Ernst fired off his gun several times in no particular direction till Hambledon, snatching out his own Luger, drilled him through the shoulder. He dropped his gun to clasp his arm and Hambledon hit him on the side of the head with all his strength.
Walter had disengaged himself from the mêlée and, having drawn a lungful of wood smoke, was clinging to the doorpost coughing his heart out. He was, in fact, a consumptive.
Micklejohn got up again, limping, and was about to resume operations when the flames reached a heap of shavings in a corner and blazed up in real earnest.
Franz uttered a shout of warning. “Get out, get out! The explosives!” He dodged into the doorway, taking Walter with him.
“Explosives?” said Ernst, shaking his head as though Hambledon’s punch had rattled his brains. “What explosives?”
“Under the floor, you fool! Run!”
They ran, dragging the coughing Walter with them, down the long shed and out of the door at the far end into the night. The flames, encouraged by the draught from the door, ran up the partition.
“We’d better go too, hadn’t we?” said Micklejohn, edging round the table.
“Not that way, I think,” said Hambledon, tearing at an old tarpaulin which had been nailed to the wall like wartime blackout. “I think there’s a window behind this—yes, there is. They might be waiting for us at the other end—you never know.” The rotten tarpaulin gave way and the equally rotten window frame went out with a crash. “Can you get out or shall I—oh, good. I was afraid that fellow had really hurt you.”
“Only hacked my shin and it serves me right. You did warn me,” said Micklejohn as Hambledon scrambled out after him. “Now what?”
“Run,” said Hambledon, “before the place blows up.”
They ran off behind the shed and found a fence. They went over it like cats and dodged among tree trunks till Micklejohn came upon a path. They trotted along more easily, having their way illuminated by the leaping flames from the big shed, which, being made of old tarred timber, burned like a torch.
“They had better do something quickly about that fire,” said Hambledon, “or they’ll have the trees alight. Ever seen a forest fire, Micklejohn?”
Before Micklejohn had time to answer there was a sudden hollow boom; they took cover behind tree trunks and saw sparks and flame and burning timbers hurled high into the air to fall slowly over a wide area with pattering noises like the first heavy drops of a storm; something small and heavy crashed through the branches of Micklejohn’s tree and thudded into the ground behind him.
“If that doesn’t wake up the village,” said Hambledon thoughtfully, “it’s a poor lookout for the Last Trump.”
Reaction seized upon Micklejohn, who leaned against his tree and laughed till the tears came.
“I was hoping to leave the district with my usual modest unostentation,” added Hambledon, “but I don’t think it’s going to work this time. I’ve got a car, such as it is—here’s the road.”
They came out upon the road and began to walk along it, hearing excited shouting from the direction of the village and the sound of a car engine being started.
“Waldecke is awake,” said Micklejohn.
The noise from the car increased suddenly and twin head lamps lit up the road as they came.
“The Vopos,” said Micklejohn, “they’ve got the only car in the village,” and he turned to dive into the bushes but Hambledon seized him by the arm and dragged him back.
“Stand fast,” he said, “if you’ll excuse my talking like a whisky advertisement, they’ve already seen you. Do the Vopos know you at all?”
“No. Never seen me, I took care of that.”
Hambledon stepped into the road and held up his hand with a commanding gesture; the car slid to a halt with screeching brakes and a voice bellowed, “Volkspolizei!”
“I should hope so. Why the devil weren’t you here before? Or don’t you read orders on a Saturday night?”
“Mein Herr——”
“I come here on a special mission from Magdeburg,” stormed Hambledon, “expecting to find you at your posts. I suppose you were tired. I suppose you were in bed. I suppose you think that orders from General Ambromovitch can be left over till Monday. Why the hell weren’t you surrounding the place as ordered?”
“What place—we had no orders——”
“What place! The underground subversives have a meeting place and a store of arms and explosives here, under your noses, and you don’t even know it!” Hambledon shook his fists in the air. “When I report this——”
The car door opened and a fat agitated German hopped out. Over his shoulder it could be seen that the car was full of Vopos still hastily doing up buttons and buckling equipment. Hambledon flung open the other door.
“Get out and go and put the fire out! What do you mean, sitting in there doing nothing, do you think you’re in a box at the theatre? Aus! Aus!”
The men tumbled out and ran towards the burning ruins of the Möbelfabrik shed and their unhappy commander turned to follow them. “Not you! I have cleared out this nest of vipers for you with one assistant and now I am going home. You can drive me to my car. Fritz”—to Micklejohn—“don’t stand gaping there, get in the car.” Micklejohn dived inside as the first of the running villagers drew near.
“But the men,” bleated the commander, “the scoundrels who——”
“You can rake over the ashes in the morning,” said Hambledon, entering the car and slamming the door. “You may find a few blackened bones—drive on till I tell you to stop—but I doubt it. There may be some pieces hanging in trees.”
The Volkspolizei commander shuddered and drove on past the leaping flames, not very high now since the roof and most of the walls had been blown away. The commander had once been a major in an Army Commissariat branch; when his Army life came to an end with the war and there was, of course, no pension to be had, he had thought himself lucky to get a police post in a quiet country district. Waldecke was not within the frontier zone and the violent young men of the frontier guard were under a separate command, Gott sei dank. The commander had never been used to violence; all he wanted in life was a quiet office where he could sit filling up forms, for he loved filling up nice tidy forms and did it very well, not to be driving along dark roads in the small hours alone with this terrible man from Magdeburg and his downtrodden assistant. The commander discovered in himself an unexpected gush of sympathy for a young man appointed as assistant to a man like that. Dreadful.
“Stop here,” said Hambledon.
The car stopped at the entrance to the cart track up which Hambledon had driven Kirsch’s car earlier in the night. The Vopo commander leapt out.
“One word, I beg,” he said. “I implore the Herr to believe that I received no orders for this evening from Magdeburg; indeed, indeed, I am most meticulous about opening orders at once. Mein Herr, the orders must have been misdirected—lost in transit—stolen——”
Hambledon, half out of the car, appeared to hesitate.
“I suppose that is possible,” he said slowly. “I find it hard to believe that a man of your rank would deliberately ignore an order. Certainly, once the alarm was given, you brought your men upon the scene with commendable promptitude.”
The commander practically wagged his tail.
“I was sure that the Herr’s sense of justice would prevail. I will lodge a strongly worded complaint with Magdeburg about the non-arrival of these orders.”
“Just a moment,” said Hambledon, and drew his feet back into the car. “I don’t think you had better do that. I don’t think it would be wise. If, by any chance, the loss of the orders was not carelessness but deliberately arranged—you see what I mean?”
“You mean——” began the commander, and stopped.
“You have it. Your complaint would be looked for and abstracted like the orders, and endless confusion would result.”
“Dreadful. Ach! Dreadful!”
“I am myself driving straight back to Magdeburg now and I will visit Command Headquarters first thing in the morning. If I myself give a full account of what has happened here—including the non-arrival of your orders—all will be made clear with no possibility of leakage. You agree?”
“But, of course——”
“And an enquiry can be set in train from the Headquarters end.”
“Excellent. From every conceivable aspect preferable. In my report of tonight’s doings, what should I say, then?”
“For your own records, a full account, naturally. As for a report to Headquarters it would be better to wait until you hear from them. I shall, after all, be making your report for you and will explain that you have qualms about entrusting it, in writing, to possibly unreliable communications. You will hear from them in due course by a reliable messenger.”
“A thousand thanks. What a relief! I shall remember the Herr with gratitude to the end of my life. With apologies, I have a small flask of schnapps in the car, the Herr must be exhausted and thirsty, I should be so greatly honoured——”
“Thank you. I think a little something would go down very well.”
The commander produced a flask which must have contained at least half a pint, pulled the cup off the bottom of it, unscrewed the cap, and handed both to Hambledon, who was, indeed, not sorry for a little restorative. It had been a crowded evening. He said: “Prosit!,” drank, and asked if his young assistant might also——
“Oh, please——”
So Micklejohn had a small tot while Hambledon explained that though young and inexperienced he was really shaping quite well on the whole. “Now you, Commander. No, I insist.”
“What name,” said the commander, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, “shall I be permitted to remember with honour?”
Hambledon got out of the car and shook hands. “In the branch in which I have the honour to serve,” he said solemnly, “we do not use names. If you refer to X37, Headquarters will understand. Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Commander. Would you mind moving your car a few yards? Mine is parked away up this lane. Come, Fritz.”
Hambledon led the way up the track with long strides, Micklejohn dutifully keeping half a pace behind. The old car started at the first attempt and they drove out into the road, past the saluting figure of the commander, and turned right for Ilsenburg.
“Congratulate me,” said Hambledon, “for I have attained a lifetime’s ambition.”
“Certainly I do,” said Micklejohn. “Congratulations, sir. What about?
“For years I have had a secret longing for somebody to call me X37 and at last I’ve managed it.”
“Sounds like a policeman to me.”
“What? Oh. Oh, well, you may be right. I thought the name of Ludwig Kirsch had been bandied about quite enough for the moment. Policeman, eh? Never mind. I took some trouble to muzzle him for the moment, Micklejohn, because we’ve got to go back to Magdeburg to pick up our exit passes for Helmstedt. I didn’t want him ringing up Headquarters early in the morning with a dramatic story about bangs in the dark and have old Ambromovitch demanding a full account of it tomorrow afternoon and probably well into the night. I want to get away as soon as possible.”
22: Dead or Alive
They drove away through the sleeping countryside; just before they reached Ilsenburg an odd light high in the air to the west caught Hambledon’s eye. He slowed down, staring, and stopped the car for a moment.
“What in the name of Heaven is that?”
It was a great cross of glowing light and looked as though it were hanging in the sky.
“That,” said Micklejohn, “is what they call the East German Cross. It’s a huge wooden one about sixty feet high on a hilltop in the Western Zone near Bad Harzburg. It is covered all over with reflectors and on Saturday nights they floodlight it from the ground. You can see it for miles and miles into the Soviet Zone and people creep out after dark to look at it sometimes. You know. It rather awes me.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Hambledon.
He drove on for some time and then stopped the car again off the road in a quiet spot.
“It is now a little after 3 A.M.,” he said, “and only forty miles to Magdeburg. There is no sense in arriving there at 5 A.M., making people wonder what we’ve been doing all night. I simply loathe people wondering what I’ve been doing. Besides, the offices won’t be open till eight. Let’s have two or three hours’ sleep. Can you sleep in this wagon-non-lit?”
“I think I should sleep if I were pegged up on a clothesline,” said Micklejohn frankly.
“Sleep well,” said Hambledon. He turned his shoulder to his companion, snuggled down into his corner, and closed his eyes, though how much he slept is another matter.
At six he woke Micklejohn by the simple method of starting the car and driving off. Micklejohn, whose young energies seemed completely restored by two and a half hours’ sleep sitting up in a cramped space, woke up at once.
“Good morning,” said Hambledon. “I hope you slept well.”
“Yes, thank you. Good morning, Mr. Hambledon. I hope that you also had a good night.”
“Passable,” said Hambledon, slowing down for a herd of cows, “passable. Which is more than can be said for these beasts, isn’t it? Let us talk German, shall we? They might overhear us and give us away. Take your fool’s tail out of my radiator, Strawberry.”
When they had passed the cows Micklejohn asked whether Hambledon knew anything about a thing called the Smirnov Plan. “I started it off to you as soon as I heard that you were in Goslar, but communications seemed a little——”
“I know,” said Hambledon. “Difficult. But I got it all right. Want to hear the whole story? Listen.”
Hambledon talked on to an enthralled audience and ended: “So after it had all been carefully photographed I brought it back as a nice present for the Russians. Not a very civilised people but they’re great on presents.”
“But why not simply remove it——”
“And have them thinking out a brand new plan we know nothing about? Not likely.”
At Magdeburg there was no difficulty about the exit permits, as Hambledon had had the forethought to get a signed authorisation for them from General Ambromovitch’s office beforehand.
“Breakfast?” asked Micklejohn.
“Certainly, breakfast. I know a pleasant café down by the river. Come on.”
They sat on the terrace in the morning sunshine; since it was Sunday, a few church bells rang halfheartedly, but there were no little groups of people, prayer books in hand, making their way through the streets. The Communists do not encourage Sunday observance, as is well known, secularisation is the word of power, and traffic and people passed busily about as on a weekday.
“You wouldn’t think it was Sunday,” said Micklejohn. He emptied his second cup of coffee and attacked his third roll. He received no answer and looked round in surprise to see Hambledon sitting very still in his chair, with his hat tilted forward over his eyes. He was watching two men who were walking together past the café; one was a small neat man who looked across at Hambledon, raised his hat, and bowed. Hambledon made no response whatever. The other man was tall and lean, dark-skinned and saturnine, with a deeply lined face, he did not look in Hambledon’s direction at all. The two men walked on quickly and could be seen to be deep in conversation.
The moment they were out of sight Hambledon sprang to his feet, threw a note upon the table, pointed it out to the attentive waiter, said: “Come on, Micklejohn,” and walked rapidly away, leaving his coffee unfinished. Micklejohn abandoned his roll and hurried after Hambledon, who was already starting the car.
Micklejohn jumped in beside him, shut the door, and said: “Who were those two men?”
Hambledon swung the car off the car park and drove away without answering. When they were at last clear of the city and upon the road to Helmstedt he settled down to send the car along at the utmost speed of which she was capable.
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“Those two men,” he said, and laughed abruptly. “The small fair one is Lorenz Grober, a German in Russian Intelligence. He came to see Ludwig Kirsch at his house at Goslar. Kirsch being already in gaol, he saw me instead and as he’d never seen Kirsch I managed to persuade him that I was Kirsch. He then kindly arranged this little trip for me and even met me at Helmstedt, to ensure that I wasn’t held up on the Russian frontier. The other man’s name is Dittmar and he is probably the one man in the whole Soviet Zone of Germany who knows that my name is Hambledon and not Kirsch. Tiresome, isn’t it?”
Micklejohn thought this over and considered that “tiresome” as a summary was a trifle inadequate.
“But he was the tall dark man—are you sure he saw you? And recognised you? I thought he did not look across at all.”
“He saw me all right; that’s why he didn’t look again. As for recognising me, he was shadowing me round Goslar for a fortnight on Kirsch’s orders, Kirsch was his boss. When things blew up and Kirsch and another man were arrested, Dittmar ran for it and got clear away.”
“But what’s he doing here with the other man, Grober?”
“All in the network of Russian Intelligence. I expect Dittmar knew him by name and where to find him. Dittmar had to get out of the Western Zone because the police were after him. No doubt he made his way here and went to see Grober to report and ask for another post. I ought to have thought of it. It’s obvious, when you come to think of it. We ought to have had a pint of beer in a cellar for breakfast instead of coffee on a terrace, but I thought I was the illustrious Herr Kirsch still and it wouldn’t matter if I was seen. They would know that I had picked up our exit permits, you see.”
“Yes. For Helmstedt. And we’re making for Helmstedt.”
“That’s right. It’s only thirty miles from Magdeburg and we’ve covered more than half the distance already and the Russians simply hate getting up early and it’s Sunday anyway. Grober is not a very important person, it may be some time before he can induce anybody to listen to him—I hope.”
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