Spandau Phoenix. Greg Iles
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Dungavel Castle,” the pilot said. Somehow, in his confusion, he could not—or would not—abandon his original mission. “I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton,” he added solemnly.
“Are you armed?” McLean’s voice was tentative.
“No. I have no weapon.”
The farmer simply stared. A shrill voice from the darkness finally broke the awkward silence. “What’s happened? Who’s out there?”
“A German’s landed!” McLean answered. “Go get some soldiers.”
Thus began a strange pageant of uncertain hospitality that would last for nearly thirty hours. From the McLeans’ humble living room—where the pilot was offered tea on the family’s best china—to the local Home Guard hut at Busby, he continued to give the name he had offered the plowman upon landing—his own. It was obvious that no one knew what to make of him. Somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong. The pilot had expected to land inside a cordon of intelligence officers; instead he had been met by one confused farmer. Where were the stern-faced young operatives of MI5? Several times he repeated his request to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton, but from the bare room at Busby he was taken by army truck to Maryhill Barracks at Glasgow.
At Maryhill, the pain of his broken ankle finally burned through his shock. When he mentioned it to his captors, they transferred him to the military hospital at Buchanan Castle, about twenty miles south of Glasgow. It was there, nearly thirty hours after the unarmed Messerschmitt first crossed the Scottish coast, that the Duke of Hamilton finally arrived to confront the pilot.
Douglas Hamilton looked as young and dashing as the photograph in his SS file. The Premier Peer of Scotland, an RAF wing commander and famous aviator in his own right, Hamilton faced the tall German confidently, awaiting some explanation. The pilot stood nervously, preparing to throw himself on the mercy of the duke. Yet he hesitated. What would happen if he did that? It was possible that there had simply been a radio malfunction, that Hess was even now carrying out his secret mission, whatever it was. Heydrich might blame him if Hess’s mission failed. And then, of course, his family would die. He could probably save his family by committing suicide as ordered, but then his child would have no father. The pilot studied the duke’s face. Hamilton had met Rudolf Hess briefly at the Berlin Olympics, he knew. What did the duke see now? Fully expecting to be thrown into chains, the pilot requested that the officer accompanying the duke withdraw from the room. When he had gone, the pilot took a step toward Hamilton, but said nothing.
The duke stared, stupefied. Though his rational mind resisted it, the first seeds of recognition had been planted in his brain. The haughty bearing … the dark, heavy-browed patrician face … Hamilton could scarcely believe his eyes. And despite the duke’s attempt to conceal his astonishment, the pilot saw everything in an instant. The dizzying hope of a condemned man who has glimpsed deliverance surged through him. My God! he thought. It could still work! And why not? It’s what I have trained to do for five years!
The duke was waiting. Without further hesitation—and out of courage or cowardice, he would never know—the pilot stepped away from the iron discipline of a decade.
“I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess,” he said stiffly. “Deputy Führer of the German Reich, leader of the Nazi Party.”
With classic British reserve, the duke remained impassive. “I cannot be sure if that is true,” he said finally.
Hamilton had strained for skepticism, but in his eyes the pilot discerned a different reaction altogether—not disbelief, but shock. Shock that Adolf Hitler’s deputy—arguably the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany—stood before him now in a military hospital in the heart of Britain! That shock was the very sign of Hamilton’s acceptance!
I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess! With a single lungful of air the frightened pilot had transformed himself into the most important prisoner of war in England. His mind reeled, drunk with the reprieve. He no longer thought of the man who had parachuted from the Messerschmitt before him. Hess’s signal had not come, but no one else knew that. No one but Hess, and he was probably dead by now. The pilot could always claim he had received a garbled signal, then simply proceeded with his mission as ordered. No one could lay the failure of Hess’s mission at his door. The pilot closed his eyes in relief. Sippenhaft be damned! No one would kill his family without giving him a chance to explain.
By taking this gamble—the only chance he could see of survival—the desperate captain unknowingly precipitated the most bizarre conspiracy of the Second World War. And a hundred miles to the east, alive or dead, the real Rudolf Hess—a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic civil war in England—disappeared from the face of the earth.
The Duke of Hamilton maintained his attitude of skepticism throughout the brief interview, but before he left the hospital, he issued orders that the prisoner be moved to a secret location and held under double guard.
A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.
PROVERBS 11.13
The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds, launching bricks through the air like moss-covered mortar rounds. Spandau Prison, the brooding red-brick fortress that had stood for over a century and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty years, was being leveled in a single day.
The last inmate of Spandau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the aged Nazi’s isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—the former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns—had agreed that the prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.
Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a collapsing house of cards. Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison’s masonry, dismembered its iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.
This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost, seemed ancient history. But now that Spandau’s forbidding battlements no longer darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.
By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck like a bomb. The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.
A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors. It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human expression of awe at the sight of large-scale destruction.