Just as the Fuhrer planned! Even if you could persuade these cowards to
allow you to detonate the weapons, you don't have the knowledge to do
it. I have won!'
Gadi Abrams pointed his R5 at Hess's face.
'No, Gadi!' Stern cried. 'God, I wanted so badly to take him back to
Israel for trial! To see him forced to tell the world his vile story.
To tell what he knows about the British.'
'I'll tell you now,' Hess coughed. 'You'll all be dead within minutes,
anyway. I might as well entertain you while we wait for Major Karami.'
'Shut up!' Stern snapped in German. 'No one cares anymore!'
'Let him talk,' Hauer said. 'If we're going to die, I want to know why.
I want to know what this Nazi bastard had planned for Germany.'
Hess smiled defiantly. 'I think I'll keep that to myself, Captain. But
I will tell you about the British.'
Hans stepped forward. 'Maybe there is another way out of here, Captain.
Why don't we search the lab?'
Pieter Smuts laughed dryly. 'Sorry, Sergeant. One way in, one way out.
That's the best security there is. You're going to die where you
stand.'
'You'll die before I do,' Hans shot back.
Ilse reached out and squeezed Hans's arm. 'I want to hear Hess's story,
Hans. I want to know why an innocent man rotted in Spandau all those
years, and why the Allies kept silent about it. My grandfather came
here to find those answers.
He thought they were very important. I want to learn them, if I can.'
Hess signaled for Smuts to set him up straighter. The gesture silenced
everyone in the room. In spite of the Libyan commandos who would soon
hammer through the protective shields above, in spite of the
incomprehensible danger that lay between them all like coals delivered
up from hell, every person in the basement crowded silently around the
old man propped against the steel wall.
'The Jew knows most of it already,' Hess rasped. 'What he doesn't
know-what nobody knows-is what my part of the mission was. For so long
the furor has focused on my flight to Scotland. The simple truth is
that my flight was only a small part of the plan.' Hess's voice gained
strength.
'Our goal was to replace the government of England. No one in England
wanted another war, yet any idiot could see that Churchill would never
make peace with the Fuhrer. So, the answer was simple-get rid of
Churchill. The Americans and the Soviet Union did the same thing many
times after the war.
Coup d'etat is the fashionable term, yes? The Fuhrer was always years
ahead of his time.' Hess scratched at a wisp of beard on his chin.
'It makes me laugh now, all that rot about how the valiant British saved
the world from Hitler. Ha! There were dozens of powerful Englishmen
ready to throw Churchill out and put a right-thinking man in Downing
Street. And I don't mean radicals. They were lords and ladies, members
of Parliament, knights of the realm.
They understood that the only,way to stop communism was to ally England
with the Reich. So they tried it! They got word to the Fuhrer that if
Churchill and his gang could be got out, they had men ready to step in.
If the king could be eliminated, they could fill his shoes also. Of
course the Fuhrer agreed immediately. While he made arrangements to
have Churchill and the king liquidated, his English friends prepared to
fill the coming power vacuum. Windsor was to take his younger brother's
place on the throne.'
Hess's voice gained strength. 'It was to happen on the tenth of May-the
anniversary of our victorious attack on Western Europe. My mission was
simple. The Englishmen behind the coup demanded absolute proof that the
Fuhrer would live up to his end of the bargain-that he would actually
make peace with Britain, cease the terror bombing of London and so
forth.' Hess's eyes glazed with lost glory.
'So the Fuhrer asked Rudi-his faithful deputy and lifelong friend-to be
his emissary to his British friends!'
'But why was your double sent?' Ilse asked.
Hess smiled cagily. 'British Intelligence learned that I was planning
to fly to Britain. They had informers everywhere. They expected me to
land near Dungavel Castlewhich was my original plan-but two weeks before
my flight, Reinhard Heydrich discovered that mI-5 knew about the
Dungavel meeting. Rather than cancel it, however, Heydrich simply
changed the actual rendezvous to the beach opposite Holy Island.' Hess
nodded admiringly. 'It was Heydrich's idea to send my double on to
Dungavel. To act as if nothing had changed, you see! The double's
mission was to dupe mI-5 into believing they had captured me, but just
long enough for me to complete my real mission. It was never intended
that he do what he did!'
'But you didn't complete your mission,' Hauer pointed out. 'Why not?'
Hess sighed. 'Because by the time I jumped out of the plane over Holy
Island, mI-5 had found out about that rendezvous as well. Another
informer had betrayed us. When I landed-several hundred meters off
target, by the way-I heard shooting. I quickly realized that something
had gone wrong. When I moved closer to the firing, I saw that British
agents had already stormed the rendezvous site-which consisted of a
half-dozen autos parked on a shingle of beach.
There was a gun battle between some mI-5 operatives and my contacts.'
Hess grimaced as if at some private pain. 'It was there I received the
wound that eventually took my eye.
A stray bullet.' He shrugged. 'My part of the mission had failed. I
knew the name of a German agent who maintained a radio link to Occupied
France from a nearby coastal village, and I made my way to his house on
a stolen motorbike.
The rest is unimportant.'
'But what of the plan to kill Churchill?' Ilse asked.
Hess looked tired now. 'Ask the Jew.'
Stern cast Hess a disparaging look. 'It actually might have worked,' he
said, 'but for a confused Englishman who came to his senses just in time
to thwart the assassination. If my guess is right, the only man to
escape from that part of the mission-a Russian named Zinoviev-fled to
the same German agent Hess did.' Stern looked at Hess.
