Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  Fourteen

  ROBIN ‘TIN-EYE’ STEPHENS turned from the window overlooking the common to face Colonel Ross. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  The Colonel stared back at him, making sure that he engaged with Stephens’s good eye, the one without the monocle. Officially, Ross outranked Stephens, but expecting Stephens to defer to authority was a waste of time. In fact, the less you did to upset the famously short-fused Captain the better. Ross had read Stephens’s reaction to complaints about internees’ treatment by men under his command. ‘The motives of the complainers are invariably foul. Most of them are degenerates, most of them come diseased from V.D., they are pathological liars and the value of their Christian oath is therefore doubtful.’ It was, thought Ross, rather harsh but then Stephens was anything but soft—on his men, his prisoners, or himself.

  ‘I’m not sure—’

  ‘Look, Ross, I know you are probably tied up at Broadway Buildings these days, but the fact remains, you were the best interrogator of men we had in the last war. You speak German, know their minds.’ He thumped the slim volume on his desk. ‘You wrote the book, goddamn it, and we still use it. At the moment we have to grill internees at Scotland Yard, the Oratory, Wandsworth, wherever they find us a space. My idea is to use this place, Latchmere, solely for the purpose of interrogation, with a crack team, whom I would like you to help train. For crying out loud, man, the whole system is a shambles at the moment. Documents in the four corners of England, no central cross-checking of statements. Most of them written up and left to gather dust.’

  Ross knew that only too well.

  ‘Your boys get to question some of the captives, don’t they?’

  Ross shrugged. ‘A handful.’

  ‘Not what I heard. Anyway, here we’d be, the central repository of foreign spies, reporting everything to Five—’

  ‘With copies to MI6.’

  A pause. ‘Copies to Six of anything deemed relevant.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I shall have to put it to Swinton, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  This was the new committee set up by Churchill and headed by Lord Swinton, whose task was to integrate the various security services. All involved agreed that it was needed, even if all dreaded its findings. They were dealing with hard-fought-for spheres of interest, after all, and the blood on the walls was hardly dry in some areas. Stephens relaxed now that he had Ross on the line. All he had to do was reel him in.

  ‘Whisky?’

  Ross nodded and waited while Stephens slopped out two tumblers of Glenmorangie.

  ‘Cheers.’ Stephens adjusted his monocle. ‘You know, I realise that many people think the rounding-up of all the German refugees was …’

  ‘Draconian,’ suggested Colonel Ross. He had read the reports on the Huyton camp, its poor feeding and sleeping arrangements, the houses full of invalids and the sick who were clearly no threat to anyone.

  ‘Draconian. Quite,’ said Stephens. ‘But the fact is this. We know, by and large, that somewhere in there we have all of the enemy’s agents. We’ve had to inconvenience a lot of innocent people to do it, perhaps, but the fact remains: we can be certain we’ve collared the lot.’

  ‘It’s possible. There might be the odd sympathetic Fenian at large—’

  ‘And Welsh Nationalist. True. But basically, it’s done. If you were Canaris or one of the others, what would your next move be?’

  Ross didn’t hesitate. ‘To infiltrate a fresh batch.’

  ‘Of course. So, any day now, we can expect them, by boat and by plane. Our job will be to catch them and …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Use them.’

  ‘Not hang them?’

  ‘Well, eventually, maybe. But for each one we hang, they’ll send another. The trick here will be to …’ He flicked the pages of the document on his desk. ‘What was the phrase you used to use? Ah, yes … “to turn the weapon back on the enemy”.’

  Ross knew he was flattering him by quoting from his twenty-year-old pamphlet on techniques learnt in the Great War. ‘When do you envisage this infiltration beginning?’ he asked.

  Stephens smiled. ‘Yesterday. The police picked up a rather interesting Swede, reported because of his strange accent, and he had with him a parachute, a radio transmitter, two hundred pounds in notes, maps, a pistol and an atrocious identity card. He claims he’s come looking for his sweetheart.’

  Ross felt a shudder of excitement. ‘What have you done with him?’

  ‘He’s downstairs in the cells. Not said a word apart from that stupid story.’

  The Colonel drained his glass and let the liquid warm his gullet. ‘Keep him in solitary for another two days. I have a few things to wind up over at SIS. I assume I can pick my own assistants? Good. Then …’ He clapped his hands together. ‘The silly bugger is all mine.’

  Uli had only just discovered the name of the half-completed housing estate—Huyton—before they were told that they would be moving again the next morning. The women’s enclosure was to be redesignated for those with children, although it hardly seemed sanitary enough. She was glad to leave. The ordinary soldiers guarding them were kind enough—in fact, within a few days a black market supplied by the army had sprouted—but the ignorance of the officers, even the so-called intelligence officers, beggared belief. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she had heard one of them say to a colleague, in a booming voice that assumed she and the others around her were deaf, ‘is why so many of these Jews in here have sided with Hitler.’ She had bristled at such gross stupidity.

  It was just after six in the morning when they were roused. Breakfast was, as always, a dollop of pale yellow watery powdered egg and a scrap of bread. Afterwards she repacked her case, having taken down the dress she had donated to the blackout and placed her father’s journal on top. She knew from rereading its contents with a less emotional eye that she had been too hard on her father. She didn’t think what she’d read in his face was wrong, exactly, just her interpretation of it. Whether she would have reached the top or not, her musicianship had given him great pleasure. She thought that he’d have been satisfied with nothing less than the best. Now, it seemed, he’d have been satisfied with whatever she’d have been able to give.

  Uli wondered where Fritz was right now, hoping, praying that conditions were better for him. He was an old, broken man. She had heard rumours about the decaying rat-infested cotton mills they were using in some parts of the North.

  She wondered yet again if there was any way of getting in touch with that policeman, Ross, to see if he could help her father. But she’d clearly offended him deeply, despite trekking out to Tempelhof to put things right and giving him her favourite piece of Mörike poetry. If only she’d taken that perfume.

  ‘You all right?’

  It was Frau Menkel.

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’ She quickly wiped her eyes.

  The older woman grabbed her hand and pulled her close. ‘I feel sorry for you. No, really. You could say I deserve this.’

  ‘Nobody deserves this, Frau Menkel.’

  ‘My husband was a steward on the Bremen. He has been a courier for the Abwehr since 1935. He has an Iron Cross. He was ordered to settle here, as a refugee from the Führer, in Portsmouth in 1938, which we did. His job was to log naval movements.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Interned. God knows where. My point is they have every right to do this to me. But you … no.’

  Before Uli could answer, they heard the ancient buses start up, coughing like smokers in the morning, until the engines settled down to a lumpen clatter.

  ‘Letsbeavinyou!’ came the cry.

  Uli smiled at her companions. ‘Here we go again.’

  Ross slipped out of the house just as a late dawn was breaking, its tardiness thanks to the double summer time that the country now observed. Much of the sky was still rich with fast-fading stars as he walked down the lane towards the Mere, Bess at his heels. He
was thinking about Emma, who was still asleep in his bed, and about how much he had enjoyed the previous evening with her. She had an attitude to life that he envied, a desire to grab each moment and relish it. He should try and do the same, he decided, rather than brooding on what might have been.

  Yet among the elation were grits of suspicion. Could he detect the hand of his father in all this? He dismissed it. Emma was a nice girl, not one to lie back for King, Country or Colonel Ross. As she had said to him, these were unusual times.

  He reached the Mere and walked its perimeter, past the village call box, watching the growing sun redden the eddies that played across the water’s surface.

  He thought of Uli. Had he betrayed her by sleeping with Emma? No—surely, by constantly summoning up Uli’s face and figure, it was Emma he was being beastly to. The fading memory of one kiss at an airport, that was all he shared with Uli, whereas Emma was here, real flesh and blood. And they had another day’s work to do together. He felt butterflies in his stomach. This would not change their working relationship, he promised himself, then laughed. As if.

  Ross looked up and saw a brace of fighters climbing into the east, the leading edge of their wings aflame from the sun. They were Boulton Paul Defiants, judging by the gun-turret bulge behind the cockpit, and he cursed the war that was sending up his inexperienced countrymen against the fast and lethal Me 109s of the Luftwaffe with their combat-blooded pilots.

  Yet this same war, the one that had so effectively isolated him from Uli, had also given him Emma. Surely that was something to be grateful for. In fact, compared to those aircrews searching the skies over the Channel for incoming bandits, he had an awful lot to thank the Lord for.

  Ross bent, picked up a stone and tossed it into the Mere, watching the ripples, and set off on the rest of his walk.

  Fifteen

  A HOSTILE CROWD, mostly of women, arms folded and faces set hard, were waiting at the Liverpool dock gates as the old buses wheezed to a halt. Uli kept a tight grip on Hilda’s arm as they stepped down and she was aware of the others crowding round, forming into a protective cluster.

  She looked around. The whole world here seemed to have been sandbagged—vast walls of them reared in front of every building. Barrage balloons floated over the docks, their cables singing in the wind, and the air smelled of oil and smoke. Other buses and trucks had already arrived, and new ones chuffed in every few minutes. Drinkers from a pub on the corner opposite, its frosted windows thick with anti-blast tape, huddled in the doorway, watching the sport. It was not yet eight in the morning, but these men were already sinking their foul-looking pints with enthusiasm.

  A junior officer directed Uli’s group towards the gates while his men, bayonets at the ready, pushed them into a ragged line two abreast. They shuffled towards the wharfs.

  Someone yelled from the pub in an accent so thick that Uli couldn’t make it out. Except for the word ‘Nazi’, pronounced with a long, soft ‘z’.

  The women at the gate started chanting insults. ‘Go on, fuck off,’ cried one of the more ruddy-faced ones, waving an arm the size of a ham. ‘Fuck off back to Germany.’

  Then the spitting began, a hail of sputum, flying over the women. Hilda shrieked and Uli could feel it hitting her hair.

  ‘You filthy who-ers.’

  ‘Hitler-lovers.’

  ‘I hope they rip the tits off yer.’

  Frau Menkel turned around and spat straight into the face of her nearest attacker. The yelling turned to baying. Uli grabbed Hilda to her chest as the kicking started and a sharp stone glanced off her head. Frau Menkel had a cut above one eye and there were screams coming from the front. One of the locals held up a fistful of dark hair, waving it victoriously.

  The two gunshots caused an alarmed squawking of startled seagulls. Cordite smoke drifted over a stunned crowd. Slowly the attackers withdrew. The column of internees and guards marched through the dock gates and into the grimy complex of warehouses without further incident.

  ‘Eh, Tommy?’ came the shout from behind. ‘Make sure you give your German bitch one from me, eh?’ The locals dissolved into laughter.

  ‘I’ve been told to ground you,’ said Hermann Goering as he sipped his coffee. He watched Heydrich’s lips twitch in irritation. The SS man ran a hand through his thinning blond hair. At least he looks something like our idea of an Aryan, thought Goering, even if popular rumour suggested otherwise.

  ‘By who?’

  A military band began to tune up in the street below. Goering signalled for the window to be closed. They were in the Reichsmarschall’s private dining room on the first floor of the House of Flyers, a convenient lunch venue close to the Air Ministry and across the street from Heydrich’s Berlin headquarters.

  ‘By the Führer.’

  Now Heydrich flushed with anger. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said that he did not want his head of Reich Security flitting about the sky simply to add a pilot’s badge to his cap. You are too valuable.’

  Goering winced as Heydrich spooned several sugars into his coffee. ‘That’s nonsense,’ Heydrich grunted eventually.

  ‘You should be flattered that he cares.’

  Heydrich had been flying in secret for months. It was one of the reasons why he was newly enamoured of the air force. He didn’t trust the army, which he felt hampered the essential work of his Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories, and he had loathed the navy ever since it had drummed him out for getting a young girl pregnant and refusing to marry her back in the 1920s. Finally the SS-Gruppenführer said: ‘Who told him? Who told him about my flying?’

  ‘The same person who suggested that you might have Jewish blood.’

  It could only be Canaris.

  ‘That is a damned lie!’

  ‘I know,’ said Goering, holding up a placating hand.

  Heydrich, however, clearly felt the need to explain himself. ‘My grandmother remarried after my grandfather died. To a Protestant locksmith called Süss.’

  ‘Unfortunate name.’ The Jew Süss was a popular anti-Semitic film of a few years previously.

  ‘But not Jewish. I can prove it.’

  ‘You don’t have to. You just have to shut him up.’

  ‘I will.’

  Goering nodded. He wouldn’t put it past Heydrich to neutralise Canaris. The White Fox might be cunning, but Heydrich’s men could arrive at your house at dawn and an hour later you could find yourself hanging from a meat hook. Explanation to follow as soon as they had thought of one. But Canaris still had the Führer’s respect, so such action was out of the question. For the moment.

  ‘Do you know what he said at the General Staff Meeting?’ asked Goering. Heydrich shook his head. ‘I quote: “We are up against an enemy that is well armed, with high morale and an excellent air force.” I could have strangled him. I am just back from France. I have seen what we can do to their excellent air force.’

  ‘On what does he base this? The Daily Express? Is he guessing or does he have many agents there reporting the state of morale?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Heydrich laughed. ‘That would be against the Ten Commandments.’ This was the informal agreement that split intelligence-gathering responsibilities between the SD, the Reich Security Service, and the Abwehr. Canaris could send in agents abroad; Heydrich and his master Himmler were meant to operate only within the new Greater Reich, although they could make use of intelligence from German sympathisers, as opposed to infiltrated spies, in other spheres. As an attempt to clarify demarcation lines, it had been an overcomplicated failure from day one.

  ‘Do you?’ repeated Goering.

  ‘Not enough,’ Heydrich admitted. ‘Not yet. Mainly people drawing up arrest lists for when we invade. Although the British seem to have done much of our work for us.’

  ‘Well, Canaris hasn’t got many in place either. But this one might interest you.’ Goering slid a piece of paper across the table. ‘He seems to swear by this source.’

&
nbsp; Heydrich glanced down. It was a tightly typed report, with various parts scratched out, including its origin. Goering’s personal spy network, the Forschungsamt, was meant to have been rolled into his bodyguard or subsumed into Luftwaffe intelligence. Maybe the deletions hid the fact that it still existed. Heydrich made a mental note to check.

  The document consisted of intercepted transmissions from an agent identified as Cigar who, according to the dates, had been operating in England since before the war. Which made him remarkable, whoever he was. ‘How do you know about this, Reichsmarschall?’

  Goering tapped the side of his nose and the fleshy folds in his face wobbled. ‘Never you mind.’

  ‘Where is this Cigar?’

  ‘On the coast. Suffolk. What about—how would you have put it in the navy—a shot across Canaris’s bows? Let him know that we know what he is up to.’

  Heydrich considered for a moment. The band outside struck up again. It was a parade by the Berlin police to celebrate the victories of their Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS comrades. If Germany carried on expanding, the police would soon be formed into SS Battalions, perhaps to help subdue Great Britain.

  ‘Short of hauling his backside in front of a People’s Court and having him strung up for defeatism, I can think of nothing that would give me more pleasure.’

  ‘What are you flying?’ asked Goering.

  ‘A 109.’ Heydrich was pleased at the surprise on the fat man’s face. A Messerschmitt 109 was not an easy plane to handle for a relative novice, particularly on take-off and landing. Heydrich had had the fighter plane repainted in SD insignia, with prominent SS flashes on the nose. One day, he thought, the security services should have their own air force. He’d want a fighter with more room in the cockpit than the Messerschmitt, though.

  ‘I recently inspected Jagdgeschwader 26 in Calais,’ said Goering. ‘The Hauptmann of Staffel 1 is a personal friend. I flew with his father in the last war.’ He scribbled the name down and passed it to Heydrich.

  ‘What about this talk of grounding me?’

  A lusty chorus of ‘We March Against England’ drifted up from the street and Goering smiled as he wiped his lips with a napkin. ‘My dear Reinhard, this lunch never took place. I’m far too busy crushing England to worry about such things.’