The Hornet's Sting (40 page)

‘Why? It’s harder.’

‘You’ll conserve your body heat better, and cough less. Try not to ask questions and just do as I say. You might live that way.’

They wore berets under their white hoods to slow the loss of heat through their heads; Sneum was aware that every tactic they could employ in order to preserve that precious heat for a little longer might eventually prove crucial. Very soon they had begun to achieve a rhythm, marching side by side. Two former glider pilots, firm friends, with distant dreams of flying again. As the last remnants of light from the shoreline faded to black, that unity came their comfort.

‘Looks nice, should be a pleasant trip,’ said Tommy cheerily to boost morale. In reality the words of his grandfather, Thomas Sonnichsen Hansen, were echoing in his head: ‘If you fall beneath ice, never give in to panic and never be fooled by appearances. The lighter-coloured ice looks inviting from below, because it appears to offer escape from the darkness. But it’s a nasty trick of nature, because that white ice is the thickest ice, and will lock you in below it. The dark ice is thinnest—that’s where you can break through. Strike at the dark, not the light.’ If they did fall through at night, however, it would probably be impossible to distinguish between the darker, weaker ice and the lighter, thicker surface which would trap them. Meanwhile, the fate of Thorbjoern and Kaj continued to hang in the air like the mist, haunting them every step of the way. Tommy hoped that the cold had taken Thorbjoern beyond fear when he had finally gone under. Sneum knew what it was like suddenly to find yourself thrashing around below the surface. ‘I went under once as a boy,’ he explained. ‘If you fall through, the ice closes. It is an awful feeling and you do panic a bit. You have to get your elbows and upper body back up on the ice straight away, before the hole closes completely.’

The darkness enveloped them, and smothered them so completely that Sneum had to fight his fears to maintain his composure. ‘I told myself to be pleased about the darkness, because it meant there were no enemies around us,’ he said. Stubbornly, he tried to focus on Sweden, and Britain beyond. But it wasn’t easy. Even though they were heading for the medium-sized town of Landskrona, there were no lights twinkling in the distance, and they had nothing but a compass to confirm the accuracy of their route.

He and Arne were engulfed in a ghostly haze, which conjured strange shapes in the night against a black, forbidding backdrop, and played cruel games with the imagination. Meanwhile, the bleak monotony of the frozen wasteland beneath their feet became almost as hard to bear as the constant fear of falling through it. There was nothing to use as a landmark or reference point. It wasn’t as though waves had frozen as they rose or died; the ice was almost perfectly flat and featureless. There were no frozen boulders, no ships, no stranded small boats. Just a vast sheet, an awful uniformity hiding its weak points.

The two pilots trudged on, hour after hour, wandering ever further away from Denmark. Their fitness and determination were sorely tested against the biting cold. Then an awful groaning beneath their feet alerted them to fresh danger. They had stepped onto unstable ice. A sharper, splitting sound warned that their weight might take them down at any moment. Using their poles, they launched themselves towards what they hoped would be a more secure surface. The fear that they might land in freezing water instead lasted for as long as they were in the air, seconds seeming like an eternity. Instead their momentum took them onto what felt like firm ice. Scarcely daring to trust their feet, they scurried away before the fresh sheet could also betray them.

Tommy believed they must now be near the middle of the Oeresund, close to the daytime shipping lanes. He thought he could just make out the little island of Hven to their left, though he knew it could well be a trick of the eye. So, ignoring the possible mirage, they straightened their course and pressed on for the preferable target of Landskrona. Later Tommy reflected: ‘We didn’t have any trouble until we were south-east of Hven. But in the morning, just before dawn, we could feel that the ice was starting to move under us, it cracked sometimes.’

As the first weak colours of dawn streaked the horizon, there was an almighty roar, as if the gods of winter and spring had begun to do battle. Sneum admitted:

If that happened so far out in the Oeresund, they faced the same fate as Thorbjoern. From the southern end of the channel, where the younger Christophersen brother had died, a storm was now blowing with terrible ferocity. A swirling wind whipped up the cold air and flurries of sleet and snow flew in all directions. ‘We didn’t realize that such a heavy storm was moving north so quickly,’ Tommy explained. ‘We didn’t have a weather forecast.’

But the natural forces unleashed above the ice were nothing compared to the dangers lurking below. The stretch of sea shaken by the storm had begun to exert untold pressure on the thick slabs of ice above it. The original, thunderous sound heard by the men was a fracture that threatened to open all the way down the Oeresund’s main shipping lane. Vast areas, carved up by icebreakers the previous morning, had healed overnight in a brittle callus. Now the storm had sliced open the old wound, leaving Tommy and Arne perilously close to a channel of water filled with freezing debris.

In the distance, beyond the widening gap in the ice, Sneum could see dark figures, like matchstick men, near the Swedish shoreline. The thin light had brought out the morning fishermen near Landskrona; and now the distant crowd seemed to be warning away the two intruders. Frantic shouts carried kilometers across the ice floes which were steadily breaking into pieces.

‘Oh God, Sneum, look.’ Helvard pointed south and Sneum followed his gaze to the source of his concern.

The latest fracture line was heading straight for them. The previous morning’s ice-breaker had clearly chopped its way along this line, riding up on the slabs with its rounded bow and crushing them as it sank back into the water. Now the underwater turbulence had reopened all that a frozen night had begun to heal.

Sneum recalled: ‘The storm from the south-east had brought all the water in from the Baltic, which had lifted the ice and made it break up again. That was the greatest danger to our survival. The ice all around that line was breaking into flakes, and we didn’t know when we were going to have to step onto a flake that wasn’t big enough to carry our weight.’

Their wooden poles came into play again as they reacted instinctively to avoid the bubbling veins of water now appearing at their feet. ‘As soon as a crack opened up, we jumped in unison,’ said Tommy. But for a few perilous moments they lacked firm direction. Sneum was the one who finally came to a decision. ‘Come on!’ he yelled, pulling on the rope which tied them together. ‘Back to Hven. It’s our only chance.’

The main fracture was almost upth m. If they didn’t outrun it, they would surely fall through. But Helvard hesitated for a crucial moment, apparently frozen in fear. Tommy explained Arne’s confusion: ‘Helvard hadn’t been to sea until he joined the navy. He didn’t understand the ice like I did, because he’d been brought up in the country. He had never been in a situation like this before and I think he must have been more scared than me. I knew we had to turn back to Hven, but Arne didn’t turn as quickly as I did.’

Since they were still attached by the rope, it looked certain that they would both be killed, but the fracture deviated slightly as it tore past them. Even so, the consequences appeared to be no less devastating than a direct hit under their feet:

Helvard snapped into action and they both charged at the ice as it ripped apart in front of them. Ramming their staffs into the softening surface and leaping for their lives, both men hung in the air long enough to land in a heap on the other side. Sneum, struggling for breath, was first to drag himself to his feet. He pulled Arne up quickly and said: ‘Come on, keep moving, let’s get out of here!’

They stumbled back towards Hven, their only chance of survival. Adrenalin kept their exhausted limbs pumping as they skipped across the crumbling surface, praying all the time that they wouldn’t fall under. The sleet and snow whipped into their eyes as the worst of the storm caught up with them. Tommy began to notice more matchstick men, moving towards them from the island. At first they seemed far away, unreachable; but Sneum and Helvard fought on like men possessed until the matchsticks became real people. All of a sudden their rescuers, Swedish policemen, grabbed each man by the arm and dragged him away roughly. ‘We thought they were our saviors but they treated us like criminals,’ Tommy observed wryly. ‘Still, at least they were dragging us onto solid ground, and that was good to know.’

For five or six hours, Sneum and Helvard had been tormented by the creaks and groans of the ice beneath their feet, and had felt the vast slabs shifting menacingly as they moved to the rhythm of the silent currents below. Now they were being scraped across a beach by their captors, towards a grim-looking building on the cliffs above.

It might not have been the mainland, but it was at least Sweden. And perhaps the first firm stepping stone back to London.

T
OMMY SNEUM AND ARNE HELVARD were trapped in Malmo Prison. The governor, Einar Karstengren, was rumoured to be a Nazi. Since their escape to a supposedly neutral country, life had been full of strange twists and turns. On the island of Hven they were locked in a shed as punishment for refusing to give their names. They tried to keemoving in order to prevent the onset of hypothermia, until at last they were put on motor-sledges and driven across the ice to the Swedish mainland. A comfortable night at a police station in Helsingborg saw the town’s chief constable, Olaf Palm, lay on the most extraordinary hospitality, including a lavish dinner in their cell served professionally by the head waiter of a local hotel. But then, before their transfer to the bigger Swedish city, Palm warned his guests to prepare for the worst. Tommy remembered how awkward his host had looked as he broke the news. ‘I feel obliged to tell you,’ Palm began, ‘that they are going to send you to Germany, or at the very least back to the Germans in Denmark.’

‘I got scared when I heard that,’ admitted Sneum. ‘I knew that if the Germans got their hands on me, they would shoot me or torture me, or more likely both. I had heard about so many people being tortured, and the Germans scared everyone with their methods. I was almost sure I would have broken down. I needed to avoid it.’

As their fate hung in the balance in Malmo, they had their mugshots and fingerprints taken. Then all they could do was wait for the arrival from Copenhagen of Politikommissaer Odmar, who would help to decide what was to happen to them.

If Tommy thought that Colonel Rabagliati might be able to exert some influence over his and Arne’s precarious predicament from back in Britain, he was wrong. By then, the political wind had turned against the Secret Intelligence Service.

On 30 March 1942, Colonel Harry Sporborg of the Special Operations Executive’s Scandinavian Section revealed how he intended to outmanoeuvre his rival Rabagliati to gain control of British dealings with Denmark: