Agent of Death (22 page)

‘Yes, Simon!’

‘With me now!’ said Leonard. ‘Double march!’

That meant one hundred and eighty paces per minute: a steady, jogging trot which was fine for commandos, especially Leonard’s men who did it with such ease that they kept in step, while I kept up only because I was young, even though my chosen mode of warfare involved sitting down and letting the engines do the work.

Hup, two-three! Hup, two-three! Boots pounding, arms swinging. Down the hill, stepping over the dead and wounded. Straight through the cut wire, round the flying field, under the floodlights, and across the runway, looking right towards the mysterious buildings that lined it, then out through a proper gate in the wire, and into the darkness beyond the floodlights, except that it wasn’t so dark anymore, because the dawn was coming. Then down a neat, paved road that curved to the left, with the sound of the waves in the harbour to our right, then down a long avenue of trees, with a gravel drive between them, under another set of floodlights and up to the front of what looked like an English stately home. It had broad steps, a pediment over six columns, a dome rising over that, half of it pink in the early sunrise, and some commandos standing at the entrance with five SSA prisoners, sitting with their hands on their heads looking ashamed of themselves as we came down the drive.

‘Aaaaaaaand ….’ roared Leonard, ‘
halt
!’

Stamp
stamp
! The commandos came to a halt, dressed their lines, and stood to attention as if on parade, except that they were all grinning. They were funny bunch. They were funny and I was gasping. I suppose we’d doubled for about five minutes, which was quite enough for me.

The commando officer outside the Punnohaus was a lieutenant. He saluted Leonard, and Leonard raised his bandaged hand. It was bloodstained now. The double march had set Leonard’s heart bumping.

‘Simon,’ said the lieutenant. He was a little man with a cunning face and a rural, working-class accent. He was about as far from officer material as could possibly be imagined. But there were all sorts in 14 Commando, including poachers from Leonard’s estates in Gloucestershire, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if this man was, or had been, one of them. Anyway, some strange people get commissions in wartime. Look at me. I wasn’t an officer and a gentile: I was an officer and a Jew.

‘Arthur,’ said Leonard. ‘So what have we got?’ The little man glanced at the house.

‘It’s their command post all right,’ he said, ‘there’s a radio room like something out o’ Flash Gordon, with all knobs and dials an’ whatnot, an’ tarts in uniform with earphones.’ He pointed upwards. ‘An’ there’s a big aerial on the dome.’ We all looked up and saw the lattice mast against the lightening sky. ‘An’ it’s full o’ brass. We’ve got two colonels nearly intact in the house, there’s a brigadier among that lot,’ he said, pointing to a row of black-clad bodies laid out in a line, ‘an’ we’ve got a full general upstairs, all in one piece in his best silk pyjamas and dressing gown.’

‘Oh, well done, Arthur,’ said Leonard.

‘It was all your drill, Simon,’ said the lieutenant, hero-worshipping Leonard. ‘We just snuffed the sentries …’ he looked again at the row of dead, and I followed his eyes and saw one corpse with his throat wide open.

One of the reasons I found it hard to like Simon Peter Chattan, the twelfth Lord Leonard, was that less than an hour ago I’d seen him personally ‘snuff’ a sentry on the way to taking up our position on Radar Hill, just as others of his men dealt with other sentries to make sure we took the enemy by surprise. We all crept quietly as we came up to the base, and as we passed through some trees, we found a gate through the base’s outer fence: a series of three-metre steel posts, with a net of barbed wire string between. And there we saw an SSA trooper with a field telephone ready for him to give the alarm, and him with his flies undone, piddling, with his back to us.

Leonard made silent signs, the rest dropped, and he darted forward with his Fairburn-Sykes fighting knife. He made no sound, the knife-blade was blackened so it couldn’t shine, and he was on the trooper in an instant. His technique was to grab the enemy from behind, jerk back his head with the left hand, plunge the point of the knife deep into his neck, behind the larynx and trachea, then punch the blade forward, slicing all the major blood vessels
and
making it impossible for the man to scream. Which he didn’t. He just kicked and spouted while Leonard lowered him to the ground to finish his dying.

My point is not that this is a nasty form of warfare, because there is no nice form of warfare. Injuries from high explosive and shrapnel are much worse than those inflicted by a knife. My point is that Leonard didn’t have to do the killing himself. He was a senior officer. So he killed with a knife because he wanted to.

‘… we just snuffed the sentries,’ said the lieutenant, ‘then I did what you said, Simon. I sent in my best, quiet boys, to go upstairs and watch the bedrooms, so we could catch Jerry as he woke up, an’ smack him on the bonce. An’ the rest of us waited outside till the shooting started at the main base, an’ they all come running out the front, just like you said they would, where we was waiting for them.’

‘Rat-a-tat-tat!’ said Leonard.

‘Rat-a-tat-tat!’ said the lieutenant. ‘An’ we got these lot,’ he pointed at the live prisoners, ‘because some of them fell over their mates and knocked themselves silly, an’ some of them didn’t get shot up too bad.’

‘Good,’ said Leonard. ‘And what about Svart?’

‘No go, Simon.’ He looked at a sergeant standing close by. ‘Harry boy speaks a bit of German, don’t you, boy? An’ he’s been asking about Svart.’

Leonard looked at me. ‘How good is your German?’ I asked the sergeant.

‘Not very good,’ he said. ‘My Dad knew it from the last war, and I got a bit from him.’

‘Did you ask them about Svart?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I asked them if he’s here. I said
Wo
ist
Herr
Abimilech
Svart
?’ The accent was bad, the question brutally simple. But not as brutal as what Leonard had in mind to put matters right. I saw it in his face.

‘Don’t worry, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘It’s the way you ask that gets answers, and I know how to ask.’ He smiled but I didn’t.

‘Simon,’ I said, ‘I have something to say. Could we have a quiet word?’

‘Of course,’ he said. He beamed goodwill. He was full of rosy glow about me and the Colt.45. After all, I’d saved his life, hadn’t I? So we had our quiet word, and I explained precisely why the Russians had failed to get anything out of
Obersturmführer
Grauber, the pilot that attacked Ulvid, and I explained that I had a better way. At least I hoped I did, and fortunately he liked my idea. He liked it very much.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘So you’ll need some men who can act a bit?’ He thought about that. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have some of those.’

So then it was up to me.

CHAPTER 27

The
Führerboat,

The
North
Atlantic.

Saturday
3 June
,
08
.
00
hours

Six men stood in the cramped, narrow corridor between the cramped, narrow officers’ cabins as Captain Sohler pointed to the watertight hatch in the bulkhead in front of them. There wasn’t much room for so many men, and they stood shoulder to shoulder.

‘Can he get through that?’ said Sohler, and everyone looked at the hatch. It was perfectly round, sealing a hole only just big enough for its purpose, and was placed so low that a man had to stoop down and duck his head awkwardly to get through. Every watertight hatch in the boat was like that, because they were designed to keep each compartment safe, should the next be flooded. They were not designed to be easy to use.

‘Can he get through?’ said Sohler again, looking at the young sub-lieutenant engineer who stood holding a Draeger breathing set. The boat’s trained diver stood just behind with a rubber suit in his hands and a pair of lead-loaded boots on the deck at his feet, while Daniel Feldman – once
Inginieur
Oberleutnant
Feldman – stood beside Sohler, dressed in his Tommy outfit, with a thick pullover underneath. The diver had given him the pullover, plus a set of long woollen underwear to go with it.

‘You’ll need ’em,’ he’d said. ‘The water’s not freezing but it’s cold. I’m sorry they’re not very clean. I’ve worn them quite a bit. Can’t be helped.’

‘I know,’ said Feldman, and he did know. There was no wash-tub on a U-boat. But he wasn’t thinking of that. He was thinking of Landau’s last words to him.

Meanwhile, Sohler frowned. ‘Will there be room?’ he repeated, because the sub-lieutenant hadn’t spoken.

‘I think so, sir,’ said the sub-lieutenant. He wasn’t sure.

‘Yes or no?’ said Sohler. ‘There’s a man about to risk his life getting through there.’ He looked at Feldman and the sub-lieutenant dithered.

‘Well?’ said Sohler.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said the sub-lieutenant. ‘Nobody’s ever tried in a diving suit and escape gear. I just don’t know, sir.’

‘It’ll do,’ said Feldman. ‘I’ll get through.’

Sohler wondered if he could. But it had to be tried. The torpedo compartment was on the other side of the bulkhead. It was flooded, and it contained three live torpedoes that could go off whenever they chose, and three detonations would sink the boat for sure. They’d tear the Führerboat’s constituent tubes apart, and shatter their pressure hulls. Sohler considered his options yet again.

There were three ways to get at those torpedoes. The first was to surface the boat, pump out the torpedo compartment, and send Feldman – and it had to be Feldman because only he really knew what he was doing – into the compartment to deactivate the warheads if he could, and fire the torpedoes clear of the boat if he couldn’t. But Sohler had tried that, but the weather was so rough, with green water surging over the bow, that they couldn’t pump out the torpedo compartment and, worse still, was the fear that the boat’s heavy movement might set off the warheads; they dared not wait for the weather to clear in case the warheads went off by themselves.

So Sohler had taken the boat down just enough to keep her steady and sitting at neutral buoyancy, for the second approach. That was to put Feldman in diving gear and send him out by the conning tower, which had an air-lock for submerged escape, so he could move down the casing to the torpedo loading hatch, and get into the torpedo compartment, which could not be pumped out under water because it was blown open at the bow. But that would have meant Feldman – who was not a trained diver, and was not a strong man, nor even a healthy man – would be moving down the casing in semi-darkness, peering through goggles, with nothing to hang on to, and might find when he reached the hatch that wearing the bulky breathing set he couldn’t squeeze down the torpedo loading tube.

No. The best way – though weak and desperate - was the present solution.

Sohler looked at Feldman. ‘Are you ready, Herr Feldman?’ he said.

‘Yes, Herr Captain,’ said Feldman. ‘I’ll put on my gear now, sir.’

‘Give him room,’ said Sohler, ‘everyone back.’

So the engineer sub-lieutenant and the diver helped Feldman pull on the rubber diving suit, which was a squeeze and a stretch over Feldman’s bulky clothes, but he had to be well-insulated because the sea was cold, and nobody knew how long he would be in the water.

The rubberized diving suit was Kriegsmarine standard. Every boat had one, and it could be used either with a domed helmet and a pumped fresh-air supply or, as now, with no helmet but a Draeger set that went over the head, like a life jacket, and was secured by a strap between the legs. The Draeger was basically a waterproof bag with a tube from an oxygen cylinder leading into it, and a rubber hose leading out of it, bringing breathable gas to the user, while carbon dioxide was removed by soda lime.

It worked on exactly the same principles as the breathing set in
Obersturmführer
Grauber’s Mem Tav suit. But it was designed for an entirely different purpose, and acted as a life jacket because the oxygen filled the waterproof bag, which swelled out, giving buoyancy to the wearer: buoyancy which in this case had to be offset by the lead-loaded diver’s boots. The Draeger was primarily designed as an escape device, enabling men to rise from a sunken boat. But it was perfectly good as a breathing set for other work, as long as the oxygen lasted, which depended on the depth of water and how hard a man was working. It would be something like fifteen minutes and perhapsmore if the man took his time and didn’t exert himself.

So, with the suit on, and the Draeger in place, Feldman inserted the mouthpiece and put a clip over his nose, while the diver helped him into the boots that would keep his feet on the deck.

‘Here, sir,’ said the diver, and gave Feldman a pair of goggles.

‘Anything else, sir?’ said the sub-lieutenant, ‘Are you comfortable? Nothing too tight? Are your tools and torches OK, sir?’ Feldman took out the mouthpiece.

‘Yes,’ he said, noting what they’d called him. He thought of that and he thought of Gavriel Landau and he didn’t know what else to think. What was right and what was wrong? What was anything? Why was he doing this? He didn’t know.

‘Herr Feldman,’ said Captain Sohler.

‘Yes, Captain?’

‘We shall leave you now.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘We’ll secure the hatch to the control room, and then you can flood this compartment. It’ll take a while, so don’t turn on your oxygen until the last moment.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘You should then be able to open the hatch into the torpedo room.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Then once you’ve got rid of those torpedoes ...’

‘God willing,’ said Feldman.

‘God willing,’ said Sohler. ‘Once you’ve done that, get back in here, secure the hatch to the torpedo room, blow the water out of this compartment, knock on the hatch to the control room, and we’ll drink a bottle of schnapps, right?’ Feldman smiled.

‘Yes, Captain.’ Feldman looked round at the little cabins. ‘Sorry about all your beds and things.’

‘Bah!’ said Sohler. ‘That’s nothing compared to flooding the battery compartments underneath. If this boat weren’t so big, with more batteries in other tubes ….’ But that didn’t matter. Something else did. Sohler stood to attention and saluted. ‘You are a very brave man, Herr Feldman,’ he said, and all the rest raised their hands to their caps; all but von Bloch. He felt the urge to salute, because he knew bravery when he saw it, but he served a greater cause.

*

Then they all clambered back into the control room and the last man waved, the hatch slammed, and Feldman stood – horribly, utterly, and totally alone – in the empty compartment, and flicked on his first torch to make sure it would work, which it did because it was German. Then he opened the valves that let in the sea, and the vent-holes to let out the air, and the water roared and gushed and soon there was debris and foam around his massive boots; the icy-cold black wet rose until it reached his chest. He put the mouthpiece in place, opened the oxygen valve, and the re-breather unit billowed out; the cold stabbed at his chin and cheeks and most painfully into his brow.

The process was hideous. Feldman wanted to swim, to get away, to keep his head above water; with the deck head seeming to close down upon him, and the water rising over his mouth, and the layer of air reduced to an arm’s reach over his head, the sense of claustrophobia was appalling, dragging memories out of his mind where they’d been buried.

He was in a ruined U-boat on the sea-bottom. He was senior officer in a flooded motor-compartment, wearing the bulky Draeger of the Kaiser’s war, and men were screaming and fighting for the escape hatch, too terrified even to breathe through their Draegers; Feldman was lifting a spanner and striking down some, so that the rest might escape, including himself last of all, except for one poor lad who should have gone before Feldman, but panicked absolutely, and kicked and fought and would not go through the drill, so Feldman – driven beyond anything a man can bear – shoved him aside and left him to drown, and escaped himself. Feldman was indeed a very brave man to be wearing a Draeger again: far braver than Captain Sohler knew.

Then the compartment lights fused, and Feldman was back in the present; the noise stopped as the last of the air went bubbling up to the surface, and Feldman was left only with the dim glow of his waterproof torch, and was using that to find the hatchway.

He took two steps. Clump. Clump. The boots did their job. They kept him upright. He didn’t float away. He unclipped the hatchway. He drew it wide back, he ducked and squeezed and pushed and pulled, and something caught, then tore, bringing awful fear that he might have ripped the re-breather bag, but it wasn’t that, and then he was through.

Inside the torpedo compartment he found miserable gloom, profound shadow, dim outlines and distorted metal that made everything even more of a wild chaos of pipes, valves, wheels, switches, tubes, levers, rails, and wires than was present when the compartment was brand new, and the compartment was very far from being brand new. The explosion of a warhead right inside it had blasted steel and torn brass, and driven small pieces of men jammed into corners and crevices. Feldman saw these fragments in the beam of his torch. Some had bits of hair attached. Some flapped in the currents he made as he moved. Some had scraps of uniform. Some were recognizable as parts of human beings and some were not.

In those dreadful surroundings, Daniel Feldman attempted to find the local controls that would launch the live torpedoes and send them to explode in safety, somewhere far ahead of the boat … if that were the right thing to do. The proper and loyal thing to do. The trouble was, deciding where loyalty lay.

*

Sohler, in the control room, had the Führerboat running on creep-motors and dead-silent routine, as if an enemy above were hunting them. But this time the enemy was on board. It was three warheads that couldn’t make up their minds whether or not to explode, and Sohler was determined to give them no reason to do so. He explained this to von Bloch, who didn’t understand why they hadn’t blown already, though the reasoning was only Sohler’s best guess.

‘They’re the very latest weapons and they’re full of SSA electronics.’

‘Yes?’ said von Bloch.

‘The electronics were designed by your leader, himself.’

‘Herr Svart?’

‘Yes. Herr Svart! And I don’t know what overrides and safeties he’s built into those warheads that might be stopping them from exploding, and which we don’t want to disturb, and it would be helpful to say the least if we could have him here to advise.’ Sohler looked round the control room, and his crewmen nodded.

Von Bloch shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said, ‘Herr Svart cannot be moved.’

‘Then I’ll send our doc to see him. You haven’t got an actual doctor down there in his tube, have you?’

‘Irrelevant,’ said von Bloch. ‘Herr Svart cannot be moved or disturbed.’

‘Well, at least let’s get a proper diagnosis and … Shhh!’ said Sohler. ‘Listen!’

…
clump
…
clump
…
clump
.

Dull sounds ran through the boat from the bow. The boat was so quiet that Feldman’s heavy footsteps could actually be heard.

‘He’s moving again,’ said Sohler. ‘Everyone quiet.’ It was stuffy in the control room with the ventilators off for silence, because the control room was full of men. Kuhnke, Huth, and the other lieutenants were there, and the watch on duty sat or stood at their stations, with open-neck shirts, faces shiny with sweat, and everyone listening.

…
shhhhhhhhhhhhh
…

A gushing-water sound came from the torpedo room.

‘Ah!’ said Sohler. ‘He’s flooding the tubes. One of them anyway. Just one.’

‘What does that mean?’ said von Bloch.

‘To fire the fish he’s got to go through a drill.’