Eye of the Needle(35)

Even a low-flying reconnaissance plane equipped with the latest cameras and fast film would come back with pictures that indisputably showed an enormous concentration of men and machines.

No wonder the general staff was anticipating an invasion east of the Seine.

There would be other elements to the deception, he guessed. The British would refer to FUSAG in signals, using codes they knew to be broken. There would be phony espionage reports channeled through the Spanish diplomatic bag to Hamburg. The possibilities were endless.

The British had had four years to arm themselves for this invasion. Most of the German army was fighting Russia. Once the Allies got a toehold on French soil they would be unstoppable. The Germans’ only chance was to catch them on the beaches and annihilate them as they came off the troop ships.

If they were waiting in the wrong place, they would lose that one chance.

The whole strategy was immediately clear. It was simple, and it was devastating.

Faber had to tell Hamburg.

He wondered whether they would believe him.

War strategy was rarely altered on the word of one man. His own standing was high, but was it that high?

That idiot Von Braun would never believe him. He’d hated Faber for years and would grab at the opportunity to discredit him. Canaris, Von Roenne…he had no faith in them.

And there was another thing: the radio. He didn’t want to trust this to the radio…he’d had the feeling for weeks now that the radio code wasn’t safe anymore. If the British found out that their secret was blown…

There was only one thing to do: he had to get proof, and he had to take it himself to Berlin.

He needed photographs.

He would take photographs of this gigantic dummy army, then he would go to Scotland and meet the U-boat, and he would deliver the pictures personally to the Fuehrer. He could do no more. No less.

For photography he needed light. He would have to wait until dawn. There had been a ruined barn a little way back—he could spend the rest of the night there.

He checked his compass and set off. The barn was farther than he thought, and the walk took him an hour. It was an old wooden building with holes in the roof. The rats had long ago deserted it for lack of food, but there were bats in the hayloft.

Faber lay down on some planks but he could not sleep. Not with the knowledge that he was now personally capable of altering the course of the war.





DAWN WAS DUE at 05:21. At 04:20 Faber left the barn.

Although he had not slept, the two hours had rested his body and calmed his mind, and he was now in fine spirits. The cloud was clearing with a west wind, so although the moon had set there was starlight.

His timing was good. The sky was growing perceptibly brighter as he came in sight of the “airfield.”

The sentries were still in their tent. With luck, they would be sleeping. Faber knew from his own experience of such duties that it was hardest to stay awake during the last few hours.

But if they did come out, he would have to kill them.

He selected his position and loaded the Leica with a 36-frame roll of 35mm fast Agfa film. He hoped the film’s light-sensitive chemicals had not spoiled; it had been stored in his suitcase since before the war, and you couldn’t buy film in Britain nowadays. It should be all right; he had kept it in a lightproof bag away from any heat.

When the red rim of the sun edged over the horizon he began shooting. He took a series of shots from different vantage points and various distances, finishing with a close-up of one dummy plane; the pictures would show both the illusion and the reality.

As he took the last, he saw movement from the corner of his eye. He dropped flat and crawled under a plywood Mosquito. A soldier emerged from the tent, walked a few paces, and urinated on the ground. The man stretched and yawned, then lit a cigarette. He looked around the airfield, shivered, and returned to the tent.

Faber got up and ran.

A quarter of a mile away he looked back. The airfield was out of sight. He headed west, toward the barracks.

This would be more than an ordinary espionage coup. Hitler had had a life of being the only one in step. The man who brought the proof that, yet again, the Fuehrer was right and all the experts were wrong, could look for more than a pat on the back. Faber knew that already Hitler rated him the Abwehr’s best agent—this triumph might well get him Canaris’s job.

If he made it.

He increased his pace, jogging twenty yards, walking the next twenty, and jogging again, so that he reached the barracks by 06:30. It was bright daylight now, and he could not approach close because these sentries were not in a tent but in one of the wall-less huts with a clear view all around them. He lay down by the hedge and took his pictures from a distance. Ordinary prints would just show a barracks, but big enlargements ought to reveal the details of the deception.

When he headed back toward the boat he had exposed thirty frames. Again he hurried, because he was now terribly conspicuous, a black-clad man carrying a canvas bag of equipment, jogging across the open fields of a restricted area.

He reached the fence an hour later, having seen nothing but wild geese. As he climbed over the wire, he felt a great release of tension. Inside the fence the balance of suspicion had been against him; outside it was in his favor. He could revert to his bird-watching, fishing, sailing role. The period of greatest risk was over.

He strolled through the belt of woodland, catching his breath and letting the strain of the night’s work seep away. He would sail a few miles on, he decided, before mooring again to catch a few hours’ sleep.