Eagle Has Landed Page 4

  Radl looked up. ‘All right, damn you. Show me where the place is. I expect you know.’

  ‘Certainly, Herr Oberst.’ Hofer placed a finger on the Wash and ran it south along the coast. ‘Studley Constable, and here are Blakeney and Cley on the coast, the whole forming a triangle. I have looked at Mrs Grey’s report on the area from before the war. An isolated place—very rural. A lonely coastline of vast beaches and salt marshes.’

  Radl sat there staring at the map for a while and then came to a decision. ‘Get me Hans Meyer. I’d like to have a word with him, only don’t even hint what it’s about.’

  ‘Certainly, Herr Oberst.’

  Hofer moved to the door. ‘And Karl,’ Radl added, ‘every report she’s ever sent. Everything we have on the entire area.’

  The door closed and suddenly it seemed very quiet in the room. He reached for one of his cigarettes. As usual they were Russian, half-tobacco, half-cardboard tube. An affectation with some people who had served in the East. Radl smoked them because he liked them. They were far too strong and made him cough. That was a matter of indifference to him: the doctors had already warned of a considerably shortened lifespan due to his massive injuries.

  He went and stood at the window feeling curiously deflated. It was all such a farce really. The Führer, Himmler, Canaris—like shadows behind the white sheet in a Chinese play. Nothing substantial. Nothing real and this silly business—this Churchill thing. While good men were dying on the Eastern Front in the thousands he was playing damned stupid games like this which couldn’t possibly come to anything.

  He was full of self-disgust, angry with himself for no known reason and then a knock at the door pulled him up short. The man who entered was of medium height and wore a Donegal tweed suit. His grey hair was untidy and the horn-rimmed spectacles made him seem curiously vague.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Meyer. Good of you to come.’

  Hans Meyer was at that time fifty years of age. During the First World War he had been a U-boat commander, one of the youngest in the German Navy. From 1922 onwards he had been wholly employed in intelligence work and was considerably sharper than he looked.

  ‘Herr Oberst,’ he said formally.

  ‘Sit down, man, sit down.’ Radl indicated a chair. ‘I’ve been reading the latest report from one of your agents—Starling. Quite fascinating.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Meyer took off his spectacles and polished them with a grubby handkerchief. ‘Joanna Grey. A remarkable woman.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  Meyer paused, a slight frown on his face. ‘What would you like to know, Herr Oberst?’

  ‘Everything!’ Radl said.

  Meyer hesitated for a moment, obviously on the point of asking why and then thought better of it. He replaced his spectacles and started to talk.

  Joanna Grey had been born Joanna Van Oosten in March, 1875, at a small town called Vierskop in the Orange Free State. Her father was a farmer and pastor of the Dutch Reform Church and, at the age of ten, had taken part in the Great Trek, the migration of some ten thousand Boer farmers between 1836 and 1838 from Cape Colony to new lands north of the Orange River to escape British domination.

  She had married, at twenty, a farmer named Dirk Jansen. She had one child, a daughter born in 1898, a year before the outbreak of hostilities with the British of the following year that became known as the Boer War.

  Her father raised a mounted commando and was killed near Bloemfontein in May, 1900. From that month the war was virtually over, but the two years which followed proved to be the most tragic of the whole conflict for, like others of his countrymen, Dirk Jansen fought on, a bitter guerrilla war in small groups, relying upon outlying farms for shelter and support.

  The British cavalry patrol who called at the Jansen homestead on 11 June 1901, were in search of Dirk Jansen, ironically, and unknown to his wife, already dead of wounds in a mountain camp two months earlier. There was only Joanna, her mother and the child at home. She had refused to answer the corporal’s questions and had been taken into the barn for an interrogation that had involved being raped twice.

  Her complaint to the local area commander was turned down and, in any case, the British were at that time attempting to combat the guerrillas by burning farms, clearing whole areas and placing the population in what soon became known as concentration camps.

  The camps were badly run—more a question of poor administration than of any deliberate ill-will. Disease broke out and in fourteen months over twenty thousand people died, amongst them Joanna Jansen’s mother and daughter. Greatest irony of all, she would have died herself had it not been for the careful nursing she had received from an English doctor named Charles Grey who had been brought into her camp in an attempt to improve things after a public outcry in England over the disclosure of conditions.

  Her hatred of the British was now pathological in its intensity, burned into her forever. Yet she married Grey when he proposed to her. On the other hand, she was twenty-eight years of age and broken by life. She had lost husband and child, every relative she had in the world, had not a penny to her name.

  That Grey loved her there can be no doubt. He was fifteen years older and made few demands, was courteous and kind. Over the years she developed a certain affection for him, mixed with the kind of constant irritation and impatience one feels for an unruly child.

  He accepted work with a London Bible Society as a medical missionary and for some years held a succession of appointments in Rhodesia and Kenya and finally amongst the Zulu. She could never understand his preoccupation with what to her were kaffirs, but accepted it, just as she accepted the drudgery of the teaching she was expected to do to help his work.

  In March, 1925 he died of a stroke and on the conclusion of his affairs, she was left with little more than one hundred and fifty pounds to face life at the age of fifty. Fate had struck her another bitter blow, but she fought on, accepting a post as governess to an English civil servant’s family in Cape Town.

  During this time she started to interest herself in Boer nationalism, attending meetings held regularly by one of the more extreme organizations engaged in the campaign to take South Africa out of the British Empire. At one of these meetings she met a German civil engineer named Hans Meyer. He was ten years her junior and yet a romance flowered briefly, the first, genuine physical attraction she had felt for anyone since her first marriage.

  Meyer was in reality an agent of German Naval Intelligence, in Cape Town to obtain as much information as he could about naval installations in South Africa. By chance, Joanna Grey’s employer worked for the Admiralty and she was able, at no particular risk, to take from the safe at his house certain interesting documents which Meyer had copied before she returned them.

  She was happy to do it because she felt a genuine passion for him, but there was more to it than that. For the first time in her life she was striking a blow against England. Some sort of return for everything she felt had been done to her.

  Meyer had gone back to Germany and continued to write to her and then, in 1929, when for most people the world was cracking into a thousand pieces as Europe nose-dived into a depression, Joanna Grey had the first piece of genuine good fortune of her entire life.

  She received a letter from a firm of solicitors in Norwich, informing her that her late husband’s aunt had died leaving her a cottage outside the village of Studley Constable in North Norfolk and an income of a little over four thousand pounds a year. There was only one snag. The old lady had had a sentimental regard for the house and it was a strict provision of the will that Joanna Grey would have to take up residence.

  To live in England. The very idea made her flesh crawl, but what was the alternative? To continue her present life of genteel slavery, her only prospect a poverty-stricken old age? She obtained a book on Norfolk from the library and read it thoroughly, particularly the section covering the northern coastal area.

  The names bewildered her. Stiffkey, Morston, Blaken
ey, Cley-next-the-Sea, salt marshes, shingle beaches. None of this made any kind of sense for her so she wrote to Hans Meyer with her problem and Meyer wrote back at once, urging her to go and promising to visit her as soon as he could.

  It was the best thing she had ever done in her life. The cottage turned out to be a charming five-bedroomed Georgian house set in half an acre of walled garden. Norfolk at that time was still the most rural county in England, had changed comparatively little since the nineteenth century so that in a small village like Studley Constable she was regarded as a wealthy woman, a person of some importance. And another, stranger thing happened. She found the salt marshes and the shingle beaches fascinating, fell in love with the place, was happier than at any other time in her life.

  Meyer came to England in the autumn of that year and visited her several times. They went for long walks together. She showed him everything. The endless beaches stretching into infinity, the salt marshes, the dunes of Blakeney Point. He never once referred to the period in Cape Town when she had helped him obtain the information he needed, she never once asked him about his present activities.

  They continued to correspond and she visited him in Berlin in 1935. He showed her what National Socialism was doing for Germany. She was intoxicated by everything she saw, the enormous rallies, uniforms everywhere, handsome boys, laughing, happy women and children. She accepted completely that this was the new order. This was how it should be.

  And then, one evening as they strolled back along Unter den Linden after an evening at the opera in which she had seen the Führer himself in his box, Meyer had calmly told her that he was now with the Abwehr, and asked her if she would consider working for them as an agent in England.

  She had said yes instantly, without needing to think about it, her whole body pulsing with an excitement that she had never known in her life before. So, at sixty, she had become a spy, this upper-class English lady, for so she was considered, with the pleasant face, walking the countryside in sweater and tweed skirt with her black retriever at her heels. A pleasant, white-haired lady who had a wireless transmitter and receiver in a small cubbyhole behind the panelling in her study and a contact in the Spanish Embassy in London who passed anything of a bulky nature out to Madrid in the diplomatic bag from where it was handed on to German Intelligence.

  Her results had been consistently good. Her duties as a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service took her into many military installations and she had been able to pass out details of most RAF heavy bomber stations in Norfolk and a great deal of additional relevant information. Her greatest coup had been at the beginning of 1943 when the RAF had introduced two new blind bombing devices which were hoped to greatly increase the success of the night bombing offensive against Germany.

  The most important of these, Oboe, operated by linking up with two ground stations in England. One was in Dover and known as Mouse, the other was situated in Cromer on the North Norfolk coast and rejoiced in the name of Cat.

  It was amazing how much information RAF personnel were willing to give to a kindly WVS lady handing out library books and cups of tea, and during half-a-dozen visits to the Oboe installation at Cromer, she was able to put one of her miniature cameras to good use. A single phone call to Señor Lorca, the clerk at the Spanish Embassy who was her contact, a trip by train to London for the day, a meeting in Green Park, was all it took.

  Within twenty-four hours the information on Oboe was leaving England in the Spanish diplomatic bag. Within thirty-six, a delighted Hans Meyer was laying it on the desk of Canaris himself in his office at the Tirpitz Ufer.

  When Hans Meyer had finished, Radl laid down the pen with which he had been making brief notes. ‘A fascinating lady,’ he said. ‘Quite remarkable. Tell me one thing—how much training has she done?’

  ‘An adequate amount, Herr Oberst,’ Meyer told him. ‘She holidayed in the Reich in 1936 and 1937. On each occasion she received instruction in certain obvious matters. Codes, use of radio, general camera work, basic sabotage techniques. Nothing too advanced admittedly, except for her morse code which is excellent. On the other hand, her function was never intended to be a particularly physical one.’

  ‘No, I can see that. What about use of weapons?’

  ‘Not much need for that. She was raised on the veld. Could shoot the eye out of a deer at a hundred yards by the time she was ten years old.’

  Radl nodded, frowning into space and Meyer said tentatively, ‘Is there something special involved here, Herr Oberst? Perhaps I could be of assistance?’

  ‘Not now,’ Radl told him, ‘but I could well need you in the near future. I’ll let you know. For the moment, it will be sufficient to pass all files on Joanna Grey to this office and no radio communication until further orders.’

  Meyer was aghast and quite unable to contain himself. ‘Please, Herr Oberst, if Joanna is in any kind of danger …’

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ Radl said. ‘I understand your concern, believe me, but there is really nothing more I can say at this time. A matter of the highest security, Meyer.’

  Meyer recovered himself enough to apologize. ‘Of course, Herr Oberst. Forgive me, but as an old friend of the lady…’

  He withdrew. A moment or so after he had gone, Hofer came in from the anteroom carrying several files and a couple of rolled-up maps under his arm. ‘The information you wanted, Herr Oberst, and I’ve also brought two British Admiralty charts which cover the coastal area—numbers one hundred and eight and one hundred and six.’

  ‘I’ve told Meyer to let you have everything he has on Joanna Grey and I’ve told him no more radio communication,’ Radl said. ‘You take over from now on.’

  He reached for one of those eternal Russian cigarettes and Hofer produced a lighter made from a Russian 7.62 mm cartridge case. ‘Do we proceed, then, Herr Oberst?’

  Radl blew a cloud of smoke and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Are you familiar with the works of Jung, Karl?’

  ‘The Herr Oberst knows I sold good beer and wine before the war.’

  ‘Jung speaks of what he calls synchronicity. Events sometimes having a coincidence in time and, because of this, the feeling that some much deeper motivation is involved.’

  ‘Herr Oberst?’ Hofer said politely.

  ‘Take this affair. The Führer, whom heaven protect naturally, has a brainstorm and comes up with the comical and absurd suggestion that we should emulate Skorzeny’s exploit at Gran Sasso by getting Churchill, although whether alive or dead has not been specified. And then synchronicity rears its ugly head in a routine Abwehr report. A brief mention that Churchill will be spending a weekend no more than seven or eight miles from the coast at a remote country house in as quiet a part of the country as one could wish. You take my meaning? At any other time that report of Mrs Grey’s would have meant nothing.’

  ‘So we do proceed then, Herr Oberst?’

  ‘It would appear that fate has taken a hand, Karl,’ Radl said. ‘How long did you say Mrs Grey’s reports take to come in through the Spanish diplomatic bag?’

  ‘Three days, Herr Oberst, if someone is waiting in Madrid to collect. No more than a week, even if circumstances are difficult.’

  ‘And when is her next radio contact time?’

  ‘This evening, Herr Oberst.’

  ‘Good—send her this message.’ Radl looked up at the ceiling again, thinking hard, trying to compress his thoughts. ‘Very interested in your visitor of sixth November. Like to drop some friends in to meet him in the hope that they might persuade him to come back with them. Your early comments looked for by usual route with all relevant information.’

  ‘Is that all, Herr Oberst?’

  ‘I think so.’

  That was Wednesday and it was raining in Berlin, but the following morning when Father Philip Vereker limped out through the lychgate of St Mary’s and All the Saints, Studley Constable, and walked down through the village, the sun was shining and it was that most beautiful of all things, a perfect
autumn day.

  At that time, Philip Vereker was a tall, gaunt young man of thirty, the gauntness emphasized even more by the black cassock. His face was strained and twisted with pain as he limped along, leaning heavily on his stick. He had only been discharged from a military hospital four months earlier.

  The younger son of a Harley Street surgeon, he had been a brilliant scholar who at Cambridge had shown every sign of an outstanding future. Then, to his family’s dismay, he had decided to train for the priesthood, had gone to the English College in Rome and joined the Society of Jesus.

  He had entered the army as a padre in 1940 and had finally been assigned to the Parachute Regiment and had seen action only once in November, 1942, in Tunisia when he had jumped with units of the First Parachute Brigade with orders to seize the airfield at Oudna, ten miles from Tunis. In the end, they had been compelled to make a fighting retreat over fifty miles of open country, strafed from the air every yard of the way and under constant attack from ground forces.

  One hundred and eighty made it to safety. Two hundred and sixty didn’t. Vereker was one of the lucky ones, in spite of a bullet which had passed straight through his left ankle, chipping bone. By the time he reached a field hospital, sepsis had set in. His left foot was amputated and he was invalided out.

  Vereker found it difficult to look pleasant these days. The pain was constant and would not go away, and yet he did manage a smile as he approached Park Cottage and saw Joanna Grey emerge pushing her bicycle, her retriever at her heels.

  ‘How are you, Philip?’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you for several days.’

  She wore a tweed skirt, polo-necked sweater underneath a yellow oilskin coat and a silk scarf was tied around her white hair. She really did look very charming with that South African tan of hers that she had never really lost.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ Vereker said. ‘Dying by inches of boredom more than anything else. One piece of news since I last saw you. My sister, Pamela. Remember me speaking of her? She’s ten years younger than me. A corporal in the WAAF.’