The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [68]
At least that meant he hadn’t severed his spinal cord. ‘I suspected damage to my coccyx but knew there was nothing I could do, except to swig cognac from the hip flask I had brought with me for my cover story—that I had been at a party all night.’ Some party. He had torn one of the legs of his civilian suit, although at least the everyday shoes in which he had chosen to jump, against British advice, were still firmly on his feet.
Tommy knew he had to move quickly, whatever the source of his pain. ‘It wasn’t nice walking but you can manage an awful lot in this life if you have to, and I had no choice.’ To stay where he was, on a ridge with no cover, might lead to his capture before dawn. ‘There was moonlight and you could easily see,’ he remembered. ‘I looked around to see if Christophersen was anywhere near by, but there was no sign of him. I didn’t know what had happened to him but I knew that if he got caught they would look for me.’
He spotted a wood below him and headed for that. Once among the trees, he tried to shut out the pain as he dug a hole at the foot of an old, distinctive stump. Then he buried his parachute beneath the roots, replaced the fresh earth and shuffled away as quickly as possible. Only the parachute could prove beyond all doubt that he was a spy. Now he had taken care of it.
There was little point in wasting any more time searching for Christophersen: ‘We had an agreement that we should meet the next morning in a certain district of Copenhagen if we got split up on landing.’ So Tommy came out of the trees and walked to the nearest road, where he could see a sign in the distance. As he did so, beams from a car’s headlights shot across the scene, though the vehicle itself was still some way off. He had time to drop under the cover of some bushes, but the sudden evasive action made him want to scream with pain. He stopped himself from doing so when he realized the type of car that was coming his way. ‘It was a Danish police car, going quite slowly. That got me worried. We were in the middle of nowhere, so what was a patrol car doing out there?’ As he listened to the growl of the engine pass and fade, he wondered if the parachute canopies had been spotted in the few moments it had taken to land.
Gingerly, he rose to his feet and walked back over to the roadsign. To his horror, he saw that he had landed at Brorfelde, near Holbaek, a full eighty kilometers from Copenhagen. But more worrying than his own isolation was the thought of Christophersen trying to cover that sort of distance to the Danish capital without arousing suspicion. Tommy feared that his untrustworthy comrade would head instead for Holbaek.
‘If he got caught they would look for me there too,’ Tommy explained. ‘So I decided to do what would be least expected of me, and walk fifteen kilometers to the next town after that, Ringsted.’
In fact, Christophersen had decided to lie low until dawn in the field where he had landed, hoping that his descent from the skies had gone unnoticed. This contravened British orders to vacate the drop-zone as quickly as possible. If the area were to be sealed off, he would be trapped, so he was taking a big risk.
Meanwhile, Tommy took another long swig of cognac from the flask, and tipped some of the liquor on to his clothes to support the cover story about his drunken night out. Though the analgesic properties of the cognac increased his mobility, he still found it hard going. Any strange noise or distant flicker of lights made him crawl for cover, increasing his discomfort. Mostly, though, he passed silently through villages and never saw a soul. ‘I could sometimes hear people talking behind closed shutters. Or dogs barking—they probably smelled me.’
When he noticed the first streaks of dawn, Tommy knew he would have to face the local population. He looked at his shabby