Agent of Death (15 page)

CHAPTER 17

The
Briefing
Room
,
Drake
House,

No
.
14
Commando
,
Royal
Marines
,

Lympstone
,
Devon.

Friday
26
May,
08
.
50
hours

Lady Margaret looked at the roomful of young men. They grinned at her with arrogant confidence. They were 14 Commando’s officers and NCOs. They all wore medal ribbons and there was nobody present who hadn’t seen action. They looked her over in her tight-fitting, cream-coloured, Schiaparelli trouser suit with maroon accessories, and for once she was grateful for Brigadier Sanders’s presence, because these men weren’t like ordinary soldiers. They were more like pirates. Their discipline was odd, because in 14 Commando, respect had to be earned within 14 Commando, by the standards of 14 Commando. So captains chatted easily to corporals, their dress was casual, and they used first names. They didn’t say ‘sir’ to anyone, and even Lord Leonard was
Simon
. But they stood up sharp and all together when Simon came into the room.

Sword-and-pistol Sanders was different though. He got salutes and sirs, because he was the sort of man they admired. He had the VC. So they behaved themselves when he spoke, and there were no jokes and interruptions such as Leonard got, and expected, and dealt with in his own way.

Lady Margaret looked at Leonard, who had gathered his room full of men round a big model on a table. She and Sanders were standing there too, and she looked at the beautifully made miniature of a Swedish island, with its hills and inlets, and its little harbour with a cluster of buildings round a quayside. She was impressed. The model showed the SSA base on Punno Island, and had been made from stereo reconnaissance shots provided by the RAF. The model makers had worked at astonishing speed, and now Leonard was pointing out where the boats would go in, and where the destroyer would be waiting beyond that.

She found Leonard very odd. He was squat and scruffy, with a huge chest and long arms. He smoked non-stop, he had dirty fingernails, he didn’t smell very nice, and he always wore shorts whatever the weather. But the men idolized him and they made jokes all the time, and had no respect for any ladies that might be present, which may have been due to a further oddity of Leonard himself. While his men gazed at her with cheerful lust, Leonard was impassive. Margaret Comings was so used to seeing desire in men’s faces that on the rare occasions when it wasn’t there, it was like a dead bulb in a row of street lights. It stood out. It couldn’t be missed. And he wasn’t a dress designer or a ballet dancer either. She had friends who were homos, and she liked them, and they liked her, and always smiled. But not Leonard. He was inert. His passions were directed elsewhere. They were directed towards adventure, and she could see that he was alive with delight at the thought of the raid they were planning.

‘We think this is the most important building,’ he said, pointing to a large house.

‘Is that the shithouse?’ said a corporal in a strong Cockney accent. Leonard smiled and replied in a slow, Oxford drawl.

‘Oh, do shut up, Dave, or you’ll get my boot straight up your bumhole.’ The commandos all laughed. ‘Meanwhile, and to continue,’ said Leonard.

‘Simon?’ said another voice, interrupting.

‘Yes, Roger? But do be brief.

‘What’s this sodding great thing?’ a lieutenant stepped forward and pointed at a long, straight line, running east–west across the model. ‘Is it for doodlebugs? A launching ramp?’

‘No,’ said Leonard, ‘it’s far too big for that. It’s nearly two miles long, as you can see from the scale. In fact, we don’t know what it is, and it’s a raid objective to find out.’ Lady Margaret looked at the object. It did look just like the concrete ramps that the Germans used to fire their flying bombs, except that it was so very long.

‘Thanks, Simon,’ said the lieutenant.

‘You’re welcome, Roger,’ said Leonard, and looked round. ‘Any more words of sodding wisdom? Or may I sodding well continue?’ More laughter. So Leonard explained the raid, and started to explain that this was only the first briefing, and grinned at the result, which was derisive laughter, as his men gave him back his own drill.

‘So we all gotta learn the bleedin’ model,’ said one.

‘And we all must know everyone’s job, not just our own,’ said another.

‘And we’re gonna rehearse it all, by the stopwatch.’

‘On the full-scale bleedin’ layout, with full kit, in the dark!’

They laughed and drummed their heels on the floor. But then the tolerant grin went from Leonard’s face. Casually, and ever so slightly, he raised just the forefinger of his right hand … and there was such instant silence that the only sound was that of a Southern Railways locomotive chugging steadily past the mud flats of the Exe estuary, two miles away.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and puzzled his only female listener still further because she thought she’d got him nicely classified, and found that she hadn’t. Not quite. ‘We will now sit down and listen to Lady Margaret,’ he said, and paused. ‘Now … it may be that some of the more perceptive among you will have noticed that she is a woman?’ He stared at them stone-faced, then grinned so they could laugh. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘I see that you’re awake. But what you won’t know is that Lady Margaret has more brains than all of us put together, and is jolly well damned expert at breaking Nazi codes. So shut up, sit down, and listen!’ He turned to her. ‘Lady Margaret?’ he said, and sat down with his men as they moved to rows of chairs, where he proceeded to pick busily at a scab on his left knee.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘Good morning,’ they said.

‘You’ve all heard the basic plan from Lord Leonard,’ she said, and they nodded. ‘Now I’ll add some details that are so secret, they can’t be written down.’ She saw that she had their attention. They were eccentric but not stupid. ‘You know that your task is to bring back personnel and equipment from Punno Island?’ They nodded quietly. ‘And your first target is to lay hands on Herr Abimilech Svart. We’ve got a picture of him, and you will each get a copy of it. So, if he’s on Punno Island we want you to find him, grab him, and bring him back alive.’ They nodded. ‘But what we can’t write down is that you are after a weapon called Mem Tav, which is so deadly it could wipe out all of London or any other city.’

They stirred; some of them grinned, and there were raised eyebrows. There was disbelief. Everyone heard bogeyman stories of German secret weapons all the time, and they were mostly nonsense.

‘This is real,’ she said. ‘It’s been used on the Russians, and it works, and there is a Nazi submarine somewhere at sea – we don’t know where – with a Mem Tav weapon on board that could be fired from the deck of the sub at any city within two hundred miles of the sea.’ She paused.
Good
! she thought, because they were glancing at one another, impressed at what she’d said. They believed her. They took the threat seriously. She continued.

‘So another major raid objective is to find out – by any means – anything you can about the location of that submarine.’ She looked at Leonard, who looked round.

‘You heard?’ he said to his men.

‘Yes, Simon,’ they said.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘Mem Tav itself is so dangerous that you can’t be anywhere near where it’s been used, or it’ll kill you. We’re trying to get you our best expert on this weapon – Wing Commander David Landau. We’re trying to get him back from Russia where he has seen what Mem Tav can do. We hope he’ll go with you on the raid. But we can’t advise how to handle the equipment or chemicals that you will find on Punno. We can’t advise because we don’t know. As with finding the submarine, you’ll have to question the German staff and see what you can get out of them.’ She turned to Leonard. ‘Can you do that, Lord Leonard?’ she said.

‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ he said. ‘We can be very persuasive when we get hold of someone.’ It could have been mere gallows humour, but she saw that it wasn’t because the men round Leonard just nodded, seriously. So she asked no more questions for fear of hearing things she didn’t want to know. She moved on.

‘Later on I’ll tell you everything we know about Mem Tav, but first, please note that the main target of this raid is Abimilech Svart. Our latest information is that his team – the SSA – seem to agree with us that Mem Tav is so secret that they shouldn’t write down the details of how it’s made. So they don’t, and only Svart knows those details, and that’s why we want him.’

CHAPTER 18

Field
234
of
The
People’s
Soviet
Socialist
Collective
Farm
914,

12
Kilometres
South
-
West
of
Ulvid,

The
Soviet
Socialist
Republic
of
Ukraine
.

Monday
22 May,
13
.
20
hours.

The motor-pool mechanics switched off their steamer and stood back. The men on the Deuce tanker switched off their pump. Ulitzky unfastened the water feed to his suit and made a pantomime bow to us all, and everyone cheered. Then he used the hook to cut open his suit and began to wriggle out of it. The cheers rose again as we saw his sweat-soaked face and black hair. He grinned, waved a naked arm at us, and pulled at the suit to free his other arm … and then, quietly, and without the least fuss, or the least expression, or any sound of any kind … he just dropped as the life went out of him, his soul departed, and he became one with the already dead soldiers and the peasant with his dog.

We groaned, all of us, in deep and despairing voices; I started forward to go to Ulitzky’s aid, and others around me were also beginning to go forward, and we would have done except for Colonel Piotr Basil Zharkov of the NKVD who – just for once – did the right thing, even if he did it in his brutal NKVD way, because he pulled his pistol and fired into the air and yelled at us as we looked round at him.

‘Nobody move!’ he cried. ‘Nobody go near him! I’ll shoot any man who touches him.’ And he waved his bloody pistol at us all, and his bloody NKVD goons stepped up beside him with their bloody submachine guns, and made ready to fire. So I suppose he did right, because otherwise I would have grabbed hold of Ulitzky and the still-deadly suit. But I still despise Zharkov because I saw the look on his face. He was pleased that Ulitzky was dead, because Ulitzky was a better man than him, and Ulitzky had made him feel small. So Zharkov saw his moment and took over, and the bastard did it efficiently … within his narrow, miserable limits.

‘So now we do this properly,’ he said to me, sneering because he didn’t like me, and for sure was going to blame me for everything if he could. ‘Now, we do the proper thing that higher authority has ordered. We blow that Fritz machine wide open to see what’s inside!’

I said nothing. I hadn’t any better ideas. I was still struggling to believe that Ulitzky was dead, even with his body laid out in front of me, and Zharkov wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. So he pulled us all back from danger and wouldn’t let anyone touch any of the discarded German equipment. Then he bustled round yelling orders, and got everyone aboard the trucks, and the trucks moving, and falling well back from the upturned Arado with the demolition charges still stuck on its belly. The engineers ran out more cable so we could get a couple of hundred yards clear from the charges when they blew.

He got the trucks drawn up in a long line, with the armoured cars on the wings, the camera teams working so that everything should be recorded, and the cricket commentator chattering into his mic. Everyone looked over and beyond Ulitzky’s body in his wretched rubber suit, with the steam generator and hoses left where they were, and everyone focused on the German bomber.

I was beside Zharkov in the command truck, and he was bouncing with self-satisfaction. The bugger obviously felt vindicated, and in control, and he made a business of setting off the charges. An engineer officer gave him the switch-box, and he put on a serious, dutiful frown.

‘So,’ he said, ‘in the name of Stalinist Socialism … Five! Four! Three! Two!’ he waved his index finger theatrically over the switch. ‘And
one
!’

*

The explosion was huge.

The Arado was indeed booby-trapped.

It was packed with munitions; TNT, picric acid: something like that.

Abimilech Svart’s men had taken precautions.

We were thrown back by the blast, stunned by the noise, as bits of aeroplane, soil, and stones sliced into the trucks like shrapnel, severely injuring a dozen or so of the onlookers. I saw Zharkov cringing, with the switch-box still in his hands and his jaw hanging open in horror, and I looked out over the truck’s cab-roof and peered through the dust and smoke.

The Arado was gone. There was only a crater and smouldering black ruin where the aircraft had been. I looked round. There was damage everywhere and wounded men were yelling, and there wasn’t a single truck without dents, holes, and broken glass. The secret technical wonders hidden within the Arado were now wrecked, smashed, burned, and blasted out over several square miles of Ukranian soil. Zharkov dropped the switch-box and wrung his hands in dread, knowing that his superiors, fifteen hundred miles away in Moscow, would not be pleased.

*

And they weren’t. When the trucks returned to the NKVD base in the big college building by the airfield, Zharkov was duly screamed at and abused by the NKVD general, who slapped his face with a full round swing of the arm, but the general took care not to do this until Stalin’s representative, Vorishilov the assistant undersecretary, had first heaped abuse on Zharkov and made clear who was at fault. I could see that they wanted to scream at me too, but they weren’t quite sure where the power lay with respect to me. So they locked me up in a room with a small bed and a tin washbasin, and a jug of water, and soap and towels. It was luxury by their standards and it gave me time to think.

It was the something that had been at the back of my mind. Something I’d thought of  and then forgotten.  It was Grauber, the Arado pilot the Russians had cut out of his protective suit. They’d done it without any steaming, leaving enough live Mem Tav on his suit to kill several Russians there and then, and even more later on when they tried to carry away the suits.  So why hadn’t Grauber been killed?

But I was only in there for a couple of hours while they took advice from Moscow and arranged a flight. So that evening, Zharkov and I were led out on to the airstrip and put on board a big two-motor transport aircraft. It looked just like a Dakota, but it wasn’t. It was a pre-war, licensed Russian copy, a Lisunov Li-2 with nine-cylinder Shvetsov engines which sounded a bit different from the original Wright Cyclones. But it was a handsome aircraft with a row of windows like any civil airliner, even though they’d ripped out all the seats to turn it into a military transport. So we had to sit on the bare floor, and secure ourselves by straps fixed to the bulkheads. It even had a toilet cubicle, which, in this militarized, unpressurized aircraft, consisted of a seat over a tube, leading to a hole with a spring flap at the bottom to stop the slipstream blowing up your beam ends.

Zharkov was in a dreadful funk, head down, cringing, and he didn’t speak to me or anyone else, not even to the four NKVD guards who came aboard with us, and they were his own men. They were the ones who’d stood over the German equipment when I examined it with Ulitzky – poor Ulitzky – who was gone, like the chaps who never came back from missions, and whose names got wiped off the raid blackboard, and whose kit got collected by their batman and sent back to their parents with a handwritten letter from the wingco. I wondered if someone was collecting Ulitzky’s kit and packing it up in a bundle? And was someone else writing a letter that said he’d died like a hero, which indeed he had?

So maybe the dead got respect, but not Zharkov. He’d blown up the Arado and scattered its secrets. So he was in disgrace and the guards hustled him like a criminal, and, once they got us aboard, one of them produced four sets of handcuffs and fitted us each with two pairs, chaining our wrists and ankles. It was dark inside the aircraft, and the pilot and engineer were yelling at the NKVD men and the ground crew to get on with it so they could take off; the engines were growling, and three of the guards were up near the cockpit, yelling back at the flight crew who spoke Russian. At least I found out where we were going. It was to Moscow. For interrogation.

Then I saw where the handcuff keys went and later the temptation was too great to bear because, as soon as the aircraft bumped off the runway and climbed for cruising height, the four guards came and sat physically together, right alongside Zharkov and me. That was standard Russian drill when it got cold – which it did, at full height – and they began swigging some booze they’d got from somewhere, and never offered a drop to Zharkov or me. That was one thing about the NKVD: they were never short of drink. Whatever shortages may have afflicted the average Russian, they didn’t apply to the NKVD’s alcohol.

So they all had a nice, deep, sleep and, hours later, with the light coming in from the windows of the roaring, bouncing aircraft, when they scratched and yawned, and found food and drink from their packs, eventually one of them noticed that my wrists and ankles were free. Zharkov was chained up but I was not. So there was an argument in some language that wasn’t Russian. I suppose it was Ukrainian, which is a cousin to Russian, and some words seemed familiar. I couldn’t really understand it, but I followed the argument because it was obvious and it was comical.

Three of them were accusing the one who’d put on the handcuffs, and who’d been sitting right next to me. He dived his hand into a pocket for the keys, which he found because I’d slipped them back when I was done with them. He waved them at the rest and then they looked round for the handcuffs, which they didn’t find because they’d long since gone down the toilet into the cold air, and the broad arms of the Motherland below.

Eventually they switched to Russian.

‘Where’s your chains?’ said the key-bearer.

‘What chains?’ I said.

‘Them what I put on!’ he said.

‘You didn’t put any on,’ I said, and pointed at Zharkov. ‘You chained him but not me.’ I appealed to Zharkov. ‘He didn’t chain me, did he?’ Zharkov just shrugged, as I’d hoped he might. It’d been too dark for him to see, and he didn’t care because he was deep in his own misery.

‘See?’ I said to the guards. ‘I’m special. I’m here on the Boss’s business. I’m not to be chained up.’ They blinked at that, then had another argument among themselves in their own language, but it was a quiet argument, and they’d got no more chains anyway, and even the man with the keys wasn’t sure of himself, and all of them stared at me seriously and bit their lips and pondered.

The point was not that I could pick pockets but that, in 1945, while urban Russians were as sophisticated as any people on Earth, that didn’t go for the peoples of the vast Soviet wilderness. So some of the Red Army’s men, and the NKVD’s too, were peasants from villages so remote that it took a week to walk anywhere else, and you had to walk because there was no other transport, and when you got anywhere else, it was still nowhere. That is particularly vital for the British to remember because the British Isles are so minutely tiny, and with such universally high standards of education – as compared with the Soviet Union – that it was damn near impossible for the British to understand how simple-minded a Russian peasant could be. Or a Ukrainian peasant, or an Uzbeck, a Kazakh, or whatever.

So, while most of them were supposedly Christian or Muslim or even Jews like me, they
all
believed in the evil eye, witchcraft, and the undead scratching on the front door at midnight, trying to get in. So the four guards were beginning ask themselves just where I stood in the hierarchy of superstitious wonders.

*

As with my original flight into the Soviet Union, this one took several days, manoeuvring round the war zones, and plenty of time on the ground. Thus we landed three times at extemporized military airfields, but the first stop, still in Ukraine, was at a proper airport serving a city whose name I never learned. But I remember it well because of what happened there. We came down on a proper concrete runway, with a proper control tower with the Aeroflot logo painted on it: a winged hammer and sickle in pale blue.

As soon as the aircraft stopped moving, a
Starshiy
-
Lejtenant
(first lieutenant) NKVD came aboard with a sergeant in tow. The lieutenant stood just inside the cabin door, talking quietly to the pilot, while the sergeant stood to attention. Then the officer left, the sergeant beckoned to our guards, and we were taken off the aircraft and into the passenger lounge nearby. The same lieutenant and some more senior officers were waiting in a group to one side of the aircraft. They stood in their smart overcoats, and watched but said nothing. They were keeping well clear of any taint that might attach to Zharkov and me and we never saw them again.

The passenger lounge was all modern glass and concrete and huge CCCP letters everywhere, plus stainless steel chandeliers, and paintings of idyllic Russian scenery on the walls. It also had one row of futuristic, tubular steel furniture: low tables facing chairs with black leather cushions. But there was only one row, because mostly the lounge was empty and no more of the furniture had ever been installed. The work had been stopped by the war, I suppose, and the whole place was empty and dusty, and its café was closed for the duration. So we sat down, and the NKVD sergeant walked off, taking two of our guards and leaving the other two in charge. Then we were left bored and ignored for hours, and Zharkov didn’t look at me or anyone else, but sighed deeply every so often, and put his head into his hands. I was beginning to feel sorry for him. He knew what was waiting at the end of our flight.