Agent of Death (33 page)

CHAPTER 38

Ship’s
Library
,

USS
Saint
Mihiel
,

300
Miles
East
of
New
York
.

Thursday
8
June
,
13
.
00
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

The US Navy rating was on library duty: clearing up, stacking shelves, and answering questions from the three officers reading in the library and asking for books.

He was Angelo Rivera, Mess Attendant First Class and he liked library duty because he liked books. He liked the ship’s library too: something The Old Man – Captain Fenner – took pride in, and which was fitted out with real wood bookshelves and tables and chairs, and lamps to read by, and it was a good, big library, open to all the ship’s people, by rota.

So Rivera smiled to himself as the Limey aviator leaned over a table beside the little German doll, and he wasn’t the only one looking because the three officers were looking too, with distant, wistful looks on their faces. They thought Landau was a lucky bastard because there wasn’t any other female company on board and he’d got it all.

Rivera put away a stack of
Life
magazines, closed a cupboard door, and looked again. Landau and the German girl were talking loudly, which was to say that
she
was talking loudly. They had papers and plans – all in German – spread out so they could look at them together under the table lamps. It was everything about the secret Kraut plane, and they stood side by side, with her pouring out German, and pointing at the plans, and smacking the flat of her hand on the paper for emphasis.

*

As for me, I tried to focus my attention as she continued into the second hour of the lecture. We’d completed the ground check and the cockpit check, we’d started up the two Junkers Jumo turbojets, and now we were getting under way.

‘Hold the aircraft on the main wheels,’ she said, ‘and open the throttle very, very slowly to seven thousand rpm.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Release brakes! Open throttles fully! Steer by using wheel brakes, because at so slow a speed the rudder is ineffective.’ The word is
unwirksam
in German, so she banged the table three times, ‘
Un
!
Wirk
!
Sam
!’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘ineffective.’

‘Make sure you remember! And so, when flying speed is achieved at one hundred and eighty to two hundred and twenty kilometres per hour ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Pull back the control column. Lift the nose wheel. Make the take-off!’ another slam on the table. ‘Note that by opening the throttle too fast before seven thousand rpm, there is danger of causing cavitation in one of the compressor stages. It is absolutely vital to avoid this!’

‘Hm,’ I said, and she stared at me fiercely, but I got the slightest flicker of suspicion that she was laughing at me inside her head.

‘Because,’ she said, leaning close and tapping me on the chest, ‘by running up too quickly, the compressor is overloaded and the smooth air flow breaks up, just as it does on a stalled wing, resulting in loss of power.’

‘Loss of power,’ I said, straining to absorb all this.

‘So!’ she said, with a wintry little smile. ‘When airborne, retract undercarriage and check that the landing gear indicator light shows green for the “up” position.’ And again I wondered if she was entirely serious. The English think the Germans have no sense of humour, which may be they don’t by English standards, but then who does? Nonetheless, I knew Germans and they laughed at lots of things and they had a strong sense of the ridiculous, so I began to wonder if Helga Karlsson saw me as ridiculous?

‘Up position,’ I said, and on she went. And on and on.

She was indeed boring. She was boring because she was so dedicated to aviation that she had no time for any other subject and no sympathy for anyone who did. And I say that as a dedicated airman myself! So the fact that she was boring me with her lecture on flying the Me 262 was a tribute to her talent as a world champion, Olympic-class bore. She was one on her own indeed: an odd, self-obsessed woman, and, other than flying, the great passion of her life was pleasing herself. That was why she’d ratted on the Jerries when she thought they were losing. That and relatives in the Norwegian resistance, her father being Norwegian.

And so to my ground-based flying lesson, because once we’d got our theoretical aircraft off the ground and up to cruising height, she turned the lecture round, and this time I was pretty sure that she was secretly grinning at me if not actively laughing.

‘Now, Wing Commander,’ she said, ‘let us assume that you are walking out towards the aircraft, to receive it from the ground crew and take it into the air.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So now,’ she said, ‘you will tell me what I have just told you, without looking at the notes.’ I did my best, even though I could see a couple of US Navy officers smiling at my predicament. But then the fascinating part of little Helga started up. She had a habit of fiddling with the zipper that closed her overalls, which weren’t US Navy, but something from back home, and when she got agitated she moved the zipper up and down, in a distracted, jerky movement and, the more mistakes I made, the more she worked the zipper. So, when I forgot to stress the vital need for a slow increase in rpm before seven thousand, she really got annoyed – seemed to anyway – and the zipper went up and down viciously.

‘No!’ she cried, ‘you must take care! Or you will destroy not only your life, but a ninety-thousand Reich mark aircraft, built of irreplaceable scarce resources, by thousands of hours of skilled labour!’ The zipper whizzed, demonstrating at its low point that she hadn’t much on underneath the overalls. It was fascinating but weird, because if Rita Hayworth had done it in a movie, the censor would have struck it right out, but when Helga did it, it was different; it was just cold, white flesh – white with some pink bits.

We went on like that for many hours over nearly two days, while the Avengers searched for the U-boat, the repair crews worked miracles, and the ship steamed in slow circles. We stopped only for canteen meals and I got so intensively briefed on the Me 262 that I could have taken conducted tours round it at a shilling a head.

Then, late in the second day, Helga surprised me. She seemed to be getting more annoyed, and it took all my tact to put up with her when she started to cross-question me about the aircraft, and stood right in front of me, looking up and tapping a finger on my chest, which all the Yanks thought was hilarious.

‘How’s the Gestapo treating you today, Wing Commander?’ said Bushey, when he met Helga and me in the canteen. He had three friends with him, and they all laughed.

‘Has she got the rubber truncheons out yet, sir?’ said one of the others, and Bushey smiled at Helga.

‘Gestapo?’ he said, pointing at her. ‘You? Gestapo?’

She scowled. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she said to me in German. ‘Do they think the Gestapo is funny?’

‘They think the situation is funny,’ I said.

‘What situation?’

‘You and me.’

‘There is no
you
and
me
,’ she said. ‘Is there?’ Her black eyebrows signalled a question.

‘What’s she saying, Wing Commander?’ said Bushey. ‘Is it time for your lesson again?’ And they all laughed, and Helga shrugged and gave me an actual smile.

‘What can you expect,’ she said, looking at Bushey and his friends. ‘They speak no German.’ It was the sort of remark that Frenchmen make, because Frenchmen believe that all those who can’t speak French are pitiful idiots. But I’d never heard a German say the like, and there were more surprises to come. She was an odd little creature and I never did understand what she was thinking, except that on this occasion she seemed to be taking my side. ‘We need some equipment,’ she said. ‘Come with me and we will fetch it.’

That meant a walk down a couple of decks and off towards the stern, to the officers’ quarters, where some unfortunate lieutenant had been turned out of his cabin to accommodate the ship’s guest. I suppose a single woman is an embarrassment aboard a warship, especially if she is young and shapely, and more especially if she is an enemy alien. But Captain Fenner’s ship had been generous; the cabin was substantial. Somebody’s pictures were still on the walls, there was a decent-sized bunk bed, and there were bits of personal furniture. There was also a small chest of drawers, and Helga went straight into the cabin and opened one of the drawers.

‘Close the hatch,’ she said, without looking back, so I did. It was oval steel, rounded at top and bottom, and secured with clips. It closed with a soft, complete,
thud
, isolating the pair of us, alone, together. ‘Here,’ she said, turning round, ‘you will need this.’ And she handed me something that I barely noticed, because she was now openly laughing at me. ‘You are so naïve!’ she said. ‘You should have seen your face when I did this,’ and the zipper worked up and down in her hand. This time it went really up, and really down: all the way down. She had on something silky below the waist, but nothing above, because there was nothing there that needed support: not a bit of it.

‘Oh!’ I said.

‘
Oh
!’ she said, and laughed again, and I looked at what she’d given me. It was a small cardboard packet, striped in red-and-yellow with a single word in the centre. The word was
Fromms
: Germany’s foremost brand of condom. As I said, she was very boring but extremely fascinating.

*

The
Führerboat,

750
Kilometres
East
of
New
York.

Wednesday
7 June,
03
.
00
hours
boat’s
time.

Each of the three-man team – The Triad – was certified as racially perfect, with ancestors documented back to the sixteenth century founding of Mennonism itself, let alone the ninteenth century beginnings of Karolism. Each was tall and blond with blue eyes. Each wore SSA black with pure gold gorgets that had been blessed by Abimilech Svart himself:
The
One
.

Now they stood round their table in the Führer’s personal compartment, as from outside their compartment, Huth and Weber explained their radio transmission to Churchill and the English. Huth’s and Weber’s voices sounded from a loudspeaker on the intercom panel inside the compartment, and one of the Triad – their spokesman – asked Huth and Weber a few questions, speaking in a perfect, Karoling accent. Then he gave orders.

‘You will go back to the
Freiherr
,’ he said, ‘and await our decision. Tell him that the decision will be given as soon as possible.’ Then he switched off the intercom, and the three young men discussed the matter, speaking in turn. The discussion was remarkably brief since the three of them had spent years in each others’ company; they had discussed Svart’s wishes until nothing more was left to say, and their day-to-day conversation was of such narrow, specialized, and sharply focused content that any normal person forced to be among them would have faced death by boredom, with suicide as a welcome option.

‘This was allowed for,’ said the first.

‘It was covered under section 98:
Betrayal
of
Position
,’ said the second.

‘I agree,’ said the third.

Nonetheless, they looked at a large ring-folder file, laid ready on their table. The file had been put together by Abimilech Svart himself, and contained Svart’s orders for dealing with every imaginable or unimaginable situation relating to the voyage of the Führerboat. There were even additional pages, extemporized by Svart in his own handwriting during the forty-five minutes between the warning of the Besuboft 1 air raid and the Führerboat’s departure. And, of course, the file was comprehensively cross-referenced and indexed to give swift access to Svart’s wishes under all circumstances; Svart had discussed and explained the file to the Triad, and tested their understanding of it, until it was perfect. So now the three young men knew the folder by heart, such that it was physically present only as an aide-memoire.

They were good at things like memorizing. They’d been chosen for that, they’d been bred up for that, and they’d been bred up for diligence and dedication. In addition, they each had a modest level of intelligence, but intelligence, character, outside interests of any kind, were not needed for their purpose – Svart’s purpose – and had been actively discouraged.

Thus the brief discussion continued.

‘So we shall continue close approach to the target.’

‘With the missile at constant readiness.’

‘While informing Herr Svart of our actions.’