Agent of Death (14 page)

‘Moscow boy! What’s got a thousand legs and eats stale bread?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said.

‘A queue outside a Soviet butcher’s shop! A communist and a Russian find a gold bar,’ he said. ‘The communist says, “Let’s share this like socialist brothers.” The Russian says, “No chance! We share fifty fifty!”’ We laughed. ‘Little Ivan asks the teacher what’s the difference between communism and socialism. The teacher says, “Well, today, under socialism, when you buy butter it’s the same fair price throughout the Soviet Union. But when we have communism butter will be issued free!” Little Ivan says, “Yes, but what’s butter?”’

So Ulitzky sang the Soviet anthem, which to me was even more moving than the Marseillaise, because that’s all high tones, quick march, and a fierce fire that burns fast. But
Soviet
Motherland
is slow, ponderous, and magnificent. It stirs you in the depths of your belly, it shivers the spine and brings tears to the eyes. It sings from the soul of a mighty nation. It was commissioned by communists, but the music was written by a Russian – Alexander Alexandrov – and it’s pure Russian in its emotions. So it wasn’t odd at all that Ulitzky should sing it, because he was Russian before everything.

So everyone joined in, including me, because I’d had the words drilled into me at my Moscow school. We all sang, then we all cheered him as he put on the three suits with Goraya’s men fussing round: putting the oxygen mouthpiece in place, turning on the cylinder, and pulling and heaving at the suits, and slapping on the sticky rubber sheets to make Ulitzky airtight three times over.

Then they checked that he could breathe, and could see through his three face-plates, and checked that he could walk about in the triple suit, which he just about could, though only like a diver with lead boots. But Ulitzky waved and smiled, and they sat him down in a chair rigged with four bicycle wheels so they could get him across the field and within easy distance of the Arado without him having to waste energy on walking.

We followed in procession behind the two men pushing Ulitzky: me, Zharkov, Goraya, a three-man cine-camera team with plenty of cans of film, the engineer officer who’d prepared the demolition charges, and a signaller with a microphone describing everything that happened down a trailing cable taking his words to a wire-recorder. As I said, the Russians were very thorough. I don’t think they missed out much. The only thing that stopped them rigging a microphone into Ulitzky’s suit was the fact that there wasn’t room for a wireless set, and piercing it for wires might have let in the Mem Tav.

So they got him to within sixty metres of the Arado, and the film men took more shots of the aircraft, and Ulitzky got up and lumbered across the soft earth to the wreck. But once we got close to it – even sixty metres close – we could see that it was no good. The plane was on its back; sky-blue underside upwards, olive drab topside downward, and a big, black, German cross smack in the middle proclaiming its nationality. Its modern tricycle undercarriage stuck up like the legs of a dead bird, and one of its wings was wrecked, with most of the jet engine blown apart. The nose section was likewise blown open, presumably by the ejector seat. But the greater part of the fuselage was intact, apart from a pipe sticking out near the tail end with what looked like the spray head of a domestic shower at the outer end. It made the heart beat faster because that must have been the Mem Tav outlet. It was exactly where you’d expect it to be, assuming the mixture was brewed up in the bulk of the fuselage, then sprayed out at the back to keep it off the aircraft as much as possible. The big disappointment was that whatever equipment had made the Mem Tav was still firmly hidden inside the aircraft.

But Ulitzky did his best. He went round and round the plane. He poked and prodded, then stood facing us and slowly shook his head. He couldn’t get in or open it up. So he plodded back to us – we kept well clear of him – gave an exaggerated shrug, and pointed to the engineer’s charges. So we all nodded, and, as previously agreed, Ulitzky took the charges one by one; there were four of them, shaped like long pipes, to split the fuselage down its length, and he placed them on the Arado. Here again, all credit to the Russians, because the upturned fuselage was way over Ulitzky’s head, so they’d improvised a long pole, with a quick-release hook to lift the charges at their balance point, then release them, and they’d put something sticky on the charges so they’d stay in place when dropped on the plane.

In the event, he got only two of them into place because he was exhausted, but the engineer officer yelled that two was enough. So Ulitzky staggered back, flopped into the wheel chair, and was pulled back towards the circle of trucks by men in full anti-gas kit: oilskins, boots, and respirators, pulling the chair by long poles with hooks so nobody need touch the contaminated suits.

At that point Goraya took over. He had two airtight steel chests ready, well away from the trucks, and well away from each other. He and all his men were also in anti-gas kits. He had the steam generator fired up, with a man ready to use the steam hose, and a pump ready to deliver cold water from the Deuce tanker.

The rest of us all stood back, the camera teams recording everything. The signaller with the mic kept going like a test-match commentator, and Ulitzky went through the drill we’d planned. He drew the knife-shaped hook and cut himself out of the first suit, put the remains into the first chest, and closed the self-sealing lid. There were cheers at that: Russian battle cheers, long and drawn out, with a barking conclusion.

‘Hoooooooooo-
ruh
! Hooooooooooo-
ruh
!’

Ulitzky waved at us. He did the same with the second suit, dropping it into the second chest. More cheers; bigger ones. And some of the men started calling out.

‘Come on colonel!’

‘Ulitzky! Ulitzky!’

‘Sixth Rifles! Sixth Rifles!’

Ulitzky waved again. Now he was down to the inner suit, and fumbling to connect the water-pump hose that had the Russian version of a Jubilee clip at its end, to be tightened over the inlet valve to the water network in his suit. He did it! He stood, and waved and smiled. They got the water pump going, and water spurted from the outlet valve in other side of the suit. So far, so good. Another cheer; more calls and whistles and clapping.

‘Come on Ulitzky!’ That was me. ‘Come on comrade!’

Ulitzky waved at me. He beckoned to the men with the steam hose, who were standing next to a hissing brass and iron oil-fired steam generator the size of a small car, and mounted on fat, cast iron wheels. Someone turned a valve, and a jet of live steam played over Ulitzky’s suited form. They did a good job. They sprayed him from every angle, sparing no risk to themselves. They got right up close. Then they moved back, leaving Ulitzky dripping and glistening, having been steamed for the time we thought sufficient. We made our best guess, taking into account the fact that his oxygen supply was not unlimited. So, before he cut open the final suit, we steamed him.

We steamed him for fifteen minutes.

CHAPTER 16

The
Führerboat,

Running
Surfaced
130
Miles
South
of
the
Faroe
Islands
.

Friday
19 May
,
14
.
15
hours.

Sohler looked along the enormous wet casing of the giant submarine. It was featureless and dangerous. Once the boat was at sea, only the hand-lines rigged between removable stanchions made it possible for men to work on the casing at all. The trouble was that there was no sea-breaking bow rising out of the hull as in a conventional boat. On this vessel the bow was smooth and curved down underwater, to a whale-like, rounded snout. Or at least it had been until a warhead containing two hundred and eighty kilograms of hexite had blown open the torpedo room and ruined the symmetry of the casing.

That apart and, even as the designers had intended, there was so little freeboard that the bigger waves washed right over the casing and hissed back down the sides in foam. Nor did it help that the boat rolled heavily. It rolled because it was a pure undersea boat, intended never to surface once it left harbour. So the hull was shaped to slip easily through the water when submerged, unlike every other ship Sohler had ever seen, which were designed to ride smoothly on the surface. So the Führerboat rolled, and the motion was sickening for the men down below. The only blessing in that respect was that it affected the blackshirt SSA far worse than the submariners.

‘How much longer?’ said Sohler to the team working on the bow, only metres ahead of him: five men, in oilskins like himself, and lashed by waist-belts to the stanchions, the seas washing over them thigh-deep with the boat’s forward motion because it had to be kept going to give steerage way. Otherwise she’d take the seas on the beam and risk being rolled right over.

‘Not much more, sir,’ yelled the petty officer in charge. ‘We’ve cut away most of what we can get at.’ There were tubes from big gas cylinders on either side of him and his men, leading to a man with a cutting torch who was trying to remove the warped casing plates blown out by the torpedo. The man with the torch – the boat’s diver in his copper-domed Siebe Gorman suit – was fully underwater, breathing air fed down a hose from a box-shaped air pump, driven by two more men turning cranking handles. The complexity of the job was fearful, cold, and perilous for every man, but especially for the diver, working in a blue-white undersea glare and fiercely-hissing bubbles. Sohler looked back, beyond the conning tower, to where another team was working by a hatch in the casing with another diver – an untrained volunteer – below them, attempting to find a serious leak in a fuel line.

‘Well done, lads!’ said Sohler. ‘Keep it up! Do it for the boat, and all of us!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the petty officer, and saluted, and Sohler staggered and gripped a hand-line as he nearly went over, with a big wave soaking him to the waist in icy water.

He looked back at the narrow, streamlined conning tower, and the heads peering out of the two watch positions. They were scanning the horizon with binoculars, while above them the radars were turning, and the two, twin-thirty millimetre flak guns were manned, with rounds in the breech and the barrels weaving, as the nervous gun teams tested their weapons to make sure they’d train and elevate properly if need be.

Sohler himself looked round the horizon. It was bad, bad, bad being surfaced like this. The boat was so vulnerable. Then a hand beckoned from the conning tower. It was Kuhnke’s.

Sohler waved to the men on the bow, took a grip of the hand-lines, and pulled himself back to the conning tower. It was a smooth, narrow structure, nearly five times longer than it was wide, and was beautifully streamlined. He reached it just as men emerged from the lower hatch, which was like a conventional doorway. It was set into the side of the tower, and it wasn’t watertight; nor was it meant to be. It was just the entrance into the streamlined shell that encased a much smaller, pressure-tight unit within. That was the tower proper which was reached by vertical ladders running inside the shell and up to the watch positions, where a round, sealable hatch led down into the boat.

The first man through the casing hatchway stopped, turned, and faced backwards to help pull out the limp form of a dead man sewn up in a sheet. Sohler looked on as more men emerged. Four dead seamen were brought out by eight of the living. There was a small area of flattened casing around the conning tower and fore and aft of it, and the boat’s dead were laid along the starboard side of the tower, in the lee of the wind and spray. Then Kuhnke emerged, saluted Sohler, and handed him a pocket-sized active service manual.

‘I’ve marked the page, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve only got two flags though.  We haven’t got one each for each lad.’

‘Never mind,’ said Sohler. ‘We’ll hold them up for all four. And sound the hooter in the boat. All work to cease, and all hands to give honour.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Kuhnke, and yelled orders through the hatch. From inside the boat, the hooter sounded. The men at the bow and on the casing heard it, and they too stopped work, even though they’d been told they didn’t have to.

‘All hands! Caps off and stand by for burial drill!’ said Kunke, and he produced his two flags – Kriegsmarine naval ensigns - to be held up behind the dead, because on a boat like this there was no chance to rig a slide and cover the bodies with flags, as would be done aboard a surface ship.

So Sohler read what he thought were the most important words of the Kriegsmarine’s active service burial drill, because he couldn’t give time to the full version. Then a chief petty officer stood to attention, raised up the Boatswain’s Call that hung on a lanyard round his neck, put the tiny silver whistle to his lips and blew a long sad note, as the four men were rolled into the sea with every possible respect. They were the two shipmates incinerated in the attack on pen six, and the two shipmates whose bodies had been recovered from the compartment immediately aft of the torpedo room. It had been blasted open, then later secured and pumped out. Other remains from that compartment had, of necessity, been collected in buckets and poured over the side by men who tried not to look at them.

‘Sound the hooter!’ said Sohler as the long note faded away, ‘Hands to stations!’ The hooter sounded, the teams on the bow and on the casing resumed work, and Sohler went for’ard to the bow, where at least he could share the discomfort of his men, and maybe inspire them by example. He was there only a few minutes, in the icy water, with the spray in his eyes, when he heard Kuhnke’s voice.

‘Sir, sir! Here, sir!’

Sohler looked round. Kuhnke was shouting from one of the watch positions while, at the base of the tower, black figures were emerging; two of them, SSA men, not in oilskins like seamen, but in greatcoats and forage caps. They slipped and slid like clumsy landsmen, and one nearly went over the side. They were Weber and his ever-attendant Zapp, with his submachine gun.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ cried Sohler. ‘Who gave you permission to come topsides? Get your black arses back below!’

‘Keep out of this!’ said Weber. ‘I’ve told you. This boat’s under orders of Herr Abimilech Svart, and no bugger else!’ Then the boat rolled heavily, the SSA men gasped, Zapp staggered, and clutched hold of Weber who grabbed at the hand-lines. Then more figures came out of the hatch. They were forcibly pushed out of it: two of the slave workers, already freezing in their thin, striped, pyjama-like garments, and they were followed by two more SSA men with submachine guns, but the weapons were slung across their backs to leave their hands free to manhandle the prisoners. All these men, SSA and slave workers, stood nervously by the conning tower, rightly afraid of the heaving sea and their uncertain location. One false step would put a man in the freezing water and incapable of climbing back up the curving wet sides of the boat.

‘Weber, God damn you!’ yelled Sohler. ‘What the hell are you doing! I’ve told you I’m not having any shootings, and we’ve just given honour to four men who died in the service of the Fatherland, so it goes double – you’re not going to shoot anyone now!’

Sohler was white with anger. He detested Weber and Zapp already, but what they wanted to do now was a desecration of the values to which he’d given his life. After the torpedo explosion, Weber had focused on vengeance. Weber said the explosion must be sabotage by the slave workers; he picked two at random and wanted to shoot them, and Sohler had lost his temper. He ordered the SSA men back to their compartments, and did it in such screaming rage that even Weber did not dare disobey. Not when Sohler’s skills and his Kriegsmarine discipline were vital to save the boat. But now the boat was on the surface and its wounds were being treated, and Weber was bold again.

‘You keep out of this,’ Weber repeated, ‘this ain’t ship’s business, it’s SSA.’ He turned to Zapp and the other two SSA men. ‘Get it done,’ he said, and the two slave workers were pushed to the very edge of the flat just ahead of the conning tower. One bore the number 416, the other 344. Zapp cocked his gun and aimed at 334. Seeing this, Sohler pulled up the hem of his oilskins and fumbled urgently inside his pea-jacket and the Tommy battledress blouse beneath that.

‘Shoot ’em!’ cried Weber, and Zapp pulled the trigger. A chatter of automatic fire, a stream of cartridge cases in the air, and one of the slave workers fell, to be bumped and swirled and sunk by the boat’s forward motion. Zapp aimed at the second man. He grinned as he did so, showing his crooked brown teeth. He began to squeeze the trigger. The second slave worker was 416: Gavriel Landau, professor of electronics, whose heart beat so loud that he could hear it and whose limbs shook with dread, and who abandoned all hope, humanity, and courage, and closed his eyes and awaited the shock of the bullets.

Crack
! A single, sharp pistol shot. Zapp twitched at the impact and looked round in amazement. Then he snarled and attempted to cover a fresh target. But
Crack
!
Crack
!
Crack
! The pistol fired seven times. It did so because Captain Sohler was shooting in hatred. He despised Zapp. He was disgusted by Zapp. Sohler steadily pulled the trigger, putting his first bullet into Zapp’s left lower jaw – smashing through teeth and tongue to pass out through the right lower jaw – and putting the rest of his fire into the mass of Zapp’s chest. Thus the outraged and uncomprehending Zapp, still disbelieving what was happening to him, staggered and missed his footing, then slipped over the side with his gun blazing into the air, until he and it went under and were gathered into the belly of a greedy ocean that swallowed even such filth as him.

‘Right, you blackshirt bastards!’ cried Sohler. ‘You’ll damn well obey my orders aboard my boat, starting with heaving your damned guns over the side. All of you! Do it now!’

But Weber stared at Sohler’s Walther PPK pistol. The slide was thrown back, proclaiming an empty magazine. Weber fumbled with the catch of the pistol holster strapped to the belt round his greatcoat, and the two SSA men reached for their submachine guns.

‘Stop!’ cried a voice behind them. They turned to see Kuhnke, the first lieutenant, standing just outside the hatch in the control tower casing. He held a PPK and so did the three men behind him, and all the pistols were pointing at the SSA blackshirts in defence of their captain.

Kuhnke had taken the ABUS, the front-door key to the arms locker, as ordered. Then he’d recruited some good men and issued pistols. He, and they, and Sohler had carried the weapons ever since. They’d carried them inside their Tommy battledress blouses, the PPK being conveniently neat and compact.

‘Firearms over the side,’ said Sohler. ‘All of you! Then you can call up your mates, one at a time, and they can chuck their guns over the side too.’