The Eagle Has Landed Read Online Free PDF

protected.'
     
     
'If you believe that, you'll believe anything,' Canaris said drily. 'Whatever else they are, the English aren't fools. MI five and six employ lots of very well-spoken young men who've been to Oxford or Cambridge and who'd put a bullet through your belly as soon as look at you. Anyway, take the old man himself. Probably carries a pistol in his coat pocket and I bet he's still a crackshot.'
     
     
An orderly brought them some coffee. Himmler said, 'So you don't intend to proceed in this affair?'
     
     
'You know what will happen as well as I do,' Canaris said. 'Today's Wednesday. He'll have forgotten the whole crazy idea by Friday.'
     
     
Himmler nodded slowly, sipping his coffee. 'Yes, I suppose you're right.'
     
     
Canaris stood up. 'Anyway, if you'll excuse me. I think I'll get a little sleep.'
     
     
He moved to another seat, covered himself with a blanket provided and made himself as comfortable as possible for the three-hour trip that lay ahead.
     
     
From the other side of the aisle Himmler watched him, eyes cold, fixed, staring. There was no expression on his face - none at all. He might have been a corpse lying there had it not been
     
     
for the muscle that twitched constantly in his right cheek.
     
     
.
     
     
When Canaris reached the Abwehr offices at 74-76 Tirpitz Ufer in Berlin it was almost dawn. The driver who had picked him up at Tempelhof had brought the Admiral's two favourite dachshunds with him and when Canaris got out of the car, they scampered at his heels as he walked briskly past the sentries.
     
     
He went straight up to his office. Unbuttoning his naval greatcoat as he went, he handed it to the orderly who opened the door for him. 'Coffee,' the Admiral told him. 'Lots of coffee.' The orderly started to close the door and Canaris called him back. 'Do you know if Colonel Radl is in?'
     
     
'I believe he slept in his office last night, Herr Admiral.'
     
     
'Good, tell him I'd like to see him.'
     
     
The door closed. He was alone and suddenly tired and he slumped down in the chair behind the desk. Canaris's personal style was modest. The office was old-fashioned and relatively bare, with a worn carpet. There was a portrait of Franco on the wall with a dedication, On the desk was a marble paperweight with three bronze monkeys seeing, hearing and speaking no evil.
     
     
'That's me.' he said softly, tapping them on the head.
     
     
He took a deep breath to get a grip on himself: it was the very knife-edge of danger he walked in that insane world. There were things he suspected that even he should not have known. An attempt by two senior officers earlier that year to blow up Hitler's plane in flight from Smolensk to Rastenburg, for instance, and the constant threat of what might happen if von Dohnanyi and his friends cracked and talked.
     
     
The orderly appeared with a tray containing coffee pot, two cups and a small pot of real cream, something of a rarity in Berlin at that time. 'Leave it,' Canaris said. 'I'll see to it myself.'
     
     
The orderly withdrew and as Canaris poured the coffee, there was a knock at the door. The man who entered might have stepped straight off a parade ground, so immaculate was his uniform. A lieutenant-colonel of mountain troops with the ribbon for the Winter War, a silver wound badge and a Knight's Cross at his throat. Even the patch which covered his right eye had a regulation look about it, as did the black leather glove on his left hand.
     
     
'Ah, there you are, Max,' Canaris said. 'Join me for coffee and restore me to sanity. Each time I return from Rastenburg I feel increasingly that I need a keeper, or at least that someone does.'
     
     
Max Radl was thirty and looked ten or fifteen years older, depending on the day and weather. He had lost his right eye and left hand during the Winter War in 1941 and had worked for Canaris ever since being invalided home. He was at that time Head of Section Three, which was an office of