The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [14]
She was snooty in an awfully nice way, from a good but stupid family. Stupid because in her father’s eyes I wasn’t good enough for her. In those days fathers thought about prospective sons-in-law in terms of career and breeding. Although he couldn’t complain about my family, I was still at polytechnic and had a reputation for being a wild child, so he did everything he could to keep us apart. In those days it was difficult for young people to meet away from their parents, and fathers believed that boys should be properly introduced to their daughters through the family or not at all.
We still found ways to see each other and we stayed together for a couple of years, but in the end Oda couldn’t stand the strain because of her family’s disapproval, and we agreed it was better to part. That was probably in 1936, but we stayed good friends. The situation was painful, and we did no more than kiss each other warmly on the cheek whenever we met. That’s how it was when the war came, but secretly I still loved her. And I think my original decision to marry Else was also partly motivated by my desire to send a message to Oda, saying: ‘Look what happens if you don’t marry me.’
I still wanted Oda, you see, and whatever was left between us lasted for several years without coming to a final end. I didn’t try to force things, which would have been the worst possible way, but I used to go up to her penthouse near the Hotel d’Angleterre so that we could talk intimately. She was single, and she trusted me enough to give me my own set of keys to her apartment. From a war perspective, the location was too good to be true, and I was convinced there had to be another way to use this opportunity without damaging Oda.
It didn’t take me long to come up with the answer. I bought a steel longbow from a hunting shop in Copenhagen. It was perfect because it came in two pieces, which you could quickly assemble or fold away as you liked. It didn’t take up too much room and I had used a longbow as a child to hunt birds and rabbits. But to draw back this bow required a force equivalent to lifting a twelve-stone man; and it weighed about seventy-five pounds. The power it unleashed meant that the arrows, wooden with duck-feather flights, were lethal.
The beauty of the longbow is that it can be a silent killer, and I felt confident that I could escape the scene before the Germans pinpointed the source of the arrow. With luck, I would be able to carry out the perfect assassination. So I went into Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, and put targets up on trees. After a while, I could hit playing cards from fifty meters. Then I went back to Fanoe and practiced against moving targets. The seagulls gliding along had no chance against my steel longbow. I knew it would be a much harder challenge to hit a moving German while aiming downwards from an apartment window, but I believed that from fifty meters I could not only hit a man but strike whatever part of his body I was aiming for.
As part of my preparations, I even wrote ‘9 April 1940’—the day of the invasion—on my arrows. Now I only needed a tip-off that a top German was coming to the d’Angleterre. As long as Oda was well away from the apartment on that day, I would have time to do the job.
By now it was early 1941, and Tommy had spent many days at the central Copenhagen home of a resistance sympathizer called Jens Dahl, waiting for the phone call from one of Dahl’s contacts that might give his plan the green light. At Kastrup Airport, Arne Helvard, an old colleague from Fleet Air Arm, was monitoring the movements of top Nazis. Another ally was Tommy’s brother-in-law, Niels-Richard Bertelsen, who as a Copenhagen detective