The bastards, Johnny swore silently. The bastards who had not sent the car.
Johnny knelt over Otto Guttmann. He was very close to Erica, could feel her breath on his face, could smell the scent that she had worn for the journey.
'Doctor Guttmann, we have to talk now, but quickly. We have to make a decision and then we have to accept that it is irreversible. . .'
'You promised that the car would come. You promised that there was no danger, no risk. What right have you to share a decision with me?'
'And I promised that I would take you to Willi, and I will do that. . .'
'You are incompetents, you have shown that. There was no car, there was only a trap.'
' I don't have time for debate, Doctor Guttmann. If you come with me I will take you across the frontier.' You're killing yourself, Johnny.
Without him you have a small chance ... ' I will take you across the frontier, Doctor Guttmann.'
'And why should I not go back to my hotel, and this afternoon take the train to Berlin, and fly to Moscow tonight? Why not?'
' It's too late to go back. You are hunted now, you must think about that. You cannot explain where you have been. You will never be trusted again, the office at Padolsk will be taken from you and the flat in Moscow, if you are not in prison you will rot the rest of your life under surveillance. That's the future . . .'
'Again the threat,' Erica said.
' It's the truth . .. They asked me before I came to take the chance of talking to you, finding anything about your work that I could carry back if the autobahn failed, if I went back on my own. I haven't done that. I asked for nothing. I asked for no drawings, nothing. That's the promise, I'm taking you over the frontier.'
The old man was very still, a prone figure communing with himself.
His head rested easily in the crook of Erica's arm. Johnny looked at his watch . . . not long till the organisation would have been mustered, till the road blocks were in position, till the trap would snap shut. Perhaps a few more minutes. The sirens told him that there had been panic in Magdeburg, that the sending of the cars had been the first reaction.
Cooler heads would take control within an hour, a plan would be formed.
In the dark Otto Guttmann's hand grabbed at Johnny's. He squeezed, tight and painful, and the bones of his fingers dug at Johnny's skin.
'How do we go to the border?'
' I think we should start by borrowing a car,' Johnny said.
For the moment the tension spilled from them. There was quiet laughter. Johnny and Erica pulled the old man to his feet. They began to walk towards the village.
Ulf Becker and Jutte Hamburg took the stowed tent and the rolled sleeping bags back to the caretaker of the Camp- ingplatz 'Alte Schmiede' at first light. It would be on foot from here he had told her, they would move only in the woods, only in the depths of the Landschaftschutzgebiet that stretched from the town of Haldensleben behind them to the outskirts of Walbeck village. They would cut through a nature zone, crossed by few roads, with few villages.
They went out of the Campingplatz hand in hand. Two products of the regime, two machine-tooled children of the Party. Her blonde hair was whipped back on her shoulders by the wind. Their stride was bold and long. Two young people on whom the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands had lavished care
'How long will it take?' she asked, and the leafy light played at the tan of her cheeks.
' If we go hard we shall be close by tonight. We rest for a few hours and we watch. Tomorrow, early in the morning, we go over.'
So sure, so confident, he seemed to her. She kissed him quickly behind the ear, and did not see the quaver at his lips. In a few minutes they were hidden by tall trees, walking a carpet of fallen autumn leaves, alone together in the territory of wild pigs and fallow deer and foxes. Jutte dreamed of Hamburg and of the car of her uncle and of the house in which he lived. Ulf thought of the automatic guns and the wire and the watchtowers, and of Heini Schalke and an MPiKM high velocity rifle.
Carter stayed by the barrier at the station of Wolfsburg until all the passengers had left the train. Not many of them on the early train of the day out of Magdeburg. And never really a chance that Johnny would have been with them. Straightforward enough at Holmbury. Johnny to see the Guttmanns into the pick-up car, then back to Magdeburg for the station, and nobody had drawn a blueprint for the plan if the autobahn ran off schedule. A wasted journey for Carter and he'd known it before he started. Johnny wouldn't quit, not before it was hopeless, he would have stayed at the autobahn intersection. Stayed till the train was lost to him.
What would Johnny have done with the Doctor and Erica Guttmann ? Carter couldn't know, doubted that he knew his man well enough to make the judgement. The order was quit and run ... it would be a hell of a thing for his man to do, but that was the order.
He had heard from Pierce the report from the Signals monitoring unit, that police activity across the border had risen sharply from the small hours of the night. The codenames for prearranged road blocks had been called, reinforcement detachments had been summoned, search parties were co-ordinated. Johnny would have stood a chance on the first train of the day. Not after that. They'll tear the bloody carriages apart till they find him.
Back to Helmstedt, back to sweat it through. Mawby and Smithson were returning in a few hours to London, Percy would fly to Bonn.
Pierce and George had been told to take the first aircraft to Heathrow.
Carter was to be left to gather up any information that might seep through. Of course it would be Carter who was left behind, because Carter was too junior to field the blame that would be ambushing the senior men of DIPPER. Better off where, he was. He would hear of Johnny soon, that was certain. He would hear of an Englishman arrested in Magdeburg.
God knows we conned you, Johnny. Conned you rotten.
He drove back from Wolfsburg on the secondary road to Helmstedt.
Through small villages that were timbered and attractive. Through fields that were tended and flourishing. Along the line of the frontier. The border was perpetually with him, as a ribbon of wire and torn earth.
Beyond it were distant and faded hills and protective woods that his eyes could not penetrate.
The border drew him, as a cliff edge will a man who suffers vertigo.
He turned off left and drove into the sleeping, Sunday morning of Saalsdorf. The wire was in front of him, away across a field. He walked from the car and threaded his footsteps between the lines of young barley. Trying to share something, wasn't he? Trying to share something with Johnny, and the only way that he knew was to go to the fence and stare across at the closed country beyond.
The River Aller, not wide, only a dozen feet or so and deep banked.
Carter stood beside the cement post painted in red, white and black that carried the embossed symbol of the German Democratic Republic.
There was a spike set in the angled top of the post and he remembered the laughter of the men he had met in the Roadhaus when they had told him that all the posts had spikes because that way the birds couldn't perch on them and defecate and smear the sign. Thorough bastards you're up against, Johnny. Fifty feet from him a dozen troops were working on the steel gate that fell to the river bed ... at this bloody time in the morning. It was the first time Carter had seen the wire close up.
Formidable, chilling, high. From the fence posts where the soldiers worked beside the river, wires trailed to the ground and Carter followed them till he saw the white painted boxes, the automatic guns disconnected for the day. None of the men working on the gate looked at him, none caught his gaze.
There was the click of a camera shutter. Carter swung round. Two soldiers lay in the thick grass between him and the work party. One with a camera fitted with a telephoto lens, one with the MPiKM. The ones who guarded the guards. Bastards.
We should never have asked it of you, Johnny.
Chapter Twenty
An insipid little car it s
eemed to Johnny. An impoverished creature with an underpowered engine, a slipping clutch and mushy steering. His foot was hard down on the accelerator, and the needle on the dial in front of him flickered optimistically towards the figure of 90. Kilometres, Johnny, 50 miles an hour that's the maximum you'll beat out of her, and she's straining like a donkey. A pathetic bloody car, and the two doors that were loosely fastened rattled on the poor road surface. Check the dial with the engine temperature, Johnny, check the fuel gauge, and check the forward mirror. Always back to the mirror. And it's left hand driving, Johnny, and it's four years since you've done that. Check, check, check, Johnny, and pray God the road stays clear behind.
Difficult to see the Trabant saloon as the supreme success symbol of a citizen of Barleber village. Would have been the star of his life, and perhaps that was why it was parked outside the front door of the house and not garaged behind the back fence where it would have been unseen.
A bloody good thing that it had been at the front, because that was where Johnny had found it. Not a car you'd drive down Cherry Road for a boast.
Don't knock it, Johnny, it's taking you clear of Magdeburg.
Erica's hair pin had opened the door for Johnny. From under the drawn curtains and upper windows of the house he had silently pushed the car a hundred yards away down the road. Then the pin again, inserted into the slot of the ignition and the engine had spluttered long-sufferingly. Otto Guttmann had been given the back seat and been told to lie down as best he could across it so that only two occupants would show. Erica beside Johnny and holding through the open window a white handkerchief.
That was the justification for haste at this early hour. A medical emergency. A young man driving a young girl, and any who saw the speed- ing car would think only of a person in pain, a person in need of help.
They might have had time, Johnny believed, to block the main roads, but not the secondary routes. The red ribbons on his map he avoided, and also the yellow marked roads where possible until he was forced into the town of Haldens- leben. Small and deserted on a Sunday morning.
Comrade Honecker leered from the hoarding outside the FDGB
building. Once Johnny chuckled grimly to himself as a racing green and white car of the polizei hurtled by him heading towards Magdeburg.
Calling reinforcements to the city. So far so good, Johnny.
It was a pretty road out of Haldensleben, winding through woods and curling on slight hills.
There was no talk in the car, no attempt at conversation, because the Stechkin rested on the seat under Johnny's thigh. He had taken the gun from his waist as he had first driven away, tried it on his lap and it had slipped, decided against asking Erica to hold it. The gun maimed his passengers' confidence, slipped them into silence. And if Johnny knew it, then so could Erica and her father realise that each time they swept round a blind corner then that might be the place where the block was in position.
Strangely calm, Johnny felt, as if he had found fulfilment, as if at last he approached some personal summit. Onto the crucial steep slope, and the mountain high, high above him. Through Suplingen, through Ivenrode, and the light haze was creeping on them and the headlights could be cut and the need for more speed from the car because they had lost the shelter of roadside trees for wide fields. One more wood and that would be the limit of the Trabant's usefulness.
The hamlet of Bischofswald was hardly more than a collection of high, brick farm buildings beside a railway station. A small private place.
Home for half a dozen families who would work a Landwirtshaftliche Produktiongenossens . . .
collective farm to you, Johnny . .. what a bloody mouthful. Six hundred hectares of potato and beet, and a small patch beside each house that could be called the peasant farmer's own, for growing the vegetables that he could take to the market to pay for his luxuries, for his soap and his meat and his wife's best dress . . . Steady, Johnny, dreaming. More trees, more woods. He looked at the dashboard, at the kilometre figures, snapped out his sums and subtractions. Far enough for the car, far enough for pushing their luck.
He swung the Trabant off to the right and bounced it on full power across the giving compost of the forest floor. Away between the trees until he saw the hollow a hundred metres from the tarmacadam. Otto Guttmann out, Erica out. Johnny plunged the car down, braced himself against the wheel for the last bruising impact. He slid the Stechkin into his waist, slammed the door shut behind him, and ignored the other two as he set about his work. Into the boot by pulling forward the rear seat. It was a chance and he was rewarded; many cars that travelled the north German plain carried a spade that could be used in winter to dig snow from behind the wheels. He tossed it without comment to Erica. There was a towing rope, and that too he took. Next to the bonnet which he lifted and then he began to rip systematically at every foot of wire and cable that he could reach. From the trunk of a birch tree he tore small, leafy branches and methodically brushed at the tyre imprints.
Johnny walked back a few yards towards the road then looked again at the place where the car rested. Not good, not bad, the best that he could manage.
'All on foot from here. I reckon we're eight miles from the border, and that means five miles from the Restricted Zone. We start quick and we get slower as we come close, slower and more careful. I want to get into the Restricted Zone at dusk, be near to the Hinterland fence by the time we rest. ..'
'What is the Hinterland fence?' asked Otto Guttmann. An out of place animal, he seemed, bristle coming to his drawn cheeks, tie slewed sideways, suit crumpled.
'Five hundred yards from the border there's an electrified fence, that's the Hinterland.'
'You can take us through an electric fence?' A spark of awe from Erica.
'. . . Or under it, or over it. It runs damn near the whole length of the sector. We have to cross it if we are to get to the frontier.'
'What is at the frontier?'
'When we get there, when we're near it, that's the time to talk about the frontier.'
Erica persisted. 'Have we done well so far, Johnny?'
'We've done well, and it's all still in front of us. You've seen nothing yet, just a few lamps and sirens . . .'
They started to walk. Johnny took his bearings from the gathering sunlight. The same procedure as before. Erica on one side, Johnny on the other, husbanding the strength of Otto Guttmann.
'Why do you do this for us?' the old man asked.
'It's my job.'
'I say again, why.3'
'It's the job I was given .. .'Johnny said. 'A contract I was given. . .'
'By people who were not worthy of you, who did not provide the car.
Why not abandon us, make good your own escape?'
His voice was close to Johnny's ear, and his tone was gentle in age, persuasive in pitch. No witnesses, no tape recorders, nothing to recall and keep in perpetual memory what Johnny might say. No justification for a further lie.
'I have to do it, Doctor, it's a way back for me. It shakes off my past.
You know in battle, in combat, some men go far up the road towards their enemy and get medals for courage, most of them go that far so as not to be called cowards. . .'
'We would never accuse you of cowardice,' Otto Guttmann said quietly.
'We shouldn't talk any more,' clipped Johnny. 'The sound carries a long way. We make enough noise already.'
They had started at a brisk pace. Johnny had no complaint.
In the Long Gallery at Chequers where the previous evening he had heard of the breakdown of the DIPPER plan, the Prime Minister played host to Oskar Frommholtz, Trade Minister and Politburo member of the German Democratic Republic. The two men were alone with the Downing Street interpreter.
The Prime Minister had showered, had then taken breakfast in his room, had telephoned the Deputy-Under- Secretary for the latest reports.
He was told of the flight of Willi Guttmann. He knew that the Magdeburg police radio had broadcast descriptions of a Br
itish passport holder travelling under the name of John Dawson, and of Doctor Otto Guttmann and his daughter, Erica. He knew that checkpoint searches at Marienborn had reduced motor traffic on the Berlin road corridor to a trickle. He was given a brief outline of the East German manhunt to draw in the tatters of the mission.
So the meeting demanded of him now by the Trade Minister was the first of the crisis that would break about his shoulders. And crisis it was, he had no illusions. Much greater than the dismemberment of the adolescent relations between the United Kingdom and the German Democratic Republic. That could be coped with, managed. That was inconsequential to the wider crisis. The damnable incompetence of those people over in Germany would involve him in the recrimination of the Chancellor in Bonn. The Federal Republic was involved because DIPPER had launched from their territory, utilised their nationals, avoided the channels of co-operation. A wretched business the whole damned thing. There would be reverberations in Washington, they were always fast enough to raise questions of the efficiency of their British cousins when an intelligence mission was bungled. If the European newspapers sniffed at the scandal of a botched operation and printed, then the domestic protection of the D notice was invalidated, and the story of failure would slither into the British media. The escape of Willi Guttmann was the final straw. God, how could they have been so stupid?
Stupid and arrogant.
Questions in the House would follow that he would have to evade and sidestep, queries as to his control over the mechanics of government.
There would be a great communal titter. Eisenhower had faced it, he had been confronted with a downed spy plane and a pilot who talked freely in Lubianka gaol. The President of the United States had the name of Gary Powers scratched on his heart, he'd survived. He'd weathered the cyclone .. . But, God, he'd suffered in the process of the sweeping up of the pieces.
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