Berlin Red (3 page)

‘It should,’ answered Hildebrand, ‘as long as we’re in the right place.’

‘We are, Ka-Leu. I checked.’

‘Which direction is it going?’ asked Hildebrand.

‘North,’ replied Barth. ‘Due north.’

Hildebrand clambered down the ladder into the hold.

‘Is everything all right?’ asked Grimm, removing his headphones.

‘A chart!’ shouted Hildebrand. ‘Find me a chart of the area.’

Grimm fetched out a map and laid it on the table, sweeping aside a collection of pencils, protractors and decoded Enigma transcripts.

Hildebrand studied the chart, tracing one finger along the north–south line until it came to a stop at the island of Bornholm, 50 kilometres away. ‘Son of a bitch!’ shouted Hildebrand. ‘I think we’ve just declared war on Sweden.’

‘Bornholm is actually Danish,’ said Grimm.

‘Never mind who it belongs to! Just send a message to the general and ask him what the hell is going on.’

As Pekkala slowly made his way through a bowl of sorrel and mushroom soup which Valentina had brought him, he suddenly felt that he was being watched.

Glancing up, he caught the eye of an ancient, thickly bearded man who was staring at him.

Embarrassed to have been spotted, the old-timer smiled awkwardly and returned to eating his own meal.

This was not the first time that Pekkala had experienced the strange, prickling sensation that the gaze of a stranger was upon him.

Some, like the old man, who had once been a guard at the Winter Palace of the Tsar, recognised his face from long ago. Others had heard only rumours that this quiet midnight visitor was known across the length and breadth of Russia as the Emerald Eye.

Pekkala had been born in Lappeenranta, Finland, at a time when it was still a Russian colony. His mother was a Laplander, from Rovaniemi in the north.

At the age of eighteen, on the wishes of his father, Pekkala travelled to Petrograd in order to enlist in Tsar Nicholas II’s elite Chevalier Guard. There, early in his training, he had been singled out by the Tsar for special duty as his own Special Investigator. It was a position which had never existed before and which would one day give Pekkala powers that had been considered unimaginable before the Tsar chose to create them.

In preparation for this, he was given over to the police, then to the State Police – the Gendarmerie – and after that to the Tsar’s secret police, who were known as the Okhrana. In those long months, doors were opened to him which few men even knew existed. At the completion of his training, the Tsar gave to Pekkala the only badge of office he would ever wear – a heavy gold disc, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Across the centre was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disc and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large, round emerald. Together, these elements formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. Pekkala never forgot the first time he held the disc in his hand, and the way he had traced his fingertip over the eye, feeling the smooth bump of the jewel, like a blind man reading braille.

It was because of this badge that Pekkala became known as the Emerald Eye. Little else was known about him by the public. In the absence of facts, legends grew up around Pekkala, including rumours that he was not even human, but rather some demon conjured into life through the black arts of an Arctic shaman.

Throughout his years of service, Pekkala answered only to the Tsar. In that time he learned the secrets of an empire, and when that empire fell, and those who shared those secrets had taken them to their graves, Pekkala was surprised to find himself still breathing.

Captured during the Revolution, and after months of interrogation at the Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons, he was convicted by the Bolsheviks of crimes against the state and sent to labour camp at Borodok, to serve out a sentence of no less than twenty-five years.

Pekkala had been a prisoner for nine of those years when a young, newly commissioned officer in the Bureau of Special Operations came clambering through the forest of Krasnagolyana to deliver the news that Pekkala’s sentence had been repealed, but only on condition that he agreed to work for Stalin, just as he had once done for the Tsar.

As a gesture of Stalin’s good will, the officer brought with him a satchel containing two trophies which had been taken from Pekkala at the time of his arrest, and which he was now authorised to return.

One was a .455 calibre Webley revolver with solid brass handles, a gift from King George V of England to his cousin the Tsar, and passed on to Pekkala by Nicholas II as a token of his esteem. The second trophy was the emerald eye itself, which Stalin had kept in a purple velvet bag in his desk drawer. The jewelled emblem had been one of his most prized possessions. Often, over the years, when Stalin found himself alone in his red-carpeted office in the Kremlin, he would take out the badge and hold it in the palm of his hand, watching the jungle-green stone drink in the sunlight, as if it were a living thing.

Since that time, maintaining an uneasy truce with his former enemies, Pekkala had continued in his role as Special Investigator, answerable only to the ruler of the Russian people.

‘There you are!' exclaimed a Red Army major as he stepped into the fuggy air of Café Tilsit. He was tall and wiry, with rosy cheeks and arching eyebrows which gave him an expression of perpetual astonishment.

On each sleeve of his close-fitting
gymnastiorka
tunic, he wore a red star etched out in gold-coloured thread, to indicate the rank of commissar. Riding breeches, the same dull colour as rotten apples, had been tucked into a set of highly polished knee-length boots. He strode across the room and joined Pekkala at his table.

While they were openly curious about Pekkala, the diners at the café immediately averted their gaze from this officer, having recognised the red stars of the commissar upon his sleeves. Now they busied themselves with scraping dirty fingernails, or reading scraps of newspaper or with a sudden fascination for their soup.

The man who sat before Pekkala now was that same officer who had trudged through the Siberian wilderness to deliver the news that Stalin required his services again.

They had been working side by side for many years now, each having learned to tolerate the eccentricities of the other.

Kirov reached across the table, picked up the half-drunk mug of kvass, took a sip and winced. ‘For breakfast?' he asked.

Pekkala answered with a question of his own. ‘What brings you here at this ungodly hour?'

‘I came to deliver a message.'

‘Then deliver it, Major Kirov,' said Pekkala.

‘We are wanted at the Kremlin.'

‘Why?' asked Pekkala.

‘Whatever it is, it can't wait,' replied Kirov, rising to his feet.

At the V-2 rocket site, General Hagemann’s technicians had just completed the dismantling of the mobile launch platform, which they referred to as a ‘table’. The heavy scaffolding, bearing the scorch marks of numerous ignition blasts, had been stacked upon the Meillerwagen, which had been fitted with a double set of rear wheels to take the extra weight of a fully loaded rocket.

The technicians, using their helmets as seats, sat in the road smoking cigarettes which, these days, consisted mostly of corn silk and acorns, while they waited for the order to move out. Assembling and dismantling the V-2 platforms had become second nature to these men. It had to, since their lives depended on the speed with which they worked. During the hours of daylight, once the enemy had spotted the tell-tale fire of a V-2 launch, it was only a matter of time before artillery was brought to bear on the position, or fighter planes equipped with armour-piercing bullets roared in at treetop level. It was the job of these technicians to be long gone by then, and they required little encouragement to carry out their work.

But night-time launches were different, especially this far from the front line. They did not have to fear the prying eyes of artillery spotters, and no fighter-bombers would take to the skies for low-level missions unless they could see where they were going.

For the men of the V-2 programme, darkness had become the only thing they trusted in the world. That and their ability to vanish before the heat had even left the metal of the launch scaffolds.

General Hagemann waited by the communications truck, in which an Enigma machine, set to the same rotor configuration as the one on the trawler, would receive the message sent by Captain Hildebrand, giving the coordinates of this particular’s rocket’s crash site.

It was to be the last test launch for at least a week. The reason for this was that the bulk of available V-2 rockets were being pulled back from their launch sites in Holland, where they had been used for bombarding London and the port of Antwerp, and were now to be redirected towards targets in the east. Overseeing the safe transport of the rockets, as well as scouting out new launch sites, was about to become a full-time job for Hagemann.

His troubles did not end there.

Targeting the Russians would only increase the pressure placed upon him by the High Command to solve the guidance problems which had plagued the V-2 programme from the start. Thanks to wildly over-optimistic predictions from Propaganda Minister Goebbels, the German public had been led to believe that miracle weapons were being developed which would turn the tide of the entire war. Even some members of the High Command believed that such things might be possible. But time was running out. Soon not even miracles would save them.

By the small dusty red light of the radio’s main console, Hagemann watched the operators scribbling down the trawler’s message as it emerged from the Enigma machine. It was a longer message than usual. Normally, Hildebrand just relayed the coordinates of the V-2’s splash point. Hagemann immediately began to worry that something had gone wrong.

The radio operator finished transcribing the message, tore off the page on which he had written it down and handed the page to the general.

The first thing Hagemann noticed was that there were no numbers written down, which would have indicated the coordinates where the rocket, or ‘needle’ as it was always referred to in the messages, had landed. These numbers would then have been tallied with the adjustments made for this particular flight, indicating whether or not they had improved the V-2’s accuracy.

Instead, the message read: ‘Needle overshot to north-north-east. No splash point indicated. Unusual exhaust pattern observed.’

When Hagemann read those last words, his whole face went numb. ‘Reply,’ he croaked, barely able to speak.

The radio operator rested his first two fingers on the keyboard of the Enigma machine.  ‘Ready,’ he said quietly.

‘Explain unusual exhaust pattern,’ Hagemann told the operator.

The operator tapped in the four words.

They waited.

‘What’s taking them so long?’ snapped Hagemann.

Before the operator could reply, a new message flickered across the Enigma’s light board.

Hurriedly, the operator decoded the message. ‘It says “Silver cloud in halo”.’

The general’s heart slammed into his ribcage. ‘Silver cloud?’

‘That is correct, Herr General. Shall I ask for further clarification?’ asked the radio man.

‘No,’ replied Hagemann, barely able to speak. ‘Send a new message, this one to FHQ.’

The operator glanced up. Those three letters stood for Führerhauptquartier and meant that the message would be going directly to Hitler’s private switchboard. He hesitated, unsure that he had heard the general correctly.

‘Is there a problem?’ barked Hagemann.

‘No, Herr General!’ the radio man waited, fingers poised over the keys.

‘The message should read: “Needle overshot Target Area”.’

‘That’s all?’

‘No.’ But then Hagemann hesitated.

‘Herr General?’ asked the signalman.

‘Diamond Stream observed,’ said Hagemann. ‘Add that to the message. Send it now.’

Hitler had been waiting for that message for almost two years. Hagemann just hoped to God those boys floating out there on the Baltic were right about what they had seen.

By now, the technicians, sitting in their huddle, had noticed that something unusual was going on. Leaving their helmets, which resembled a crop of large grey mushrooms that had suddenly sprouted from the road, they came over to the radio truck.

Among them was Sergeant Behr. ‘What is it, Herr General?’ he asked.

Hagemann handed him the message which they had just received.

‘Diamond Stream,’ whispered Behr.

Soon the words began to echo among the small group of men gathered beside the radio truck.

Hagemann stared at the list of calculations scribbled on his clipboard. He had waited so long for the Diamond Stream to become a reality, rehearsing in his mind the precise array of emotions which hearing those words would evoke. But now that the moment was finally here, and so unexpectedly, the only thing he felt was nauseous.

By now, Behr had also read the trawler’s message. ‘But why would it have overshot?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ answered Hagemann. ‘The Diamond Stream must have had some unintended effect on the propulsion system. I’ll have to go over the flight calculations again. It might be a while before I know for certain what took place.’

‘Do we have any idea of where it might have come down, Herr General?’

Hagemann shook his head. ‘Most likely in the water.’

‘And even if the rocket did crash on land,’ Behr stated confidently, ‘there would be nothing of it.’

Hagemann didn’t reply. He knew that whole sections of V-2 fuselage had survived their supersonic impacts, even those which had been fully loaded with explosives. Disoriented, the general began walking down the sandy road towards the ocean, as if he meant to swim out into the freezing waters of the Baltic and retrieve the missing rocket by himself.

‘Congratulations!’ Behr called after him.

Hagemann raised one hand in acknowledgement as the darkness swallowed him up.