Spandau Phoenix (87 page)

Unaccustomed to firing the Vulcan, Jijrgen Luhr had missed the chopper on the first pass. Tracers danced wildly above the chopper's rotors.

Diaz signaled frantically for his compadre to put down, but Fidel still seemed uncertain of where the greater danger lay. Burton convinced him with a sustained burst that fragmented the chopper's windshield. The JetRanger dropped until it hovered a meter above the runway. Burton dashed for its side door, passing Diaz on the way. He leaped into the shuddering machine and trained his weapon on Fidel.

"Don't take off till Diaz is in!"

The little Cuban was close, but not close enough. Without even meaning to, Fidel jinked his ship two meters higher.

"Down!" Burton roared.

The JetRanger settled, then jerked up again.

Luhr backed his tracers off about forty meters from his target and began vectoring in again. This time the deadly beam held steady as he walked it in on the struggling helicopter.

"Jump!" Burton yelled.

Diaz leaped for the chopper's right skid, caught it. Burton got one hand on the Cuban's collar, saw the fear and anger in his eyes-then he felt the wild impact. For the briefest instant the tracer beam had sliced up and nicked Diaz in the side. One bullet plucked him off the skid as deffly as the finger of God.

The chopper yawed wildly as Fidel sought to avoid the tracer beam.

"Set this whore down!" Burton cried. He fired a round through the Plexiglas two inches from Fidel's head. The panicked Cuban shrieked in ten-or. Leaning out of the side door, Burton saw Diaz lying in the mud below, one arm raised in supplication.

Without any warning the chopper tilted ninety degrees and, whether by Fidel's design or not, Burton tumbled out.

He caught himself on the skid and hung on with claws of desperation. He felt the JetRanger start to rise. Fidel had made his decision: he was clearing out. In a split second Burton made his own.

With a curse on his lips he let go of the skid and fell six meters to the ground.

He landed badly, but the muddy earth cushioned his fall.

Above him, Fidel's chopper climbed rapidly, but not rapidly enough. Luhr had finally got the hang of the Vulcan. The fiery stream of slugs intersected the JetRanger amidships and nearly cut it in two before the fuel tank_ blew. The chopper fireballed like its sister ship, blasting wreckage all over the runway.

Burton threw himself over Diaz as the shrapnel tore the asphalt all around them. Without waiting for any further fire from the Vulcan, he took hold of the Cuban, heaved him over his shoulder like a sack and started slogging toward the Wash. If that gunner's still watching the fireball, he thought, we might just make it. But if he saw me jump, he's sighting -in on us right now. Ten meters to the edge ... seven ...

ton sped up, leaned forward ...

He leaped.

The two men tumbled head over heels down the steep slope and skidded to a stop at the edge of a raging flood.

Burton made sure Diaz wasn't about to be swept into the water, and then he glanced around for a hiding place. The Cuban caught his sleeve and pulled his face down close.

"Gracias, " he coughed. "Gracias, English."

Burton looked down at the tough little Cuban. Diaz's camouflage shirt was soaked with dark blood, but his lips and eyes showed the trace of a smile. "Don't thank me yet, lad," the Englishman said quietly. "It's going to be a long bloody night."

With the stealth that had carried him safely through four wars and countless intelligence operations, Jonas Stern made his way back to the bedroom he had briefly shared with Ilse.

His brain duummed wildly. He had to get back to that telephone.

He had scratched a mark deep in 'the library door with his broken fork so that he could quickly find the secret room again. But would he get another chapce? Horn's security chief would surely check the bedroom soon. The Afrikaner would naturally assume that "Professor Natterman"

had tried to escape with his granddaughter. And when he found Stern waiting here, what would he think?

Would he believe that "Natterman" had sat like a rabbit in an open cage while his granddaughter risked her life to escape?

Stern had heard Horn's promise to spare Hans Apfel's life, but he doubted if the old man's clemency would extend to Ilse's "grandfather."

To survive the next few minutes, Stern knew, he would have to find some plausible reason for having stayed behind while Ilse fled. Boot heels were already pounding up the hall when he remembered the Zinoviev notebook. Snatching it from inside his shirt, he darted to the little writing desk, mussed his hair, and opened the leatherbound volume at the middle.

The boots stopped outside his door.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Stern did not look up when Smuts opened the door. He pored over the thin black volume as if it were a lost book of the Bible. The Afrikaner stood silent for some time, watching him.

"What are you doing, Professor?" he said finally.

"Reading," Stern muttered.

"I can see that," snapped Smuts. "Where is your granddaughter?"

"I have no idea."

"How did she get out of this room?"

Stern looked up at last. "She picked the lock."

"With what?"

"A fork from your dinner table, I believe."

Smuts frowned. "Why didn't you go with her?

Stern shrugged. "She is young, I am old. With me along she would have little chance of escape. Without me ... who knows?"

"She did not escape," Smuts said, smirking.

Stern sighed and let a hand fall from the desk to his knee.

"Will you bring her back to me, please?"

"Impossible. She must pay for her insolence."

Recalling Horn's promise of mercy'to Ilse, Stern suppressed a smile as he brought a hand to his forehead. "She's only a young girl who wanted to find her husband. Where is the crime in that?"

"Herr Horn will decide," Smuts answered stiffly. "I think you're lying, Professor. You tried to escape and failed, didn't you? You ran into the shields."

"You underrate my devotion to history, young man." Stern laid a hand on the Zinoviev notebook. "This volume is a treasure-a lost fragment of history. Already I've learned things my colleagues would trade a limb for."

Smuts shook his head slowly. "You're past it, old man.

You can't see anything, can you?"

"I see that this book is far more valuable than the rubbish Hans found at Spandau."

"I'll tell you what that book is, Professor," Smuts snarled.

"It's your bloody death sentence. Only one man has read that book and remained alive, and you've already met him."

Smuts reached for the doorknob. "Enjoy it while you can," he said, and went out.

Stern stared at the closed door. He knew he could pick the lock again, but the Afrikaner might be waiting for just such an attempt. He took a deep breath and rubbed his temples.

He was sweating. Sixty seconds ago he had seen something so shocking it had wiped the ghastly Nazi shrine room from his mind.

It was the book. Zinoviev's notebook. The moment he had opened it, the moment before Pieter Smuts marched into his room, Stern had seen the strange black characters marching like foreign soldiers down the page.

Cyrillic characters.

Paragraph after, paragraph of laboriously handwritten Russian covered the left-hand page. And on the right-neatly typewritten on an old German machine-Stern had seen what he prayed was a German translation of the Russian handwriting. But what had so shocked him-what had blown everything el e out of his mind-was his nearcertainty that the Cyrilslic characters had been written by the same hand that wrote the "fire of Armageddon" note warning of danger to Israel in 1967. The same note which had said the secret of that danger could be found in Spandau.

Now he leafed quickly through the thin volume. The pages-twenty in all-were merely sheets of heavy typing paper glued amateurishly into a leather spine. The same strange configuration over and over: first Russian, then German. Stern could not verify his intuition about the author of the Spandau note. The note was in his leather bag, back in Hauer's room at the Protea Hof But he did not need to verify anything.

He knew. He closed the black notebook and reread the name on the cover: V V Zinoviev. Who was this mysterious Russian? How was he tied to the Rudolf Hess case? If Zinoviev had warned Israel in 1967 of some apocalyptic danger, had he voluntarily given this book to Alfred Horn?

Stern shivered with a sudden rush of deja vu. Alfred Horn.

The name buzzed in his brain like a swarm of bottleflies. Where had he seen it before? In some intelligence report? On some tattered list of Nazi sympathizers crossing a desk inTel Aviv?

He forced his mind away from the question. He forced himself to think of the telephone, the phone that waited in the bizarre Nazi shrine room.

To think of Hauer and Gadi, waiting anxiously for his call. He had to make contact with them. Yet in spite of Ilse's warning about a nuclear weapon, in spite of his conviction that Israel actually was in danger, Stern felt oddly certain that the key to the whole insane business-both past and present-lay within the thin volume in his hand.

If the papers Hans Apfel found in Spandau Prison proved that Prisoner Number Seven was not Rudolf Hess, what did this strange book reveal?

Horn had said-it related to May of 1941. Did this book, finally, reveal the secret of Rudolf Hess's real mission to England? Did it name Hess's British contacts? Did it reveal the full scope of the threat to Israel?

Could it silence the maddening hum at the back of Stern's brain when he heard the name Alfred Horn?

This notebook, he thought, not the Spandau papers, is Professor Natterman's Rosetta stone of 1941. I only hope I live to tell the oldfool about it. Stern opened the black cover and began to read: I, Valentin Vasilievich Zinoviev, here record for posterity thefacts of my service to the German Reich, specifically my part in the special operation undertaken in Great Britain in May 1941 known as "Plan Mordred. " I do so at the request of the surviving Reich authorities, to the best of my ability, adding or omitting nothing.

I was born in Moscow in 1895 to Vasili Zinoviev, a major in the army of Alexander II. At seventeen I became a soldier like my father, but after rising to the rank of sergeant I was recruited into the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police. I was promoted rapidly there. Some of my colleagues criticized my methods as overly harsh, but no one denied the results I achieved. Looking back on the bloodbath of 1917, I believe many of those same colleagues would say that my methods were not harsh enough. But they are dead now, and that is another story.

When I received word in 1918 that Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been executed by the Bolsheviks, I decided to make my way to Germany.

Strange to choose the vanquished nation as my sanctuary, but I did. Of all the Western nations, I had admired Prussia's military most. The journey was a nightmare. Europe was a shambles, but by using Okhrana contacts I finally managed to pass through the frontier into Poland.

From there I had little trouble.

Germany was in chaos. The people were starving. Armed gangs roamed the streets at will, preying on the unwary and stripping returning soldiers of their decorations. Chief among these gangs were the Spartacist Communists. I could scarcely believe I had fled Lenin's revolution only to find more of the same madness awaiting me. Quickly seeing how things stood, I offered my services to a band of Friekorps, one of the groups of German ex-officers and enlisted men who were trying to reestablish order in their country. The Friekorps leadership appreciated my special talents and put me to work immediately.

These were farsighted men. Even at that early stage they were planning for the next war At their request I refrained from joining the Nazi Party throughout Adolf Hitler's rise to power They preferred to use me as a "cat"s paw" whenever actions were required where absolutely no risk of being traced back to the Party could be tolerated.

Because the chief enemy of the Nazis was the Communist Party, I proved invaluable, and soon came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, Reichs hrer of Hitler's newly created SS.

.M Though I never developed more than the most superficial personal relationship with this strange character I admired his efficiency.

Himmler saw to it that some of my Okhrana methods were taught to members of his counter intelligence unit-the SD. It was through these endeavors that I came to know a promising young officer named Reinhard Heydrich.

Because of what happened later, I should mention my service in Spain. In 1936 I accompanied Germany's Condor Legion to Spain, to help Generalissimo Franco in his struggle against the Republican Forres-which were actually controlled by the Spanish communists and a few generals borrowed from Stalin. I served as an interrogator, my chief responsibility being interrogation of communist prisoners. It was this eighteen-month period that would later rise up to thwart my greatest mission, but who could foresee it then?

Back in Germany, I worked closely with Heydrich on a special program which I had helped initiate after the 1919

communist uprisings in Germany. Because yet another world war seemed inevitable, certain Nazi leaders expressed a desire that we should infiltrate not only the German Communist Party, but the communist organizations in those countries likely to be enemies of Germany in the next war By 1923 we had put a large number of agents in place, and by 1939 we had the most extensive anticommunist intelligence network in the world. There were losses and defections, of course, but the strategy remained sound.