The Hornet's Sting (22 page)

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Sneum. ‘Malcolm Campbell tried for the land speed record on my home island when I was a boy. There were races too, but one of my friends was killed by a flying wheel and that put a stop to it all.’

‘Dangerous business,’ said Rabagliati sympathetically, and pointed to the huge dent in his skull. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, ‘my brains are still where I need them to be.’ Turning his attention to the Bentley, he said: ‘See the clutch? When you’re racing, you don’t necessarily need it. Not if you have a good ear for music.’

Tommy was baffled, so Rabagliati decided to demonstrate. He hit the accelerator on a straight stretch and the Bentley roared forwards, but when he heard the engine strike a certain pitch, he flicked the gear-stick into neutral. On the cue of a new engine note, he changed down into a lower gear. The car had barely lost any speed during this manoeuvre; and at no point had Rabagliati touched the clutch. ‘See?’ Triumphant, the colonel performed the trick again, then turned to his pupil. ‘Now you try.’

They swapped places and Sneum had a go. Soon he had the hang of it.

‘You’re a natural,’ said Rabagliati. ‘Don’t make a habit of this if you’re not racing. Cocks up the car. But it’s fun, isn’t it?’

Tommy couldn’t argue with that. The tension caused by the long wait for that elusive take-off all but dissipated as they sped through the flat Cambridgeshire lanes. Sneum wondered how the colonel might explain a road accident to his superiors, just hours before his protégé was due to set off on an important mission. But Rabagliati knew what he was doing; he had demonstrated his little trick as a precursor to raising more serious matters.

‘Look, Sneum, I know we’ve had a difference of opinion over Christophersen. And I know you dislike him. But he’s all you’ve got, so use him and put up with it. Try to work together as a team.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Tommy decided it was pointless to argue further.

‘And if he really puts you in the shit or becomes a genuine threat to security, there’s a simple solution,’ added Rabagliati.

‘What’s that?’ Sneum expected more talk of compromise from his British handler.

‘Kill him.’

Rabagliati’s suggestion was exactly what Tommy had wanted to hear, and perhaps the colonel saw as much in his agent’s eyes. ‘But you’d need a bloody good reason,’ added the older man.

By the time they had returned to the airfield on that September day in 1941, Sneum was buoyant again. He felt as though he had gained a little more control over his destiny because of what had been said on those country roads. And to aid his mood, the weather had improved. It looked as if they would soon be ready to go.

O
N THE NIGHT OF 11 SEPTEMBER 1941, less than three months after his arrival in England, Tommy Sneum climbed back into the Whitley bomber with Sigfred Christophersen, and braced himself for the roller-coaster ride to Denmark. Although Christophersen was still carrying nearly all their money, Sneum put his concerns to one side and drifted off to sleep. This time there was no German anti-aircraft fire to disturb him. Before he knew it, though, the red light came on to indicate that they were flying over the drop-zone at Agerup, near Roskilde, just thirty kilometers west of Copenhagen. Sneum was woken and told to move to the exit door so that he would be ready to jump straight after Christophersen. An English sergeant checked that their static lines were securely hooked on to the rig. Then the two parachutists watched and waited for the green light. It came at 11.40 p.m., and Sigfred was gone in an instant. ‘I pushed him,’ admitted Tommy later. ‘Just in case he hesitated.’ Sneum then peered down to make sure that his colleague’s canopy had opened. As soon as he glimpsed the white flurry of Christophersen’s parachute unfurling in the gloom, Sneum prepared to jump. But there was a problem: ‘The sergeant was fooling with the static line, and before he cleared everything we had flown on anor kilometer.’

When finally given the signal, Tommy jumped in a hurry. The icy air battered his face as he hurtled towards the earth and struggled to fill his lungs with the oxygen his body demanded. Suddenly he was wrenched up into the night and the parachute’s canopy began to flap noisily above him. Despite the training he had undergone at Ringway, the shock still stunned him. But he knew there would be time to regain his composure during the final, quieter phase of the drop. Or at least he thought there would be: ‘The ’chute had just unfolded when I felt something sharp tear into my legs and backside.’ Before he even had time to bend his legs to absorb some of the impact, he crashed through a barbed-wire fence backwards and slammed into the ground with an ugly thud. ‘I rolled over on my shoulder but the sudden jolt of the impact damaged my lower jaw and some of my teeth. I then felt a terrible pain just above my buttocks. I thought I must have broken something, perhaps even my back, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to walk.’

He cursed his luck: ‘There are very few hills in Denmark and somehow we had managed to find one,’ he explained with a smile. ‘That meant the pilot must have drifted off course.’

Unclipping his parachute, he tried to stand. As soon as he got to his feet, however, he felt the searing pain from just above his buttocks again, only this time even more intensely. ‘It was excruciating work just to fold up the parachute,’ he recalled. ‘I’d never known anything like it. And I could feel warm blood on my legs from the cuts.’

At least that meant he hadn’t severed his spinal cord. ‘I suspected damage to my coccyx but knew there was nothing I could do, except to swig cognac from the hip flask I had brought with me for my cover story—that I had been at a party all night.’ Some party. He had torn one of the legs of his civilian suit, although at least the everyday shoes in which he had chosen to jump, against British advice, were still firmly on his feet.

Tommy knew he had to move quickly, whatever the source of his pain. ‘It wasn’t nice walking but you can manage an awful lot in this life if you have to, and I had no choice.’ To stay where he was, on a ridge with no cover, might lead to his capture before dawn. ‘There was moonlight and you could easily see,’ he remembered. ‘I looked around to see if Christophersen was anywhere near by, but there was no sign of him. I didn’t know what had happened to him but I knew that if he got caught they would look for me.’

He spotted a wood below him and headed for that. Once among the trees, he tried to shut out the pain as he dug a hole at the foot of an old, distinctive stump. Then he buried his parachute beneath the roots, replaced the fresh earth and shuffled away as quickly as possible. Only the parachute could prove beyond all doubt that he was a spy. Now he had taken care of it.

There was little point in wasting any more time searching for Christophersen: ‘We had an agreement that we should meet the next morning in a certain district of Copenhagen if we got split up on landing.’ So Tommy came out of the trees and walked to the nearest road, where he could see a sign in the distance. As he did so, beams from a car’s headlights shot across the scene, though the vehicle itself was still some way off. He had time to drop under the cover of some bushes, but the sudden evasive action made him want to scream with pain. He stopped himself from doing so when he realized the type of car that was coming his way. ‘It was a Danish police car, go but you cite slowly. That got me worried. We were in the middle of nowhere, so what was a patrol car doing out there?’ As he listened to the growl of the engine pass and fade, he wondered if the parachute canopies had been spotted in the few moments it had taken to land.

Gingerly, he rose to his feet and walked back over to the roadsign. To his horror, he saw that he had landed at Brorfelde, near Holbaek, a full eighty kilometers from Copenhagen. But more worrying than his own isolation was the thought of Christophersen trying to cover that sort of distance to the Danish capital without arousing suspicion. Tommy feared that his untrustworthy comrade would head instead for Holbaek.

‘If he got caught they would look for me there too,’ Tommy explained. ‘So I decided to do what would be least expected of me, and walk fifteen kilometers to the next town after that, Ringsted.’

In fact, Christophersen had decided to lie low until dawn in the field where he had landed, hoping that his descent from the skies had gone unnoticed. This contravened British orders to vacate the drop-zone as quickly as possible. If the area were to be sealed off, he would be trapped, so he was taking a big risk.

Meanwhile, Tommy took another long swig of cognac from the flask, and tipped some of the liquor on to his clothes to support the cover story about his drunken night out. Though the analgesic properties of the cognac increased his mobility, he still found it hard going. Any strange noise or distant flicker of lights made him crawl for cover, increasing his discomfort. Mostly, though, he passed silently through villages and never saw a soul. ‘I could sometimes hear people talking behind closed shutters. Or dogs barking—they probably smelled me.’

When he noticed the first streaks of dawn, Tommy knew he would have to face the local population. He looked at his shabby civilian clothes and hoped they would be enough to make him credible. It was not uncommon for young men to fight or get drunk at parties; and despite the old bruises on his face, the fresh damage to his mouth and the blood on his leg, he offered a hearty ‘good morning’ to passers-by and pretended to be proud of his laddish exploits. ‘If asked about my injuries, I was going to say that I had been involved in an argument over a girl. As it turned out, no one asked.’

By the time he reached central Ringsted, it was almost light. He spotted a single taxi parked at a rank, with the driver waiting patiently in the hope of early morning trade. ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ said Sneum. ‘I’ve had a few drinks and I’m a bit of a mess. Are women worth all the trouble they get us into? Please, take me to Copenhagen so I can forget all about it.’

The driver looked unhappy about his potential fare’s state, but he weighed that against the small fortune a trip to the capital would net him. He put a towel out on the passenger seat and told Tommy to get in.

In the meantime, Christophersen had waited until dawn to walk to the nearest railway station at Grandloese, south of Holbaek. Now he was bound for Copenhagen on a morning commuter train, a risky journey if his dishevelled state aroused suspicion among his fellow passengers.

As Tommy’s taxi sped through the western suburbs and neared the center of the Danish capital, the streets were already busy. He felt quietly exhilarated that he had got this far under difficult circumstances. When he asked the driver to stop, however, he treized that he had no Danish money. It was a tense moment as he pulled out some Swedish kronor and tried to explain. He made up a story about having recently returned from a business trip across the Oeresund, only to walk straight into an argument with his twotiming girlfriend. She had gone off with their Danish money, he had fought his love rival and now he was in this rather embarrassing predicament. As one man to another, he hoped the taxi driver would show a little compassion and accept his payment in Swedish money.

Much as he sympathized, the driver wouldn’t play ball. He suggested they go to Copenhagen railway station, where Sneum could change his funds into the local currency.

‘I thought, Bloody hell, this is going to be dangerous—the railway station in Copenhagen was usually crawling with Germans. But I couldn’t think of an alternative.’ As he walked into the station, the blood on his torn trousers dark and dry, he avoided eye contact with anyone in uniform. The last thing he wanted was for his forged papers and shaky cover story to be put to the test by the Danish police or their Nazi masters. ‘My heart was pounding when I went up to an exchange counter, especially when I saw a doubtful expression on the face of the clerk. Even after I changed the money and began walking back towards the taxi, I thought I might feel a hand on my shoulder and hear the order to stop.’ He walked on, and paid off the taxi driver without being challenged. It was hard to know which of the men looked more relieved as they parted company.

Shuffling along quietly, Sneum reached the designated rendezvous point at 10.00 a.m. He had arranged to meet Christophersen outside the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Margit and Niels-Richard Bertelsen, in Njalsgade. But Tommy was horrified to discover they had moved in his absence. As fate would have it, though, he bumped into Christophersen just as the latter turned to leave the same address. Sigfred looked nervous, particularly when he saw the state Tommy was in. ‘Relax,’ said Sneum as he shook hands with his partner. ‘All is well.’ They arranged to meet again later, when Tommy had done something about his appearance and injuries.