Angel, Archangel (30 page)

Kruze felt Fleming’s body relax, saw some of the fire die in his eyes.
He drew back, not sure what would happen next.
Fleming’s breath came more easily as he looked into the Rhodesian’s face, straightening his tie and uniform as he did so.

“I need to get some air,” Fleming said, simply.
“The Auster leaves in fifteen minutes.”
And with that, he stepped out into the night.

* * * * *

Stalin looked at the two reports on his desk.
He picked up the first and held it to his chest for a moment in the silence of his office.
The news could not have been better.
All across the front, the great nine hundred and fifty kilometre front, the British had halted their advance eastwards and were digging in.

All the signs were clear.
Archangel was in London.
In a short time it would be in Washington too.

Sabak could feel his master’s elation.

“What about the other matter?”
Stalin asked.

“The problem is solved,” Sabak said.
“We have obtained the Nerchenko girl’s complete co-operation.
It seems the prospect of her father being informed of her little performances for Comrade Beria terrified her more than the chief of internal security himself.”

“But has she served her purpose?”
Stalin asked.

Sabak smiled.
“We need make no other arrangements, Comrade Stalin.
She was going to give the game away sooner or later, but as it happened, she tripped the wire sooner than we expected.
It’s all in the report.”

Stalin opened the second file and read the dispatch.
With scant clues available to him, Beria had none the less picked up the trail.

He read on.
Shlemov had been sent to Branodz.
Knowing the diligence of Beria’s most tenacious investigator he would now be roaming around the 1st Ukrainian Front pulling in the missing strands.

Shlemov was a loose canon, Stalin thought to himself.
A little knowledge in his hands was certainly a dangerous thing.

He needed help.

He closed the file and started drafting the note.
Sabak could ensure that it was typed up with no clue to its origins and delivered anonymously to Beria’s love nest on Kuznecki Most.

The rest would be up to him.

* * * * * * * *

Herries had taken his cap off and thrown an RAF greatcoat over his shoulders to shield his uniform from the USAAF groundcrew who worked through the night to get their battle-weary Mustangs ready for operations the following morning.
Despite their proximity to the front line, there was hardly any gunfire to be heard, the wind carrying most of the sound back inside the retreating borders of the Reich, but every now and again the horizon lit up as another Allied artillery barrage began to pummel the Wehrmacht’s positions around the Bavarian capital, a mere twenty kilometres away.

They jumped into the jeep.
Fleming drove, while Kruze peered through the night trying to avoid any source of light, the distant gunfire, the glow of an arc-welder’s torch, or the sparks belching from the exhaust of a night fighter taxiing by.
Although the moon would allow the Auster pilot good visibility for their short journey to the Achensee, he would need the help of an extra pair of eyes to spot for any Luftwaffe night stalkers that might latch onto their scent.

As they journeyed in silence to the far end of the airfield where the Auster was waiting, Kruze’s urge to speak to Fleming intensified until it became almost agonizing.
But there was nothing he could say in front of Herries, who was hunched, animal-like on the back seat, shielding himself against the cold slipstream as the jeep bounced across the frozen, pitted ground.

They passed a row of sleek-looking aircraft tucked away in their dispersal pens.
Kruze strained for a better look, his eyes tracing their graceful lines, the curious bulge in the middle of each wing, where the powerplants were grafted to the airframe, and the short nose, from which four lethal-looking 20mm cannon protruded.

“The Meteors that are going to give us a hand at Oberammergau?”

Fleming nodded, but said nothing.

They left the RAF jets behind and drove on for another half a minute in silence.
Fleming seemed agitated.
He took a wrong turn behind a hangar, cursed and set off on the right course again.
Then, Kruze caught a glimpse of the Auster a few hundred yards ahead of them, its distinctive high-set wings shimmering in the blinkered headlights of the jeep.

They pulled up alongside it.
The pilot was in the cockpit doing his last instrument checks, the motor was idling.
Herries shed the blue-grey greatcoat, donned his peaked cap and jumped from the back of the jeep and pulled himself on board, settling himself in the rear of the cabin, which was just big enough for three.

Kruze, still in his seat, turned to Fleming, who was gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead.
Kruze looked to the aircraft.
The pilot was beckoning him towards the passenger door.

Fleming turned to face him.
When the words came they were fast, urgent.

“Whatever you do, don’t look up at the aircraft,” he said.
“Herries is a traitor who served in some sort of British legion in the SS on the Eastern Front.
Staverton made a bargain with him: his amnesty in exchange for getting you into Oberammergau.
I had to tell you, you had a right to know.”

A thousand questions churned inside the Rhodesian.
Fleming carried on before Kruze had a chance to ask any of them.

“Herries has to get a code word off you before he leaves you at Oberammergau.
The word itself isn’t important and as far as you’re concerned it’s to signal us that you made it to the base.
But Herries knows that if anything happens to you and he doesn’t get the word, he swings.

“Piet, watch him like a hawk.
If he gives any trouble, shoot him.
No questions, no mercy.
Same goes for you if you fall inside Russian territory.
I’m sorry .
.
.
Have you got that?
About Herries, I mean.”

“What’s the code word?”

“How about ‘traitor’s gate’?
Should be easy to remember.
But for God’s sake don’t give it to him until you’re about to take the aircraft.”

Fleming could see the pilot beckoning.
“About the other matter,” he said.
He looked up as a cloud scudded across the face of the moon.
“It hasn’t been a waste, at least, I don’t think so.”
He hesitated.
“Good luck.”

Kruze pulled up the collar of his coat and jumped into the passenger seat beside the pilot, who opened up the throttles and eased the Auster onto the runway.
With its hybrid wheel and skid assembly it rolled down the concrete, fighting for airspeed.
Then it disappeared from Fleming’s view into the night.

He carried on listening to the fading sound of its engine long after it had lifted off and turned south-east towards the Alps.

CHAPTER ONE

Malenkoy was still too excited to sleep.
The Chief of the General Staff had congratulated him on his maskirovka and that was all he could think about.
Now he patrolled his way around Chrudim, looking over his dummy tanks, vehicles and gun emplacements with a new sense of pride.

During this moment, even the chaos and the fear that the SS had brought into his sector had receded to the very back of his mind.

Even close to, his mock-ups seemed alive.
The fires and lamps flickered around them, shadows moved, like men scurrying around their tanks, making final preparations.
From the air it would look just like a camp of an army that was poised to rout the enemy.
A liberating army, confident that this was the last push, an army that knew victory was close at hand.

Soon the Luftwaffe pilots would come again.
This time they would bring listening equipment and hear the radio transmissions - orders from generals to men in the field, requisitions for more equipment to be sent up to the front, signals to start the engines of the T-34s.

The intelligence would fly back to Berlin.
The Wehrmacht would be mobilized to meet the threat of his ghost army.

While in the next door valley, stealthy preparations continued to build up Marshal Konev’s very real divisions to assault strength, preparations that would go unseen now, thanks to him.

He looked down at his chest and saw the Order of Lenin, which was surely his just reward now, swinging from his tunic.
To Malenkoy, the vision was as real as the maskirovka would appear when the Luftwaffe arrived at dawn.

* * * * * * * *

The moonlit lake at Achensee was iced over from shore to shore, just as Fleming had said it would be.
Kruze looked down and saw a sparkling, frosted pane of glass lying unbroken in a basin between the mountain peaks, some two thousand five hundred metres above sea-level.
As they flew around it, the Auster’s engines throttled right back, he was relieved to see that there was no sign of habitation on its banks, but beyond them it was hard to tell.
Below the tree-line, the landscape was covered by an immense blanket of thick pine forest, a light layer of snow on the tops of its trees.

A thousand feet above the ground, the pilot picked out an imaginary runway on the ice and banked the Auster around a pinnacle of rock at the far end of the three-sided valley to line himself up for the approach.
Throughout the half-hour journey no one had spoken, but Kruze did not have to question the young flight lieutenant to know that this was by no means his first trip behind enemy lines.

With jagged rocks behind them and more peaks stretching up into the night sky on either side of the Auster’s wing tips, the pilot cut the engine and began side-slipping the little aeroplane, losing height in careful, measured steps, until they soared silently below the treetops and out over the lake.

It crossed Kruze’s mind that the ice might not be able to sustain the weight of the aircraft.
If the ice began to crack up below the Auster’s skids - and with the option to put on power closed to them - it would all be over in a second.

They came in to a dead-stick landing, the skids brushing the frozen surface in a perfect three-pointer.
Over the diminishing noise of the slipstream and the swish of the skids, Kruze asked the pilot to try to position them at the far end of the lake where, a few moments before, he and Herries had spotted the white water of the mountain stream trickling down towards the valley below.
There, they would pick up the road that would eventually lead them into Munich; provided Herries could get transport.

The Auster slid to a stop a hundred yards from the shoreline.
Kruze moved fast, scrabbling out of the front seat, Herries seconds behind him.
They sprinted for the trees, slipping and sliding on the ice, the Rhodesian looking back only once across the luminous silence to catch the wave of the pilot, whose name he had never known.
In a few minutes, after they had had time to slip into the vast expanse of the forest, the Auster’s Lycoming would be gunned into life and the pilot would coax the aircraft into the night sky, back to the safety of the Allied lines.

They found the stream, neither of them speaking, for every step, every movement seemed to crash in their ears beside the lightly burbling waters that rippled the silence of the night.
Kruze kept on telling himself that his mind exaggerated the sound, that his imagination had conjured up the whispers, snapping twigs and the crunch of snow under boots that seemed to emanate from every corner of the forest.

Herries led the way down the slope, always keeping the brook just a little way to his left.
Kruze looked at the new SOE-issue Swiss watch given to him by Fleming earlier that afternoon.
The luminous face told him they had only been on the Reich’s soil for a few minutes, but already it seemed like a lifetime.
Even the slow-motion world of aerial combat, in which a pilot might engage a score of enemy fighters in a tenth of the time, seemed like sanctuary to him at that moment.
Here he was a stranger, vulnerable, out of his element, with only Herries to help him.

It was already coming up to half-past one.
Taking his eyes off Herries for a split second, he sought out the star-speckled inkiness of the night sky between the trees.
In just under five hours dawn would be upon them.
They had to be out of the wood long before then for Herries to find the means to get them into the city.
He remembered the vast area of trees he had seen from the aircraft and began to doubt that they would ever make the valley floor in time.

The cold stung his throat each time he drew in gulps of air to feed his aching limbs as he bounded down the mountainside.
Herries was like a mountain goat; it was all he could do to keep his eyes on the stark outline of his Obersturmführer’s uniform, silhouetted against the snow.
He stumbled on a root, lurking unseen beneath the white carpet, and fell headlong at Herries’ heels.

He lay there, his cheek smarting from the thousands of razor-sharp ice particles that pierced his skin, gasping for breath.
Further movement seemed impossible.

Then a new sound, a new smell.
Herries’ breath close to his face, the condensation mingling with his own.
The voice, when it came, was a hoarse whisper in his ear.

“Get up, flyboy.
This is no moment to rest.”

“No, we stay here for a minute,” he panted.

Herries grabbed his shoulder and rolled him over.
“In the forest, I’m king,” he said.
“Now move.”

A sudden noise, like a buzz-saw, split the night.
Kruze saw Herries go into a tense crouch, his fingers clawing at his holster; a moment later, the Luger was in his hand.

“It’s only the Auster taking off,” Kruze said.

“All the more reason to put a bit of distance between us and the lake,” the traitor hissed.
“If there are any troops in the area, they’ll find the landing point and our trail in no time.
We’ve got to get lower down, below the snowline; that way, we’re virtually impossible to track.”

Herries’ thin face seemed to glow green in the moonlight that filtered between the branches as the Auster droned off into the distance.
He prodded Kruze in the ribs with the barrel of the gun.
“You heard me, let’s go.”

In a sudden, fluid motion Kruze was on his feet and Herries was without his gun.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you’ve come from,” the Rhodesian snarled, “but never, ever pull your gun on me again, do you understand?”

“So you can move fast,” Herries smiled.
“I’m impressed.”

Herries snatched the weapon back and slipped it into his holster, his eyes remaining fixed on Kruze’s face.
For a moment, they stood there, two dark shadows in the vastness of the forest, shoulders square to each other, scarcely a foot between them, then Herries moved off, twisting between the trees down the mountainside.

Kruze loped after him, settling into a mechanical rhythm after a while, enabling him to think about the man in front.
Fleming’s hasty warning had confirmed his own suspicions about Herries and in a strange way, it made him feel better.

They carried on at an unrelenting pace down the steep slope, pausing to rest one minute in every fifteen, until the snow began to give way to a rocky, stick-strewn forest floor.
Herries appeared to relax.
They had been going for about three hours; the mountain had to bottom out soon.

Ahead, Herries had stopped running and was moving towards the stream.
Kruze joined him by the bubbling water.
The rushing filled his ears.
It sounded good, invigorating, a long way from the war.

“Drink,” Herries said, “even if you’re not thirsty.”

To Kruze, the order was superfluous.
He took long, deep gulps of the crisp mountain water cupped in his hands and then splashed more over his face and neck, allowing the cold rivulets to run down his chest and back, cooling his sweat-stained body.

He looked over to the Obersturmführer, who was on his haunches, leaning against a rock.
Every now and again he sipped water, bird-like, and then threw some onto the back of his neck.

“Where did you learn to do all this?”
Kruze asked.
He couldn’t resist it.

Herries’ eyes swivelled around the forest briefly as if to warn Kruze that they might be overheard, but he realized that the sound of the stream would have drowned their conversation to anyone standing more than a few yards away.

“I served in a commando unit,” he said.

“It couldn’t have been just any mob.”
Herries seemed to flinch.
“You must have done a lot of covert stuff behind the lines to have been selected for this.
I suppose you’ll be returning to your old unit when it’s over - if we get out, that is.”

“Unlikely,” Herries said.
“They’re dead.
The unit’s been disbanded, you might say.”
He was back in the clearing above Chrudim, standing over Dyer, Gunnersby, McCowan ...
all of them, very, very dead.
He splashed more water over his face.
“And you ask too many questions, flyboy.
Save your breath for the rest of the journey.
We leave here in five minutes.”

Kruze suddenly wanted to get away from him.
The forest seemed to call; as the bush below the Mateke had, a long time ago.

“Don’t go far,” Herries said, as the Rhodesian moved off.

Kruze walked a little way from the stream, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his raincoat.
He found the ersatz cigarettes that had been provided for him at the airfield, cheap German military-issue tobacco, rolled in tatty paper that was too thick, so they kept going out.
Herries would have told him not to smoke, the smell and the glow of the tip being obvious intrusions in the primeval world of the forest.

Kruze saw an outcrop of rock, rising up through the gloom ahead; there would be crags and nooks enough there for him to hide the flare of a match and to hell with the smoke.

Then he saw the movement and froze.

At first he thought it was Herries, but almost as soon as the idea crossed his mind he knew that was impossible.
In the fifty yards he had walked from the stream, Herries would not have been able to work his way round to his front, to be standing where this figure was, to the right of the outcrop.

Kruze had never felt so vulnerable.
A patch of moonlight illuminated the ground between him and the rock and played delicately over the man standing not more than thirty yards away.
He could see a peaked cap, a long coat and a rifle slung over the shoulder.
The back was three-quarters to him, but was moving, as if the figure were surveying the forest.

A sentry.
Turning towards him.

Kruze began lowering his body, pulling his arms in, hunching his shoulders, so slowly that he knew he would not be able to get to the ground before the sentry’s eyes swept his position.
Shooting him was the only other option, but, his mind screamed over the fear, there would be others.

He was bent almost double, with the soldier’s line of vision perpendicular to his own, when a cloud covered the moon and the spotlight above him went out.
It was his only chance.
He pitched forward, his arms sinking into the deep, wet pine carpet lining the forest floor, muffling his fall.
He felt the stick caught between his right hand and the damp earth below, felt it bend beneath his weight.
He held his breath.

The twig snapped.

The sentry did not utter a sound, but Kruze heard him unsling the rifle and take a step forward.
Then another.
He was coming his way.
The Rhodesian’s eyes were wide open, but he dared not move his head, whose top pointed towards the advancing sentry, making it impossible for him to see what was going on.
All he knew was that the moon was still behind the cloud.
But for how long?