by Daniel Wyatt
“Turning port three degrees,” Croucher acknowledged.
“Five above. Range two thousand.”
Visibility was down to one hundred feet. The radar scope was approaching the minimum range.
“Fifteen hundred ... twelve hundred ...”
Suddenly, the target slid off the baseline and disappeared into the outgoing pulse. “We’re off, Jack. Keep a sharp lookout.”
“OK.”
“Slow down,” Jones warned.
Croucher backed off on the throttles as he strained for sight of the target. The cloud grew thicker. Then it happened. There it was. Directly in front of them. The rear view of an ME-110.
“Look out!” Jones screamed, closing his eyes. “We’re going to collide!”
Croucher yanked the stick towards him.
* * * *
At that precise moment, Rudolf Hess happened to glance through the Plexiglas above and to his shock saw a twin-engine plane directly above him, its whirling propellers a stone’s throw away. Then it banked away right, disappearing into the cloud. Hess alertly pressed the stick forward, sending the fighter into a dive.
* * * *
They came out of the turn and levelled off.
“That was close.”
Croucher agreed. “Too ruddy close.”
“That was an ME-110, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I think it was.”
“Whatever it is, it’s back on scope. Ease up,” Jones said, his eyes stuck to the display. “We have to find out if he’s the one.”
Croucher pulled the throttles towards him. “Give me a bearing.”
“Ten below. To port. Range fifteen hundred. Throttle back.”
The transmitter light flicked on, then went off. Once more the target was disappearing into the baseline of the radar scope. Croucher gave the target some distance before he dropped the nose.
“Good. That’s good. That’s it. Level out,” Jones said, guiding his pilot. “Eight below to starboard. Great.” A minute later. “Six below. Range nineteen hundred. The bugger’s trying to get away. Pour it on. Let’s see what we got.”
“I see him!” Croucher shouted, pointing. Through the dispersing cloud, they spotted a camouflaged ME-110 below. “She’s a Hun, all right. ME-110.”
* * * *
Hess glanced over his shoulder at the twin-engine fighter with the airborne radar following him. She was fast. Real fast, as evidenced by how quickly she was closing the gap, despite Hess giving full-throttle to his own machine. Hess was fighting for each breath, his World War I lung injury pestering him. To his surprise, the Messerschmitt 110 was not the fastest twin-engine in Europe as he had been led to believe. He felt so alone at this moment, and so cold from the onrushing air in the cockpit through the shattered window.
He wondered what an RAF fighter with an airborne radar crew was doing this far out over the North Sea in daylight hours. It was too far for a patrol. Hess didn’t stand much of a chance in an unarmed fighter, and he had nowhere to bail out. He wouldn’t survive twenty minutes in the North Sea.
Hess watched through his shattered window as the strange fighter blasted by and banked to port. He caught a good look at the RAF roundel on the fuselage. What speed! There was no time for evasive action, not the way that thing could fly.
* * * *
“He didn’t shoot,” Croucher said.
“And the markings were NJ-OQ. She’s not the one. Must be a stray. What do we do now?”
Croucher knew what to do. “Shoot her down. That’s what. She’s still a Jerry.” He put the Mosquito into a stiff bank to port, his vision going grey from the pressure.
* * * *
Hess realized there was still sufficient fuel for an alternative, such as neutral Sweden. Or he could head back to Denmark? But what hope did he have there? Whoever was out to get him would finish him off.
Then he had an idea.
* * * *
“What’s he doing?” Croucher gasped. “He’s heading for the deck.”
“He won’t get away.”
Croucher set the gun master switch to fire. The twenty-millimetre cannon was ready to do its work. He sent the Mosquito into a dive, hot on the tail of the German, applying more power to the Merlin engines, until he was two hundred yards behind his prey, whose pilot was now jinking his aircraft to stay out of harm’s way. Croucher nudged the stick left and right to line the ME-110 in the centre of the gun sight.
“He’s a tricky one, Jack.”
It was now a game of cat-and-mouse. Pilot against pilot. Machine against machine. The ME-110 dove, twisting and turning, and Croucher dove after him. At five thousand feet, the German suddenly climbed to starboard, then dove again. Croucher lined the German up in the gun sight, then lost him in a violent banking turn.
They were 150 yards apart, with Croucher closing fast.
“Slow down or we’ll overshoot.”
Croucher knew his navigator was right. At one hundred yards, the German was centred in the Mosquito’s gun sight. Then he wiggled away. This Jerry was bloody good. Croucher hit the firing button, attempting a deflection shot with his armour-piercing and incendiary cannon. The fighter shuddered from the noise, and the speed dropped off dramatically, as the cockpit quickly filled with the smell of burned cordite. But he missed. Then, in a stroke of luck, the German’s tail crossed Croucher gun sight. He fired again and missed again. Croucher hung on and lined up another shot, this one between the wings.
He fired. They saw smoke.
“You got him, Jack!”
* * * *
Hess acted instinctively. He closed the throttle to the starboard engine and feathered the prop. The RAF fighter roared over and climbed. Hess turned off the fuel cock, switched off the ignition, and closed the shutter. The starboard prop was spinning slowly. Behind the engine belched a trail of black smoke. He could still make it to Scotland on one engine, if he had to.
But the British fighter probably had other plans because it turned and came around at him. Hess tried to anticipate the strange fighter’s next move. He chopped the throttle until the enemy machine came within seventy-five yards. Then he crossed directly in front of the plane, pushed on the power, and climbed as the enemy almost banged into him.
* * * *
Croucher’s reflexes weren’t quick enough to avoid the German’s prop wash. The engines sputtered and the wing rocked. Then the experimental Mosquito fighter turned on its side and began to spiral.
“We’re going down! Do something damn it!” Jones yelled, the world spinning around in tight circles.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!”
“Try harder!”
But Croucher was powerless to gain control. He waggled the stick. Jones banged on the glass. The ocean raced towards them. This was not good. This was not good!
TWENTY-TWO
Over the North Sea
Eighty-five miles off the east coast of Great Britain, Hess fiddled with his beam recording apparatus, positioning himself onto the invisible radio beacon that Pintsch had arranged to be sent out from Aalborg.
Hess aimed for the wide-arcing beam by performing the required right-angle procedure. As he drew near to the tunnel of the beam, his X-gerat — the beam recorder — started to pick up a pattern. He heard a fast-paced DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT in his headphones. The closer he came to the tunnel, the steadier the tone became until it merged into a continuous hum. Then he heard a slower DIT... DIT... DIT... Now he had gone too far to the right. He nudged the stick to the left ever so carefully. The hum gradually returned. He was now on track. The line would take him right to Dunhampton. One of the gauges told him his port engine was beginning to overheat from the strain, but it should make it. His face was numb from the cold rush of air through the window. He was going in with a damaged aircraft — one howling engine — but he was going in.
The sun was casting its last few minutes of golden rays over the Scottish coastline, dead ahead. The air was calm, the sky unbelievably clear. A pale mist reste
d upon the water. He had been promised excellent flying conditions and he got them. He suddenly believed that the mist had appeared just for his sake. God was on his side. The side of peace and decency in a crazy world. That’s if there was a God, a higher authority. Someone or something had to be higher than Adolf Hitler. Hess glanced at the altimeter — eight thousand feet — and threw the aircraft into a nose-down attitude.
* * * *
Stanmore, England
The British called it RDF — Radio Direction Finding — the detection system that had saved the country during the Battle of Britain by identifying German aircraft the second they were in the air over France, well before they even hit the far side of the Channel. Twenty-four hours a day, RDF generated pulses of energy in short radio waves on high frequencies of more than one thousand megahertz. These same waves were concentrated into narrow beams, searching the far reaches of England and Scotland.
At that moment, Hess’s range, course, and speed were being monitored by RAF Fighter Command Headquarters, north of London, in a room smelling of electronic machinery. One attentive woman plotter stood over the table and guided a lone black enemy aircraft marker — tagged Raid 42 — into position over the giant grid-map of Britain’s eastern approaches. Within minutes, Chain Home Stations sent additional reports to Stanmore of a low-flying aircraft heading west at more than three hundred miles per hour. At first, those at Stanmore took the flight to be a diversion to draw attention to a raid at another part of the island. To be certain one way or the other, a call went out to 13 Fighter Group Headquarters.
* * * *
Edinburgh, Scotland
At 2200 hours, Wing Commander the Duke of Hamilton was on evening duty in the 13 Fighter Group Operations Room at RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh when the data came through on Raid 42. For the last four nights, the duke and a handful of his officers had been on steady call due to a series of small German raids on parts of Scotland. Earlier that day, Hamilton, behind the controls of his Hurricane fighter, engaged his second in command in a fierce mock dog fight over the Firth of Forth.
Now, Raid 42 appeared on the filter board in front of him. One word from Hamilton would alert every fighter base for a hundred miles. He had to make a move because an enemy fighter was on the loose in his airspace. The two-month-old “Instruction 17” stated that on full-moon nights under good visibility, enemy attacks on nearby Glasgow and Newcastle were to be met by a sufficient fighter force.
A telephone rang.
A dark-haired airman in glasses close to the filter board caught Hamilton’s attention. “Excuse me, Wing Commander, the Observer Corps at Chatton says the aircraft is an ME-110 and it’s flying at fifty feet!”
Hamilton laughed out loud, the others in the room quickly joining in. The RAF never did take the civilian Observer Corps too seriously. “It has to be a Dornier. A 110 doesn’t have the range,” Hamilton informed the men. “Our observer boys did it again. They couldn’t identify an ME-110 if their lives depended on it.”
* * * *
RAF Dunhampton, Scotland
Group Captain Walker answered his ringing telephone, while Wesley Hollinger looked on anxiously in front of the wide window.
“Thank you,” the RAF officer said, hanging up. Easing out of his chair, he turned to the American. “Radar picked up a swift-moving aircraft off the Scottish coast just a few minutes ago, and several Observer Corps people have identified an ME-110 flying west at zero altitude, heading this way. It gave no IFF signal.”
“Sounds like our boy.”
“Indeed.”
* * * *
Denise and Schubert struggled through the trees, and got on their stomachs as they neared a long, thick roll of barbed wire that circled the aerodrome. They could see the runways and the dispersal ahead. To the left stood the hangars, the tower, and the administration office.
“How am I supposed to get through this?’’ Schubert asked, pointing at the wire.
Denise smiled. “This way.”
They crawled back into the trees and ran a few hundred yards towards the buildings. As they neared their destination, they heard noises and voices. Then a car or truck door slammed.
“Get down!” Denise whispered.
“What now?” Schubert whispered back. He was lying on his stomach, the woman only a few feet away.
“There’s a hole in the barbed wire farther down there, fifty feet or so. You won’t see it unless you’re right on it. I’m friendly with an NCO on the base. Most of the men know about the opening and use it because it’s closer to the pub up the road. They’re too lazy to go to the gate on the far side of the aerodrome, I suppose.”
Schubert didn’t care. “Yes, I suppose.”
“This is where I depart. Heil Hitler, Herr Reichsfuehrer,” she said, then left in a hurry through the thicket.
It was up to Schubert now. He saw a line of refuelling trucks on the other side of the barbed wire. All he needed was one. Then he had to reach the aircraft, providing the pilot had made it. It would be dark soon. Schubert waited nervously, laid out on his stomach for what seemed like at least half an hour. When he finally checked his watch, he saw that only seven minutes had elapsed.
* * * *
Where are they? Denise thought, scrambling back to the woods. She squatted and looked around. A tug on her arm made her jump. A stocky, six-foot man in a long, open coat stood over her.
Denise bounced to her feet. It was Snowden. “Where the hell were you?”
“I was going to ask you the same question,” Snowden said.
“I took the south road—”
“I told you not to take the south road. There was a change of plans, remember. It’s too winding and we couldn’t see you coming.”
Denise felt her sweaty forehead. “Oh, yes, I do remember. Sorry, I’m not a professional like the rest of you. I’m a throw-in, as you may recall. I’m bloody terrified as it is. Do you know who I had in my auto?”
“Who?”
“Rudolf Hess, that’s who. Rudolf bloody Hess. I’m still shaking like a leaf.”
“Hess? Are you certain?”
“Yes. No mistake.”
“Where is he now?”
“I led him through the barbed wire.”
“You did what!” Snowden exploded. “You mean he’s on the base?”
“That’s right.”
“How could you?”
“How could I not? What else was I supposed to do? Kill him? Me? With what, my pencil? And if I could have stalled him, he would’ve known something was up and he would’ve killed me.”
“Is he armed?”
“A Luger, for sure. I saw it. And he removed some papers from a briefcase and stashed them inside his coat.”
“All right,” Snowden grunted. “I’ll let those on the inside know.”
* * * *
Schubert heard a sound through the trees. Thinking it was a single-engine fighter, he was surprised to see an ME-110 flying on one engine, turning to his right. There were only a few minutes left until darkness.
He found the barbed wire opening and carefully squeezed through it, mindful of the fact that he could easily get tangled in the sharp points. Free of the wire, he half-crawled, half-ran to the first of the smaller hangars, which shielded him as he scrambled to one of the trucks opposite the hangar tarmac. Once he got to the truck, he peeked over the door. Through the open window, he saw the Messerschmitt fighter touch down with a screech of tires. His heart thumped like a drum all the way up to his throat. Then to his left three men came out of nowhere and began to slowly work their way in his direction. Schubert ran behind the hangar and flew around the other side. Ahead, all he saw was a black, four-door sedan. He ran to it, opened the passenger door, and jumped in. He was about to slide over to the driver’s side and start it up, when he heard footsteps. He threw himself down to the passenger side floorboards, withdrew his Luger and waited...
The steps came closer. Then the door opened. Schubert looked up and pointed th
e gun at the startled young man who stood gawking at him.
“Don’t make a sound.” Schubert warned him.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Never mind that. Get in and shut up!”
TWENTY-THREE
RAF Dunhampton, Scotland
“Now what do you want me to do?” Hollinger slammed the sedan door, eyeing the sweaty individual in the shadows, crouching down, his hat pulled down over his forehead and his collar flipped up.
“Look straight down the asphalt and drive me out to the fighter,” Schubert demanded in accented English. “Keep both hands on the steering wheel.”
As calmly as he could, Hollinger released the brake and put the sedan in gear. As he drove slowly past the Secret Service men, one of the men nodded. Hollinger didn’t dare nod back, not with a gun barrel poking his ribs. Ahead, near the mechanics’ shack, the Messerschmitt had already come to a full stop at the edge of the mile-long runway. A low-to-the-ground mist had appeared.
By the time Hollinger had braked at the runway’s end, the aircraft had spun around 180 degrees to face the hangars and the base. With the sun now below the horizon, the twin-engine fighter was a profile of shapes superimposed against the orange sky. It struck Hollinger as odd to see that only one engine was running and that the right-side Plexiglas was shattered. And it had different fuselage letters than the NJ-C11 he had been expecting. These were NJ-OQ.
“What do I do now?” Hollinger asked.
“Put your head down on the steering wheel,” Schubert answered.
When Hollinger leaned forward, Schubert got up and clubbed him in the back of the head twice with the Luger. With the driver out, Schubert had to act fast and with precision. The pilot was coming down the wing, holding his briefcase. Schubert recalled his orders. Kill the pilot. Take the papers. Return by sub. He slid out of the sedan to meet the pilot who by this time had come around the starboard side of the fighter.
At ten feet apart, Rudolf Hess and Felix Schubert saw each other.
“Hess,” Schubert uttered, mouth open.