Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,52

adjourn for a very long lunch break.’

It took the six officers several seconds to grasp what he was saying and rise up from their desks.

A young major smiled at Henderson. ‘If my teachers at school had been as much fun as you, Mr Boyle, I never would have ended up in the bloody army.’ A few of his colleagues laughed in agreement as they headed out the door. ‘Would you care to join us for lunch?’

Henderson shook his head. ‘I have a pile of translations to type up. Another time, perhaps.’

As the officer’s boots clattered down the marble stairs outside, Henderson gathered his papers into a briefcase and took a side door through a disused kitchen. He then cut across a thickly carpeted corridor and found himself in the reception area outside Oberst Ohlsen’s office.

The reception was usually manned by the Oberleutnant who worked as Ohlsen’s assistant, but Henderson had sent him to lunch, so he opened the double doors and peered cautiously into the empty room. The office was opulent, with models of steamships in glass cases and a private bathroom behind a huge desk with marble columns for legs.

Hitler gave a reproachful look from the wall and a vase was filled with the miniature swastika pennants that were usually attached to the bonnets of cars. They reminded Henderson of the paper flags he’d pushed into sandcastles as a child.

In the two days since becoming Ohlsen’s personal translator Henderson had taken part in half a dozen meetings with city officials, directors of the local ports and railways and a variety of shipyard and dock owners.

All of these produced intelligence and gave clues about the German invasion plans. However, the highest level meetings between military officers took place entirely in German, which meant there was no reason for Henderson to sit in. The only way he’d get his hands on the actual plans would be to steal them.

At the end of the room nearest the double doors was a huge plan chest with more than thirty slim drawers. It had been designed for naval charts and blueprints belonging to the steamship company, but served as well for maps of German positions and diagrams of the invasion plans.

Henderson checked the corridor outside before opening the assistant’s desk and snatching a bunch of keys from the top drawer. Back inside, a tiny key unlocked the plan chest, allowing Henderson to slowly open the top drawer. He drew a terse breath, awed at what lay within.

Henderson had seen the plan laid out on the Oberst’s desk, but had been ordered to stand well back as he was told to deal with a dispute over a car repair with a garage in town.

The original map had been drawn on linen-backed paper by a German draughtsman. The English Channel and the French and British coastlines ran top and bottom. There were hundreds of markings and symbols, denoting everything from towns and sea lanes to the locations of German tank divisions and British coastal defences.

Corrections had been added. Some were drawn over patches of correction fluid. In other places sections of the map had been sliced out with a craft knife and everything redrawn on fresh paper. This had happened several times in some spots, turning the map into a delicate collage of postcard-sized pieces held together with sticky tape.

It was unacceptably risky to view the map in the open office, so Henderson carried it quickly to the bathroom where he pushed the bolt across, laid one of the Oberst’s thick bath towels over the floor tiles and put the map on top of it.

There was a mass of details and so many markings that it was difficult for anyone other than the person devising the plan to distinguish between truly important information and notes and crossings-out jotted during telephone conversations with Berlin.

But as Henderson studied the whole map it became clear that the invasion plan had been scaled back since it was first conceived. The Germans had originally planned to invade with 250,000 men, launching out of a dozen occupied ports stretching from Bruges to Cherbourg. This had now been downsized to a force of just 100,000 troops which would land on a strip of England’s southern coast between Portsmouth and Dover, with the aim of rapidly advancing to London.

The plan to invade across the sea with less than a fifth of the manpower that had taken France was undeniably bold. The physical reality of the map, with the names of German divisions written over