The Red Eagles

by David Downing

  He had sent down to Selma for the police report, to Birmingham for the Locust Forks report, taken the hijack file out of its cabinet, and put them all together. It was all there, had been all the time. The car that had broken through the roadblock was the one stolen in Locust Forks; the prints found on the bars in the Locust Forks jail matched those found on the train.

  He had sent down to Selma for the bullets that had killed the two policemen. They’d been fired from the same gun that had killed the guard on the train. That had convinced even Sam Benton.

  But he’d still wanted something more. It was almost a year now, so there was no hurry. He took a long weekend and the train down to Birmingham, where he hired a car and drove south through the Talladega Forest to Selma. If they’d gone through the roadblock at around 7 p.m. they must have holed up someplace during the day, and this looked like an ideal spot. For one ridiculous moment he thought of stopping to look for clues.

  In Selma he got the names of the witnesses to the incident, and from one of them, a middle-aged woman with the sort of Southern accent you could spread on bread, he found what he wanted. Their car had been in the line, and behind them there’d been a camper. She remembered because she’d been struck by the face of the woman sitting in the passenger seat.

  Mitchell had showed her the photograph of Amy Brandon.

  “Yes, sir, that’s her.”

  That had been enough. He’d driven back to Birmingham and taken his train home, wondering what had happened to them, almost admiring them in spite of himself. What ruthlessness, to deliberately sacrifice one U-boat and leave the way clear for another. And it had worked.

  He’d written the report the moment he’d gotten back, but Benton had dissuaded him from turning it in for a week. “What’s the percentage?” his partner had asked, and sitting there in Hoover’s anteroom, he was beginning to wonder. But duty was duty, and he didn’t find that as old-fashioned as Benton did.

  He had only a few minutes more to wait. Director Hoover greeted him warmly and seated him in a plush armchair before taking one himself.

  “Mitchell,” he said, “I’ve got two things to say to you, and I wanted to say them both myself, man to man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One, you’ve done a very fine piece of detective work, and that will go on your file.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But the substance of it will not, because of the second thing I have to tell you. The case is closed, Mitchell. And I mean closed.”

  “Sir …”

  “Let me finish. Mitchell, I’m sure you can see that nothing can be gained from publicizing this matter. The war with Germany is over, and whether or not those commandos or agents or whatever they were got back to Germany with the stolen material … well, obviously nothing came of it.”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “What may not be so obvious to you is the danger any publicizing of this story might do to the United States of America.” Hoover stood up and walked to the window, his hands in his vest pockets. “Japan will be beaten before Christmas, and the soldiers will come home. But the FBI, Mitchell, fights an endless war. We are America’s first line of defense. The enemy changes but we do not, and the American people have the right, the right, to have a Bureau they can respect and trust.”

  “I understand, sir.” And he did. They’d made fools of the FBI, and no one was going to know.

  Hoover smiled for the first time, a baring of the teeth that had nothing to do with amusement. “I’m sure you do, Mitchell. Use your talents on today’s enemies, not yesterday’s.”

  New Zealand, 1947

  Paul loaded the last fertilizer sack onto the back of the pickup, fastened the tailgate, and whistled for his dog. She came tumbling out of the freight office and leaped up obediently onto the front seat. Paul raised a hand in farewell to the clerk and pulled the pickup out of the station yard. He was driving down the town’s main street when one of the two local policemen, the new one he hadn’t met, flagged him down.

  “Paul Brent, isn’t it?” the officer asked, leaning into the cab and fondling Rosie behind the ears.

  “That’s right. You’re Pete Ackerman, right?” He extended his hand.

  “Thought I’d tell you. Your brother-in-law has arrived from America – I just saw him over at the hotel asking for your address.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said automatically, gazing into space.

  “Sure.”

  Paul pulled out of his trance. “Thanks again,” he said, “I’ll be seeing you.”

  He parked the pickup outside the hotel, found Betty at the desk. He and Amy had stayed there while they were rebuilding the farmhouse; their daughter, Elisabeth, had been born there. Betty and her husband, Jim, had been the first real friends they’d made in New Zealand.

  “Hello, Paul—”

  “Is Amy’s brother here?”

  “No … what’s the matter?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He drove out to your place, about fifteen minutes ago—”

  He was gone, accelerating up the street, praying he wouldn’t be too late.

  Kuznetsky drove slowly up the valley, savoring the countryside. He liked New Zealand’s South Island, there was a touch of Siberia’s wild emptiness about it, a place for beginnings, not endings. And at this time of the day, as the falling sun lit the tops of the trees, the valleys seemed like darkened paths in a never-ending forest.

  He turned off onto a side road that wound upward alongside a narrow rushing stream. After half a mile the valley suddenly widened, and at its farthest end he could see the house, surrounded by tall trees and sheltered by a steep hillside. He’d told her the ends of the earth, and here they were.

  He stopped the car, lit a cigarette, and watched. The lights were on in the house, smoke curling from the chimney into the twilight sky. It was not the kind of house in which the landlord settles down. He felt pleased for them, absurdly pleased.

  He’d spent almost a year searching for Nadezhda, pestering every committee he could think of, cashing in every favor he’d ever earned. She’d vanished off the face of the earth. And then one day he’d been buying a ticket at Belorussia Station and recognized Yakovenko in a group of men drinking tea in the office next door. Yakovenko told him she had been killed, had been dead even before he left for America, cut down by a group of retreating Germans who’d blundered into their forest hideaway.

  The news had stunned him; he knew that now. The body still worked, even his knee after a fashion, the brain still worked, but everything else in him was dead. There was a generation of Nadezhdas, and for that he was grateful – his life had not been wasted. But they were not for him; the new world had a right to be free of the terror that had made it possible.

  He got out of the car, gun in hand, remembering the sad look on Sheslakov’s face at their last meeting. The old proverb – you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink – crossed his mind. He smiled grimly and began walking toward the house.

  * * *

  Amy saw the car pull up under the trees, the sudden spark as the driver lit a cigarette, and she knew who it was. She’d known he would come one day, known it in her bones.

  She took Elisabeth out of the cot, praying that she wouldn’t wake up, and carried her into their bedroom. “Ssssh,” she said to the sleeping baby, as her mother had said to her all those years before.

  Back in the front room, she turned off the lights and peered out through the crack between curtain and frame. He was walking, limping, up the dirt road toward the house. She sat back in the chair and waited, listening to his feet crossing the yard and climbing the steps up onto the porch. There he stopped, and in the silence she could hear Paul’s pickup hurtling up the valley.

  He heard it too. He knew she was behind the door in the corner – that’s where he would be. He smiled to himself and walked across the threshold, slowly, deliberately, his gun pointing down at the floor. He never saw Amy sitting in the s
hadows, or the shotgun that scattered his life away, only a flashing vision of a forest split by sunbeams rushing into night.

  Copyright

  First published in 2014

  by Old Street Publishing Ltd

  8 Hurlingham Business Park, Sulivan Road, London SW6 3DU

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © David Downing, 2014

  The right of David Downing to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

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