Hitler's Secret (5 page)

“I suppose so,” he said.

“Exactly.” MacPherson was now looking at Otto steadily. “So that’s why I need to talk to you about one last matter, just us men together … without Leni. All right?”

Adrenaline was making Leni’s heart thud. Encased in a thick flying suit and leather helmet, she was lying inside the bomb bay of the Mosquito, on the actual bay doors. Otto was beside her. Their parachute release lines were fixed on to metal O-rings above them, next to a steady red light. Leni kept an eye on it while she wiggled her toes, trying to keep the pins and needles at bay. The light would start to flash as they reached the drop zone and then switch to green at the moment of release. At that point the doors would drop open and gravity and the slipstream would suck them out, snapping the release line tight and opening their chutes. The whole business would take no more than a few seconds.

Her heart continued to thump. It was dark inside the bay, and the noise from the engines was deafening. But that wasn’t why she was scared. It was the fact that they’d never
deployed by this method. In their jumps during the last two weeks they had gone out of the side of a conventional transport plane.
On the green light, stand by in the doorway, feel the slipstream, hands across your chest, and go!
That had been the drill, and she and Otto had just about got used to it. But the Mosquito wasn’t a conventional transport plane, so they had had to be strapped in, literally like bombs, to be dropped from its belly.

She felt the Mosquito hit another trough of turbulence and her stomach came rushing up to her throat as the plane dropped like a stone for a dozen terrifying seconds before slamming into a trampoline of clouds and hurtling back up.

They’d been in this unpressurized, freezing craft for hours, at least three by her calculation.
Perhaps we’re over the Alps
, she thought. The pilot increased the throttle and the engines roared loudly above Leni, making her whole body vibrate. She struggled to see Otto on her left. With a heavy pack on his front and a parachute on his back, he looked the way she felt: like some insect in a cocoon, waiting to hatch.

The plane shuddered and bucked again. She felt the sour taste of vomit at the back of her throat but refused to let it rise higher and gush into her mask. They’d both been given a drug called Dramamine before takeoff, but that only counteracted the motion sickness. Not the fear. She stared up at the metal panels above her head and started to count the rivets, willing the time to pass.

As if on cue, a small hatch opened above her head and the navigator’s face appeared, his oxygen mask hanging to one side. He looked ludicrously young to be flying a plane, not much older than Leni.

Leni, Leni, Leni. Her new name throbbed through her head in time with the engines.

“Can you hear me?” yelled the navigator above the din.

Leni nodded and raised her gloved hand in a thumbs-up. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Otto respond similarly. She hoped he was all right.

“Five minutes to the drop zone. Understand?”

Thumbs up again. The plane gave a sudden violent lurch to the left.

“Sorry about the bumps!” the navigator went on jovially. “Bit of a storm. It’s blown us south of the drop zone. But we’ll soon have you down. Good luck!”

He gave them what Leni thought might have been a look of pity, then he slammed the inspection hatch shut.

Leni focused on the steady red light. Her stomach had turned to water.

The light started to flash. Her toes curled tight in her boots.

Then it turned green.

She took a deep breath. Before she knew it, she was completely weightless. Falling. Into the night.

It was so black that when the ground came up to meet her, Leni only just managed to see it before her boots slammed down. She landed with her feet together just as she’d been taught, collapsing her knees and rolling onto her side. It really hurt, and knocked all the breath out of her. It was, she thought, a bit like being shot out of a circus cannon towards a brick wall, feetfirst. She lay still for a minute, trying to breathe, then scrambled to her feet and started gathering up her parachute. She prayed Otto had made it down safely. It had been too dark to see him, and she’d been concentrating on her own landing.

She tried to put the last few terrifying hours to the back of her mind. From the moment they’d strapped her into the Mosquito’s bomb bay and the doors had slammed shut, she’d been convinced she was going to die. But she hadn’t, and here she was. Which brought her back to the present. She was on a road. She frowned. There weren’t supposed to be any roads near the landing zone.

She looked around, trying to get her bearings as her eyes gradually became accustomed to the dark. Soon she could see the outline of a forest to her left. Above her there was still the odd rumble of thunder, but the storm had passed through. She finished gathering in the parachute, unclipped her harness, and stepped out of it. The first thing she had to do was find somewhere to hide it. The ditch by the side of the road was the most obvious option.

It was still very dark and the moon was covered by the last of the storm clouds, but she managed to climb down into the ditch and crawled along it until she found a drain running under the road. She stuffed the parachute and harness inside it, out of sight. Next she took off her heavy flying suit, gloves, and helmet, and pushed them into the drain as well. Then she unpacked her Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform and quickly slipped on the long dark blue skirt, white short-sleeved blouse, and black neckerchief. When she had finished, she sat down in the ditch and rested for a few minutes. She suddenly felt cold as the sweat cooled her skin, and reached into her pack, pulling out the BDM woolen sweater she had also been issued.

Except for the sound of her rapid breathing, it was deathly quiet. No sounds at all. And no Otto, either.
How long have I been on the ground
? she wondered.
Half an hour? He has to be nearby, surely
. She checked the luminous hands on her watch. A nice German child’s watch.
Glashütte
. Quite expensive. A present from her godmother, Frau Varbinner. The one they would be visiting in Bregenz in a couple of days. It was quarter to three. Two hours until dawn.

She didn’t dare yell out his name. There was no way of knowing who might be out there in the darkness. Perhaps he was dead.

Please don’t be dead
, she thought.

Otto was thinking exactly the same thing.

If Leni was dead, or even badly hurt, then the mission was as good as finished. And so was he.

He had crashed down into a fir tree and was suspended fifty feet above the ground, his canopy hopelessly enmeshed in the higher branches. If Leni didn’t turn up soon, he would have to cut himself free and face falling, wearing a full pack, through the branches to the ground below, risking a broken ankle or worse. He hissed her name again, afraid to yell. She could be anywhere. Where the hell was he, for that matter? He knew where he was supposed to be: on wide-open hop fields in the countryside twenty-five miles southeast of Munich. But he was getting a bad feeling that he was nowhere near the drop zone. When he parachuted down he’d felt the strong winds blowing him, and for a moment he had been terrified they might
collapse the canopy. The rain had hammered at his face, and he’d gripped the lines for dear life. But he’d made it down in one piece, even if it was into this wretched forest.

It was just getting light now, shafts of dawn light filtering through the trees. He checked his father’s wristwatch. MacPherson had had it repaired and Otto was glad to have it with him. A lucky talisman, he’d thought. But the mission hadn’t exactly started well. It was a little after four o’clock. He’d been hanging here for over an hour. His legs felt numb and the harness cut painfully into his groin.

“Leni.” He hissed her name one more time.

Nothing. Then he heard the sound of branches snapping beneath him. Someone was approaching.

Otto reached for the Walther PPK resting in the shoulder holster inside his flying suit. He pulled off the leather retaining strap and drew the pistol out, pointing it down to the gloomy forest floor.

“Don’t move or I’ll shoot,” he ordered in German.

There was another sharp crack of branches.

“I mean it,” he said. He swept the gun barrel, trying to find the target, every sinew in his body tense. His finger tightened on the trigger. Then he saw it. A fox staring up at him quizzically. He shooed loudly at it, and the animal darted away.

He reholstered the pistol, breathing hard. Shooting paper silhouettes was one thing; getting to ready to shoot for real had his head pounding.
Would I actually have pulled the trigger
if it had been someone?
he wondered.
Perhaps instinct takes over and you just do it.

“Otto!”

His heart jumped and then relief flooded over him. Leni. He twisted around in his harness to look down. There she was, standing below him, craning her neck up to see him in the gloom.

“Leni, thank God, you heard me!”

“Half of Bavaria probably heard you, Otto. Are you stuck?”

“No, no … I’m just enjoying the view.” He grinned. He was so pleased to see her alive.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked, shaking her head at his silly remark.

Otto glanced down at her. “Give me a hand?”

Leni nodded and sized up the tree. She tucked her skirt into the waistband, then spat on her hands, rubbed them together, and grabbed hold of the lowest branch. Slowly she made her way up the side of the tree and edged out along the branch above him. He could see the training at Wanborough Manor had made the most of her natural agility. She took hold of the twisted parachute lines above her head, pulled on them, and built up a pendulum-like swing until Otto was able to grab hold of the branch she was sitting on, and wrap his arms and legs around it.

“Now cut the lines,” he said, desperately hanging on.

Leni pulled out a short double-edged knife from a sheath
strapped to her thigh. She started to saw away at the lines. Otto watched her working, concentrating on the job, her legs clamped around the branch.

“Are you all right?” she said, severing the first of the nylon cords.

“I’m fine,” he lied, though he was dripping with sweat and his skin was on fire.

At last Leni had cut all the lines. She resheathed her knife, planted her hands on the branch, and deftly swung her legs around like a gymnast on the uneven bars.

Otto couldn’t hold on any longer. His hands slipped from the branch and then he was falling through the thick foliage. He landed on the soft mossy ground and lay there groaning.

“Don’t move!” Leni whispered from the tree. “I’m coming.”

Otto smiled weakly. “Hey, it’s all right. I just decided to take the quickest way down.”

Ten minutes later, after Otto had changed into his Hitler-Jugend uniform, and they’d buried his harness and flying suit as best they could, they reached the edge of the woods.

“Follow me!” said Leni, running forward from the tree line towards a farm track.

“Wait!” hissed Otto, grabbing her arm and pulling her down. “You need to be more careful.”

He took a pair of binoculars out of his pack and scanned the area around them. In the dawn light he could see they had landed in rolling agricultural countryside: meadows and fields
of grain, surrounded by thickly wooded hills. About a mile away he could make out a village.

“There’s no one around, Otto,” Leni said quietly. “It’s not even five o’clock.”

Otto ignored her and swept the area a second time before he stowed the binoculars. “Okay,” he said, “where do you think we are?”

“Bavaria?” she said.

Otto laughed before he could stop himself. Then he found a map in his top pocket and pored over it. It was made of silk and beautifully detailed. But it wasn’t much help in such poor light and with no landmarks to speak of. They’d have to take the farm track, and look out for features on the way.

Leni unwrapped a chocolate bar. “You want some?” she said, handing him a square.

He popped it in his mouth. It was the first thing he’d eaten in six hours and it tasted delicious. Too delicious, in fact. He glanced at the wrapper. Hershey’s.

“Are you insane?” He turned on Leni. “You brought
American
chocolate with you? How are you going to explain that if someone stops us, searches us?”

Leni blushed. “It was just this bar, all right!” She pulled the wrapper off and screwed it up into a little ball. Then she threw it into the woods. “Satisfied?” she said.

“Let’s hope no one finds it,” Otto said grudgingly. He fished out his pocket compass and waited for the needle to settle.

“I think we should go east,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, clearly still irritated about the chocolate.

Otto knew they were only getting angry at each other because they were scared and they had no idea where they were, but they just had to make the best of it. There was no going back now.

“Sorry, all right? Can I have another piece?”

Leni handed him the rest of the chocolate and he wolfed it down. Then he stood up and adjusted his uniform, pulling up his long khaki socks and tightening the brown belt holding up his black lederhosen. The Hitler-Jugend uniform was immaculate in every detail, right down to the enamel badges on his shirt pocket for proficiency in swimming and sailing.

He remembered how upset his parents had been when his father had finally decided he and his brother would have to join. Not to have done so would have risked imprisonment for his parents and an orphanage for them. Not that it had mattered much in the long run, but right now he wished he could explain that to Leni.

“How do I look?” he asked her as he slid his service dagger with the swastika hilt into the scabbard on his belt.

“Horrible,” she said.

Otto nodded. “So do you.”

Together they picked up their packs and set off down the farm track.