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

train for Stockholm. Sneum couldn’t show any signs of the exhilaration he felt. He was free of the Nazi occupation, however temporarily.
    Sleep came easily on the train once the adrenalin wore off. Before dawn, making sure that he wasn’t followed as he left Stockholm train station, Tommy made his way to the Strandvagen peninsula outside the city. Soon after it opened for official business, he proudly entered the British Legation.
    ‘I’m Flight Lieutenant Thomas Sneum of the Danish Fleet Air Arm and I have a lot of important information,’ he announced at reception. He was led to Squadron Leader Donald Fleet, the ageing but enthusiastic Assistant Air Attaché. A smiling Fleet decided to take Sneum straight to the office of Captain Henry Denham, the Naval Attaché, who operated from the kitchen wing of the Legation.
    Turnbull, who had attended some of the same Copenhagen functions as Sneum during the winter of 1939-40, was nowhere to be seen. Had Tommy renewed his acquaintance with Ronnie that day, the brave Dane’s war could have turned out very differently. Turnbull might well have taken one look at all the excellent information in Sneum’s possession and recruited him on the spot for SOE Denmark. Denham worked in close proximity to Turnbull, but answered to a different British chain of command. ‘I wasn’t employed to help the Admiralty,’ Turnbull pointed out. By the same token, Denham wasn’t employed to help SOE.
    The dynamic between the two men was curious. Both had worked at Britain’s Copenhagen Legation, and they had been repatriated by the Nazis on the same sealed train. Turnbull now worked with Denham’s former secretary, Pamela Tower, but ‘She was still in love with Henry,’ Ronnie claimed. Since Turnbull’s arrival in Stockholm, Denham had offered him access to any routine naval information at his disposal, but the SOE man later said dismissively, ‘We didn’t need ordinary intelligence.’ It seemed that Denham and Turnbull shared almost everything, but when it came to the precious new secrets that Sneum had brought into the building, there would be no sharing, even though this wassecisely the sort of extraordinary intelligence Turnbull craved.
    As a regular naval officer, Denham was obliged to pass any significant intelligence through the established Admiralty channels, which led through Naval Intelligence to the Secret Intelligence Service in London. Turnbull, meanwhile, had to report to his own SOE spymaster back in Britain, Commander Ralph Hollingworth. Denham wasn’t about to entrust the ‘amateurs’ at SOE with vital scientific intelligence, no matter how much he liked Turnbull on a personal level. Had Sneum’s discoveries landed on Turnbull’s desk rather than Denham’s, he too would have wanted to send them exclusively to his own organization, SOE. And the source of such valuable intelligence was to be treated in a similarly possessive fashion: Tommy was already becoming a trophy, the sort of prize that one covert British organization would jealously guard against overtures from its rival.
    Naturally, Tommy didn’t know any of this. As he began his presentation, he viewed ‘the British’ as one united force lined up against the Germans. He could never have imagined that, behind the scenes, they were squaring up to each other. Starting with something simple and tangible, he told Denham that some German sea-planes had been brought out of the water in the northern Danish port of Thisted and were now arranged on the quayside like sitting ducks. Then he moved swiftly on to the more pressing issue of the installation on Fanoe, and the remarkable capacity of the rectangular devices to pick out planes in the night sky with their searchlights.
    Denham and Fleet betrayed no prior knowledge of the installation. If Oxlund’s thick envelope had arrived at the British Legation as intended the previous summer, these officers seemed determined to give the impression that they had not seen