The Hornet's Sting (39 page)

Bertelsen listened to Tommy’s explanation on that tense day in March 1942 and shook his head. ‘I think you’ve forgotten who your true enemy is,’ he observed sadly.

‘Right now,’ Tommy replied bitterly, ‘it feels like almost everybody.’

It wasn’t true, of course, because, even under the most mindbending pressure, Sneum had already shown that he could think of resistance men such as Duus Hansen, Olsen and the unknown parachutist before he concentrated on trying to save his own life. He still knew that the Nazis were the only real enemy.

But many years later, Sneum had a better insight into the sort of man that more than six months of spying in Nazi-occupied territory threatened to turn him into. The constany, ar, the lack of support from Britain, the death of Oxlund, the feeling of being hunted and the suspicion that Danish Intelligence didn’t have his best interests at heart—all those factors led him to look after number one at all costs once his mission in Denmark was over. He reflected: ‘In the spy game you have to tell so many lies that in the end you can hardly distinguish between truth and lies, and you don’t even trust your nearest friends.’

In all the chaos, Tommy might have felt a temptation to visit his wife and baby one last time, and rediscover a sense of the person he had been before the invasion, a man with control over his destiny. Others had been banking on him succumbing to that temptation. It was mid-morning when Odmar ordered Olsen and his two colleagues to raid Carl Jensen’s apartment, where Else and Marianne were staying. The operation took place under the watchful eye of Thomas Noerreheden, who had liaised with the Germans and wanted to make sure everything ran smoothly. Noerreheden knew they would have to move quickly to be effective, and urged his officers to hurry to the third floor before any evasive action could be taken inside the apartment. Carl Jensen opened the door before it was broken down.

‘We’re looking for Thomas Sneum,’ said Noerreheden as his colleagues dashed past the owner and searched one room each.

‘I haven’t seen him since last June,’ replied Else’s father honestly.

Within minutes it became obvious that Sneum was not in the apartment. Noerreheden hoped for a new lead and asked Jensen if his son-in-law had access to a summer house somewhere along the coast. Else’s father replied that, to the best of his knowledge, he did not.

The officers then turned their attention to Jensen’s wife Gerda and their daughter Else, who were in the living room with Marianne. They were both asked when they had last seen Thomas Sneum. They both answered: ‘June last year.’ Else was promptly put in a police car and taken to Copenhagen’s central station.

Politikommissaer Odmar was following events closely. He had already instructed four detectives from the Criminal Investigations Branch—by now closely affiliated to the Abwehr—to observe proceedings at the station. As the interrogation began in earnest, Criminal Detective Normander and his colleagues Harry Jensen, Rasmus Christensen and Emil Petersen watched for signs of weakness in Else’s story. Olsen later said of this interview: ‘In the department they believed Sneum had had some contact with his wife, which in fact turned out to be the case. It was decided that she should be shadowed and her telephone tapped. Then she was brought in for an interrogation by my department.’

Under intense pressure, Else tried to stick to what she could say truthfully without endangering her husband: that Tommy had left home on 18 June 1941, and that she had received a farewell letter from him dated 5 July. She insisted she had no idea where Tommy was now, and maintained a friendly demeanour even under intense pressure. This composure gave Olsen the nerve to try something which might have rebounded on him in spectacular fashion had his audacious move been discovered by his pro-Nazi colleagues. He recalled:

When Else left the station that afternoon, she was followed by Detectives Normander and Jensen, who had orders to shadow her indefinitely, in case she should lead them to her husband.

Olsen revealed: ‘She understood the content of my note and followed the instructions. And as she had a sense of humour, in the following days she had quite a lot of fun leading her police shadows a merry dance.’ Else Sneum hadn’t been given the opportunity to enjoy herself so much in ages, and she wasn’t going to pass up the chance to make her own amusing contribution to the Allied war effort by wasting police time.

Meanwhile, other Danish police officers checked all mail to and from the Jensen family home for the slightest clue as to Sneum’s whereabouts. They grew similarly frustrated. The correspondence revealed nothing, though it seemed increasingly likely that the elusive Tommy would turn up soon enough, dead or alive. Even Britain’s best spy couldn’t remain at large for ever in the midst of such a manhunt.

T
OMMY AVOIDED HIS ESTRANGED WIFE and daughter throughout this dangerous time, focusing instead on escape. Emotional complications could be fatal for a spy in occupied territory. He and Arne Helvard would head for Sweden and then Britain. Nothing else mattered.

Sneum and Helvard met late on the afternoon of 26 March at Copenhagen’s central railway station, where they both deposited some of their personal effects in lockers. They avoided locker number thirteen, where the original British radio, now not only cumbersome but entirely useless without its crystals, still lay neatly packed away in its case. However, Tommy fully intended to take the receipt for that locker to Sweden, where he thought it could be used to his advantage.

He joined Arne on a northbound train to Skodsborg. Originally, Tommy had seen Skodsborg only as an ideal location from which to improve radio communications with Sweden and Britain. Now, though, he believed the northern end of the village would provide the perfect stepping-off point for their escape across the ice. Though this part of the coast was patrolled by the Danish police, who had observation boxes at strategic points along the sea front, the local lookouts were known to be less than dedicated to their tedious task. Tommy and Arne would also wear white for camouflage against the snow and ice, so that if searchlights were shone in their direction, they might still blend into their surroundings unnoticed. On the Swedish side the following morning, they d bese as fishermen, mingle with those already on the ice, and slip away unnoticed.

Their ultimate target was the Swedish town of Landskrona, seventeen kilometers across the frozen sea. But Tommy believed they might not even have to reach the mainland to achieve their objective of escaping Denmark’s Nazi occupation. In the middle of the channel, the island of Hven lay just inside Swedish waters, and only eleven kilometers from Skodsborg. The small number of Swedish police who were based there might feel obliged to take any unauthorized visitors across to their own mainland for processing. However, they might equally call in their Danish counterparts to repatriate two of their citizens. So Landskrona remained the favored destination, because it appeared to guarantee Tommy and Arne’s long-term freedom.

They were joined at the Skodsborg flat by Sneum’s cousin Knud Nielsen, who would help with the first phase of the escape attempt. In the meantime, they cooked themselves a meal and enjoyed a few beers, teasing each other to shake off the fear that this might be their last supper. Little more than a fortnight earlier, two out of three men had died on the ice. Since then, the daytime temperatures had risen slightly, a potentially deadly development which meant the ice was probably breaking up during the day. Although the bitter nights still repaired most of the cracks, Tommy feared that the spring sun might have done lasting damage to their hopes.

Anticipating a scenario where they might need to jump across the fracture lines, Tommy insisted they take a pole each, between two and three meters long. Such props would do no harm to their alibi, since many fishermen took the same precautions when stepping out onto the ice to carve their fishing holes. If they were forced to vault across cracks to stay above the water, the poles might become lifesavers. They could also be used to rescue a freezing man who had fallen through the ice and needed help to claw his way back out of the water.

Tommy had walked over frozen seas before, from Fanoe to the Danish mainland at Esbjerg. He felt sure his experience would help Arne survive too, especially if the pair were tied together with rope. He was determined to do all he could to avoid the tragedy that had befallen the other men a few weeks earlier, though he knew there were no guarantees. ‘Of course I was scared,’ he admitted later. ‘I would have been stupid not to be. But I always forced myself never to show other people that I was scared. If you show fear as a leader, you are not a leader any more.’

Knud Nielsen knew the importance of running checks and crosschecks before stepping onto the ice. At 11.00 p.m., he went over Arne and Tommy’s kit and made sure their clothing was adequate. Over several thermal layers, the two men were wearing bulky white, hooded anoraks and white trousers. Even their boots had been painted white to help avoid detection in the first vital minutes. In order to reach their stepping-off point without arousing suspicion, however, they had realized it would be necessary to wear normal clothing over their whites. If confronted, it would be better to look like locals breaking the curfew for a spot of illegal fishing than to be seen for what they were—highly organized resistance men dressed for an evasive expedition across the ice. Therefore, they put on their naval overcoats before they began the short walk towards northern Skodsborg’s beach.

Knud accompanied Tommy and Arne on this crucial phase of their journey. When the time was right, he would take charge of the discarded overcoats and hurry back to the apartment for the night. Together they carved a pathrough the deep snow. Each man marched in the footsteps of his predecessor, in order to minimize the evidence they left behind. They also kept in step, to try to sound like just one person. Nights were particularly silent during the occupation, and the crunching sound of three men trudging through the snow at midnight could have raised the alarm even before they stepped onto the beach.

There were dangers lurking on the sea front now. Only forty meters to the left of the point at which they were due to descend to the ice, a police lookout post could be made out in the darkness. Two hundred meters further along the promenade, there was another. Tommy had hoped that neither police box would be manned, but a flicker of light in the first cabin disappointed him. Looking closer, he saw the silhouetted shoulders and head of the policeman; for a moment, it seemed certain the officer would spot them. As he lit a cigarette, however, the lone watchman turned away to survey the promenade in the other direction. All three men managed to hurry to the beach unchallenged, praying their footprints would not be spotted in the gloom. Wasting no time, Sneum and Helvard took off their overcoats and threw them to Nielsen. In that instant, they became virtually invisible. Using their staffs, they then negotiated the six steps down to the beach, tied themselves firmly together with rope, and trudged across the five or ten meters of smooth, snow-covered sand. Without hesitation, they stepped onto the creaking ice and, in seconds, they were gone. Even from a few meters above sea level, Knud now couldn’t make them out. It was as though they had stepped off the edge of the world. He wondered for a moment if they had fallen through the ice already, but he knew he would have heard something if they were in trouble. So he turned and headed back for the warmth of the apartment, leaving Helvard and Sneum to their fate.

In the reassuring light of day, you could often see the cliffs of Hven, just a few kilometers away from the Danish mainland. In the best visibility you could even see the skyline of Landskrona. But in the darkness, there was precious little to guide them. Tommy and Arne were met merely by silence and black cold. Only the impact of the freezing air reminded them they were still alive; and neither man knew exactly what lay under his next footstep. Surrounded by the void, Helvard hesitated. Feeling the rope pull him back, Sneum pressed on, urging his partner to follow him more closely. Tommy wanted to a find a rhythm and rely on the simple action of walking for reassurance. He explained later: ‘You have to keep moving on ice because if you stand still you could go through.’ The first creaking of the ice did nothing to dispel the thought that the spirits of recently departed men lurked somewhere in the night. But once they were about a hundred meters away from the shore, they began to exchange banter, and create a distraction from their fear.

‘Breathe through your nose,’ whispered Tommy, having noticed that Arne was using his mouth.