The Spandau Phoenix
Greg Iles
The North Sea lay serene, unusual for spring, but night would soon fall
on a smoking, broken continent reeling from the shock of war.
From the bloody dunes of Dunkirk to the bomb-shattered streets of
Warsaw, from the frozen tip of Norway to the deserted beaches of the
Mediterranean Europe was enslaved. Only England, beleaguered and alone,
stood against the massed armies of Hitler's Wehrmacht, and tonight
London was scheduled to die.
By fire. At 1800 hours Greenwich time the greatest single concentration
of Luftwaffe bombers ever assembled would unleash their fury upon the
unprotected city, and over seven hundred acres of the British capital
would cease to exist.
Thousands of incendiary bombs would rain down upon civilian and soldier
alike, narrowly missing St. Paul's Cathedral, gutting the Houses of
Parliament. History would record that strike against London as the
worst of the entire war, a holocaust. And yet ...
... all this-the planning, the casualties, the goliathan destruction-was
but the puff of smoke from a magician's gloved hand. A spectacular
diversion calculated to draw the eyes of the world away from a mission
so -daring and intricate that it would defy understanding for
generations to come. The man behind this ingenious plot was Adolf
Hitler, and tonight, unknown to a single member of his General Staff, he
would reach out from the Berghof and undertake the most ambitious
military feat of his life.
He had worked miracles before-the blitzkrieg of Poland, the penetration
of the 'impassable' Ardennes-but this would be the crowning 'achievement
of his career. It would raise him at last above Alexander, Caesar, and
Napoleon. In one stunning blow, he would twist the balance of world
power inside out, transforming his mortal foe into an ally and
consigning his present ally to destruction. To succeed he would have to
reach into the very heart of Britain, but not with bombs or missiles.
Tonight he needed precision, and he had chosen his weapons accordingly:
treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism-the most destructive forces
available to man. All were familiar tools in Hitler's hand, and all
were in place.
But such forces were unpredictable. Traitors lived in terror of
discovery; agents feared capture. Fanatics exploded without warning,
and weak men invited betrayal. To effectively utilize such resources,
Hitler knew, someone had to be on the scene-reassuring the agent,
directing the fanatic, holding the hand of the traitor and a gun to the
head of the coward. But who could handle such a mission? Who could
inspire both trust and fear in equal measure? Hitler knew such a man.
He was a soldier, a man of forty-eight, a pilot.
And he was already in the air.
Two thousand feet above Amsterdam, the Messerschmitt Bf-110 Zerstdrer
plowed through a low ceiling of cumulus clouds and burst into clear sky
over the glittering North Sea.
The afternoon sun flashed across the fighter's silver wings, setting off
the black-painted crosses that struck terror into the stoutest hearts
across Europe.
Inside the cockpit, the pilot breathed a sigh of relief. For the last
four hundred miles he had flown a tiring, highly restricted route,
changing altitude several times to remain within the Luftwaffe's
prescribed corridors of safety. Hitler's personal pilot had given him
the coded map he carried, and, with it, a warning. Not for amusement
were the safety zones changed daily, Hans Bahr had whispered; with
British Spitfires regularly penetrating Hermann Goering's 'impenetrable'
wall of air defense, the danger was real, precautions necessary.
The pilot smiled grimly. Enemy fighters were the least of his worries
this afternoon. If he failed to execute the next step of his mission
perfectly, it would be a squadron of Messerschmitts, not Spitfires, that
shot him into the sea. At any moment the Luftwaffe flight controllers
expected him to turn back for Germany, as he had a dozen times before,
test flying the fighter lent to him personally by Willi Messerschmitt,
then returning home to his wife and child, his privileged life. But
this time he would not turn back.
Checking his airspeed against his watch, he estimated the point at which
he would fade from the Luftwaffe radar screens based on the Dutch island
of Terschelling. He'd reached the Dutch coast at 3:28 Pm. It was now
3:40. At 220 miles per hour, he should have put forty-four miles of the
North Sea behind him already. German radar was no match for its British
counterpart, he knew, but he would wait another three minutes just to
make sure. Nothing could be left to chance tonight.
Nothing.
The pilot shivered inside his fur-lined leather flying suit.
So much depended upon his mission: the fates of England and Germany,
very possibly the whole world. It was enough to make any man shiver.
And Russia, that vast, barbaric land infected by the cancer of
communism-his Fatherland's ancient enemy-if he succeeded tonight, Russia
would kneel beneath the swastika at last!
The pilot nudged the stick, dipping the Messerschmitt's left wing, and
looked down through the thick glass canopy.
Almost time. He looked at his watch, counting. Five ... four ...
three ... two ...
Now! Like a steel falcon he swooped toward the sea, hurtling downward
at over four hundred miles per hour. At the last instant he jerked the
stick back and leveled out, skimming the wave tops as he stormed north
toward Aalborg, the main Luftwaffe fighter base in Denmark. His
desperate race had begun.
Fighting through the heavy air at sea level, the Messerschmitt drank
fuel like water, but the pilot's main concern now was secrecy.
And finding the landing signal, he reminded himself. Two dozen training
flights had familiarized him with the aircraft, but the detour to
Denmark had been unexpected. He had never flown this far north without
visual references. He was not afraid, but he would feel much better
once he sighted the feords of Denmark to starboard.
It had been a long time since the pilot had killed. The battles of the
