Eagle Has Landed Read online

  ‘Court martial?’ Radl said. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ He opened the file. ‘Who on earth is this man?’

  ‘His name is Steiner. Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Steiner,’ Hofer said, ‘and I’ll leave you in peace to read about him. It’s an interesting story.’

  It was more than interesting. It was fascinating.

  Steiner was the only son of Major-General Karl Steiner, at present area commander in Brittany. He had been born in 1916 when his father was a major of artillery. His mother was American, daughter of a wealthy wool merchant from Boston who had moved to London for business reasons. In the month that her son was born, her only brother had died on the Somme as a captain in a Yorkshire infantry regiment.

  The boy had been educated in London, spending five years at St Paul’s during the period his father was military attaché at the German Embassy, and spoke English fluently. After his mother’s tragic death in a car crash in 1931, he had returned to Germany with his father, but had continued to visit relatives in Yorkshire until 1938.

  For a while, he had studied art in Paris, maintained by his father, the bargain being that if it didn’t work out he would enter the Army. That was exactly what had happened. He had a brief period as a second lieutenant in the Artillery and in 1936 had answered the call for volunteers to do parachute training at Stendhal, more to relieve the boredom of military life than anything else.

  It had become obvious immediately that he had a talent for that kind of freebooter soldiery. He’d seen ground action in Poland and parachuted into Narvik in the Norwegian campaign. As a full lieutenant he’d crash-landed by glider with the group that took the Albert Canal in 1940 during the big push for Belgium and had been wounded in the arm.

  Greece came next—the Corinth Canal, and then a new kind of hell. May, 1941, a captain by then, in the big drop over Crete, severely wounded in savage fighting for Maleme airfield.

  Afterwards, the Winter War. Radl was aware of a sudden chill in his bones at the very name. God, will we ever forget Russia? he asked himself, those of us who were there then?

  As an acting major Steiner had led a special assault group of three hundred volunteers, dropped by night to contact and lead out two divisions cut off during the battle for Leningrad. He had emerged from that affair with a bullet in the right leg which had left him with a slight limp, a Knight’s Cross and a reputation for that kind of cutting-out operation.

  He had been in charge of two further affairs of a similar nature and had been promoted lieutenant-colonel in time to go to Stalingrad where he had lost half his men, but had been ordered out several weeks before the end when there were still planes running. In January, he and the one hundred and sixty-seven survivors of his original assault group were dropped near Kiev, once again to contact and lead out two infantry divisions which had been cut off. The end product was a fighting retreat for three hundred bloodstained miles and during the last week in April, Kurt Steiner had crossed into German lines with only thirty survivors of his original assault force.

  There was an immediate award of the Oak leaves to his Knight’s Cross and Steiner and his men had been packed off to Germany by train as soon as possible, passing through Warsaw on the morning of the 1st of May. He had left it with his men that same evening under close arrest by order of Jurgen Stroop, SS Brigade-Führer and Major-General of Police.

  There had been a court martial the following week. The details were missing, only the verdict was on file. Steiner and his men had been sentenced to serve as a penal unit to work on Operation Swordfish on Alderney in the German-occupied Channel Islands. Radl sat looking at the file for a moment, then closed it and pressed the buzzer for Hofer who came in at once.

  ‘Herr Oberst?’

  ‘What happened in Warsaw?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Herr Oberst. I’m hoping to have the court martial papers available later this afternoon.’

  ‘All right,’ Radl said. ‘What are they doing in the Channel Islands?’

  ‘As far as I can find out, Operation Swordfish is a kind of suicide unit, Herr Oberst. Their purpose is the destruction of allied shipping in the Channel.’

  ‘And how do they achieve that?’

  ‘Apparently they sit on a torpedo with the charge taken out, Herr Oberst, and a glass cupola fitted to give the operator some protection. A live torpedo is slung underneath which during an attack, the operator is supposed to release, turning away at the last moment himself.’

  ‘Good God Almighty,’ Radl said in horror. ‘No wonder they had to make it a penal unit.’

  He sat there in silence for a while looking down at the file. Hofer coughed and said tentatively, ‘You think he could be a possibility?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Radl said. ‘I should imagine that anything would seem like an improvement on what he’s doing now. Do you know if the Admiral is in?’

  ‘I’ll find out, Herr Oberst.’

  ‘If he is, try and get me an appointment this afternoon. Time I showed him how far we’ve got. Prepare me an outline—nice and brief. One page only and type it yourself. I don’t want anyone else getting wind of this thing. Not even in the Department.’

  At that precise moment Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Steiner was up to his waist in the freezing waters of the English Channel, colder than he had ever been in his life before, colder even than in Russia, cold eating into his brain as he crouched behind the glass cupola on his torpedo.

  His exact situation was almost two miles to the north-east of Braye Harbour on the island of Alderney, and north of the smaller off-shore island of Burhou, although he was cocooned in a sea-fog of such density that for all he could see, he might as well have been at the end of the world. At least he was not alone. Lifelines of hemp rope disappeared into the fog on either side of him like umbilical cords connecting him with Sergeant Otto Lemke on his left and Lieutenant Ritter Neumann on his right.

  Steiner had been amazed to get called out that afternoon. Even more astonishing was the evidence of a radar contact, indicating a ship so close inshore, for the main route up-channel was much further north. As it transpired later, the vessel in question, an eight-thousand-ton Liberty ship Joseph Johnson out of Boston for Plymouth with a cargo of high explosives, had sustained damage to her steering in a bad storm near Land’s End three days earlier. Her difficulties in this direction and the heavy fog had conspired to put her off course.

  North of Burhou, Steiner slowed, jerking on the lifelines to alert his companions. A few moments later, they coasted out of the fog on either side to join him. Ritter Neumann’s face was blue with cold in the black cowl of his rubber suit. ‘We’re close, Herr Oberst,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I can hear them.’

  Sergeant Lemke drifted in to join them. The curly black beard, of which he was very proud, was a special dispensation from Steiner in view of the fact that Lemke’s chin was badly deformed by a Russian high-velocity bullet. He was very excited, eyes sparkling, and obviously looked upon the whole thing as a great adventure.

  ‘I too, Herr Oberst.’

  Steiner raised a hand to silence him and listened. The muted throbbing was quite close now for the Joseph Johnson was taking it very steady indeed.

  ‘An easy one, Herr Oberst.’ Lemke grinned in spite of the fact that his teeth were chattering in the cold. ‘The best touch we’ve had yet. She won’t even know what’s hit her.’

  ‘You speak for yourself, Lemke,’ Ritter Neumann said. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my short and unhappy life it’s never to expect anything and to be particularly suspicious of that which is apparently served up on a plate.’

  As if to prove his words, a sudden flurry of wind tore a hole in the curtain of the fog. Behind them was the grey-green sweep of Alderney, the old Admiralty breakwater poking out like a granite finger for a thousand yards from Braye, the Victorian naval fortification of Fort Albert clearly visible.

  No more than a hundred and fifty yards away, the Joseph Johnson moved on a north-westerly course f
or the open Channel at a steady eight or ten knots. It could only be a matter of moments before they were seen, Steiner acted instantly. ‘All right, straight in, release torpedoes at fifty yards and out again and no stupid heroics, Lemke. There aren’t any medals to be had in the penal regiments, remember. Only coffins.’

  He increased power and surged forward, crouching behind the cupola as waves started breaking over his head. He was aware of Ritter Neumann on his right, roughly abreast of him, but Lemke had surged on and was already fifteen or twenty yards in front.

  ‘The silly young bastard,’ Steiner thought. ‘What does he think this is, the Charge of the Light Brigade?’

  Two of the men at the rail of the Joseph Johnson had rifles in their hands and an officer came out of the wheelhouse and stood on the bridge firing a Thompson sub-machine-gun with a drum magazine. The ship was picking up speed now, driving through a light curtain of mist, as the blanket of fog began to settle again. Within another few moments she would have disappeared altogether. The riflemen at the rail were having difficulty in taking aim on a heaving deck at a target so low in the water and their shots were very wide of the mark. The Thompson, not too accurate at the best of times, was doing no better and making a great deal of noise about it.

  Lemke reached the fifty-yard line several lengths in front of the others and kept right on going. There wasn’t a thing Steiner could do about it. The riflemen started to get the range and a bullet ricocheted from the body of his torpedo in front of the cupola.

  He turned and waved to Neumann. ‘Now!’ he cried and fired his torpedo.

  The one upon which he was seated, released from the weight it had been carrying, sprang forward with new energy and he turned to starboard quickly, following Neumann round in a great sweeping curve intended to take them away from the ship as fast as possible.

  Lemke was turning away now also, no more than twenty-five yards from the Joseph Johnson, the men at the rail firing at him for all they were worth. Presumably one of them scored a hit, although Steiner could never be sure. The only certain thing was that one moment Lemke was crouched astride his torpedo, surging away from danger. The next, he wasn’t there any more.

  A second later one of the three torpedoes scored a direct hit close to the stern and the stern hold contained hundreds of tons of high explosive bombs destined for use by Flying Fortresses of bombardment groups of the 1st Air Division of the American 8th Air Force in Britain. As the Joseph Johnson was swallowed by the fog, she exploded, the sound re-echoing from the island again and again. Steiner crouched low as the blast swept over, swerving when an enormous piece of twisted metal hurtled into the sea in front of him.

  Debris cascaded down. The air was full of it and something struck Neumann a glancing blow on the head. He threw up his hands with a cry and catapulted backwards into the sea, his torpedo running away from him, plunging over the next wave and disappearing.

  Although unconscious, blood on his forehead from a nasty gash, he was kept afloat by his inflatable jacket. Steiner coasted in beside him, looped one end of a line under the lieutenant’s jacket and kept on going, pushing towards the breakwater and Braye, already fading as the fog rolled in towards the island again.

  The tide was ebbing fast. Steiner didn’t have one chance in hell of reaching Braye Harbour and he knew it, as he wrestled vainly against a tide that must eventually sweep them far out into the Channel beyond any hope of return.

  He suddenly realized that Ritter Neumann was conscious again and staring up at him. ‘Let me go!’ he said faintly. ‘Cut me loose. You’ll make it on your own.’

  Steiner didn’t bother to reply at first, but concentrated on turning the torpedo over towards the right. Burhou was somewhere out there in that impenetrable blanket of fog. There was a chance the ebbing tide might push them in, a slim one perhaps, but better than nothing.

  He said calmly, ‘How long have we been together now, Ritter?’

  ‘You know damn well,’ Ritter said. ‘The first time I clapped eyes on you was over Narvik when I was afraid to jump out of the plane.’

  ‘I remember now,’ Steiner said. ‘I persuaded you otherwise.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Ritter said. ‘You threw me out.’

  His teeth were chattering and he was very cold and Steiner reached down to check the line. ‘Yes, a snotty eighteen-year-old Berliner, fresh from the University. Always with a volume of poetry in your hip pocket. The professor’s son who crawled fifty yards under fire to bring me a medical kit when I was wounded at the Albert Canal.’

  ‘I should have let you go,’ Ritter said. ‘Look what you got me into. Crete, then a commission I didn’t want, Russia and now this. What a bargain.’ He closed his eyes and added softly, ‘Sorry, Kurt, but it’s no good.’

  Quite suddenly, they were caught in a great eddy of water that swept them in towards the rocks of L’Equet on the tip of Burhou. There was a ship there, or half one; all that was left of a French coaster that had run on the reef in a storm earlier in the year. What was left of her stern deck sloped into deep water. A wave swept them in, the torpedo high on the swell and Steiner rolled away from it, grabbing for the ship’s rail with one hand and hanging on to Neumann’s lifeline with the other.

  The wave receded, taking the torpedo with it. Steiner got to his feet and went up the sloping deck to what was left of the wheelhouse. He wedged himself in the broken doorway and hauled his companion after him. They crouched in the roofless shell of the wheelhouse and it started to rain softly.

  ‘What happens now?’ Neumann asked weakly.

  ‘We sit tight,’ Steiner said. ‘Brandt will be out with the recovery boat as soon as this fog clears a little.’

  ‘I could do with a cigarette,’ Neumann said, and then he stiffened suddenly and pointed out through the broken doorway. ‘Look at that.’

  Steiner went to the rail. The water was moving fast now as the tide ebbed, twisting and turning amongst the reefs and rocks, carrying with it the refuse of war, a floating carpet of wreckage that was all that was left of the Joseph Johnson.

  ‘So, we got her,’ Neumann said. Then he tried to get up. ‘There’s a man down there, Kurt, in a yellow lifejacket. Look, under the stern.’

  Steiner slid down the deck into the water and turned under the stern, pushing his way through a mass of planks to the man who floated there, head back, eyes closed. He was very young with blond hair plastered to the skull. Steiner grabbed him by the lifejacket and started to tow him towards the safety of the shattered stern, and he opened his eyes and stared at him. Then he shook his head, trying to speak.

  Steiner floated beside him for a moment. ‘What is it?’ he said in English.

  ‘Please,’ the boy whispered. ‘Let me go.’

  His eyes closed again and Steiner swam with him to the stern. Neumann, watching from the wheelhouse, saw Steiner start to drag him up the sloping deck. He paused for a long moment, then slid the boy gently back into the water. A current took him away and out of sight beyond the reef, and Steiner clambered wearily back up the deck again.

  ‘What was it?’ Neumann demanded weakly.

  ‘Both legs were gone from the knees down.’ Steiner sat very carefully and braced his feet against the rail. ‘What was that poem of Eliot’s that you were always quoting at Stalingrad? The one I didn’t like?’

  ‘I think we are in rat’s alley,’ Neumann said, ‘Where the dead men lost their bones.’

  ‘Now I understand it,’ Steiner told him. ‘Now I see exactly what he meant.’

  They sat there in silence. It was colder now, the rain increasing in force, clearing the fog rapidly. About twenty minutes later they heard an engine not too far away. Steiner took the small signalling pistol from the pouch on his right leg, charged it with a waterproof cartridge and fired a maroon.

  A few moments later, the recovery launch appeared from the fog and slowed, drifting in towards them. Sergeant-Major Brandt was in the prow with a line ready to throw. He was an eno
rmous figure of a man, well over six feet tall and broad in proportion, rather incongruously wearing a yellow oilskin coat with Royal National Lifeboat Institution on the back. The rest of the crew were all Steiner’s men. Sergeant Sturm at the wheel, Lance-Corporal Briegel and Private Berg acting as deckhands. Brandt jumped for the sloping deck of the wreck and hitched the line about the rail as Steiner and Neumann slid down to join him.

  ‘You made a hit, Herr Oberst. What happened to Lemke?’

  ‘Playing heroes as usual,’ Steiner told him. ‘This time he went too far. Careful with Lieutenant Neumann. He’s had a bad crack on the head.’

  ‘Sergeant Altmann’s out in the other boat with Riedel and Meyer. They might see some sign of him. He has the Devil’s own luck, that one.’ Brandt lifted Neumann up over the rail with astonishing strength. ‘Get him in the cabin.’

  But Neumann wouldn’t have it and slumped down on the deck with his back against the stern rail. Steiner sat beside him and Brandt gave them cigarettes as the motor boat pulled away. Steiner felt tired. More tired than he had been in a very long time. Five years of war. Sometimes it seemed as if it was not only all there was, but all there ever had been.

  They rounded the end of the Admiralty breakwater and followed the thousand yards or so of its length into Braye. There was a surprising number of ships in the harbour, French coasters mostly, carrying building supplies from the continent for the new fortifications that were being raised all over the island.

  The small landing stage had been extended. An E-boat was tied up there and as the motor boat drifted in astern, the sailors on deck raised a cheer and a young, bearded lieutenant in a heavy sweater and salt-stained cap stood smartly to attention and saluted.

  ‘Fine work, Herr Oberst.’

  Steiner acknowledged the salute as he went over the rail. ‘Many thanks, Koenig.’

  He went up the steps to the upper landing stage, Brandt following, supporting Neumann with a strong arm. As they came out on top a large black saloon car, an old Wolseley, turned on to the landing stage and braked to a halt. The driver jumped out and opened the rear door.