It was Britain’s most humiliating intelligence disaster of World War II. The newly established Special Operations Executive (SOE) dropped fifty-three agents during 1941 and 1942 into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Their mission was to aid the Dutch underground as part of Winston Churchills plan to set Europe ablaze. However, Dutch resistance was thoroughly penetrated by German counter-intelligence. In spite of repeated security warnings including one by SOEs own chief encoder, Leo Marks, agent after agent was parachuted into the waiting arms of the Nazis. Almost all of those captured were executed at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Two were able to escape from captivity and reach London to report the calamity. These two heroic men were promptly arrested as suspected double agents, their tale ignored. In this story, Sgt. Jeff Williamson, a fictitious Canadian agent, goes through SOE training and because of his ability to speak Dutch, is dropped into the Netherlands. He manages to evade German capture and make his way through war-torn, occupied Europe to Spain and Gibraltar only then to be incarcerated in an MI5 (British counter-intelligence) prison and kept there until the Germans surrender. During his time in prison and long afterwards he is haunted by his own history and the fate of his fellow agents. He is driven to attempt to find the cause of the intelligence disaster and SOEs motivation for his own imprisonment.
