The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan Read Free Book Online

then worked as a journalist on the London Evening Standard . He was under no illusions about Hitler’s intentions by the time Neville Chamberlain returned from a meeting with the Fuhrer in September 1938. The Prime Minister claimed triumphantly that he had secured ‘peace in our time’ for Britain. Turnbull knew the truth: ‘I felt sick when Chamberlain waved that white paper,’ he said. ‘I knew what was coming.’
    But even the perceptive Ronnie, who by 1940 was a press attaché at the British Legation in Copenhagen, was taken aback when the Germans invaded Denmark on 9 April. He was celebrating his engagement to Maria Thereza do Rio Branco, daughter of the Brazilian Ambassador, when the Nazis rolled in. He escaped thanks to his diplomatic immunity, but some of the British journalists with whom he had liaised in the Danish capital were trapped.
    Though Ronnie didn’t exactly cover himself in glory during those frightening, chaotic days, his affinity with Denmark was remembered in Britain’s corridors of power, and he had also broadcast anti-German propaganda to Denmark from the BBC in London. Thereza made her way to England soon after her husband had arrived, and they had been married for two months when SOE came calling in July. Turnbull accepted the organization’s offer enthusiastically, but then realized that just to reach his new office would present a serious challenge.
    Due to the extreme dangers of travelling from Britain to Sweden by air in the winter of 1940-1, Turnbull was sent on an extraordinary, roundabout route to Stockholm. Ronnie and Thereza, who was by now pregnant, were accompanied by his secretary, Pamela Tower. They sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, then went north, reaching Istanbul before the Turnbulls’ son Michael was born. As soon as mother and baby were strong enough to continue, they headed overland to Moscow, via Tiflis, Baku and Rostov. Once in the Russian capital they boarded yet another train, this time to Leningrad, and from there travelled to Finland. Eventually, in February 1941, the exhausted Turnbulls reached Stockholm by ship. They had left Liverpool more than two months earlier.
    This epic journey drew only derision from Lord Haw-Haw, Hitler’s infamous propagandist William Joyce, who announced on Berlin radio: ‘The British must really be in a sad condition if they have to send a fellow from the Foreign Office halfway around the world to get to Stockholm.’
    The resistance organization that the ‘fellow froreign Office’ had been sent to run—SOE Denmark—would eventually become a thorn in the side of Tommy Sneum. But he couldn’t have known that as he started to make his way to the very building in which Turnbull was now based.

    Smarting from his failure to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi with his longbow, Sneum had finally spotted a weakness in the German ring of steel around his country. He upset his good friend Kjeld Pedersen and their resistance colleague Christian Michael Rottboell by insisting that he must use the route alone. It would be safer that way, he told them firmly, and they had to accept his decision, however reluctantly.
    So, on 20 February 1941, Tommy set out for Kastrup Airport. He carried with him an update on the radar installation on Fanoe, where the Germans had been building a third tower for their early-warning system. He also had facts and figures about the Nazi occupation of Denmark and German troop movements. An hour on a civilian plane took him to Roenne Airfield on Bornholm, a Danish island within striking distance of the Swedish mainland. A couple of days later he climbed aboard a huge ferry which, aided by ice-cutters, carved a path to Ystad on the Swedish coast. The first, nervous minutes of 23 February saw him posing as a businessman in front of a yawning customs official on the quayside. Tommy dreaded a search of his belongings or clothes, but the lazy official simply stamped his passport and directed him to the night