Eagle Has Flown, The by Higgins Jack

Author:Higgins, Jack
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007385560
Publisher: Harper

8

In Belfast, Devlin found it impossible to get a ticket for the crossing to Heysham in Lancashire. There was a waiting list and the situation was no better on the Glasgow route. Which left Larne, north of Belfast, to Stranraer, the way he had got across the water for Operation Eagle. It was a short run and a special boat train all the way to London, but this time he wasn’t going to take any chances. He caught the local train from Belfast to Larne, went into a public toilet on the docks and locked himself in. When he came out fifteen minutes later, he was in uniform.

It paid off immediately. The boat was full, but not to military personnel. He produced the travel voucher they had given him in Berlin. The booking clerk hardly looked at it, took in the major’s uniform, the ribbon for the Military Cross and the clergyman’s dog collar and booked him on board immediately.

It was the same at Stranraer where, in spite of the incredible number of people being carried by the train, he was allocated a seat in a first-class carriage. Stranraer to Glasgow, Glasgow down to Birmingham and then to London arriving at King’s Cross at three o’clock the following morning. When he walked from the train, one face amongst the crowd, the first thing he heard was an air-raid siren.

The beginning of 1944 became known to Londoners as the Little Blitz as the Luftwaffe, the performance of its planes greatly improved, turned attention to night raids on London again. The siren Devlin heard heralded the approach of JU88 pathfinders from Chartres in France. The heavy bombers came later but by then he was, like thousands of others, far below ground, sitting out a hard night in the comparative safety of a London tube station.

Mary Ryan was a girl that people remarked on, not because she was particularly beautiful, but because there was a strange, almost ethereal look to her. The truth was her health had never been good and the pressures of wartime didn’t help. Her face was always pale, with dark smudges beneath her eyes, and she had a heavy limp which had been a fact of life for her since birth. She was only nineteen and looked old beyond her years.

Her father, an IRA activist, had died of a heart attack in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin just before the war, her mother of cancer in 1940 leaving her with only one relative, her uncle Michael, her father’s younger brother who had lived in London for years, on his own since the death of his wife in 1938. She had moved from Dublin to London and now kept house for him and worked as an assistant in a large grocery store in Wapping High Street.

No more though for when she reported for work at eight o’clock that morning, the shop and a sizeable section of the street was reduced to a pile of smoking rubble. She stayed, watching the ambulances,

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