Death Order

by Jan Needle

  Hamilton was a tall man, who treated Edward briskly, and clearly as a social inferior. Luckily he was engaged on operational matters when his ‘guest’ arrived, and turned him over temporarily to his intelligence officer, a flight lieutenant called Benson, who recognized the symptoms instantly and prescribed a double whisky. When Edward suggested ablutions first he grinned engagingly and led him to the bar.

  ‘A whisky’ll take thirty seconds, man. Then come to my quarters and leap into a bath. Then more whisky, then we’ll eat.’ It sounded, put like that, like a damned fine plan.

  Later – several whiskies later – Hamilton did emerge, and they went into a private office to talk. He still treated Edward coolly, stating with conviction that he had his orders direct from London and saw no need to go over them in detail, and no possibility that he would modify them on the say-so of a junior officer he did not know. He was expecting the ‘target’ to enter his ‘field of jurisdiction’ sometime late that evening, and his instructions had gone out. The plane would certainly not be shot down, and as he had not alerted the Observer Corps, there was a good chance that it would get close to its destination – Dungavel, his family home – before being spotted. After that, assuming Hess survived whatever form his landing took, he would no doubt be apprehended on the ground in the normal manner of crashed enemy aircrew: there were plenty of Army units in the area.

  Feeling slightly at a loss, Edward said: ‘But how do you see your part after that?’ And noting the widening of the haughty eyes, amended: ‘I mean, sir, what are your orders?’

  Benson was smirking slightly. Edward felt like a colonial or a schoolboy, and it irked.

  Wing Commander the Duke of Hamilton replied: ‘My instructions are to let it run its course as if I know nothing at all about it. That is rather obvious, I should have thought. Either Hess will name me, which God forbid he should be stupid enough to do, or I will be contacted in the normal run of things. I do, after all, control this sector. Either way, he will be locked up and guarded, and in the fullness of time I will be conveyed to speak to him. Your instructions, as I understand them, are to sweep up all the pieces, tie the loose ends, make sure nobody goes dancing about the countryside shouting that Rudolf Hess has landed. Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  In the officers’ mess afterwards, Benson laughed at what he said had been Edward’s expression in the last moments of the interview. ‘Pained, old boy, quite pained. It’s clear that you’ve never been in the services.’

  ‘Or gone to a public school,’ Edward rejoined. ‘God, Benson, how do you put up with it?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a good man underneath it,’ said Benson. ‘In fact I think it’s you that’s got on top of him. Or this Hess lark in general. He’s being ruled from London, and he’s not used to that. He moves with Royalty, you know, his ma-in-law’s chief lady of the chamber or what-have-you to the Queen. To be quite frank, this cloak and dagger stuff is beneath him, and he feels it keenly. You’re just the whipping boy. Listen, don’t mind the Wingco anyway, have another drink. I’ll watch your back at this end, you can count on me.’

  It was getting towards ten o’clock, and they had switched to beer some time ago, to keep their brains clear. According to Benson it would be getting dark soon after ten, so Hess would have to show up soon. He had keyed up all the radar stations and they would be alerted the moment anything significant was plotted. Then they could follow Hess by phone, and Carrington could head off immediately to the spot where he’d ‘kissed the deck’ to make sure some Home Guard maniac didn’t put a bullet in him. Carrington remembered Miller.

  ‘Talking of maniacs, my driver,’ he said. ‘He was tiddly when he picked me up. I’d better check him.’

  ‘I’ll send a man. You’re worrying too much. I chose Miller for you, he could drink a distillery dry and chase it with a brewhouse. This is Scotland. Have another drink. It’s Saturday night.’

  The first news came shortly after ten o’clock, and it was followed up, annoyingly, by a report from a Royal Observer Corps post on the coast near Berwick. Carrington and Benson had joined the Wingco in the control room when they’d received the radar tip-off, and heard him cursing under his breath. The ROC had identified the interloper as an ME110, which was more or less unheard of this far north because of its range. Indeed, Hamilton suggested crisply that they had got it wrong and left it at that. When he came off the line he smiled his first genuine smile in Edward’s presence.

  ‘If anybody dares to wonder why I’m not scrambling, there’s my cover,’ he said. ‘Carrington, I must admit I never much believed in any of this malarkey, but it looks as if I’ve been proved wrong. We’ve got a bloody German in our air space and we’re meant to welcome him. I think the show’s about to start.’

  For Edward, over the next hour, ‘the show’ degenerated rapidly into farce. The next reported sighting was from RAF Ayr, then the ME110 was tracked intermittently until overshooting Scotland altogether and flying out to sea. It returned, ‘wove about like a drunken hoorie’ in Benson’s words, and disappeared from radar south of Glasgow. A couple of judicious phone calls, and they had a more or less exact location: Eaglesham. At twelve miles from Dungavel, the pilot had not done too well.

  Edward was kitted up and ready to go, and Benson went with him to the car, which was ticking over outside the control tower. Miller jerked himself into some sort of alert state as they approached, smiling glassily.

  ‘Miller,’ said Benson, warningly. ‘If you’re pissed, man, I’ll have your balls for breakfast.’

  ‘Never in this world, sir,’ slurred Miller. ‘Just tell me where the gennleman wants to go.’

  The reek off him was now of whisky.

  The night, when Edward relaxed into it, was really quite amusing. Miller had two uncanny knacks. One of missing other vehicles, or walls, or signposts, by inches, and the second of missing their destinations and the action by a mile. By the time they reached the Mearns Road near Eaglesham and trudged to the wreckage of the Messerschmitt, it had acquired a small crowd of sightseers, who were bantering with the Home Guards trying to keep it safe from looting. Carrington was directed to a nearby farmhouse where ‘a tall, dark German airman had been arrested at the sharp end of a pitchfork’ to find only another crowd of excited neighbours and a labourer called Davie Maclean who was getting fed up with the whole affair. Carrington managed to get him to one side long enough to ask him what the airman had said.

  ‘Not a lot,’ replied the Scot. ‘He’d hurt his back a bit, and couldnae walk so well. He took a glass of water till the Home Guard barged in and waved a muckle pistol in his face. He said he was called Horn and he’d popped across to see the Duke of Hamilton or somesuch. His English wasnae good, I’m thinking, he didnae seem to understand a word I said.’

  As Edward could hardly understand a word the man said either, that did not surprise him. Nor did the false name Hess had given. With Home Guard revolvers in the question, it would be a foolish man indeed who claimed to be a Nazi warlord.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Well done with the pitchfork, but don’t talk to the neighbours too much about this, will you? And especially not the newspapers if they start nosing. From what I’ve seen of it, this is a perfectly normal thing, the pilot probably got lost.’

  ‘I didnae use a pitchfork, that’s just nonsense. And he mentioned the Duke of Hamilton, he said he was a friend of his.’

  The crush of people in the kitchen were beginning to take notice. It was amazing, Edward thought. Did they not have beds to go to? He looked at his watch. Well gone midnight. And the plane had crashed at 11.10, or thereabouts. Ah, what the hell? The gabblings of a Scots farm labourer would hardly matter.

  ‘Unlikely, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘He must have read his name in the German papers, unless he’s crackers. Well, I must go, no rest for the wicked. And remember. Not too much talking.’

  ‘Walls have ears,’ piped up a white-haired old lady. ‘Careless talk costs lives!’

  Fuck off, thought
Edward, sourly. He stumbled into the blackness and made his way to the wreckage, where Miller was meant to have found out the location of the Home Guard HQ. He found him chatting with two soldiers, and sharing their bottle of whisky. For a moment, he was furious.

  ‘Miller! You’re on duty! For God’s sake, man!’

  The two soldiers looked at him, uncrushed. As one of them turned away, Carrington heard him mutter something, undoubtedly obscene. Miller winked.

  ‘Ach, sir,’ he said. ‘Unwind, why don’t you? Have a dram.’

  He offered the bottle, and Carrington took it. He was in a foreign country, and he was lost. Miller looked surprised, the other two astonished.

  ‘Hey!’ said one. ‘You wouldnae drop it?’

  Carrington raised the bottle, swallowed, and sneezed hard as the fumes went up his nose. He drank again.

  ‘I bloody wouldnae,’ he said, in a perfect Dumfries accent. ‘Thanks. Now, where the hell’s the next stop?’

  The next stop was a scout hut in a Glasgow suburb called Giffnock. By now Miller had dropped all pretence at knowing where he was, and the night was exceedingly dark. The headlights, in their blackout cowls, threw about as much light as a candle, and finally they went off the road. They missed the ditch-lip by a foot, but Miller, required to reverse with delicacy and skill, got a fit of giggling. So it was that Carrington became the driver, and so it was they turned up at Florence Drive to learn that Major Barrie of the Home Guard had gone with a lieutenant and two soldiers of the Eleventh Cameronians to escort the prisoner to Maryhill Barracks, on the other side of the city.

  ‘Have we identified him formally?’ asked Edward, of the senior NCO left in charge. The man looked strangely shifty. He fiddled with some notes.

  ‘Well sir, he says he’s Hauptmann Alfred Horn. But there’s some here hae their doubts.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Edward, casually. ‘Hauptmann Horn. No mystery there, surely? Who’s the doubter?’

  It was an ROC officer, who had already left. The rumour was that he thought Horn resembled Rudolf Hess, and had rung Turnhouse to tell the Duke of Hamilton so. No one else was sure if they agreed, but they did know it had taken him nearly half an hour to get through, and the conversation had been brief. The telephone exchanges were manned by civilians, and they were being more recalcitrant in responding as the night wore on. Edward, given a private room, discovered the problem first hand: it took twenty minutes before he raised the operator, and another ten before he was talking to Flight Lieutenant Benson. They shared notes.

  ‘No trouble on the ident here,’ said Benson. ‘The ROC man was Graham Donald and the Wingco sorted him out, he’ll keep his mouth shut. The Army HQ have also been on, trying to get us excited, but our Duty Pilot turned them off pretty effectively. He told them we knew all about it, and said we’d be over in the morning. He had their duty wallah fair squeaking, about this mystery man being the Duke’s best pal or some stuff, but he got nowhere. Just check that no one’s taken anything away from him, will you? Oh, and if anyone has made inventories of his possessions, the Wingco says to pick them up. The less that gets out the better, whatever happens.’

  Miller was fast asleep in the passenger seat when Carrington got to the car, but he did not try to wake him. The Home Guard had drawn him a map of how to get to Maryhill, and he was quite happy now. The whole thing had a total air of unreality, it was so different from anything he had expected. There was a war on, the military were in control, and all was chaos and confusion. Probably Germany was in a similar state. It was a pity one could not invade without giving advance warnings and following the rules: it would be a pushover.

  At Maryhill Barracks, he met his first instance of bad temper of the night. The Home Guard officer, Major Barrie, was beside himself with pompous fury at the way he and his prisoner had been treated. The gates had been shut and unguarded, he said, and he had been forced to blow his horn to attract attention. Edward made the mistake of allowing a small smile to show.

  ‘You may not realise it, young man,’ said Barrie, witheringly, ‘but in so doing I was breaking the law. It is not permitted to sound a car horn after a certain hour. I could be prosecuted.’

  Lieutenant Whitby of the Cameronians confirmed that laxness had been rife, although he was more worried at the lack of respect meted to the prisoner than the damage done to his self-esteem. The night duty officer, he said bluntly, had been drunk, and so had most of the NCOs detailed to the job.

  ‘Lieutenant Fulton was in bed!’ said Barrie. ‘I was not saluted, I was not given my proper form of address. He conducted the matter in his pyjamas, and wanted to shove Hauptmann Horn in the guardhouse for the night. There will be complaints about the matter, and my language will be most stiff.’

  Carrington asked Whitby: ‘Where is he now? Who is in charge of his possessions?’

  ‘I’ve got them, sir, they’re in a bag. I also have an inventory.’

  He pulled a piece of paper from his tunic, and Carrington took it. He glanced through it. A Leica, letters, photographs, headache pills. He would take care of all that later, when he’d got the bag.

  ‘And Hauptmann Horn?’

  ‘He’s been driven to the hospital. Major Greenhill’s given him a draught. He’s not badly injured, just a few aches and abrasions.’

  Major Barrie put in acidly: ‘He was driven over there by a second lieutenant called Bailey, if you have any jurisdiction in this matter. Another disgrace. He was wearing tartan trews and a glengarry. The German was appalled.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Whitby, rather sheepishly. ‘He did complain at one point, actual fact. He said a British officer wouldn’t be treated like that in Germany. Bit rich from what I’ve heard, but unfortunate. That was when we first got here. They’d locked him in a dirty little hole with a bed you wouldn’t put a dog under. Would you need to speak to him, sir? In the hospital?’

  But Edward did not. Herr Hess was safe, and sedated. He collected the bag of possessions from Major Barrie’s car and returned to his own. Judging that Miller had been snoring long enough, he shook him till he woke, and made him drive to Turnhouse. As Miller related it to his mates later, they were both asleep when they drove through the gates. It was nearly 5 a.m.

  While the Duke and Lieutenant Benson went to Maryhill later in the morning to talk to Hess, Edward Carrington sorted out a few more ends. He spoke to intelligence officers at several airbases and made sure that certain records were amended. If the censor ever allowed any of the story to appear in the newspapers, there would be tales of hot pursuit and near interception – the hot pursuit line giving the I.O.s particular pleasure as the fighters mentioned were Defiants, which everybody knew could not have caught a cold.

  He discovered that two Spitfires from 602 Squadron had actually met the ME110 head on – quite fortuitously – but it had been going so fast they had lost it by the time they’d turned around. This had been good fortune, as they had not been aware that it was a ‘protected’ aircraft, but Edward arranged in any case for the record of their flight to be blotted from the squadron’s sortie book. One of the pilots had been the ace Al Deere. It would not look too good if a 110 flown by a man well over forty had outpaced and outmanoeuvred two Spitfires piloted by ‘the cream’. He also followed up a rumour that another ME110 had crash-landed north of Glasgow the same night, although he did not get to the bottom of it, and assumed it was more evidence of the Scottish Saturday Night. A trip to Eaglesham followed, where he met the Duke and Benson. The field was swarming with sightseers from Glasgow, and the sweating guards from RAF Abbotsinch were having little luck preventing the looting of souvenir items from the scattered wreckage. Carrington had already arranged to have it carted away as soon as possible by a salvage unit, and dumped at the old railway sidings at Carluke.

  Back at Turnhouse, after a light lunch, Carrington and Benson sipped beer. Both were pale and tired, although Edward was conscious of an almost manic elation. Benson was quieter. He had been excluded
from the interviews with Hess on the German’s insistence, but said Hamilton had confirmed that the Horn nonsense had been immediately dropped. There had been something in the Wingco’s demeanour that Benson did not like much, however, a quietness, an air of brooding.

  ‘You’re MI6, aren’t you?’ he challenged Edward. ‘Perhaps you could ask him?’

  As it happened, Hamilton called Carrington into his office shortly after half past five that afternoon, again excluding Benson. He had been on the telephone for more than half an hour, he said, and had got precious little sense out of them. He had been trying to talk to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Cabinet’s linkman with the secret services, but had been told that he was busy. Too busy, Hamilton added drily, to be informed the Deputy Führer of Germany had just dropped in. He’d had a blazing row with a ‘Foreign Office Johnnie ‘, and was on the point of bursting when a third voice had come onto the line. It had identified itself as Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, and said they realized he had some news to tell them.

  ‘Which means,’ said Hamilton, looking hard at Carrington, ‘that the line was tapped. The Foreign Office line. Is that possible?’

  Carrington made a neutral gesture. Which also means, he thought, that Churchill was expecting something. Who knew about all this, who knew?

  ‘It would surprise me,’ he said. ‘But… And what did he suggest?’

  ‘Mr Churchill was not in London last night,’ said Hamilton. There was an enormous raid, some thousands of people killed. Mr Churchill was luckily in Ditchley Park, in Oxfordshire, and I am to fly there now. I shall take a Hurricane.’

  ‘Well at least you got through at last,’ said Carrington. ‘Is there a problem?’

  The Duke tapped his desktop nervously.