The Beast in the Red Forest (19 page)

At last, when the dawn began to glimmer in the sky, Vasko was preparing to leave cover when a gunfight erupted between a crew of partisans returning to their base and a Red Army squad just heading out on patrol. From his hiding place, Vasko witnessed the battle. Some of the stray shots even slammed into the woodwork above his head. The Red Army soldiers pulled back, bringing their wounded with them as they headed for the safety of their headquarters, which had been fortified with barbed wire and sandbags. The partisans carried away two of their men who had been killed in the skirmish, and faded back into the darkness. In a matter of minutes, the streets were empty and quiet. But Vasko knew it might not stay that way for long. Both sides would almost certainly return with reinforcements. Taking advantage of the lull, he slipped away and was soon beyond the outskirts of the town.

‘I’ve searched the whole place,’ said Kirov, as he trampled down the rickety stairs of the safe house. ‘There’s no sign of Malashenko anywhere.’

‘He should have been here by now,’ muttered Pekkala, as he walked over to a window and peered out through a crack in the shutters.

‘So much for our bodyguard,’ grunted Kirov as he sat down in one of several mismatched chairs, tilted back and set his heels up on the table. ‘I’d gladly trade him for a plate of blinis.’

‘Blinis,’ Pekkala echoed thoughtfully.

‘With sour cream and caviar,’ continued Kirov, locking his hands behind his head, ‘and chopped red onion and a glass of cold vodka.’

Pekkala stared at the ceiling with a distant look in his eyes. ‘I can’t even recall the last time I had a good meal.’

‘We’ll soon put that right,’ Kirov assured him. ‘Once we get back to Moscow, we can return to our ritual of Friday afternoon meals, at which, with your permission, Elizaveta will become a permanent guest.’ The major smiled happily, his thoughts returning to their cosy little office, with its temperamental stove and wheezy samovar and the comfortable chair which they had salvaged off the street. ‘What do you say to that, Inspector?’

But there was no reply. Pekkala remained by the window, staring out into the street. Snow had begun to fall again. Fat, wet flakes slid down the weathered old shutters.

There was something about the way he stood; sombre and alone, which made Kirov realise that the fears he had secretly been harbouring ever since he’d found Pekkala might come true after all. ‘You’re not coming back to Moscow, are you?’ he asked.

‘Skorzeny, you idiot!’ Seated at his desk, in a high-ceilinged office on Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin, Heinrich Himmler, lord of the SS, roared out his disapproval. ‘Why didn’t you inform me about this mission?’

‘I received a direct order from the Admiral not to share details of the mission with anyone. Anyone at all.’ Skorzeny shifted uneasily, knowing that his excuse was unlikely to appease the Reichsführer.

‘I am not “anyone”!’ barked Himmler, fixing Skorzeny with his grey-blue eyes, which appeared strangely calm, in spite of his obvious rage. ‘I am commander of the SS of which, as of today, at least, you’re still a member!’

‘And Canaris is an admiral,’ replied Skorzeny, ‘and his orders were perfectly clear.’

‘If your orders were to tell no one,’ Himmler leaned forward, placing his hands flat upon the desk, the thumbs side by side, in a way that reminded Skorzeny of the Sphinx, ‘then why are you telling me now?’

‘I believe that something may have gone wrong. Vasko was parachuted over the abandoned village of Misovichi, not far from the rendezvous point. There he was due to meet with a partisan named Malashenko, who has been working with the Abwehr’s Secret Field Police. Vasko made a low-level jump over the target and his chute was seen to open properly. Twenty-four hours ago, a reconnaissance aircraft reported seeing smoke rising from the chimney of a cabin where the meeting was due to take place.’

‘So far,’ said Himmler, ‘it sounds as if everything has gone according to plan.’

‘Yes, Reichsführer,’ replied Skorzeny. ‘Up to that point, I had no reason for concern, but Vasko was supposed to have contacted us immediately upon completion of his mission, at which time we would dispatch another agent to guide him back through the lines.’

‘Perhaps the answer is simply that he has not yet carried out his task.’

‘That’s just it, Reichsführer. He has.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We received confirmation from one of our informants in Rovno. The target, Colonel Andrich, has been eliminated. Vasko should have contacted us by now. I am afraid that his radio might have been damaged, leaving him unable to communicate, or even that he might have been captured.’

‘And it has suddenly occurred to you,’ said Himmler, ‘that it might not reflect well upon on the SS if Canaris chose to blame us for Vasko’s disappearance.’

Skorzeny nodded grimly.

Himmler removed his pince-nez glasses, the silver frames glittering in the light of his desk lamp. ‘This agent who has been assigned to guide Vasko back to our lines? Is he one of theirs or one of ours?’

‘He’s ours,’ Skorzeny assured him. ‘It’s Luther Benjamin.’

‘A capable man.’ Himmler nodded with approval. ‘And where is Benjamin now?’

‘He is currently travelling with soldiers who are engaged in an attempt to recapture Rovno from the enemy. As soon as we receive word from Vasko that his mission has been completed, we will relay a message to Vasko and . . .’

‘There is to be no more waiting!’ As Himmler spoke, he polished his glasses vigorously with a black silk handkerchief, even though they were already clean. ‘Inform Benjamin that he is to proceed immediately to the rendezvous point. If Vasko is there, Benjamin will proceed with the original evacuation plan.’

‘Yes, Reichsführer.’ Then Skorzeny paused. ‘And if Vasko isn’t there?’

‘Then Benjamin is to return immediately on his own, and Vasko will be abandoned to his fate, just like the pompous admiral who sent him on this suicidal errand.’

‘I knew it!’ shouted Kirov, swiping his heels off the table and jumping to his feet.

Pekkala turned away from the window and glanced at the major. ‘Knew what?’ he asked.

‘That you’re not coming back to Moscow! But why, Inspector? You have a life waiting for you there, as well as people who rely on you, not to mention friends, one of whom came all this way to find you!’

‘You don’t understand,’ began Pekkala.

But Kirov hadn’t finished yet. ‘Why would you choose to remain among the partisans? Where are they, now that we need them? Where is Malashenko? Where is Barabanschikov? I’ll tell you where they are! They’ve disappeared, because that’s what they do best. And who knows where they’ve gone? Search for them now and all you’ll find are their abandoned forest hideaways. Is that where you’re going? Is that where you plan to spend your life, in the company of ghosts?’

‘Kirov!’ shouted Pekkala.

Startled, the major fell silent.

‘Be still,’ Pekkala told him, ‘and I will explain everything.’

Bewildered, Kirov slumped back into his chair. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I owe you that much, I suppose.’

As Pekkala began to speak, he felt a part of himself pull free from the heavy shackling of his bones and vanish into the past, like smoke coiled by the wind into the sky.

Deep in the Red Forest, not far from the Barabanschikov camp, was a lake called the Wolf’s Crossing. At first, the name made no sense to Pekkala. Only with the arrival of winter did he finally grasp its meaning, as packs of yellow-eyed wolves would lope across its frozen surface, bound on journeys whose purpose seemed a mystery even to the beasts who had embarked upon it.

Sometimes, Pekkala went out there alone to fish. The water in the lake was brown like tea from all the tannins in the pines which grew down to its banks, and contained perch and trout and even some landlocked salmon. Using an axe, Pekkala chopped several holes into the ice, then fed a line into each one. Straddling the holes was a cross-shaped contraption made from twigs bound together with dried grass. When a fish pulled on the line, the cross would tilt upwards and Pekkala would know he had a bite.

But he had to be patient. Hour after hour, he would stand bent-backed like an old hag, wrapped in the shreds of an old army blanket, shuffling his feet to stay warm, his only company the whirlwinds of glittering snow dust, spiralling like dancers across this frozen desert.

Sometimes the reward was hardly worth the effort, but on rare occasions when the lake yielded more fish than the partisans could eat, the extras would be dried over a smouldering birchwood fire, the two halves of their bodies split like wings, and packed away in a storehouse he had built, raised above the ground on stilts to keep away the mice in wintertime.

Stray leaves, dry and curled, blew out into the lake. There, warmed by the sun, they melted their perfect forms into the ice, as if to remind him that spring would come again, in those times when it seemed as if winter would never end.

It was out of this wilderness, on the coldest day he’d ever known, with sunlight blinding off the snow and a fierce blue sky, the colour of a Bunsen burner flame, that a man appeared who would change Pekkala’s life forever.

He had been gathering the fish he’d caught that day – one speckle-backed trout and three perch – when he glimpsed a figure in the distance, heading directly towards him.

Pekkala did not run, or reach for the gun in his coat. There was something about the forlornness of this creature which made him more curious than afraid.

Silhouetted against the blinding snow, the figure seemed to change its shape, separating from itself and merging together again, like a drop of dirty oil in water.

Only when the man was almost upon him could Pekkala clearly distinguish the tall, dishevelled man, clothed in a tattered coat, whose torn hem dragged through the snow. Rags bound his feet instead of shoes. He carried no weapon, or any equipment at all. Covering his face was a sheet of white birch bark which had slits cut into it – a primitive but effective measure against the glare of snow which would otherwise have blinded him. With the scarf about his face and eyes hidden behind this paper scroll, his human shape seemed almost accidental.

For a moment, the man stood in front of Pekkala. Then he tore away his mask, revealing a face so creased with dirt and worry that it seemed no more alive than the bark which had concealed it. He dropped to his knees, snatched up a perch and, ignoring dorsal spines which punctured his fingertips like a fan of hypodermic needles, he tore into the meat.

When nothing remained in his hands but a fragment of the tail, the man finally looked up at Pekkala. ‘The last man I expected to find out here,’ he said, ‘was the Emerald Eye himself.’

‘How do you know me?’ asked Pekkala.

The man offered no words of explanation. Instead, he simply removed his cap, grasping it from behind and tilting it forward off his head in the manner of the old Tsarist soldiers, and it was in this movement that Pekkala finally recognised the man, whom he had last seen in a clearing on the Polish border, just weeks before the outbreak of the war. His name was Maximov. A cavalry officer before the Revolution, Maximov had become the driver and bodyguard of Colonel Nagorski, the secretive designer of the Red Army’s T34 tank. Known to those who operated the 20-ton machine as the Red Coffin, this tank had been one of the few weapons in the Soviet arsenal which outgunned its German counterparts. While other Russian tanks proved to be no match for German armour, the T34 had held its own against all but the largest enemy weapons. In the winter of 1941, with the German army within sight of Moscow, the T34 had kept running when the temperature dipped below minus-60, thanks to the low-viscosity oil used in its engine, while the cold transformed the German panzers into useless hulks of iron.

Nagorski did not live long enough to see his great invention put to use. He was found shot to death in the muddy swamp which served as a testing ground for his machines.

It was during the investigation of Nagorski’s murder that Pekkala first came in contact with Maximov. For a while, it had seemed as if Maximov himself might be the killer, but Pekkala’s investigation eventually disclosed that Nagorski’s own son had fired the shot that ended his father’s life. Maximov had gone on to assist Pekkala and Kirov in tracking down a missing T34 prototype. Their search led them to the German-Polish border, where Alexander Kropotkin, an old acquaintance of Pekkala’s and a bitter enemy of Stalin, was attempting to stage an attack on German troops stationed nearby. With this suicidal move, Kropotkin was less interested in killing the enemy than in providing Hitler with an excuse to invade the Soviet Union. In those days, he was by no means alone in thinking that only with the destruction of the Red Army could Stalin be removed from power and that even Nazi occupation was better than continuing to live under the boot of the Communist Party.

Having located the missing tank, Kirov had disabled the machine using an anti-tank rifle equipped with experimental titanium bullets. The T34 was destroyed, and Kropotkin died in a blaze which engulfed the crew compartment. But when the fire had died down enough for Pekkala and Kirov to approach the wreck, they discovered that Maximov had disappeared. Upon their return to Moscow, Kirov wrote in his report that Maximov had been killed in the shoot-out and his body consumed in the inferno of the burning tank. Although Pekkala said nothing to contradict this, privately he had always suspected that Maximov might have survived after all.

The reason Pekkala kept these thoughts to himself was that, although Maximov had so far been able to conceal his former career as a Tsarist officer, the truth would undoubtedly have surfaced now that Maximov had been drawn into the spotlight of this investigation. Far from being the recipient of a medal for his heroism, it was more likely that Maximov would be arrested for his past deeds in the service of the Tsar. For Maximov, the future would have led only to the Gulag, which was why Pekkala turned a blind eye to a missing motorcycle that he had spotted near the tanks before the battle, and the faint but unmistakable impression of tyre tracks leading away through the forest.