Angel, Archangel (9 page)

“Yes, I’m inclined to agree with you,” Staverton said.
“But Churchill’s main concern, based on the latest intelligence reports from Germany, is that the Nazis have a plan to pull their armies back from Northern Europe and Italy and get them dug into Southern Bavaria and Austria.
Basically, it would terminate the possibility of a swift conclusion to the war.
Personally, I’ve never bought the idea of Hitler’s Alpine fortress.
Now I’m not so sure.”

Fleming’s mind raced.
“The performance of this new 163 - let’s call it the ‘C variant, because that’s what it must be - suggests that it could operate from small strips in the Bavarian and Austrian mountain valleys and deal out a hell of a lot of punishment to any bombers trying to locate and bomb their airfields from high altitude.”

Staverton nodded.
“We cannot take any chances.
Reconnaissance photos show they’ve been steadily pulling their forces back into the region.
There’s evidence of intense tunnelling activity in the mountains, too.”

“But even if they do manage to establish fighter squadrons in the mountains, surely it would be impossible to get any large-scale manufacture of the 163 going?”

“One of our chief faults in recent weeks has been underestimating the capability of the Nazi as he retreats into his corner.
Our armies have constantly been coming across empty factories throughout their advances into Germany.
The Nazis have just moved the entire operation lock, stock and barrel further on down the road, if necessary.
There is no reason why they shouldn’t move it just that little bit further away into the Bavarian and Austrian Alps.”

“But could they build even short runways in time?”

“With their infuriating ability to hide things away underground, they could build hangars for these aeroplanes deep into the mountains and launch them off straight country roads.
It would be a nightmare even trying to find their bases, let alone destroy them.”

“And it would be suicide for the army to try and storm those mountains and valleys,” Fleming said.

“Exactly, Robert, suicide.
The alternative is to put the Alps under siege and starve them out, but that could take years.”

The drone of the air-conditioning system suddenly seemed to fill Fleming’s ears.
“What can we do?”
he asked.

Staverton sucked the end of his pencil.

“I agree with the conclusions in your report.
We have no way of knowing whether this new aircraft is a prototype, or fully operational, but we need to find out fast.
Churchill has made it clear that it’s up to us at the EAEU to produce an answer to whatever it is that’s out there.
I think there is only one.”

Staverton paused.
Fleming was used to such dramatic gestures.
There was still something of the showman in the Old Man.

“We will have to recover one from the Reich.
We must find out if we’re right about the 163C, and what makes it tick.”

Fleming went still.

“You can’t mean it, sir.”

“It’s the only way, Robert.”

“I know that one of the EAEU’s responsibilities is to ensure that as many German aircraft, aero-engine and armaments factories get captured by the Allies before the Russians get hold of them, but isn’t this taking our duties a bit far?”

“Not at all.
We came within a hair’s breadth of pulling off a similar operation several years ago.
It was late 1942 and a new version of the FW 190 was making mincemeat of our latest Spitfire.
We had to capture one and take it apart at Farnborough.
We had a test pilot ready to parachute into France close to an FW 190 base, but at the very last minute the whole thing was called off.”

“Why?”

Staverton smiled.

“It was a remarkable stroke of luck, really.
An FW 190 pilot got completely lost over the channel, took a reciprocal bearing and landed his brand spanking new Focke-Wulf in the mist at RAF St Athan in Wales.
He was so stunned when they came to arrest him that he didn’t even attempt to set fire to the aircraft.”

“But that was an operation to bring a conventional aircraft out of France,” Fleming said.

Staverton was unperturbed.
“This operation is certainly going to be different.
It’s required a great deal of planning and we haven’t got much time.
So this is what we’re going to do.”

Fleming put the coffee down.

The Old Man got to his feet and walked over to the map of western Europe that adorned most of the wall behind his desk.
He pointed to a small area south of the Danish Peninsula.

“As you know, the Nazis have carried out most of their rocket research on the Baltic coast at these two test centres - Peenemunde, here,” Staverton stabbed his finger at a spot on the North German shoreline, “and Rostock here.

“We’ve had a crew on a Danish trawler keeping Peenemunde under surveillance for several weeks and it’s been dead.
Not a squeak since they did their last A4 rocket tests there over two months ago.
So it’s not Peenemunde - I double-checked with the trawler last night.”

“That leaves Rostock.”
He stabbed his finger once more on the map.

“This morning, at 3 a.m., an RAF Mosquito took off from a captured airfield in Germany on a routine recce mission of Rostock harbour, only the docks were not its real objective.
The pilot was briefed to cause a hell of a stir above the harbour, attract a bit of flak and then to all intents and purposes head home, hugging the trees until he was beyond the range of Rostock’s gun batteries.
By sheer chance, his course takes him slap over the test centre just outside Rostock and that’s where he really gets busy.
Those cameras work like billyo over the airfield, but the enemy, of course, doesn’t know that.
He’s convinced that it’s the harbour that we’re interested in.”

Staverton halted for a moment, pleased with himself.
It was a favourite trick of the reconnaissance boys.

“One of our own chaps from the EAEU at the Mosquito’s base sent back a coded message just before you got in.
The photographs are positive.
At least, our man Bowman has good reason to think so.
The only trouble is, he has no data with which to compare them.”

That was logical enough.
Fleming was one of only a handful of people, even within the EAEU, who was allowed access to archive material on new enemy equipment.
He’d given up counting the number of bloody evenings he’d spent peering through stereoscopic pairs at a maze of black and white dots that some boffin claimed formed the image of some new enemy weapon.

He was half expecting what came next.

“I want you, Robert, to get over to Germany right away and positively identify those photographs, one way or another.
Find out if that thing is the long range rocket fighter.”

“Yes, sir.”
He thought of Penny.

But Staverton hadn’t finished.
“And if it is, I want you to co-ordinate the extraction operation.
I’ve already set the wheels in motion.
I need to ensure that it’s carried through to the letter and you’re the best qualified man to do it.”

The drab walls of the bunker seemed to cave in for Fleming, but the AVM was in full stride.

“There’s a Dakota waiting for you at Northolt.
Your travel documents are at the airfield.
With your papers are a further set of instructions which set out all the objectives of the trip.
Read them carefully.
I don’t have to tell you how important this whole thing is.”

Fleming wanted to move, but his legs felt like lead.

“I’ve got great faith in you, my boy.
I know you can do it.”

The Old Man, now with his back to the wall chart, arms crossed, stared fixedly at Fleming who had not moved from the hard, straight-backed chair.

“That’ll be all, Robert.
There’s a car waiting outside that will take you to Northolt.
Good luck.”

Fleming got to his feet and left.
For once, he forgot to salute.

* * * * * * * *

As the Riley staff car swung off the Oxford road into Northolt aerodrome, Fleming felt a tinge of sadness.
The wide highway slid out of view and was all but obscured by the guardroom where they drew to a halt.

He turned round for a last look at the road.
Endless convoys were sweeping into the centre of London, only a few miles away, but there was little traffic heading in the direction of Oxford.
It was ironic that Staverton had chosen Northolt as his point of departure.
In better days, Penny and he passed it regularly on the way home to the cottage.

The corporal tapped on the window.

“Wing Commander Fleming?”

Fleming pulled back the glass and let the raw wind catch him full in the face.
He nodded.

“Papers please sir.”

On the far side of the airfield Fleming could see his DC-3 transport taxiing over to the dispersal point.
A ray of sunshine broke through the clouds and raced across the runway, passing directly over the Dakota as it drew up alongside the control tower.

“Thank you sir,” the corporal said as he handed back Fleming’s papers.
“Please make your way over to the tower and report to the duty orderly.
You can pick up your travel documents there.”

Fleming entered the tower building and found few signs of life.
A middle-aged WAAF corporal was typing with her back to him behind the reception desk.
The room was shabby.
Fleming straightened a picture of the King which had been blown crooked by the wind as he had opened the door.
The WAAF turned round to see who it was.

“I’m Wing Commander Fleming.
I believe you should have some travel documents for me.”

The WAAF delved her hand into a pigeonhole and produced a thick bundle of papers which she handed over.
Fleming went through them.
A travel pass that would give him rights of passage through Northern Germany and a thin carnet with his photograph on the inside front cover which was the standard-issue passport.
Also, a thick manila envelope with
Not to be opened until airborne
typed on the top left-hand corner.
That would be from Staverton.
He tucked the papers into his inside jacket pocket.

“Corporal, I wonder if you could do me a favour?”

“I’ll try sir.”

“Could you post a letter for me?”

The corporal shifted nervously.

“I can’t, sir, it’s against base rules.”

“I understand that,” Fleming said, “But it’s only a few words to my wife.
If it makes any difference, you can censor it yourself.”
He smiled warmly.

The WAAF hesitated, then nodded.

Fleming scribbled a note, sealed it in one of the WAAF’s envelopes and handed it over to her.
He dug deep in his pocket and came up with two pennies for the stamp.

“Thank you,” he said, “I’m deeply grateful.”
He sprinted for the door.

Outside, he could see the pilot of the Dakota waving him over to the transport.
The aircraft was already taxiing to the runway threshold when Fleming was pulled aboard by one of the aircrew kneeling by the open cargo door.

As the DC-3 lumbered into the sky two minutes later, Fleming looked to the west one last time.
On a clear day you could probably see Padbury from two thousand feet.

* * * * * * * *

Inside the control tower building, the WAAF shivered as the wind blew through the door by which Fleming had left.
She walked over and closed it and sat back at the typewriter.
Her husband had been killed just under a year before on the Normandy beaches, but she hadn’t been too upset.
She had been having an affair with a GI sergeant for several months by then.
She was looking forward to seeing the American later on that evening.
He had promised to take her to a show in town.

She had failed to notice the wind lifting Fleming’s envelope and casting it down behind her desk.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The DC-3 rolled to a halt beside a wrecked hangar at the northernmost end of the airfield.
Coming in to land, the plane had first been buffeted by the strong crosswind that whipped across the North Sea as they began their descent over the Frisian Islands, and then the rain had come down.

When the pilot finally shut down the engines, Fleming’s battered eardrums took a few seconds to register the new sound.
The rain that was being driven against the aircraft’s metal skin sounded like sticks rapping on a kettle-drum.

As a crewman wrestled to open the Dakota’s door, Fleming pulled his greatcoat in tight around his body.
The icy blast that hit his face was a chilling welcome to Kettenfeld, an ex-Luftwaffe airfield on the outskirts of Emden.
As he jumped down onto the grass, Fleming felt a surge of adrenalin.

A jeep screeched up beside the Dakota.
The driver pulled back a canvas flap and shouted against the wind.

“Wing Commander Fleming?
I’m Bowman.
Jump in.”

The vehicle sped off onto the concrete perimeter road which led to a cluster of buildings on the far side of the field.
Bowman, a stocky, balding squadron leader, squinted hard through the windscreen.
The wipers were fighting a losing battle against the rain.

From what Fleming could see, Kettenfeld was chaos.
Aircraft of all types littered every inch of available space.
Fitters, their collars pulled up for protection against the wind and rain, scuttled around their charges, filling empty tanks with fuel, replenishing reserves of oil and hydraulic fluid, checking that rudders and elevators had not iced up.

They passed a recovery team trying to raise the nose of a Havoc whose starboard leg had collapsed as it was being bombed up for a mission.
All around, British and American aircraft were landing and taking off, their wings waggling precariously as the pilots fought to keep control in the strong winds.

A week before, Kettenfeld had been in the hands of the Luftwaffe’s NJG 1, a night fighter unit with the hopeless task of intercepting the hundreds of Allied bombers that poured into the German heartland almost every night.
At one point, Fleming thought he saw some Junkers 88s parked in a distant corner of the airfield, but they could have been Mosquitoes.

They reached a row of Nissen huts and the brakes squealed as the jeep skidded to a stop.

Bowman pointed to the door of the corrugated iron building and then made a run for it.
Fleming was right behind him, but something made him pause by the door.
A hundred yards away groundcrew were busy attaching tow lines from troop-carrying gliders to four-engined Halifax tugs.
Staverton hadn’t wasted any time.
Looking at the gliders, Fleming tried not to think about how many men would die.
For a moment he hoped that Bowman’s photographs were not of a 163C, but a trick of the light or an act of deception by the Germans.
Then he could rid himself of the whole affair, catch a plane back to England.
He shook his head and moved after Bowman.

It was warmer inside, but only just.
Bowman led the way down the central corridor and into the office at the far end.
The walls were still covered with the regalia of the previous occupants.
A recognition chart with the silhouettes of a dozen British and American planes was pinned to one wall and a Luftwaffe squadron photograph tilted at a crazy angle on another.
Someone had pushed pieces of newspaper into several bullet-holes that dotted the large iron-framed window, but the draught still forced its way into the room, rustling the papers on Bowman’s desk.
Fleming hung his coat up on the back of the door while his companion poured two cups of coffee from the pot which had been gently simmering on the coal-fired stove.

“I’m sorry the weather couldn’t have been a little nicer for you, sir, but then Kettenfeld’s a bloody awful place, I’m afraid.
I can’t say I blame Jerry for leaving here in a hurry.”

Fleming put the mug to his lips and sipped the dark, bitter liquid.
The coffee burnt his stomach.
He hadn’t eaten since the previous evening.

“Would the Germans’ hasty departure explain what looked like some Ju 88s out there?”
Fleming gestured with his thumb out the window.

Bowman nodded as he gulped down a mouthful of coffee.

“We found six of them, all pretty much intact.
One of them has even got the latest variant of their Lichtenstein radar on board.
We’ve been wanting to get our hands on one for months to see how they’ve improved the system.”

“It seems odd the Luftwaffe didn’t destroy them before they left.”

Bowman shrugged.

“I seem to spend the entire bloody time briefing ruddy Army officers about the value of German equipment.
The trouble is, their men just look on it as target practice, or a piece of junk that they can vandalize.
The EAEU doesn’t mean a thing to them.
And as for Montgomery, all he wants to do is get to Berlin as quickly as possible and if that means destroying anything that gets in the way, it’s too bad.”

Bowman was bitter.
It was the Russians who had captured all the really good stuff so far.
Rocket scientists, aircraft designers, electronics specialists; the Soviets had them all.
The British and the Americans had little to show for their efforts.
Apart from anything else, it distressed Bowman that few people outside the EAEU appreciated Germany’s military technology, the role it could play in a post-war world.
The Russians knew all right.

“In this instance, we were lucky,” Bowman continued.
“The Canadians who overran Kettenfeld advanced so quickly that it was all the Germans could do to get their personnel off the base.
We found the Ju 88s with their tanks almost dry, so there was no possibility of flying them out and there couldn’t have been time to place demolition charges on them.
London radioed this morning to say that a team from Farnborough is on its way over here to fly them back to England.
Best of luck to them in these conditions.”

Fleming put his coffee down and pulled out his briefing notes.

“I think,” Fleming said quietly, “that we’re going to have a bit more cooperation from the army over the next few days.”

Bowman looked puzzled.

“Don’t ask me how he did it, but Staverton has somehow managed to convince the top brass that we need to get our hands on the 163C, if that’s what that thing is sitting on the tarmac in your photographs.”

“So it really is the 163C, eh,” Bowman said.
“They finally got that beast into production.
We’ve been hearing rumours out here, but no one actually believed the Germans could do it.”

“Maybe that’s moving a little fast,” Fleming interjected.
“We’re not really sure, but Staverton’s told me to find out.”

Fleming tapped the papers as he placed them on the desk.
“These are Staverton’s instructions in the event there is a rocket fighter at Rostock.
We haven’t got much time, so let’s have those photographs from the recce Mosquito.”

Bowman produced a cardboard folder from a drawer and handed it and a set of stereoscopic glasses to Fleming who had settled into the chair at the desk.
Before he pulled out the photographs, Fleming stared out over the cold German airfield.

“If this is a 163C, two hundred and fifty glider troops will take off at dawn tomorrow for Rostock.
Their objective is to capture the airfield and hold it until I can get the rocket fighter out of there.”

* * * * *

HQ came back to Malenkoy with the reaction that he had been dreading.
It was his maskirovka and if the security of that exercise was in jeopardy, it was his responsibility to find the insurgents.

It had not taken long for the garrison commander at Chrudim to muster three hundred Siberians from the 3rd Guards Army and send them down the Branodz road to the point where he had been ambushed by the SS terrorist.
And if there was one, there had to be others.

It was over two hours after the attack took place that the convoy of trucks rounded the bend in the track and Malenkoy saw the smouldering tree that had taken the full force of the panzerfaust’s detonation.

Two hours!
What was wrong with the Red Army these days?

The marauding German aircraft was undoubtedly on a reconnaissance mission and if the crew had seen his dummy tanks it did not matter, even if he had not quite put the finishing touches to them.
After all, that was what the maskirovka was all about.
But a Waffen-SS unit seeing it from the ground would not be so easily fooled.

The Germans had to believe that the Red Army, supported by hundreds of tanks, was massing to intercept the main Prague-Berlin highway.
Hitler would divert his straggling troops from the defence of Berlin to meet the threat, but when they reached Chrudim, they would find nothing - save his cardboard army.

To their immediate north, the First Belorussian front under Zhukov would exploit Berlin’s new weakness and penetrate the capital’s eastern defences, cutting off any thrust towards Chrudim at the same time.

Meanwhile, Konev’s massive flanking movement which would be launched from Branodz against the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre would hit the Germans to the south of Berlin and then swing north, reaching the capital within a week if fortune chose to stay with them.

Malenkoy, in the truck at the head of the convoy, told the driver to halt.
He jumped down from the cabin and walked alone along the last fifty yards of the track to the place of the ambush.
The panic that he had felt only hours before welled up in him once more.
He flashed a glance to the place where the madman had stood in the middle of the road, firing at will, while his driver struggled to heave the jeep round in a two-point turn.
He now saw his attacker with a clarity that had been missing in the mind-numbing moments of the ambush.
He was tall, huge in fact.
He had a rifle held firmly into his shoulder and he had fired single rounds at them.
Single rounds, while he cowered on the rear seat!
Even when he had come up from the back of the GAZ and scattered half his pistol clip at the man, he had not moved.
Malenkoy’s hand moved instinctively to his holster.
The cold metal of the Tokarev jolted his senses back to reality and the spell was broken.

He stepped over the boundary line that separated the road from the forest.
Even though he was now only ten metres into the wood, its size and darkness chilled him.
Two fucking hours!
If there was a rogue SS unit at large it could be anywhere by now.

He ran back to the rear of the lead truck and spoke to a lieutenant.
The young officer in turn briefed his troops in the local Irkutsk dialect that was their first language.
Not all of them could speak High Russian.
It was all lost on Malenkoy, who could not understand a word of Siberian.

All the platoon commanders were given a similar message.
Fan the troops out and try to find tracks.
Anyone who picked up the scent was to radio through to Malenkoy immediately so the search could be concentrated.
As long as they found the trail before sunset, Malenkoy was confident that they would have the SS by the following afternoon at the latest.

It was now four o’clock.
That gave them two hours to find out the direction in which the SS were heading.

* * * * * * * *

It took little more than a minute for Fleming to identify the blurred object in the middle of the photograph as the C Model 163.

The differences between the C and its predecessor, the fully operational 163B, were subtle, but the evidence was clear after Fleming had scrutinized the recce photograph under the stereoscopic glasses.

No wonder Bowman had been unable to establish a positive identification.
The photograph was grainy and the actual image of the aircraft was smaller than his little fingernail, so you had to know exactly what to look for to differentiate between the two types.

But there it was.
The streamlined fuselage between the two stubby wings set against the mottled surface of the airfield made the rocket fighter look like a hawkmoth clinging to the bark of a tree.
The 163G did not have quite the same bulbous body as the standard 163B, but to the untrained eye, referring to grainy photos of minute scale, the aircraft would have appeared identical.

Fleming had one last look through the glass, before he was satisfied.
One Me 163C at Rostock.
It seemed a tiny thing for which to launch such a massive military operation.

Later, when he asked himself why he had not noticed it straight away, he put it down to fatigue.
He knew, as he tilted his chair back and examined the pitted ceiling of the old Luftwaffe ops room, that the 163C was hiding something from him.
There had been an unnatural kink in the leading edge.
A dark shape, a shadow, somehow familiar, but unexpected on an aircraft of this capability.