The Spandau Phoenix wwi-2

by Greg Iles

  had finally got the hang of the Vulcan. The fiery stream of slugs

  intersected the JetRanger amidships and nearly cut it in two before the

  fuel tank_ blew. The chopper fireballed like its sister ship, blasting

  wreckage all over the runway.

  Burton threw himself over Diaz as the shrapnel tore the asphalt all

  around them. Without waiting for any further fire from the Vulcan, he

  took hold of the Cuban, heaved him over his shoulder like a sack and

  started slogging toward the Wash. If that gunner's still watching the

  fireball, he thought, we might just make it. But if he saw me jump,

  he's sighting -in on us right now. Ten meters to the edge ... seven ...

  ton sped up, leaned forward ...

  He leaped.

  The two men tumbled head over heels down the steep slope and skidded to

  a stop at the edge of a raging flood.

  Burton made sure Diaz wasn't about to be swept into the water, and then

  he glanced around for a hiding place. The Cuban caught his sleeve and

  pulled his face down close.

  "Gracias, " he coughed. "Gracias, English."

  Burton looked down at the tough little Cuban. Diaz's camouflage shirt

  was soaked with dark blood, but his lips and eyes showed the trace of a

  smile. "Don't thank me yet, lad," the Englishman said quietly. "It's

  going to be a long bloody night."

  With the stealth that had carried him safely through four wars and

  countless intelligence operations, Jonas Stern made his way back to the

  bedroom he had briefly shared with Ilse.

  His brain duummed wildly. He had to get back to that telephone.

  He had scratched a mark deep in 'the library door with his broken fork

  so that he could quickly find the secret room again. But would he get

  another chapce? Horn's security chief would surely check the bedroom

  soon. The Afrikaner would naturally assume that "Professor Natterman"

  had tried to escape with his granddaughter. And when he found Stern

  waiting here, what would he think?

  Would he believe that "Natterman" had sat like a rabbit in an open cage

  while his granddaughter risked her life to escape?

  Stern had heard Horn's promise to spare Hans Apfel's life, but he

  doubted if the old man's clemency would extend to Ilse's "grandfather."

  To survive the next few minutes, Stern knew, he would have to find some

  plausible reason for having stayed behind while Ilse fled. Boot heels

  were already pounding up the hall when he remembered the Zinoviev

  notebook. Snatching it from inside his shirt, he darted to the little

  writing desk, mussed his hair, and opened the leatherbound volume at the

  middle.

  The boots stopped outside his door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Stern did not look up when Smuts opened the door. He pored over the

  thin black volume as if it were a lost book of the Bible. The Afrikaner

  stood silent for some time, watching him.

  "What are you doing, Professor?" he said finally.

  "Reading," Stern muttered.

  "I can see that," snapped Smuts. "Where is your granddaughter?"

  "I have no idea."

  "How did she get out of this room?"

  Stern looked up at last. "She picked the lock."

  "With what?"

  "A fork from your dinner table, I believe."

  Smuts frowned. "Why didn't you go with her?

  Stern shrugged. "She is young, I am old. With me along she would have

  little chance of escape. Without me ... who knows?"

  "She did not escape," Smuts said, smirking.

  Stern sighed and let a hand fall from the desk to his knee.

  "Will you bring her back to me, please?"

  "Impossible. She must pay for her insolence."

  Recalling Horn's promise of mercy'to Ilse, Stern suppressed a smile as

  he brought a hand to his forehead. "She's only a young girl who wanted

  to find her husband. Where is the crime in that?"

  "Herr Horn will decide," Smuts answered stiffly. "I think you're lying,

  Professor. You tried to escape and failed, didn't you? You ran into

  the shields."

  "You underrate my devotion to history, young man." Stern laid a hand on

  the Zinoviev notebook. "This volume is a treasure-a lost fragment of

  history. Already I've learned things my colleagues would trade a limb

  for."

  Smuts shook his head slowly. "You're past it, old man.

  You can't see anything, can you?"

  "I see that this book is far more valuable than the rubbish Hans found

  at Spandau."

  "I'll tell you what that book is, Professor," Smuts snarled.

  "It's your bloody death sentence. Only one man has read that book and

  remained alive, and you've already met him."

  Smuts reached for the doorknob. "Enjoy it while you can," he said, and

  went out.

  Stern stared at the closed door. He knew he could pick the lock again,

  but the Afrikaner might be waiting for just such an attempt. He took a

  deep breath and rubbed his temples.

  He was sweating. Sixty seconds ago he had seen something so shocking it

  had wiped the ghastly Nazi shrine room from his mind.

  It was the book. Zinoviev's notebook. The moment he had opened it, the

  moment before Pieter Smuts marched into his room, Stern had seen the

  strange black characters marching like foreign soldiers down the page.

  Cyrillic characters.

  Paragraph after, paragraph of laboriously handwritten Russian covered

  the left-hand page. And on the right-neatly typewritten on an old

  German machine-Stern had seen what he prayed was a German translation of

  the Russian handwriting. But what had so shocked him-what had blown

  everything el e out of his mind-was his nearcertainty that the Cyrilslic

  characters had been written by the same hand that wrote the "fire of

  Armageddon" note warning of danger to Israel in 1967. The same note

  which had said the secret of that danger could be found in Spandau.

  Now he leafed quickly through the thin volume. The pages-twenty in

  all-were merely sheets of heavy typing paper glued amateurishly into a

  leather spine. The same strange configuration over and over: first

  Russian, then German. Stern could not verify his intuition about the

  author of the Spandau note. The note was in his leather bag, back in

  Hauer's room at the Protea Hof But he did not need to verify anything.

  He knew. He closed the black notebook and reread the name on the cover:

  V V Zinoviev. Who was this mysterious Russian? How was he tied to the

  Rudolf Hess case? If Zinoviev had warned Israel in 1967 of some

  apocalyptic danger, had he voluntarily given this book to Alfred Horn?

  Stern shivered with a sudden rush of deja vu. Alfred Horn.

  The name buzzed in his brain like a swarm of bottleflies. Where had he

  seen it before? In some intelligence report? On some tattered list of

  Nazi sympathizers crossing a desk inTel Aviv?

  He forced his mind away from the question. He forced himself to think

  of the telephone, the phone that waited in the bizarre Nazi shrine room.

  To think of Hauer and Gadi, waiting anxiously for his call. He had to

  make contact with them. Yet in spite of Ilse's warning about a nuclear

  weapon, in spite of his conviction that Israel actually was
in danger,

  Stern felt oddly certain that the key to the whole insane business-both

  past and present-lay within the thin volume in his hand.

  If the papers Hans Apfel found in Spandau Prison proved that Prisoner

  Number Seven was not Rudolf Hess, what did this strange book reveal?

  Horn had said-it related to May of 1941. Did this book, finally, reveal

  the secret of Rudolf Hess's real mission to England? Did it name Hess's

  British contacts? Did it reveal the full scope of the threat to Israel?

  Could it silence the maddening hum at the back of Stern's brain when he

  heard the name Alfred Horn?

  This notebook, he thought, not the Spandau papers, is Professor

  Natterman's Rosetta stone of 1941. I only hope I live to tell the

  oldfool about it. Stern opened the black cover and began to read: I,

  Valentin Vasilievich Zinoviev, here record for posterity thefacts of my

  service to the German Reich, specifically my part in the special

  operation undertaken in Great Britain in May 1941 known as "Plan

  Mordred. " I do so at the request of the surviving Reich authorities,

  to the best of my ability, adding or omitting nothing.

  I was born in Moscow in 1895 to Vasili Zinoviev, a major in the army of

  Alexander II. At seventeen I became a soldier like my father, but after

  rising to the rank of sergeant I was recruited into the Okhrana, the

  Tsar's secret police. I was promoted rapidly there. Some of my

  colleagues criticized my methods as overly harsh, but no one denied the

  results I achieved. Looking back on the bloodbath of 1917, I believe

  many of those same colleagues would say that my methods were not harsh

  enough. But they are dead now, and that is another story.

  When I received word in 1918 that Tsar Nicholas II and his family had

  been executed by the Bolsheviks, I decided to make my way to Germany.

  Strange to choose the vanquished nation as my sanctuary, but I did. Of

  all the Western nations, I had admired Prussia's military most. The

  journey was a nightmare. Europe was a shambles, but by using Okhrana

  contacts I finally managed to pass through the frontier into Poland.

  From there I had little trouble.

  Germany was in chaos. The people were starving. Armed gangs roamed the

  streets at will, preying on the unwary and stripping returning soldiers

  of their decorations. Chief among these gangs were the Spartacist

  Communists. I could scarcely believe I had fled Lenin's revolution only

  to find more of the same madness awaiting me. Quickly seeing how things

  stood, I offered my services to a band of Friekorps, one of the groups

  of German ex-officers and enlisted men who were trying to reestablish

  order in their country. The Friekorps leadership appreciated my special

  talents and put me to work immediately.

  These were farsighted men. Even at that early stage they were planning

  for the next war At their request I refrained from joining the Nazi

  Party throughout Adolf Hitler's rise to power They preferred to use me

  as a "cat"s paw" whenever actions were required where absolutely no risk

  of being traced back to the Party could be tolerated.

  Because the chief enemy of the Nazis was the Communist Party, I proved

  invaluable, and soon came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, Reichs

  hrer of Hitler's newly created SS.

  .M Though I never developed more than the most superficial personal

  relationship with this strange character I admired his efficiency.

  Himmler saw to it that some of my Okhrana methods were taught to members

  of his counter intelligence unit-the SD. It was through these endeavors

  that I came to know a promising young officer named Reinhard Heydrich.

  Because of what happened later, I should mention my service in Spain. In

  1936 I accompanied Germany's Condor Legion to Spain, to help

  Generalissimo Franco in his struggle against the Republican Forres-which

  were actually controlled by the Spanish communists and a few generals

  borrowed from Stalin. I served as an interrogator, my chief

  responsibility being interrogation of communist prisoners. It was this

  eighteen-month period that would later rise up to thwart my greatest

  mission, but who could foresee it then?

  Back in Germany, I worked closely with Heydrich on a special program

  which I had helped initiate after the 1919

  communist uprisings in Germany. Because yet another world war seemed

  inevitable, certain Nazi leaders expressed a desire that we should

  infiltrate not only the German Communist Party, but the communist

  organizations in those countries likely to be enemies of Germany in the

  next war By 1923 we had put a large number of agents in place, and by

  1939 we had the most extensive anti-communist intelligence network in

  the world. There were losses and defections, of course, but the

  strategy remained sound.

  Two years later (January 1941) Hitler informed Heydrich that a powerful,

  highly placed clique of Nazi sympathizers existed in England, men who

  wished to arrange a peace treaty with Germany. These Englishmen claimed

  to be in a position to seize their government, if only two obstacles

  could be got out of the way. The main obstacle was Winston Churchill,

  who considered Adolf Hitler his personal nemesis.

  The second was King George VI, who, unlike his dethroned older brother

  was a fervent anti-Nazi. Hitler's English sympathizers saw this

  dethroned brother-then called the Duke of Windsor-as a malleable

  alternative British monarch.

  Hitler charged Heydrich with removing the human obstacles to this

  alliance, and Heydrich naturally turned to me. Because an Anglo-German

  alliance would virtually guarantee the destruction of Stalin's regime, I

  volunteered immediately.

  Heydrich's plan, though complex in execution, was simple and ingenious

  in theory. We would assassinate both Churchill and the king, then lay

  the blame on our archenemies the communists-just as the Nazis had done

  with the Reichstag Fire! To accomplish this, Heydrich envisioned using

  one of the British communist cells infiltrated by our agents. He asked

  if I thought we might dupe one of these groups into carrying out the

  assassinations for us, and I must admit that I expressed pessimism. The

  revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939

  had disil&sioned communists around the world; consequently, I considered

  the chance of finding western communists still fanatical enough to

  attempt a suicide mission very small But Heydrich was undaunted On his

  orders I set to work bringing his plan to fruition.

  The communist cell I chose for the operation was based in London, and,

  from our point of view, was under the command of one Helmut Steuer-a

  former Wehrmacht sergeant. This Helmut deserves special mention, for

  he-like the unit he had created-was uniq Helmut had@ been spying on .

  communists since Munich, where he was "sole survivor" of the massacre at

  the Hauptbanhof.

  When he "fled" to Britain (on our orders) the British communists

  welcomed him as a hero. His bond with them was so strong that when

  these communists went to Spain to fight in the International Brigades in />
  1936, Helmut went with them.

  Heydrich could not believe it. It was an insanely dangerous thing for

  Helmut to do, but I understood. He was a young man then, a man of

  action, and he craved danger In Spain he fought heroically for the

  Republicans, all the while feeding to the Fascists information on the

  movements of the very armies he was fighting in! Helmut lost an eye at

  Guernica, and probably because of the accuracy of his own reports! It

  was truly a miracle that he survived at all, yet his service in Spain

  made him irreproachable in the eyes of his English comrades. After

  returning to EnglandStern stopped reading. His heart was pounding. He

  put his finger to the paper, traced the sentences backward and read

  again: Helmut lost an eye at Guernica "My God," he muttered. "I've

  found you out at last. Alfred Horn ...

  You're not Rudolf Hess, and you're not'Zinoviev either."

  Stern's mind raced as he tried to assimilate this new information.

  There actually was a Helmut involved in the Hess affair-just as the

  Oxford draft research had claimed. Professor Natterman would be

  extremely disappointed to hear it! Stern heard himself laughing. It

  all fits, he thought with satisfaction. I simply couldn't accept the

  idea that Rudolf Hess had survived the war, that he had wormed his way

  into South A ica's power elite, and I was right!

  .fr "Well," he murmured, "let's find out exactly what Helmut the great

  German spy did during the war." Stern picked up reading Zinoviev's

  narrative where he had left off-.

  After returning to England, Helmut-on our ordersorganized his own

  communist cell. It was small (six men, not counting Helmut) and every

  man had been seriously wounded either in the Great War or in Spain. In

  his communiques Helmut called them his Verwunden Brigade-the "Wounded

  Brigade. " These men had come from the British working class, and no

  men everfelt more betrayed by their government than they- The flower of

  their generation had been slaughtered in the Great War, yet they had

  survived.

  And when a neighboring republic was threatened by a newly risen German

  monster, their government had not only turned its back, but disparaged

  its sons who went to defend the democratic ideal that their friends and

  brothers had died for in the Great War There is no hatred like that of