The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan

Author:Mark Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781602397101
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-28T10:00:00+00:00

On New Year’s Day, Emmy Valentin called into Sneum’s flat. She pulled out a napkin containing some crude sketches and explained that she had persuaded her Abwehr officer, after several bottles of wine, to draw some U-boat bays and the bomb shelters that housed them. They were all to be found at the docks in Kiel. He had even provided a map. ‘The officer was probably in love with Emmy, but even so I don’t know how the word “intelligence” could be used to describe him or his department after what he gave away that night,’ Sneum said later.

But Emmy hadn’t finished. She explained how she had asked her escort if he was depressed that there appeared to be no end in sight to the war, now that the German advance to Moscow had stalled in the Russian snow.

‘Don’t worry about the war; it’ll soon be over,’ he repeated. When asked how he could be so sure, he replied, ‘We’ll soon have a little bomb powerful enough to blow the whole of south-eastern England to atoms.’

Sneum made her repeat the phrase. It still seemed too terrible to contemplate. Perhaps a drunken officer’s bravado had got the better of him, but Tommy knew the remark had to be taken seriously. Was such a bomb feasible? He had always been fascinated by physics, and possessed the intellect and imagination to grasp ideas that others might dismiss as too fantastic for serious consideration. His identification of a radar installation on Fanoe had demonstrated just such a flexible mind, though talk of a super-bomb was another matter entirely. Sneum knew he would have to call upon his contacts in the scientific community in order to check the Abwehr officer’s boastful claim.

In his youth, Tommy had been taught physics by Harald Bohr at a college in Copenhagen. Harald was the brother of Niels Bohr, the leading authority on nuclear physics, and Sneum realized that Niels might now be able to provide the key to understanding what the German had said. The problem was that Harald probably wouldn’t remember Tommy well enough to want to help him; and anyway, Niels was renowned as a very private individual who liked to spend his leisure time in the company of a select group of close friends. Fortunately for the British, though, Niels Bohr and Thomas Sneum had some mutual friends: two brilliant scientists who also happened to be resistance sympathizers. Bohr trusted both men implicitly. These were Professors Chiewitz and Hagedorn, the doctors who had helped Tommy after his painful landing back in September. Now Chiewitz was asked to contact Bohr on a matter of the utmost scientific urgency.

Tommy explained the relationship between the two men:

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