Whatever his motive, his aircraft was spotted by a British detection station as he approached the northeast coast of England. Spitfire fighter planes were scrambled to go after him, but no one found him in the air. Hess apparently ran out of fuel and parachuted out of his Messerschmitt, which crashed southeast of Glasgow in Scotland (the remains of his plane are on display in the Imperial War Museum in London). He was found on the ground by a local farmer, given a cup of tea, and made a prisoner by the Home Guard. He insisted he wanted to talk to the Duke of Hamilton, saying that he hoped to negotiate a peace treaty between Britain and Germany. That didn’t happen. Hess doesn’t seem to have acted under anyone’s orders but his own; the result of his failed mission was that he spent the rest of his life in prison, taking his own life in 1987 at the age of ninety-three—not his first attempt.

Obviously Felix Baer is not based on Rudolf Hess himself, although Hess’s flight made me feel that Baer’s was plausible. But the real inspiration for “Odysseus” and his collaboration with British Intelligence came from an “Individual History” report describing a German bomber, a Junkers 88, now in the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, in England. I’ve known about the events leading to the capture of this aircraft for some time—at least ten years—because I used the description of the RAF interception of this Ju-88 as source material for an interception scene in Rose Under Fire. On 9 May 1943, this Luftwaffe plane, with its crew of three, flew from Denmark via Norway and was then escorted by a group of Spitfires into Dyce near Aberdeen (the location of my fictional Deeside). One of the German airmen in the Ju-88 had been brought along at gunpoint, unwillingly; the other two may well have been working for British Intelligence since 1940. Intriguingly, it has been suggested that the pilot, Heinrich (or Herbert) Schmitt, may have landed in the UK twice before, in February and May 1941, both times on clandestine intelligence missions.

The RAF continued to fly this captured Junkers 88 on experimental operations throughout the war, and it was a gift for the British and the other Allied forces because it contained an up-to-the-minute German radar set, which allowed the RAF to make some key adjustments to the existing technology that hid their own bomber aircraft from enemy detection. Despite the importance of this discovery, the details of the tech are so stunningly obscure and complex that I knew I couldn’t possibly use them to create a gripping read. I asked my husband to brainstorm ideas about an alternative secret for my German resistance pilot to sneak into Britain, something which could be considered equally game-changing for the war effort but a bit more exciting. He immediately suggested an Enigma machine.