Brandenburg (55 page)

His memory of the exact position of the prison was vague. Naturally, it never appeared on any map and even during his brief period attached to the Main Directorate, he had never been to the prison or the buildings near it. However, when Biermeier had picked him up after seeing his brother for the last time he had noted that the car turned onto Konrad-Wolf-Strasse.

By now it was 7.40 a.m. The group of men exited the cafe with their lunch boxes and newspapers and proceeded along Frankfurter Allee. They turned right on Genslerstrasse, a dismal street, which he knew must lead to the prison, and in the distance he glimpsed a red and white road barrier. He moved on to the intersection with Konrad-Wolf-Strasse where he waited, smoking a cigarette, reading the paper and occasionally glancing at the traffic. A man asked him for a light and another stopped and gave him several enquiring glances. Only a member of Stasi would do such a thing. Rosenharte smiled and volunteered that he had been stood up.

‘At this time of day?’ asked the man.

‘I sometimes walk my daughter to school from here,’ said Rosenharte. ‘Her mother and I are divorced.’

‘Ah well, there you go,’ said the man as though he richly deserved to be left standing there on this dank Berlin morning.

Rosenharte said goodbye to the man’s back and noted how easily his mind had regressed to the adept young Stasi trainee. The guile and the lies came as second nature now.

He walked around the area for about two hours, seeing just one of the Stasi trucks. This emerged from a side street on Frankfurter Allee and took the long way round to the prison, avoiding Genslerstrasse. He saw it turn right off Frankfurter Allee and then, having doubled back, reappear some minutes later to cross Konrad-Wolf-Strasse and head for the prison.

Through the day he moved in and out of the area but by the end of the afternoon he had learned that whatever routes the Stasi trucks took in the early stages of their journey to the prison they almost always approached it by crossing Konrad-Wolf-Strasse. This last stretch offered several possibilities for interception, but he would wait until he had consulted Kurt before settling on a plan. All that remained now was to study the routine followed by the prison transports as they neared the gates of Hohenschönhausen. He waited until he saw a truck appear on Frankfurter Allee, then walked rapidly up Genslerstrasse, where he encountered a barrier across the road manned by two plainclothes Stasi. He was now entering the closed area. He offered his ID and said he was late for a meeting. The men raised the barrier without examining the card. Rosenharte kept to the left of the street, so he could study the prison on his right without seeming to do so. The first corner watchtower came into view. He hurried on under a line of young lime trees, passing a green and white office block on his left and the main entrance to the prison on his right. The walls were no more than twenty feet high, but ten feet of wire added to them on the inside of the prison. Several cameras were trained along the perimeter, but they did not rotate to follow him. Just as he reached the end of the compound, the white truck appeared from the direction of Konrad-Wolf-Strasse and took several turns round the block to enter the prison unseen from a street that ran east and west. He dared not approach closer to see what happened when the truck reached the gate. However, he was pretty sure from his own experience a few weeks before that the truck had pulled up at the gate at the side of the prison and waited for it to roll back.

It was now 5.30 p.m. The longer he stayed in the prison’s vicinity, the more likely he was to attract interest. He turned towards Konrad-Wolf-Strasse. He had gone fifty yards when a Skoda tore across a stretch of old cobblestones towards him. He looked up and instantly saw Kurt in the back seat on his side. A man was holding onto him by the scruff of the neck. Kurt’s gaze skated across Rosenharte without recognition as the car sped towards the main entrance. Rosenharte did not turn but just kept walking towards the barrier that lay a hundred yards up the road.

Some twelve hours after Rosenharte’s call to Harland in the middle of the night, the Bird materialized at the Ostbahnhof - the main station in East Berlin. Rosenharte had said little on the phone except that the trainee was detained elsewhere and that he would need a replacement in order to load the goods. The pick-up would be made at the station any time after midday.

When he spotted the British agent striding through the crowds in a long leather jerkin without sleeves, the like of which he was sure had never been seen on German soil, he hastened towards him and greeted him like an old friend. The Bird responded with similarly dramatic signals of affection, but they didn’t speak until they had climbed into the Wartburg.

‘Where’s Harland?’ Rosenharte asked in English. ‘I thought he would be coming.’

‘He sends his apologies,’ said the Englishman, stroking his nose. ‘But we really can’t have the chief of Berlin Station breaking into prisons at the moment. But if you need a spare pair of hands I’m ready and willing.’

‘Can you drive a truck?’

‘Of course. Where is it?’

‘We have to hijack it first. I know the routes.’

‘Jesus, when are you hoping to do this?’

‘In the next two hours.’

‘Got any kind of weapon?’

Rosenharte turned round and lifted the back seat to show the guns and boxes of ammunition.

‘Right, well that’s something, I suppose.’ The Bird looked to the front and sniffed. ‘What’s the plan after you’ve got her out?’

‘Harland gave me these when we were in Dresden.’ He showed him two dark-blue British passports, complete with East German entry visas dated the week before and laminated strips that peeled back so that the picture could be fixed underneath. A note clipped to one had told him to heat the strips briefly in the steam from a kettle. ‘I don’t have a photo of Ulrike, and I need another passport for my friend Kurt Blast. He was the one arrested yesterday.’

The Englishman’s head whipped round. ‘Will he talk?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m his only chance of rescue.’

The Bird nodded. ‘But you admit there’s a possibility that they could know your whole plan, such as it is?’

‘Yes, but I must try - Kafka won’t last much longer in that place. We all owe her. You too.’

The Bird considered this. ‘All right, I’m in but it’s against all my better instincts. We’ll leave this car near the prison. At the first sign of trouble we’ll have to ram or shoot our way out.’

Rosenharte nodded.

‘Afterwards we’ll all go our separate ways. This isn’t a flaming package tour, you know. You’ve got your passports. You make your own way out of this apology for a country. Right, I think we’d better get a move on.’

‘Don’t you speak
any
German?’ asked Rosenharte.

‘No, I’m like most Englishmen: I can order from a menu and ask for a lavatory quite convincingly, but beyond that I’m rather at sea.’

He started the car and pulled out into the traffic on Mühlenstrasse. ‘Doesn’t your service require languages?’

‘Yes, but they chose to overlook my cloth ear because of my other skills.’

‘And those are?’

‘Oh, you know - duffing up people, driving cars, releasing the odd hostage, backgammon, explosives, weaponry. The usual things.’

Rosenharte nodded and offered him a cigarette. ‘Why are you called the Bird?’

‘I would have thought you’d got that by now, but maybe even your English doesn’t stretch that far. My name - Avocet - is a type of bird. A wader, I believe, with a long beak for sifting through the mud. That’s me,’ he said, stroking his crooked nose.

‘Ah, yes. Your name in German is
Säbelschnäbler
.’

‘Never had much time for birds myself - except driven grouse, of course. And the odd woodcock.’

They parked about a mile from the prison in Friedrichsfelde and, after ripping one of Rosenharte’s shirts into several lengths of cloth, they shared the four guns between them. They took the U-bahn four stops to Mollendorf and walked the rest of the way to Hohenschönhausen. The Bird was evidently unaffected by his proximity to the heart of darkness, yet for all his extraordinarily vivid Englishness, he did somehow manage to blend into his surroundings more than Rosenharte would ever have imagined. He walked with a stoop, didn’t look anyone in the eye and contrived with a rather depressed demeanour to appear much older than a man in his late thirties.

They reached the spot that Rosenharte had chosen, a narrow right-angle bend, where the trucks slowed to a walking pace. It wasn’t overlooked by any of the houses in the area. The only problem was that it was just three hundred yards from Konrad-Wolf-Strasse and, therefore, many hundreds of Stasi officers.

‘We’ve got no option,’ the Bird murmured with his hand in front of his mouth. ‘How many Stasi do we expect on board?’

‘Two, maybe three if they’ve got a guard in the back.’

He explained his plan and they split up to wait at different positions around the right-angle bend. Rosenharte took up a position beside a wooden fence and watched the gradual incline that the truck would climb before reaching the bend. The area seemed to be almost uninhabited and not for the first time in these last few weeks Rosenharte had the sense of expiration around him. The traffic on the arterial roads seemed muted, the factory chimneys in the south dribbled smoke into the sickly air and, as the night rushed from the east, the houses and apartments began to leak feeble lights into the dreary evening of the exhausted, hunched city. Rosenharte did his best to think of other things, but as the hands of his watch moved past five o’clock - the hour when the forged release documentation came into effect - his stomach knotted with anxiety.

Near seven the Englishman appeared from nowhere, offered him some whisky from a hip flask and asked whether he thought there would be any more trucks passing that night. The Bird snorted a laugh. ‘We don’t want to hold up some bloody bread van in the dark, do we now?’

Rosenharte replied that they had nothing to lose by waiting and the Bird again melted into the darkness on the other side of the street.

It was just past nine when the lights swung into the road from Frankfurter Allee and the truck began to grind up the gentle slope.

Rosenharte threw away his cigarette and called out to the Bird. The vehicle was almost upon them when he saw him lope at great speed from the shadows and jump up to the driver’s door at the point where the truck was moving at its slowest. Rosenharte drew his gun and ran to the passenger side, reached up and wrenched it open to find no one there. All he saw was the astonished face of the driver as the Bird hauled him out on the other side. The truck was still moving. Rosenharte dived for the gearstick, but the driver’s foot had left the accelerator and the vehicle juddered forward with a series of complaints from the engine and then stalled. He scrambled through the cab, turning off the lights on the way. ‘Where’re the keys for the back?’ he demanded. The driver’s head turned towards him. ‘Tell us and we won’t kill you.’

‘There’s no one in the back!’ he protested.

‘Then why are you going to the prison?’

‘To leave the vehicle there for tomorrow morning. They need it first thing. That’s all I know.’

‘Why?’

He looked down at the barrel pressed into his chest. ‘I don’t
know
! I’m just a driver. I don’t know anything.’

‘Where’re the keys to the back?’

The man pointed to a hook above the driver’s door. Rosenharte reached up and then got out of the cab. They frogmarched him round to the right side of the truck, unlocked the door and placed him in one of the open cells. The Bird gagged him with one of the strips of cloth, turned him and tied his hands behind his back, running the cloth through the bar on the side of the cubicle.

‘Now you listen to me,’ said Rosenharte. ‘Any sound out of you and you’ll die. Keep quiet for the next two hours and you’ll remain unharmed. Is that understood?’

The man nodded and they slammed the door on him.

‘I’ll drive into the prison,’ Rosenharte said. ‘I know the way and I may need to speak to the guards. Then you drive us out. Is that okay with you?’

‘Righty-ho,’ said the Bird enthusiastically. ‘Let’s go and get your friends.’

The truck was cumbersome and slow, and only as he neared the prison gates did Rosenharte understand that he had to pump the brakes to make them respond. The gate inched back and he let the truck shoot forward into the garage space, but managed to stop before hitting the second door that led into the compound.

A man came down a short flight of metal steps. ‘Hey, what’s going on? We’re not expecting any more deliveries.’

‘This isn’t a delivery,’ said Rosenharte. ‘This is a collection.’ He waved the papers at him. The Bird got out and nodded to him.

‘You’d better come to the office. We don’t know about any collection.’

‘This is a
special
collection. Anyway, weren’t you expecting a truck to be left here for morning? There’s another on the way.’

‘Identity card,’ said the guard, putting out his hand and turning to take the steps. He glanced at it and handed it back before opening the door. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? We have to sort this out now.’

Rosenharte looked nonplussed. ‘Yes, we’re in a hurry too. We’re four hours late. The prisoner was meant to be at Karlshorst at five.’ He followed him into an office where there was a table, a bank of four black and white TV monitors, which showed murky impressions of the perimeter wall, two telephones and a single desk light. On the wall was a notice board and a complicated three-tiered diagram of cells and interrogation rooms but - naturally - no names of prisoners were attached to the numbered cells. The records and cell number of each inmate would be kept in the main administration block at the centre of the compound.

The man ran his finger down a list then looked at the forged papers. ‘I have no record of this.’

‘You mean to say that the prisoner isn’t ready for immediate transport? That’s ridiculous.’

‘Of course not; she’s not on the list.’ He opened the palm of his left hand displaying a line of warts.