Agent of Death (27 page)

Hold
the
missile
ready
for
use
at
short
notice
.

Report
any
failings
to
me
instantly
.

A
.
Svart
Oberstgruppenführer SSA
.’

*

Lieutenant Huth laid out the diagram on a lower bunk in the other ranks sleeping compartment. There was nowhere else to display it. There was too much work and noise in the control room. The big sheet of glossy paper, stamped with SSA lettering and codes, was far too big for the narrow bunk. But it gave a general view of the boat, and the men crowding behind him strained to see it.

Huth tried to concentrate. He was twenty years old, he was carrying intolerable responsibility, and he was near his limit. The other surviving lieutenant, now supervising work in the control room, was even younger, even more stressed, and the whole crew was in shock that their captain was gone. They’d thought he was superman. They’d thought he was immortal. Once – while fitting out and things were not going well – Kuhnke had brought them together and all he had to say was, ‘The captain doesn’t think we’re working hard enough,’ and some of the men had shed tears of shame. But now they’d seen their superman thrown down when a high-pressure line burst, the broken bones sticking out of his ribcage, Lieutenant Kuhnke’s head smashed open, and both of them now under the surgeons in the sick bay.

Huth looked at the blueprint. It showed the four tubes of the monster craft, in plan, elevation, and cross sections, giving details of its fittings right down to Herr Svart’s personal toilet in the forward half of the port tube. Huth had never seen any of this before because the SSA didn’t trust the Kriegsmarine. Huth had the plan now, only because Captain Sohler had passed him the key to the top secret locker before they took him off to the docs. Huth thought all this secrecy was stupid. How could the U-boatsmen run the boat if they couldn’t see it? Huth hated the blackshirts, especially Weber.

He forced his mind back to the boat. It was a masterpiece of improvisation, a leap into the future, a work of engineering genius. But it was an abomination of over-complexity thrust into service before it was ready. In a normal boat – even a type XXI – there could have been no such disasters with torpedoes as there’d been in this one. Or was it all sabotage by the slavies as lower-deck gossip said? Huth didn’t know.

‘The captain says this is what saved us,’ he said, and everyone leaned forward as he pointed to the torpedo compartment of the upper tube. ‘The first explosion blew out the foremost end,’ he said, pointing at the compartment astern of it, ‘while this compartment was flooded by Feldman so he could get into the torpedo room.’ They nodded. Huth continued. ‘So when the second lot went off, there was a way for the explosion to get out for’ard, and the bulkhead astern was backed by water pressure.’ He tapped the flooded section. ‘So the captain says it was like a gun going off: the breech held firm, and the blast went out of the muzzle. Most of it anyway … some of it.’

Huth’s finger moved across the blueprint to a longitudinal section of the starboard tube.

‘This one’s gone,’ said Huth. ‘Even if the fires are out, it’ll have no air, and be full of fumes and all its equipment melted.’ The finger moved to the lower tube. ‘We’ve still got some of this one. Compartments one to ten are smashed, nothing works, most of the lights are gone and we’ve lost some battery power. But the stern compartments are sound, with only a few leaks, and that gives us one full set of usable motors and fuel tanks that can drive screws. That’s two MAN six-cylinder diesels, two GU365 electric motors, and the creep motor for quiet running. And that’s just as well, because we can’t use the upper-tube motors to drive their screws because something’s fouling the port screw, and the starboard shaft is warped and shaken out of its mountings.’ He turned and looked at the men; at the chief petty officers who were his advisors. ‘Any suggestions?’ he said.

‘Can we clear the port screw, sir?’ said someone, and they all looked at the diver.

‘I’ll go, sir,’ he said, at once, ‘I’ll have a look.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Huth. But he’d heard the clang when they tried to drive the upper-tube port screw. The boat rang like Fat Peter, the giant bell of Cologne Cathedral, as the propeller struck something massive and stopped dead. Huth turned back to the blueprint. ‘So we’ve got about half of our battery power, plus the lower-tube engines driving their screws, and the bow blown to pieces, and some of the struts gone that are supposed to hold the boat together. But the snort works, and enough ballast tanks are sound so we can surface.’ Huth fell silent, thinking hard. He was silent for so long that those around him shuffled and looked at one another.

‘Sir?’ said the diver. ‘What do we do now?’

Huth knew only the simple answer: the one which didn’t involve the Mem Tav missile. But he still thought dangerous thoughts. The younger men – which was to say most of them including himself – had no wives and children back home. They could imagine a new life if the old one died, and there was lower-deck gossip on that – plenty of it. Without Sohler to lead them, the men were wondering if it really, truly, definitely was a good idea to wipe out the people of New York? Seven million of them? Would that keep the Red Army out of Germany? Would the Yankees even listen to Svart? And if not, what would they do to those who fired the missile?

‘We fix the boat,’ said Huth. ‘We fix everything we can, and get round what we can’t.’

So Huth and his men did their best. In three days they stopped all leaks, rewired the boat, reconnecting the parts that worked, and isolating the parts that did not; they repaired the control room, sealed off the port tube, ran the upper-tube motors to recharge batteries, got the galley working to serve hot food, and put load on the lower-tube screws and found that if they went dead slow they could make way, provided the boat ran with the conning tower breaking surface, but the ruined bow underwater where the waves couldn’t get at it.

That was the limit of their success because, if they submerged properly, the water pressure forced leaks through the damaged hulls which could never again be fully watertight and, if they drove the boat too hard, it started to come apart. But running awash, at less than four knots, the boat could proceed towards its target. In addition, Weber’s men had cleared the Fieseler missile from the steam generator, fuelled and tested it, and found that everything worked. Which brought back the big question: the one that Huth couldn’t answer. Were they going to fire the missile or not? Huth did not dare discuss that with Weber because he knew what Weber would say.

Then, on the sixth of June, fortune solved the problem.

The control room was functioning on basic, U-boat standard equipment. All SSA complexities were shut down and no more slavies were allowed anywhere near them. But there was one SSA device still working: in the radio room, a tiny cell where the petty officer signaller was on watch.

‘Sir! Lieutenant Huth,’ said the signaller, leaning out to look for him.

‘What is it?’ said Huth.

‘Signal, sir! U-boat frequency. Standard Kriegsmarine code followed by SSA Code Category III. That’s Punno Island signalling, sir.’

Huth pushed past the planes men and the helmsman at their stations and put his head into the tiny compartment. The signaller sat on his chair, with earphones on his head, a bank of complex radio equipment in front of him, and a stream of tape chattering out from the printer of an SSA Enigma.

‘I put the Morse straight into the decoder, sir, as soon as I got the warning from standard code. It prints out in plain. It’s nearly done. It’ll repeat to make sure we’ve got it, but it’s nearly done.’

Huth looked down as the printer stopped; the signaller tore off the message strip and handed it to Huth, who read it with amazement, because it was from Punno Island all right, but – unbelievably, incredibly – it was sent on behalf of Churchill, the British prime minister! At first, he read it with such relief that he nearly fainted. But then a surge of doubt, because he’d have to consult Weber after all. There was nobody else. No senior officer to take away the decision. Captain Sohler had reacted badly to the anaesthetic. He’d woken up vomiting heavily, broken open his stitched chest and been sewn up again and sedated. Poor Lieutenant Kuhnke, massively brain-damaged, had died on the operating table.
Freiherr
von Bloch was helplessly weak after intensive surgery, and Svart was in and out of consciousness … as usual … so his team said. That left Huth and Weber.

But agreement came with astonishing ease.

‘No question,’ said Weber, summoned to the control room and shown the signal. ‘The British have got sense after all.’ He waved the paper at Huth and grinned in triumph. ‘This is what Herr Svart’s been working for. So you send a reply right now, Lieutenant Huth.’ He pointed towards the signaller, who sat looking out into the control room. ‘You tell him to crank up that sodding machine and send a signal right now. Tell the Tommies we want to talk!’

Huth agreed. He agreed absolutely, but for entirely different reasons. It was the perfect way to avoid launching the missile. It was the perfect way out of a war that Germany wasn’t going to win. It was the perfect way to avoid Yankee vengeance. And it might still keep the Red Army out of the Homeland.

CHAPTER 32

The
War
Rooms
,

Beneath
the
Treasury
Building
,

Clive
Steps
,
King
Charles’
Street
,
London.

Wednesday
7 June
,
08
.
10
hours.

Ruth Young had the most perfect English voice. She sounded like a mixture of Jessie Matthews and Princess Elizabeth, and wore a woollen twinset, with an English row of pearls round her English neck. She was a ‘bright young thing’, like the elegant ‘gels’ that appeared, full-page portrait, at the front of
Country
Life
– Lady Dunabunk, The Hon. Miss Moneysack, and the lovely Miss Brokebut-Noblyborn. All very English and proper. But then she delivered one of the most unconsciously funny lines I’d ever heard. She read it from standing orders.

‘I must warn you,’ she said, ‘that the enemy is recording your conversation and will compare it with previous information, thus great discretion is necessary.’ But that was just the preamble. ‘Any indiscretion,’ she warned, ‘will be reported by the censor … to the highest authority,’ which was hilarious, because the person being threatened with the headmaster’s wrath was Winston Churchill himself.

‘Huh!’ he said. A tolerant grunt. We heard it on our earphones because he was in another room – the transatlantic telephone room – while Ruth Young, Margaret Comings, and I, together with a switchboard girl and two GPO engineers, were sitting in a narrow, cigarette-smoked cell, listening to the great man about to talk to Franklyn D. Roosevelt in the White House.

*

Nantwich
had brought home Lord Leonard’s expedition at tearing speed and a white wash trailing behind. So we were nudging into Harwich after only seventeen hours steaming, and I slept most of it because I was that tired. We docked at Harwich in the dark of the night at 02.45, because on the seventh of June – D-day plus one – we were forbidden to get anywhere near the massive seaborne traffic crossing the south-west English Channel, taking the British, Americans, and Canadians to the Normandy beaches. Our mission was important, but not as important as that.

Margaret was waiting for me on the floodlit Harwich Docks. She got a huge cheer and whoops and whistles from the crew and commandos, because she amazed all the world, and profoundly amazed me. She jumped at me, threw her arms round me, and kissed me in the classic pose: right leg stretched high on tip-toe, left leg bent up at the knee. I know that because one of Leonard’s men took a picture, and I’ve still got it. It’s a very important picture.

She got a salute, too, from Captain Draper, up on his bridge, who’d sent a coded signal giving our destination and ETA. But only that and no more, for secrecy. So we had an hour’s meeting with Leonard and Draper in
Nantwich
’s wardroom, to brief her, so she could talk to Whitehall via a secure landline from the dockyard. Then it was another tearing journey, this time down the A12 in her Bentley, past Colchester and Chelmsford and into London through the poor, battered East End with the sun coming up on its scars and bomb sites, and the buildings all grimy with ancient soot. But the street markets were opening up and the milkmen were on their rounds; it was the biggest city in the world, still unconquered, and millions of free people were getting ready to get up and go to their work. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was what we were fighting for.

The journey through Essex hadn’t been too bad. It was just very fast. But getting through London was different again. Imagine history’s finest racing driver – Juan Manuel Fangio – then imagine he’d ‘done the knowledge’ as a London cabbie, and been given a fiver to get through the endless road blocks, road-ups, UXBs, and diversions at record speed. That’s how Lady Margaret Comings drove. Her knowledge of the city was amazing. She finally gave up on the East End, crossed Tower Bridge, ran south of the river, and re-crossed at Westminster Bridge. So I didn’t sleep much on that journey. At least there wasn’t much traffic at that time in the morning.

But she still talked, because she had a lot to tell me; things she hadn’t mentioned to Draper and Leonard.

‘Your signal worked,’ she said, as the car left Harwich. ‘The signal from Punno Island, so well done!’ She said it with such enthusiasm that I wondered if her kiss-hello had been for that rather than any personal reasons. But that was me and that was her. ‘They transmitted your birthday code, and asked for help,’ she said.

I struggled to keep up.

‘D’you mean Svart? Did he reply? If he was on Punno then I certainly couldn’t find him.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘someone called Weber replied. He’s an SSA officer. A
Standartenführer
. He replied on Svart’s behalf.’

‘Did you get their position? Are they in a U-boat at sea?’

‘We don’t know if it’s a U-boat, but they’re in something at sea.’ She looked at me as she spun the car round a corner, feeding the wheel, as I grabbed a dangling, plaited-rope hand-hold to keep my seat. ‘We got a good fix from several stations. They’re in the North Atlantic and, listen to this, they’re somewhere east of New York. A few hundred miles east.’ She glanced at me again, as she straightened the big car on to its new road and flattened the accelerator.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ I said. ‘If it is that sub then they’ve got a Mem Tav flying bomb on board. We thought they were going after London or Manchester, but it looks like it’s New York! Have we told the Yanks?’

‘We’re trying to,’ she said, ‘but there’s more. The U-boat sent another signal about an hour after they replied to ours. It was a different code. We think it’s another SSA code, so the signal’s not for us and we’re trying to crack it at Bletchley, but we can’t have all the time we need on a Colossus because everything’s turned on to German traffic about Normandy. Everything’s Normandy, Normandy, Normandy!’ I didn’t know what to say. I was still tired because you don’t sleep that well on a destroyer going forty knots.

‘So what are we doing?’ I said. ‘Can we alert the US Navy to go out and sink the U-boat? Or warn the US Air Force about the doodlebug?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We dare not tell Washington. Not in plain nor in any sort of code, because we have to assume the SSA will crack it. So we can’t send a radio message, or send anything down the Atlantic cable, because we can’t secure that at the US end. We have to be terribly careful because if the SSA knows we’re deceiving them we’ll lose the sub and they’ll attack New York anyway.’

‘Can’t we tell Eisenhower’s people in London? Surely London’s full of senior Yanks?’

‘Same thing applies, only more so, because they don’t know about Mem Tav or Svart – not yet, because we haven’t told them. And they won’t be pleased we’ve kept it from them. They’ve got plenty else to worry about just now, such as the biggest seaborne invasion in history, and the German army fighting back hard against it. So Eisenhower might not take us seriously. He might even think that US codes are unbreakable, and send a signal that Svart can pick up.’

‘What about sending a courier to Washington? By air?’

‘That’s Plan B,’ she said, ‘and you’re him, if it comes to that, with a personal message from Churchill to Roosevelt. I’ve spoken to Bletchley, and they’ll talk to Whitehall and have an aircraft standing by to take you.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and what’s Plan A?’

*

‘Mr White?’ said Churchill.

‘Mr Smith?’ said Roosevelt. The voices buzzed in our earphones, and Roosevelt’s waxed and waned with the strength of the incoming radio signal, but the two leaders of western democracy were speaking live to one another, and in supposed secrecy because the transmissions were scrambled. Unfortunately it was highly likely that the Germans – even the ordinary Germans, let alone the SSA – could unscramble the calls and listen in. Hence Ruth Young’s solemn warning, which she read out even when the King was using the link. So Churchill accepted the rebuke, but he laughed at being called ‘Smith’, a precaution that he thought ridiculous.

‘Mr White,’ he said, ‘do you suppose that even the most obtuse of Teutons could fail to recognize our voices?’

‘They’ll certainly recognize yours,’ said Roosevelt.

‘Then, my dear sir, may I first apologize for summoning you at this dreadful hour. It is eight fifteen in the morning here, so you must be suffering in the dark watches of the night.’

‘No, sir,’ said Roosevelt. ‘There’s not much sleeping being done in this house. Not with such busy events afoot on your side.’

Ruth Young clapped a hand to one of her earphones and reached out for a switch, ready to break the call if necessary. At twenty-two years old, she was the censor charged with preventing any indiscretion because a whole range of topics was forbidden. There could be no mention of troop movements, convoys, casualties, V1 or V2 strikes, even food shortages, and much else. It was her job to interrupt and point out mistakes, and she had to be quick. She had to anticipate and, on this occasion – with so unique and special a topic under discussion – she had Lady Margaret and me at her side to advise.

‘Quite so, Mr White,’ said Churchill, ‘with your young men and mine equally involved.’ Ruth’s hand trembled over the switch. But she didn’t touch it. Hitler must know by now that the invasion was under way, so no secrecy was needed here. But then Churchill changed tack.

‘Mr White,’ said Churchill, ‘we must now turn, without preamble, to other matters which I know you will find of great personal interest.’

‘Proceed, Mr Smith.’

‘I refer you to book five, page two hundred and thirty-six, lines eleven to thirteen.’

There was a silence and a faint murmuring from the American end as Roosevelt was handed a book. At the same time, our switchboard girl snatched up a book from a rack on the desk. The rack held a row of books with big, bold numbers fixed to their spines on white sticky paper. An identical rack, with identical books, was on the other side of the Atlantic. Our girl opened book five – a bible – at page 236, looked for lines eleven to thirteen, and found Jeremiah, chapter 37, verse 10:

For
though
ye
had
smitten
the
whole
army
of
the
Chaldeans
that
fight
against
you
,
and
there
remained
but
wounded
men
among
them
,
yet
shall
they
rise
up
every
man
in
his
tent
,
and
burn
this
city
with
fire
.

‘I have the reference,’ said Roosevelt. ‘I have read it and I ask, to whom do these words refer? Who is it that might suffer the wrath of these men?’

‘Yourself, Mr White.’

‘And to which place do we refer? The place that shall be visited by the men in the tents?’

‘A place very dear to you, Mr White.’ Voices just out of hearing spoke on the American side. Roosevelt obviously had advisors around him. ‘A moment, Mr Smith,’ said Roosevelt, and his line went silent. Then he came back. ‘Are you telling me, Mr Smith, that events shall proceed – in the place of which we speak – as in the last five words of line thirteen?’

Ruth tapped her finger on the words ‘burn this city with fire’.

‘Not quite, Mr Smith, because my point in summoning this quotation was first to advise that you should consider persons you may wrongly suppose to have become harmless.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Roosevelt, ‘I take your drift.’

‘So,’ said Churchill, ‘as regards the events that shall proceed, I refer you to book seven, page five hundred and sixty-seven …’ Churchill paused and counted, ‘… line twenty-three.’ Our girl grabbed a
Complete Works of Shakespeare
and found the reference – which, incidentally, Churchill had thought of unprompted, on the instant, exactly as for the Jeremiah quote. This time it was Mercutio from
Romeo and Juliet
, Act 3, Scene 1.

A
plague
on
both
your
houses
.

‘It is the second word of this line which describes the event that you should be informed of,’ said Churchill. ‘It is the most extreme and irresistible of its kind …’ – this time my hand shot out to the switch that would cut the communication – ‘… that can be imagined,’ said Churchill, ‘and it will be delivered by the persons I named in my first quotation.’ There was another private conversation at the American end. I took my hand away.

Then Roosevelt spoke. ‘Mr Smith?’

‘Sir?’

‘The time here – Eastern Standard Time – is half past two in the morning.’