The Hess Cross (9 page)

Heather McMillan unbuckled the safety straps and rose from her seat next to Hess's.

"How much longer until we land, Mr. Crown?" she yelled above the drone of the plane.

For the first time since they had met two days ago, Crown looked at her squarely. Her large eyes were deep green and contrasted with her shoulder-length, muted auburn hair. Her mouth was wide, perhaps too wide. A few light freckles were splashed over the thin bridge of her nose. She purposely kept her full lower lip tucked in, reflecting the business of the question.

"The commander said we'll arrive within thirty minutes. How are your conversations with Herr Hess?" Crown asked, knowing Hess had said almost nothing.

"Wonderful," Heather replied, showing him the yellow pad. "I took down everything he said verbatim and used a quarter of a page. Occasionally I ask him to pause so I can flex my worn-out fingers." She lifted her right hand and made a series of fists. Ludendorf joined them in the small laugh.

Crown had reviewed her dossier during his first hour in England. RAF Lieutenant McMillan was Air Chief Marshal Hilling's adjutant. She had initially been assigned to Hilling as his typist, but soon displayed skill at distributing orders, rough-drafting correspondence, and turning away unwelcome junior officers beset with minor problems. Soon she was making decisions for the air chief marshal. Each day she submitted a list of orders she recommended. Hilling reviewed them briefly, occasionally penned in a change, signed them, and returned the sheet to Heather. She would then send them off. The air chief marshal discovered he had more time for major decisions. As his adjutant, Heather became one of the few women non-nurses to hold an officer's commission in the RAF.

Because of the absolute trust the air chief marshal had in her, and because of the strict security of the mission, he had assigned Heather, rather than an outsider, to assist Crown.
Her primary duty was boring: take down on a legal pad every word Hess uttered en route. She would also transcribe the conversations between Hess and Enrico Fermi in Chicago. Thus far, her job had been easy. On her pad appeared the only thing Hess had said since he was put on the plane, twelve identical questions: "Do you think it might be possible for me to use the bathroom?"

The Fortress lurched as it hit an air pocket, and she grabbed for the back of her wicker seat. The woolen scarf, wrapped several times around her neck, and the tight flight coat made her movements awkward. She wore regulation RAF gray-brown flight pants, designed for warmth, not style. Their legs made her look bottom-heavy. The RAF commando sitting across the aisle from her straightened in his seat and tried to catch her eye. He failed, just as he had failed in his clumsy attempt to meet her as they boarded the bomber.

Rudolf Hess walked from the head, his feet wide apart in an exaggerated sailor's gait to prevent losing his balance. He grabbed the back of Crown's chair, expecting the plane to lurch, and when it did not, he said, "Excuse me," and slipped past Heather to his seat. She made an elaborate production of writing "Excuse me" on her pad, smiled brightly, and sat down.

Ludendorf said to Crown, "I think she is telling us she's underemployed."

The snapping of Heather's seat buckle and the unsnapping of the commando's were almost simultaneous. The soldier rose from his seat, smiled knowingly to the commando sitting next to him, and then leaned across the aisle to Heather. He was a large man with a hard-bitten face, the face of a professional soldier. His flattop hair was brown and close-cropped.

Crown couldn't hear what he said, but her shaking head left no doubt of the nature of his proposal. He spoke again,
this time holding up a note pad and riffling it with his thumb. Again she shook her head, this time more insistently. The commando's smile vanished, and he exposed his lower teeth as he spoke.

Crown tapped the commando's leg with his hand. The soldier looked at him, then looked away, as if dismissing a servant, and returned his overbearing attention to the reddening Heather. Crown tapped again, and now the soldier couldn't ignore the man he had been told was his superior on this journey. Crown leaned forward and said in a low voice, "How about leaving the lady alone? She's had a long day."

"Listen, Yank, you may be my boss here, but you can't bloody well run my life, now, can you?"

"I'm telling you to back off." The soldier didn't recognize the thin warning smile that crossed Crown's face.

"Drop dead, Yank."

No one in the plane saw Crown's hand move. Not even the offending commando, who jerked upright, paled, then slumped clumsily back into his seat with his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. His friend in the next seat had to help him with his safety straps.

Heather only knew the soldier was no longer pestering her. Crown must have said something. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled her confused thanks.

Ludendorf again wanted an escape from his fear. "Can you tell me how you got Hess out of the hospital?"

"Sorry, Professor. Perhaps when this is over I can let you know. I've been instructed to tell no one."

"Of course," replied Ludendorf, "but I'll bet it was interesting."

Very interesting. Hess had been interned at Maindiff Court Hospital in June. The hospital had been chosen because it was suitable for the accommodation of a psychopathic personality, although no severe mental cases
were treated there. In addition, many British officers were undergoing treatment and recovering from war wounds at the hospital. Removing Hess from the hospital without raising suspicion was Crown's first task when he arrived in England. He assumed that Nazi agents, ordered to discover why the deputy führer made the flight, were closely tracking Hess. And then there was the insatiable British press.

On November 18, after Crown and Heather painstakingly searched RAF officers' files, Lieutenant Chauncey Stewart, a supply officer in the Tenth Wing, stationed at Croyden, received a phone call from Air Chief Marshal Hilling ordering him to report to the base commander's headquarters at 1100 hours the following morning. The lieutenant, a tall, thick-set man with bushy black eyebrows and a full crop of black hair, was nervously wringing his service cap when he entered the Quonset hut. He glanced about quickly, and was only slightly relieved to see a civilian. He nevertheless stood stiffly at attention.

"No need to be formal, Lieutenant. You outrank whatever rank I ever had in the service. Will you please read this?" Crown handed the lieutenant a sealed envelope.

Crown's assurances of his inferior rank did not assuage Lieutenant Stewart. He fumbled as he tore open the envelope and read:

EYES ONLY

Nov. 18, 1942

Lieutenant Chauncey Stewart

Supply Station

Tenth Wing, RAF

London, England

Lieutenant Stewart:

      
The person delivering this letter to you is John Crown. You will follow his orders as if they were my orders.

      
You will accompany Mr. Crown to Maindiff Court Hospital and remain there for as long as he determines.

      
I have cleared your absence with your superiors and you are not to discuss this with them or anyone else.

Yours very truly,

J. R. Hilling

Air Chief Marshal

Royal Air Force

Lieutenant Stewart looked up from the letter, no less puzzled and tense. "Sir, may I ask, why to a hospital? Am I sick?"

"No, Lieutenant. Air Chief Marshal Hilling is arranging for a very important man to leave the hospital in strict security. No one must suspect he has gone. You'll be that person's stand-in during his two- or three-week absence. We want someone in his cell, or more correctly, in his ward, while he is gone, to give the impression he's still in the hospital. You were chosen simply because of your physical resemblance to this man."

The lieutenant whispered, "Hess."

"Lieutenant," Crown said, not displeased, "if you think you know the name of the person, you will forget the name. This assignment is more important than anything you've ever worked on before. And it must be kept an absolute secret. Your guess can't be mentioned to anyone."

"I understand, Mr. Crown. I should tell you that in May 1941 I was kidded a lot by friends because I looked like a certain very high-ranking German who had just flown into Scotland."

"How unfortunate. Tell me, Lieutenant, are you always this nervous when receiving letters?"

"No, sir," Stewart answered, tension draining from him, "it's just that Air Chief Marshal Hilling phoned me last night. An RAF lieutenant normally never receives phone
calls from a marshal. That was bad enough, but then he told me to report here this morning because I was going to jail. That's all he said."

Crown laughed and said, "Well, to a hospital cell, not really a jail."

"I know that now, sir," Stewart said wanly, "but I put in a bad night last night."

That night, a screaming Rover ambulance pulled into the Maindiff Court Hospital's emergency entrance. Only thin streams of light escaped its hooded blackout headlights as it swerved away from the entrance, noisily switched gears to reverse, and backed under the canvas canopy. Four attendants lifted the injured man from the truck and gently placed him on a litter, then carried him quickly to the emergency door, where a physician and nurse waited. Only the injured man's nose protruded from the heavy white gauze wrapped around his head. The man moaned softly. He was gently transferred to a rolling table. John Crown, dressed in white coat and pants, lifted a stethoscope from the coat pocket and plugged it into his ears and said to the ambulance attendants, "Thank you. We'll take him from here." Heather McMillan, wearing a nurse's white smock and a cap bobby-pinned to her hair, closed the emergency door behind the attendants as they left.

Through the gauze over his mouth, Lieutenant Chauncey Stewart mumbled, "This bloody war."

Flat feet kept Bertrum Atley out of the Royal Navy. So he bought specially built-up shoes and wore them for two weeks before his army physical, but his arches fell during the walk to the recruiting station, where he was examined and rejected by army doctors. His last chance to serve England was in the Royal Air Force. For three weeks before the physical, two hours a day, while he dreamed of piloting a
Hurricane, Atley stood in his bare feet on whiskey bottles, trying to push his arches up.

On the morning of the physical, he took a lorry to the air-force recruiting station. He sat as much as he could during the interminable delays while his application was being processed. In the examination lines, he stood bowlegged on the edges of his feet to keep pressure off the arches. The physical lasted two minutes. His feet passed, and Atley's joy was not diminished when the doctor, who had noticed his bowlegged stance in line, ordered Atley to drop his pants so that he could, with a flashlight, look for piles. Atley passed that, too.

He was in the Royal Air Force, but as ninety percent of air-force personnel the world over will testify, there is always some test during the physical that keeps one from becoming a fighter pilot. Atley's was the color-blindness test. When the nurse held up a series of multicolored charts and asked him to identify the numbers hidden in the swirling colors, all Atley could say was "Very nice" and "Lovely."

The RAF assigned Aircraftman Second Class Atley to the Maindiff Court Hospital with a job entitled "Short-trip Pallbearer." His duty was to pick up bodies from hospital rooms, load them into coffins, and transfer the coffins to waiting trucks.

Like all hospitals, Maindiff Court hid its failures. Bodies were removed during the graveyard shift, midnight to eight in the morning. Each night, Atley arrived to find the list of deceased and a row of empty coffins. The job was not a hard one. He usually did his full shift's paperwork and loading in five hours, and he occupied the remaining time by drinking tea with the coffin truck driver, Aircraftman Howard Ross.

On this night there were nine caskets, lined in an even row on the loading ramp. His work was completed, and Ross was a few minutes late, so Atley occupied his time by
carving his initials on one of the coffins. The loading-ramp door swung open, and Atley quickly pocketed his knife. A tall nurse with reddish-brown hair pushed a coffin on a roller onto the ramp.

"Here's a late one," the nurse said. "Can you get him on the truck?"

"You bet," replied Atley. "It's a little late, but I'll manage."

The nurse wore the insignia of a lieutenant, and Atley wished all lieutenants looked like her. He had a weakness for freckles.

She nodded toward the hot plate and boiling water Atley had prepared for himself and Ross. "Do you mind if I have some tea? Rolling this poor man down here has quite winded me."

Atley rushed to the hot plate. He shook out a few drops of last night's tea from Ross's cup and handed it to her. Heather McMillan looked into the cup and could not suppress a wince. She asked, "How often do you clean these cups?"

"Oh, about once a month," said the embarrassed Atley, "whether they need it or not. Here, I'll fix that."

He opened his knife and scraped the tea residue from the inside of Heather's cup. He turned it over and tapped the bottom with his palm. Heather retreated several steps.

"Let me guess," Atley said, seeing his opportunity to entertain the nurse wither rapidly, "you've lost your thirst."

"Quite, yes."

Heather turned to the approaching whir of a truck running at high rpm's in low gear. Atley said, "That'll be Ross, the hearse driver."

The camouflage-green Chevrolet two-tonner circled and backed toward the ramp. The tarpaulin covering the flatbed swayed as the truck hit a pothole and bumped into the dilapidated tires attached to the ramp. Atley squinted in
surprise when a lean RAF pilot officer jumped down from the cab instead of the corpulent Ross.

John Crown held out an RAF identity card and said, "I'm Lewis. Ross was given a day's leave, and I'm taking his job while he's gone."

Atley shrugged his shoulders and lied, "Well, he usually helps me load them."