfeit when judgment was rendered against him. Children, parents, the aged and infirm—none were spared. There was no appeal, and the sentence, once decreed, was swiftly executed.

With a guttural scream the pilot cursed God for giving him another man’s face. In that moment, he felt it was a surer death sentence than a cancer of the brain. Setting his mouth in a grim line, he hurled the plane into a screaming dive, not pulling up until the rocky Scottish earth seemed about to shatter the nose of his aircraft. Then—as Hess had suggested—he ran like hell, opening the Zerstörer up to 340 miles per hour over the low stone villages and patchwork fields. In other circumstances, the heart-stopping, ground-level flight might have been an exhilarating experience. Tonight it felt like a race against death.

It was. A patrolling Boulton Paul Defiant had answered a scramble call from the RAF plotting room at Inverness. The Messerschmitt pilot never even saw it. Oblivious, he stormed across the darkening island like a banshee, sixteen feet above the earth. With the twin-engined Messerschmitt’s tremendous speed advantage, the pursuing British fighter was outpaced like a sparrow behind a hunting hawk.

Dungavel Hill rose in the distance. Height: 458 meters: the information chattered into the pilot’s brain like a ticker tape. “There it is,” he muttered, spying the silhouette of Dungavel Castle. “My part of this insane mission.” The castle flashed beneath his fuselage. With one hand he checked the radio set near his right knee. Working. Please call, he thought. Please …

He heard nothing. Not even static. With shaking hands he touched the stick and hopped over a line of trees bisecting a sheep pasture. He saw fields … a road … more trees … then the town of Kilmarnock, sprawled dark across the road. He swept on. A patch of mist, then fog, the sea!

Like a black arrow he shot out over the western coast of Scotland, climbing fast. To his left he sighted his turning landmark, a giant rock jutting 120 meters into the sky, shining pale in the moonlight. As if drawn by a magnet, his eyes locked onto the tiny face of his newly acquired watch. Thirty minutes gone and no signal. Ten minutes from now his fate would be sealed. If you receive no signal in forty minutes, Hauptmann, you will turn out to sea and swallow your cyanide capsule … He wondered if he would be dead before his plane plowed into the icy depths of the North Atlantic.

Christ in Heaven! his mind screamed. What mad bastard dreamed this one up? But he knew—Reinhard Heydrich—the maddest bastard of them all. Steeling himself against panic, he banked wide to the south and flew parallel to the coast, praying that Hess’s signal would come. His eyes flicked across the instrument panel. Altimeter, airspeed, compass, fuel—the tanks! Without even looking down he jerked a lever next to his seat. Two auxiliary fuel tanks tumbled down through the darkness. One would be recovered from the Clyde estuary the next day by a British drifter, empty.

The radio stayed silent. He checked it again. Still working. His watch showed thirty-nine minutes gone. His throat went dry. Sixty seconds to zero hour. Sixty seconds to suicide. Here you are, sir, one cyanide cocktail for the glory of the Reich! For the last time the pilot looked longingly down upon the dark mirror of the sea. His left hand crept into his flying suit and touched the cyanide capsule taped against his breast. Then, with frightening clarity, an image of his wife and daughter came into his mind. “It’s not fair!” he shouted in desolation. “It’s the fucking nobodies who do the dying!”

In one violent flash of terror and outrage, the pilot jerked the stick to port and headed the roaring fighter back inland. His tear-filled eyes pierced the Scottish mist, searching out the landmarks he had studied so long in Denmark. With a shudder of hope, he spied the first—railroad tracks shining like quicksilver in the night. Maybe the signal will still come, he hoped desperately. But he knew it wouldn’t. His eyes scoured the earth for his second landmark—a small lake to the south of Dungavel Castle. There …

The Messerschmitt streaked across the water. Like a mirage the small village of Eaglesham appeared ahead. The fighter thundered across the rooftops, wheeling in a high, climbing circle over Dungavel Castle. He had done it! Like an intravenous blast of morphine, the pilot felt a sudden rush of exhilaration, a wild joy cascading through him. Ignited by the nearness of death, his survival instinct had thrown some switch deep within his brain. He had but one thought now—survive!

At sixty-five hundred feet the nightmare began. With no one to fly the plane while he jumped, the pilot decided to kill his engines as a safety measure. Only one engine cooperated. The other, its cylinders red-hot from the long flight from Aalborg, continued to ignite the fuel mixture. He throttled back hard until the engine died, losing precious seconds, then he wrestled the canopy open.

He could not get out of the cockpit! Like an invisible iron hand the wind pinned him to the back panel. Desperately he tried to loop the plane, hoping to drop out as it turned over, but centrifugal force, unforgiving, held him in his seat. When enough blood had rushed out of his brain, he blacked out.

Unaware of anything around him, the pilot roared toward oblivion. By the time he regained consciousness, the aircraft stood on its tail, hanging motionless in space. In a millisecond it would fall like two tons of scrap steel.

With one mighty flex of his knees, he jumped clear.

As he fell, his brain swirled with visions of the Reichminister’s chute billowing open in the dying light, floating peacefully toward a mission that by now had failed. His own chute snapped open with a jerk. In the distance he saw a shower of sparks; the Messerschmitt had found the earth.

He broke his left ankle when he hit the ground, but surging adrenaline shielded his mind against the pain. Shouts of alarm echoed from the darkness. Struggling to free himself from the harness, he surveyed by moonlight the small farm at the edge of the field in which he had landed. Before he could see much of anything, a man appeared out of the darkness. It was the head plowman of the farm, a man named David McLean. The Scotsman approached cautiously and asked the pilot his name. Struggling to clear his stunned brain, the pilot searched for his cover name. When it came to him, he almost laughed aloud. Confused, he gave the man his real name instead. What the hell? he thought. I don’t even exist anymore in Germany. Heydrich saw to that.

“Are you German?” the Scotsman asked.

“Yes,” the pilot answered in English.

Somewhere among the dark hills the Messerschmitt finally exploded, lighting the sky with a momentary flash.

“Are there any more with you?” the Scotsman asked nervously. “From the plane?”

The pilot blinked, trying to take in the enormity of what he had done—and what he had been ordered to do. The cyanide capsule still lay like a viper against his chest. “No,” he said firmly. “I flew alone.”

The Scotsman seemed to accept this readily.

“I want to go to Dungavel Castle,” the pilot said. Somehow, in his confusion, he could not—or would not—abandon his original mission. “I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton,” he added solemnly.

“Are you armed?” McLean’s voice was tentative.

“No. I have no weapon.”

The farmer simply stared. A shrill voice from the darkness finally broke the awkward silence. “What’s happened? Who’s out there?”

“A German’s landed!” McLean answered. “Go get some soldiers.”

Thus began a strange pageant of uncertain hospitality that would last for nearly thirty hours. From the McLeans’ humble living room—where the pilot was offered tea on the family’s best china—to the local Home Guard hut at Busby, he continued to give the name he had offered the plowman upon landing—his own. It was obvious that no one knew what to make of him. Somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong. The pilot had expected to land inside a cordon of intelligence officers; instead he had been met by one confused farmer. Where were the stern-faced young operatives of MI5? Several times he repeated his request to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton, but from the bare room at Busby he was taken by army truck to Maryhill Barracks at Glasgow.

At Maryhill, the pain of his broken ankle finally burned through his shock. When he mentioned it to his captors, they transferred him to the military hospital at Buchanan Castle, about twenty miles south of Glasgow. It was there, nearly thirty hours after the unarmed Messerschmitt first crossed the Scottish coast, that the Duke of Hamilton finally arrived to confront the pilot.

Douglas Hamilton looked as young and dashing as the photograph in his SS file. The Premier Peer of Scotland, an RAF wing commander and famous aviator in his own right, Hamilton faced the tall German confidently, awaiting some explanation. The pilot stood nervously, preparing to throw himself on the mercy of the duke. Yet he hesitated. What would happen if he did that? It was possible that there had simply been a radio malfunction, that Hess was even now carrying out his secret mission, whatever it was. Heydrich might blame him if Hess’s mission failed. And then, of course, his family would die. He could probably save his family by committing suicide as ordered, but then his child would have no father. The pilot studied the duke’s face. Hamilton had met Rudolf Hess briefly at the Berlin Olympics, he knew. What did the duke see now? Fully expecting to be thrown into chains, the pilot requested that the officer accompanying the duke withdraw from the room. When he had gone, the pilot took a step toward Hamilton, but said nothing.

The duke stared, stupefied. Though his rational mind resisted it, the first seeds of recognition had been planted in his brain. The haughty bearing … the dark, heavy-browed patrician face … Hamilton could scarcely believe his eyes. And despite the duke’s attempt to conceal his astonishment, the pilot saw everything in an instant. The dizzying hope of a condemned man who has glimpsed deliverance surged through him. My God! he thought. It could still work! And why not? It’s what I have trained to do for five years!

The duke was waiting. Without further hesitation—and out of courage or cowardice, he would never know—the pilot stepped away from the iron discipline of a decade.

“I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess,” he said stiffly. “Deputy Führer of the German Reich, leader of the Nazi Party.”

With classic British reserve, the duke remained impassive. “I cannot be sure if that is true,” he said finally.

Hamilton had strained for skepticism, but in his eyes the pilot discerned a different reaction altogether—not disbelief, but shock. Shock that Adolf Hitler’s deputy—arguably the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany—stood before him now in a military hospital in the heart of Britain! That shock was the very sign of Hamilton’s acceptance!

I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess! With a single lungful of air the frightened pilot had transformed himself into the most important prisoner of war in England. His mind reeled, drunk with the reprieve. He no longer thought of the man who had parachuted from the Messerschmitt before him. Hess’s signal had not come, but no one else knew that. No one but Hess, and he was probably dead by now. The pilot could always claim he had received a garbled signal, then simply proceeded with his mission as ordered. No one could lay the failure of Hess’s mission at his door. The pilot closed his eyes in relief. Sippenhaft be damned! No one would kill his family without giving him a chance to explain.

By taking this gamble—the only chance he could see of survival—the desperate captain unknowingly precipitated the most bizarre conspiracy of the Second World War. And a hundred miles to the east, alive or dead, the real Rudolf Hess—a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic civil war in England—disappeared from the face of the earth.

The Duke of Hamilton maintained his attitude of skepticism throughout the brief interview, but before he left the hospital, he issued orders that the prisoner be moved to a secret location and held under double guard.