Greg Iles - Spandau Phoenix

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.