by Nick Cook
It was warmer inside, but only just. Bowman led the way down the central corridor and into the office at the far end. The walls were still covered with the regalia of the previous occupants. A recognition chart with the silhouettes of a dozen British and American planes was pinned to one wall and a Luftwaffe squadron photograph tilted at a crazy angle on another. Someone had pushed pieces of newspaper into several bullet-holes that dotted the large iron-framed window, but the draught still forced its way into the room, rustling the papers on Bowman’s desk. Fleming hung his coat up on the back of the door while his companion poured two cups of coffee from the pot which had been gently simmering on the coal-fired stove.
“I’m sorry the weather couldn’t have been a little nicer for you, sir, but then Kettenfeld’s a bloody awful place, I’m afraid. I can’t say I blame Jerry for leaving here in a hurry.”
Fleming put the mug to his lips and sipped the dark, bitter liquid. The coffee burnt his stomach. He hadn’t eaten since the previous evening.
“Would the Germans’ hasty departure explain what looked like some Ju 88s out there?” Fleming gestured with his thumb out the window.
Bowman nodded as he gulped down a mouthful of coffee.
“We found six of them, all pretty much intact. One of them has even got the latest variant of their Lichtenstein radar on board. We’ve been wanting to get our hands on one for months to see how they’ve improved the system.”
“It seems odd the Luftwaffe didn’t destroy them before they left.”
Bowman shrugged.
“I seem to spend the entire bloody time briefing ruddy Army officers about the value of German equipment. The trouble is, their men just look on it as target practice, or a piece of junk that they can vandalize. The EAEU doesn’t mean a thing to them. And as for Montgomery, all he wants to do is get to Berlin as quickly as possible and if that means destroying anything that gets in the way, it’s too bad.”
Bowman was bitter. It was the Russians who had captured all the really good stuff so far. Rocket scientists, aircraft designers, electronics specialists; the Soviets had them all. The British and the Americans had little to show for their efforts. Apart from anything else, it distressed Bowman that few people outside the EAEU appreciated Germany’s military technology, the role it could play in a post-war world. The Russians knew all right.
“In this instance, we were lucky,” Bowman continued. “The Canadians who overran Kettenfeld advanced so quickly that it was all the Germans could do to get their personnel off the base. We found the Ju 88s with their tanks almost dry, so there was no possibility of flying them out and there couldn’t have been time to place demolition charges on them. London radioed this morning to say that a team from Farnborough is on its way over here to fly them back to England. Best of luck to them in these conditions.”
Fleming put his coffee down and pulled out his briefing notes.
“I think,” Fleming said quietly, “that we’re going to have a bit more cooperation from the army over the next few days.”
Bowman looked puzzled.
“Don’t ask me how he did it, but Staverton has somehow managed to convince the top brass that we need to get our hands on the 163C, if that’s what that thing is sitting on the tarmac in your photographs.”
“So it really is the 163C, eh,” Bowman said. “They finally got that beast into production. We’ve been hearing rumours out here, but no one actually believed the Germans could do it.”
“Maybe that’s moving a little fast,” Fleming interjected. “We’re not really sure, but Staverton’s told me to find out.”
Fleming tapped the papers as he placed them on the desk. “These are Staverton’s instructions in the event there is a rocket fighter at Rostock. We haven’t got much time, so let’s have those photographs from the recce Mosquito.”
Bowman produced a cardboard folder from a drawer and handed it and a set of stereoscopic glasses to Fleming who had settled into the chair at the desk. Before he pulled out the photographs, Fleming stared out over the cold German airfield.
“If this is a 163C, two hundred and fifty glider troops will take off at dawn tomorrow for Rostock. Their objective is to capture the airfield and hold it until I can get the rocket fighter out of there.”
* * * * *
HQ came back to Malenkoy with the reaction that he had been dreading. It was his maskirovka and if the security of that exercise was in jeopardy, it was his responsibility to find the insurgents.
It had not taken long for the garrison commander at Chrudim to muster three hundred Siberians from the 3rd Guards Army and send them down the Branodz road to the point where he had been ambushed by the SS terrorist. And if there was one, there had to be others.
It was over two hours after the attack took place that the convoy of trucks rounded the bend in the track and Malenkoy saw the smouldering tree that had taken the full force of the panzerfaust’s detonation.
Two hours! What was wrong with the Red Army these days?
The marauding German aircraft was undoubtedly on a reconnaissance mission and if the crew had seen his dummy tanks it did not matter, even if he had not quite put the finishing touches to them. After all, that was what the maskirovka was all about. But a Waffen-SS unit seeing it from the ground would not be so easily fooled.
The Germans had to believe that the Red Army, supported by hundreds of tanks, was massing to intercept the main Prague-Berlin highway. Hitler would divert his straggling troops from the defence of Berlin to meet the threat, but when they reached Chrudim, they would find nothing - save his cardboard army.
To their immediate north, the First Belorussian front under Zhukov would exploit Berlin’s new weakness and penetrate the capital’s eastern defences, cutting off any thrust towards Chrudim at the same time.
Meanwhile, Konev’s massive flanking movement which would be launched from Branodz against the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre would hit the Germans to the south of Berlin and then swing north, reaching the capital within a week if fortune chose to stay with them.
Malenkoy, in the truck at the head of the convoy, told the driver to halt. He jumped down from the cabin and walked alone along the last fifty yards of the track to the place of the ambush. The panic that he had felt only hours before welled up in him once more. He flashed a glance to the place where the madman had stood in the middle of the road, firing at will, while his driver struggled to heave the jeep round in a two-point turn. He now saw his attacker with a clarity that had been missing in the mind-numbing moments of the ambush. He was tall, huge in fact. He had a rifle held firmly into his shoulder and he had fired single rounds at them. Single rounds, while he cowered on the rear seat! Even when he had come up from the back of the GAZ and scattered half his pistol clip at the man, he had not moved. Malenkoy’s hand moved instinctively to his holster. The cold metal of the Tokarev jolted his senses back to reality and the spell was broken.
He stepped over the boundary line that separated the road from the forest. Even though he was now only ten metres into the wood, its size and darkness chilled him. Two fucking hours! If there was a rogue SS unit at large it could be anywhere by now.
He ran back to the rear of the lead truck and spoke to a lieutenant. The young officer in turn briefed his troops in the local Irkutsk dialect that was their first language. Not all of them could speak High Russian. It was all lost on Malenkoy, who could not understand a word of Siberian.
All the platoon commanders were given a similar message. Fan the troops out and try to find tracks. Anyone who picked up the scent was to radio through to Malenkoy immediately so the search could be concentrated. As long as they found the trail before sunset, Malenkoy was confident that they would have the SS by the following afternoon at the latest.
It was now four o’clock. That gave them two hours to find out the direction in which the SS were heading.
* * * * * * * *
It took little more than a minute for Fleming to identify the blurred object in
the middle of the photograph as the C Model 163.
The differences between the C and its predecessor, the fully operational 163B, were subtle, but the evidence was clear after Fleming had scrutinized the recce photograph under the stereoscopic glasses.
No wonder Bowman had been unable to establish a positive identification. The photograph was grainy and the actual image of the aircraft was smaller than his little fingernail, so you had to know exactly what to look for to differentiate between the two types.
But there it was. The streamlined fuselage between the two stubby wings set against the mottled surface of the airfield made the rocket fighter look like a hawkmoth clinging to the bark of a tree. The 163G did not have quite the same bulbous body as the standard 163B, but to the untrained eye, referring to grainy photos of minute scale, the aircraft would have appeared identical.
Fleming had one last look through the glass, before he was satisfied. One Me 163C at Rostock. It seemed a tiny thing for which to launch such a massive military operation.
Later, when he asked himself why he had not noticed it straight away, he put it down to fatigue. He knew, as he tilted his chair back and examined the pitted ceiling of the old Luftwaffe ops room, that the 163C was hiding something from him. There had been an unnatural kink in the leading edge. A dark shape, a shadow, somehow familiar, but unexpected on an aircraft of this capability.
His pulse quickened.
Fleming put his face back over the framework of the stereoscopic pairs and slipped a higher power lens into the base of the device. His fingertip, looking blimp-like under the magnification of the lenses, traced its way clumsily across the airfield until it hovered by the rocket-fighter.
Not a change in the shape of the wing profile, but something beneath the wing. He could see its shadow on the concrete. Its tip was just visible; not part of the leading edge, as he had first presumed, or a trick of the light.
A fucking bomb.
A fighter-bomber for the defence of the Alpine Redoubt, one that could hit back from the sanctuary of the mountains.
He reached for the phone on Bowman’s desk, but thought better of it.
“What is it?” Bowman asked.
Fleming looked into the face of the other man, aware that Bowman would know of his reputation and had seen his excitement.
“Take another look at the aircraft. Notice anything strange under the wing?”
Bowman peered into the optical device for a long time. Fleming knew he was desperate to find something. Eventually, Bowman sat up, his face devoid of expression.
“I can’t make anything of it. The leading edge has got a funny line to it, that’s all. Could be a smudge on the negative.”
Fleming bent over the glasses again. Could it be that the enemy was developing a dual-role rocket fighter, one that could hit the Fortresses at twenty-five thousand feet, then swoop down over Allied lines and deliver ordnance at phenomenal speeds against tanks, command bunkers and bridges? Silently, without warning . . .
If he were an EAEU field officer like Bowman, perhaps he would have put it down to an abnormality on the print. But after several months of analysing reconnaissance shots in the Bunker, he’d learnt fast. He was sure it was a bomb, but that wasn’t enough.
He breathed in slowly and tried to think it through.
Staverton’s briefing notes had been specific. Immediately upon identification, Fleming was to send the coded message. The Old Man did not want any half-hearted crap. He had tagged the aircraft as the latest Messerschmitt rocket fighter, that would do for now. If it was a fighter-bomber, he would find out when he arrived at Rostock.
The mission left no room for uncertainty. Rostock was caught between the advancing Canadian First and British Second Armies and the Soviets’ Second Belorussian front, pressing westwards at an incredible pace. It was touch and go who would get to Rostock first. Current estimates put the Western Allies two days’ march away from the German test establishment. The Russians were probably three to four days, but they had been known to storm through fifty kilometres of enemy territory in twelve hours under Marshal Rokossovsky’s leadership.
If the Russians discovered that British paratroops had leapfrogged beyond their frontline troops to take Rostock, there would be one almighty diplomatic row. Churchill promised Staverton that he would try and hold off Stalin, but he could only stall for so long. It would therefore be up to Colonel Jewell’s paratroops to take Rostock, hold it for long enough to airlift the 163 out, and then retire with the help of the Royal Navy from Rostock’s Baltic shore.
Once the airfield was secured, Fleming’s hand-picked unit was to fly in, supervise the dismantling of the 163 and fly it out.
Fleming had the solution as he lifted his face off the stereoscopic pairs.
Bowman had been standing in the corner of the room watching intently for his reaction.
“I want this message sent to London straight away,” Fleming said, scribbling on a pad. “Transmit it in morse, twice. No encryption. That’ll tell Staverton we’re in business.”
Bowman hesitated. “You all right?”
Fleming did not answer at once. He hardly heard the question. He just wanted to sleep.
“Yes,” he replied at length. “Listen up, Bowman. I think that your ‘smudge’ is a bomb strapped to the wing of that thing. If I’m right, Staverton should know about it as soon as I’ve made a positive identification at Rostock. If the 163C does turn out to be dual-capable, I’ll see to it that you get word from the airfield. Then I want you to put a call through to the Bunker and tell Staverton. It’s important that you do it straight away.”
Bowman took the scrap of paper and ran through the rain to the communications hut, some fifty yards away.
“The star shines in the East.” The message was quite innocent, but there was one man in an office deep below the streets of Whitehall for whom it would have a special significance.
* * * * * * * *
Long after the message had been sent to the Bunker, Fleming lay back in the deep armchair in Bowman’s office and tried to snatch some sleep. Everything was in place, but it was hard not to think about the things that could go wrong.
Staverton’s signal had come from London, acknowledging his identification, confirming that the mission was to go ahead. A second reconnaissance Mosquito had flown over Rostock an hour previously and checked that the 163 was still there. It had not moved from its position on the tarmac, although Fleming was quite ready for the Germans to wheel it into one of the hangars, out of the bitter temperatures that still hit the Baltic coastline in early spring.
Bowman had been busy during the past hour getting together a small team of engineers who could accompany Fleming to Rostock. Outside, Fleming could hear work continuing on the Halifax tugs and gliders, and the constant drone of engines as aircraft taxied to their dispersal points in readiness for the off signal that would be given in just over eight hours’ time. But it was not the sound which kept Fleming awake.
He was afraid of death, not because of the pain and suffering - he had already beaten those two enemies on the hospital bed - or through fear of what lay beyond. He did not want to die because he did not want to leave Penny behind with only a couple of lines on a letter to tell her that perhaps they did have a life together after all.
And all he could see was her running away from him, into the night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Siberians had been searching the forest floor for a clue for the past two hours, but had turned up nothing which could point them in the direction of the Waffen-SS terrorists.
Malenkoy had been sitting in the back of one of the trucks at the spot where he had been ambushed earlier that day waiting for news of progress over the radio. The last bulletin had been made by a young officer who sounded clearly jumpy at having to scour the dark wet forest for a tiny group of bandits who could be anywhere by now.
Malenkoy pulled back the canvas flap at the rear of the lorry and peered at the darkening sky. Nor
mally they would have had a little more light at the end of the day, but the ever gathering rain clouds had precipitated the onset of dusk and he knew he had no choice but to summon back the Siberians and resume the search the next day. If the Germans decided to press on during the night the chances of picking them up tomorrow were even more remote, but what could he do? His men marching through the pitch-black wood with torches to light their path would present easy targets if the SS decided to turn and fight. They would have to be recalled. He only hoped that the Siberians weren’t baying for blood, for rumour had it that they could turn on their own officers when they were pulled off the scent.
Malenkoy flicked the power switch and gave the call sign which signalled a general return to base.
* * * * * * * *
It was raining heavily, but the rivulets that ran down the officer’s neck, soaking his coarse grey shirt, did not bother him. The attention of SS-Obersturmführer Christian Herries of the Britische Freikorps was seized by the two maps spread out on the ground in front of him, but he couldn’t work out what the hell they meant.
Both charts showed the same topography to identical scales. Chrudim, in the south-east of the map, stood out as being the largest town, although it was closely followed by Branodz, some forty kilometres away to the west. The rest of the two and a half thousand kilometre area was covered by a forest which clung to the slopes of the broad range of hills that separated the two towns. Herries could see that they would reach their own lines quicker if they followed the network of valleys that criss-crossed the area, but he also knew that the valleys would contain the largest troop concentrations and thus they had to be avoided where possible. Their only real chance lay in sticking to the hills and moving under cover of the trees. It would be an unpopular route with his severely weakened men, but it would make them hard to find for Ivan.
