Riptide

by Lawton, John

  ‘You’re among friends, for the first time in years. Maybe you can afford to relax,’ Cormack said.

  Stahl eased himself up on the pillows to be more level with Cormack, who had propped himself against the mattress at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Who was he?’ he asked.

  ‘One of ours, I’m afraid. You were right about that. Frank Reininger, a colonel in US Intelligence at our embassy here. I’m as surprised as you are. He was pretty close to being the last person I suspected. Known the man since I was a teenager.’

  ‘We’re both speaking of him in the past tense. Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes. I know it might have been useful to get him alive. But I can see why you didn’t take chances. That last shot to the head killed him outright. If it hadn’t, who knows – it could be both of us stretched out in the morgue.’

  Stahl said nothing. He hadn’t fired to the head. He hadn’t had the chance. Cormack said, ‘The British are waiting. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Let me wash and eat something and then I’m theirs. After all, I’m their prisoner.’

  ‘They’re calling you their guest.’

  ‘And Hitler called the Anschluss a “reunification”. We’re in a war of words. Meaning was the first casualty.’

  ‘A couple of hours?’ said Cormack.

  ‘Yes. I’ll be ready.’

  § 87

  Stahl acknowledged Reggie’s introduction of ‘Brigadeführer, I’m Reggie,’ with a terse ‘Colonel’.

  ‘Oh . . . so you know me?’

  ‘Born Edinburgh, February 1900. Expelled from your private school over an incident with marijuana. Sandhurst 1919. Commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers 1921. Recruited to Military Intelligence 1926. Married twice, a daughter by each marriage. Despite a playboy image your grasp of German language and history is said to be excellent. Christened Alistair, always known as Reggie.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Reggie. ‘And what do I call you?’

  ‘Stahl, Wolfgang, anything but Brigadeführer. The Brigadeführer died in Berlin on April 17th.’

  ‘I see,’ said Reggie, looking ticked off. ‘Stahl it is.’

  Stahl lay on the bed in slippers, pyjamas and a dressing gown. With his receding hairline, his salt and pepper colouring and the clipped, dark, moustache, he could easily have been the British officer recuperating from wounds who might ordinarily have occupied a room such as this. There was only one chair. Reggie took it. Cal stood, wondering if there was anything symbolic in Reggie’s brusque assumption of command.

  ‘It’s . . . er . . . not too soon for you?’ Reggie asked.

  ‘No. Now is as good a time as any. Ask me whatever you want.’

  ‘Well,’ said Reggie. ‘There was one thing in particular.’

  ‘Russia,’ Stahl said.

  Reggie glanced quickly at Cal, and said, ‘Oh, you know?’

  ‘What else could be quite so urgent? You had Hess. Hess told you nothing, so you come to me. Fine. I know more than Hess.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Hess is “the heart of the Party” – not the brains. It’s been a while since he had that level of confidence placed in him. Russia is very much Heydrich’s dream, and what he knows I know.’

  ‘Oh. Jolly good. Where shall we start?’

  ‘Why don’t we start with you getting me a blackboard?’

  ‘A blackboard?’

  ‘They’re bound to have one somewhere or do your hospitals teach nothing? And while you’re at it, some chalk. Four different colours of chalk.’

  ‘I see,’ said Reggie, not seeing. ‘Chalk.’

  ‘I have a visual memory – let me visualise the battle plan for you, and everything else will fall into place.’

  ‘He’s right, Reggie,’ said Cal. ‘This is the way we’ve always done things. Wolf thinks in images. He remembers text as images.’

  Ten minutes later two hospital orderlies staggered in with an easel and a blackboard and set it up. Stahl swung his legs off the bed and picked up a stick of white chalk.

  Cal had seen the results of so much of the work of Stahl’s photographic memory. Lists and charts that he had reconstructed from the eidetic snapshots of the mind and forwarded to him. Once, in a rare face-to-face meeting he had roughed out a scheme for some troop manoeuvre on a single sheet of foolscap. Before he began to draw, he said, he could not have described it. Once drawn, he had burnt the sketch in an ashtray and recited the battle plan to him. It was, Cal thought, an odd relationship between image and language, a mental short-circuit, a conative loophole – but it worked. Undeniably it worked.

  He watched as Stahl roughed in the boundaries – the Bug River, the current front line between the Axis and the USSR – the Baltic coastline – a jagged set of inverted Vs to mark the Urals – a scoop of the Black Sea at the bottom of the board. All of which amounted to a steel wall of armament around Eastern Poland, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – now earmarked as a new circle in hell.

  Stahl switched to green chalk.

  ‘Let us start with Army Group North.’

  He drew a box up near the Baltic Sea and wrote in the name von Leeb. Reggie finally seemed to have caught on. He took a tiny notebook from his inside pocket, unscrewed the top of his fountain pen and started to jot down notes. Under von Leeb’s name Stahl began to chalk in the formation of battle – the 18th and 16th German Armies under von Küchler and Busch, the 4th Panzer Army under Hoepner – 11 divisions of Infantry, supporting 10 Tank divisions . . . Reinhardt . . . von Manstein . . . the Panzer Army Reserve SS Totenkopf. Cal saw Reggie reach for his glasses as the chalk names got smaller and smaller with each sub-division Stahl made.

  Stahl switched to the red chalk – von Bock’s Army Group Centre . . . his hands began to fly across the board, sometimes writing in the horizontal, sometimes the vertical as though he thought or saw in two planes at once . . . 32 Infantry divisions . . . Guderian’s Panzers. Often gaps would appear as he skipped over some name or number, only to double back seconds later, scrawling furiously, chalk snapping off and flying across the room with the speed of bullets. To blue chalk. Army Group South under von Runstedt . . . another 24 Infantry divisions, 15 divisions of Panzers and the Axis partners – troops from Hungary, Italy and Rumania. Reggie could scarcely keep up. His head bobbed like a doll’s on a coiled spring, up and down from the paper, weaving right and left as he peered around Stahl to the multi-coloured jigsaw now assembling itself in front of his eyes.

  Then Stahl began shooting arrows across the board. Green arrows aiming at Leningrad, red arrows forking across central Poland to reunite at Smolensk in a push for Moscow, and blue arrows driving across Kiev to the Volga and Stalingrad.

  It took more than quarter of an hour.

  ‘What’re those last two at the bottom there?’ The first words Reggie had spoken in what seemed to Cal to be an age. He’d never known the man to shut up for so long.

  ‘More Waffen SS regiments,’ Stahl said. ‘The Adolf Hitler and the Viking.’ Stahl no longer looked at the board – he turned his back on it. Cal was staring at it, overawed, chilled by the magnitude of it, the sheer power of what it stood for. Reggie was smiling. Not pleasure, not smugness, he thought, more like a schoolboy thrilled to have finally got what he wanted.

  Cal moved closer to the board while Reggie scribbled and said, ‘Will it work? Will anything so colossal hold up once you get it off the drawing board?’

  ‘It’s perfect country,’ said Stahl. ‘The flat plains that stretch from Prussia to Moscow. Perfect Panzer country. The tanks will simply throttle up and roll – and when they’ve cleared a way through, there are more than three million men in uniform to follow on. Hitler thinks it will be over before winter sets in – although it might be more accurate to say that he prays it will be over by then. These men have not been issued with winter uniforms. There aren’t even orders placed with the factories for any winter uniforms.’

  ‘Air
power?’

  ‘The Lutwaffe will pound the Russians first. Rather like what was meant to happen here last year.’

  ‘How many men was that?’ Reggie chipped in, head bent over his notebook.

  ‘Three million. But that is a conservative figure.’

  ‘Could I ask you to run through it again?’

  Cal looked at Stahl. He didn’t seem to resent the question – more as though he had expected it. He didn’t even glance at the blackboard.

  ‘Pick a column,’ he said simply.

  ‘Okey doh,’ said Reggie. ‘How about von Kleist’s Panzers?’

  Stahl rattled it off like liturgy.

  ‘3rd Panzer Korps, von Manteuffel, comprising the 14th Panzers, the 44th and 298th Infantry. 14th Panzer Korps, von Wietersheim, 13th Panzers. 48th Panzer Korps, Kempl, comprising the 11th Panzers, the 54th and 75th Infantry.’

  ‘Astonishing,’ said Reggie. ‘I don’t suppose you could recite that backwards?’

  Stahl closed his eyes as though projecting an image onto the back of his eyelids and recited the entire list from bottom to top, Reggie checking every item against his notes.

  ‘Jolly good. Do you know, I think I’ve got enough to be going on with. I think we might take a bit of a break now, eh?’

  He smiled at Cal. Cal knew he was bursting, simply bursting to tell somebody.

  ‘There is just one thing,’ Stahl said. ‘The date? You haven’t asked me the date.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Reggie, as if surprised that he might have forgotten anything. ‘Oh bugger.’

  ‘June 22nd. The anniversary of the 1812 invasion by Napoleon. At dawn, needless to say.’

  ‘Right,’ said Reggie. ‘If you chaps will excuse me for an hour or so . . .’

  He scuttled out.

  Stahl looked at Cal.

  ‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘So soon?’

  ‘I doubt he means to be rude, but I guess you told him what he wanted to know.’

  ‘There’s more,’ said Stahl. ‘Much more than dates and division numbers. There are ideas in this. And an idea of Russia so big that it would shock Mr Ruthven-Greene.’

  ‘Try shocking me instead.’

  § 88

  Reggie would not take no for an answer. He brushed McKendrick’s secretary aside and took the inner office by storm. McKendrick looked at him across the top of his glasses and said, ‘What’s so bloody important you have to barge in here like a gatecrasher? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  He waved his secretary away and told Reggie to close the door.

  ‘Let’s hear it, Reggie.’

  Reggie was almost breathless with glee.

  ‘Stahl is everything the Americans cracked him up to be. Memory like a Pathé newsreel. Marvellous stuff, sir, simply marvellous.’

  ‘Give me the edited version, Reggie.’

  ‘June 22nd, dawn. Luftwaffe attack precedes Panzer invasion and Infantry. He reckons three million men under arms, possibly more.’

  McKendrick thought this important enough to merit taking off his glasses.

  ‘As many as that?’ he said flatly. ‘Oh well, it’s pretty much what I thought. Just the scale is a wee bit bigger. No matter . . .’

  ‘When do we tell the Russians?’ Reggie asked.

  McKendrick thought this important enough to merit putting his glasses back on.

  ‘We don’t,’ he said.

  ‘What?!?’

  ‘We don’t tell them. But, to be exact . . . we have already told them.’

  ‘I do hope I’m not being dim, sir, but I don’t get it.’

  ‘Remember Reggie, I said all along that you were “confirming sources”?’

  Reggie vaguely remembered.

  ‘Our ambassador in Moscow saw Vice-Commissar Vyshinsky at the Soviet Foreign Office on the twenty-third of April. He’d asked for a meeting with Stalin in person. A Vice-Commissar was all the audience he got. Nonetheless, he delivered our warning. We gave Stalin the date and the time of the German invasion six weeks ago, and as far as our sources can tell, Stalin’s only reaction was to dismiss the ambassador as some sort of agent provocateur.’

  ‘Six weeks ago? How did we know six weeks ago? Six weeks ago Stahl was still on the run.’

  McKendrick said ‘Reggie, shut up. Don’t ask. Don’t tell’ . . . and looked enigmatic.

  § 89

  ‘Imagine,’ Stahl began, ‘a German settlement as a series of concentric circles, like the rings on a target – but each ring is a layer in a racial hierarchy. At the centre, the pure Nordic stock – not just Germans, but Dutch and Danes and Norwegians. English too – the maddest of plans has planned for the eventual surrender of the English. As the circles fan out, ripples around a stone in water, the lesser races. Perhaps a circle of Estonians or Byelorussians, until you get to the perimeter, and beyond the perimeter are the races condemned to barbarism. The Slavs.’

  ‘And the Jews?’ Cal asked.

  ‘No. Not the Jews.’

  ‘Then where are they?’

  ‘Nowhere. The Jews are no more. Imagine a series of such settlements strung out from the Bug River to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Caspian, linked by new roads, roads made straight for soldiers and Panzers, or made high along every ridge to keep them clear of snow. And what you have is a map of the moon or Mars in some scientific romance. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist. It is occupied by the higher races as though in some atmosphere unbreathable by man; the colony is a bubble – the bubble civilisation. Enough barbarians have been left this side of the Urals to labour for us all – they sow and reap the Ukrainian wheat fields, they drill and pump the Caucasian oil – they are taught to sign their names but expressly forbidden literacy, and if they prove too fecund they are sterilised. But, being inferior they are happy in their inferiority. Does any of this sound familiar? Because this is what those madmen are going to do.’

  ‘It’s part Brave New World – “gee, I’m so glad I’m not an alpha” – but it’s Roman in its model,’ said Cal. ‘It reminds me of all those Roman forts scattered across Britain, linked by military roads. But the Romans at least absorbed the local populace eventually – they made Romans of some of them.’

  ‘The Germans won’t. Russia will know a new slavery beyond the bounds of the serfdom they shook off less than a hundred years ago. Beyond the fort, a new dark age. Within a new civilisation.’

  ‘They make a wilderness and call it peace. That’s what Tacitus wrote of the Romans’ first century in Britain.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Stahl. ‘ The Pax Germanica – a bubble of civilisation in a vast wilderness of their own making.’

  ‘And the Jews. They’re going to exterminate the Jews?’

  ‘Eventually. They have no scheme I know of as yet other than sticking them up against a wall and shooting them. Thousands of Polish Jews have died that way. But Heydrich will think of something. The Jewish Question long ago became the Jewish Problem. A problem requires a solution. Heydrich’s good at that sort of thing. And east of the current front line, the entire territory is already regarded as an SS fiefdom. The only law will be death’s-head’s law. Himmler sees himself as an Emperor for the East – but Heydrich is the smarter man. If they succeed, it will be Heydrich who rules this wilderness.’

  § 90

  Crossing the lobby of Claridge’s, Cal heard a woman’s voice say ‘There he is now’, and turned to see the receptionist talking to an RAF officer.

  ‘Captain Cormack,’ she called out to him. ‘A gentleman to see you.’

  A gentleman he might be – but he was the oddest-looking RAF officer Cal had ever seen. RAF blouse, with green corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt and gumboots.

  ‘I’m Orlando Thesiger,’ the scarecrow said, in a voice as posh as Reggie’s.

  This meant nothing to Cal. It was hardly a name to be forgotten once heard.

  ‘Walter worked for me,’ he added. ‘It was me seconded him to your operation.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Walter never did t
ell me your name. Always called you the Squadron Leader. Told me odd bits about all the fun he had out in Sussex.’

  ‘Essex, actually. Wot larx, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, that was pretty much how he saw things.’

  ‘Look, you must excuse the clobber – we’re a bit off the beaten track in Essex, and the walk to the station’s a trifle muddy . . . all the same, I was wondering if you’d care for a spot of lunch. A spot of lunch and a bit of a chat.’

  Cal wouldn’t. He couldn’t face the off-the-ration champagne and foie gras diet of the English upper classes again. It seemed somehow to run against his current feelings. It seemed like pissing on the graves of dead men. He knew the time – there was a huge clock on the wall just above Thesiger’s head – but feigned looking at his wristwatch.

  ‘Won’t take long,’ Thesiger said. ‘I brought sandwiches.’

  He tapped the side of his gas mask case.

  ‘I thought we could just sit in the park for quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Sandwiches?’ Cal said, warming.

  ‘Yes. In the park. Brought enough for two.’

  Grosvenor Square was sunny. Thesiger slipped off his blouse and sat in his shirt and braces. With the last vestige of rank and service stripped from him he looked more like a pig farmer having a day in the city than a spycatcher. But, then, what did spycatchers look like? Cal carefully hung Kevin Stilton’s blue jacket on the end of the bench. One day he might have to give it back.

  Thesiger flipped the lid on his sandwich tin.

  ‘Help yourself, old chap.’

  Cal bit into an indeterminate paste. He knew he was pulling a face, but it tasted like nothing on earth.

  ‘Sardine and Bovril,’ said Thesiger. ‘My favourite. Ever since Nanny used to make them when I was a boy. Many’s the time Walter and I ate sardine and Bovril butties together.’

  Cal forced down a lump. Very salty, very fishy, with a curious undertaste of beef. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Walter.’

  ‘Quite. No point in beating about the bush, is there? My line isn’t the front line. I’ve never lost a man before. If you can see what I mean. Walter’s death was shocking, simply shocking. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you, but by the time those thick buggers in Scotland Yard bothered to tell me what had happened, someone else had already got you out. If I’d known, I’d have cleared you right away. I gather you had rather an awful couple of days. And after that, well, it was Reggie’s show, so I kept out of it until now. But you’re right, it is Walter that brings me here. I want to know exactly how he died.’