Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  I asked Arthur Webb where the report had come from as to the expected woman.

  He said, “Radley-Bewick.” Piers Radley-Bewick was our man in Moscow: the British public, and the Soviet authorities, knew him as a spy who’d fled to the East just before being arrested for ostensibly passing highly-classified material to the Russian Embassy, material to do with the British capacity to wage bacteriological warfare. Only a handful of people in Whitehall knew that the material was fairly useless but Radley-Bewick, a brave man and a patriot, was a valuable plant inside Russia once he had been allowed to make his getaway from Britain. One day, if he was lucky, he might be exchanged for a Russian held in this country. There was no guarantee that he would be lucky.

  I asked, “Didn’t he have anything else to offer? For instance, didn’t he know what this vital piece of information is?”

  “Apparently not. You know how it is, Commander. He may be trusted by the Russians, but he’s always at risk just the same.”

  “These Ladybirds wouldn’t chance it, in case he was ever pulled in by the KGB?”

  “That’s it,” Webb said. “Or anyway, that’s my assessment.”

  A reasonable one, I thought. No-one really trusts spies, not even the spy-masters. Such as Radley-Bewick live out their lives on a tight-rope. He had his ways of passing reports through to Focal House – not via the Embassy, who couldn’t afford to be involved in espionage, which was why he’d been given to us by Whitehall in the first place, but by other means. We have a system of messengers, collection agents, commuting by air between most parts of the world … Radley-Bewick would have used dead letter boxes and so on, casual bumpings in the street when a message could be passed, and never the same place or the same person twice. But I could understand that a dissident group inside Russia might prefer to keep their own counsel in certain circumstances.

  *

  After leaving Webb’s office I went back to the penthouse suite and bearded Max. I said I wanted Miss Mandrake with me: she had been due to share that postponed leave, so she wouldn’t have been re-allocated. Max didn’t argue; he knew that in fact Felicity and I worked well together and never mind the emotional angle. But he was ungracious about it as usual and I knew he was envious: Felicity was a very attractive girl and Max had always had an eye for her though conscience and duty, and his own position as God in 6D2 HQ Britain, had kept a rigid control. Like the captain of a liner, all could sin save he. When I left Focal House I rang Felicity.

  “Meet me at Martinez,” I said. “Soonest possible. An early lunch. Bring an overnight bag.” I rang off before the protests came: she would have understood that the leave was off. We’d been bound for the sunshine in Madeira …

  London was grey and depressing, cold and about to rain, heavy cloud lying overall. Martinez would remind us of recent sunnier skies in Andalusia. I took a taxi to Regent Street and walked through to Swallow Street, ordered a large Scotch in the tiled bar and waited for it to be brought by the Spanish waiter. I asked for the menu: Felicity liked paella, I went for riñones Jerezano even though the Jerezano might not mix with the Scotch. Felicity arrived looking ruffled and drank a La Ina; she didn’t say much, waited for me to tell her the score, which, in the bar, I didn’t. We went up to the restaurant; the head waiter knew me and led us to a table for two in a corner where we were nicely distant from the other customers. I ordered; when the waiter had gone Felicity asked what it was all about.

  I said, “For a start, my flat’s been done over.” I told her about that and she was concerned and upset: a lot of the decor and furnishings had been her ideas, especially the bedroom. I didn’t tell her much else, not there and then. “1355, Heathrow for Hanover,” I added. “And I’m sorry about Madeira. Don’t let it spoil your appetite, though. Good food costs money … “ I was still sore about that six thousand pounds, the potential payer of which I still hadn’t sorted out for dead certain. Felicity too had been rocked by that: there were all sorts of horrid implications. She had two small nephews who sometimes stayed with her. If ever they got to hear, they might see it as a hell of a joke to play on auntie. When we were in a taxi en route for Heathrow – I’d taken my grip to Focal House, not having intended camping out in my wrecked flat – I gave her such facts as I’d been told. My orders, I said, were to get to Braunlage and Hans Schulz, the 6D2 local agent who would give us all the assistance we needed. It was to his house that word would go, as soon as it reached Focal House, as to the time of the crossing from east to west. Once I’d contacted the woman, I was to extract the information from her and bring her to Focal House pronto.

  “A short enough assignment,” I said. Felicity gave a rather hollow laugh at that; I’d made similar remarks on earlier occasions. At Heathrow, we just about made it: Max himself had rung through and made it plain that we were to be given seats no matter who had to be bumped off to make room for us and if by any chance we were late the flight was to be held. We didn’t talk much on the way but enjoyed another meal and a couple of large Scotches and touched down at Hanover at 1615 local time. It was snowing when we got there; I left Felicity drinking coffee in a cafe near the British Airways desk while I coped with the formalities involved in taking over the self-drive hire car, a Volkswagen, that had been fixed for me from Focal House. As soon as I’d taken delivery we drove away from the airport, heading south for the Harz Mountains via Hildesheim and Salzgitter. By the time we reached Braunlage it was well past dark and the lights shining from the windows of the houses onto the lying snow – that and the pines rising up the sides of the massive Wurmberg above the small town – gave the place a fairyland look of Christmas and you half expected to meet a reindeer with sledge around the next corner. The feel of Christmas evaporated fast when I thought of the East German border not so far away.

  I had been given detailed directions by Arthur Webb and I found Hans Schulz’ house easily enough. Braunlage itself was built in a big clearing of the forest but the Schulz house was outside the town itself, closer to the mountains and the border, all by itself at the end of a rough track in another, smaller clearing beyond which close-set pines could be seen in my headlights as I approached. I had seen a bearded face peering from a lighted window as the Volkswagen crunched up the track and it was Schulz himself who opened the door even before I had tugged at the bell-pull.

  “Herr Schulz?” I asked.

  “Ja.”

  “From Max,” I said, and held out my 6D2 pass in the palm of my hand. Schulz nodded, stood aside, and told us to come in. His family was grouped around a blazing fire – the wife and two sons, whom he introduced. “They know my work,” he said in English. “They are to be trusted. You may speak freely.”

  “All right,” I said, though with inward misgivings: I’d been trained to a higher degree of security than this and talking to too many strangers can be a risk. However, this time I had to accept it; and it was a straightforward enough job, the taking over of a dissident when she arrived: the risks were all hers. I asked, “Have you any further information, Herr Schulz?”

  “No, none. Like you, I wait.”

  “Yes,” I said, and went on carefully, since I didn’t yet know precisely how far Schulz took his wife and sons into his work details, “In London, I was told there would be … help.”

  “The diversion, yes. That I shall see to, with my sons.”

  I asked, “How will you know when to divert?”

  Schulz smiled, and met his sons’ eyes. “There will be a message, Commander.”

  “May I know who from, and how?”

  “I think not. Not now. Later, yes.”

  I had to be content with that, but my mind roved over many possibilities and impossibilities. How on God’s earth did one get an immediate message across the East German border other than perhaps by some sort of short-range radio contact, one that would surely be picked up – though perhaps, with a lot of luck, not pinpointed? One short transmission: It was possible. But there were all kinds of risks and somehow I couldn’t s
ee the Ladybirds chancing any radio transmissions. Schulz seemed disinclined at first to talk any more shop and we chatted about the London scene; he knew London quite well, having worked for a wine company in the West End back in the ‘sixties, selling German wines. He was an unlikely-looking wine salesman; I would have put him down more as something like a forester or a game warden. Since those days he had paid only short visits and had found them depressing: London had changed. It was dirty, he said without apology, and there was no discipline anywhere, and the British roads were appalling. He didn’t mean the state of upkeep, he meant the standard of driving.

  “So dangerous,” he said. “So many fools, and there is the lack of driving discipline. Here in Germany, the driving laws are obeyed by all but the tourists.”

  “You’re a disciplined people,” I said. I thought about Hitler, and before him the Kaiser. The people had had hard lessons in discipline right enough. But I took his point, and I appreciated it too – we could do with something of his ideas in Britain. I’d noticed when I’d been in Germany before how clean and tidy all the small towns were and I’d been told that the law made householders keep their gardens in good order, for one thing; there was none of the scruffy dereliction so evident in any English town’s less fashionable quarter, the unkempt plots, the uncut grass, the bangers parked in the driveways of what had once been biggish houses now converted into flats. That, and the litter. I’d also seen how in Germany the pedestrians obeyed the little red and green men at the crossings even when there was no traffic in sight. While we talked, Schulz brought out the tankards and poured lager, which he called beer, and got back onto the subject of the Ladybirds, making the remark that they would kill whenever necessary. They sounded rather fearsome women. I didn’t say anything to Schulz about the greenfly or what had happened to my flat. I didn’t see that as his concern. Once he had assisted our female dissident across the border his part would have been played.

  I did a little more probing about the frontier: Schulz had drunk a fair amount of good strong beer and had relaxed a little more. He said the woman would have a very good chance, though sooner her than him. The Harz Mountains formed a tough area physically, geographically, which was one reason why it had been chosen apparently – since it was not a good crossing point, and in fact there had never, so Schulz said, been an escape attempt made in the vicinity, the watch tended to be rather more lax than elsewhere. Another reason for the choice was that some essential maintenance work was going on, and was suffering delays on account of the wintry weather – sections of the fences being replaced, the ground being dug up … it was even believed likely that the electrification would be found switched off though this couldn’t be entirely relied upon. What was certain, Schulz told me, was that there were no SM70s along the sector to be used; and the SM70, which scattered wicked little slivers of razor-sharp steel over a wide area, was regarded by escapers as the most terrible of all the border devices.

  “A good chance,” Schulz said again. But I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t deceiving himself.

  When the time came for bed, Schulz showed me to my room while Frau Schulz showed Felicity to another. No hanky-panky: we were obviously not husband and wife. German discipline held even in the bedroom. If, that night, I’d attempted any wandering and been caught, the wrath of all the Teutonic gods would have fallen on me …

  *

  I lay awake: it could have been frustration. But I don’t think it was. I believed something had woken me up, some small sound in the otherwise deadly silent night. Lying almost without breathing, and feeling an unusual prickle of apprehension running along my spine, I heard another sound, a creak of the stairs; then another. A shaft of moonlight showed behind the curtain over the window: the night had cleared, the snow-clouds gone. I saw in my imagination the tall trees, the thickness of the forest that covered the Harz Mountains, and I wondered what might have come through those trees to bring sounds to Schulz’ house. After the two stair-creaks there was another silence. It lasted perhaps three minutes and then there was a tap at my door, which opened to admit candlelight, and I almost fell out of bed, seeing ghosts and worse: it could have been Felicity, taking a big risk of being burned at the stake as a fallen woman.

  But it was Schulz, candle held high.

  “Commander, are you awake?”

  I said I was; I’d heard vague sounds, I said.

  “Then you will get up, please. The message has come.”

  “The woman?”

  “She will cross the frontier during the morning early, after the dawn patrol has withdrawn. I will guide you and then leave you.”

  To create his diversion, I supposed. I said, “Ready and willing, that’s me. Have you woken Miss Mandrake?”

  “It is not woman’s work tonight,” he answered, looking more than ever ogrish behind the candle’s yellow light. I didn’t argue; in fact I agreed with him, even though it was a woman that was coming over – I didn’t want to risk Felicity so close to the border as I was going to be before long and I’d brought her for other reasons: she could be a help with the female dissident once I got her here to Schulz’ house. The Ladybird might be more willing to talk to another woman than to me, and Arthur Webb had been specific that she was to be persuaded to talk, presumably just in case she was got at before she reached London. It was certain that once the East Germans or their Russian bosses knew that the border had been breached they might put two and two together and suspect a Ladybird and all their undercover operatives around the Harz and all the way to London would be alerted to go in for the elimination.

  I got dressed: Schulz was already in his cold-weather rig, heavy boots, roll-top pullover, thick quilted anorak with hood, and over his arm he had similar gear for me. Also he had two torches, powerful ones, big jobs like those used aboard oil-tankers to look down the cargo tanks, and two pairs of binoculars. On the way out he collected a dismantled and cased sub-machine gun; the two sons brought similar weapons plus a sack that they told me contained grenades. As for me, I had my Colt Detective Special, a heavy job – 21 ounces, 63A inches, .38 calibre. Thus equipped, we left stealthily, like burglars, crunching through the snow and heading into the trees behind Hans Schulz who moved very purposefully, knowing his terrain, probably, like the back of his hand. I went behind him, with the sons in rear, like warders. We were soon climbing, shallow at first but growing steeper, and from time to time, in the moonlight, I could see Braunlage getting smaller below me. There were few lights showing that I could see; the little town slept the winter night away. I wondered they could sleep so easily, so close to the Iron Curtain’s fringe. No doubt they’d grown used to it over the last forty-odd years, but they must have known that if ever the Russian armour rolled again, their little town would be among the first to be over-run.

  Hans Schulz and the two sons moved with very little sound: they were well used to the forest. I was rather more clumsy and found it hard not to swear aloud when branches whipped across my face or the undergrowth caught my feet and tripped me. I fell once or twice, but each time the leading son took me from behind before I hit the ground. Moving on, climbing, beginning to feel warmer with the physical effort, I thought about Felicity alone in the Braunlage house with Schulz’ wife. Frau Schulz had struck me as tough, a real German hausfrau with a granite jaw. She would be a good watchdog in Schulz’ absence should any elements from the other side, men would could have come to know Schulz’ associations, try anything nasty. As for my Miss Mandrake, she had steel in her as well. But worry still nagged. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.

  *

  The dawn came up and dim light filtered down through the tall pines. The Schulzes had left me an hour previously. I had asked about the diversion. Hans Schulz said, “You will hear. When you hear – ”

  “What will I hear? Firing, or the grenades?”

  “Firing first. That will be the signal that the crossing is about to be made. You will descend as fast as you can to the east, towards the border wir
e.” In fact we had been coming down for the last half-hour and Schulz had said that the dawn would show me that I was not far from the wire, a matter of a thousand yards or so, where it ran through the forest. I’d asked him earlier, in his house, how the crossing would be made and he said he hadn’t been told – it was always, he rightly said, a case of the right hand being better off in ignorance of what the left hand was doing. Such was virtually the theme song of my own life as an agent of 6D2. As I waited interminably, as that dawn came and proved Schulz right in that I could see the border ahead of me and a little below, and seeming in some disarray on account of the repair work, I thought about the various ways that had been tried, the different attempts, some successful, others not, to cross from the East into freedom. Many of them had been in the area of the Berlin Wall: straight and foolish attempts to run like a rabbit from the guns only to be colandered and left to twitch to death; suicidal dashes in heavy vehicles; persons concealed in car boots at the Corridor check-points, or in crates aboard lorries; tunnelling, helicopters, grappling irons and ropes. Crop-spraying aircraft had been used with success, a mass escape years ago had been made aboard a train that had crashed through the barriers; a fire-engine had achieved a similar success. It still remained – I would have thought – virtually impossible to get through the electrified fences, through the minefields, past the watch-towers, one of which I could see now, over the trip-wires and away from the shrapnel-firing booby traps. But it had been done. That was hard fact, no argument. The mind and body of your oppressed seeker of freedom can achieve miracles.