Jack Higgins – The Eagle has Flown
Jack Higgins – The Eagle has Flown
For my mother Henrietta Higgins Bell
Preface
At one o’clock in the morning of Saturday, November 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfiihrer of the SS and Chief of State Police received a simple message; The Eagle has Landed. It meant that a small force of German paratroopers under the command of Oberstleutnant Kurt Steiner, aided by IRA gunman, Liam Devlin, were at that moment safely in England and poised to snatch the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, from the Norfolk country house where he was spending a quiet weekend near the sea. By the end of the day, thanks to a bloody confrontation in the village of Studley Constable between American Rangers and the Germans, the mission was a failure, Liam Devlin apparently the only survivor. As for Kurt Steiner…
LONDON BELFAST
1975
Chapter ONE
THERE was an Angel of Death on top of an ornate mausoleum in one corner, arms extended. I remember that well because someone was practising the organ and light drifted across the churchyard in coloured bands through stained-glass windows. The church wasn’t particularly old, built on a high tide of Victorian prosperity like the tall houses surrounding it. St Martin’s Square. A good address once. Now, just a shabby backwater in Belsize Park, but a nice, quiet area where a woman alone might walk down to the corner shop at midnight in safety and people minded their own business.
The flat at number thirteen was on the ground floor. My agent had borrowed it for me from a cousin who had gone to New York for six months. It was old-fashioned and comfortable and suited me fine. I was on the downhill slope of a new novel and needed to visit the Reading Room at the British Museum most days.
But that November evening, the evening it all started, it was raining heavily and just after six I passed through the iron gates and followed the path through the forest of Gothic monuments and gravestones. In spite of my umbrella the shoulders of my trenchcoat were soaked, not that it bothered me. I’ve always liked the rain, the city at night, wet streets stretching into winter darkness, a peculiar feeling of freedom that it contains. And things had gone well that day with the work, the end was very definitely in sight.
The Angel of Death was closer now, shadowed in the half-light from the church, the two marble attendants on guard at the mausoleum’s bronze doors, everything as usual except that tonight, I could have sworn that there was a third figure and that it moved out of the darkness towards me.
For a moment I knew genuine fear and then, as it came into the light, I saw a young woman, quite small and wearing a black beret and soaked raincoat. She had a briefcase in one hand. The face was pale, the eyes dark and somehow anxious.
‘Mr Higgins? You are Jack Higgins, aren’t you?’
She was American, that much was obvious. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves. ‘That’s right. What can I do for you?’
‘I must talk to you, Mr Higgins. Is there somewhere we could go?’
I hesitated, reluctant for all sorts of obvious reasons to take this any further and yet there was something quite out of the ordinary about her. Something not to be resisted.
I said, ‘My flat’s just over the square there.’
‘I know,’ she said. I still hesitated and she added, ‘You won’t regret it, believe me. I’ve information of vital importance to you.’
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘What really happened afterwards at Studley Constable. Oh, lots of things you don’t know.’
Which was enough. I took her arm and said, ‘Right, let’s get in out of this damn rain before you catch your death and you can tell me what the hell this is all about.’
The house interior had changed very little, certainly not in my flat where the tenant had stayed with a late Victorian decor, lots of mahogany furniture, red velvet curtains at the bow window and a sort of Chinese wallpaper in gold and green, heavily patterned with birds. Except for the central heating radiators, the only other concession to modern living was the kind of gas fire which made it seem as if logs burned brightly in a stainless steel basket.