The Striker Portfolio q-3

by Adam Hall

  Trees were the biggest hazard: they hid him suddenly if the road dipped or turned at that point and as soon as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight I was running into the trees myself and the whole lot went dark because they hid the sky as well and I was driving blind for five-second periods at sixty k.p.h. and at that speed I was covering more than eighty metres blacked out.

  The only tune for thinking was along the stretches of straight road where I slowed a fraction to increase the gap and make it more difficult for him to pick up reflected light in his mirror. There were no facts to go on except that since he'd turned south from Neueburg he wasn't heading for Hanover where he was probably based and this gave me a chance to get some more information provided I could stay with him to the end of the line. There were a few assumptions, one of them reasonable: the clockmaker's must be a safe-house or a radio-point or both, but nothing more: an organization capable of half crippling the Luftwaffe's front-line strike-force and removing the Army Chief-of-Staff and the Minister of the Interior from office wouldn't make its headquarters in Neueburg. Another assumption — possibly more wishful than reasoned — was that the man ahead of me was making direct for those headquarters either in the routine duty of courier or to report on Benedikt. One thing was certain: I had to go with him.

  We were thirty-one kilometres south of Neueburg on the speedo-trip when his lights vanished and I drove by the moon until some trees came and the offside of the 17M ploughed clay from the bank and struck roots and began creasing: the weight was shifting and the front tyre howled like a buzz-saw as the wing folded against it and I tried to ease over without correcting too sharply and hitting the opposite bank. Thorn and the boughs of saplings whiplashed along the bodywork and there was a dead-weight feeling to the wheel so I gunned up and dragged her clear and hit the lights on because there was the chance he wouldn't see them whereas there was no chance of dodging a head-on impact if the whole thing ran wild: without his lights and without the moon I was driving into a waste of darkness and the margin of error was the width of the car subtracted from the width of the road and it wasn't enough to get me through.

  The whole scene jumped into focus as the lights came on: road-surface and grass and earth banks and a gateway and a group of elms rearing with the interplay of light and shadow swinging through their columns. It began from there: a series of rocking lunges that took the car through a zig-zag from bank to bank with the nearside rear skinning bark from an elm and the springs pitching so hard that the steering was half under control and half abandoned as the front wheels slid and struck earth and bounced away and found a grip and lost it again. Given some calculated bursts of acceleration the trim would have steadied but I was having to slow, having to brake because it was the only chance.

  There were three more impacts at acute angles before I could pull up with all four wheels in a slide. As soon as movement stopped I cut the lights and hit the door open. I was in a hurry now and the wing came clear of the front tyre because it had to, because I made it, the left hand hooking to help, the bandage catching on the torn edge of the metal, some of it tearing. Then I stood and listened, seeing a patch of light flickering a kilometre away, south and eastwards.

  He'd taken a branch road and that was why he'd been hidden for so long. He couldn't have seen my lights or heard the wing on the tyre because he would have stopped and doused his own lights and lain low. So there was still a chance.

  It took time to come up on him again. The land was flatter, eastwards, but twice I had to light up for other traffic and once I lost him for minutes through a region of brush. Petrol fumes were filling the interior, and backdraught bringing them in through gaps in the torn bodywork: the tank had been split at some time when the rear had struck obstacles. It was a new worry but there was nothing I could do about it except coast when there was a chance, conserving fuel.

  The moon was the only reference for any kind of bearing and I estimated that we were only some forty kilometres east of our north-south leg from Neueburg to the point where he'd turned off. I didn't know the area but I had looked at the map Ferris had put into the statistics folder and when the Kapitan slowed and turned across rough ground and doused its light I knew that this could only be the East German Frontier Zone.

  It was a winter silence. The moon's light blanched colour away and left a bone-white landscape. There was no frost but the air was cold and very still. Far north the first murmuring came from the cloud-mass but here the land was quiet.

  He had run the car into a huddle of black oblongs: the hulk of a military depot left here to rot a quarter of a century ago. When he had turned off the road I had started coasting with the engine dead, letting the last of the momentum thrust the 17M into thick bush. I pushed the statistics folder under the carpet and got out.

  Ill For a minute the black outline was unbroken, then he detached himself and began walking. I drew my left hand along one of the wheel-ruts where the earth was soft at the edges, darkening the bandage, then took up the tag. I think he looked round but no more than casually and I was motionless before his eyes could have focussed. A light flickered as he checked his watch and I knew there was a rendezvous.

  We walked fifty-odd metres apart. I was ready at every pace to freeze if he looked back. He didn't look back.

  Between the North Sea and Czechoslovakia runs the jagged scar of the Frontier, nine hundred miles of barbed wire, trenches, watchtowers, concrete bunkers and minefields. For West Germany it doesn't exist: East Germany doesn't exist, therefore it can possess no frontier. But it is there, manned by fourteen thousand troops of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik with machine-guns, searchlights and dog-patrols. In the sensitive areas where attempts at 'exfiltration' are insistent the vigilance is sharp and every day someone, somewhere along the nine hundred miles of the Frontier, dies, a worn coat puckered by a ballet and a hand going out to break the fall of the living body that is dead before it meets the ground; and there is special leave for the man who shot him down.

  The Hanover section is the responsibility of the Federal Customs and is patrolled by the Bundesgrenzschutz and the British Frontier Service. It is a less sensitive area and reliance is placed on the barbed wire and mines. It. is not the only section where vigilance on the part of the East German Volkspolizei has become cursory: since the Frontier was fortified in 1961 more than two thousand of their own border troops have themselves crossed it from east to west.

  In some places the wife has rusted and the loose boards of the watchtowers rattle in the wind; the warning signs lean from rotten posts and the patrols keep to the warmth of their huts unless a sound reaches them through the winter night. But the mines are there, sown invisibly across the thirty-metre strip of desolate land. Some people still get across. There is a match-seller who sits outside the Hauptbahnhof in the city of Hanover, legless.

  South and east from Neueburg are pine forests, the haunt of wild boar, but a lot of timber has been cut and the land ploughed: in many places the horizon is low and distant across a waste of beet-fields. The wind has an edge when it blows from the north and there is not much shelter.

  It was here that he led me, the man who Liked marzipan.

  A notice leaned in the moonlight, propped on the barbed wire. Haiti Heir Zonengrenze. Achtung! Lebensgefahr: Wirkungsbereich Sowjetzonaler Minen. Haiti Following him I had looked back a dozen times, sighting on the ruin of the military depot and keeping in line with it so that if he turned his head I would be seen against its shape and thus perhaps not seen at all. Also I noted landmarks: a hump of withered bush, the skeleton form of a watchtower to my left, the ash-grey shape of what looked like a concrete bunker on the other side.

  He went straight through the wire and I stood watching him, keeping quite still because as he stooped to pass between the strands the pallor of his face showed up. But he didn't expect to be followed: his head was turning to left and right and I saw a new shape, smaller than the bunker and farther away and with a vertical blade of light cutting its ma
ss. It would be a guard-hut, the light showing through the join of a door. He checked it and then went on but more slowly because the sign had said Danger of Death.

  I waited. He had stopped and stood motionless but I heard no sound anywhere. Then he began going forward again at an angle and I walked to the wire and went through it as he had. The barbs had been turned inwards with pliers along a metre of its length and as I straightened up I took another bearing and committed it to memory.

  He had stopped again and his head was turning and I stood waiting. The white of his face was showing now and he had swung his body in my direction and for half a minute he made no movement at all. I wasn't sure that he had seen me. It was an eerie place, a landscape with dead figures: the posts leaning like gibbets and the web of the wire breaking the flat two-dimensional background into sections as if the whole scene were cardboard, a badly lighted stage. Perhaps it was difficult for him to believe in the unlikely: that a man was standing not far from him, thrown up from the waste of earth where armies had once passed, leaving their dead. Perhaps he was afraid of his own imaginings and even hoped it was in fact a man of flesh and blood that stood here, a creature he could deal with, natural, mortal.

  Neither of us could move easily, move quickly, here. They were lying quietly, the brass-capped detonators, an inch below the surface of the earth, protected by their pitch-mouldings against the rain. He knew where they were but it was only another way of saying that he knew he mustn't move too quickly, here.

  Then I was sure that he had seen me, recognized me at least for something that shouldn't be here, something that was neither a post nor a shadow thrown by the moon. His outline was changing slowly on one side and now the pale light flickered on metal in his hand. Softly: 'Who is there?'

  Chapter Fourteen — STORM-CENTRE

  I went up to him slowly, following the angle he had taken. The earth was crusty with frost.

  'You can't use that,' I said. 'It'd make too much noise.'

  He held it cocked up to aim at my face. It was his usual, the P38, and he remembered what he'd been taught: at close quarters it has to be the heart or the brain because anywhere else is too slow and even two or three in the stomach won't stop you from trying to take a man with you bare-handed if your blood's up. And you might have anything under a thick sheepskin coat: wallet, holster, so forth.

  Sweat was on his face, a grey dew in the moonlight. His breathing was shaky and it confirmed what I'd felt about him two nights ago when he'd sat behind me in the 250 SE with this thing lined up with the bridge of my nose: he was gun-dependent.

  'Don't move,' he breathed.

  'Go on, then, get it over.' I was suddenly fed up because we were wasting time. 'Then see how far you'll get before they're out of that hut. They've got the real thing, rapid-fire.'

  'Don't speak so loud.'-Soft panic on his breath. He'd crossed here before but he didn't like it.

  'That's what I mean.' I'd been getting it ready over a period of several seconds, working out the exact way it would have to go, and the gun smashed upwards into his face and didn't go off because the blow was directly on the wrist-nerve to paralyse the fingers before the index could contract but there was risk attached and I had to sweat it out until the gun hit the ground with a negative thud and didn't blow our legs off.

  He was worse then I'd thought, even though I knew what they were like, the gun-dependents: take their toy away and they break down blubbing. He just rocked stupidly with a hand up to his face and didn't do anything about me at all so I cancelled the second half of the trick — the knee-to-groin number — and picked up the P38 and threw it well across the wire where it would be all right.

  'You go first,' I said.

  Reaction was setting in and I wasn't feeling much better than he was; it had been a rough run from Neueburg in the dark and it had looked so many times as if the best I could hope to do was climb out of a smashed 17M just as I'd climbed out of a smashed N.S.U. and at every one of those times the whole mission had depended on which way a one-ton mass would swing when it left my hands.

  Now I could relax.

  There are mines here,' he said. His mouth had begun bleeding.

  'I can read.'

  'You'll have to go back.'

  It was just because he didn't know what to do. A lot of them are like that: they work to strict orders and when there aren't any orders they beat the air. But I knew it would be all right: I had known since he'd looked at his watch just after he'd left the car. He had a rendezvous.

  'You go first,' I told him. 'And start now. They're not going to wait for ever.'

  He was staring into my face, intent on everything I said, hoping it might give him some kind of direction: and finally it did. He had needed telling almost in so many words that all he had to do was take me with him to the rendezvous where 'they' were waiting. Then he could ask one of them for a gun and he would be six feet tall again and I would be dead.

  'It is heavily mined,' he said slowly. 'You will have to take care.'

  A new thought had been worming its way through the sludge: he was worried in case I trod on the wrong thing and brought the guards out firing from the hip. He only liked shooting people: he didn't like people shooting him.

  'We'll both be very careful, yes. Both of us.'

  He nodded and turned away and went forward for three or four metres at a time, stopping to check bearings. There was something disgusting about the way I had to put my feet precisely where he put his, turning my head exactly as he did, it was just deep in my nature to resent being dependent on people, even people as good as Ferris, and now I was dependent on this gross creature, my life linked intimately with his.

  He moved again and stopped again and I checked the new reference: the third wire-stanchion from the nearest warning-sign was lined up with the edge of the ruin. I assumed we were halfway across the thirty-metre strip because he began checking ahead for bearings instead of behind. It was easier in that direction: pines stood sparsely at the fringe of a darker mass and the intervals between their trunks were irregular so that each had identity.

  The lightning flashed and everything leapt sharply in it: trees, wire, posts, the rutted earth. He caught his breath and stumbled. The pathology of the gun-dependent is odd: once armed he loses his fear even of things against which a gun is of no use: spiders, heights, the elements. He carries a magic talisman. Conversely, deprived, his fears are exaggerated.

  The lightning struck twice again and flickered out and for a moment it was difficult to see. We had both stopped. The Harz range stood fifty or sixty kilometres to the north but the storm had been drifting south-east and the thunder reached us in less than one minute. I looked up and saw that the moon was now ten or twelve degrees of arc from the edge of the cloud-mass.

  I said: 'We haven't got long.'

  He moved again, counting seven paces and checking. The post was lined up with the fourth pine from the end but I used one of the wire-stanchions as the closer reference because it was thinner and therefore more accurate. He was taking his time and I began thinking it had been a mistake to throw the bloody thing away: his confidence had gone with it, 'Look, we've got about nine minutes' visibility left so for God's sake get off the pot.'

  Through his teeth: 'You want me to blow myself up?'

  'If it'll get you off the pot.'

  Halfway to the eastern wire my weight broke the crusty earth and one shoe slipped on the shoulder of something hard. I said:

  'Wait.'

  I made sure he stopped, then bent down and felt the thing because I needed to know how good his bearings were. The soil came away under my fingers and I went on clearing it until they could define the shape. It was a curved shoulder and pitch-smooth and the detonator would be three or four inches to the right, in the centre. It would be at least a fourteen-ounce actuator, otherwise the odd crow or some heavy rainfall would trip it, so I finished the job and left the whole thing exposed: it would be a help if I ever came back this way and if I didn't
it would help someone else.

  'You're not very good,' I said, 'are you?'

  It was just possible that he'd deliberately taken me too close but I didn't think so: even in his demoralized condition he must realize that he'd catch some of the blast.

  'You shouldn't have done that.' His whisper was reedy with fright.

  'You shouldn't have taken me so bloody close.'

  There were two more changes of angle before we reached the wire and I took a final sighting with the military depot as a reference. It looked closer than I would have believed: the nerves had come farther than thirty metres. He climbed through the wire, more confidence in his movements now that we were clear of the mines and he could lead me to his friends and borrow a gun. When he'd gone five paces I said sharply:

  'What was that?'

  He turned his head and I did it and when he was down I looked for his papers. All he had were an identity card and a crossword puzzle and I held my watch-glass at an angle against the name to increase the light-factor. Guhl. Re-check, Guhl. I kicked a hole in the earth and buried the card and put the crossword puzzle into my coat as a flash came. There were three more over a ten-second period and I kept still until they were over. He lay in much the same position as Benedikt but there were no bits of porcelain around, just the scuffed earth.

  I had waited until he had taken his last five paces so as to know the direction of the rendezvous. It lay towards the group of pines and I started off. The sound of the preliminary flash was already crackling and the rest of the series followed and sent a ricochet of echoes from the Thuringerwald range to the south-east so that for longer than half a minute the sky and earth reverberated.