A Time To Every Purpose

by Ian Andrew

  Lowther sat.

  “Hauptscharführer, what’s your name?”

  “Schern, Standartenführer”

  “Is this your team?” Heinrich swept his hand over the other three soldiers sitting in Schern’s row.

  “Yes sir.”

  Heinrich looked at the three men. It was a standard SS-Kommando team. The three men wore the rank of SS-Unterscharführers but their rank meant little. Between them and Schern there would be a weapons specialist, an explosives specialist, a communications expert and a team medic trained to paramedic standards. However all of them, including Schern, could ably fill in for the others if the need arose. He had their names printed on a sheet in front of him. Honecker, Schmitt and Calise. They didn’t look like most people expected Special Forces soldiers to look. They were not tall and blonde and built like tanks. In fact Heinrich remembered he had been a little disappointed the first time he had met any of their ilk.

  He had been a very young, very junior soldier in the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend and had gone on exercise to southern Italy. They had been told the SS-Kommando would be playing roles in the upcoming exercise and he had expected to walk into the company of giants. Instead he found himself surrounded by wiry little men. His Panzer Division friends were a majority of tall, blonde Aryan blueprints and so there was a bit of sneering at these ‘Special Forces’. The talking behind the backs of the Kommando was that the Panzer Division could whip them and that SS-Kommandos were not really elite but more e-little. He remembered the talk was always ‘behind their backs’ and never directly to them. There was a wariness. A ‘just in case’ mentality.

  Then had come the fight in the bar in Taranto. Some Italian soldiers had decided to share their wit and wisdom, both of which had been lacking. The Kommando’s fuse had been a long, slow burn. They hadn’t responded to the baiting they got. Heinrich recalled that it was one of the Panzer Division that had swung the first punch at the Italians and gone down in a flurry of fists and boots. At that point the Kommando decided enough was enough.

  Heinrich had been twenty years old and had been in uniform of one sort or another since joining the Junior Hitler Youth at age ten. He thought he had been made shockproof against the effects of violence and hard men. After seeing the pure aggressive savagery of the Kommando that night he had learnt there were violent men that he never wanted to come up against. He had reassessed his thinking about those wiry little men and he had never forgotten that four of them had weighed in to more than a dozen Italians just to rescue one Panzer Division soldier who had spent the previous week taking the piss out of them.

  His focus returned to the briefing room, “You three, do you trust this man?” All three soldiers responded by snapping up to a sitting attention position, “Yes Standartenführer.”

  “Well that’s good, because so do I. Schern you total fuck-wit. You know you shouldn’t have gone into details with an outsider. But I’m guessing you were going to get your leg over and your dick was driving your mouth. You’re not the first. Thing is, you could have kept your mouth shut just now and we’d all have walked into a prewarned target. So I’m guessing you just gave up your career for your men here. Is that correct?”

  “Yes Sir.” Schern answered Heinrich whilst looking directly at him, then dropped his gaze and looked down at the ground.

  Heinrich thought back to Taranto. He thought of the Italian Mountain Division soldier. A big burly son-of-a-bitch who had been about to ram a smashed glass into Heinrich’s head. He remembered the oldest of the Kommando team step in front of him and go with the thrust of the glass before grabbing the Italian’s wrist and twisting in a circle. The Italian had flipped over his own elbow and the sound of breaking bones and tearing tendons had been gratefully received by Heinrich.

  The Kommando casually took the glass from the now limp Italian and drove it into his chest before kicking him in the head with enough force to leave permanent damage. Heinrich had watched awestruck. When the Kommando had turned round to look at him, Heinrich had said the only thing he could think to say, “Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me son. You’d do the same for me. We’re German Soldiers.”

  Heinrich decided it was time to settle a long held debt. “Right, well I’ll figure out something fun for you later Schern, but I will not be taking your rank, nor will I be ending your career. As far as I’m concerned and as far as everyone else is concerned,” Heinrich looked around the room making eye contact with all the personnel, “this little balls-up stays inside this room. Am I clear?”

  There were a few nods.

  “Not good enough gentlemen. Am I clear?”

  “Yes Standartenführer,” the whole group responded.

  “Right. Now that’s settled, Schern sit down. I need all you SF types to get your shit together and figure out how we fix this. She has half an hour on us now. I want thoughts on what she’s going to do. Pascal, when did your guys get out front of Harrow?”

  “Ten minutes ago. No sign of her at present.”

  “Get them in there now and find out if her car’s still there. If it isn’t then we know something, if it is we’ll still not know a damned thing.”

  As Mary turned into her road she was aware she would have the advantage of surprise if there was a recce team already there. They didn’t know she had left work yet, would be on the lookout for her car and not the black Mercedes and would probably, hopefully, be focussed on their task. What she hadn’t expected was to find two of them standing in front of her house taking photographs. She drove down the street and noticed their official vehicle parked near the end of the road. It was empty. Either there was another pair out the back of her house or possibly they had been in such a rush that they had only sent the two. She drove around the block, parking in the road parallel to hers and cut through the side garden of the house that ran back to back with her small townhouse. She was relieved to see that they had obviously only sent a single Special-Reconnaissance team and they were still out front.

  Pascal closed his mobile phone, “Her car’s still there but they’ve run a check on all the pool cars on the site. Three of them are missing and one of them was signed out at 18:05 by a civilian administrator from her office.”

  Heinrich’s options were closing in, “Sod it, we can’t dick around anymore. Get your guys into her office now Pascal, tell them to try to get her alive.”

  The rear gardens of both properties were about 10-metres in length so she had 20-metres of fairly open ground to cross to get to her back door. Her only possible cover once she made her own garden was a small shed on the left hand side perimeter that had originally been a coal store when the house had been built. It now held Mary’s underused lawnmower and even less frequently used gardening tools. As she was about to negotiate the low hedge and flimsy wooden fence that separated the gardens she saw both members of the recce team coming down the side path of her house. She crouched behind the hedge and was thankful for her black uniform.

  Pascal’s phone rang again. He stood quietly listening to his men at the Harrow Holding Centre for a moment before looking up at Heinrich again, “She wasn’t there. Both of her admin staff are missing. She’s running.”

  Heinrich looked at the map that had been pinned up by the SF teams. He looked at the distance lines and time lines. “Fuck it! This is unravelling. Get on to your SpecRecce team Pascal and tell them that if she’s on her way to the house then she’s going to be on top of them very soon. The rest of you, I want routes and options for where she could be now, assuming she isn’t heading back to her house.”

  Mary watched the two surveillance men. They were both dressed in dark suits and both were average height and average build. The quick glimpse of their faces as they had come into the garden told her they were both average looking. Overall they were ideal candidates for close observation reconnaissance duties.

  She figured the one on her right was the more experienced of the two only in that he had greyer hair than his colleag
ue on the left. He also had a pencil and was making notes in an old fashioned flip notebook, the pages of which would be ripped out and handed to the assault team. Sometimes computers weren’t better and faster.

  They stood with their backs to her about six metres distant. The one on the left began to take photographs which would no doubt include each window and door and would be used to brief the Kommandos. It would have been a lot easier for the assault team to be here waiting for her return so she knew that their time must have been limited. They had to have been planning that she would beat them home. Well they were correct about that.

  As they remained with their backs turned she carefully climbed over the small fence and stayed as centrally behind them as she could. She crouched and then sprinted forward. She was less than two metres away when they began to turn round.

  Greyhair dropped his notebook and pencil and went to reach inside his jacket with his right hand whilst the photographer threw his camera at her and started reaching for his left hip.

  Mary half turned to her left and let the camera sail past before bringing her pistol up and pointing it directly at the now camera-less photographer.

  “Keep reaching for your weapons and the only question is ‘how many rounds will I put into you?’ It’s your choice.”

  They all held their positions and Mary kept her aim on the younger of the two. The moment seemed to stretch into a minute. She was about to instruct them on what she needed them to do when Greyhair’s Fone buzzed on his arm.

  The noise seemed to break the spell and they all moved at once. Greyhair instinctively reached up to his right ear to connect the call. Mary brought her pistol around and at almost point blank range fired through the Fone attached to his left wrist. The younger officer reached for the pistol on his hip and had almost got his weapon clear of the leather holster when Mary turned to him and yelled for him to stop. Whether it was adrenaline or inexperience or both, the younger officer continued to draw his weapon. The muzzle was almost level and bearing in on Mary.

  Her bullet went through his right cheek, just below the eye and exited, along with most of the back of his skull, onto the faded green grass. As his corpse was crumpling into a heap Mary refocussed on Greyhair who was sunk to his knees and grasping his left wrist. He made no sound save for the noise of laboured breathing.

  “Who has the car keys?” she asked.

  He merely nodded in the direction of his dead partner. She slowly walked a full 360-degrees around him to check each of the surrounding houses that had oversight of the garden. The suppressed pistol had made very little noise, so no one had come to look out. There were no staring faces at any window and no curtains were twitching. She disarmed Greyhair and advised him to use his own jacket as a binding for his wound. Then she opened the small combination padlock on her garden shed and ushered him inside. After taking the car keys and Fone from the body of the photographer she rolled it over to the shed door and had Greyhair pull it in beside him. Resecuring the padlock she went inside her house to grab an already prepared backpack. It was 18:45.

  Heinrich was still standing at the lectern. Johan Lowther stood next to him and Pascal was on his mobile at the back of the room, pacing and looking concerned. He closed the phone and looked at Heinrich.

  “Nothing.”

  “Right gents, at worst we can assume she’s taken down our recce and she’s been at the house for at least fifteen minutes. At best she just got there a few minutes ago. Either way she’s not going to be hanging around. I need options.”

  “Local Kripo?” asked Honecker.

  One of the backup squad answered, “If she’s just taken down a SpecRecce team, then what do we think she’s going to do with the K-heads? No offence Sir.” He spoke towards Kriminalrat Debouchy who had rejoined the other’s at the lectern.

  “None taken Unterscharführer, in fact I’d agree with you. But we might use them to screen the roads. Force her the way we want her to go.”

  “Great, but where’s she going to run to?” asked Dietmar Heysburgh.

  “Ireland.” The voice came from the back of the room. Carl Schern was logged onto the Security Directorate Network and had Mary Reid’s personnel record on screen.

  “Schern?” Heinrich prompted.

  “Standartenführer, her parents are dead and her two living sisters are off the radar. She goes on holiday alone and has, for the last three leave periods, headed to the north Antrim coast. If she gets there and goes to ground we could spend a year trying to find her. Think of how long it took to negate the Ulster Resistance Force in the Fifties and Sixties up and down that coast. The good news is that she’s going to have to get there and that means boat or plane. Commercial travel’s obviously not an option now so she’ll probably go for a boat.”

  Heinrich looked around the room. No one voiced any disagreement with the theory. “Okay. It’s the best option we have, so where’s her jump off point?” as Heinrich asked the question a general hubbub of conversation and ideas sprang up from around the room. He let it run for a minute or two before nodding at Lowther.

  “Okay!” Lowther raised his voice and the noise stopped. “Possible courses of action?”

  “North Wales.”

  “Southern Scotland.”

  “Cornwall.”

  Heinrich looked at the map and back at the room. He hated inaction and indecision. It was now almost 19:00 hours and for the previous hour and a half every plan that he had come up with to apprehend this woman had turned sour almost as soon as he had put it in place. He was playing catch-up and he detested it. He took a breath and thought through his options.

  The room waited.

  He had combat experience, investigation experience and he wore the rank of a SS-Standartenführer. All he needed to do was figure out what to do and he knew all the men in the room needed him to do something. He took another breath and began to issue his orders in a calm and authoritative manner.

  “Johan, wake the rest of your squads up. I want three helicopters, 8-man teams for each and ready to lift at fifteen minutes readiness. Get the pilots briefed, one each to cover those likely destinations and the routes to them. If we get a trail on her car then I want an immediate interdiction. Get on to your Army Aviation buddies and pull them out of whatever hotel they happen to be pissing it up in.” Heinrich nodded for him to start now and Lowther left the room.

  “Pascal, put Kripo VCPs into all autobahn routes and as many trunk roads as you can in or near Watford. Dietmar, I need military backup at those checkpoints but they are not to engage her. They are not to return fire, understand? If she runs the checkpoint they let her go and we let the air assault take her. Also Dietmar, you’re going to be running this end of things while I’m away.” Again Heinrich motioned with his head and the two officers started making their calls.

  “Schern, get your team and the backups booted, spurred and out front in five minutes. I want an immediate assault on her house. If we catch her there then life is going to get a lot simpler. If she’s gone then we find her. Let’s go gents.”

  Chapter 27

  Two Geländewagens pulled into the eastern end of Brightwell Road in Watford. A third entered from the western end and immediately slewed across the street to form a blocking force. The eastern most vehicle did the same and the troops debussed. Heinrich stepped out and began to watch the rest of the operation. He was hooked into the main communications channel and could hear the running commentary.

  “Charlie secure.”

  “Bravo secure.”

  “Alpha squad, check,” it was Schern’s voice followed by a series of radio clicks. Heinrich knew that Schern would be sitting in the front passenger seat of the Geländewagen that was pulled in to the side of the road just in front of him. All the man’s focus would be on the target address and he only needed to hear the radio clicks of the three other members of his assault team to know they were ready.

  “Go.”

  The vehicle was accelerated hard down the little terra
ce street until the brakes were hammered on and it stopped just in front of Mary Reid’s townhouse. Schern was out and took a kneeling position in the front garden. Honecker went to the front door as Schmitt and Calise headed down the side ally to the back garden. Honecker nodded at Schern and stood to the side of the door frame.

  “Alpha callsigns, engage.”

  The charge Honecker had placed on the front door blew the locking mechanism off the frame at the same time as Schern fired two stun grenades through the lower room window. Calise was a fraction behind putting his grenades through the kitchen window and Schmitt was the last to detonate his charge and blow the back door but it was only a second from first to last.

  “Alpha 2, hall clear”

  “Alpha 3, rear approaches secure”

  “Alpha 4, back clear”

  Heinrich listened as the four men moved quickly through the rest of the small house. It was less than thirty seconds worth of repeated ‘clears’ before he heard Schern.

  “All callsigns, this is Alpha 1. Status Black. Bravo and Charlie lift the block and relocate here, I want a full sweep.”

  Heinrich knew it had been a long shot. He checked his watch. Mary Reid had been phoned by Schern less than one and three quarter hours before. She had acted quickly and with no hesitation. He had tried to take a cautious approach and keep her arrest as controlled as possible. So far she was beating him hands down. He waved for the wagon to go on down to the house, he needed the short walk to refocus. He continued to listen in to the comms chatter.

  “Warrior Control, this is Alpha 1. Request immediate CasEvac. We have Sierra Romeo 1, Cat-six, secured to rear of target. Over.”

  “Alpha 1, this is Warrior, Medivac en route your locale. How so Sierra Romeo 2. Over”

  “Negative Warrior, Sierra Romeo 2, Cat-one. Over.”

  “Roger Alpha 1, Backup team moving now. They’ll take control of Sierra Romeo 2. Out.”