Agent of Death (23 page)

‘Yes.’

‘First you flood the tube with seawater from tanks in the torpedo room, making sure that any air in the tubes is vented. Then … listen, listen, listen!
There
! Hear that squeaking sound?’

‘Yes,’ everyone nodded.

‘That’s him opening the pressure-equalization valve so water pressure in the tube equals that outside the boat … now next we should hear …’

There was a heavy mechanical groan, then a solid thump.

‘Yes! He’s got one of the outer hatches open. The torpedo’s cleared to fire!’

Then a faint, but growing hum of an electric motor starting up and running.

‘Good!’ said Sohler. ‘He’s running up the torpedo motor.’ He turned to von Bloch. ‘Normally you do that early on, to check that the fish is alive and the driving motor’s active, but he’s leaving it till nearly last to avoid setting the damned thing off.’

‘So is it running? Are the propellers turning?’

‘No. A safety pin stops that until the fish launches. It’s pulled out by a wire.’

‘What now?’ said von Bloch.

‘Last step of all,’ said Sohler. ‘Listen!’

There were more faint squeaks and scraping, then a heavy motor sound.

‘He’s turning on the water ram,’ said Sohler to von Bloch. ‘Normally we’d have done that long since, if we were expecting to launch torpedoes. There’s an electric-hydraulic system – all watertight – that pumps water under high pressure into a tank, then you open a valve and the water belts into the rear of the tube …’

WHOOOOSH
! And the Führerboat trembled.

‘Yes!’ cried Sohler and there was a cheer from the men around him.

But their little sound was beaten into nothingness by the rumbling explosion that followed, causing the lights to go out, and the boat to shudder and rock.

CHAPTER 28

The
Punnoshaus,

SSA
Base
Härönholmen
Bay
,

Punno
Island
,
Sweden.

Tuesday
6 June,
04
.
50
hours
.

It took about fifteen minutes to get everybody in place and briefed; far quicker than I’d expected because Leonard’s men all showed remarkable initiative and intelligence. I don’t think there was a dull brain among them, not among those he chose for this job. All credit to him, and with the sun rising and the birds giving their dawn chorus we were ready to go.

Now I had to dress for the part, which I’d expected to mean merely brushing the dirt off my battledress and combing my hair. But Leonard called over a corporal who opened a backpack and produced a carefully-folded brigadier general’s uniform jacket, with red tabs on the collar, epaulettes loaded with insignia, a peaked cap, a Sam Browne belt, and a tie. They gave me the lot, and I tried not to notice the three rows of ribbons on the tunic. Perhaps I was getting used to that.

‘What’s this for?’ I said. ‘It’s a dress uniform.’

‘It’s for surrenders,’ said Leonard. ‘
Their
surrenders. A bit of gold lace works wonders on the Jerries. Makes it easier for them, which means much easier for us.’ He smiled. ‘I think you’ll find it useful. For your idea.’

I did. The jacket was too big in the chest and too short, but the cap fitted well and suddenly I wasn’t a scruffy commando. I was a brigadier. So I had the costume, and I had two pieces of vital information. First was Svart’s warning to Stalin, when Uncle Joe was about to refuse a deal on Mem Tav. Svart had said:

‘… should we reach no agreement, I have the means to persuade others to my point of view.’

So he was looking to make a deal with someone else and it certainly wasn’t the British. Second was the fact that Svart was seeking a deal at all, and was looking for personal safety, plus whatever else he could get, in exchange for the secrets of Mem Tav. So I built on that and extemporized. But to begin with I pulled back my shoulders, trying to fill out Leonard’s tunic, and I’ll say one thing for him: when he did something, he did it well, and so did his men. He looked at me, and all the floppy languor departed. He stamped to attention.

‘
Suh
!’ he yelled, like a sarn’t major, and saluted me with his blood-soaked bandage quivering Sandhurst-style above his right eyebrow.

‘
Suh
!’ yelled all present, and they stamped heels in a synchronous instant. They were bloody good actors the lot of them.

Then in we went at the quick march: left-right-left-right-
left
! In through a huge, domed vestibule, up a massive flight of marble stairs – strangely decorated with a large, dead Alsatian dog shot full of holes – then down a corridor and finally, with doors thrown open by standing-to-attention commandos, we advanced into what looked like the long gallery of an English mansion, where you promenaded on wet days, looked out at the rain through the big windows, and admired the furniture and portraits. But all that was piled at one end of the room, and the rest was indeed like something out of Flash Gordon.

There were rows of radio sets, ranks of control panels, lines of switches, black boxes, wires, cables, plus cathode-ray radar receivers, and a big glass plotting table to follow the progress of air traffic over the island and beyond. More exotic yet, there was a line of television screens, something very rare in those days. Most were blank; switched off. But one was alive and showing an image. The radar screens were working too, showing rotating green lines going round clockwise, but the television showed something nastier. It showed a clear black-and-white image of an empty, bright-lit room seen from up near the ceiling. The room had a door and nothing else but a thin, naked man lying on the floor, very obviously dead. At the time I had no idea what this meant. But it wasn’t very nice and it was pure science fiction. Ming the Merciless would’ve loved it.

Another surprise was a large female staff. I counted eleven women in their teens and twenties, some in SSA black – the duty shift presumably – and the rest in nightclothes. A tall, square-shouldered, blonde-haired Brunhilde stood protectively in front of the rest, fully dressed including forage cap, gloves, and boots as if about to go out, and displaying a lightning-bolt – a blitz – embroidered on her tie. She had a dog-lead hanging from her wrist, and it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to connect her with the dog on the stairs. Presumably Fido had taken exception to the commandos and been sprayed with a Sten. Her expression proved it because she stood with arms folded and jaw grim-set, ready to resist rape, torture, death, or even a nice cup of tea. The other girls weren’t so sure about that and some were in tears and hanging on to each other.

But the prize exhibit was a group of two men and two women, mostly with glasses and untidy hair, likewise caught, half in uniform and half in night clothes. These beauties blinked and chewed their lips and kept glancing at their precious equipment. They were about as military as Mickey Mouse; they had
Technical
Wallah
written all over them, and one of the men had bruises where he’d been tapped on the bonce by Lieutenant Arthur’s best boys. But the four of them were otherwise unharmed, which was excellent because they’d be indispensable later on, if all went well.

Or perhaps they weren’t the prize exhibit because, standing apart from the tecchies, there were three senior officers in various bits of night clothes and uniform; not actually pyjamas and dressing gowns, but wearing whatever they’d managed to pull on when the shooting started. Two of these types – both wounded and dripping blood – stood wobbling on their feet and looking sick, standing deferentially behind the most senior officer of all, a white-haired, elderly man who stared me straight in the eye. He must have been over eighty but had authentic charisma, great dignity, and showed neither fear nor alarm, nor anything other than complete self-confidence. He was an
Oberstgruppenführer
SSA
: a full general. He wore his uniform tunic buttoned up, with an Iron Cross first class at the neck, and, even with pyjama trousers and slippers under that, he looked like a soldier. The man had style.

Meanwhile, everything British in the room saluted me. They made a great business of doing so, having been told to do so by Leonard.

‘
Suh
!’ they said, with one loud voice, and they stamped firmly, and stood to rigid attention. I was playing mind-games and they were working, because all the Germans also stood to attention. So that was my entrance. Me and my four bodyguards, with Leonard at my elbow, and myself uniformed up to the eyebrows.

‘Carry on, chaps,’ I said, and waved a lazy salute at them, before drawing myself up to give the full works to the general, my arm swinging longest way up, shortest way down, right hand ending with thumb in line with the seam of the trouser. He accepted it as his due, nodded, and clicked his heels, but of course he couldn’t return the salute without a hat. That was German military etiquette as well as British.

And so into my role. I affected to notice the wounded Germans for the first time and raised my voice in chastisement. I didn’t shout. I did better than that. I gave my impression of outraged British decency from a member of the officer caste who was born to be obeyed. It was all part of the act.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ I said, and pointed at the wounded. ‘Why aren’t those men receiving attention? Get the first aiders in here this instant minute, and get those wounds dressed, and those men sitting down, and do it pretty damn quick!’

‘Suh!’ said the commandos, and there was great show of haste, and a couple of first aiders – who’d been waiting outside the doors – rushed in and did their stuff with field dressings, morphine, chairs dragged away from the radio sets, and tots of rum all round. The Germans took note and the general gave a brief nod of approval. That was my cue for phase two. I saluted him again, and stepped forward and spoke to him in German.

‘Herr General. May I know your name, sir?’

He bowed slightly. ‘Schulinger,’ he said. ‘Klaus Manfred Schulinger, SSA.’

‘Thank you, sir. And I am Brigadier David Landau of Central Staff Special Operations Unit.’ He clicked heels again and nodded. ‘But why did your men fire on us, sir?’ I said it with every appearance of dismay. ‘And where is Herr Svart? Did you not get his orders?’ Schulinger was thrown completely. He’d been asleep when the fighting started; he’d got no idea what had happened outside let alone who fired first, he was profoundly shocked at the mention of orders from Svart, and, above all – and with due modesty – he was totally deceived by my pretence that
something big
was under way, which he should have known about, and was at fault for not knowing. Also I was getting the moment of surprise that one gets by speaking someone else’s language fluently. It wasn’t the jaw-dropping astonishment I got from the Russians, but it was still something and it was adding to Schulinger’s confusion. On top of that he really was quite old, and old people think more slowly than young people, and become more easily confused, and when people are confused they say things they shouldn’t.

As I’ve said, I play tricks on people. I do it easily and without thinking. But sometimes I feel sorry as I do it, and I was sorry in this case because I took advantage of a brave old man who’d been woken up in the middle of the night and didn’t know what was going on. On the other hand, I was a Jew, and his people were gassing
my
people. So what the hell, and I pressed on fast, giving him no time to think.

‘Herr General,’ I said, ‘sir! Why did you not obey Herr Svart’s orders?’

‘What orders?’ he said.

‘Herr Svart’s! Where is he? I was expecting to meet him here.’

‘He’s not here,’ he said.

‘Then where is he? In the U-boat?’ My guess hit the mark because Schulinger nodded unconsciously. That was vital, precious information, and meanwhile I’d noticed something about the way Schulinger spoke. ‘Sir, I ask again: why did your men open fire? Herr Svart will be furious. This isn’t what he wants.’ That really upset him. His face fell.

‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘His plan is to negotiate, to stop the Russians. That before everything. They are Slavs! Sub-humans! They cannot be let loose in the Reich.’ That was still more information and I built on it by calling on the Russians for help.

‘But this fighting here,’ I said. ‘This needless fighting. It will let the Russians in. Their parachute troops are on their way, and we must move fast.’

He frowned. ‘What parachute troops?’

I spoke patiently, as if exasperated. ‘Those we warned you about, sir. Didn’t you get our message? Didn’t Herr Svart tell you about the Russians?’

‘Only that Stalin will not negotiate. Stalin is afraid of Herr Svart.’

‘We know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I am here to take Herr Svart to safety – at least that was my intention – before the Russians arrive. We wanted to take him and all possible equipment.’ At the mention of equipment, Schulinger looked to one of the wounded colonels, now propped up in a chair.

‘Are the Mem Tav generators safe?’ he asked. The colonel was rocking as he sat, loaded with drugs and not properly with us.

‘Yes, Herr General,’ he said, with slurred speech. ‘We blew the thermite charges as soon … as soon … as the firing started.’ He looked towards a control board that had keys sticking out of sockets, and red-coloured switches thrown. ‘Everything’s safe. Everything. All the generators on the lab roofs … all stocks of precursors, catalysts … records … and the Sänger models. Everything. It’s all safe.’

Schulinger gaped. That wasn’t what he’d meant by ‘safe’. I sighed. At least I knew what the fires had been on the roofs of the rectangular buildings. It looked as if we weren’t going to find any useful hardware, but there was still more to be done. I spoke to Schulinger again.

‘General! The important thing is that Russian airborne troops will be here within three hours …’

Schulinger interrupted me. ‘But the Swedes should be here before then.’

‘
What
?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Schulinger. ‘We are here by personal mandate from the Swedish Minister of the Army. We are under his protection and there is a battalion of motorized infantry on Orust Island, who will be on their way already.’ He looked at the half-dazed colonel again, and the colonel nodded and pointed vaguely at one of the control panels, where presumably an alarm switch had been thrown. ‘Our standing orders are to summon them if we are attacked,’ said Schulinger, and the colonel nodded again. Schulinger continued. ‘Herr Svart complained that the roads were bad on Orust, so the Swedes improved them. The Swedish battalion will be here within two hours, including the ferry journey.’

That was nasty. My Russians were imaginary but the Swedes weren’t. We really did have only a couple of hours! So I improvised again.

‘The Russian parachutists are hardened veterans,’ I said, ‘east front veterans, and the Swedes have never fought a modern war. We can’t rely on them. We’re not safe here and it’s vital that I get a message to Herr Svart while I still can. I have come with an offer of amnesty. Mr Churchill himself has promised safe conduct for Herr Svart, and His Majesty’s Government is ready to negotiate. Can’t you see that, sir?’ That really pushed him off the rails and it all came tumbling out: