Angel, Archangel (10 page)

His pulse quickened.

Fleming put his face back over the framework of the stereoscopic pairs and slipped a higher power lens into the base of the device.
His fingertip, looking blimp-like under the magnification of the lenses, traced its way clumsily across the airfield until it hovered by the rocket-fighter.

Not a change in the shape of the wing profile, but something beneath the wing.
He could see its shadow on the concrete.
Its tip was just visible; not part of the leading edge, as he had first presumed, or a trick of the light.

A fucking bomb.

A fighter-bomber for the defence of the Alpine Redoubt, one that could hit back from the sanctuary of the mountains.

He reached for the phone on Bowman’s desk, but thought better of it.

“What is it?”
Bowman asked.

Fleming looked into the face of the other man, aware that Bowman would know of his reputation and had seen his excitement.

“Take another look at the aircraft.
Notice anything strange under the wing?”

Bowman peered into the optical device for a long time.
Fleming knew he was desperate to find something.
Eventually, Bowman sat up, his face devoid of expression.

“I can’t make anything of it.
The leading edge has got a funny line to it, that’s all.
Could be a smudge on the negative.”

Fleming bent over the glasses again.
Could it be that the enemy was developing a dual-role rocket fighter, one that could hit the Fortresses at twenty-five thousand feet, then swoop down over Allied lines and deliver ordnance at phenomenal speeds against tanks, command bunkers and bridges?
Silently, without warning .
.
.

If he were an EAEU field officer like Bowman, perhaps he would have put it down to an abnormality on the print.
But after several months of analysing reconnaissance shots in the Bunker, he’d learnt fast.
He was sure it was a bomb, but that wasn’t enough.

He breathed in slowly and tried to think it through.

Staverton’s briefing notes had been specific.
Immediately upon identification, Fleming was to send the coded message.
The Old Man did not want any half-hearted crap.
He had tagged the aircraft as the latest Messerschmitt rocket fighter, that would do for now.
If it was a fighter-bomber, he would find out when he arrived at Rostock.

The mission left no room for uncertainty.
Rostock was caught between the advancing Canadian First and British Second Armies and the Soviets’ Second Belorussian front, pressing westwards at an incredible pace.
It was touch and go who would get to Rostock first.
Current estimates put the Western Allies two days’ march away from the German test establishment.
The Russians were probably three to four days, but they had been known to storm through fifty kilometres of enemy territory in twelve hours under Marshal Rokossovsky’s leadership.

If the Russians discovered that British paratroops had leapfrogged beyond their frontline troops to take Rostock, there would be one almighty diplomatic row.
Churchill promised Staverton that he would try and hold off Stalin, but he could only stall for so long.
It would therefore be up to Colonel Jewell’s paratroops to take Rostock, hold it for long enough to airlift the 163 out, and then retire with the help of the Royal Navy from Rostock’s Baltic shore.

Once the airfield was secured, Fleming’s hand-picked unit was to fly in, supervise the dismantling of the 163 and fly it out.

Fleming had the solution as he lifted his face off the stereoscopic pairs.

Bowman had been standing in the corner of the room watching intently for his reaction.

“I want this message sent to London straight away,” Fleming said, scribbling on a pad.
“Transmit it in morse, twice.
No encryption.
That’ll tell Staverton we’re in business.”

Bowman hesitated.
“You all right?”

Fleming did not answer at once.
He hardly heard the question.
He just wanted to sleep.

“Yes,” he replied at length.
“Listen up, Bowman.
I think that your ‘smudge’ is a bomb strapped to the wing of that thing.
If I’m right, Staverton should know about it as soon as I’ve made a positive identification at Rostock.
If the 163C does turn out to be dual-capable, I’ll see to it that you get word from the airfield.
Then I want you to put a call through to the Bunker and tell Staverton.
It’s important that you do it straight away.”

Bowman took the scrap of paper and ran through the rain to the communications hut, some fifty yards away.

“The star shines in the East.”
The message was quite innocent, but there was one man in an office deep below the streets of Whitehall for whom it would have a special significance.

* * * * * * * *

Long after the message had been sent to the Bunker, Fleming lay back in the deep armchair in Bowman’s office and tried to snatch some sleep.
Everything was in place, but it was hard not to think about the things that could go wrong.

Staverton’s signal had come from London, acknowledging his identification, confirming that the mission was to go ahead.
A second reconnaissance Mosquito had flown over Rostock an hour previously and checked that the 163 was still there.
It had not moved from its position on the tarmac, although Fleming was quite ready for the Germans to wheel it into one of the hangars, out of the bitter temperatures that still hit the Baltic coastline in early spring.

Bowman had been busy during the past hour getting together a small team of engineers who could accompany Fleming to Rostock.
Outside, Fleming could hear work continuing on the Halifax tugs and gliders, and the constant drone of engines as aircraft taxied to their dispersal points in readiness for the off signal that would be given in just over eight hours’ time.
But it was not the sound which kept Fleming awake.

He was afraid of death, not because of the pain and suffering - he had already beaten those two enemies on the hospital bed - or through fear of what lay beyond.
He did not want to die because he did not want to leave Penny behind with only a couple of lines on a letter to tell her that perhaps they did have a life together after all.

And all he could see was her running away from him, into the night.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Siberians had been searching the forest floor for a clue for the past two hours, but had turned up nothing which could point them in the direction of the Waffen-SS terrorists.

Malenkoy had been sitting in the back of one of the trucks at the spot where he had been ambushed earlier that day waiting for news of progress over the radio.
The last bulletin had been made by a young officer who sounded clearly jumpy at having to scour the dark wet forest for a tiny group of bandits who could be anywhere by now.

Malenkoy pulled back the canvas flap at the rear of the lorry and peered at the darkening sky.
Normally they would have had a little more light at the end of the day, but the ever gathering rain clouds had precipitated the onset of dusk and he knew he had no choice but to summon back the Siberians and resume the search the next day.
If the Germans decided to press on during the night the chances of picking them up tomorrow were even more remote, but what could he do?
His men marching through the pitch-black wood with torches to light their path would present easy targets if the SS decided to turn and fight.
They would have to be recalled.
He only hoped that the Siberians weren’t baying for blood, for rumour had it that they could turn on their own officers when they were pulled off the scent.

Malenkoy flicked the power switch and gave the call sign which signalled a general return to base.

* * * * * * * *

It was raining heavily, but the rivulets that ran down the officer’s neck, soaking his coarse grey shirt, did not bother him.
The attention of SS-Obersturmführer Christian Herries of the Britische Freikorps was seized by the two maps spread out on the ground in front of him, but he couldn’t work out what the hell they meant.

Both charts showed the same topography to identical scales.
Chrudim, in the south-east of the map, stood out as being the largest town, although it was closely followed by Branodz, some forty kilometres away to the west.
The rest of the two and a half thousand kilometre area was covered by a forest which clung to the slopes of the broad range of hills that separated the two towns.
Herries could see that they would reach their own lines quicker if they followed the network of valleys that criss-crossed the area, but he also knew that the valleys would contain the largest troop concentrations and thus they had to be avoided where possible.
Their only real chance lay in sticking to the hills and moving under cover of the trees.
It would be an unpopular route with his severely weakened men, but it would make them hard to find for Ivan.

It was the positions given for the Red Army that bothered him.
They were different on each map, even though both charts showed the same date in their top right-hand corners, clearly indicating that they were both still current.
But were they valid?
What was confusing was the fact that one showed the huge concentrations of tanks and troops ringing Chrudim that he had just witnessed with his own eyes one hour before, while the other did not, having instead an almost identical armoured build-up depicted around Branodz.
Herries would have dismissed it altogether had not the route back to his own lines depended on whether Branodz was heavily fortified or not.
If the Red Army was there in the same strength as it was at Chrudim then he would have to give it a wide berth and that would add at least another day’s march to the trip.
One thing was quite obvious whichever of the two maps told the truth: Ivan had close on half a million troops in the area and Herries wanted to be as far away as possible when the tanks rolled towards Germany.

There was one other small difference between the maps.
The one which showed Branodz as the centre of the buildup had been given the title “Archangel”.
The simple word, scrawled in a shaky hand along the northern edge of the map, provided the best clue so far to unravelling the mystery.
Herries delved into the Red Army-issue despatch case looking for some text that he had noticed earlier with the maps.

He found some soggy and crumpled pages in the bottom of the bag.
They were typed and barely legible, but he leafed through them, searching for the information he required.

The words on the pages seemed strangely unfamiliar.
Herries had spoken plenty of Russian over the last few years, mainly interrogating prisoners or beating information out of local civilians, but this was almost the first time since Oxford that he had picked up Cyrillic.
There was just not enough time to go over the whole of the twenty-page document so he scoured down the lines for “Archangel”, his index finger weaving a precarious course through words and sentences which gradually built up a picture of a pending Russian assault.
At the back of his mind Herries wondered what a lowly major in the Red Army was doing with such sensitive items of strategy.
Ivan must be getting complacent.

Archangel jumped out at him from the middle of the fifth page.
He picked up the text from the top of the sheet, praying that there had been some mistake and that Branodz was an insignificant and poorly garrisoned town which did not require them to make a massive detour.
That way, they could be back behind their own lines by the day after tomorrow.
Picking a path through both sides’ front lines would be a nightmare he would worry about when the German positions were in sight.

It should have taken Herries five minutes to absorb the details about Archangel, but instead he reread the account twice, at first thinking that his grasp of the Russian language had left him, then that the lack of food and sleep over the last few days had caused him to lose a grip on reality.
When he had finished, he rolled onto his back and let the rain fall on his face.
Herries was past feeling the freezing cold droplets and the dampness of his clothes.
His mind raced at the information that he now knew he had interpreted correctly.

Herries sprang to his feet.
He started to break into a run, but slowed as he passed the two men on watch.
When he had left McCowan and Dyer out of sight further up the hill, Herries charged through the trees, ignoring the pine branches that whipped and stung his face, until he reached the spot on the edge of the forest where they had first spotted Chrudim.
Just before he approached the clearing he slowed to draw breath, cursing himself for the way he had breached one of the most elementary rules for survival behind enemy lines.
So often the insurgent who momentarily took his eyes off his surroundings wound up dead, taken by surprise by a Soviet patrol for failing to look and listen.

Herries crouched behind a tree trunk and watched the dark interior of the wood for signs of life.
It was still, apart from the sounds of the raindrops which had managed to penetrate the foliage, splattering the leaves on the forest floor around him.
Satisfied he was on his own, he unslung his Zeisses and turned his attention to Chrudim, nestling in the middle of the valley floor almost a kilometre away.
Nothing much had changed in the past hour.
There were no tanks on the move, only a few jeeps scuttling in and out of the square in the centre of the town.
Eventually Herries found what he wanted, a line of T-34s several hundred metres from his position, which unlike all the other tanks in the area, had not yet been covered with camouflaged netting.

He raised the binoculars.

He had seen hundreds of T-34s on the Eastern Front, and they had never failed to chill his soul.
But there was something strange and unmenacing about this one.
It was too clean, even for a vehicle that had left the factory that morning.
It had none of the trappings that made up a fully functional and operational tank.
Usually they brimmed with oil cans, spades, pickaxes, spare pieces of track, but this one was bare.
There wasn’t even the customary slogan painted on the side of the driver’s cupola.
“For Moscow”, “Long live Stalin”, “To the Front from the Kolkhoz Workers of Novosibirsk District”, or some other such crap was usually daubed on tanks by workers before they left the factories for the front.

Then there was the gun.
It was far too big for a T-34, unless the Russians had suddenly equipped the type with a long-barrel 90mm instead of the standard 76mm.
After Herries had focused on the length of the barrel he knew that what he had read about Chrudim was valid.
The T-34s gun had not been forged in a factory, but sculpted from wood.
Ivan had done a good job with the telegraph pole; it was hard to tell that it had been lashed to the front of the turret with rope.
Herries went down the rest of the line before he was satisfied.
They were fakes, all of them.
Impossible to identify as such from the air, but unmistakable at close range.
He picked out other armoured vehicles at random, but it was the same story.
None of the tanks in or around Chrudim was going anywhere, just as the documents had said.

So he could trust them.
And that meant he could use them.

Two maps.
One showing a mythical assault against the German positions, the other all too real.

He sat back against the nearest tree and scarcely moved for the next half-hour.
When he got up and started to move back towards the camp, every nerve-end in Obersturmführer Christian Herries’ body was tingling.

Archangel was not a plan to feint the Germans towards Chrudim and then outflank them from Branodz.
Archangel wasn’t aimed at the Germans at all.

Ivan was poised to launch a pre-emptive strike on the West - against their own allies the British and the Americans, for God’s sake!
The Red Army was going to bulldoze its way through the crumbling Reich to Paris and, if the momentum was still there, push on to the Channel ports, driving the British and the Americans into the sea.

Herries felt a smile crease his face.

Archangel was his ticket home.

* * * * * * * *

Just before he re-entered the clearing where most of his men were asleep, his jacket caught a branch, snapping it with the noise of a gun shot.
Before he could even curse, Herries heard two machine-pistol bolts being drawn back as McCowan and Dyer prepared themselves for ambush from a Russian patrol.

He threw himself flat.

“It’s Herries,” he said through clenched teeth.

When he heard two more clicks and knew that the MP40S had been made safe, Herries picked himself up and walked into the clearing that housed their makeshift camp.

The two men on watch were standing with guns at the ready on each side of the open patch of forest.
The other four, who had been huddled around a small fire, were also prepared for a fight.
Dietz, Herries observed wryly, still held a bead on him with his rifle.

“All of you get some sleep, and that includes you two.”
Herries looked at McCowan and Dyer.
“We’re all edgy, but we must be rested when we break out of Chrudim later tonight.
Any nervous behaviour like that could bring a whole Siberian division down on us.
In the meantime, I’ll take over the watch.”

Herries felt the tension ease.
He was satisfied that his voice had not faltered.
If the plan was to work, he had to maintain their respect.
Even Dietz, at any time a moment away from insurrection, had lowered his rifle and was settling down to rest again.

“Do the maps show a way out of here, sir?”
It was Gunnersby, the Freikorp’s youngest and last recruit.

Herries grunted.
“I’ve seen a way.”

Gunnersby’s mouth twitched at the edges then broke into a thin, faltering smile.
Herries watched him as he lay down between Berry and Wood, the three of them drawing close to each other for warmth.
They were joined by the two sentries who unfurled their groundsheets close to their fellow Englishmen, shunning the open space next to the leprous Dietz.

Herries chose a spot on the edge of the clearing and sat back against a pine, cradling his MP40 in his lap.
Darkness was falling rapidly and it was now possible to see the faint glow of the fire, its intensity checked by the rain that still fell lightly over the central Czechoslovak foothills.

He had to be sure before he made his move.

The main thing was that work was continuing on Archangel at Chrudim, that he’d seen with his own eyes.
Yet it was over forty-eight hours ago that they’d carried out the ambush and Ivan must have found the jeep and its Hanomag escort by now.
It had to mean that they were satisfied the documents had been destroyed.
The slightest hint of trouble and the dummy armour at Chrudim would have been dismantled by now.

Herries glanced back at the six forms hunched round the dying fire.
It would be difficult negotiating his way back without them, especially without the skills of the master predator Dietz, but there was no other way.
Archangel’s value was that it was his, and his alone.
There was no room for anyone else.