Night Soldiers (54 page)

The Soviet contact was something of a sore subject, because the OSS had had its problems with the NKVD. In 1943, they had made attempts to cooperate with their allied service, sending them cryptographic materials, miniature cameras, miniature microdot-manufacturing devices, microfilm cameras and projectors, as a gesture of good will. But the good will was not returned. On a trip to Moscow in 1944, General Donovan, head of OSS, had been prevented from leaving the USSR for ten days. In the first months of 1945, reports from intelligence officers in Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw and other territories recently occupied by Soviet armies indicated that the NKVD was hard at work against its Western allies. Then, in response to a broad pattern of Soviet actions, Donovan had proposed to the Roosevelt administration that the United States continue to maintain an intelligence agency after the war. But J. Edgar Hoover—Donovan's mortal bureaucratic enemy in Washington, D.C.—had learned of this proposal and leaked word of it to several newspapers that shared his views and the American people had been informed, in banner headlines, that a postwar “American Gestapo” was under consideration. There were those in the OSS who now believed—correctly, it turned out—that the agency had received a mortal wound, and the time of its dismantling was only months away.

Information relevant to Soviet intelligence operations was therefore handled by a special committee, so the FELDSPAR product was duly forwarded amid the daily traffic of memoranda, reports, personnel actions, requests for clarification of policy, and proposals for new operations originated by the Bari station.

As for the FELDSPAR operative himself, the March 24 message was his final transmission. Mosquito missions were flown above Prague on March 29 and on April 4, 5, and 6, but he was not heard from on those dates and the mission was therefore terminated with the notation that the agent had been neutralized—believed killed or captured by the enemy. The FELDSPAR committee ceased to meet, its members assigned to oversee new operations. It was considered a lousy break. The FELDSPAR operative had been erratic at times, but during his active period he had furnished significant product to the intelligence effort and those who had known him personally had generally liked him.

In Prague, the night of March 24 was cloudy and overcast and there was no wind to stir the dead air. Moving through the blacked-out city, Khristo found it difficult to breathe. Coal smoke poured from the chimneys of the ceaselessly operating factories and hung in the streets like a fog. There was other burning as well: two hundred miles to the north the Russian armies were massed for an assault on the eastern borders of Germany, firing twenty-two thousand field guns in barrages that lit up the evening sky and set whole cities on fire. The distant rumble could be heard all night long and a haze of acrid smoke drifted south, covering Central Europe and blackening the roofs of Prague with a fine, sooty layer of ash. People scrubbed themselves with lye soap but the grime was stubborn and would not leave them, so they tried to live with it, spitting incessantly when the taste of the war in their mouths grew too strong to bear.

The 7:50
P.M
. radio transmission from the roof of the warehouse had cost Khristo his first opportunity to meet with Voluta, but there was nothing to be done about that. He just barely managed to make the 9:15, trudging along the winding streets like a tired man on his way to work, but Voluta did not appear. Khristo moved away from the bridge, found an unlocked door, and settled down to wait in the narrow hallway of an old tenement, listening to a loud argument in the apartment on the other side of the wall. It was a mother-daughter fight, something to do with money, punctuated by banging and bumping as the two women cleaned the house while they fought.

Heading toward the 10:20 meeting, he found the streets nearly empty—Occupation rules of curfew specified that only those with stamped permits could be on the street after 9:00
P.M.
As he walked, a Tatra automobile slowed to have a look at him. Gestapo, he thought. He came almost to a halt and stared apprehensively at the car, like a man about to have his papers checked. This tentative act of submission apparently satisfied the Germans, because the Tatra accelerated and drove off toward the river.

At the edge of the small square that faced the Jiráskův bridge, he heard running footsteps and moved quickly against the wall of a building, fingers touching the outline of the pistol in his belt. A heavy man, panting hard, came jogging around the corner and stopped dead when he saw Khristo, his eyes lit with fear. “Run!” he whispered, waving him away with both hands. “There's been a shooting.”

Khristo ran forward into the square, peering into the darkness. There was something midway across the bridge—a dim shape wedged between the roadway and the sidewalk, a man, he realized, sprawled face down in the gutter, the soles of his shoes resting together at an angle, one arm flung forward, the hand white against the gray pavement.

Across the river, a car without lights raced south on Dvorakovo Street, its engine noise rising as it gained speed.

He took a deep breath, then sprinted across the open square, the pounding of his boots echoing against the building façades. Suddenly, a pair of headlights turned a corner at the other end of the bridge, the beams narrowed and intensified by blackout slits. Light fell on the man lying in the street and Khristo knew it was Voluta. The vehicle—he could see it was a Wehrmacht armored car—rolled to a stop and a searchlight mounted atop the roof probed at the body. Khristo heard himself make a wordless exclamation, a small sound of disappointment. He simply stood there for a moment, frozen, unable to think. The shape on the bridge lay still in the spotlight. Finally, he turned his back and walked away, not bothering to run until a static-laden voice crackled from a loudspeaker on the armored car across the bridge and a white beam swept across the deserted square.

As master sergeants, SS Sturmscharführers, Geiske and Helst did the work while the officers took the credit. That was generally the way of the world, and certainly the way of the Gestapo, so you lived with it and kept your mouth shut. There were compensations. In 1934, when they'd joined the Nazi party, they'd been poor men. Now they had a little put by—there were ample opportunities in counterintelligence work, it only remained to have the courage to take advantage of them. The war, they acknowledged, was the best thing that ever happened to either of them. Sturmscharführer Geiske had been a prison guard in Leibnitz when he got the call, while his partner Helst had worked on the Hamburg docks; they'd both risen quite a way up in the world since then. They were heavy, well-fed men; dark and stolid, and they both smoked cigars, so that when they sat side by side in the black Borgward the car sank low on its springs and the interior turned blue-gray with smoke. Their particular war—interrogation cellars, executions—tended to smell bad, and the cigars were a common man's way of dealing with that. The worst corpse in the world hadn't a chance when Geiske and Helst lit up.

The battle between the Gestapo and the Czech resistance had been a savage one, and they'd both played a role in its major actions. In 1942, Geiske had taken part in the pursuit of the assassins Gabcik and Kubis—parachuted in by British MI6—who had murdered Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Gestapo intelligence service, by rolling a hand grenade under his car. Heydrich had survived the initial wounds—fragments of leather upholstery and uniform buried in his spleen—then died of gangrene. Geiske had helped to organize payment of the $600,000 bounty to the Czech who had betrayed the assassination ring, while Helst had assisted in the interrogation of the young man whose confession had ultimately led to its capture—the boy's collapse under questioning having been facilitated by the presentation of his mother's severed head. The Gestapo had staged a strong reprisal for Heydrich's murder, arresting ten thousand people, executing the entire population of Lidice, then leveling the town with explosives.

From their Borgward, parked discreetly just off Jiráskův Square, Helst and Geiske had observed with interest the unfolding of events on the night of March 24.

A man had loitered briefly on the bridge just before the 9: 00 p.m. curfew, then melted away quickly into a side street.

A second man had walked into the square at 9:15, looked about, then retreated much as the first one did. “Better and better,” Geiske remarked. Patiently, they waited for the fallback meeting. Entirely unprofessional to have it at the same location, but the two sergeants had seen stranger things in their time. Perhaps a poorly contrived black market exchange, perhaps a situation where extreme necessity had outdistanced caution. Either way, a plus for them.

Geiske grunted with satisfaction when the first one showed up again at 10:10.

This time he walked onto the bridge with great determination, ignoring the fact that he was alone and there were no crowds to protect him, carrying it off as best he could. Then the Tatra appeared, moving slowly into the square. Geiske and Helst sat forward expectantly—the chemistry of the situation had altered with the addition of the car. “Ah,” Helst said, “he gets in.” But he did not. The Tatra slowed to a crawl as it reached the man on the bridge, someone in the back seat rolled a window down an inch or two. The man on the bridge glanced at the Tatra and there was a muffled report inside the car and he collapsed, falling forward. He made no move to shield himself as he fell; the marksman had been perfect.

The Tatra accelerated, then turned right at the end of the bridge. Helst snatched the radio handset from beneath the dashboard and reached another unit almost immediately. “For you, my friend,” he said in a low voice, “a Tatra headed south on Dvorakovo.”

“I'll go see to the other one,” Geiske said, hauling himself out of the car. He trotted toward one of the side streets and, sure enough, here came the second one, right on schedule. Geiske didn't want him in the square. The Wehrmacht clods in their armored car at the other end of the bridge would likely shoot him, and he didn't want him shot—not just yet. “Run!” he called out. “There's been a shooting.”

But the second man was as much of a fool as the first, for he went charging off into the square without hesitation. Geiske shrugged and let him go, stepping back into a shadowed doorway and waiting to see what would happen. But the Wehrmacht boys held their fire, simply squawked at him over their loudspeaker and tried to pin him down with a searchlight. Lately, he had noticed, they were all teenage recruits, green as grass and barely trained. He breathed a sigh of relief as the man came back out of the square in a hurry. Perhaps not such a fool after all.

Geiske counted slowly to sixty, then sauntered on after him. He had little hope of being able to follow the man for very long—not alone, not in a city where the streets veered and twisted in a devil's maze—but his professional instincts were challenged and he decided to give it his best effort. Helst would understand, you had to take chances now and then, and he was extremely curious about this one, about where he might be headed. He could have arrested him on the spot, but these bastards worked on a certain principle:
if I don't come back on time, they've got me
. That made it damned difficult to find their friends, no matter how hard you worked in the cellar.

But Geiske was lucky. The man ahead of him appeared to be in some sort of daze. He just went slogging along for a time, street after street, taking no elusive action at all. There was one bad moment, when he climbed down a ladder onto a disused spur of railroad track that headed out into the factory district, but Geiske counted again and climbed down after him, then followed at a distance, picking his way along the track among the weed-choked ties. The man in front of him never stopped dead, never turned around, seemed to believe he was alone in the world. Geiske gave himself a bit of credit for that—he could walk like a cat when he had to. But it was the man himself who made the pursuit possible. When Geiske halted for a moment to listen, the sound of his footsteps never faltered. Geiske the sergeant was delighted by such stupidity, though Geiske the hunter, he admitted to himself, was perhaps a little disappointed.

As he entered the factory district at the eastern edge of the city, the smoke and fog seemed especially thick and, at the point where the man ahead of him suddenly left the tracks, the smell of burning was particularly bad. They were really catching it tonight, Geiske thought, up north on the Oder where the Russians were working their massed artillery. The entire eastern border was likely on fire, judging from what drifted south. Worse yet, he was below a loading dock that served some sort of warehouse and the stench of rancid oil in the burnt air very nearly made him gag. He patted a row of cigars in his breast pocket, but of course that was out of the question. The sound of footsteps had disappeared,
subject having entered said warehouse
. The warehouse part was very encouraging, however, so Geiske tried to take shallow breaths and concentrated on great caches of Czech hams and automobile tires. That would make the whole business quite worthwhile.

He stood at the base of the loading dock for a time and listened carefully to the silence. Now he missed his partner. He was going to have to go groping around in there alone and he didn't look forward to it. He took a moment to steady his nerve—he'd done this sort of thing many times before. If you kept your wits about you, nothing much could go wrong. He unholstered a Walther automatic and worked the slide, made sure of the pen flashlight in the pocket of his coat, then vaulted up onto the dock.

Getting in quietly turned out to be easy: a sliding door had been left partly open. And, once inside, he realized that finding the man wasn't going to be a problem either. The first floor of the warehouse was empty—apparently the place was no longer in use—and a faint glow at the far end indicated a candle burning behind a windowed partition in what must have once been the shipping office. But, candle or not, a sea of darkness lay between him and his quarry and he would have to cross it blind—a flashlight in this black hellhole would shine out like a beacon.