The Secret of Spandau (41 page)

He decided to stay in the character of Hess and wander across the grass, scattering breadcrumbs. A dash for the bushes would have been easier on the nerves, but suicidal. Hunched and with his back to the watchtower, he tottered off the path.

Almost immediately, there was a shout from the tower, some warning in Russian that he pretended not to hear. He continued his meandering walk towards the cover of the bushes, still scattering handfuls of crumbs.

Another shout, this time through a loud-hailer.

Fifteen yards covered. Ten to go.

He bent lower and moved in a straighter line. Five more.

He sprinted.

A burst of gunfire. But he was already in the bushes and had dived to the right, out of sight against the wall that formed the side of the workshop.

An alarm blared through the prison.

He took a foothold on the nearest bush, grasped the top of the wall and hauled himself up, to roll across the low-angled roof as the gunfire spattered around him. He had come in range of a second watchtower.

Flat to the roof, he spotted a skylight. He crawled towards it and got his fingers under the edge. A piece of tarpaulin came off in his hand, but the wooden cover wouldn't shift. He tugged at it frantically. It wouldn't budge. They must have made it secure with nails.

Another burst from the watchtower machine gun. He abandoned the skylight and slithered down the roof until his feet hit the guttering. He felt a stab of pain in the calf of his left leg.

He had been hit.

It was hopeless. He slid down and lay along the length of the gutter a moment, then gripped it and swung by his hands. Just below was a window into the workshop. Anything to escape the gunfire. He kicked hard at the glass, shattered it and swung himself inwards, feet first. The jagged glass at the edges of the frame ripped into Hess's overcoat, but miraculously Red got inside without further injury.

For a few seconds he lay immobile, fighting the pain in his leg. Then he forced himself to crawl away from the window. Gripping his leg above the knee with both hands, he tried to stand. He staggered a few steps and fell across a workbench. He wasn't going to get much further, however he tried.

The alarms screeched all over Spandau. He heard army boots on the gravel outside, orders shouted in Russian. The acute pain in his leg had subsided a little and was being supplanted by a more generalised ache. If it were only a flesh-wound … But he knew he was kidding himself. He was trapped. He could only wait and see if they wanted to take him alive.

A crash, as someone shattered another window. At the far end of the workshop, they were battering their way through a locked door.

Red heaved himself into a sitting position and raised his hands in surrender. The door burst open and two soldiers moved in with guns levelled. The man at the window also had him covered.

He didn't move a muscle as they advanced on him. They shoved him face down on the bench, ripped off the overcoat and searched him for arms. One of them noticed the blood on his trouser-leg. They rolled it back to look at the wound.

More soldiers came in. Red thought he heard the voice of the NCO from the guardroom. He was using a two-way radio.

Someone else arrived and applied a bandage to Red's wound. As if to correct any impression that they meant to treat him gently, two men then handcuffed him, grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him off the bench and out of the workshop. He tried to get a footing, but the pain was too severe.

He was hauled across a yard and into the main block, up one of the iron staircases and through a couple of rooms, his perceptions blurred by the agony in his leg. Dimly, he became aware of a door he recognized. The guards knocked first, and took him in. He was facing Colonel Klim, the Soviet Director. A chair was found and Red slumped into it.

‘Sit up!' ordered Klim.

He raised his head.

‘You have committed many breaches of prison regulations. You have conspired with prison warders to attack a Soviet guard and a Soviet warder. You have gained illegal entry to the inner cell-block and spoken with prisoner Number 7. These offences will be reported to the military authorities. In my capacity as director, I shall now invite Soviet General Vanin to take you into his custody for interrogation.'

‘Vanin?' mumbled Red. ‘That bastard from the KGB?'

He was immediately struck from behind, a vicious punch against his cheekbone that tore the soft flesh under his eye and sent blood coursing down his face. His hair was grabbed and wrenched back.

He found himself looking upside down into a pale face dominated by bulging eyes, yellow and bloodshot at the edges. He avoided looking into them. Instead, he found himself watching a blob of saliva slowly form between slightly open, fleshy lips. He was helpless as it dropped between his eyes in a dribbling string of spittle, and slid across his face. It smelt of vodka.

Klim said, ‘General Vanin speaks no English, but he can make himself understood.'

‘Sod off.'

There was an exchange in Russian. Someone opened a door behind him and a lighter set of footsteps crossed the room. A woman?

‘Sit up,' ordered Klim. ‘The lady wants a look at your ugly face.'

Blood and spit were smearing Red's vision, but he could see enough. It couldn't have been worse. Heidrun Kassner was standing in front of him. They had brought her in to identify him. Dimly, his brain told him that she shouldn't have been there. He had left her trussed up at Cal Moody's apartment. Jane had been with her.

God, what had happened to Jane?

Heidrun's eyes were directed downwards as if she preferred not to look at Red. Something was said in Russian. She raised her face briefly. Their eyes met. Hers were indifferent.

Heidrun nodded and told the Russians, ‘Goodbody.'

‘My name or your opinion?' said Red.

Someone struck his head from behind.

‘Cow!' said Red inadequately.

With that, he was dragged off the chair and bundled out of the office. On the way, he had his first full glimpse of Vanin and it was in no way encouraging. The General was not in uniform, but wore a blue three-piece suit. Overweight and in his forties, with reddish hair that he probably tinted, he had the bloated look of an ex-boxer who has hit the vodka and neglected his fitness.

The descent was agonizing. That left leg was throbbing from thigh to ankle and, handcuffed as Red was, he was prevented from using his arms to steady himself. At each step, the pain was like a chisel being turned in the wound. As they started down the second flight, an order was given and the guards supported his thighs and carried him the rest of the way. They hurried him along a corridor and out through the gates of the main prison block.

A brown Lada limousine with diplomatic plates was waiting in the yard. The chauffeur got out and opened the rear door. Red was lifted in, while one of the guards kept him covered with his gun through the open door.

After about three minutes, General Vanin emerged from the building with Heidrun. Vanin got into the back seat beside Red. He drew a small, silver automatic from inside his jacket, pressed it into Red's ribs and spoke something in Russian.

Heidrun was getting into the seat beside the driver. She said, ‘He is telling you to lie on the floor.

‘I don't mind lying for the KGB,' said Red, shifting forward to obey the order. ‘Where are we going?'

‘I'm not allowed to say. They want to interrogate you.'

Red crouched on the space between the seats. Vanin gave an order and the car glided away, saluted by the guards.

They drove slowly across the cobbled yard to the first set of gates. The NCO came out to check. Noticing Red's blood-streaked face, he started to smirk; then, at a sharp word from Vanin, came smartly to the salute and gave the order for both sets of double gates to be unbolted. The Lada edged out of Spandau Prison and turned left on Wilhelmstrasse, towards the city and the Wall.

At the edge of the Südpark in the Wilhelmstadt section of Spandau is a highrise block of flats with a clear view across Gatower Strasse to the Allied Prison. At a window on the twenty-fourth floor, Jane was standing with a pair of Zeiss binoculars focused on the main gate. It was
5.35
a.m. At her side, in a nightdress and curlers, was the
hausfrau
, a stout, cheerful person in her fifties, whose name she had not discovered. Things had happened too swiftly for social exchanges.

Willi Becker had brought her here from his flat in Kreuzberg, driving one-eyed through the almost deserted city streets at speeds that had scared her, though she had tried not to show it.

He had already alerted the people in the flat by phone, so the woman's husband, a tall, bearded man called Alfred, had been dressed when they arrived. After a few words in German, both men had gone down by the lift to the car.

‘You are afraid?' the woman asked Jane in halting English that sounded as if she had been putting it together for some time.

Without lowering the glasses, Jane answered, ‘Yes, but not for myself. For someone else.'

‘Your lover?'

For all her anxieties, Jane managed a faint smile. ‘Yes. My lover.'

‘Red?'

‘Yes. You know him?'

‘Of course. Willi and my Alfred.'

‘I see.'

‘Cold War,
ja
?'

‘Yes?' responded Jane, not quite following.

‘Die Fluchthelfer?'

She had heard the word, but where?

‘
Die Mauer
? Berlin Wall,
ja
? Willi, Alfred, Red help many peoples. Over, under.'

Belatedly, it dawned on Jane, and she was angry with herself for being so obtuse. The shocks of the past twelve hours had dulled her brain. These were the people Red had written about in that series of articles she had read and admired: the escape-helpers, the daring or reckless men and women who secretly schemed the crossings of fugitives from the East. Over the beer on Saturday night in that weekend at Cedric's, he had told story after story about them. The woman appeared to be saying Red had been one of them; and it was not too incredible, thinking back. His writing and his stories had burned with the passion and vigour of personal experience. And now the
Fluchthelfer
were scheming to help him.

The knowledge warmed Jane like a brandy. The odds against rescuing Red were still enormous, but thank God the attempt would be made by an experienced team.

Twenty minutes went by.

Then Jane told the woman, ‘Something is happening down there.'

There was movement at the prison entrance. A Soviet soldier came out of the small door in the blue double gates and moved forward under the arc-lamps, his gun levelled. He was followed by another.

‘Two guards,' Jane reported. ‘They seem to be checking that no one is outside.'

‘I tell Willi.' Her companion picked up the two-way radio the men had left her and spoke into it.

Down below, they were opening the gates and a brown saloon car was visible under the turreted entrance. Jane trained the binoculars on the registration-plate as the light caught it and spoke the number aloud, adding, ‘A dark brown saloon, very large.' Before the message was passed to Willi Becker, she had shifted her sights upwards to the windscreen. The car glided forward across the cobbles. For a moment, the faces inside were illuminated: a chauffeur in a dark uniform, not military; beside him, a girl in a close-fitting blue and white tracksuit-top – a pale, staring face, framed by short, dark hair. Heidrun.

‘Oh, God! They
must
have got Red.'

‘Red?' said the German woman. ‘You see him?'

‘No. Wait!' Jane watched the car accelerate and swing across the carriageway. ‘One man in the back, not Red, I'm certain. Tell them Heidrun Kassner is in the car, but I can't see Red.'

Waiting in a narrow street between two blocks of flats off Wilhelmstrasse in his VW Golf, Willi Becker took the message and made his decision.

He made radio contact with the third section of his team, giving them the description and registration number. ‘A Lada, I guess. Don't miss it.' To Alfred, seated beside him, he commented. ‘You can bet they've got Red in there somewhere. They wouldn't make two trips.' He turned the ignition and moved forward to the intersection to wait for the brown saloon.

The early morning traffic, was already starting to build. When the Lada cruised past, Becker swung the Volkswagon smoothly on to Wilhelmstrasse behind it. They travelled in the fast lane for about a kilometre, Becker driving one-handed and speaking instructions into his handset. Then the traffic slowed. Unusually for this time of day, there was a hold-up ahead, a short way before the junction with Pichelsdorfer Strasse. The cars were actually stationary and three men in bright yellow safety-jackets were moving forward, stooping to speak to the drivers.

The Lada drew up behind a petrol tanker.

Becker brought the VW to a smooth halt, and said calmly, ‘Guns.'

Alfred had two loaded sub-machine guns ready on his lap. He passed one to Becker.

They waited for one of the yellow-jacketed men to approach the Lada. As the chauffeur wound down his window, the other men in safety-jackets moved fast to the rear of the car. One of them looked through the rear window and raised his arm in a signal to Becker.

‘Now!' said Becker, thrusting open the door of the Golf.

In the same split-second, a shot was fired from inside the Lada. The man who had made the first approach keeled back and crashed over the bonnet of another vehicle.

The Lada's engine roared as the chauffeur swung the wheel and bumped the big car over the raised strip of grass that formed the central reservation. A container lorry in the slow lane of the opposite carriageway was forced to veer on to the cycle-way with a shriek of tyres. The Lada completed its U-turn and raced away from the ambush.

Becker crouched on the grass and fired a volley of shots. One of them must have pierced a front tyre, because fifty metres down the street the Lada careered into the fast lane, almost jumping the reservation again.