by Ashton, Hugh
Harry was still bent over the drawings, examining them closely and running his finger over the paper. “Sir? My guess is that this is a fuel line?”
“Yes, Sergeant, I believe that it is.”
“Then it shouldn’t be there.” Petrov frowned at him. Unabashed, Harry went on, “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, that’s a damn’ stupid place to put it. A rifle bullet, or even a shell splinter, would cut that fuel line. And it’s feeding both engines? Stupid again, sir. You need at least two fuel lines to each engine, each needs to be armoured, and they should take separate routes. And you can let gravity feed the engines. You don’t need those fuel pumps – at least not ones that size.”
Petrov was looking at him in astonishment. “In the Imperial Russian Army, if a sergeant spoke like that to a colonel, he’d be reduced to the ranks or shot for insubordination. If an officer spoke like that to a superior, he’d be reprimanded severely. But in this case, I have to admit that what you are saying makes a lot of sense. And this is really why I feel you may both be needed in Russia. One of the reasons, anyway.”
“So how many reasons are there, Colonel?” asked Brian.
“A number,” counting off on his fingers. “First, as I mentioned, we need people like you and the sergeant with experience of the Western Front and the conditions there to advise us on how to perfect this machine for use in battle. Next, we need technical expertise, such as the sergeant here seems to possess, to point out possible problems with the current design. Also, he can help with the installation of the Rolls-Royce engines when they arrive. Lebedenko has very little English, so would be unable to follow any written instructions coming from the factory. He will need help. And another, maybe the most important of all, we need to prevent this design, and more importantly, the prototype, from falling into the hands of the socialist revolutionaries. Especially the Bolsheviks. We think you may be of use there.”
“That’s the second time today that I’ve heard about the Bolsheviks,” said Brian. “I’d never heard of them before.”
“What do you now know of them?”
“Very little, except that it seems I know their leader, Vladimir Ulyanov. He used to visit our house in London sometimes when I was a boy. He taught me how to play chess.”
Petrov shot him a look. “I hope you have nothing to do with him now?” His tone was anxious.
“Believe me, sir, I’d almost completely forgotten about his existence until C reminded me of it yesterday.”
“Be that as it may, we are concerned that this invention may fall into the wrong hands, and we need your help to organise some sort of defence against such a possibility. And there is yet another reason why I want you to visit Russia. Once the plans are perfected, it will be your job to bring a copy of the plans back here, so that Britain can start the manufacture of its own Netopyrs.”
“It sounds like fun,” said Brian. “When do we start?”
“You’re serious? Fun?” said Petrov, startled into Russian. “It might be dangerous.”
“That’s what I said, fun,” switching back to German. Harry nodded agreement at Brian’s words.
“You English are all mad,” said Petrov.
“I’m half-Irish,” Brian pointed out.
“English, Irish, British, whatever. Crazy. We can start for Moscow in two or three days’ time, then.”
It was Brian’s turn to stare. “‘We’, you say? You would be coming with us?”
“Naturally. Now,” pulling out his watch, “I must return to the Embassy. I will inform you of arrangements through your chief, C. And you may pass questions and enquiries to me through the same channel. A pleasure to have met you both.”
He bowed in their general direction as he left, followed by his Special Branch protector. Brian and Harry returned the compliment.
-oOo-
“Well, it really does sound like fun, eh, Harry?” said Brian.
“All right for you. You speak Russian. I can’t even read the bloody language.”
“You’ll manage all right. I bet most of the technical words are English with -ski stuck on the end.” Brian grinned.
“Do you reckon that contraption’s going to work, then? Seems like a right pig’s ear to me, looking at the plans.”
Brian sighed. “God knows. It’s crazy, I grant you. But then look at aeroplanes. Who’d ever have believed that they’d come to anything? Anyway, your hands are going to get oily and greasy again. Why you ever joined the Guards when you could have been in the Engineers, I still don’t know. Anyway, what do you make of our future travelling companion? I wonder who he is.”
“We know that. C told us, and he told us himself. His name is Colonel Petrov.”
“Oh, no it’s not. Believe me. I’ve seen that face before somewhere. I can’t put a name to it, but I’m sure the name I saw when I saw that face somewhere in a magazine or somewhere wasn’t Petrov. And he’s certainly more than just another Colonel. I wonder just who it is that’s going to be making the trip to Moscow with us.”
Chapter 6: Germany
“Just a mistake,” he said. “They had the wrong person.”
Kolinski sat in the third-class compartment of the train, chewing a piece of Swiss sausage and taking swigs from a bottle of schnapps, ignoring the looks the German civilian passengers were shooting in his direction. Some of the men on the seat facing him looked as though they would snatch the sausage out of his hands and devour it, if only he didn’t look so intimidating.
The pistol dug uncomfortably into his back as he leaned against the hard wooden seat, but he welcomed it. It would keep him awake through this, probably the most risky and dangerous part of the whole journey. He had decided to travel to Sweden from Travemunde, rather than Kiel, on the grounds that there would be more police and guards surrounding the naval base at Kiel, and he would be arriving in Malmö, which was not only safer, being some distance from the capital, Stockholm, but was also a much shorter sea voyage. Kolinski, born and brought up on the steppes, was a poor sailor, and tended to feel queasy even when in a small boat on a pond. The sea voyage was the part of his journey that he was most dreading. Water scared him.
“Tickets!” came the shout from the end of the carriage, and the uniformed conductor entered, followed by two Feldgendarmerie – military police – on the lookout for deserters and soldiers who had overstayed their leave. As Kolinski was approached by the three, he held out his ticket, keeping his face turned away.
“Why are you going to Travemunde?” asked one of the MPs.
“Going to Sweden,” mumbled Kolinski.
“Speak up when you talk to us!” ordered the Feldgendarmerie corporal. “What regiment are you from?”
“I’m not with a regiment,” said Kolinski, a little more clearly than before.
“You’re not German, are you?” asked the conductor. “I can tell from your accent.”
“Swiss,” said Kolinski, still looking away.
“Papers.”
Kolinski handed over his forged Swiss passport.
“Full name?” asked the corporal.
“It’s written there,” said Kolinski. “Right there, in the passport.” He was sweating. Dear Mother of God, he’d managed to forget the name he was travelling under. What the devil was he going to do?
“I asked you for your name, you chocolate-guzzling mountain goat,” replied the German.
“Peter,” choked out Kolinski. It was all he could remember.
“Peter what?” demanded the other.
Holy Mother of Jesus. No, as a good Communist, he must stop using those terms. Holy whatever. Kolinski’s mind, never the sharpest of instruments when it came to a crisis, had slowed to a paralysed halt. The schnapps hadn’t helped him, either. “Peter Hellmann,” he burst out.
The corporal smiled. “And your date of birth?”
Oh, Mother of— He’d completely forgotten. They watched his confusion chase itself through his mind and over his face, and grinned at him.
&nbs
p; “Well, Peter Helling,” said the corporal, emphasising the last syllable of the name written in the passport, “you’d better come along with us.” He reached for one arm, and his colleague took the other. “On your feet.”
The other passengers said nothing. Kolinski had the impression that they had seen similar scenes many times before. He stood up. “This way, deserter scum,” said the corporal, dragging him to the end of the carriage, where the conductor’s compartment was located. Kolinski heaved a mental sigh of relief. At least he wasn’t being accused of being a spy right now. But then, when he thought about it, deserters, as well as spies, were shot by the Germans. He wished that he’d never drunk the schnapps. Too late, he thought.
He allowed himself to be led to the conductor’s compartment, which also served as a guardroom for the two Feldgendarmerie.
“Hands behind your back,” ordered the corporal, producing a pair of handcuffs. Kolinski complied. One cuff was snapped tightly round his left wrist. Now was the time. Kolinski made his move, sweeping his left arm, with the free cuff dangling, in front of his body. The free cuff swung from the chain, and the heavy metal hit the corporal hard on the side of the head. He went down instantly, moaning, and bleeding from his scalp. The other soldier, surprised, went for his rifle, propped up in the corner of the room. Kolinski brought himself beside the guard with one enormous stride, reached behind his back, and brought the butt of the Nagant revolver onto the back of the man’s neck with a dull crunch. The soldier slumped noiselessly to the ground. Kolinski reached for the rifle, and grasping the stock in one hand and the muzzle in the other, flexed his shoulder muscles. The sweat beaded on his grinning face as the barrel slowly bent into a shallow curve before the fascinated and horrified gaze of the railway conductor, who stood there watching, apparently powerless to do anything to stop him. Kolinski threw the now useless weapon on the floor beside the first guard, who stirred slightly as he received a vicious kick to his ribs.
“Don’t even think about following me,” said Kolinski as he removed a bunch of keys from the belt of the seemingly paralysed conductor, and stepped through the door of the compartment. There was no movement behind him as he closed the door, and locked it after a brief search for the train key. Immediately he heard a hammering from inside the compartment as the conductor appeared to realise fully what had happened.
Kolinski thrust his left hand with the handcuffs into his pocket, and walked back to where he had been sitting. The other passengers looked at him curiously as he passed.
“Just a mistake,” he said. “They had the wrong person.” Inwardly, he chuckled. That was nothing but the truth. They really had picked on the wrong person. He reached his travelling bag down from the overhead luggage rack, and walked towards the carriage door, keeping his cuffed left hand in his pocket the whole time. The train was now travelling quite slowly, and Kolinski started looking for a place where he could jump off and land without being seen, while being relatively close to a town or village, or at least a road from where he could continue his journey.
He was in luck. He stuck his head out of the window, and saw a small town a few hundred meters ahead. A road ran parallel to the railway tracks, with a grassy bank beside it. He debated with himself whether to pull the emergency handle, allowing him to jump safely, but draw attention to himself, or to take the risk of jumping from the moving train. He had just decided to risk the moving jump, when the engine whistled and the train started to shudder to a halt. Quickly, he opened the carriage door and leaped onto the bank.
-oOo-
The drop was a little longer than he had expected, and he fell awkwardly, with the breath knocked out of him. His bag had flown out of his hand and spilled open, and he spent the next few seconds collecting his scattered belongings and stuffing them back in. The train finally came to a halt, with the sound of whistles, followed by banging and crashing noises, all coming from the carriage where he had trapped the conductor and the soldiers.
After a final massive crash, he heard unintelligible shouted orders, and what looked like a platoon of armed infantry jumped out of the train onto the bank. Keeping as low as he dared, while still keeping an eye on the soldiers, who had started to beat the undergrowth and were obviously now searching for him, he started to crawl towards the road.
The ditch by the side of the road seemed deep enough to hide in, but Kolinski guessed that this would be one of the first places that they would look. Still, he reasoned, he could still use it as his route to somewhere more suitable. He slipped into the ditch, where he was hidden by the long grass and reeds growing at the edge. Thankfully it was relatively dry, and he could crawl along the bottom without too much difficulty.
A breath of wind blew over him, assaulting his nostrils with an unpleasant acrid smell that he recognised after a few seconds as that of pig dung. He raised his head slightly and saw what looked like a pigsty attached to a farmhouse, only about ten metres from the ditch. The soldiers behind him were looking in the wrong direction, and it was the work of a moment to make his way out of the ditch and vault over the low wall of the pigsty, where he found himself face to face with a large, but seemingly under-nourished and hungry-looking pig.
“Excuse me, your Ladyship,” he said to her in German, and moved towards the shelter at the back of the pen. He crawled through the narrow doorway and, after taking up a cramped position on the straw of the sty, tried to peer through the door. All he could see was a narrow strip of sky, but he consoled himself with the fact that if that was all he could see from inside, it was extremely unlikely that anyone outside could see him. More worrying was the fact that the pig, which he had already mentally named “Hilda”, after his landlady in Switzerland, had started a squealing and a snorting that made it almost impossible for him to hear anything that was going on outside the sty.
The squealing grew louder and more excited, and Kolinski could now hear the sound of approaching footsteps – seemingly those of military boots. He felt in his coat pocket for his revolver, where he remembered he’d stuffed it after his assault on the Feldgendarmerie corporal, but there was nothing in the pocket. Panic-stricken, he searched in all his other pockets, and in his bag, but all he could discover was the knife he’d wrapped in his clothes. It would have to do. He braced himself, gripping the hilt of the knife in his right fist.
The boots stopped, and he could hear a clatter of metal. It didn’t sound like any kind of weapon that Kolinski recognised, but he didn’t relax until he heard the words, “Here you are, old girl. Not as much as you want, I know, but we’ve all got to make sacrifices with the war on.” The boots moved away, and Kolinski relaxed, listening to Hilda slurping her way through her mash.
-oOo-
Kolinski remained in the pigsty for a few hours, waiting for dusk to fall and the searching troops to go away. Just before the time when he judged the farmer would come to shut Hilda up for the night, he crept out of the sty, and set off down the road. The loss of the pistol troubled him a little – it was obviously Russian, and if anyone discovered it, it would point to a Russian being in the vicinity – but worse, as far as he was concerned, was the handcuff that was still around his left wrist. Though he was moderately skilled at picking simple locks, such as the ones to be found on handcuffs, he lacked any suitable implement to exercise his talent.
He had to find a way to get rid of the handcuffs. At least he could hide them, he thought, as he passed a house where there was still some laundry on the line in the back garden, even at this time of evening.
He looked carefully at the house and listened, but could detect no signs of anyone’s being inside. Keeping his left hand in his pocket, gripping the knife hilt, he marched to the front door and knocked. He could hear the sound of footsteps from inside the house, and cursed to himself. Obviously he hadn’t listened carefully enough. He moved to the side of the house quickly, going round to the back, as he heard the front door open. He had just reached the laundry drying on the line when he heard a furious yapp
ing from a small dog that stood outside its kennel, straining at its chain. Almost as a reflex action, his left hand left his pocket, and the knife he had been holding blurred through the air to bury itself in the dog’s neck. The dog gave a whine of pain and astonishment, and collapsed, whimpering. Kolinski bounded to the laundry line, and picked out a pillowcase and a white towel, together with a man’s white shirt. Carrying his booty, he strode back to the dog’s semi-conscious twitching body, and pulled out the knife. He wondered briefly whether he should finish the job by cutting the dog’s throat, and decided against this. The beast was going to die anyway. He wiped the knife on the dog’s fur and put it back in the sheath as a woman’s voice came from the front of the house asking if anyone was there. At least it wasn’t a farmer with a gun, he thought to himself. He climbed over the fence into the next garden, and crept, keeping low, back towards the road.
He found a place where the bushes and shrubs hid him from view and ducked down. First he changed his rather grubby shirt for the clean one he had taken from the line, and put the old shirt into his bag. Taking out the knife again, he cut the towel into strips, and used his right hand to wrap the cloth around his left hand and wrist, completely covering the handcuffs. His fingers protruded from the “bandage”, where he noticed a couple of smears of the dog’s blood from the knife when he cut up the towel. So much the better, he thought, and smiled grimly to himself. He cut the pillowcase with the knife, and folded it into a triangular sling for his left arm. Pretty good, he told himself, rearranging the contents of his pockets so that they were now all accessible with his right hand. He brushed some of the straw, mud and leaves off himself, wishing that he’d had the foresight to do this before he’d wrapped his left arm in the bandage.
