The book makes use of the false document technique, and opens with Higgins describing his discovery of the concealed grave of thirteen German paratroopers in an English graveyard.
After Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned by the Italian government, Otto Skorzeny led a German team and achieved his release and escape from Italy.
Adolf Hitler, with the strong support of Heinrich Himmler, considered a similar plan to kidnap the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), is ordered to make a feasibility study of capturing Churchill and taking him to the Reich.
Churchill is scheduled to spend a relaxing weekend at a country house near the village of Studley Constable, Norfolk, where Joanna Grey, an Afrikaner woman and longtime Abwehr agent, lives.
In response, Radl arranges for Liam Devlin, a member of the Irish Republican Army[2] who served as an officer in the Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War,[3] to be smuggled to Norfolk by way of Northern Ireland.
Posing as a wounded veteran of the British Army, he contacts Mrs. Grey, who arranges a position for him as gamekeeper to the estate of Studley Grange.
Meanwhile, Radl selects the members of the "commando style" unit, to be led by disgraced Fallschirmjäger commander Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Steiner, which is supposed to carry out the operation.
To the outrage of the SS and Polizei, he took one of their men hostage and helped a teenage Jewish girl to escape on a passing freight train.
The commandos outfit themselves as Free Polish paratroopers, as few of them speak English; the plan is to infiltrate Studley Constable, capture Churchill, rendezvous with an E-boat at the nearby coast, and make their escape.
After the Colonel is shot in the head by Mrs. Grey, Major Harry Kane, Shafto's Executive officer in the Rangers,[5] organises a second, successful attack.
In Higgins' novel Confessional (1985), Devlin allies with MI6 to prevent a rogue KGB assassin from murdering Pope John Paul II.