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Tommy said later, ‘When we heard all about Operation Barbarossa, we realized why we had managed to get through the previous night without being intercepted. Nearly all the Luftwaffe planes had already gone east.’

By the time the coffees arrived in the restaurant, however, so had two more officers, slightly older and wearing different, darker uniforms. Suddenly Sneum didn’t feel so lucky any more. The new arrivals were police sergeants—and being friendly wasn’t at the top of their agenda. The RAF men had no choice but to hand over their guests as arranged, and the mood soon changed. The natural camaraderie and mutual respect shared by airmen of every nation was replaced by the strained civility of their new escorts. In little more than half an hour, a police car had rushed the prisoners to Newcastle’s railway station, where they boarded a midnight train, closely followed by their guards.

The first smears of dawn had already turned to morning as Tommy and Kjeld were marched bleary-eyed out of London’s King’s Cross Station and ushered towards an unmarked police car.

As far as they could see, it was business as usual in England’s capital, with few visual signs of a country at war. They were driven through a sleepy West End and across the River Thames, until finally the car drew to a halt at the Royal Patriotic School for Orphan Daughters in Unity Street, Battersea. The large, neo-Gothic building had previously been home to a charitable institution. Now it was a vetting center for foreigners who had entered the country through unofficial channels. It had been adapted for this new role just five months before, and the chaos inside suggested that an efficient system had not yet been discovered.

For illegal aliens who failed to present a convincing case to the Allies, however, a swift and ruthless procedure did exist. Anyone deemed a security risk was shipped to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Many of the so-called impostors who were sent there would not be heard of again until the end of the war. Tommy and Kjeld didn’t realize it, but their individual wars, indeed their very freedom, would depend upon how they coped with questioning over the next twenty-four hours. And this time the interrogation would be extreme.

Chapter 14

SENDING FOR THE DOCTOR

THOUGH IT WAS NO LONGER in his possession, Tommy was confident that the Movikon film of the Fanoe radar installation was already in London too. Therefore, he had every reason to believe that it would be only a matter of time before he and Pedersen were congratulated on their intelligence coup and offered the chance to join the Royal Air Force. He presumed that the film had already been developed and was now probably being watched by several senior British officers.

However, there was no evidence of that as yet. Sneum and Kjeld were taken into a spartan room, where they were directed towards a simple wooden table and invited to sit opposite each other on two hard chairs. To their surprise, they were then left alone, and it soon dawned on them why such unexpected breathing space had been offered. Tommy revealed: ‘They had installed microphones in our room, which we very quickly found.’

The British guards didn’t return for some time, their superiors perhaps hoping for some slip of the tongue inside the cell. Eventually, though, the pilots were separated and taken to even smaller rooms, where the questioning began in earnest. Tommy found himself being interrogated by a fellow Dane, who gave his name as Seaman Peters. In fact he was a naval officer called Olaf Poulsen, and he seemed impressed by the quality of Sneum’s intelligence. He called in some British Royal Navy officers, who wanted to focus on two German ships Tommy had mentioned. It quickly occurred to Sneum that the Nurnberg and the Schleswig-Holstein might just provide his passage to freedom, so he told the fascinated naval men everything he knew about the vessels and their movements.

With the prospect of a Spitfire waiting for a new pilot on some English airfield, Tommy answered questions on a variety of