The Spandau Phoenix wwi-2 Read online

  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 tightfolded 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.@d 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 Zerstdrer up to 340 miles

  per hour over the low stone villages and patchwork fields. In other

  circumstances, the heart-stopping, groundlevel 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.

  Dun avel Hill rose in the distance. Height.-45

  9 8 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 Kilmamock, 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 Heydrichthe 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 cocktailfor 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 nowsurvive!

  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 c<)operated. 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'd

  been met by one confused farmer. Where were the stern-faced young

  operatives of mI-5? 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 apd 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 Fuhrer 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 eat

  rea u Hess-a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic

  civil war in England@isappeared from the face of the earth.

  The Duke of Ham
ilton 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.

  BOOK ONE

  WE T BERLIN, 1 7

  A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit

  concealeth the matter.

  PROVERBS 11.13

  CHAPTER ONE

  The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted

  courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds,

  launching bricks through the air like mosscovered mortar rounds. Spandau

  Prison, the brooding redbrick fortress that had stood for over a century

  and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty

  years, was being leveled in a single day.

  The last inmate of S andau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed

  suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the

  burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the

  aged Nazi's isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity,

  France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union-the

  former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns-had agreed that the

  prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its

  becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.

  Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the

  demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it

  fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first

  light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a

  collapsing house of cards.

  Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking

  cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison's masonry, dismembered its

  iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all

  too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.

  This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive

  construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in

  celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the

  Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this

  way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this

  last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost, seemed ancient

  history. But now that Spandau's forbidding battlements no longer