Spandau Phoenix

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.