Agent of Death (26 page)

And of course we sent out the signal to Svart.

Now we had to wait to see if he got it, and responded.

CHAPTER 31

The
Führerboat,

The
North
Atlantic.

Saturday
3 June
,
08
.
40
hours.

The Führerboat was heavy with medical staff. The senior doctor was a
Stabsartz
– a staff medical officer – with a rank equivalent to that of a naval captain. He was Kristoff-Leon Billroth, who had qualified at Heidelberg in 1922 and enjoyed a distinguished civilian career before volunteering for the Kriegsmarine, being a yachtsman and a patriot, convinced by Hitler’s rhetoric. He was a fine surgeon, heading a team of two second lieutenant assistant surgeons and four medical orderlies, chosen from the best in the German naval service.

The boat’s sick bay was equally large and contained every refinement of modern medicine, including an operating room with the latest in oxygen/nitrous-oxide anaesthetic machines from the same Draeger company that manufactured submarine escape kits. There was also a pharmacy that held a range of drugs including even American penicillin, which the Reich could not make and which had been sourced via Sweden.

This massive over-endowment of medical resources reflected the original role of the boat as the Führer’s escape route, equipped to preserve his infinitely precious life at all costs. Since Abimilech Svart placed identical value on his own life, medical provision was left unchanged when he took over the Führerboat, which meant that Billroth and his large team had nothing to do for months other than treat cuts and sprains at Besuboft 1. So they were now secretly delighted to have real patients needing real surgery, indeed, such were the numbers of patients that Billroth’s sick bay attendants were overloaded, and slavies – having nothing better to do – were scrubbed clean, dressed in whites, and put to work on the more menial jobs, such as fetching, carrying, and emptying bed-pans.

The first patient for surgery was von Bloch.

‘Thiopentone, Herr
Freiherr
,’ said Billroth, in his surgical whites, cap, and mask. Von Bloch nodded, trusting if not understanding, and his eyes closed as Billroth pressed the plunger of a hypodermic, its needle in the back of von Bloch’s hand. Billroth looked at the white-clad medical orderly standing on the other side of the steel table where von Bloch lay draped in white towels, with a rectangle of exposed abdomen painted brown with tincture of iodine. ‘Good veins on this man,’ said Billroth. ‘An easy access.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the orderly, standing ready to pass instruments.

‘And thiopentone’s a good induction agent,’ said Billroth, slipping into lecture mode, ‘so long as the patient’s fluid volume is satisfactory.’ Billroth glanced round his operating room. It was better than those in most hospitals ashore, sparkling clean, with excellent lighting, just so long as the boat’s electricity kept working, because the lights constantly dimmed and revived. Also the operating room rolled slowly as the submarine rolled, because the boat was hurt far worse than von Bloch, but that wasn’t a surgeon’s responsibility.

Billroth looked at the unconscious von Bloch, then at the lieutenant anaesthetist sitting by the Draeger machine at the patient’s head.

‘Intubate,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the lieutenant, and slid a Mackintosh, curved-blade laryngoscope into von Bloch’s mouth and down his trachea, using it to insert a rubber breathing-tube to keep the airway clear, before withdrawing the Mackintosh, a British instrument, and putting a Draeger, a German anaesthetic mask, over von Bloch’s face. Only the best was good enough for the Führerboat. Origin was irrelevant.

Once von Bloch was fully anaesthetized Billroth spoke again.

‘Curare,’ he said, and the orderly passed him a hypodermic. Billroth slid the needle into a vein and pressed the plunger. ‘A relaxant,’ said Billroth, ‘which paralyses the muscles so they don’t contract.’ He smiled behind his surgical mask. ‘It was hard work in the old days. Like cutting leather. Curare makes the muscles soft, so you get through easily, by blunt dissection. But of course it stops the patient breathing.’ He looked to the anaesthetist who was already squeezing the anaesthetic machine’s breathing-bag to ventilate the patient. ‘Good,’ said Billroth, handing the syringe back to the orderly. ‘Knife,’ he said, and paused, as ever he did, in the satisfying moment before commencing the procedure, relishing the opportunity to teach. ‘Now we’ll open up and trace the bullet’s path,’ he said, ‘cauterising any haemorrhage, repairing any tears, and cleaning out any faecal contamination should the bowel be pierced. Then once we’ve closed up, leaving a drain for excess fluid, we’ll give penicillin to deal with any source of infection we may have missed.’ He smiled again. ‘And we’ll see if Yankee magic can stop the microbes killing the patient after all our good work!’ He slid his scalpel across von Bloch’s belly. ‘Here we go then,’ he said.

*

Weber stood clear of the work because a leader must observe and supervise, not heave and strain. He looked round. It was better here. Better than the starboard tube. Even he shuddered at the thought: the explosion, the shock waves, the boat going over. The smashing and shattering, the fishy smoke of burning Bakelite and hot flames, men fighting to get into the tunnel to the upper tube, and he himself slamming the hatch on the dead and dying left behind.

Weber closed his mind to that. The port tube was sound. He’d brought his men here to help. The bulkheads were holding, the lights were working, and the ventilators too. Weber supposed that was due to the battery capacity of the boat, which was enormous, even with the engines stopped as they were now. Meanwhile, if the port tube itself was sound, its contents were not. Complex equipment had shifted within packing cases, smashing planks, spitting nails, shearing bolts, and leaving the deck covered in debris.

He yelled at men trying to pull one crate clear of another. ‘No! Stop that! The bottom corner’s stuck into the one in front.’ He turned to a group of three men led by Sergeant Müller, waiting with specialist tools. ‘Müller,’ he said, ‘saw the corner off that case, and bring a crowbar and help lever the thing round.’

The men stopped work and looked at Weber. They were sweat-stained in singlets and trousers, and filthy with oil from a broken pipe. They looked like damned souls in a mechanized hell. Weber thought of Fritz Lang’s film
Metropolis
. He’d never seen it because it was communist crap, but he’d seen the advertising posters and his men looked like characters in the film. They were nervous and unsettled, out of their normal world and trapped in a broken submarine that groaned and creaked as it rolled. Torn metal screeched on metal, and the sound of hammering and power tools came from the distant upper tube where the navy was working.

So Weber found some words.

‘Sod it!’ he said to the men. ‘You’re lucky to be here. There’s dead buggers in that starboard tube, and others ripped open and limbs blown off and the whole sodding thing on fire. So you just remember who was last man out and kicked your arses through the hatch.’ Weber wasn’t subtle. He had no gift of eloquence, but the men remembered who’d stood by the hatch and shoved them through even as the flames roared and ammunition cooked off in ear-splitting explosions, while some screamed and fell and had to be rescued with their open wounds. Weber did that too. He was a sadist and a thug, but he was never defeated by fear, and had too little imagination to duck his duty.

‘Now get back to work,’ he said. ‘Mem Tav’s gonna scare the shit out of the Americans and make them stop the Russians, right?’ They still looked back at him, blinking. ‘
Right
?’ he said, and they nodded and got on with the job, because that was what they were trained to do.

‘Sir?’ said a voice behind Weber. It was an SSA technician, one of Svart’s personal crew. The technician was clean and smart in his unblemished uniform and side cap. He saluted Weber. He’d been waiting until Weber stopped shouting.

‘What?’ said Weber. ‘I’m busy here.’

‘Orders, sir. From Herr Svart.’

‘Oh,’ said Weber, and lost some of his brutish self-confidence at the name. ‘Has he woken up, then?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the technician. ‘Here are his orders, sir.’ He handed Weber a typed sheet. Weber read it and looked up. If he was surprised he didn’t show it. If he had doubts he didn’t show them.

He just raised his voice. ‘Müller,’ he said, ‘you’re in charge here. Send three men to come with me.’ And Weber set off astern towards the next compartment, the Fieseler compartment, which held the actual missile; the single one they’d had time to bring aboard before the boat sailed.

Five men clambered through the hole in the pressure bulkhead, Weber first and the technician last, sealing the hatch while Weber looked round and smelt the petrol because they weren’t actually in the Fieseler compartment, not yet. They were in an enclosed fuel store containing aviation fuel in twenty-litre cans, fifty of them, the famous containers that the allies copied and called Jerry Cans, because the Germans were
Jerries
to the British, just as the British were
Tommies
, and the Americans were
Amis
to the Germans. These cans held the fuel for the Fieseler’s motor, and Weber nodded in satisfaction that all were firmly in place and none were damaged or pierced, because he – Weber – recognizing the horrible danger of petrol leaks in a submarine, had insisted and repeatedly checked that they were clamped in racks of exceptional strength. So everything was in order.

There was another bulkhead and another hatch leading to the Fieseler compartment proper. Weber hadn’t been in here before. It was strictly forbidden to everyone but the Mem Tav crew, as were Svart’s personal quarters, further forward. The Fieseler compartment seemed empty compared with the generator compartment, and five men looked at Müller. They’d been making poor efforts to shift a long, slewed-round, broken-free skeleton case that showed the fuselage of a Fieseler flying bomb through the slats. The sleek, streamlined fuselage, with its engine, the
Argus
pulse-jet motor in the big tube fixed above the fin, and the stubby tail planes were attached, but the wings were in separate cases secured to the bulkheads. Also there were sections of collapsible launch ramp, and – smashed up against the Fieseler – was another big wooden skeleton case, two metres long by one and a half metres high, containing the T-Stoff/Z-Stoff steam generator that hurled the missile up the ramp and into flight.

This case had been torn from its mountings and crushed into the Fieseler case, jamming them together and entangling some of the steam generator’s pipework into the tail planes of the Fieseler. There were other, smaller cases too, lying in disorder. These contained the missile’s gyroscopic guidance system, its fuses, its electronic launch controls, its catalyst rack, and three separate cases for the Mem Tav precursors, ready to be filled into the generator in the missile’s warhead.

Weber recognized the cases by their stencilled numbers, because he’d been briefed with launch information in case of emergencies. But what actually went on inside these exotic devices was as mysterious to him as it would have been to a jungle savage. Nonetheless, Weber took control.

‘Attention!’ he said, and everyone stood rigid. ‘Herr Svart’s orders are as follows.’ He looked down and read aloud.

‘
Clear
and
secure
the
Fieseler
missile
and
the
steam
generator
.

Fill
the
steam
generator’s
T
-
Stoff
and
Z
-
Stoff
tanks
.

Test
and
check
the
steam
generator’s
controls
.

Install
and
check
the
missile’s
guidance
mechanism
.

Install
and
check
the
missile’s
catalyst
rack
.

Fill
the
missile’s
Mem
Tav
precursor
tanks
.

Fill
the
missile’s
main
fuel
tank
.

Connect
and
test
the
missile’s
electronic
controls
.

Check
that
the
launch
ramp
sections
are
intact
and
ready
for
assembly
.

Conduct
all
tests
to
check
the
missile
is
functional
.