Agent of Death (37 page)

The
North
Atlantic.

Friday
9
June,
12
.
15
hours.

The deck crew got clear of the jet exhausts. They connected a power cable via a plug handcrafted to fit the German socket in the German aircraft. They waved. I waved. I went through the start-up procedure:

Turn on battery switch, invertor and generators!

Turn fuel selector valve to
off
!

Keep throttles closed!

Push down starter handle to prime starter motor!

Push down starter handle and hold!

Press tachometre button and hold!

When jet unit reaches 700 to 800 rpm press ignition button and hold!

And a deep, powerful, throbbing noise told me that the jet engines were firing up. There was much more to do: detailed, technical, precise. Some of it was common to the start-up of any modern aircraft, some was novel, and I was sweating with effort, working from notes strapped to my knee, and distilled from two days of lessons from Helga Karlsson.

The jet noise was raucous. It wasn’t the melodic, rolling thunder of piston engines. The jets screamed and howled and the aircraft surged against the chocks and hydraulic brakes.

I crossed hands at the deck crew: the gesture they’d taught me. It said:
Get
clear
!
Hold
chocks
! They fell back, leaving two men, each holding a rope, each ready to pull chocks away. They all leaned heavily and clung on to anything they could, to keep footing in the eighty miles per hour wind. The aircraft quivered. The wings trembled. Only brakes and chocks were holding it. The 262 was like the greyhounds in Shakespeare’s
Henry V
– ‘in the slips and straining at the start.’

But I looked down a miserable short deck instead of a thousand-metre runway. It wasn’t enough. Helga had said so. It wasn’t long enough even with the eighty mph over my wings that was my first trick. But I had another trick, because tricks are what I do. The trick was to time my take-off against the pitching of the vessel, so that I rolled
downwards
as the stern rose, shooting past the midpoint, then
upwards
just as the bow heaved up and the whole, huge mass of the ship rose beneath my wheels to hurl me into the air.

That was what I hoped. It would be better than a rocket-assisted take-off. It was a nice idea: a nice trick. But the timing was guesswork. The deck crew could measure the time between bow going up and down. That was easy. The problem was to guess how long it would take me to go from stern to bow, assuming I had to be at one hundred and twenty mph by the time I flew off the flight deck.

In the event, I left it to them. They did the sums. They were the experts. The senior deck officer would give the word. He had an orange stripe on his canvas helmet. I looked at him. He was hanging on to another man who was hanging on to some fitting on the deck, against the wind. The deck officer had a stopwatch in his free hand. He raised it. He looked at it. He looked down the deck. I looked down the deck. The bow sank. The officer stared at the watch … and closed fist on it and brought it down in one slashing movement.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ said his lips.

I opened the throttles. The jet engines roared. I let off the brakes. I passed hand across throat:
Cut
!
Chocks
away
! The machine shot down the deck, and acceleration threw me back against my seat; the deck flashed past, and the bow rose … and I was over the fore-deck guns, over the bow, over the sea, and heaving upwards … and then, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, sinking, and sinking, because I wasn’t fast enough, and sinking and sinking, and there was grey ocean in the gunsight, so I opened the throttles wide, wide, wide, and
bugger
the warning about over-revving! Sod it! Damn it! Fuck it! I’d die anyway if I didn’t get speed, and I was nearly in the drink; the engines howled and shrieked until it wasn’t down, down, down, anymore … it was up, up, up! Up on the wings of song, up from Earth to heaven, up from disaster to triumph. I’d never been in a machine like it. Never anything that soared like that. Everyone said that the Me 262 was the best fighter in the world and, by God Almighty and all his little angels, they were right. What a plane! What a machine! What a joy! It was like sex with a beautiful woman and I thought of Margaret Comings, which says something about her and me.

I levelled off at two thousand feet. I banked round over the carrier. Little figures of men were just visible on deck. Were they waving? Were they playing
Anchors
Aweigh
? I didn’t know. They were far below. So I checked my compass, and turned on to the heading that would take me to the big sub. At full speed
Saint Mihiel
would take nearly ten hours to reach it, but my wonderful German jet-plane would get there in half an hour.

CHAPTER 42

The
Führerboat
,

The
North
Atlantic.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
15
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time.

It was the
Deutscher
blick
again. Huth looked over his shoulder and looked round the control room, because the slavie had just said something dangerous. Huth tried to look discreetly, to see if anyone else had heard.

Good! It seemed that they hadn’t, but three blackshirts were there, each with a machine pistol slung over his shoulder, gripped ready for use, while the U-boatsmen got on with their duties. Huth took the slavie’s arm and pulled him aft of the periscope standards. That way the two guards on the fore-hatch couldn’t see them, including the corporal who was in charge.

Then the slavie surprised Huth, because he took over. Huth noticed that he looked different. He looked confidant. He looked like a man, and he was thinking, and looking round. Then he nodded to himself and drew Huth’s attention to one of the boat’s SSA electronic control boards. Huth looked at it. It was one of the non-serviceable SSA pieces that Captain Sohler had said to leave alone. This one was the radar alert board. The slavie pulled the board half out from its mountings, pointed at the wiring behind it and spoke quietly, but not whispering, which would have been suspicious.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘pretend to discuss what I am doing,’ and the slavie’s fingers brought the control board to life, connecting broken wires, and Huth nodded; the slavie worked on the board because he – Gavriel Landau – was as good at psychological tricks as the electronic kind. So the SSA guard was deceived and suspected nothing, and Huth followed the slavie’s example. He leaned over the board and pretended to take notice, though he didn’t really know what the slavie was doing, and he followed the slavie’s example and spoke softly, repeating what he’d just been told.

‘You’re telling me that the captain says:
by
any
means
?’

‘By any means,’ said Landau. ‘You are to remove Weber and prevent the launch of the missile, by any means.’

‘Why isn’t the captain here?’ said Huth.

‘The captain can’t come,’ said Landau. ‘He’s barely standing, and if he did try to move, the blackshirt outside the sick bay would have come with him and stood beside him and he’d have been unable to say what I’ve just said.’ Huth went very quiet. Many ideas turned in his mind. He knew his captain very well, and could believe that he didn’t want the missile fired. For that matter, Huth didn’t want it fired. None of the crew did. They were too afraid of American vengeance, and had no belief in Abimilech Svart, who was God knew where and working only for himself. And Huth certainly didn’t want to be gassed with Mem Tav by the three lunatics in the Führer’s compartment!

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but we’re going to need a gun.’ He pretended to discuss the attack board for a while, then used his initiative. ‘Stay here,’ he said to the slavie, and picked up a chart from the navigating table, went to the radio watch cubicle, and beckoned the navigating petty officer to follow. He showed the chart to the two men and leaned over their shoulders and spoke carefully, as Landau watched from the periscope standards.

‘Just nod,’ he said to them, ‘and don’t say anything.’ They nodded. ‘I want two of those black sods out of the control room,’ said Huth, ‘do you understand?’ They nodded. ‘So. When I go back to that slavie,
you
,’ he said, squeezing one man’s shoulder, ‘you count to ten then go to the heads for a piss.’ The man nodded. ‘Then
you
,’ he squeezed the other man’s shoulder, ‘you count twenty, and you do the same, and make sure one of bastards goes with you. Now say
Aye
,
sir
.’

‘Aye-aye, sir!’

Then Huth and Landau pretended to discuss the radar board again, and carefully didn’t look as the two men, one after another, went out with their guards. One of the guards was the corporal. There was now just one guard standing in front of the aft hatch.

Huth’s heart began to thump. The one guard left
wasn’t
out of sight behind the periscope standards. He was standing where he could see everything. There would be no chance for the slavie to pass the spanner unseen to Huth. Damn, damn, damn! Huth should have thought of that, and he stood and dithered, knowing he had only minutes before the first blackshirt was back. Huth sweated. He agonized. He didn’t know if he could kill a man at all: not with a spanner, not when the man had a gun and would see him coming. He worried and fretted, and feared that it couldn’t be done.

*

Out on the casing, everything was ready. Everything was perfect. Weber congratulated the Mem Tav team.

‘This fat bastard’s clapped out,’ he said, stamping a boot on the steel plates, and the team laughed politely. ‘But this beauty,’ Weber pointed at the fully assembled, fully operational Fieseler Fi 103, on its launch ramp. ‘This little wonder is going to give the Americans the biggest boot up the arse since Pearl Harbor. So get it fired up and launched!’ The team saluted and made final preparations.

The one hundred and fifty kilo iron piston was ready in the launch tube, and the
dampferzeuger
, the steam generator, was connected to the breech end of the tube. At the flick of a switch, the steam generator would blow two chemical solutions into its reaction chamber: ninety per cent hydrogen peroxide and concentrated sodium permanganate sending explosive, violent steam into the tube to drive piston and Fieseler up the ramp at over two hundred miles per hour.

Simultaneously, the
anlassgerät
, or ground starter unit, was connected electrically to the steam generator and a mobile starting panel on a cable, to let the crew get clear of the launch. The starter unit controlled the Fieseler’s electronics and pneumatics to start the Argus motor in the tube over the tail.

The head of the Mem Tav team went from machine to machine. He made final checks including one last reading from the gyro compass in the launch ramp, to be sure that the ramp was aimed at New York. Then he marched up to Weber, and saluted.

‘
Alles
in
ordnung
,
Herr
Standartenführer
!’ Everything OK, Colonel, sir!

‘Good!’ said Weber. ‘Then let’s get out of the way and fire the beast.’

‘Sir!’ said the team leader, and he and his men walked back down the casing, past the conning tower, one of them carrying the starter board, another paying out its cable.

‘Give me the board,’ said Weber when they got past the conning tower. They did: it was the size of a small typewriter. The Mem Tav team clustered around him, but he was going to let this one off himself! So he looked down and pushed switches in sequence, then pressed
START
, and everyone looked forward as high-grade aviation fuel sprayed into the Argus engine, the single spark plug cracked, and the tube roared into life with the reverberating, buzzing, deafening bellow that Londoners would learn to dread. ‘Ooof!’ said Weber, and made a pantomime of cringing at the sound. But then he grinned. All he had to do now was push the switch that turned on the steam generator, and the missile would fly.

*

Gavriel Landau finished his extempore work on the radar board, because he’d not been pretending at all. He’d been serious.

‘In case the Americans try again,’ he thought, because now the boat’s air search radar would now be unable to detect incoming aircraft and if the Americans came back, there would be no warning and no defensive gunfire. Captain Sohler had said to stop the launch
by
all
means
, and that’s how it would be.

Then he looked at Lieutenant Huth and frowned. He could see what was in Huth’s mind, because Landau’s ability to read faces had been forcibly enhanced by being a slave labourer under brutal guards, such that guessing their moods was life or death. He saw that Huth was helpless, and in that moment Gavriel Landau looked into the depths of his own soul and saw what sort of man he had become, which was not the man he’d ever wanted to be, or would have been in a kind and gentle world. So he touched Huth’s arm.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘You call the guard. You talk to him, and I’ll do it.’ He felt Huth tremble. ‘You get him here, my boy,’ said Landau, ‘then leave it to me.’ Huth nodded. He breathed deep. He stood upright and called the blackshirt.

‘There’s a problem here,’ he said, ‘I must show you.’ The guard shrugged, hitched his machine pistol out of the way and stepped forward. Gavriel Landau stood aside to let him pass.

‘What is it?’ said the blackshirt. Huth pointed to the radar board.

‘See here,’ said Huth, whose face was white and whose lips were black and who was sweating and trembling horribly.

‘What’s the matter?’ said the blackshirt, getting suspicious. ‘What’s going on?’

Then Gavriel Landau – Professor of Electronics, Doctor of Philosophy, honours graduate of three universities, speaker of four languages, lover of the arts, paterfamilias and gentleman, who had never raised hand in anger in all his fifty-five years – gave a great shout:

‘AAAA-
UH
!’ and he swung the spanner with all his might. He swung it two-handed with heart, soul, mind, and strength, in memory of all the horrors he’d endured, and in vengeance and atonement, and refusal any more to be a slave, and smashed a man’s head with one massive stroke; he felt bones crunch as the heavy steel drove forage cap, hair, and flesh through the broken defences of the skull and deep into the soft, puddled mush beyond. He struck so fast that most of the control room crew never saw. But they heard the shout and turned and saw the slavie step back, holding a spanner, and Lieutenant Huth grabbing the blackshirt as he fell, lowering him down, and shouting at them all:

‘Secure hatches! Get it done! Now!’ They were trained to emergency and leapt at the hatches, swung them and clamped them as Huth grappled with the still warm, still breathing blackshirt, to pull the machine pistol off him and slip the strap over his shoulder. But the SSA guard wasn’t quite dead and he groaned and tried to clutch at his machine pistol; Huth flinched, as if facing a risen corpse, but Landau stepped forward.

‘Drop him!’ he cried. ‘Stand clear!’ And Huth looked at Landau and found no words. ‘Get away!’ said Landau. Huth moved and Landau swung the spanner again, in two monstrous blows. Landau’s chest heaved and his breath was raw pain, but he was thinking clearly.

‘Take all the magazines,’ he said, ‘you may need them.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Huth, and knelt beside the mangled body and pulled at the ten long thirty-two-round magazines in the purpose-made pockets of the blackshirt’s tunic front. ‘Where do I put them?’ he said, stupidly, because Huth was on the edge, and nearly over, of his ability to think and function, and horrified at the brutal killing.

‘Anywhere,’ said Landau. ‘Your belt, your pockets, anywhere. Just get up on deck and deal with Weber.’ He pulled the magazines out of Huth’s hands and stuffed them into Huth’s pockets. There wasn’t room for all, and Landau was left holding two of them. ‘Get up above,’ said Landau. ‘Stop Weber!’ Huth nodded and ran to the conning tower ladder, then stopped and stood firm, and took hold of himself.

‘Nobody comes in here!’ he shouted at the men in the control room. ‘Keep the hatches shut!’ Then he was up the ladder, through more hatches, and out on to the casing in the cold, wet outside. He blinked. He looked forward. Nobody on the fore-deck! Just the Fieseler on its ramp with other equipment all round it. Then a most ghastly noise. The missile came to life! Its engine roared and threw a jet of flame backwards and the heat singed Huth even where he stood. He looked aft.
There
they
were
! Weber and the rest – Weber holding a control panel. Huth ran forward and yelled at the top of his voice.

‘Stop, stop, stop! Don’t launch!’ Nobody heard him over the roar of the Argus motor but some of them saw; Weber was fiddling with the Fiesler’s control panel, and one of the Mem Tav men touched Weber’s arm and pointed. Weber looked up at Huth and yelled in anger.

‘Get away, you little bastard! Get back down below with all the rest of you shits of sailors.’

‘Don’t launch!’ said Huth, and raised his gun. ‘Don’t launch it or I’ll shoot!’

‘Sod you!’ screamed Weber, and shoved the control board into the hands of the Mem Tav team leader, pulled open the button flap on his pistol holster, drew the pistol, and glared at Huth in utter hatred, because Weber hated all these poncy dicks of sailors and their poncy boat that kept blowing up and their poncy, pacifist, defeatism. ‘Get out of my bloody sight!’ he said.

‘Don’t launch it!’ cried Huth, and looked down, found the cocking handle, and pulled it back. ‘Last warning!’ he said, but neither man heard the other over the noise of the Argus motor; Weber raised his pistol and Huth knew he would fire. Huth fired first and the MP 40 Schmeisser chattered into life, and Huth sprayed Weber too close to miss, such that he staggered, dropped his pistol, fell over, tried to sit up, and cursed and snarled and beat fists on the casing, then flopped back spreadeagled and still, and dead.