“I want everyone to remain calm. He must suspect nothing. I will take in a Red Cross document for him to sign, then Lorenzo and Mattia will go with you to the photographer and forger in Eugendorf, only you won’t get that far. In the woods to the left of the main road, you will do what has to be done, and make sure you hide the body well. Is everyone clear? And you, Manteufel, are you now calm?”
Everyone nodded, and Cecelja re-entered his office, emerging a few moments later arm-in-arm with Kelly. “When you have the papers and photographs from our document specialist, you will return here and we will arrange transportation to Rome. I fear your journey is not at an end yet, Dragan,” he said, smiling.
They drove away from the property heading, as far as Kelly could tell, roughly north-east on a main road, Kelly and Manteufel in the back, Lorenzo and Mattia in the front. After a couple of miles, Lorenzo turned off the main road and onto a small track, heading into a dense wood. The vehicle pulled to halt in a clearing deep in the trees. Manteufel instantly leapt out of his side door, drawing his Luger, cocking it and pointing it at Kelly.
“Get out! Slowly!” he ordered.
Kelly emerged, his face a picture of bewilderment.
“Move away from the car, hands in the air!”
Kelly once more complied.
“You two, get out! I’ll need a hand in a minute,” Manteufel ordered.
The Italians climbed out of the car and leaned back against it, each holding a small handgun in his right hand. At that point Manteufel swung round and levelled his Luger at the two men.
“Drop your weapons and turn around, hands on the car!” he ordered.
Lorenzo started to raise his weapon, but it only reached waist height before a Luger round smashed into his chest, sending him crashing into the side of the car and sliding down. Kelly moved in swiftly and retrieved the pistol from the dead hand, levelling it at the other man.
Mattia was in a frenzy of terror. He flung his weapon away and stood with his hands in the air, visibly shaking and repeating, alternately in German and Italian, “My friends, my friends, please don’t shoot, please!”
“Turn around, hands on the top of the car!” ordered Manteufel. As Mattia complied, Manteufel called to Kelly, “Cover him.” He tucked his Luger into the back of his belt and frisked the Italian, producing a flick knife which he slung into the back seat of the car. He then went in search of the other weapon, so hastily discarded by the terrified Mattia. Having found it, he returned to the car and shrugged at Kelly, palms in the air and eyebrows raised.
Kelly nodded and moved towards Mattia, who was now openly weeping. “Listen, Mattia, we are not going to kill you, do you understand? We need you to take a message back to Father Vilim. Tell him we are coming for him. Skorzeny has ordered us to finish him because he has broken the rules of the Thule Society. Skorzeny wants him to understand that Thule is greater than the Catholic Church, so we have been ordered to hang him, tonight at midnight. Do you understand all that I have told you, Mattia?”
“Yes, Herr Novak, I understand. Please don’t shoot me! I’ll deliver the message, I promise.”
“Good man, Mattia, and stay away from the house tonight or you will be killed too. Now move off the track and lie face down in the grass. We are going to drive off now, but I’ll be watching you out of the rear window. If you move before we are out of sight, I will stop the car and come back and shoot you. Do you understand?”
“I understand, Herr Novak, thank you, thank you.”
Manteufel and Kelly jumped into the front seats of the car, Manteufel in the driving seat, and they moved off back down the track. As they approached the main road, Kelly said, “Turn left onto the main road, Horst, and make for Linz. Take it steady though, not too fast or too slow. We don’t want to attract attention.”
Once on the main road, they settled into a comfortable cruising speed and Kelly felt able to relax slightly. He glanced at Manteufel, who looked back with a face expressing total amazement.
“Something wrong?” asked Kelly nonchalantly.
“What was that pile of horse shit you were feeding poor Mattia back there? Thule taking on the Catholic Church, Skorzeny going to hang Cecelja, what was all that about?”
Kelly laughed. “I just thought it might create confusion among our enemies, keep them occupied with each other for a time. It just might keep their minds off us for a while.”
“Once Mattia gets back, say half an hour, an hour at the outside, do you think Cecelja will raise the alarm, get the police onto us perhaps, search for this car?” asked Manteufel.
“I’m gambling that that won’t happen,” said Kelly. “I don’t know how much you know about our ex-Ustase Lieutenant Colonel Father Vilim?”
Manteufel shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Well, the fact is, he has just come out of prison—only last year in fact—after doing two years for people trafficking and falsifying Red Cross documents. The house he occupies is almost certainly the property of the Vatican, and he probably lives there under sufferance from the Austrian authorities as well as the US authorities, who still have occupational army control over this sector. He will be desperate not to draw attention to his continued people trafficking—and remember, I still have some of those falsified documents on my person. If we were apprehended by the Austrian police, he would have some very embarrassing questions to answer. My guess is that he’s praying we don’t get caught. That said, I could be wrong.”
“Fine,” said Manteufel, “so where are we going?”
“How much petrol do we have?” asked Kelly in response.
“Full tank.”
“Right, I’m going to have to do some maths—in English. This metric stuff baffles me,” said Kelly. “Let’s see now. A car like this will have a fuel tank of about ten-gallon capacity, and it should do about thirty miles to the gallon, say twenty-five to err on the side of safety. That means we have a range of roughly two hundred and fifty miles! Distance from here to Vienna is less than two hundred miles, so we should do it on one tank.”
“We’re going to Vienna?” asked Manteufel, surprised.
“Not quite. We’ll be turning off the main road just before we get there and heading for a small town called Tulln. There’s a US Airforce base there. I’m hoping we can convince them we are who we say we are. If we can, then we’ll be able to claim sanctuary there.”
“Claim sanctuary? Sounds very medieval,” said Manteufel facetiously. “Just hope there’s a cathedral there!”
Kelly laughed. “I don’t think there’ll be a cathedral on the base, but it’s a fair bet there’s a Catholic church, and we both know how accommodating the Catholic Church is when it comes to looking after escaping criminals!”
After they had circumnavigated Linz, they took a short break and changed places, Kelly driving the second leg. They turned off the main road at a village called Einsiedl, following the signs to Tulln. Before reaching the town, they spotted a tac sign to ‘USAFE Tulln’ and followed it. A kilometre or so from the base, Kelly pulled the car off the road and into a wood, with the petrol gauge hovering close to zero.
As they disembarked, Kelly grabbed the two Beretta pistols from the back seat where he had thrown them after they had disarmed the Italians. One he dropped into his pocket; the other, after removing the ammunition clip and dropping this into his pocket also, he threw into the woods as far as he could. He held the knife up for Manteufel to see.
“You want this?” he asked.
“I have my own,” said Manteufel, tapping the pocket which contained his trusty trench knife. Kelly dropped the knife into his own pocket.
“Of course, the first thing they’ll do is remove our weapons,” said Kelly, as they walked towards the main entrance of the airbase, “but hopefully we’ll get them back.”
As they approached the entrance, a guard stepped out of his sentry box and stood with his carbine held easily across his chest, a big man, as tall and broad as Skorzeny. He would have been a go
od match, thought Kelly.
There was a wide grin on his handsome face as he greeted them in a deep rich southern drawl. “And what can I do for you, gentlemen?”
Kelly returned his smile, but what he said turned the Texan’s smile to a look of blank astonishment. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Kelly, and this is Horst Manteufel, a German national. We both work for the British Secret Service, and we need to speak to your commanding officer urgently on a matter of the utmost importance!”
Part IV
South American Adventures
Into Mexico
The border guard on the Mexican side of the bridge spanning the Rio Grande between McAllen in Texas and Reynosa in Mexico barely glanced at Sybilla’s documents as he waved her through. She had memorised the directions given by her CIA contact: Locate the main road south to San Fernando, look for Hotel Los Almendros on your right just as you reach the suburbs.
The highway was easy to follow. It was well signposted, and after following the Rio Grande for a short distance, it turned south. There was a tricky section through a busy interchange, but once through that, it was straight as a die.
She located the Hotel Los Almendros set slightly off the road in a small orchard of almond trees. On entering, she found the hotel small, but clean and tidy. The proprietor was only too willing to accept US currency, although her insistence on a ground floor room cost her an extra five dollars. She needed to be easily accessible.
As she settled into her room, she took a moment to rest and reflect. Everyone concerned had gone to a great deal of trouble to get her to this point, but she was very conscious that the whole plan could come crashing down around her feet. The CIA double agent would certainly make Stefan Huber aware of her presence here, but would Huber consider a teacher to be worth bothering about? It was a long shot.
Immediately after McFarlane’s briefing, Sybilla had moved to Beaconsfield in England where a small flat was provided for her. The following day she was visited by her teacher, assigned to her for one month from the Army Education HQ based at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield.
The woman, Maria Camila Martinez, a petite and attractive thirty-something, had studied languages in England before returning to her native Gibraltar as an English teacher. After the onset of hostilities, she was used by the British as an interpreter, returning to teaching after the war. During this time, she was recruited to provide basic Spanish lessons and orientation training for military personnel recently posted to the Rock. The courses were a huge success. Looking at Maria, it was not difficult to see why.
Then, about two years ago, she was headhunted by the Army Education Corps to train selected officers in high-level Spanish to interpreter standard. It was too good an opportunity to miss, and she moved to England with her husband Rafael and their two young children, Maya and Vincente. Rafael—a radar technician in the dockyard in Gibraltar—had no difficulty in finding a job as a radio repair technician with a far-sighted company already gearing up for the introduction of television.
After two days of formal lessons in a classroom at Wilton Park, Maria had shaken her head. “Sybilla, this is no good, we’ll never have you ready in a month. To understand and speak Spanish to a good level, you have to live it. You will have to move in with Raffa and me. You must live, eat and sleep Spanish for the next month. Speak no English, no English radio, no newspapers—nothing but Spanish, Spanish and Spanish.”
And so Sybilla did. She moved into their three-bedroomed house, sharing a room with the eldest child Maya, fortunately a wonderfully polite young lady of about eight years, who loved talking to Sybilla. Perfect!
After that, it was complete immersion, which Sybilla entered into with her usual total commitment. At the end of the month, she had been ready.
On her arrival in the US, she was given a final briefing in Washington before being inserted into McAllen on the Mexican border with a suitcase of clothes, two hundred US dollars and a 1939 Oldsmobile 60. Now it was the waiting game.
She didn’t have long to wait. On the third day after her arrival in Reynosa, the receptionist knocked on her door and informed her that a Señor Huber was in reception asking for her. Sybilla’s heart beat a little faster but she remained outwardly calm. Wearing her most worried look, she walked the short distance to reception where Huber waited.
“Yes?” she asked peremptorily, working her hands as she did so.
Huber was a short man, fairly rotund, balding and with thick glasses. Despite that, there was an air of authority about him. He answered in German.
“You have nothing to fear from me, Frau Thorstaadt. I am nothing to do with the American authorities. I am here to help you.”
“Who are you? What do you want?” responded Sybilla, still speaking in English and allowing fear to creep into her voice.
“Why don’t we go to the corner coffee house? We will have more privacy there.”
They walked to the café—Sybilla clearly agitated and furtively glancing up at him from time to time—and took a seat outside, distancing themselves from the only other customer.
“Speak German,” Huber commanded. “It’s more secure.”
He paused while a waiter took their order then continued, “You have escaped from the USA to avoid extradition, is this not so?”
Sybilla looked as though she was about to deny it then hung her head. After a pause she confirmed, very softly in German, that his suspicions were correct.
“What did you intend to do after crossing the border?” he asked.
“I didn’t think it through very clearly, I was panicking. I had the crazy idea that I could drive to Brazil. They have German settlements there, you see. I thought I might get a job as a teacher.” Sybilla was near to tears as she told her story.
“Drive to Brazil?” he asked incredulously, raising his eyebrows.
“I told you it was done in a moment of panic. I hadn’t realised the distances, and even if my car could make it, which I doubt, I wouldn’t have enough money to cover the fuel.”
“So, what will you do now?”
“I’ll go back and give myself up. It’s all I can do. It’s hopeless!” This latter in a fit of sobbing.
Huber placed his hand on hers. “Don’t despair, I may be able to help. You lost your husband whilst on a mission in France, I believe?”
“Jürgen wasn’t my husband. We weren’t married, but we were lovers and lived together. Our mission was to obtain information about the underground. My job was to try to infiltrate then report back to Jürgen, and he in turn would report back to Gestapo HQ in Dunkirk.”
“What happened then?” Huber prompted.
“I reported what had happened to the Gestapo, but they were already aware and decided to move me as I had become known and therefore a liability. I was transferred to Dunkirk. This was 1944, and the Gestapo knew that the Allied invasion was imminent but had assumed—wrongly—that it would be in the Dunkirk area. I was to lay low and report troop numbers, armour types and if possible, direction of travel, via radio. In the event, the invasion came through Normandy, so I was moved again, this time as close to the enemy as I could get, then waited for them to pass through and again transmitted the information. I did this until the signal from the receiving station went dead. I assumed they had been overrun or moved further back out of range.”
“You’re a brave woman. How did you get out?”
“I destroyed the radio and buried the bits, then claimed to the British that I was a displaced person, a Norwegian worker, stranded in France. They transferred me to England, where I was interrogated. In the end I think they believed me, although I had to stay in an internment camp until the war ended. I was then repatriated to Oslo.”
The truth was somewhat different. After being inserted into the Normandy region, Sybilla had made contact with the advancing Allied troops and in particular with an intelligence unit. Once they had established that she really was undercover OES, they were delighted and asked her to remain in position and report
precisely what they gave her. Sybilla did exactly that, feeding the Germans misleading information: placing massive armoured units where there were none, giving them the incorrect direction of travel, exaggerated troop numbers and so on.
Once she had lost contact, British Intelligence had extracted her and she had returned to London.
“Do you have any money?” Huber asked.
“About a hundred and fifty dollars, it’s all I have in the world.”
“It’s enough to keep you for a while. Now I must return to my office in Monterrey where I will set some wheels in motion, but in the meantime promise me two things: you will not return to the USA, and you will remain at your current hotel until I return. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” said Sybilla, trying to smile through the tears.
Whilst waiting for Huber’s return, Sybilla acquainted herself with the town. Being a main crossing point between the USA and Mexico, it was clearly geared to import and export. A number of American companies had based themselves in and around the town and the population, though predominantly Mexican, had a significant number of US nationals mingled among them. Sybilla assiduously avoided contact with the Americans; she didn’t want to answer any difficult questions.
There were several insalubrious areas in the city, but in the main it was relatively calm and decent. She managed to find a better-quality hotel with a restaurant and bar, which she occasionally frequented. She also found a newsagent who sold American newspapers. They were a day old and quite expensive, but it was something to read. She would, at the same time, buy a Mexican newspaper to practise her reading skills, which had improved tremendously under Maria Camila. In this way she passed the eight days until Huber returned.
Once again, he escorted her to the coffee house and waited until they had been served before he spoke, as he had done previously, in German.
Shadow Of Evil: Cold War Espionage Thriller (Dragan Kelly Book 2) Page 17
