‘Astonishing!’ Schellenberg said.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ Devlin told him. ‘So let’s have the right photos taken. I want to get on with it.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘I want to go as soon as possible. Tomorrow or the day after.’
Schellenberg looked at him gravely. ‘You’re sure about this?’
‘There’s nothing else to hang about for now that your friend at UFA has given me a new face. We have the set-up at Chernay, Asa and the Lysander. That leaves us with three uncertainties. My IRA friend, Michael Ryan, the Shaws and the Priory.’
‘True,’ Schellenberg said. ‘No matter what the situation at the Priory, if your friend Ryan is not available you would be presented with real difficulty. The same with the Shaws.’
Devlin said, ‘Without the Shaws it would be an impossibility so the sooner I get there, the sooner we know.’
‘Right,’ Schellenberg said briskly, and rang for Ilse Huber who came in. ‘Papers for Mr Devlin from the forgery department.’
‘They’ll need photos of the new me,’ Devlin told her.
‘But Mr Devlin, the British identity card is what you need. A ration book for certain items of food, clothing coupons, driving licence. None of these require a photo.’
‘That’s a pity,’ Devlin told her. ‘If you’re being checked out by someone the fact that they can compare you with a photo is so satisfying that you’re on your way before you know it.’
‘Have you decided on your name and circumstances yet?’ Schellenberg asked.
‘As I’ve often said, the best kind of lie is the one that sticks closest to the truth,’ Devlin said. ‘No sense in trying to sound completely English. Even the great Devlin wouldn’t get away with that. So I’m an Ulsterman.’ He turned to Ilse. ‘Are you getting this?’
‘Every word.’
‘Conlon. Now there’s a name I’ve always liked. My first girlfriend was a Conlon. And my old uncle, the priest in Belfast I lived with as a boy. He was a Henry, though everyone called him Harry.’
‘Father Harry Conlon then?’ she said.
‘Yes, but more than that. Major Harry Conlon, Army chaplain, on extended leave after being wounded.’
‘Where?’ Schellenberg asked.
‘In my head.’ Devlin tapped the bullet scar. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Geographically speaking.’
‘How about the Allied invasion of Sicily this year?’ Schellenberg suggested.
‘Excellent. I got clipped in an air strike on the first day. That way I don’t need too much information about the place if anyone asks me.’
‘I’ve seen a cross-reference with British Army chaplains in the military documentation file,’ Ilse said. ‘I remember because it struck me as being unusual. May I go and check on it, General? It would only take a few minutes.’
Schellenberg nodded. She went out and he said, ‘I’ll make the arrangements for your flight to Ireland. I’ve already done some checking with the Luftwaffe. They suggest you take off from Laville base outside Brest.’
‘Talk about déjà vu,’ Devlin said. ‘That’s where I left from before. It wouldn’t happen to be a Dornier bomber they suggest, the good old Flying Pencil?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Ah well, it worked last time, I suppose.’
Ilse came in at that moment. ‘I was right. Look what I found.’
The pass was in the name of a Major George Harvey, Army chaplain, and there was a photo. It had been issued by the War Office and authorized unrestricted access to both military bases and hospitals.
‘Astonishing how powerful the need for spiritual comfort is,’ Schellenberg said. ‘Where did this come from?’
‘Documents taken from a prisoner of war, General. I’m certain forging will have no difficulty copying it and it would give Mr Devlin the photo he wanted.’
‘Brilliant,’ Devlin said. ‘You’re a marvel of a woman.’
‘You’ll need to see the clothing department as well,’ she said. ‘Will you want a uniform?’
‘It’s a thought. I mean, it could come in useful. Otherwise, a dark suit, clerical collar, dark hat, raincoat, and they can give me a Military Cross. If I’m a priest, I might as well be a gallant one. Always impressive. And I’ll want a travel voucher from Belfast to London. The kind the military use, just in case I do want to play the major.’
‘I’ll get things started.’
She went out and Schellenberg said, ‘What else?’
‘Cash. Five thousand quid, I’d say. That’s to take care of my having to hand a few bribes out as well as supporting myself. If you find one of those canvas military holdalls officers carry these days, the money could go in a false bottom of some sort.’
‘I’m sure there’ll be no problem.’
‘Fivers, Walter, and the real thing. None of the false stuff I happen to know the SS has been printing.’
‘You have my word on it. You’ll need a code-name.’
‘We’ll stick with Shaw’s. Falcon will do fine. Give me the right details for contacting your radio people at this end and I’ll be in touch before you know it.’
‘Excellent. The Führer’s conference at Belle Ile is on the twenty-first. We could be cutting it fine.’
‘We’ll manage.’ Devlin stood up. ‘I think I’ll try the canteen.’ He turned at the door. ‘Oh, just one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘When I was dropped by parachute into Ireland in forty-one for the Abwehr, I had ten thousand pounds in a suitcase, funds for the IRA. When I opened it I found neat bundles of fivers, each one with a Bank of Berlin band around it. Do you think they could do better this time?’
Schellenberg said, ‘And they wonder why we’re losing the war.’
Asa was in the canteen drinking a beer and reading a copy of Signal, the magazine for German forces, when Devlin came in. The Irishman got a coffee and joined him.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Asa said. ‘I hardly recognized you.’
‘The new me, Father Harry Conlon, very much at your service. Also Major Harry Conlon, Army chaplain, and I’m on my way tomorrow night.’
‘Isn’t that pushing it?’
‘Jesus, son, I want to get on with it.’
‘Where are you flying from?’
‘Laville, near Brest.’
‘And the plane?’
‘Dornier 215.’
‘Okay, I’ll fly you myself.’
‘No, you won’t, you’re too valuable. Say you got me to Ireland and dropped me off, then got shot down by a British night-fighter off the French coast on your way back. A right old balls-up that would be.’
‘Okay,’ Asa said reluctantly, ‘but at least I can fly you down to Laville. Nobody can object to that.’
‘Always nicer to have a friend see you off,’ Devlin said.
It was just after nine the following night, rain pounding in from the Atlantic, when Asa stood in the control tower at Laville and watched the Dornier take off. He opened a window, listened to it fade into the night. He closed the window and said to the radio man, ‘Send this message.’
Devlin, sitting at the back of the Dornier in a flying suit, his supply bag beside him, was approached by the wireless operator. ‘A message for you, sir. A bad joke on someone’s part.’
‘Read it.’
‘It just says: “Break a leg”.’
Devlin laughed. ‘Well, son, you’d have to be an actor to understand that one.’
The Dornier made good time and it was shortly after two in the morning when Devlin jumped at five thousand feet. As on the last occasion, he had chosen County Monaghan which was an area he knew well and adjacent to the Ulster border.
The necessity of a supply bag to the parachutist is that dangling twenty feet below him on a cord it hits the ground first, a useful precaution when landing in the dark. A crescent moon showed occasionally which helped. Devlin made an excellent landing and within minutes had his suitcase and a tren
ching shovel out of the supply bag, a dark raincoat and trilby. He found a ditch, scraped a hole, put the supply bag, parachute and flying suit in it then tossed the shovel into a nearby pool.
He put on his raincoat and hat, opened the case and found the steel-rimmed spectacles which he carried in there for safety. Underneath the neatly folded uniform was a webbing belt and holster containing a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, the type frequently issued to British officers. There was a box of fifty cartridges to go with it. Everything seemed in order. He put on the spectacles and stood up.
‘Hail Mary full of Grace, here am I, a sinner,’ he said softly. ‘Do what you can for me,’ and he crossed himself, picked up his suitcase and moved on.
The Ulster border, to anyone who knew it, was never a problem. He followed a network of country lanes and the occasional field path and by four fifteen was safe in Ulster and standing on British soil.
And then he had an incredible piece of luck. A farm truck passed him, stopped and the driver, a man in his sixties, looked out. ‘Jesus, Father, and where would you be walking to at this time of the morning?’
‘Armagh,’ Devlin said. ‘To catch the milk train to Belfast.’
‘Now isn’t that the strange thing and me going all the way to Belfast market.’
‘God bless you, my son,’ Devlin said and climbed in beside him.
‘Nothing to it, Father,’ the farmer told him as he drove away. ‘After all, if a priest can’t get a helping hand in Ireland, where would he get one?’
It was later that morning, at ten o’clock, when Schellenberg knocked on the Reichsführer’s door and went in.
‘Yes?’ Himmler said. ‘What is it?’
‘I’ve had confirmation from Laville, Reichsführer, that Devlin jumped into Southern Ireland at approximately two a.m.’
‘Really?’ Himmler said. ‘You’ve moved fast, Brigadeführer. My congratulations.’
‘Of course none of this guarantees success, Reichsführer. We have to take even Devlin’s safe landing on faith and the whole business when he gets to London is very open-ended.’
‘There’s been a change in our plans,’ Himmler said. ‘The Führer’s conference at Belle Ile will now take place on the fifteenth.’
‘But Reichsführer, that only gives us a week.’
‘Yes, well we’re in the Führer’s hands. It is not for us to query his decisions. Still, I know you’ll do your best. Carry on, General.’
Schellenberg went out, closing the door, feeling totally bewildered. ‘For God’s sake, what’s the bastard playing at?’ he said softly and went back to his office.
8
In Belfast, Devlin found it impossible to get a ticket for the crossing to Heysham in Lancashire. There was a waiting list and the situation was no better on the Glasgow route. Which left Larne, north of Belfast, to Stranraer, the way he had got across the water for Operation Eagle. It was a short run and a special boat train all the way to London, but this time he wasn’t going to take any chances. He caught the local train from Belfast to Larne, went into a public toilet on the docks and locked himself in. When he came out fifteen minutes later, he was in uniform.
It paid off immediately. The boat was full, but not to military personnel. He produced the travel voucher they had given him in Berlin. The booking clerk hardly looked at it, took in the major’s uniform, the ribbon for the Military Cross and the clergyman’s dog collar and booked him on board immediately.
It was the same at Stranraer where, in spite of the incredible number of people being carried by the train, he was allocated a seat in a first-class carriage. Stranraer to Glasgow, Glasgow down to Birmingham and then to London arriving at King’s Cross at three o’clock the following morning. When he walked from the train, one face amongst the crowd, the first thing he heard was an air-raid siren.
The beginning of 1944 became known to Londoners as the Little Blitz as the Luftwaffe, the performance of its planes greatly improved, turned attention to night raids on London again. The siren Devlin heard heralded the approach of JU88 pathfinders from Chartres in France. The heavy bombers came later but by then he was, like thousands of others, far below ground, sitting out a hard night in the comparative safety of a London tube station.
Mary Ryan was a girl that people remarked on, not because she was particularly beautiful, but because there was a strange, almost ethereal look to her. The truth was her health had never been good and the pressures of wartime didn’t help. Her face was always pale, with dark smudges beneath her eyes, and she had a heavy limp which had been a fact of life for her since birth. She was only nineteen and looked old beyond her years.
Her father, an IRA activist, had died of a heart attack in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin just before the war, her mother of cancer in 1940 leaving her with only one relative, her uncle Michael, her father’s younger brother who had lived in London for years, on his own since the death of his wife in 1938. She had moved from Dublin to London and now kept house for him and worked as an assistant in a large grocery store in Wapping High Street.
No more though for when she reported for work at eight o’clock that morning, the shop and a sizeable section of the street was reduced to a pile of smoking rubble. She stayed, watching the ambulances, the firemen dousing things down, the men of the heavy rescue unit sifting through the foundations for those who might still be alive.
After doing what she could to help, she turned and walked away, a strange figure in her black beret and the old raincoat, limping rapidly along the pavement. She stopped at a back-street shop, purchased milk and a loaf of bread, some cigarettes for her uncle, then went out again. It started to rain as she turned into Cable Wharf.
There had originally been twenty houses backing on to the river. Fifteen had been demolished by a bomb during the Blitz. Four more were boarded up. She and her uncle lived in the end one. The kitchen door was at the side and reached by an iron terrace, the waters of the Thames below. She paused at the rail, looking down towards Tower Bridge and the Tower of London in the near distance. She loved the river, never tired of it. The large ships from the London docks passing to and fro, the constant barge traffic. There was a wooden stairway at the end of the terrace dropping down to a small private jetty. Her uncle kept two boats moored there. A rowing skiff and a larger craft, a small motor boat with a cabin. As she looked over she saw a man smoking a cigarette and sheltering from the rain. He wore a black hat and raincoat and a suitcase was on the jetty beside him.
‘Who are you?’ she called sharply. ‘It’s private property down there.’
‘Good day to you, a colleen,’ he called cheerfully, lifted the case and came up the stairs.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
Devlin smiled. ‘It’s Michael Ryan I’m after. Would you be knowing him? I tried the door, but there was no answer.’
‘I’m his niece, Mary,’ she said. ‘Uncle Michael’s not due home just yet. He was on a night shift.’
‘A night shift?’ Devlin asked.
‘Yes, on the cabs. Ten till ten. Twelve hours.’
‘I see.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Another hour and a half then.’
She was slightly uncertain, unwilling to ask him in, he sensed that. Instead she said, ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before.’
‘Not surprising and me only just over from Ireland.’
‘You know Uncle Michael then?’
‘Oh, yes, old friends from way back. Conlon’s my name. Father Harry Conlon,’ he added, opening the top of his dark raincoat so that she could see the dog collar.
She relaxed at once. ‘Would you like to come in and wait, Father?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll take a little walk and come back later. Could I leave my suitcase?’
‘Of course.’
She unlocked the kitchen door. He followed her in and put the case down. ‘Would you know St Mary’s Priory, by any chance?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘You go along Wapping High Street to Wapping Wall. I
t’s near St James’s Stairs on the river. About a mile.’
He stepped back outside. ‘The grand view you have here. There’s a book by Dickens that starts with a girl and her father in a boat on the Thames searching for the bodies of the drowned and what was in their pockets.’
‘Our Mutual Friend,’ she told him. ‘The girl’s name was Lizzie.’
‘By God, girl, and aren’t you the well-read one?’
She warmed to him for that. ‘Books are everything.’
‘And isn’t that the fact?’ He touched his hat. ‘I’ll be back.’
He walked away along the terrace, his footsteps echoing on the boards and she closed the door.
From Wapping High Street the damage done to the London Docks in the Blitz was plain to see and yet the amazing thing was how busy they were, ships everywhere.
‘I wonder what old Adolf would make of this?’ Devlin said softly. ‘Give him a nasty surprise, I shouldn’t wonder.’
He found St Mary’s Priory with no trouble. It stood on the other side of the main road from the river, high walls in grey stone, darkened even more by the filth of the city over the years, the roof of the chapel clear to see on the other side, a bell tower rising above it. Interestingly enough the great oak door that was the entrance stood open.
The notice board beside it said: ‘St Mary’s Priory, Little Sisters of Pity: Mother Superior, Sister Maria Palmer.’ Devlin leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette and watched. After a while a porter in a blue uniform appeared. He stood on the top step looking up and down the road then went back in.
Below there was a narrow band of shingle and mud between the river and the retaining wall. Some little distance away were steps down from the wall. Devlin descended casually and strolled along the strip of shingle, remembering the architect’s drawings and the old drainage tunnel. The shingle ran out, water lapped in against the wall and then he saw it, an arched entrance almost completely flooded, a couple of feet of headroom only.
He went back up to the road and on the next corner from the Priory found a public house called The Bargee. He went into the saloon bar. There was a young woman in headscarf and slacks mopping the floor. She looked up, surprise on her face.
Eagle Has Flown, The Page 12