by Nick Cook
Fleming looked up from his work on the aircraft’s wing root as the colonel came towards him, a motley selection of individuals in tow. Several paratroopers walked behind holding guns to their backs, but the prisoners did not look like soldiers to Fleming. There were five altogether. Two of them were no more than twenty-five years old, while two more were in middle age, the last in his late sixties. They looked confused and frightened.
“They’re scientists,” Jewell said to Fleming. “My men caught them skulking in one of the outbuildings behind the hangar.”
Fleming wiped some hydraulic fluid off his hands onto his trousers. The Komet was a mechanical nightmare. The fuselage was made of metal, the wings of wood. Without carefully removing the skin covering the aerofoil sections first of all, it was impossible to find the main pins that held the wings in place onto the fuselage. And tearing the wing panels off too suddenly could ^cause untold damage. It was slow, backbreaking work.
“They’re the engineers and scientists who were working on the Komet when we landed here this morning. I thought you might need a little advice on how this thing should be taken apart.”
Fleming laughed.
“Colonel, what makes you think these men are going to assist us in taking away their latest secret weapon? Just how politely do we have to ask them?”
“We don’t have to ask them anything. They’ll do it. They know that the Russians are about five kilometres from here and I gave them a choice. Either they help us dismantle this thing so that we can all get away before Joe shows up, or we leave on our own and tie them up for the Russians to find. I think you’ll find they’re actually quite eager to help.” A thin smile spread under Jewell’s well clipped, greying moustache.
The eldest scientist stepped forward from the rest of the group, casting an anxious glance back at the corporal in charge of the prisoner detail who was still training his Sten on them. The other four Germans seemed to be willing him forward, urging him to act as their spokesman. His English was halting, more through nervousness, Fleming thought, than because his grasp of the language was poor.
“We will work for you, but only because we do not want to go with the Russians. If we take apart the Komet, you must promise to take us with you. We know what the Russians will do with us.”
Fleming looked at Jewell and nodded. The corporal, seeing the sign, pre-empted his colonel’s command and ushered the Germans over to the rocket fighter and watched, eyes darting from one to the other. Unlike Fleming, the corporal did not appreciate the threat of Soviet techniques in persuasion.
With the assistance of the technicians, it took just under half an hour to remove the Komet’s wings. Fleming was pleased with their progress.
“What next, Doctor Hausser?” He turned to a frail but dignified man, the most senior of the scientists.
“We need to get the Komet off the ground . . . on jacks.” The old man stammered as he searched for the right words. “The skid must be raised into the belly and the wheels removed if the Komet’s fuselage is to fit in the transport aircraft, I think.”
“Where are the jacks?”
“Under those sheets, there.” Hausser gestured towards a jumble of machinery half-hidden by a tarpaulin over by the hangar wall.
“Get them,” Fleming said.
Minutes later, the Komet was raised, its wheels a few inches off the ground. Another German scientist, a young, nervous-looking man, worked with a spanner to free the jettisonable undercarriage dolly from the skid.
Hausser clipped a catch and pushed the canopy hood open. Fleming turned to find the old man trying to pull himself up on to the wing, the only stepping stone to the cockpit in the absence of a ladder.
Hausser winced. “I must now raise the landing gear,” he said.
“I can do that,” Fleming said. “Just show me what to do.”
He sprang up on to the wing and was settled in the pilot’s seat a moment later. Hausser, on tiptoes, leant over the cockpit wall and nodded to a lever by Fleming’s right hand.
“Push it hard forward and the skid will come up.”
Fleming reached out, gripped the lever and pushed. He felt the heavy clunk as the skid retracted.
Then he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see the scientist with the spanner running for the door.
“Oh God,” Fleming heard himself say, “it’s booby-trapped.”
His hand went down again to the lever, found the thin strand and traced its way along the length of the wire to the underneath of the seat. He felt the grenade, grabbed it by its wooden stock and heard the rasp as the tape ripped away from the metal pan.
He threw it with all his might at the large windows half way up the hangar wall, then ducked back into the cockpit. There was a crash of glass, followed by a deafening explosion.
The Komet rocked on its jacks, then steadied.
Fleming came up to see half the assembled company lying prostrate on the floor. He tried to stand, but his legs gave and he fell back, drained, into the seat.
There was a scuffle away to his left. The man with the spanner had been knocked to the floor by a paratrooper standing guard by the door.
Jewell sprinted over to the Komet.
“What the bloody hell happened?”
“Our friends decided to make things a little more difficult for us,” Fleming replied, trying to force a smile. “A grenade was rigged to explode as soon as the skid was retracted.”
“The little shits!” Jewell barked. “We’d better round them all up.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Fleming said. Slowly his breath was coming back. “If Hausser had known it was booby-trapped, he wouldn’t have been talking to me from the edge of the cockpit.”
“Then what do I do with him?” Jewell jabbed his finger at the scientist by the door, who was struggling against the paratrooper’s headlock.
“Ask him if he’s got any other surprises. Then tie him up and dump him. The Russians can have him.”
“Done!” Jewell said.
“I hope one of your men wasn’t having a quiet smoke outside when the grenade went off, Colonel.”
Jewell smiled. “More likely to be one of yours, Fleming. The paras haven’t got time to stand around, unlike the RAF.” He clapped Fleming on the shoulder. “You’re a cool customer, Fleming. We’ll make a paratrooper of you yet.” Then he was gone.
Hausser, his face a death mask, pulled himself off the floor and looked into the cockpit.
“I never realized,” he whispered.
Fleming touched him gently on the arm. “I know,” he said. “But from now on, we take no chances. Have the rest of your men search the Komet for any more of those things. Then get the fuselage apart. We’ve got to be out of here in twenty minutes.”
Jewell watched, trying hard to be patient, as the twin Walter rocket engines were detached. The front and rear halves of the fuselage easily fitted into the two Yorks, once the cargo doors had been removed. The pilot set about getting the major components arranged around the aircraft’s centre of gravity so that the extra weight exerted as little effect as possible on flight characteristics during the return leg.
Colonel Jewell’s calm finally evaporated.
“Look, man, if you don’t get these two aircraft out of here now, you’re not going to have to worry about any fucking return journey, because the only trip that you’ll be making is to Moscow.”
Fleming made sure their prize was secure then told the two pilots it was time to move. Paratroopers swung the two aircraft around to face the hangar’s great sliding doors. The magnetos whined as the propellers started to turn, then the motors caught. Fleming waited an eternity for the engines to stabilize. Jewell was already on the radio preparing to stage his tactical withdrawal to the beach where his men would be picked up by boats from the Royal Naval destroyer.
The York led its stablemate out of the hangar. Fleming, sitting by the open cargo door, saw the first of Jewell’s troops making their
way towards the beach. Many were being supported by comrades, others limped or bore field dressings. Staverton would tell him it had been worth it, whatever the cost to the paratroops, but right now Fleming wondered how many of them would not be leaving that remote and desolate Baltic shore.
The engines roared to the response of opened throttles, taking Fleming by surprise. The pilot must have decided to take off on the shorter secondary runway, without bothering to line up into wind. It was risky, but the alternative was overflying the German positions at the far end of the airfield.
The crates holding the 163 shifted with each bump under the York’s wheels until the ropes went taut with the strain. Fleming tried not to look at his own men or the two German scientists under their charge, for the fear on their faces did nothing to soothe his own tattered nerves. At last the York clawed its way into the air and Fleming stared at the ground below, agonized at the slowness with which it receded. Away to the left he could see a procession of olive-green tanks rolling down one of the slip roads that led to the airfield. The red flashes on their turrets were barely discernible, but they were obvious enough to tell him that the Soviets were only minutes away from catching Jewell’s men in the act of highway robbery.
He undid his safety harness and squeezed past the crates until he was at the flight-deck. He grabbed the spare headset and microphone and tried to raise Jewell on the radio. No reply. He gave up after two further attempts. The colonel was cutting it fine if he wanted to rendezvous with the navy.
CHAPTER TEN
“So there’s one Nazi on the loose in our sector. So what?” Nerchenko had not even bothered to address Malenkoy to his face. He carried on writing his report, the thick gold embroidery on his cuff scratching the paper noisily as his hand moved across the page. “You think one SS insurgent is going to cause a problem? A platoon, that’s a problem, but one man ... go back to building your dummy tanks, Malenkoy.”
Malenkoy shifted nervously.
“There may be others, Comrade General, we just cannot be sure. Their camp was close to the maskirovka at Chrudim, too. Shouldn’t we at least try and find this man and make sure?”
Malenkoy braced himself for the explosion, but it never came. Instead, the General put down his pen, wearily removed his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes. He continued to talk while he kneaded his eyeballs.
“I thought that the whole point of assembling armoured divisions out of wood was that the enemy would notice them and believe that we were mounting a massive attack in that sector. Or maybe I’m wrong. You’re the camouflage and deception expert, Comrade Malenkoy, you tell me.”
Malenkoy decided to back down. He had seen the General in this mood before. Anyway, his superior was right. What was the point in making a fuss? Nerchenko had used his own argument about the consequences of this renegade Nazi spotting the maskirovka and seemed quite relaxed about the whole affair. It was time to get back to Chrudim and put the finishing touches to the dummy tanks. He had had quite enough of chasing fascists around the dense forests of Czechoslovakia. If he could finish the job by tomorrow he would get back into Nerchenko’s favour again.
“Oh, we did solve one mystery, Comrade General.”
He had almost forgotten about it, but the thought of currying favour had jogged his memory about Yuri Petrovich. He reached into his pocket, pulled out Paliev’s battered ID papers and placed them onto the General’s makeshift desk.
Nerchenko stopped massaging his eyes and studied the bloodied document. The room was as silent as a mausoleum, disturbed only by a row of Nerchenko’s medals, two Orders of Lenin and three of the Red Banner, which sounded like distant bells as they danced on his chest. Malenkoy noticed his general’s complexion turn a shade of greyish white.
Malenkoy was surprised to see that the General had a heart after all. Paliev had been his trusted aide for almost two years, that was true, but he never would have guessed that Nerchenko had been this attached to him.
Malenkoy waited several seconds for Nerchenko to regain his usual ice-cold composure, but instead he appeared to be sickening.
“I’m sorry, Comrade General, that it had to be me who broke the news. Yuri Petrovich was a good man. We were friends, you know.”
“Where did you find these?” The voice was low and almost quavering.
“We didn’t find these on him, Comrade General, they were in the pockets of one of the SS. He must have kept it to show to their intelligence people. Well, he won’t be showing it to anyone now.”
“Did you find anything else of his? Papers, plans, I mean. Things that the enemy could use.” Malenkoy could hardly hear the General now. His voice was little more than a whisper.
“No, Comrade General. The SS terrorists were clean. They did not even carry ID papers of their own. It is possible that the survivor tried to destroy all evidence of their identity before he left the camp. Perhaps he overlooked Paliev’s papers.”
Nerchenko’s hands shook as he tried to light a cigarette. He was clearly too upset to speak any more, so Malenkoy dismissed himself, leaving him alone and deep in thought.
* * * * * * * *
It was a measure of Nerchenko’s desperation, Krilov thought, that he had sent two coded messages about Archangel to Moscow in one week.
Archangel had been given a reprieve as soon as the news came in that Paliev’s charred body had eventually been found by his burnt out jeep, the victim of a random partisan attack; or so they had thought. The plans, it seemed, had gone up in smoke with him.
The Marshal listened carefully, his chin resting on his clasped hands, while Krilov read out the decoded transcript of Nerchenko’s latest bulletin. When he finished, Krilov held the paper over his lighter and dropped it, burning, into the wastepaper bin beside his master’s desk.
“It sounds as if Comrade General Nerchenko is upset by this latest development,” Shaposhnikov said calmly, watching the smoke rise from the bin. Krilov had never seen his mentor quite so resplendent as he was today, in his bright green uniform, with its red piping and heavy gold embroidery.
“And not without some justification this time,” Krilov added.
“Let us go over what we know, and I stress ‘know’ Kolya, before we do anything rash. We know that Paliev took the plans from Nerchenko’s safe and we know that he was prevented from carrying out his treachery by, of all things, an SS unit operating behind our lines.” Shaposhnikov smiled, perhaps in the knowledge of what the SS did to their Russian prisoners, Krilov thought. “Now we also know,” the Marshal continued, “that Paliev’s identification papers were found on the body of one of the Germans who foiled our traitor’s plans, which were probably to inform Stalin exactly what is happening on the First Ukrainian Front. However, that is where the firm evidence ends.”
“What about the report by the major who found the SS commandos’ bodies that there may be survivors from the unit still at large?”
“This is only the belief of a major of tanks, Kolya, it is not backed by proof. But let us suppose that it is true and, worse still, that this survivor, or these survivors, have the plans to Archangel. What can they do? They are some fifty kilometres behind our lines and even if they do make it back to their own troops, which I very much doubt as the sector is crawling with our own men, they will be powerless to stop the plan going ahead.”
“Not entirely, Comrade Marshal. If the Archangel document does end up in Berlin it would be simple for the Nazis to deliver this plan to Stalin, perhaps in return for some sort of ceasefire. They still have agents who are active in Moscow, according to the NKVD.”
“Kolya, you helped me to prepare the plans for our generals in the field and you know that to an outsider Archangel would appear to have the full backing of the Chiefs of Staff and Stalin himself. You forget that it is only we and a handful of loyalists at the front who know that Stalin does not have an inkling about Archangel. No, it will go ahead, but the plan will have one significant change.” Shaposhnikov moved over to the window and pa
used to watch the first shift of a working party arrive by lorry at the construction site on the other side of the square.
“Change, Comrade Marshal?”
“Yes, Kolya.” Shaposhnikov turned to face his subordinate. “I agree that there is some risk to Archangel between now and the great day. But there is a simple remedy. We will bring the attack forward. That will be our insurance in case these insurgents do make it back to their lines and drop Archangel into the lap of the German High Command, or what’s left of it.”
* * * * * * * *
Krilov was impressed. Once more he had come to Shaposhnikov, urging him to exercise caution in the face of another setback to their plans. Yet the Marshal had brushed off his concern as he would a piece of fluff from his uniform. Instead of playing safe he had gone on the attack.
“There is, of course, an alternative,” Krilov said. “If Archangel is compromised, then we could always play our ace right at the start. If the enemy is mobilizing to meet us, then we hit them on day one with the special. . . means at our disposal. Even as I speak, the Berezniki consignment is approaching Ostrava.”
The Marshal smiled, his lips thinning out until, to Krilov, they seemed almost opaque.
“It should never need come to that, Kolya. The Berezniki consignment is a failsafe, a weapon of last resort. That should be enough.”
“Indeed, Comrade Marshal.”
The older man clapped Krilov on the shoulder.
“Go, Kolya. Get word to our men on all three fronts. Archangel has been brought forward by a week to the 17th. The tanks roll in five days’ time. That and the Berezniki consignment should be all the insurance we need.”
* * * * * * * *
As soon as he entered his village he knew that evil lay in wait for him. The horse sensed it too, at first shaking its head violently from side to side, then rearing up on its hind legs, uttering a cry that sounded more human than animal. He looked round for the rest of his Cossacks, but they were not there. He tried to turn back, but the horse broke into a gallop and carried him down the path he had known so well since the early days of his childhood.
