Berlin Red

by Sam Eastland

  ‘What did the project involve?’ he asked the colonel.

  Wolfrum paused. Each time he gave up a new fragment of information, it seemed to him he took another step towards a line beyond which there could be no going back. But he had lately come to realise that the line had been crossed long ago. ‘Diamond Stream is the code name for a guidance system for the V-2 rocket. If it had succeeded, we could have dropped one down a chimney on the other side of Europe.’

  ‘If?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Wolfrum. ‘It was a wonderful idea, but that’s all it ever was. I don’t know how many test shots we fired in the months before I was captured, but I can tell you that every single one of them failed. The mechanisms we designed were too fragile to withstand the vibrations of the rocket in flight.’

  ‘Do you think it could have worked,’ asked Kirov, ‘even if only in theory?’

  Wolfrum smiled. ‘Our theories always worked, Comrade Major. It’s why we gave them such beautiful names. But that’s all it is, just a theory, and likely all that it will ever be.’

  A few days later, a truck pulled up before the gates of the British Propulsion Laboratory, located near King’s Dock in Swansea in the south of Wales.

  The town had once been a thriving port, but German air raids, which took place mostly at night during the summer of 1940, had reduced much of the docklands to rubble.

  The propulsion laboratory, which dealt primarily in steam-driven turbines for powering the engines of battleships, had been one of the few businesses to survive the bombing. This was by virtue of the fact that its large roof, whose dew-soaked slates gleamed in the moonlight, had served as a homing beacon for the attacking squadrons of Heinkels and Dornier bombers. The pilots of these planes had been given strict orders not to damage the roof, and the laboratory had remained intact.

  Soldiers of the Army Transport Corps unloaded a crate from the back of the truck. The heavy box was placed upon a handcart and brought inside the red-brick building. The soldiers were joined by two men in civilian clothing, who had accompanied the crate from the moment it had arrived in the English port city of Harwich two days before.

  One of these men wore a trilby hat and a brown wool gaberdine coat. He was tall and wiry and sported a pencil-thin moustache. The man made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was carrying a revolver in a shoulder holster.

  The other man, who sported a three-piece Harris tweed suit, had a small chin, curly hair gone grey and had not shaved in several days, leaving a stippling of white stubble on his cheeks.

  The man with the pencil moustache stood in the middle of the laboratory floor and, in a loud and nasal voice, informed the dozen technicians who were working on the main floor of the laboratory that they had been dismissed for the remainder of the day.

  No one argued. No one even asked why. The sight of the gun wedged under the man’s armpit were all the credentials he needed.

  Only one person was kept behind: a small, bald man with fleshy lips and cheerful eyes. Instead of the faded blue lab coats worn by the other technicians, this man had put on a chef’s apron, with a large kangaroo pocket at the front which sagged with pencils, handkerchiefs and scraps of notepaper on which mysterious equations had been written.

  ‘Professor Greenidge?’ asked the man with the pencil moustache.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Warsop,’ said the man. ‘I’m with the Home Office.’ And, as he spoke, he removed a folded piece of paper from his coat. ‘I’d like you to sign this, please.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Professor Greenidge.

  It was the man in the tweed suit who answered. ‘Official Secrets Act,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘As soon as you’ve done that, we can show you what we’ve got in here.’ He gave the crate a jab with his toe. ‘I think you’ll find it worth your time.’ Then he held out his hand to the professor. ‘My name is Rufford. I’m a member of Crossbow.’

  Greenidge had heard of the Crossbow organisation although, until now, he had never met anyone who was a part of it. The organisation had been put together to study German rocket technology. It was all top-secret stuff, far beyond his own level of clearance.

  ‘What’s this got to do with me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a steam technician. I don’t build rockets.’

  ‘We pulled your name out of a hat,’ muttered Warsop. ‘Now are you going to sign the document or not?’

  ‘I do suggest you sign it, old man,’ said Rufford.

  ‘Very well,’ said Greenidge, suspecting that he had no choice. With a few swipes of his Parker pen, the professor did as he was told.

  ‘In any of your work,’ asked Rufford, ‘have you ever come across the mention of a project known as “Diamond Stream”?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘What would that be?’

  ‘Well,’ began Rufford, ‘we are hoping it might be the contents of this box.’

  As Warsop unlatched the crate, a smell of mud and manure swept out into the room. Warsop reached inside and removed a gnarled piece of machinery, still clogged with dirt and threads of straw. That it had been torn from its mountings by incredible force was clear to see in the bent and shredded steel.

  Warsop handed it to Greenidge. ‘See what you can make of that,’ he said.

  Greenidge held the cold metal in his hands for a few seconds, but it was too heavy and he had to put it down upon a work bench. Then he took out one of the many pencils from his apron and began to poke around among a cluster of wires which splayed out of the machine like the roots of a tree wrenched from the ground. After several minutes, he stood back, tapping the pencil thoughtfully upon his thumbnail. ‘It appears to be some kind of gyroscopic mechanism, possibly for stabilising an object in flight. It’s not one of ours or I would know about it. Where did you get it?’

  ‘From a crash site on an island in the Baltic,’ replied Rufford. ‘That’s about all we can tell you for now.’

  ‘Can you at least inform me of the type of craft it came from?’

  ‘We think it was a test rocket that went off course, probably fired from the German research facility at Peenemunde.’

  ‘So it’s either a V-1 or a V-2,’ remarked Greenidge.

  Warsop glanced at Rufford. ‘Might as well tell him,’ he said.

  ‘It is the latter,’ confirmed Rufford.

  ‘I thought we bombed Peenemunde,’ said Professor Greenidge.

  ‘We did,’ Warsop answered. ‘Just not enough, apparently.’

  ‘Which would imply that the mechanism didn’t work.’

  ‘Possibly,’ replied Rufford. ‘We’ve managed to salvage a number of rocket parts out of the recent bombings of Antwerp and London . . .’

  ‘London!’ exclaimed Greenidge. ‘There’s been no report of that.’

  ‘Ah,’ Rufford scratched at his forehead. ‘Well, you see, in order not to generate panic in the city, we have been reporting these rocket strikes as gas-main explosions. Since they come in faster than the speed of sound, the detonation actually precedes the noise of its arrival, which itself is drowned out by the explosion.’

  ‘How long do you think you’ll be able to keep that fiction working?’ the professor asked incredulously.

  ‘As long as we have to,’ said Warsop, ‘but that’s not why we’re here.’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ said Rufford, who seemed anxious to defuse whatever animosity was already brewing between the two men. ‘We’ve brought you this piece of equipment, because we’ve never come across anything like this before. We have reason to believe that the enemy may be close to perfecting a radio-controlled homing system for these weapons.’

  ‘Radio-controlled?’ asked Greenidge, and suddenly he understood why they had come to him.

  Before the war, he had experimented with radio-guidance technology for weapons, but he had never been able to develop a successful prototype. His government funding had eventually been cut and he came to work at the propulsion lab as a steam-turbine engineer. Now, it seemed, the enemy had fulfilled the
dream which had once been his own.

  ‘Any chance you might be able to reconstruct it?’ asked Rufford.

  Greenidge shook his head. ‘Not from what you’ve given me. This is only part of the mechanism. If you can find me schematics, even partial ones, I should be able to make some headway pretty quickly.’

  ‘We’re working on that now,’ said Warsop.

  ‘In the meantime,’ continued Greenidge, ‘I can take apart what we do have here and should be able to tell you what is missing.’

  ‘Then that will have to do,’ said Rufford. ‘Have you got some place where you can work on it without anyone looking over your shoulder?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Greenidge. ‘There’s space in the storage room at the back.’

  ‘Put a lock on the door,’ ordered Warsop.

  ‘There is one.’

  ‘On the inside,’ said Warsop, ‘so you can keep out any unintended visitors.’

  Greenidge nodded. ‘I’ll see to it right away.’ He shook hands with Rufford. Warsop only nodded goodbye.

  ‘I do have one last question,’ said Greenidge, as the two men headed for the door.

  They turned and looked at him.

  ‘Are you sure there’s no one on the other side who knows we’ve got hold of this?’

  Rufford looked nervously at Warsop.

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’ demanded Warsop.

  ‘Because if I can build it’, answered Greenidge, ‘I might also be able to build something which could defeat its purpose. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? The simple fact that we might be able to duplicate the technology isn’t going to prevent it from being used against us.’

  For the first time, Warsop’s scowl faltered.

  ‘We’re as sure as we can be that the enemy has no idea where these rocket pieces went,’ explained Rufford, ‘but that’s never one hundred per cent. The men who brought us that wreckage took extraordinary risks in doing so, but who knows if someone saw them on their journey, or if the local authorities where the rocket came down have been able to figure out what was taken from the wreck. The way things are in Germany right now, they’ve got plenty of other things to worry about. Let’s hope this stays off their radar.’

  ‘The sooner you get me those schematics . . .’

  ‘People are working on that even as we speak, Professor, but as I’m sure you can imagine, it is easier said than done.’

  When the two men had gone, Greenidge turned his attention once more to the piece of wreckage. With one finger, he moved aside the tangled spider’s web of multicoloured wires and was startled when something fell out of the mechanism. It tumbled to floor, metal ringing on the concrete. Greenidge bent down and picked it up, relieved to see the solid disc of brass had not been broken by the fall. There appeared to be some writing on it, half hidden by the smear of the same mud that coated the rest of the mechanism. With the side of his thumb, he wiped the dirt away and squinted at the words, struggling to make sense of them. ‘Lotti,’ he read aloud. ‘Beste Kuh.’

  Message from Christophe to Major Clarke:

  Diamond Stream plans acquired.

  Major Clarke to Christophe:

  What is Diamond Stream?

  Christophe to Major Clarke:

  Rocket assembly. Purpose unclear but high value.

  Major Clarke to Christophe:

  Photos?

  Christophe to Major Clarke:

  Yes. Film is safe but not developed.

  Major Clarke to Christophe:

  We will get you out. Monitor safe house. Follow protocol.

  ‘Inspector?’ whispered Major Kirov.

  Pekkala was sitting at his desk. With unseeing eyes, he stared at the wall, a look of fixed intensity anchored to his face. His hands lay flat among the dusty white rings of mug stains on the woodwork of the desk, like someone who has just felt the ground shake beneath his feet.

  Kirov was careful not to get too close. He had seen this phenomenon before. The Inspector was not asleep. Instead, he had travelled deep inside the catacombs of his mind, leaving behind all but the shell of his body.

  When these trances overcame Pekkala, it was important to wake the man gently. Kirov had learned never to jostle him out from this state of waking dreams. The first time he had tried this, the Inspector exploded into movement and Kirov found himself staring down the barrel of Pekkala’s Webley revolver. He had drawn the weapon from its holster with a speed Kirov had never seen before in the Inspector, or in anyone else, for that matter. There had been many times since, when, in the carrying-out of their duties, Kirov had watched Pekkala unholster the Webley and, although the Inspector was quick, the pace of his conscious movements was nothing like the speed with which this savagery erupted from his self-hypnotic state.

  ‘Inspector?’ Kirov called again. He stood well back from the desk, edged in behind the wheezy iron stove they used to heat their office on Pitnikov Street. ‘Inspector, you must wake up. We are wanted at the Kremlin.’ The call had come in only a few minutes before, ordering them to appear. Whenever Kirov had to listen to Poskrebychev, and especially over the phone, he always had the impression that he was being barked at by a small and irritating dog. Flinching involuntarily as he listened to Stalin’s secretary relay the Kremlin’s order, Kirov had glanced at the Inspector, unable to comprehend how the man could sleep through the clattering of the telephone bell, followed by the muffled ranting of Poskrebychev through the receiver.

  After a few more attempts at trying to wake the Inspector with only the murmuring of his voice, Kirov removed an onion from a basket where he kept whatever food they had on hand. Removing a knife from his desk drawer, he sliced up the onion and placed it in an iron frying pan, along with a splat of butter, which he stored, wrapped in a handkerchief, on the sill outside the window, where the Russian winter kept it frozen solid.

  Resting the pan on the flat surface of the stove, which had almost consumed its daily ration of wood, it was not long before the onions began to sizzle and the room soon filled with their aroma.

  Almost imperceptibly, one of Pekkala’s hands twitched. Then his fingers began to move, as if, in his unconscious state, the Inspector was playing out a tune upon some ghostly piano.

  Sharply, Pekkala breathed in a breath. He blinked rapidly, as the focus returned to his eyes.

  ‘Where were you?’ Kirov asked.

  Pekkala shook his head, as if he could no longer recall, but the truth was he remembered perfectly. It was simply too complicated to explain.

  He had been in St Petersburg, strolling with Lilya along the Morskaya and Nevsky Prospekts. They had stopped to buy chocolate at Conradi’s, before going to see a play at the Théâtre Michel. And afterwards, they went for a drink at the Hôtel d’Europe, where the bartender was a man from Kentucky.

  These things had never happened. They belonged to a parallel world in which he had never been separated from her, and there had never been a Revolution, and a bank robber named Joseph Dzhugashvili had not murdered his way to the Kremlin, from which he ruled under the name he gave himself – Stalin – Man of Steel.

  Only in moments of great stillness, such as that quiet afternoon on Pitnikov Street, could Pekkala glimpse that other life he might have lived.

  Sometimes, in that trance of overwhelming memory, he would reach out, as if to pull himself into that second world, only to watch that fragile loophole disappear when sounds or smells or the touch of his well-meaning assistant intruded, and he would find himself once more a prisoner of flesh and bone.

  But this time it was different. Although Pekkala had long since resigned himself to the fact that those two paths – the one he had taken and the one he might have done – were never going to converge, still they both had a role to play, in this world if not in the other.

  At the outset of her days in exile, Lilya Simonova had clung to every detail of the time she had spent with Pekkala.

  But the more time that went by, the more difficult it became. The me
mories began, very slowly, to fracture. It was as if she had found herself in a room full of broken mirrors and even if she could have glued every shard back into its place, the image could never be properly restored.

  Eventually, instead of trying to remember, she did all she could to forget. It was either that, or lose her sanity completely.

  But some of them refused to fade away, especially in those moments just before she fell asleep at night, when no amount of concentration could force the memories back into the darkness. The most vivid and tenacious of these were the legends he had told her of the place where he came from.

  Pekkala had grown up in the lake region of eastern Finland, not far from the town of Lappeenranta. His father had been born there, and knew the waterways and forest trails as well as if they’d been the creases on his palm. But Pekkala’s mother was a Sami, from the northernmost reaches of Lapland. It was from her that Pekkala had learned the stories which he then passed on to Lilya, as they walked the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo in those first weeks of their acquaintance.

  He would meet her at the stone wall after she had locked up the schoolhouse for the day. Then they would walk to the yellow stone house known as the Bath Pavilion, or else they would make their way to the Lyceum garden, where the statue of Pushkin cast his brooding shadow on the ground.

  But under the spell of Pekkala’s stories, Lilya barely noticed her surroundings.

  He told her of the time when, as a child, he had gone to visit his mother’s family in the north and, after a three-day journey, arrived to find the men of the village on the point of setting out to hunt a bear. The beast had only recently emerged from hibernation and had already killed three calves from the reindeer herd on which the village relied, not only for food but for clothing.

  So sacred was the bear that no one dared to speak its name. Instead, they just called him by a word which meant ‘the Walker in the Woods’.