by Jack Higgins
His very uniqueness made most other pilots avoid him. He ordered a cognac, drank it quickly and ordered another.
A voice said, 'And it's not even lunchtime.'
As Asa turned, the Gruppenkommandant, Colonel Erich Adler, sat on the stool next to him. 'Champagne,' he told the barman.
'And what's the occasion?' Asa demanded.
'First, my miserable Yankee friend, the good Brigadeführer Farber has recommended you for an immediate Iron Cross First Class which, from what he says, you deserve.'
'But Erich, I've got a medal,' Asa said plaintively.
Adler ignored him, waiting for the champagne, then passed him a glass. 'Second, you're out of it. Grounded immediately.'
'I'm what?'
'You fly out to Berlin on the next available transport, priority one. That's usually Goering. You report to General Walter Schellenberg at SD Headquarters in Berlin.'
'Just a minute,' Asa told him. 'I only fly on the Russian Front. That was the deal.'
'I wouldn't argue if I were you. This order comes by way of Himmler himself.' Adler raised his glass. 'Good luck, my friend.'
'God help me, but I think I'm going to need it,' Asa Vaughan told him.
Devlin came awake about three in the morning to the sound of gunfire in the distance. He got up and padded into the living room and peered out through a chink in the blackout curtains. He could see the flashes on the far horizon beyond the city.
Behind him, Use switched on the light in the kitchen. 'I couldn't sleep either. I'll make some coffee.'
She was wearing a robe against the cold, her hair in two pigtails that made her look curiously vulnerable. He went and got his overcoat and put it on over his pyjamas and sat at the table smoking a cigarette.
'Two days and no suitable landing site for a plane,' he said. 'I think the General's getting impatient.'
'He likes to do things yesterday,' Use said. 'At least we've found a suitable base on the French coast and the pilot looks promising.'
'You can say that again,' Devlin told her. 'A Yank in the SS, not that the poor sod had much choice from what the record says. I can't wait to meet him.'
'My husband was SS, did you know that? A sergeant-major in a panzer regiment.'
'I'm sorry,' Devlin said.
'You must think we're all very wicked sometimes, Mr Devlin, but you must understand how it started. After the First War, Germany was on her knees, ruined.'
'And then came the Führer?'
'He seemed to offer so much. Pride again - prosperity. And then it started - so many bad things, the Jews most of all.' She hesitated. 'One of my great-grandmothers was Jewish. My husband had to get special permission to marry me. It's there on my record and sometimes I wake in the night and think what would happen to me if someone decided to do something about it.'
Devlin took her hands. 'Hush now, girl, we all get that three o'clock in the morning feeling when everything looks bad.' There were tears in her eyes. 'Here, I'll make you smile. My disguise for this little jaunt I'm taking. Guess what?'
She was smiling slightly already. 'No, tell me.'
'A priest.'
Her eyes widened. 'You, a priest?' She started to laugh. 'Oh, no, Mr Devlin.'
'Wait now, while I explain. You'd be surprised at the religious background I have. Oh yes.' He nodded solemnly. 'Altar boy, then, after the British hanged my father in nineteen twenty-one, my mother and I went to live with my old uncle who was a priest in Belfast. He sent me to a Jesuit boarding school. They beat religion into you there all right.' He lit another cigarette. 'Oh, I can play the priest as well as any priest, if you follow me.'
'Well, let's hope you don't have to celebrate Mass or hear confession.' She laughed. 'Have another coffee.'
'Dear God, woman, you've given me an idea there. Where's your briefcase? The file we were looking at earlier? The general file?'
She went into her bedroom and came back with it. 'Here it is.'
Devlin leafed through it quickly, then nodded. 'I was right. It's here in his record. The Steiners are an old Catholic family.'
'What are you getting at?'
'This St Mary's Priory. It's the sort of place priests visit all the time to hear the confessions. The Little Sisters of Pity are saints compared to the rest of us, but they need confession before they partake of Mass and both functions need a priest. Then there would be those patients who were Catholic.'
'Including Steiner, you mean?'
'They couldn't deny him a priest and him in a place like that.' He grinned. 'It's an idea.'
'Have you thought any more about your appearance?' she asked.
'Ah, we can leave that for another few days, then I'll see one of these film people the General mentioned. Put myself in their hands.'
She nodded, 'Let's hope we come up with something in those Sea Lion files. The trouble is there's so much to wade through.' She got up. 'Anyway, I think I'll go back to bed.'
Outside, the air-raid siren sounded. Devlin smiled wryly. 'No you won't. You'll get dressed, like a good girl, and we'll go down and spend another jolly night in the cellars. I'll see you in five minutes.'
Schellenberg said 'A priest? Yes, I like that.'
'So do I,' Devlin said. 'It's like a uniform, you see. A soldier, a postman, a railway porter — it's the appearance of things you remember, not the face. As I say, the uniform. Priests are like that. Nice and anonymous.'
They were standing at a collapsible map table Schellenberg had erected, the plans of St Mary's Priory spread before them.
'Having studied these on and off for some days, what is your opinion?' Schellenberg asked.
'The most interesting thing is this plan.' Devlin tapped it with a finger. 'The architect's plans for the changes made in nineteen hundred and ten when the Priory was reconsecrated Roman Catholic and the Little Sisters took over.'
'What's your point?'
'Underneath, London is a labyrinth, a subterranean world of sewers. I read once there's over a hundred miles of rivers under the city, like the Fleet which rises in Hampstead and comes out into the Thames at Blackfriars, all underground.'
'So?'
'Seven or eight hundred years of sewers, underground rivers, tunnels, and nobody knows where half of them are until they're excavating or making changes, as they were at the Priory. Look at the architect's plan here. Regular flooding of the crypt beneath the chapel. They were able to deal with the problem because they discovered a stream running through an eighteenth-century tunnel next door. See, it's indicated there on the plan running into the Thames.'
'Very interesting,' Schellenberg said.
'They built a grill in the wall of the crypt to allow water to draw into that tunnel. There's a note here on the plan.'
'A way out, you mean?'
'It's a possibility. Would have to be checked.' Devlin threw down his pencil. 'It's knowing what goes on in that place that's the thing, General. For all we know it could be dead easy. A handful of guards, slack discipline.'
'On the other hand, they could be waiting for you.'
'Ah, but not if they think I'm still in Berlin,' Devlin reminded him.
At that moment, Use Huber came in, very excited. 'You were right to recommend me to check on British right-wing organizations, General. I found details of a man in there cross-referenced to Sea Lion.'
'What's his name?' Schellenberg demanded.
'Shaw,' she said. 'Sir Maxwell Shaw,' and she laid two bulky files on the table.
Chapter Six
ROMNEY MARSH, SOME forty-five miles south-east of London on the coast of Kent, is a two-hundred-square-mile area reclaimed from the sea by a system of dykes and channels started as far back as Roman times. Much of it is below sea level and only innumerable drainage ditches prevent it from reverting to its natural state.
Charbury was not even a village. A hamlet of no more than fifteen houses, a church and a village store. There wasn't even a pub any longer and half the cottages were empty, only the old folk
left. The younger people had departed long ago for war work or service in the armed forces.
It was raining that morning as Sir Maxwell Shaw walked down the village street, a black Labrador at his heels. He was a heavily built man of medium height, face craggy, the evidence of heavy drinking there and the black moustache didn't help. He looked morose and angry much of the time, ready for trouble and most people avoided him.
He wore a tweed hat, the brim turned down, a waterproof shooting jacket and Wellingtons. He carried a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun under one arm. When he reached the store he bent down and fondled the Labrador's ears, his face softening.
'Good girl, Nell. Stay.'
A bell tinkled as he went in the shop. There was an old man in his seventies leaning against the counter talking to a woman behind who was even older.
'Morning, Tinker,' Shaw said.
'Morning, Sir Maxwell.'
'You promised me some cigarettes, Mrs Dawson.'
The old lady produced a package from beneath the counter. 'Managed to get you two hundred Players from my man in Dymchurch, Sir Maxwell. Black market, I'm afraid, so they come expensive.'
'Isn't everything these days? Put it on my bill.'
He put the package in one of his game pockets and went out. As he closed the door he heard Tinker say, 'Poor sod.'
He took a deep breath to contain his anger and touched the Labrador. 'Let's go, girl,' he said and went back along the street.
It was Maxwell Shaw's grandfather who had made the family's fortune, a Sheffield ironmaster who had risen on the high tide of Victorian industrialization. It was he who had purchased the estate, renamed Shaw Place
, where he had retired, a millionaire with a baronetcy, in 1885. His son had shown no interest in the family firm which had passed into other hands. A career soldier, he had died leading his men into battle at Spion Kop during the Boer War.
Maxwell Shaw, born in 1890, had followed in his father's footsteps. Eton, Sandhurst, a commission in the Indian Army. He served in Mesopotamia during the First World War, came home in 1916 to transfer to an infantry regiment. His mother was still alive, Lavinia, his younger sister by ten years, was married to a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and herself serving as a nurse. In 1917 Maxwell returned from France badly wounded and with an MC. During his convalescence he met the girl who was to become his wife at the local hunt ball and married her before returning to France.
It was in 1918, the last year of the war, when everything seemed to happen at once. His mother died, then his wife, out with the local hunt, when she took a bad fall. She'd lasted ten days, long enough for Shaw to rush home on compassionate leave to be with her when she died. It was Lavinia who had supported him every step of the way, kept him upright at the graveside, yet within a month she, too, was alone, her husband shot down over the Western Front.
After the war, it was a different world they inherited like everyone else and Shaw didn't like it.
At least he and Lavinia had each other and Shaw Place
although as the years went by and the money grew less, things became increasingly difficult. He was a Conservative Member of Parliament for a while and then humiliatingly lost his seat to a Socialist. Like many of his kind, he was violently anti-Semitic and this, exacerbated by the crushing political blow, led to his involvement with Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist Movement.
In all this, he was backed by Lavinia although her main interest lay in trying to keep their heads above water and hanging on to the estate. Disenchanted with the way society had changed and their own place in it, again like many of their kind, they looked to Hitler as a role model, admired what he was doing for Germany.
And then, at dinner in London in January 1939, they were introduced to a Major Werner Keitel, a military attache at the German Embassy. For several months, Lavinia enjoyed a passionate affair with him and he was frequently a visitor to Shaw Place
for he was a Luftwaffe pilot and shared Lavinia's love of flying. She kept a Tiger Moth at the time, housed in an old barn, using the South Meadow as an airstrip. They frequently flew together in the two-seater biplane, covering large sections of the south coast and Keitel had been able to indulge in his interest for aerial photography.
Shaw never minded. Lavinia had had relationships before although he himself had little interest in women. The Keitel thing was different, however, because of what it led to.
'Well, we know where we are with him,' Devlin said of Shaw. 'He's the kind who used to have children transported to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread.'
Schellenberg gave him a cigarette. 'Werner Keitel was an Abwehr agent employed at the time to select deep cover agents. Not the usual kind at all. A war was coming, that was obvious, and there was much forward planning for Sea Lion.'
'And the old sod's place was perfect,' Devlin observed. 'The back of beyond and yet only forty-five miles from London and this South Meadow to land a plane on.'
'Yes. Keitel, according to his report, found it amazingly easy to recruit both of them. He supplied them with a radio. The sister already knew Morse code. They were expressly forbidden to engage in any other activities, of course. Keitel, by the way, was killed in the Battle of Britain.'
'Did they have a code-name?'
Use, who had been sitting quietly, produced another sheet from the file. 'Falcon. He was to be alerted by the message: "Does the Falcon still wait? It is now time to strike." '
Devlin said, 'So there they were. Waiting for the great day, the invasion that never came. And what's the situation now, I wonder?'
'As it happens, there is some further information available,' Use told him. 'We have an article here which appeared in an American magazine.' She checked the date. 'March nineteen forty-three. The British Fascist Movement, it's called. The journalist got an interview with Shaw and his sister. There's a photo.'
Lavinia was sitting on a horse, a scarf around her head and was far more attractive than Devlin had expected. Shaw stood beside her, a shotgun under his arm.
Schellenberg read the article quickly and passed it to Devlin. 'Rather sad. You'll see there that like most of his kind he was detained without trial for a few months under Regulation I8B in nineteen forty.'
'Brixton Prison? That must have been a shock,' Devlin said.
'The rest is even more sad. The estate sold off, no servants. Just the two of them hanging on in that decaying old house,' Schellenberg said. 'It could be perfect, you know. Come and have a look at a map of the Channel.' They went to the map table. 'Here. Cap de la Hague and Chernay. Used to be a flying club. It's used as a landing strip for emergencies only by the Luftwaffe. Refuelling, that sort of thing. Only half a dozen men there. It's perfect for our purposes because it's only some thirty miles from the Chateau de Belle Ile where the Führer's conference takes place.'
'How far to our friends in Romney Marsh?'
'One hundred and fifty miles, most of it over the sea.'
'Fine,' Devlin said. 'Except for one thing. Would the Shaws be willing to be activated?'
'Couldn't Vargas find out?'
'Vargas could drop the lot of us, as I told you. This would be exactly what British Intelligence wanted. The chance to pull in everyone they could.' Devlin shook his head. 'No, the Shaws will have to wait till I get there, just like everything else. If they'll do it, then we're in business.'
'But how will you communicate?' Use demanded.
'They may still have that radio and I can handle one of those things. When the Abwehr recruited me to go to Ireland in forty-one I did the usual radio and Morse code course.'
'And if they haven't?'
Devlin laughed. 'Then I'll beg, borrow or steal one. Jesus, General, you worry too much.'
Shaw saw a rabbit, flung his shotgun up to his shoulder already too late and missed. He cursed, took a flask from his pocket and drank. Nell whined, gazing up at him anxiously. The reeds here were as high as a man, water gurgling in the creeks, running towards the sea. It was a
scene of complete desolation, the sky black, swollen with rain. As it started to fall, Lavinia appeared on horseback, galloping along a dyke towards him.
She reined in. 'Hello, my darling. I heard your shot.'
'Can't hit a brick wall these days, old girl.' He put the flask to his lips then gestured dramatically. 'Look at it — a dead world, Lavinia, everything bloody dead, including me. If only something would happen - anything,' and he raised the flask to his lips again.
Asa Vaughan closed the file and looked up. Schellenberg leaned across the desk and offered him a cigarette. 'What do you think?'
'Why me?'
'Because they tell me you're a great pilot who can fly anything.'
'Flattery usually gets you everywhere, General, but let's examine this. When I was, shall we say, inducted into the SS, the deal was that I only operated against the Russians. It was made clear to me that I wouldn't have to take part in any act detrimental to my country's cause.'
Devlin, sitting by the window, laughed harshly. 'What a load of old bollocks, son. If you believed that, then you'd believe any old thing. They had you by your short and curlies the minute they got you into that uniform.'
'I'm afraid he's right, Captain,' Schellenberg said. 'You wouldn't get very far with the Reichsführer with that argument.'
'I can imagine,' Asa said, and an expression of gloom settled on his face.
'What's your problem?' Devlin demanded. 'Where would you rather be? Back on the Eastern Front or here? And you've no choice. Say no and that old sod Himmler will have you in a concentration camp.'
'Sounds like no contest, except for one small point,' Asa told him. 'I end up getting caught in England in this uniform, I'll get the fastest court martial in American history and a firing squad.'
'No you won't, my old son,' Devlin said. 'They'll hang you. Now the flight. Do you reckon you could make it in?'
'No reason why not. If I am going to do it, I'd need to know the English Channel approach backwards. From what I can see I'd stay over the water for almost the whole trip. Turn inland for the last few miles.'