by Sam Eastland
‘He’s just moved in,’ said the caretaker, when Pekkala had explained who he was looking for.
He unlocked the gate and led Pekkala to a door on the ground floor of the building. ‘In there, he should be,’ said the man, then shuffled back to the office, in which Pekkala could see a huge grey dog, some kind of wolfhound, lying on a blanket beside a stove.
Pekkala pounded on the door and then stood back. The curtain of the single window facing out into the courtyard fluttered slightly and then the door opened a crack.
‘Comrade Garlinski,’ said Pekkala.
‘Yes?’ answered a frightened voice.
‘I hear you’ve just arrived from England.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Only to talk.’
‘Who sent you?’
Pekkala held up his red Special Operations pass book, with its faded gold hammer and sickle on the front.
The door opened a little wider now and the frightened-looking man who had, until the week before, been the head of operations at Unit 53A, the British Special Operations listening post at Grantham Underwood, appeared from the shadows. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, Garlinski had been asleep. With orders not to leave the flat, he had little else to do except to make his way through the meagre rations that had been left for him in the kitchen. ‘Talk about what?’ he asked the stranger.
‘An agent of yours named Christophe,’ answered Pekkala.
Garlinski blinked at him in astonishment. ‘How the hell do you know about that? I haven’t even been debriefed yet.’ And now he opened the door wide, allowing Pekkala to enter.
Inside, there was almost no furniture; only a chair pulled up next to the stove. The walls were bare, with fade marks on the cream-coloured paint where pictures had once hung. His bed was a blue and white ticking mattress lying on the floor, with an old overcoat for a blanket.
‘Look where they dumped me,’ said Garlinski. ‘After all I’ve done, I thought I’d get some kind of hero’s welcome. Instead, I get this.’ He raised his hands and let them fall again with a slap against his thighs.
With only one chair between them, both men sat down with their back against the wall. Sitting side by side, they stared straight ahead as they conversed.
‘What is it you want to know?’ asked Garlinski.
‘Why were you in such a hurry to leave England?’
‘I thought that my cover was blown,’ explained Garlinski, ‘or that it was about to be, at any rate.’
‘What happened?’
‘I was on my way home from the relay station,’ explained Garlinski. ‘In my briefcase, I had several messages that had come in from SOE agents which I planned to copy and send out to Moscow that evening.’
‘Why were you bringing them home with you?’
‘Because that’s where I kept my transmitter,’ said Garlinski. ‘Of course, we weren’t allowed to leave with these messages, but since I was in charge of the relay station, no one ever checked. Until last week, that is.
‘I got stopped at a police checkpoint two blocks from my house. They were looking for black marketers. When they opened my briefcase, they saw the messages and decided to hold on to them until they had been cleared.’
‘Couldn’t you have told them you were working for SOE?’
‘I could have, but it would only have made things worse. SOE would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for removing messages from the station.’
‘What did you tell the police?’
‘I said I was trying to invent a new code for the army to use. I went on about it long enough that they must have thought I was telling the truth. They still held on to the messages, though, and I knew it was only a matter of time before someone figured out what I was up to. That’s why I had to leave.’
‘How did you get out of the country so quickly?’ asked Pekkala.
‘There was a safe house, right outside the underground station at the Angel up in Islington. I went straight there and your people arranged for my disappearance.’
‘Did SOE ever suspect you might be working for Russian Intelligence?’
‘If they did, I wouldn’t be here now, but I don’t know how much better off I am, left to rot in a place like this.’
‘At least you are alive.’
‘If you can call this living,’ muttered Garlinski.
‘How do you know about Christophe?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Only that the agent’s messages come through our station. My job is simply to take in the raw material, decode it and send it up the chain, and all as quickly as possible. What I can tell you is that the stuff Christophe sent us was usually a mixture of gossip, scandal and shuffles in the High Command. I hear the British use it on the radio stations which they broadcast into enemy territory. It was all pretty straightforward until about ten days ago.’
‘What happened then?’
‘We intercepted a message from somewhere on the Baltic coast, mentioning something about a “diamond stream”.’
‘What does it mean?’ asked Pekkala.
Garlinski shrugged. ‘Whatever it was, it got their attention up at Headquarters. They contacted Christophe, asking for more information, photographs and so on. They’re afraid it might be some kind of new weapons system – one of the miracles the German High Command keep promising will turn the tide of the war. But whether Christophe was successful or not, I don’t know.’
‘The British have come to us, asking if we might be prepared to get Christophe out of Berlin.’
‘Berlin?’ Garlinski turned to face Pekkala. ‘And what fool are you sending on that suicide mission?’
‘That fool would be me,’ replied Pekkala.
‘Well, I’m sorry for you, Inspector, because none of it matters now anyway.’
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Pekkala, rising to his feet.
‘The enemy is done for and they know it. All but a few of them, anyway.’
‘It’s those few we have to worry about,’ Pekkala said as he headed for the door.
‘Put in a good word for me, could you?’ asked Garlinski. He spread his arms, taking in the hollowness of the dirty room. ‘Tell them I deserve more than this.’
‘Diamond stream?’ Stalin rolled the words across his tongue, as if to speak them might unravel the mystery of their meaning.
‘Garlinski said he thought it might have something to do with one of the German secret-weapons programmes,’ said Pekkala. ‘Is there anyone who might know for certain?’
‘We have a number of high-ranking German officers at a prisoner-of-war camp north of the city. It is a special place, where men are slowly squeezed,’ Stalin clasped his hand into a fist, ‘but gently, so that they barely notice, and before they know it they have told everything. You might find someone there who still has a drop or two of information which we haven’t yet wrung from his brain. You’d better send Kirov, though.’
‘Why is that?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Speaking to these men requires some finesse,’ explained Stalin, ‘and your method of questioning suspects is apt to be a little primitive.’
Pekkala could not argue with that, but he had one more thing to say before he left. ‘Garlinski asked me to put in a word for him.’
‘A word about what?’ Stalin asked.
‘About his living conditions here in Moscow. He thinks he deserves something more.’
Stalin nodded. ‘Indeed he does, Inspector. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.’
On the island of Bornholm, the Ottesen brothers had done nothing to clean up the mess caused by the explosion the night before, and the yard was still scattered with fragments of splintered wood, old horse tack and a splintery coating of straw.
For now, at least, they contented themselves with simply observing the destruction.
The two men perched side by side upon a bale of charred hay in the middle of their barnyard. Both of them were smoking pipes that had long thin stems and white porcelain bowls w
ith tin lids to dampen the smoke.
Emerging from their house at sunrise that morning, they had discovered, amongst the wreckage, several pieces of what appeared to be metal fins and heavy discs of metal pierced by a multitude of drill holes.
The idea that it might have been an aeroplane was quickly set aside. Where were the wheels, the brothers asked themselves. Where were the propellers? Or the pilot? No. This was no work of human hands.
By pooling their combined intelligence, the Ottesen brothers decided that it must have been a spaceship of some sort. Having arrived at this conclusion, they could advance no further in their thinking, and so they sat down and smoked their pipes and waited for events to unfold.
It was not long before three policemen arrived in a truck, ordered the brothers back into their house and then began to rummage through the ruins of the barn.
The Ottesens watched through the gauzy fabric of their day curtains as the policemen removed several chunks of mangled metal from the barn, loaded them aboard the truck and then left without saying goodbye.
Not wanting to disobey orders, the brothers remained in their house for another hour before finally returning to the barnyard.
Soon afterwards, another car showed up and two more policemen climbed out.
‘You’re too late,’ said Per, removing the pipe stem from his mouth. ‘The other lot already came and went.’
‘What other lot?’ demanded the policeman. His name was Jakob Horn and he had served for many years as the only policeman stationed at the southern end of the island. With him was a German named Rudi Lusser who, as part of the small occupation force located on Bornholm, was tasked with accompanying Horn wherever he went, and reporting everything back to Northern District Police Headquarters, located in Hanover. Lusser had been there since 1940, and he had never received much encouragement from Hanover. In fact, he had grown to suspect that his reports weren’t even being read. Now that Hanover had fallen to the enemy, Lusser was growing increasingly nervous about his prospects for the future. Lusser and Horn had never got along well. In the early days of their forced partnership, Lusser had been intolerant of Horn and of these islanders, whom he had written off as ludicrously provincial. He had made no attempt to learn Danish and relied instead of Horn’s rudimentary grasp of German. Now that the war was as good as lost, Lusser was beginning to regret his previous attitude, and he made every effort to ingratiate himself with Horn and with these men, who might soon be his captors.
Lusser beamed a smile at the brothers, as if he was a long-lost friend.
The Ottesens ignored him. They had always ignored Lusser and now they ignored him even more, if such a thing were possible.
‘What other lot?’ repeated Horn.
‘The other policemen,’ explained Ole. ‘They must have come down from the north end of the island.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘We didn’t recognise them.’
Lusser, who could make no sense of what was going on, continued to smile idiotically.
‘Did they speak with you?’ Horn asked the twins.
‘No,’ answered Ole. ‘They just told us to stay in our house.’
‘What did they do then?’
‘Took a bunch of stuff from the spaceship,’ said Per.
‘Spaceship?’ asked Horn.
‘At first we just thought it was God,’ Ole told him.
‘But then we found the metal bits,’ said Per, ‘and that’s how we knew it was a spaceship.’
‘And what did these men do with the things they found?’
‘Put them in their truck and drove away.’
‘Where did they go?’ asked Horn. ‘Which direction?’
Ole aimed his pipe stem down the road towards Arnager, a little fishing village on the southern coast.
Horn shook his head in disbelief. ‘Did it not occur to you to wonder why policemen from the north end would be down this way at all, let alone why they would head off to the south when they left here?’
It had not occurred to them.
Horn stared at them for a moment. Then he got back into the car, along with Lusser, and the two policemen raced towards Arnager.
Arriving not long afterwards, they found an empty truck parked at the quayside and three police jackets, stolen from the Klemensker station at the north end of the island, lying heaped on the passenger seat.
When Major Kirov walked into the interrogation room at the Alexeyevska prisoner-of-war camp, which was reserved for high-ranking enemy officers, he found a tall man with pale skin and greying hair, still wearing the tattered uniform of a colonel in the German Army. The colonel sat at a table, hunched in a chair and clasping a green enamel cup filled with hot tea. Except for one other chair, on the opposite side of the table, there was no other furniture in the room.
The soldier’s name was Hanno Wolfrum.
He had been in charge of a convoy of trucks fleeing the advance of the Red Army towards the Baltic. Having departed from Königsberg, the column had planned to travel due south to Pultusk, just north of Warsaw and from there to head west towards the German lines. Fearing that his route might be cut off by Russian reconnaissance units, Wolfrum sent his own scouts ahead to ensure that the roads were still passable. As they crossed the Polish border and entered the region of Masuria, Wolfrum’s scouts reported that Soviet tanks had been seen on the road to Pultusk. There were no westbound roads between him and the town, and he did not dare retrace his steps towards the north, so Wolfrum had been forced to detour to the east, towards the enemy lines, in the hopes that he could then find another route south. As the column made its way along a winding road which passed beside the Narew river, they came under Soviet mortar fire from the opposite bank. The lead and rear trucks on the convoy were destroyed, stranding the vehicles in between. The drivers and a small number of men who had been serving as armed escorts for the convoy all fled into the surrounding countryside.
Russian soldiers crossed the river, hoping to find food in the trucks. Instead, they discovered engine parts for both V-1 and V-2 rockets. As word of the discovery reached the Russian High Command, specialised troops of the NKVD Internal Security Service were dispatched to the scene. The rocket parts were quickly inventoried and transported to the rear and a hunt began for the men who had been travelling with the convoy.
By then, most of them had already been killed by Polish civilians. Wolfrum himself was found hiding in a barn by Red Army soldiers who had been out foraging. He was brought to the Alexeyevska prison camp, where he underwent weeks of interrogation.
During this time, Wolfrum was neither tortured nor mistreated. His interrogators, who were among the most skilled in the Russian Intelligence Service, were well aware that Wolfrum, in time and if properly treated, would supply them not only with the answers to their questions, but with questions which they had not thought to ask.
At first, Wolfrum claimed to know nothing about the contents of the crates aboard his trucks, but the unexpectedly civilised treatment he received put him off balance. He soon began to give up details about the convoy that showed that he was not only aware of the significance of these engine parts, but that he had been part of the team which designed them. It emerged that Wolfrum had been sent by General Hagemann himself, head of the Peenemunde programme, to the factory in Sovetsk, on the Lithuanian border, which had manufactured the engine parts and to remove them to safety before the arrival of the Red Army. In addition to this, Wolfrum had been ordered to blow up the factory before he left, a task for which he used so much dynamite that he not only obliterated the factory but shattered half the windows in the town.
Now Kirov studied Wolfrum’s appearance. The colonel’s tunic, although badly damaged during the days he had spent on the run, was made of high-quality grey gaberdine, with a contrasting dark green collar. All of his insignia had been removed by the camp authorities, leaving shadows on the cloth where his collar tabs and shoulder boards had been, as well as the eagle above his left chest p
ocket.
Wolfrum himself, although solidly built, looked frightened and as worn-out as his clothes. The skin sagged beneath his eyes and his bloodless lips were chapped. Kirov did not need to be told that it was not the present which terrified this officer, but the future. Wolfrum had already been in captivity for several months and was well aware that he would soon arrive at the limits of his usefulness. Whatever promises had been made by his captors, regarding his treatment in the weeks, or months or even years ahead, had only served to scour every wrinkle of his brain for information they could use. Any day now, the illusion of dignity would be set aside. Whether they put him up against a wall and shot him or else dispatched him to Siberia was all out of his hands now. In the meantime, Wolfrum answered their questions. He didn’t care what they were. The oaths of loyalty which he had taken long ago were to a country on the edge of extinction. Besides, there was nothing he knew that was still worth keeping secret. ‘You’re new,’ remarked Wolfrum when he caught sight of the major. ‘Are all the others tired out?’ Then he sipped at his tea, waiting for the interrogation to begin. They always gave him tea before these sessions and he was almost afraid to tell them how much he had come to value this miniature gesture of kindness.
‘I just have one question,’ said Kirov, ‘and I’ve been told that you might have the answer.’
Wolfrum sighed. ‘I have already explained everything. About everything. But why should that matter?’ Placing the mug on the table, he held open his hands, palms rosy from the heat. ‘Ask away, Comrade. I have all the time in the world.’
Kirov sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table.
‘What do you know about “Diamond Stream”?’ asked Kirov.
Wolfrum paused before he spoke. ‘Well now,’ he said at last, ‘perhaps there is something you don’t know about me, after all.’
‘And what might that be?’ asked Kirov.
‘That I worked on the Diamond Stream project.’
