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assuming that the noise below had been caused by a frightened rabbit. Impatiently, Sneum waited to hear some German voices again, and he was delighted when the majority began to poke fun at whoever had reacted to the sound of his approach. The increasingly boisterous conversation was the cover Tommy had desired. He clicked on the Movikon. Action! Frame by detailed frame, one of Hitler’s most precious secrets was being stolen from under German noses. The stakes were unbelievably high. This time, there could be no cover story if he was caught; no reasonable explanation for his presence.

As soon as Tommy knew he had what the British wanted, he turned off the camera, tucked it back into his jacket and waited for an opportunity to reterat. The guards in the water tower, who were making the mistake of acting as a unit in everything they did, crossed their perch to survey the north-western horizon. Sneum made a dash for safety, back the way he had come, still scarcely daring to breathe. At any time he knew he might hear the order to stand still and raise his hands. ‘I had already decided to keep running if that happened, even if it meant I risked being shot in the back,’ he recalled. ‘To be captured would have meant torture.’ He ran like the wind and heard nothing but his own deafening gasps for breath. Finally, the last remnants of fear left him. ‘I wanted to shout with joy, but I couldn’t,’ he said.

It wasn’t easy to act normally. No Hollywood film director had ever managed to create anything quite like this. One of the most priceless war movies ever made was safely in the can. The only problem now was how to get Tommy’s precious, undeveloped prize to the British.

Chapter 6

FLIGHT PLAN

TOMMY DECIDED THE REELS of film were too bulky and therefore too dangerous to be taken to Sweden by Kaj Oxlund. Besides, he had risked too much to see the results of his heroics carried away by another man. Kaj was a highly proficient courier, but the security checks were becoming more thorough between Denmark and Sweden by the day. And that gave Tommy the excuse to insist upon taking his precious intelligence to England directly. His reward for bringing the British such valuable cargo, he believed, would be the chance to fly a Spitfire in the RAF. The chance to test his skills against the Luftwaffe was Tommy’s ultimate target. But there was only silence from Captain Henry Denham in Stockholm on the Sunderland sea-plane Tommy had requested for Danish pilots with similar ambitions. The proposed airlift from Lake Tissoe seemed as far away as ever.

While Tommy wondered about the best way to escape, he realized he had a more immediate problem. As he attempted to liaise with Oxlund, Kjeld Pedersen and Christian Michael Rottboell, he was forced to abort several arranged meetings because he had the impression he was being followed. At first he thought it might just be his imagination, a symptom of the pressure he had begun to feel, but as he made several unorthodox twists and turns through the streets of Copenhagen, the same faces kept reappearing behind him. Three- or four-man teams seemed to be taking it in turns to trail him. But if that were true, Sneum didn’t see why he hadn’t already been dragged away for interrogation. Perhaps the enemy were after bigger fish than a young naval pilot. Maybe the Abwehr had suspected him all along, and thought he could lead them to more important resistance figures. Tommy explained later: ‘I don’t think I was under surveillance every day, and I always managed to shake them off eventually. But just when I had begun to relax for a day or two, they were back.’

At no time was Sneum challenged or arrested, so it occurred to him that the surveillance team, which might report to the Danish police or directly to German Intelligence, were unsure of his role in any subversive activity. If they were still guessing, that was fine with Tommy. Perhaps he had already done enough to confuse them. But he decided that the safest course of action was to get out of Denmark as soon as possible.

As a pilot, he naturally