Death Order

by Jan Needle

  ‘Good evening.’ He pulled himself athletically from the cockpit. ‘Where is he?’

  Stallen looked slightly perplexed. Heydrich jumped down from the wing, face set. Something!

  ‘Speak.’

  His voice had quietened, his nostrils flared. The SD men were watchful.

  Stallen said stiffly: ‘We arrived on time. The Deputy Führer had made other arrangements, it seems. Another plane, in fact. I could have arrested the manager of the field, but I thought it might be better to wait to see which way the cat jumped. News of arrests might…’ He left the thought to hang.

  They were standing by the aircraft. It was whistling slightly, as some part hidden in the cowlings cooled down. A rhythmic ticking from the starboard engine. Reinhard Heydrich swore, richly and obscenely. Nobody responded. The wind blew, ruffling Stallen’s hair.

  ‘What plane? Did they provide it here?’

  ‘Naturally. It was ordered. It was a new one, Mark E2 or some such jargon. Half-painted only, guns still packed with grease.’

  ‘I’ll kill the bastards.’

  ‘The Deputy Führer. They could hardly have said no to him.’

  Reinhard Heydrich wiped the portion of his face that had been covered by his mask. It was sweaty. He was beginning to overheat in his flying suit. He spat onto the concrete.

  ‘You’re quite right, Burli. A telephone. I have some words to say.’

  Goering laughed at him, on the other end, like a drainpipe full of shit.

  ‘I know already, Reinhard! I’ve scrambled Dolfo Galland to shoot him down. Imagine! Old Rudolf being smart enough to pull a trick like that! Imagine! To outwit Reinhard Heydrich!’

  I’ll get you one day, you fat sow, Heydrich told himself. I’ll boil you down for soap. He said, mildly: ‘You also were outsmarted, Hermann. Or are you in on this as well?’

  ‘Oh no, no plotting, no I’m clean, my dear. No, it’s you he doesn’t trust, Reinhard. Does anybody?’

  ‘Does the Führer know yet? Has anybody bothered to pass the news on?’

  Goering’s gurglings were even richer.

  ‘Well you can’t, can you? If you knew there was a plot afoot, shouldn’t you have mentioned it before, you know how paranoid our glorious leader gets! It’s terribly suspicious, Reinhard, you being up in Denmark when the old fox flies away. Even if you do claim you went up there to do him in! I’d keep your head down, nein?’

  For the moment, there was very little that the President could say.

  Four

  The navigation for the second leg should have been extremely easy. From Aalborg it was largely a matter of following the setting sun, which had broken from its cloud cover even before the flier had reached his chosen height. The earlier start had complicated matters slightly, but that had been remedied by flying a simple box pattern, by compass and clock, to lose time in the middle of the North Sea, as far as possible from either British or Luftwaffe fighters. As he approached the coast the Bf110 was in a shallow dive, the new, high-power DB601N motors driving her very fast. Course and landmarks were clear in his mind’s eye, Holy Island in clear reality below him. At Dungavel House, where the Duke of Hamilton had his residence, there was a private landing strip. If his luck held, nothing could prevent him using it.

  Almost as the thought formed, two aircraft appeared in front of him. The shock was terrific, he gasped into his oxygen mask, his hands clenching involuntarily. They were Spitfires, dead ahead and so close it was impossible, coming directly at him. Then they were gone, and he craned back to see behind him, to see if they were following. But he saw nothing, nothing but dark sky. The oxygen mask was filled with sweat.

  I am Rudolf Hess, he told himself, again and again. I am Rudolf Hess, and I have come to see the Duke of Hamilton. He commands 602 Fighter Squadron and he is on duty tonight, at RAF Turnhouse, near Edinburgh. He controls all hunters, so they will not hunt me down. I am Rudolf Hess, and I come in peace, for peace, to end the war.

  The repeated incantation calmed him, as it had throughout the flight from Aalborg. The news from Gatow that Heydrich had flown north had been the great shock, the confirmation of all their fears, but Heydrich for once had missed the boat. Here, in twilight’s faded blue, was Rudolf Hess, flying over Scotland, still. Fast and low and nervous. There ahead, a flash of silver. The sea. He looked down in a sudden panic. That should not be! He had gone astray! He checked his flight map, controlled his racing thoughts. He had gone too far, but all was not yet lost. He concentrated.

  At nine minutes past eleven, confused but still not hopeless, he baled out. He had flown over the sea for a short time – the western sea, the wrong sea – then swung back on a reciprocal. He had other information in his mind and on his lap, information that would guide him to Dungavel House. But it was late, the light had almost gone, he was unsure. He was certain only of one thing. Ich bin Rudolf Hess. Ich bin Rudolf Hess.

  He hurt his back and ankle baling out. It was an operation he had never done before, and it was schrecklich difficult. He hurt his back as the tailplane hit him glancingly, and his ankle when he hit the ground. He was in a field, and after the awful smashing of the grounding 110, it was very, very quiet. He forced himself from the parachute, offered thanks to God for his deliverance, and hobbled off to find someone. The Duke of Hamilton. Too much to hope for, but he was expecting him. Ich bin Rudolf Hess…

  He was confronted, in fact, by a farm labourer, who helped him into his small cottage and offered him a cup of tea. The flier, smiling reassuringly at an old lady, roused by the excitement from her bed, said he would prefer a glass of water.

  When asked, he told the labourer: ‘I am Hauptmann Alfred Horn.’

  A couple of hours earlier, on a hunch, Hermann Goering rang down to his main office in Carinhall and gave them a Stockholm number to obtain. He had a fair idea of what Heydrich had been up to in Aalborg, and he hoped he might get confirmation this way. The man was a serpent, and – who knew – he might have been more successful than he claimed, in the matter of Rudolf Hess.

  While he waited, another call came through, from Adolf Galland.

  Everything, he said, had gone perfectly. Dolfo was very circumspect about trusting telephone lines, even lines to Hermann Goering, whose Forschungsamt controlled which ones were tapped. That was all he said, and he was not asked to embellish. Two minutes later, the set jangled once more. Goering’s secretary.

  ‘The call to Stockholm, sir. Impossible, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The lines are down. Some time ago. We’ve no idea when they’ll be restored.’

  Reichsmarschall Goering, fully clad now in an opulent lounging suit of pearl grey with wide lapels and double vent ‘to give my arse some room to breathe,’ thought long and hard about this information.

  Surely not coincidence?

  Five

  Edward Carrington had not planned to be an historian. In fact, he was recruited to the discipline by what some insisted was the arsy-versy way. Instead of starting off in Oxbridge and becoming a spy, he started as a spy and ended up in Oxbridge. It happened by accident, or at least with no intent at all on his part. It was haphazard, and surprising, and even rather funny, it was the nature of the times. A week or so afterwards, the Second World War began.

  The approach came after a reception in a large private house in Belgravia. Edward’s father had worked in the diplomatic service in India and had amassed a fortune also, by irregular and secret membership of a Burmese rubber syndicate. His only son – well provided in those days with cash – had come back to Europe in the early thirties with little in his mind except escape. Like many other boys with India in his blood, he had been forced into rootlessness by education. At the age of seven he had been put on a ship to Britain, kissed by his mother and sisters, shaken hands with by his Pop, and banished from their sight for the next eleven years, save two brief holidays. When he had left, he had loved them desperately, and had hidden in the stifling furnace of his cabin for day
s, weeping himself dry. By the time he was reunited with them, for good if he so chose, he viewed his parents with an indifference that probably masked hatred. They were proud of him, they said, so pale, so educated, so English, and paraded him in the clubs and messes for a while. For Edward, India had lost the only element he had liked in it – the easy affection of the Indians that he had taken for granted as a child – and gained nothing in compensation. There were three rows with his father, behind closed doors, then they reached agreement. Edward left.

  His father, fortunately, had certain eccentricities. Although it struck him as being perfectly right and natural to tear a seven-year-old boy away from his parents and send him ‘home’ to be educated, it also struck him that the English public school system was iniquitous, a hotbed of beatings and buggery. So Edward, almost alone among his fellow unfortunates who sailed that particular August, did not go to one of the great English educational establishments, but to a small academy near Dumfries. Beating was on the agenda, certainly, but buggery very definitely was not. In fact, about the only contact Edward ever had with other people’s flesh was when the school maids, and then their friends from round about, began to share their sexual favours with him. It started when he was only fourteen, and he was more or less alone among the boys in being smiled upon. Even when he could not do it properly he loved it, and very soon he pleased as much as he was pleased. He never told, either, a lesson he learned very young, which made him everlastingly popular with the girls. Formal education he hardly bothered with. He had a flair for languages that was extraordinary, and that was quite enough. When asked by the masters where it came from, he put it down to being ‘good with my tongue’, and they nodded sagely, wondering why he smiled. When he left, he had added German, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian to his Hindi and Urdu. All, it was pointed out acidly by the headmaster, fairly useless languages (except perhaps the German), but that was his lookout. Edward, who was depressed already, homesick for the bodies he was being forced to leave, agreed without agreeing and shook hands listlessly. He had been offered university, naturally, but went ‘home’, this time to India. That lasted four months.

  Despite the violence of the schism with his father, the eccentric streak prevailed to the extent that he was offered funds until he found his feet back West. In northern England there were branches of the family with interests in ships and trading, and eventually Edward ended up with them, on a roving brief. The next few years he spent in travel and (dread word) in commerce, drinking in the wonderful perplexities that Europe, after India and Scotland, threw at him. As early as 1933, when he was nineteen, he watched in joy and fascination as Germany burst into a new era, and Russia fed her revolution on the flesh of her own children. Everywhere he went he smelled fresh blood, and was exhilarated.

  Not in England, though. As the decade rushed on, as he saw or read about slaughter in Abyssinia, beatings and murder in Hungary, Romania, Albania, racial violence in the Memel, Carpatho-Ukraine, Slovakia, fascist killing in Italy, Germany and Spain, communist in the east, Edward Carrington grew more and more amazed, then horrified, by the country that he supposed his own. To him and to most of his European friends, it was as clear as daylight in the sky that a war was coming. Central Europe was not an unexploded bomb, it was in a state of constant, barely controlled explosion. It was burning, fraying at the edges, riddled with violent cancers of nationalism, spite and greed, that could not go on much longer without a climax. The First World War had destroyed an empire and left a vacuum at the heart of Europe. Hitler – a blind man could see – was going to fill it.

  So was his country blind? Certainly his father said so, in letters. According to him the Empire was retreating into cowardice and insanity. They were all, save Winston Spencer Churchill, trying to give India to the fuzzy-wuzzies, and the cuts in arms spending would leave us quite defenceless. The National Government was a disaster under Macdonald, worse under Stanley Baldwin, and unspeakable under Chamberlain. On his returns to England, Edward more and more frequently mixed with people of like opinion, many of them friends or associates of politicians. He was at the garden party on Guy Fawkes Night in 1938 when the honourable member for Stockton, Harold Macmillan, burnt Chamberlain in effigy, and he earned the thanks of Bob Boothby later the same evening when he happened upon him making love to Macmillan’s wife against a tree – and went deaf and blind. He drank with Brendan Bracken, the red-haired Irishman who many thought was Churchill’s bastard, and slept more than once on a settee in the great man’s flat in Morpeth Mansions when they had all drunk too much whisky – although never while Churchill was in town. Edward had met him only twice, but what he saw he liked. The man was not a grey-suit, not a whey-face, not a pusillanimous, coughing politician. He was a buccaneer, and Edward admired that. By god, it was what his country needed.

  Not everybody agreed, inevitably. To many Churchill was not so much a buccaneer as a straightforward pirate, a political outcast who skated deliberately on thin ice to keep himself in the public eye, a man who polished brilliant and wounding phrases that tacitly suggested he was the alternative should his jeremiads turn out true. Edward, in bed one day with a clever country girl rebelling deliciously against the perceived repressions of her class, learned between kisses that Sir Joseph Ball, a former MI5 man who now led the Conservative Party’s organizational machine, had used his old position to tap Churchill’s phone for Chamberlain and monitor his associates. Edward had passed it on and was thus confirmed in the eyes of Winston’s men as somebody to trust. He particularly enjoyed the fact that his vaguely cosmopolitan, vaguely raffish air not only made him attractive to certain high-born English gels, but led to such useful pillow talk. Their menfolk – educated, constipated, correct – tended to despise or (perhaps) fear him for his manners. It was on the cards that he should be drawn into the circle of dissent.

  The suggestion that he might do something positive, however, came completely from the blue. It was August 17, 1939, and Carrington had spent most of the reception swallowing champagne. He did not recognize the man approaching him in a quiet corner of the drawing room, but feared he might be a drunken bore. He had a large gin in his hand, and apparently a few inside him. He introduced himself as Major Desmond Morton.

  Edward found it hard to concentrate. The reception had been a glittering affair, and an odd one. After months of fits and starts, scares and rumours, the outbreak of a war in Europe was unavoidable. Since Munich, the mood of the British people had changed almost tangibly, with only Chamberlain’s grey men in Parliament, backed by their poodles at the Daily Mail and the Express, not positively, atavistically, desiring the first shot. Poland was on the brink, it was only a matter of time before the heel of the jackboot smashed down. In Berlin and in London, in Paris, Warsaw, Rome, only the diplomats and power-brokers were hanging on, making desperate efforts, in the open and in secret, to avoid the blow-up. The people, it appeared, had clean forgotten what war meant. Some of the grey men, apparently, had not.

  At this reception in the heart of London, the atmosphere was schizophrenic. There were civil servants there, diplomats from Germany and Russia, with their ladies old and young. On one level the social niceties ground on, the minutiae of dress and behaviour observed and chattered over. A string quintet played in the largest of the reception rooms, and guests spilled out into the garden in between light showers. But beneath it all, beneath the strange rituals that passed in this milieu for normality, there was an undercurrent of fear, of latent panic. And for some of the young, a dizzyingly exciting feeling that something terrible was about to come about, something wonderful.

  There was a young woman there, an attractive girl he guessed at twenty-two, who had been introduced to him as Suzanne Simonis. She was imprisoned in a long silk gown, her face pale and beautiful, with dark circles around deep, exhausted eyes. She seemed on the verge of tears, somehow, which Edward found both strange and quite exciting.

  ‘Simonis,’ he said. ‘May I say what an unusual name? You are
German, I presume?’

  She was a German. She was the cousin, she said, of Herr Theo Kordt, the Counsellor at the German Embassy in London. She had travelled overnight from Germany, by boat and train, and had had no sleep.

  ‘How strange,’ said Edward, slipping into German. ‘You must have had a reason. A very important one? As I hear it, you may not have many days in which to get back home!’

  It was couched in the form of a joke, but it had the directness that he knew women responded to. Edward was dressed impeccably, but he retained his raffish air. He could see himself in the garden with Fräulein Simonis, investigating those dark eyes at closer quarters. But she did not respond. The eyes slid sideways, looked over his shoulder. A small smile lit her lips.

  Turning his head, Edward saw another young woman. She was shorter than Suzanne, with dark hair and eyes, a sultry, sulky mouth. She said, in Swedish: ‘Are you all right, Suzanne? You look like death. Shall I tread on his toes for you?’

  ‘No,’ Suzanne replied. ‘But take him over, will you? He’s asking awkward questions, he’s probably a spy. I might burst into tears.’

  ‘Poor thing. Do you want to lie down? Shall we go and find a place for you?’

  Suzanne Simonis smiled wanly.

  ‘I’ll go and get coffee. Find Theo. I must sleep soon.’

  To Edward, in German, she said: ‘I’m sorry for that rudeness. This is my friend, Hannele Malling. Would you like to talk to her? She speaks German, naturally, and English. I’m rather tired, I’m going to find my cousin. Excuse me.’

  When she had gone, Edward said: ‘Hannele. Short for Johanne? Is that German or Swedish?’

  He spoke in Swedish, looking directly into her eyes. They did not flinch.