Eagle Has Flown, The Page 9

  October 5, 1939. The date was engraved on his heart. No scandal, no court martial. No one wanted that. Just his resignation. One week at his parents’ opulent home in Beverly Hills was all he could bear. He packed a bag and made for Europe.

  The war having started in September, the RAF were accepting a few Americans but they didn’t like his record. And then on November 30 the Russians invaded Finland. The Finns needed pilots badly and volunteers from many nations flooded in to join the Finnish Air Force, Asa among them.

  It was a hopeless war from the start, in spite of the gallantry of the Finnish Army, and most of the fighter planes available were outdated. Not that the Russians were much better, but they did have a few of the new German FW190S which Hitler had promised to Stalin as a goodwill gesture over the Poland deal.

  Asa had flown bi-planes like the Italian Fiat Falco and the British Gloucester Gladiator, hopelessly outclassed by the opposition, only his superior skill as a pilot giving him an edge. His personal score stood at seven which made him an ace and then came that morning of ferocious winds and driving snow when he’d come in at four hundred feet, flying blind, lost his engine at the last moment and crash-landed.

  That was in March 1940, two days before the Finns capitulated. His pelvis fractured and back broken, he’d been hospitalized for eighteen months, was undergoing final therapy and still a lieutenant in the Finnish Air Force when, on June 25, 1941, Finland joined forces with Nazi Germany and declared war on Russia.

  He’d returned to flying duties gradually, working as an instructor, not directly involved in any action. The months had gone by and suddenly, the roof had fallen in. First Pearl Harbor and then the declaration of war between Germany and Italy and the USA.

  They held him in a detention camp for three months, the Germans, and then the officers had come to see him from the SS. Himmler was extending the SS foreign legions. Scandinavian, French, the neutral Swedes, Indian prisoners of war from the British Army in North Africa. There was even the Britisches Freikorps with their collar patches of three leopards instead of SS runes and the Union Jack on the left sleeve. Not that they’d had many takers, no more than fifty, mostly scum from prison camps attracted by the offer of good food, women and money.

  The George Washington Legion was something else again. Supposedly for American sympathizers to the Nazi cause, as far as Asa knew, they never had more than half a dozen members and he hadn’t met the others. He had a choice. To join or be sent to a concentration camp. He argued as best he could. The final agreement was that he would serve only on the Russian Front. As it happened, he seldom flew in straight combat, for his skill as a pilot was so admired he was employed mainly on the courier service, ferrying high-ranking officers.

  So, here he was, not too far from the Russian border with Poland, at the controls of a Stork, forest and snow five thousand feet below, Hauptsturmführer Asa Vaughan from the US of A, an SS Brigadeführer called Farber sitting behind him examining maps.

  Farber looked up. ‘How long now?’

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ Asa told him. He spoke excellent German, although with an American accent.

  ‘Good. I’m frozen to the bone.’

  How in the hell did I ever get into this? Asa asked himself. And how do I get out? A great shadow swooped in, the Stork bucked wildly and Farber cried out in alarm. A fighter plane took station to starboard for a moment, the Red Star plain on its fuselage, then it banked away.

  ‘Russian Yak fighter. We’re in trouble,’ Asa said.

  The Yak came in fast from behind, firing both cannon and machine guns and the Stork staggered, pieces breaking from the wings. Asa banked and went down, the Yak followed, turning in a half circle, and took up station again. The pilot, conscious of his superiority in every department, waved, enjoying himself.

  ‘Bastard!’ Asa said.

  The Yak banked again, came in fast, cannon shell punching into the Stork and Farber cried out as a bullet caught him in the shoulder. As the windscreen shattered he screamed, ‘Do something, for God’s sake.’

  Asa, blood on his cheek from a splinter, cried, ‘You want me to do something, I’ll do something. Let’s see if this bastard can fly.’

  He took the Stork straight down to two thousand, waited until the Yak came in, banked and went down again. The forest in the snow plain below seemed to rush towards them.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Farber cried.

  Asa took her down to a thousand, then five hundred feet, and the Yak, hungry for the kill, stayed on his tail. At the right moment, the American dropped his flaps, the Yak banked to avoid the collision and ploughed straight down into the forest at three hundred and fifty miles an hour. There was a tongue of flame and Asa pulled back the column and levelled out at two thousand feet.

  ‘You okay, General?’

  Farber clutched his arm, blood pumping through. ‘You’re a genius – a genius. I’ll see you get the Iron Cross for this.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Asa wiped blood from his cheek. ‘That’s all I need.’

  At the Luftwaffe base outside Warsaw, Asa walked towards the officers’ mess, feeling unaccountably depressed. The medical officer had put two stitches in his cheek, but had been more concerned with Brigadeführer Farber’s condition.

  Asa went into the mess and took off his flying jacket. Underneath he wore a beautifully tailored uniform in field grey, SS runes on his collar patch. On his left sleeve was a Stars and Stripes shield and the cuff-title on his left wrist said: ‘George Washington Legion’. He had the ribbon of the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic and the Finnish Gold Cross of Valour.

  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 lunch time.’

  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, Ilse 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 thinly the General’s getting impatient.’

  ‘He likes to do things yesterday,’ Ilse 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, Ilse 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.

  6

  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 Me
sopotamia 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 attaché 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.