Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  ‘A request? A request for what?’

  Schuller put his arm round Erich’s shoulder, pulling him close, and walked him towards the wire. ‘Repeat this to anyone, Hinkel, and you know what I will do to you. And to your family.’

  Erich shrugged him off. ‘Don’t threaten me, Schuller,’ he said with a boldness that he didn’t feel. ‘What do you want?’

  They had reached the perimeter fence. Schuller looked up at the sentry in the watchtower and raised a hand in greeting. The man spat. Many of the British guards had been pulled out for combat duty and had been replaced by Poles. Schuller seemed pleased by this. He spun Erich round and retraced his steps. ‘Simple. I want you to get me a submarine.’

  Colonel Donald Ross sat at his desk in his office, unable to accept what Debenham had said. There had to be a way round this. He took a deep breath and poured a glass of water. So his mind wandered now and then. With Cameron at his side, it was no problem. And the girl? She was an asset. He’d resisted the idea at first, but she had her uses and by God she made his son happy. Looked like he’d have to get used to the idea of a bloody German in the family. He hoped that Cameron would be prepared for the kind of ribbing he would get, especially if he ended up back in the police force. That was if the damned American didn’t hang her.

  He heard rushing footfalls up the stairs and was taken aback when the door burst open and Cameron and Ulrike stood staring at him. Both were panting hard.

  ‘Dad. Thank God. I’m bloody well pleased to see you.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Uli.

  ‘Am I all right? It’s not me who’s taken leave of my senses. Not this time, anyway. What are you doing here, barging in like there’s a fire?’

  ‘There has been. A gas main exploded,’ explained his son. ‘Just heard it on the radio. Roads closed, the lot.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wilton House,’ said Uli.

  ‘I knew you were over there. I thought …’

  The Colonel felt his throat constrict. He took another sip of water. ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘Well, yes. The entire building has collapsed. They’re all dead. Anyone who was in there.’

  Debenham and Lillyman, he thought. ‘Good God. How terrible.’

  ‘What were you doing there, dad?’

  ‘Just a catch-up. They wanted to let me know what they thought about our work.’

  ‘What did they say?’ asked Uli.

  ‘Well, it’s all academic now. But they said—’ He coughed, fist in front of his mouth. ‘Carry on. Keep up the good work.’

  Once the pair had left, Donald Ross asked for a secure line through to Broadway Buildings, the Secret Intelligence Service London HQ. It was five minutes before he got through to Claude Dansey, and once they’d scrambled their phones and exchanged pleasantries, the Colonel said, ‘I was over at Wilton House today.’

  ‘Oh. Were you?’ asked Dansey.

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘I heard. Terrible.’

  ‘How many gas mains is that—six? Or is it seven?’

  Dansey almost chuckled, but remembered himself. ‘Yes. Getting to be bloody dangerous out there.’

  ‘I don’t think we had six gas mains explode in the whole Blitz, did we?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ mumbled Dansey.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Donald, you know I can’t.’

  ‘Or do you think the Germans are sending whole gas mains over now?’

  ‘Donald—’

  ‘Don’t “Donald” me, Claude. I was in that bloody building not two hours ago. This is a safe line. I’d like to know what nearly killed me. And don’t give me the Victoria Light and Gas Company cock and bull.’

  ‘We think it’s a new form of rocket. Like the doodlebugs, only much more sophisticated. The Germans call it the V2, apparently. Thing is, Donald, you can’t hear them coming. They fly faster than the speed of sound. The first thing you know about it is the explosion.’

  Colonel Ross could hear genuine awe in Dansey’s voice at this new development. ‘Whatever they are, you can’t keep using the gas-main story, Claude.’

  ‘I told Winnie that. He said there’d be panic, but I told him.’

  ‘Told him what?’

  ‘It’s their last gasp, Donald. I ask you—what real harm can the Germans do us now?’

  The morning runs were instigated shortly after the first letters went out to relatives in Germany, many of them thick with the island code. Schuller had asked permission to keep his men fit with thirty laps of the perimeter fence, and each day, after roll-call, they would don singlets and shorts and lope around in a tightly bunched group, laughing and chatting until the last five circuits when they would put their heads down and sprint with gritty determination. Then it was showers, a few popular marching songs, and perhaps a football match.

  On the eighth morning, after his run, Schuller found Erich and brought him out into the open. The SS policeman was sweating, and in the cool morning air steam was rising off him.

  ‘I have just heard that the Red Cross letters are in. You will check each one for a code. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ the ex-submariner said reluctantly. Schuller was still dropping hints about what would happen to Erich’s parents should he fail to cooperate. Part of Erich wanted to call his bluff. Like the rest, though, he feared what the dying system at home could still do to those who crossed it. ‘It’s a little soon for something to be in this batch, though. Am I looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘Dates. A date for the action.’

  ‘What action?’

  ‘Our escape. Freedom.’

  ‘You’ll never get off this island, you know. Nobody ever has.’

  Schuller smiled. ‘Believe. Obey. Fight,’ he said, quoting the old SS maxim. ‘You’d do well to remember that. Run with me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Come on, run with me. I won’t go too fast.’

  They broke into a slow jog, hugging the fence, leaving the hut complex behind. Some of the walls of the Stanhope estate had been pulled down to allow maximum use of arable land, and on the other side of the fence there were freshly ploughed fields criss-crossed by hedgerows, and a couple of distant farm buildings.

  Schuller nodded at an Austin A10 parked in a lane, around twenty metres beyond the second wall of wire. ‘Always there, that car.’

  One of the dogs bared its teeth as they came past and Erich jumped away as it flung itself at the fence.

  ‘It’s me it can smell. Three laps. Pick up the pace.’

  Erich’s lungs were burning. He hadn’t done this much running since the Hitler Youth camps. There’d hardly been room for morning sprints on the sub.

  ‘Look up. Searchlight. Searchlight. Here. Not here.’

  ‘Flares,’ gasped Erich.

  ‘Yes, acetylene flares, but they have to be set off by a guard by hand. This part of the fence cannot be illuminated easily. OK, walk.’

  ‘Schul—’ he gasped. ‘Schuller, why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because, Hinkel, you are my U-boat man, my signals officer. You’re coming out with us.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Again, let’s go.’ They kicked off once more. ‘We can get men out to this fence. We can cut it. Kroll has made cutters from the bars that were on Hut Six.’

  ‘The dogs.’

  ‘Ah. The dogs. Watch.’

  On the second circuit, Schuller waited till the tethered dog came for him and quickly threw a handful of dark brown powder in its face. It began to sneeze, snuffling and shaking its head to clear its nostrils. They came round a third time and the dog simply watched them with rheumy eyes, still twitching its snout now and then.

  ‘Curry powder. Deadens their sense of smell. We got it from the kitchen detail.’

  ‘If it doesn’t work on the night?’

  ‘We got knives from the kitchen detail, too. I’ll personally cut the animals’ throats.

  ‘Stop. Enough.’ Erich place
d his feet apart, put his hands on his knees and lowered his head between them, sucking in air. ‘Be careful. To the English, escape is one thing. Killing a dog … beyond the pale.’

  ‘The curry will work.’

  ‘What about once you get out?’

  ‘We have papers to prove that we are Poles or Norwegians. The quality isn’t too good. We used the badges on the overcoats that the British issued to some of us at Southampton. It will fool the casual person.’

  ‘Let’s hope you only meet casual people.’

  ‘We, Hinkel, we. You’ll be going out too. Look, there is more to this than you think. We are in touch with Bridgend, with Devizes, with Lodge Moor, with Comrie, which the British call a Black Camp. You know what that is?’

  Erich shook his head.

  ‘The most loyal of us are kept there.’ It was where Schuller should have been, except for that nonsense about the reprisals in Rome, which had kept him tethered near London. War crimes. An oxymoron, thought Schuller. You either had war, or you didn’t. ‘My plan is for everything to be coordinated. Which is why I need you to read those letters, see if we got through.’

  ‘And when is all this going to happen?’

  ‘That is the beauty of it. It will happen whenever the Führer tells us to go.’ Schuller almost snapped to attention as he said proudly: ‘We await his command.’

  Erich felt the odds against him ever seeing Uli again rapidly clicking over, heading skywards.

  Thirty-One

  NOVEMBER 1944

  As the allies pushed across Europe, Ross and Uli’s work load increased. They were temporarily taken off War Crimes preliminaries and sent to Kempton racecourse—now called Number 9 Reception Camp—to help screen the incoming prisoners. As they swept in, seated in the back of a Humber staff car, Uli grabbed Ross’s knee. ‘My God. I was here.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I traced you here. Hardly a day at the races, eh?’

  ‘We were kept in the stables, like the bloody horses.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll manage better than that this time.’ He lowered his voice so the driver couldn’t hear. ‘A hotel, with a four-poster, no less.’

  The screening was to be carried out in what had been the jockeys’ weighing room, with each prisoner being brought in, told to sit, and asked a series of questions. Uli was to keep quiet. Officially, she was a German-speaking South African stenographer. It wouldn’t do for either side to know her true nationality. They took the first PoW at midday. He was unshaven and clearly still lousy, judging by the way he rummaged under his shirt, and Ross scribbled a note to change the interrogation order. Delousing first, then processing.

  After establishing that the man had been a gunner on the Atlantic Wall before fighting rearguard actions in various towns across France until his capture, Ross asked one of the standard questions. ‘Do you think Germany can still win the war?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do,’ the man replied.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are being lured into a trap.’ He opened his arms to mimic a pair of jaws. ‘When we have you in Germany … snap!’ He slammed his arms together.

  After twenty or more questions, Ross had him taken out by the escorting guardsmen.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked Uli.

  ‘Black,’ she said, using the informal colour code of debriefing. White was anti-Nazi, grey neutral, black still pro-Nazi. Whites would often be used as stool-pigeons, infiltrated into the huts to eavesdrop and report on what the Blacks were doing or talking about. In that way, some of the more outlandish last-stand plans in Germany were coming to light.

  ‘I agree,’ Ross said. He wrote down the man’s name next to Comrie, one of the Black camps. ‘Next!’

  A sergeant entered, looking pale. ‘Sir, sorry, sir, we’ve been told to lock down all prisoners until further notice.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Ross, looking at the pile of folders he still had to work through.

  ‘There’s been an escape from one of the camps, sir.’

  ‘The bloody idiots!’ screamed Schuller into Dietrich’s face, as if he were responsible, rather than merely the bearer of bad tidings. ‘Absolute bloody idiots.’

  He punched the wall of Hut Fourteen and stormed out.

  Dietrich looked at Erich and shrugged. It had cost Dietrich five cigarettes and six squares of chocolate from his Red Cross parcel to find out from a guard why the regime had suddenly toughened. First there had been a lock-down, then increased roll-calls. The guards had been doubled, and the Senior Interpreter and Carlisle, the camp’s Intelligence Officer, had plucked people out at random for questioning. Now Dietrich had discovered exactly what had caused the British to panic.

  Erich, who hadn’t been privy to the whispered conversation with Schuller, said to Dietrich: ‘Tell me what you told him.’

  ‘Well, it seems two pilots got out of a camp at somewhere called Devices.’

  ‘Devizes,’ corrected Erich.

  ‘They made it to an airfield, got to a plane.’

  ‘What, they got into the airfield? A British RAF base?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My God.’ Erich shook his head admiringly.

  ‘They got into two planes, but couldn’t start them. They didn’t know that British planes often have off-board starters.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Starter trolleys. To fire them up. They got caught in the cockpits, wondering why the engines wouldn’t catch.’

  Erich didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Now he knew why Schuller was angry. The fact that the pilots had got out and got so close to freedom meant that it could be done. German PoWs could escape. This wouldn’t be lost on the British, either. Every camp could expect more guards, more random checks, more suspicion.

  Schuller returned and indicated to Erich to come outside, away from any microphones. The ground was still crunchy with the last night’s frost as they began another circle of the fence. ‘This mustn’t change anything. I want you to send another letter asking for a firm date.’

  ‘I’d lie low if I were you.’

  ‘You aren’t me,’ Schuller said, grimacing. ‘Those irresponsible idiots, jumping the gun like that. The British will be all over us like lice. From now on, I want every new prisoner brought in front of the SS tribunal. They’ll be sending in stool-pigeons as part of the new security. I want to know who they are—I want them isolated.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘So that you stay vigilant. So that you don’t think of saying anything when Carlisle calls you in for questioning. If you do, I’ll kill you. Understand?’

  Erich had no doubt Schuller meant it. He nodded.

  The sound of engines made them both search the sky. A British Dakota, one of the workhorses that carried supplies and parachutists, began to climb into the darkness and disappeared into the low rain-heavy clouds. Schuller was still staring after it when large drops began to fall.

  ‘Something else in your letter, Erich,’ said Schuller, the first time he had used his Christian name. ‘See if they can get me an airdrop.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘What do you think? Weapons, man, weapons.’

  ‘How is that boy of yours, Donald?’ Claude Dansey forked another mouthful of the steak and kidney pudding into his mouth and reached for the claret. His old friend was treating the Colonel to lunch at Rules, which had managed to keep a respectable menu and cellar despite wartime restrictions.

  ‘Fine. Great help these days.’

  ‘Hear he got himself a friendly enemy alien on board. Very friendly,’ chortled Dansey. Uncle Claude, as everyone called him, was deputy head of MI6 by rank, but most people in the intelligence community knew that he was the real power at its Broadway Buildings HQ.

  The Colonel nodded. Lunch with his old employer was a rare occurrence these days. Normally they would just swop stories of rampaging through Europe in the days of the old Z Organisation. Today, however, Uncle Claude was more subdued.

  �
�What do you make of this escape attempt?’ he asked.

  Ross shrugged. Strictly speaking that was MI5’s business, not Uncle Claude’s. ‘At Devizes? A couple of chancers.’

  ‘Scotland is down there,’ said Dansey, mentioning one of PWIS’s other stalwarts, a man with a South African background like Ross’s. ‘He’s picking up some strange things. Both through interrogation and on the Ms.’ This was the code term for hidden microphones. ‘Very strange.’

  Colonel Ross knew it was no good asking why Dansey had information that should have reached him first. In intelligence, all roads led to Uncle Claude. ‘What are you getting at?’

  The older man put his knife and fork down and wiped his mouth with a napkin. Ross also stopped eating. They were out of hearing range of the other customers but, even so, Ross had to cock an ear to catch Dansey’s words. ‘This is in strictest confidence, Donald.’

  Ross only had to raise an eyebrow to remind him how far they went back and Dansey apologised. ‘We’ve had a report from the First Canadian Army. They captured signals sent out, by Hitler himself, appealing for volunteers from all arms of the army and the Waffen-SS.’

  He paused and took a sip of claret. ‘They must be physically A-plus, adept at special tasks, they must be able to speak English. But listen—those who can feign an American accent are particularly sought after. Furthermore, those familiar with silent killing techniques and hand-to-hand combat are also encouraged to apply. There were to be tests at Friedenthal the day before yesterday. Those not suitable will be returned to their unit.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Are to report to Unit Skorzeny.’

  Ross shook his head. He had not heard of it.

  Dansey looked surprised. ‘You remember, Donald. Skorzeny was the joker who rescued Mussolini by using gliders. He’s a specialist in airborne operations. Quite a character.’