The Dark Place: A historical suspense thriller set in the murky world of fugitive war criminals, vengeful Nazi hunters and spies

by Damian Vargas

  She exhaled a lungful of smoke, looked into his eyes. He was not trying to deceive her - he was too good a man to do that. But it mattered not. The state of Israel had prioritised Krügel, the Butcher of Riga as he was known, as its primary target. The lowly Auschwitz nurse who had murdered Johansson’s mother had zero political value, and nothing would change that.

  She took another drag from her cigarette. Her eyes locked on Ginsberg’s, then dropped it to the floor and crushed it with the sole of her shoe. ‘I understand,’ she said.

  As was his routine, Harry Blackman had risen at six o’clock to the sound of his alarm clock, dressed, then departed for his regular morning walk with his labrador.

  It was nearing half-past eight when Beni Ginsberg had approached Johansson in the kitchen where she stood, a washing up brush in hand, staring at the dirty crockery soaking in the tepid water.

  ‘Is he usually gone this long?’ he asked, an uncharacteristic note of concern in his voice.

  She peered up to see the Israeli’s reflection in the kitchen window in front of her. Maybe the Mossad man wasn’t quite so imperturbable after all, she thought. ‘He’ll be back soon, don’t worry.’

  Ginsberg sat down at the small kitchen table, reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one.

  ‘And what about you, Liv? Can I trust you to do what is needed?’

  Johansson dropped the plastic brush into the water, reached for a towel to dry her hands, and twisted around to face him. ‘I’ll do what I said I would. I’ll play my part.’

  Beni scanned her face, as if reading her thoughts. ‘And when we’re gone? When we’re on that boat with Krügel, what then?’

  ‘What happens then is my business,’ she said, glowering back at him.

  ‘Liv, what that woman did to your mother—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Johansson shouted. ‘Shut up!’ She strode towards him as he backed into the brick wall behind him, her finger half an inch from his face. ‘You do not get to lecture me about fucking justice and morality, Benjamin Ginsberg.’

  Ignoring her wagging finger at his chin and keeping his eyes locked on the Norwegian, Ginsberg kept talking. ‘If you hurt her…that blackness in your heart…it won’t lessen. It will only magnify. Take it from someone who knows.’

  Johansson’s fist hit him on the side of his face. ‘I said shut up!’

  He dabbed the back of his hand to his now bleeding bottom lip. ‘I never saw such hatred in you before,’ he said. He lifted his hand to touch her cheek, but she brushed it away.

  ‘You only saw what you wanted to see,’ she said.

  The sound of the back door handle turning broke the uncomfortable tension. She moved away from the Israeli just as Harry Blackman entered into the kitchen from the utility room, trailed by his Labrador.

  The Englishman paused for a moment, eyed Johansson and the younger man in the thick woollen jumper with the split lip, said nothing, then continued to the front of the house.

  She heard his heavy footsteps as he trudged up the wooden stairs. ‘He doesn’t appear to be overly happy with you and your team’s presence,’ she said.

  Ginsberg shot her a stern glance. ‘I don’t need him to be happy. I need him to do what he’s told.’

  Johansson spent the next few hours scurrying between each of the Mossad team, desperate to fend off the bitter, seething anger festering away inside of her. She brought them food, collected empty coffee mugs, then refilled and returned them.

  Blackman had returned downstairs a little later, dressed in a tatty green boiler suit. He strode towards the back door, but one of the Israelis, a shaven-headed individual and the biggest of the group, moved to block his path. The two men stood inches apart, glaring at each other, unblinking, like heavyweight boxers at an ill-tempered weigh-in.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ Blackman said, his voice controlled but equally serious. The Israeli remained unflinching.

  Johansson kicked at the sleeping Beni Ginsberg’s foot, gestured towards the two men at the door.

  The Israeli leader rose quickly from where he had been slouched. ‘Where are you going, Mr Blackman?’ he demanded, while rubbing at his eyes.

  ‘I’m going to do some work on my car. It needs a new clutch.’ Blackman angled his head towards Ginsberg. ‘Assuming that’s acceptable to the state of Israel?’

  Ginsberg hesitated for a moment, then nodded at his compatriot, who stepped aside to allow the Englishman to pass.

  ‘And be a sport,’ said Blackman. ‘Don’t drink all of my coffee.’

  Johansson watched him leave through the back door. He walked across the gravel driveway to the garage, dragged one of the wooden doors open, and disappeared inside. A moment later, the fluorescent lights flickered on inside.

  ‘Keep an eye on him,’ Ginsberg said from behind her. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  Who are we to expect trust? she thought.

  The Mossad team remained in the house all day, making conspicuous efforts to avoid the villa’s windows. They poured over small-scale maps, checked and rechecked equipment, quizzed each other’s comprehension of their mission plans, and then, when it had become abundantly clear that no more preparation could be done, they sought out ways to dispel the remaining few hours. Card games were played, books and newspapers thumbed through, doodles drawn, and previous encounters verbally revisited with a curious mixture of hubris, laughter and solemnity.

  Johansson had drifted asleep on a chair. She was woken at six o’clock by Ginsberg tapping her gently on the knee. She peered up at him. She coughed, her throat dry.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Go check on Blackman.’ The Israeli returned to his team, who were busy donning coats and backpacks. Pistols were being concealed in shoulder holsters, knives in sheaths on belts and in boots. She rose and made her way towards the utility room and to the back door. She opened it, started towards the garage, the small stones crunching under each footstep. She heard music playing on the radio - Dean Martin crooning ‘Mambo Italiano’. She pictured a time, not so long ago, when she had also listened to music rather than playing it only to conceal illicit radio messages to spy masters.

  She rounded the first of the weathered wood doors and peered inside the old brick building. ‘Harry, they’re going now.’ The Austin Healey sat in the middle of the garage, its front wheels resting on two rusty metal ramps. The car’s bonnet was propped open, an old shirt covering one of the exposed front wings. One of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling light above flickered every few seconds. A blue toolbox lay open, various spanners, screwdrivers and sockets strewn around it. The radio sat on a shelf to her right. Of Harry Blackman, however, there was no sign.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, before doing an about turn then sprinting back to the house.

  She shoved the back door open, barged past two of the Israeli team who were checking their radios, and found Ginsberg in the living room.

  ‘He’s gone!’

  45

  The descent of man

  Two days earlier.

  Harry Blackman observed from his vantage point, laying prone behind a rocky outcrop one hundred yards from the house, as the seven-man Israeli snatch team filed out of the villa’s front gate and started their descent down the winding track that led through the old vineyards to the bridge over the river and then, eventually, onwards towards the valley’s only tarmac road, and the pueblo, half-hidden by evening mist, on the opposite side.

  He saw the remaining Israeli, a spotter with a radio, taking up his position in front of the house. From there, the man would have an almost unencumbered view of the valley to his left, where the two walls of granite cliffs on either side of the valley met at the ravine three kilometres away to the west, and to the east, where the valley mouth opened up in the distance.

  Johansson stood in the garden to the rear of the property, her hands on her hips, scanning the rocky ground above. She appeared to be looking straight at Blackman, who froze for what seemed like a minute, before ambling back
inside the house.

  Blackman pushed himself to his knees and reached inside the small canvas backpack on the ground next to him, pulling out his revolver, its bulk cold and covered in a thin sheen of oil. It had been his service revolver when he was in the Commando unit at the end of the war. He thought back to those times, he and his men racing around the newly liberated territories, desperate to track down and capture their designated high-value targets. The soldiers were, naturally, supposed to have turned in all of their weapons when they had been demobbed, but as was often the case among the officers who had seen protracted combat, he had reported that the reliable Webley had been lost. Harry Blackman had ceased to become army property, and so had the gun.

  He rose to his feet, pushed the pistol into his belt, and slung his backpack over his shoulders. The sun was falling over the horizon of craggy hills at the high end of the valley, below which sat the old military compound and the scattered properties that belonged to La Mesita Blanca’s German community. The house that he had made his target sat on the far side of a small hillock, hidden amongst a carpet of pine and birch trees, and behind a tall wire fence. He checked his watch, then started his ascent up to the ancient goat herder’s trail that circumnavigated the southern flank of the valley; a route that he was now intimately familiar with, having trodden along it almost every morning since his arrival in Spain several months earlier.

  He had heard the Israelis discussing their plans. He knew that he had around six hours before they would be abducting Walter Krügel from his hotel in the pueblo. Six hours - plenty of time to finish what he had come to La Mesita Blanca to do. Tonight, it was time for SS Oberführer Joachim von Ziegler to suffer. Not only for his wartime crimes, but for a crime much more recent; the murder of Blackman’s closest wartime friend, Sergeant Gus Ferguson.

  Johansson sat under the cover of dense pine foliage, staring not out at the valley, but at the curious device the Israeli spotter next to her held to his eye. While she, in her designated role as ‘a spare pair of eyes’, held a pair of rudimentary binoculars, the Mossad man was staring through what appeared to be a short length of black steel pipe. The device had a large aperture at one end, from which a plastic cap dangled loose underneath, a grey rubberised cover over the sight at the opposite end, and multiple circular knobs and dials. The label affixed to the side stated, in silver lettering, ‘US Army. AN/PVS-1. Starlight scope’.

  ‘How far can you see with that thing?’ she asked.

  The man kept his eye on the device. ‘That’s for me to know. You just focus on keeping a lookout for that Englishman of yours.’

  We won’t be seeing Blackman, she thought. She was certain that she knew exactly where the Englishman would be heading right at that moment.

  It was dark now, but the strong winds had not dissipated; the trees above the two of them swaying back and forth with each gust. The sky was almost entirely clear, save for a few scattered wisps of clouds. She gazed up at the endless starscape above, to the pinkish red beacon that was Mars high up over the Mediterranean to the south east, and at the thin sliver of the moon; the heavens providing the only illumination for the Mossad team currently trekking across the valley floor. The majesty of the universe looked down on the squalid actions of mankind. Judging them.

  The walkie talkie next to the Israeli squawked. ‘Leviticus, this is Echo One Charlie. Come in.’

  The spotter grabbed for the radio. ‘This is Leviticus. Go ahead.’

  ‘We are at the bridge. How’s it looking on the road?’

  ‘All clear. Not so much as a cat moving.’

  ‘Okay. We’re moving up to the intersection. ETA in ten minutes.’

  ‘Copy that, Echo One Charlie. Leviticus Out.’

  Johansson lifted her binoculars. She could see nothing of the bridge that crossed the river, down on the valley floor, but above it, roughly five hundred metres further away, the road that ran along the northern flank of the valley was made illuminated in places by the lights emitting from the odd dwelling and the few, infrequently spaced low-pressure sodium lights that were positioned at the more treacherous kinks in the road.

  Ten minutes later, Ginsberg called on the radio to confirm that his team were in position at the intersection of the main road and the turning into the pueblo. They would wait there to observe Krügel’s arrival then, once he had checked in, snatch him from his hotel.

  The team knew the registration of the taxi that would be carrying the German. Another Mossad agent had been watching from a cafe at the arrivals hall at Malaga Airport. The original plan had been for two members of the team to book a room at the small hotel, but this had been rejected on the basis that the appearance of strangers at the same time might arouse suspicion - there being several Germans among the staff. Instead, Johansson had spent several nights there when she had first come to the pueblo, explaining to the receptionist - a middle-aged woman who hailed from Bavaria - that the villa where she was to live did not yet have electricity or running water. It had not been a lie and could thus be verified.

  During those days, she had drawn up detailed plans of the hotel; the semi-enclosed gardens to its rear, the location of the fire escapes, and the various routes that could be taken from the building back to the main road. She had made notes of the types of locks used throughout the building, where the lights were, and the comings and goings of all the staff. The reception was only manned up until midnight. That, the Israelis had decided, was when they would move in.

  ‘I’ve got movement,’ said the spotter, as a set of headlights appeared at the far end of the valley.

  ‘Roger that. We’re in position.’

  The spotter lowered the walkie talkie to the ground and lifted the starlight scope back to his eye, tracking the movement of the unidentified vehicle. It took an agonising two minutes before it came close enough to identify. The spotter grabbed the walkie talkie. ‘I have visual confirmation. It is a Mercedes saloon. Driver and one occupant in the rear. Looks like our man.’

  ‘Copy that. We’ll make visual confirmation as it passes.’

  Johansson watched and listened, her throat dry. A bird fluttered its wings in a nearby tree. She scanned their surroundings once again.

  The car on the main road passed the Mossad team hiding in the undergrowth and continued on its way up into the pueblo.

  The radio crackled once again. ‘This is Leviticus. We have confirmation. Sit tight. We move in at eleven.’

  Two kilometres to the west, Blackman lay in the darkness among the undulating rocks of the hillside, looking down at a single-story dwelling which sat shrouded under the cover of several pines, and surrounded by an imposing chain-link fence. Seeing no signs of security guards or dogs, he pushed himself up from the damp soil and started to edge down the rough terrain, but as he did so the building’s porch light turned on.

  He dropped to a squatting position, ignoring the discomfort in his knees.

  A tall figure wearing a long coat and a hat emerged from the front door. It was Joseph Navarro. He was accompanied by a woman in a long dress. Blackman heard the man speaking in German. Another figure emerged at the door - Conrad, Navarro’s teenage son. He was clutching what appeared to be a large sketchbook.

  Realising that he had maybe sixty seconds before his quarry would be gone, Blackman rose and started to hurry down towards the bungalow.

  Navarro senior now stood opening the door to a dark saloon car. He called back towards the boy at the door. ‘Be in bed by eleven, Conrad. You have school tomorrow. Stangle will come to check on you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, father,’ the boy replied, before scuttling to open the gate for his parents.

  Blackman was moving quickly now. He had to get down through some trees, over a stone wall and onto the track if he was to get to the front of the bungalow before Navarro’s car departed. The ground was uneven, covered in loose rocks and thick vegetation. He broke into a jog, shutting out the pain from the sharp thorns that scratched at his shins.

&
nbsp; The car headlights turned on, illuminating a tall metal gate set in a stone archway.

  Blackman glanced up to see the teenager at the gate, pushing it open, and the car starting forward. He broke into a run, but the light from the car had killed his night vision. He stumbled on a rock, lurched to one side, managing to rebalance himself for a moment, and continued forward.

  The car was at the gate now, the teenager waving at his parents, the sketchbook still tucked under his arm.

  The ground was flattening out in front of Blackman now. The stone wall was only twenty yards away. He forced himself into a sprint, convinced he could still make it. He bounded between the trees to the low wall, clambered over it and started towards the car as it pulled out of the gate, twenty yards ahead of him. It was then that his boot snared amongst some unseen vegetation. His body twisted mid-air, and he tumbled towards the ground, his shoulder crashing onto a rock with a sickening crack. The Englishman winced, his jaw clenched to suppress a scream as a lightning jolt of searing pain shot down his left arm and along his collar bone to his sternum. He grabbed at his shoulder with his right hand, rolled onto his front, his face covered in dust and pushed himself up to his knees only to see the saloon moving off down the track.

  The car was moving in the opposite direction at thirty miles an hour, kicking up a cloud of dust in its wake.

  It was over. The Israelis would be moving in on the hotel to kidnap Krügel. It would be only a matter of time now before the valley would be swarming with the Spanish police and army. And then, Blackman knew, he would never get his man.

  It was then that he realised that the gate remained open and that a solitary figure stood peering at him under the dim haze of the yellow light from above the entrance.