"At precisely one o'clock on the morning of Saturday, November 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler received a terse signal at his Prinz Albrechtstrasse H.Q. The Eagle has Landed. It meant that small force of specially trained and selected German paratroopers had been safely dropped in England and were poised to snatch the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, from the Norfolk country house near the sea where he was due to spend the weekend. Partly by basing the story of his astonishing exploit on documented historical fact and partly by allowing the full range of his imagination and narrative gifts to supply the details, Jack Higgins has written one of the most absorbing and compelling stories of World War II. This novel is in two parts: firs there is the careful preparation for the daring mission--so secret that not even Admiral Canaris, head of Germany's Secret Service, knew about it; it is fascinating, incredibly authentic. And then comes the drop itself, and the attempt to delude the inhabitants of the peaceful village of Studley Constable into believing that the invaders were in fact a detachment of Polish troops. But as always happens with carefully laid plans, luck is one of the most important elements, and the presence of a small boy at a certain place and at a certain time precipitated a chain of unscheduled events which turned the peaceful Norfolk countryside into a raging battlefield. In Jack Higgins's hands, the pace never lets up--and in the end, even the great Churchill himself supplies a characteristically dramatic and unpredictable element."--Dust jack flap.