Agent of Death (28 page)

‘Yes, Mr White.’

‘I therefore assume that you would not have called me except to discuss some matter of importance.’

‘The very greatest importance, sir.’

‘Then I must ask you to name the place that we are discussing.’

‘Book nine,’ Churchill paused, ‘page … thirteen hundred and forty-five … line twelve … second word.’

It was
The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation
… New York.

‘Ah,’ said Roosevelt, ‘and what are we to do about this? Can you not be more precise?’

‘Not with the Hun’s ear pressed to my door, Mr White.’

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘Cooperation, sir!’

‘But you have that already!’ Roosevelt was becoming puzzled and irritated, and the two men had a brief fencing match, which frustration drove closer and closer to the limit of patience, as Churchill tried his creative utmost to give detailed warning, without giving away that detail to any listening Germans. It was a time of unbelievable stress for each, with the Normandy invasion being contested even as they spoke, yet Churchill was trying to tell the president that something dreadful was under way somewhere else. So Roosevelt was demanding precision and Churchill was refusing to give it. Finally Churchill’s temper broke. He banged the desk with his fist and yelled down the phone.

‘Secrecy be damned,’ he said, ‘let us be done with secrecy! I must warn you that the nature of the peril is …’

And I cut him off. I switched off Winston Churchill’s telephone.

There was a growl in my headphones as if a bear had been robbed of its dinner. I looked at Ruth Young.

‘Can I speak to him?’ I said. She nodded and picked up a phone handset. She gave it to me. ‘Mr Churchill?’ I said. ‘Sir?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Wing Commander Landau, sir. I’m very sorry Mr Churchill, but you …’

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re bloody sorry. And I’m bloody tired and so is the bloody president! Put me back on, this instant minute, and I’ll ask him for every possible cooperation in a matter to be defined by courier. Do that, then bloody well see me in the Cabinet room, and bring Lady Margaret bloody Comings with you!’

So that was me summoned to the headmaster, which made me think of my meeting with Joe Stalin. He could have had me killed any way he liked, while the worst Churchill could do was shout. So I shouldn’t have been nervous. But I was.

Margaret and I thanked Ruth and the others and we walked down a plain, dull, corridor with white gloss-painted brick walls and marine sentries everywhere, giving everyone the hard eye and studying everyone’s passes because the place was electric with activity, thumping with excitement, echoing with noise, and full of officers of all the services. We went past the Map Room: heart and soul of the British war effort, with its famous rows of coloured telephones, red, cream, green, white, and black – all jumping off their shelves with ringing and speaking – and generals and admirals shouting at one another, Wrens bringing in bundles of notes and photos, chaps holding conferences in front of a map of Normandy, and others running forward to move pins and maps as the news came it.

It was a low, bright space with bulky white wooden trusses and beams to support the ceiling in case a direct hit smashed the six feet of concrete that lay in a great slab over this underground chamber. It was something to see, and I doubt there was ever so much to see as there was on the seventh of June 1944.

The Cabinet room was quiet by comparison. There were big, red-painted, riveted steel beams here, to support the ceiling if need be, and lines of square ventilator trunking round the walls. There were maps on the walls, and four continuous lines of green-baize-topped tables forming a hollow square round the room, with seats for about twenty people. Churchill was already there, seated with his back to the far wall, facing the door, with a fine display of military rank on either side of him. There was at least one admiral, plus an air marshal, a couple of generals, and a full Royal Navy captain – the lowest British rank present – who took notes and probably brought in the tea. There was also a three-star US general, with a colonel scribbling shorthand; the pair of them were finding out about Mem Tav for the first time, and both wore sour looks on their faces.

But the first thing I noticed was what Churchill was wearing. It was one of his siren-suits, a set of all-in-one overalls that he wore over his pyjamas if woken in the night; better than a dressing gown and equally warm. He liked them and wore them even as normal working wear. I’d seen pictures of him in a siren-suit before – everyone had – but those were black-and-white newspaper pictures and I’d assumed his siren-suits were made of something dark and practical, like a workman’s overalls, so I was surprised to see that this particular suit was claret-red and made of silk velvet. It seemed that the great man liked to dress up.

‘Ah!’ he said, as we came in and chairs scraped and rumbled as he and his top brass stood politely for Margaret. ‘Do sit down, my dear,’ he said, and smiled. So all was forgiven. Or perhaps it was her. He beamed at her as if he’d have eaten her inch by inch, given the chance. But he smiled at me. ‘And you too, Wing Commander,’ he said, ‘sit down.’

Then he plunged straight into business, spending a lot of time talking to Lady Margaret, because she had all the details anyway, and I was dazed and tired. So he addressed her – which he did by her first name – and she played up to him for all she was worth: eyelashes, pouting, laughing, which of course she would, wouldn’t she? That was her. But it was all serious stuff just the same, and he wasn’t satisfied with anything less than full detail, and pressed sharp questions if he didn’t get it fast, and the Captain RN was sent out several times to bring in maps, and summon still lesser minions with the latest information on allied warships at sea, and finally to send documents by motorcycle dispatch rider to General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander at the Normandy Invasion Headquarters.

So a strategy was agreed and, later, there was a brief discussion of how – having been dropped out of an aircraft close by a US Navy ship, and having been picked up by it, if I was lucky – I could persuade the US captain that the president and the British prime minister were ordering him personally to do everything that I asked, on trust, instantly, and with no signals sent by radio?

When it came to that, Churchill declared: ‘I’ll come with you! If I can ride a horse – which I can – I can jump by parachute and swim in the sea.’ He laughed. ‘Even I will float to some degree, when buoyed up by a life jacket!’ He was seventy years old and a lumpish figure of a man, but when he said that, I thought he meant it, and I said so later to the air marshal who took charge of me on the way out.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the air marshal, ‘he’d have gone. You won’t know, because it was kept quiet, but the IRA tried to kill him a couple of years ago: ambushed his car in St James’s, when it stopped at a junction. His bodyguard tried to push Winston out of the line of fire, but Winston pulled a pistol.’ The air marshal looked at me. ‘He has a Colt.45 automatic. Keeps it about him all the time.’ The thought of that particular pistol stirred recent memories, and the air marshal mistook my expression for puzzlement so he added some explanation. ‘It’s the American military sidearm,’ he said, ‘their service issue. D’you know the type?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, ‘I know.’

‘Do you now?’ said the air marshal. ‘Well, Winston wasn’t having any of that! Being kept out of the fight I mean. So he elbowed the bodyguard in the ear, knocked him aside, then, while the driver was fumbling with the gears trying to get the car going, he smashed a window and emptied the pistol at the assassin, hit the blighter twice and killed him stone dead. So, Wing Commander, Winston would’ve gone with you all right, and jumped with you. But we won’t let him. We can’t risk him.’

I’m not given to hero-worship. Not when I’ve seen so much of the bad of the human race. But Churchill was part of the good. He was inspirational. He had such enthusiasm, such total confidence that we were going to win, such a powerful gift of language, and such wonderful, simple morality. If other men talked about honour, and decency, and valour, they’d be actors saying their lines. So nobody uses words like that, because nobody believes them if they do. But Churchill – he used those words and he meant them.

After that, Margaret drove me to Hendon aerodrome to get aboard a neat little de Haviland Dominie, a most beautiful biplane air liner painted silver with RAF roundels. It was bound for RAF St Eval in Cornwall, where a long-range Liberator of Coastal Command was waiting to take me, and a package of documents from Churchill now countersigned by Eisenhower, to attempt to find the aircraft carrier USS
Saint Mihiel
somewhere in the North Atlantic.

Margaret came with me, though she wasn’t supposed to. She sat beside me during the couple of hours that it took the Dominie to battle down to Cornwall against a westerly wind, and she didn’t say or do anything at first. There was just her and me, and the pilot up front, behind his door. So we were alone, sitting opposite one another, the Dominie being a small machine, with just one row of seats down each side and a narrow aisle between. Finally, and with obvious reluctance, she reached across and took my hand. I looked at her as the aircraft buzzed and bumped its way out of London, and I saw the frown as she forced herself to display affection because, for all her talents, being demonstrative was one that she didn’t have. Then she saw me looking, leaned across and kissed me briefly on the lips, then squeezed my hand, let go, and spent the rest of the flight looking out of the window.

Bloody woman. It was a happy two hours, just because she was there, having chosen to be there. On the other hand I realized that I had finally discovered precisely how to get a permanent place in her affections. It was easy. All I had to do was volunteer for certain death.

CHAPTER 33

The
Führerboat,

The
North
Atlantic.

Wednesday
7
June
,
02
.
00
hours

Von Bloch groaned as he had every physical right to do so. Four days ago he’d undergone major surgery and he’d been kept sedated ever since to keep his movements to a minimum, giving his surgical wounds their best chance to heal. Now Dr Billroth, the boat’s senior medic, was grinning at him in triumph, as one of the lesser medics finished re-dressing von Bloch’s incision after removal of the sutures that had held it together.

‘I can promise you a full recovery, Herr
Freiherr
,’ said Dr Billroth, delighted with himself for the fine job he’d done in repairing a particularly nasty wound, which had indeed perforated the large bowel and contaminated the abdominal contents. But now von Bloch was recovering nicely, with not a sign of infection, and was fully awake for the first time since his operation. Billroth graciously conceded that the American wonder-drug had helped, but most of the credit went to himself, and he grinned in the infinite ownership that any doctor has over any patient he has cured.

‘Oops!’ said Billroth, and he and his acolyte swayed to one side to get out of the way of another white-clad man, who bent below von Bloch’s middle bunk to reach a patient on the lower bunk, because there was one below von Bloch and another above him. But the
Freiherr
got the comfortably located middle one by virtue of his rank, and the severity of his injuries. Billroth looked round the tiers of bunks with pride. Lives had been saved and men healed. There were patients everywhere. There was too much work for his own staff, and slavies had been drafted in to help, and it was busy, busy, busy.

In that very moment, two surgical orderlies – slavies in whites – eased past each other and Billroth in the central aisle; one with a towel-covered bed-pan, and one with a bundle of dressings.

Billroth sighed in fully justified pride, and when von Bloch groaned it wasn’t because of pain, because there was very little pain in Dr Billroth’s efficient sick bay. There was far too much morphine for that, and Dr Billroth was not one of those who believed that suffering builds a patient’s moral strength. But still von Bloch groaned.

‘Tell me again,’ said von Bloch. ‘What did they do?’

‘They sent a reply,’ said Billroth merrily. ‘Everyone knows. The news went round the whole boat.’ Billroth smiled. ‘It means that we are out of the war! The British and the Americans are coming to rescue us, and they want to talk to …’

‘No!’ said von Bloch. ‘No, no, no!’ He tried to sit up, but Billroth pressed hands to his chest. But he didn’t have to press very hard. Von Bloch was fearfully weak, and any attempt to get up or out of the bunk brought nausea and near unconsciousness.

‘Lie still, Herr
Freiherr
,’ said Billroth. ‘If you stay there you will recover, but you cannot move. I forbid it and your body forbids it!’

Von Bloch nodded, and sank back and closed his eyes. He thought back to the execution of the slavie on the casing by the conning tower, and Captain Sohler shooting Sergeant Major Zapp, and the SSA troopers in the boat’s control room handing over their arms to the boat’s crewmen to be dumped in the sea, and Weber yelling in his face, foul and vile with gutter-born curses.

*

‘Let’s get the rest of the lads!’ he’d said. ‘We’ve got a dozen more in our tube. They’re still armed and I want them up here and shooting!’ Weber’s temper had gone, and von Bloch’s was close to going. He ignored Weber and turned to the black-coated troopers all round him.

‘Take this officer below,’ he said. ‘He is relieved of duties.’ Nobody moved, so von Bloch had yelled, ‘Y
ou
will
take
him
below
!’ The troopers looked from Weber to von Bloch. They dithered. Von Bloch shouted again, ‘
Take
him
now
!’

‘Sir!’ they’d said, and Weber was dragged off for yet another shouting match, later on in the starboard tube. But there was no battle for control of the boat, and the SSA troopers cleared the control room, with the submariners glaring hatred and the slavies gaping, as the SSA men headed for the starboard tube.

When they were gone, von Bloch had quietly made his way to the nearest hatch into the port tube. This hatch was astern of the control room, in one of the crewmen’s sleeping compartments, and it led into a brief, sloping passage that connected the upper tube to the port tube. Those submariners that he met stood to attention but otherwise ignored him. They didn’t dislike von Bloch as much as the rest. They thought he was the
good
bastard, and they knew where he was going, and they were only too pleased to see any blackshirt getting out of the Kriegsmarine tube into one of their own.

So von Bloch opened the inter-tube hatch, slid down the ladder and into one of the port tube storage compartments, packed full of Fieseler parts in their cases, where members of Svart’s personal team – the Fieseler team – saluted him. They were very different from SSA troopers. They were not fierce. They were serious men, technical men, much like the U-boatsmen.

Two more bulkhead hatches led through the fuel store, the Fieseler compartment, and to a hatch labelled exactly the same as the door to Svart’s office at Besuboft 1. It said
Oberstgruppenführer
A.
Svart
,
SSA
. The hatch was closed; locked from the inside. Von Bloch pressed a button beside the hatch. A buzzer sounded.

‘Who is it?’ said a voice from an intercom.

‘Von Bloch!’

‘Give your identification code.’

Von Bloch recited the number; there was a brief pause then the hatch opened and von Bloch climbed through, into a short antechamber, where two SSA guards sat ready to ensure that no danger penetrated into the Führer’s – now Herr Svart’s – inner sanctum. But von Bloch knew what was beyond. He’d been there when the boat was fitted out.

Beyond the antechamber was a big compartment, luxurious by submarine standards, with rich carpets and framed paintings depicting rural Germany with rosy-cheek peasants tilling the soil, performing rustic dances, and standing in adoration of the Führer’s statue in the village square. There was also a full-sized shower unit and toilet, a pair of proper beds and armchairs, and bedside lamps with tasselled shades.

But of course the Führer was not there, and neither was Fraulein Eva Braun. By now the Führer was cringing in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, with his hair turning white, needing drugs to sleep, drugs to wake, and wondering how his wonderful, beautiful, racially perfect Abimilech Svart had managed to steal the Führerboat while professing absolute loyalty to Führer and Fatherland? Von Bloch wondered if even so great a man as the Führer was nervous of Herr Svart? Von Bloch knew that he himself was, and he comforted himself with the thought that no man may gaze upon the sun without being blinded.

One of the guards spoke on the intercom.

‘General von Bloch is here. He’s given the proper code.’

‘Send him in,’ said a voice. So von Bloch went in and looked round the big compartment, and noted the changes from the original plan, which included a large plain table, a filing cabinet, a radio transmitter with an integral SSA Enigma machine, and a number of square, grey, metallic boxes with SSA markings, the biggest of which was connected via a pipe into the ventilation system. This box had a combination lock like that of a safe.

*

When he came out, after an extremely uncomfortable half hour, von Bloch was briefed with the powerful, logical, persuasive arguments that caused Captain Sohler to agree to carry out the will of Herr Svart as regards the city of New York. Now, as he lay sick and dizzy from surgery and anaesthetic, von Bloch thought of all this, and fell into the greatest doubt he had ever known, such that loyalty fought decency in a mighty struggle within him, and decency was defeated only by the narrowest of Pyrrhic victories.

*

‘Herr Doctor?’ said von Bloch to Billroth.

‘Herr
Freiherr
?’

‘You will please, and as a matter of vital urgency, bring Huth and Weber here to my bedside.’

Billroth frowned. ‘I’m afraid that is impossible,’ he said. ‘We cannot risk the infections that might result from … what are you doing?’ Billroth leaned forward as von Bloch made every determined effort to get out of the bunk. ‘No!’ said Billroth. ‘Your wound is barely closed!’ But von Bloch fell back, sick and exhausted.

Von Bloch faced reality. He couldn’t move, but he wasn’t finished. He forced himself to think and to speak. ‘Get Huth and Weber!’ he said. ‘In the name of the Fatherland, the Führer, and your honour as a German officer: bring them here!’

Billroth was impressed. ‘All right! All right!’ he said, ‘I’ll send for them. Just lie still.’

Huth and Weber were standing by the tiers of bunks within minutes.

‘Good,’ said von Bloch, and looked over Huth’s khaki shoulder to find Dr Billroth’s face. ‘And now get everyone else out of here. Everyone that can walk.’ Von Bloch looked at Weber. ‘See that he does it,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Weber. The medics muttered and complained, but soon there was only von Bloch, Huth, and Weber in the compartment, and those patients who could not be moved on risk of their lives. But they were semi-conscious or unconscious … all but one who lay still as if he were.

Von Bloch got himself up on one elbow. He tried to be calm.

‘Come close,’ he said, and waved feebly at Huth and Weber, ‘I do not want to shout.’ Huth and Weber crouched down beside the bed. Their shoulders met and they blinked at one another. ‘Gentlemen,’ said von Bloch, ‘you have made a serious mistake.’

‘What?’ said Weber, in denial. But Huth said nothing. He was tired. He’d been doing his utmost for days. He’d been working above and beyond duty with imperfect tools and exhausted men. He was all too ready to accept that something might have been forgotten, or left out, or done wrong. Von Bloch saw that in his face and shook his head with considerable sympathy.

‘My dear young man,’ he said, ‘you have sent a signal – a signal that may have betrayed our position to the enemy.’

‘
What
?’ said Weber.

‘But we said nothing about our position,’ said Huth. ‘We certainly didn’t give it away, and we replied on standard frequency like any other boat.’

Weber nodded. ‘Yeah!’ he said.

‘You didn’t have to give your position,’ said von Bloch. ‘If the enemy signal was a trap – which it could well have been – then the enemy will have been awaiting your reply, ready to triangulate the source. You should have thought of that.’

‘Oh,’ said Huth: a quiet, sad monosyllable. He closed his eyes as the guilt rolled over him. He should indeed have thought of that. Captain Sohler would have thought of it. Lieutenant Kuhnke would have thought of it …

‘Thought of what?’ said Weber, and von Bloch explained.

‘Oh,’ said Weber.

‘Oh, indeed,’ said von Bloch. ‘So this is what we must do.’ He looked at Weber. ‘You will enter the port tube.’

‘Yes, Herr
Freiherr
!’

‘You will go through the compartments towards the stern, until you find Herr Svart’s personal compartment. You will see his name by the bulkhead hatch.’

‘Yes,
Herr Freiherr
!’

‘You will announce your presence by pressing a button …’ Von Bloch faltered as he came up against matters of the most profound secrecy.

‘Herr
Freiherr
,’ said Weber, ‘am I to speak to Herr Svart? Speak personally to him?’ Von Bloch still said nothing.

‘Sir?’ said Weber.

‘Sir?’ said Huth, ‘Must we get orders from Herr Svart? Will he know what to do?’

Von Bloch made his decision.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you will not speak to Herr Svart, because Herr Svart is not on this boat.’