“Will that be all, sir?” called the private from the driver’s seat. Without looking, Hamilton knew the driver was still wearing the wolf’s grin and probably checking his watch for an elasped time.
“Yes, Private. Thank God.”
The car shot away, raising another film of dirt, which clung to Hamilton’s pants and gave his uniform a two-tone appearance. An RAF interrogation officer met him at the barracks’ headquarters’ door.
“Thank you for coming, sir. At 2200 hours, May 10, a Messerschmitt 110 crashed into a field in Lanark County, six miles from Eaglesham. The pilot bailed out and has suffered a broken ankle.”
The officer was well trained. His welcome had been short, rudely short from anyone other than an interrogation officer. Within thirty seconds the duke knew all the officer knew about the flight.
“Here’s what the pilot carried with him,” said the officer as he pointed to an assortment of objects on the table in the middle of the room. There were several photographs, a gold wristwatch, a camera, a flight purse, and an identification card. More interestingly, there was a small syringe with several needles. Hamilton opened a small, ornately carved wood box that contained an assortment of vials and capsules.
“Is the man ill?” asked Hamilton, nodding to the needles and bottles.
“No, sir. Our company doctor said those are homeopathic drugs.”
“Homeopathic?”
“Yes. The capsules and bottles contain extremely weak toxins that in large doses produce symptoms of diseases the man who takes them is trying to avoid. In the seventeenth century, people believed that by taking these drugs the diseases could be escaped.”
“Is Horn a kook?”
“I don’t believe so. He’s lucid and acts with a purpose. That purpose is to speak with you.”
“Perhaps I should see this Captain Horn.”
Horn had spent the night in the Maryhill stockade, the official title for a six-by-ten-foot room fastened to the headquarters building seemingly as an afterthought. The only furniture was a wood-and-canvas cot. He had slept with his flight uniform on. And slept well. The rigors of his cross-channel flight and night jump, combined with the interrogation officer’s incessant late-night questions, had taken their toll. He had been asleep before the door on his cell closed that night.
The sound of the bolt grating against its catch propelled Horn from sleep. The importance of his mission cleared his head like a breath of ammonia. He immediately knew where he was and whom he was expecting.
Nor was he disappointed. Horn had studied numerous photographs of the Duke of Hamilton, and the duke now stood before him in the open doorway. The duke’s strikingly handsome face was unmistakable. He was the highest-ranking Scottish nobleman and he looked it.
Hamilton entered the cell and closed the door behind him without saying anything. Horn stood, stepped gingerly forward, and said, “We met, sir, during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. I have come as Adolf Hitler’s emissary, with proposals for peace. I am Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.”
* * * *
If Rudolf Hess had been expecting to be treated as a visiting dignitary, he was immediately and sorely disappointed. Rather than the prime minister or foreign secretary, Hess was visited by a series of psychiatrists, intelligence agents, and other assorted interrogators. When he wasn’t being questioned, Hess was confined in tiny cells in various prisons and secret houses.
Two weeks after his flight, Hess stopped jumping off his cot every time the cell door opened, expecting an emissary from Churchill coming to negotiate the future of Europe. His captors took his shoe laces and belt and returned his pill kit only when he stopped eating in protest. He was allowed to shave only when a guard hovered over him. The dim light bulb in his cell was always on, so that intent eyes could watch him twenty-four hours a day through the brick-size slot in the iron door. He was given only a spoon to eat with, which was taken from him as soon as he swallowed his last bite of each meal. When the doctors found spectacularly unsuccessful slashes on his wrists, the MP’s searched his cell for an hour and finally removed his bed springs. Then they pulled out the light fixture and lit the cell with a spotlight shining through a thick glass shield in the ceiling. He was shown how to salute his guards and how to properly address his superiors, which included everyone who visited his cell. His diet, exercise routine, and toilet habits were rigidly controlled.
Thus the British professionally and thoroughly reduced Germany’s deputy führer to a prisoner of war. The world thought it had heard the last of Rudolf Hess.
Copyright
S-Day: A Memoir of the Invasion of England © 2015 by James Thayer. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Visit James Thayer’s web site at www.jamesthayer.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thayer, James
S-Day: A Memoir of the Invasion of England: a novel / James Thayer.