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
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