Agent of Death (7 page)

‘Couldn’t they have bent the rules for men like you?’

‘No,’ said 245, ‘you don’t understand. It’s central to their beliefs. They think they are the master race, destined to take over the world, and the lesser races – especially the Jews – must perish. We Jews are a poison in their blood. It’s a matter of principle to them. It’s not some extra that could be ignored. It’s the core of their beliefs. It’s passion, it’s faith, it’s religion.’ They sat quietly for a while and worked on the computer. Then 416 spoke again.

‘So why do you speak such good Polish?’

‘My wife was Polish.’

‘Ah,’ said 416, ‘I understand. My wife was English.’

‘Is your wife alive?’ said 245.

‘No,’ said 416, ‘but I have a son, David, who is in England and serves in the British air force. I think he is alive. I hope so. What about your family?’

‘I don’t know,’ said 245. ‘I have uncles and cousins in America. But I know nothing of my wife and children.’

Both men writhed in the pain of what they knew of those they loved, and the pain of what they did not know. Then 416 changed the subject to something better and safer. He was good at things like that. He was good at tricks of all kinds.

‘Tell me again,’ said 416. ‘Tell me about this vessel.’

‘It’s four subs in one,’ said 245, ‘four pressure hulls side by side. They call each hull a
tube
, you see.’ Number 416 nodded. ‘The top one is the control tube for the Kriegsmarine sailors. That’s where we are now, then there’s an identical tube right underneath – they call that the lower tube, then there’s two half-length tubes, one on either side of the control tube, and a little below it. And all these tubes are locked together with cross-bracings, and there are small access tubes, joining the main tubes, so the crew can get from one to the other.’

‘Ah,’ said 416, ‘so what we saw in the pen was just the outer hull?’

‘Yes. A streamlined shell with the four tubes inside it.’

‘Why didn’t they just build one big submarine?’

‘Cheaper this way. And quicker. They were already making prefabricated sections for their Type Twenty-One submarines. The sections are made at several different sites, then moved to special bases for assembly. That way the British can’t stop it with their bombers. Too many targets to hit.’

‘So what, exactly, are these sections?’ said 416.

Number 245 thought for a moment. ‘Imagine a big sausage cut into eight pieces.’

‘Yes.’

‘Each piece contains its meat and spices. Everything it needs.’

‘Yes.’

‘Imagine that each piece was made separately in different places. But bring them together, join them up, and you have the complete sausage.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, same for the Type Twenty-One. Eight prefabricated sections, each with all its special machinery: its
meat
and
spices
. Join them up and you get the complete boat.’ He shrugged. ‘Except that on this giant boat, the control tube and the lower tubes are nearly twice the length of a Type Twenty-One tube. They have fourteen sections, not eight, and the two half-length tubes, port and starboard, which aren’t really half-length, but normal Type Twenty-One length.’ Number 416 nodded, trying to visualize the whole thing, which was hard for him but so easy for 245 because he was an expert on Type Twenty-Ones; he’d worked at the Blohm and Voss shipyard, making sections for them. ‘So, when they planned the Führerboat, instead of starting from nothing, they used the existing sections to build four tubes, then linked them, and covered them with an outer casing.’

‘Clever,’ said 416.

‘Oh yes,’ said 245. ‘They kept the Type Twenty-One conning tower, and control room, kept four sets of engine sections, and then altered some of the rest. Especially those for the port tube: the Mem Tav tube.’

‘Mem Tav!’ said 416, and sighed.

‘I know,’ said 245. ‘Wicked devils! Using Hebrew to name it.’

‘That was Abimilech Svart himself. His joke.’

A sailor came past. He briefly stared at the two slavies, who engrossed themselves in their work. Then he was gone, and 416 spoke. ‘We can’t let them use it. I’ve seen what it does.’

‘Yes.’

‘D’you think anyone picked up your radio transmissions?’

‘They must have,’ said 416. ‘The British sent their bombers. But they did not hit this boat.’ He looked around, considering. He looked at the jungle of mechanism filling the control room.

‘Surely so complex a vessel as this,’ he paused, ‘could be sabotaged?’ Number 245 looked at him and slowly nodded. Then 416 spoke again. ‘We’d go with it, of course.’

‘Huh!’ said 245. ‘They’re going to kill us anyway. They’ve only kept us alive for this.’ He tapped the eviscerated computer. ‘When we fix it, they’ll put us against the wall.’

‘So,’ said 416, ‘let’s be men. Let’s die like men.’ He sat up straight and looked at his companion. ‘Might I ask your name, sir?’

Number 245 blinked. Like non-German languages, names were forbidden at Besuboft 1, where the Polizei regiment made the slave workers use numbers, which they continued to do as a defensive discipline even when no guards were present. But not now. ‘I am Feldman,’ said 245. ‘Engineer-Doctor Heinrich Feldman, of the University of Hamburg.’ He shrugged. ‘My subject was marine engineering with a special interest in electrical control of machinery.’

Number 416 bowed his head politely. ‘And I am Gavriel Landau,’ he said. ‘Professor of electronics at the University of Warsaw.’

‘My dear professor …
Shalom
aleichem
!’

‘My dear doctor …
Aleichem
shalom
!’

They shook hands as if meeting for the first time.

‘So,’ said Landau, ‘how shall we sink this boat?’

CHAPTER 7

Natalia Kovshova,

Peshka
PE
2
high
-
speed
bomber
of
the
312th
Reconnaissance
Aviation
Regiment,

500
Metres
Over
the
City
of
Ulvid
,

The
Soviet
Socialist
Republic
of
Ukraine
,

Saturday
20May
,
08
.
45
hours
.

The aircraft went into a steep dive. The pilot was showing off: showing what his machine could do, and I wished he wouldn’t because he didn’t need to. I was already impressed. The twin-engined Peshka was in the same class as the Mosquito, right down to V12 liquid-cooled engines, except that these were Russian Klimovs not Rolls Royce Merlins. The Peshka – which means
prawn
in Russian – was a fine aircraft: neat, tough, and fast. And it was making me thoroughly ill.

I was in the bombardier’s seat, close up against the pilot in the narrow, glazed cockpit. The pilot looked surprisingly oriental. He was probably a Kasakh, a Turkuman or some other type from the Soviet far east, right next to China; it was easily forgotten how big the Soviet Union was. Its land area was two and a half times that of the USA, and the Trans-Siberian Railway ran 5,753 miles.

In any case the pilot was all done out in jodhpurs and jackboots, and the quintessentially Russian
gymnastiorka
: the uniform blouse with shoulder-boards that buttons up at the neck and flaps out over the hips, which I thought was an odd rigout for an airman. But the other man was different – the one crouched behind, hanging on to my seat, jammed between it and the empty rear gun turret. He had to sit on the floor because the recce Peshka had seats for only two, with everything else stripped out for speed. He’d have passed easily for an Englishman, apart from slightly slanted cheeks. He was the senior of the two:
Polkovnic
, colonel, Ulitzky of the 6th Guards Motorized Rifles.

I groaned as the plane levelled out sharply at a few hundred feet. I’d just spent three days inside a Mosquito, flying, landing, waiting, and taking off again, to get round war zones into Soviet-held territory. All that and now this. So I’d discovered that while I was never airsick as a pilot, I certainly was as a passenger.

‘Look! There,’ said Ulitzky, and pointed at the ground, ‘See? It’s what we told you.’ My mind translated with a slight delay because Ulitzky spoke rural, peasant Russian, not the sophisticated Muscovite that my parents had used. When I’d arrived here the previous day the Russians had been astonished at my fluency, and they’d smiled, and named me
Moscow
boy
for my accent. Then they brought out the vodka, which was typically Russian and was part of the reason I felt so lousy now. But it was my own fault, too, because when I’d had a couple, I couldn’t help showing off, making bottle-tops disappear and then reappear from behind the ears of a woman officer who was present – an operational, flying, fighter pilot I would add – and not half bad looking either. She laughed a lot and made me extremely welcome later on, which was also typically Russian, at least on the Eastern Front where you might be dead tomorrow and you lived for the day. So I didn’t sleep much and now I was tired as well as sick. Served me right.

‘Comrade!’ said Ulitzky, yelling over the engine noise, and reaching out to slap the pilot’s shoulder for attention. ‘Come round! Circle over the cathedral dome. Show him! Give Moscow boy a good look.’

I should point out that while that is reasonably close to what Ulitzky said, it is not precisely accurate. That’s because it, and most other spoken Russian that I heard during my time in the USSR – especially when men were talking, and always when soldiers were talking – was full what the Russians call
Mat
, which might freely be translated as effin’ and blindin’. This I certainly didn’t learn from my parents but from the other boys in the Russian school which I attended when my father taught at Moscow University.

But effin’ and blindin’ doesn’t do justice to
Mat
for the art form which it is in Russian, assisted by the grammar of the language which changes the meaning of words with prefixes and suffixes. The nearest I can do in English to give a flavour of
Mat
is to repeat the apocryphal tale of the RAF mechanic who turned the flats off a nut and blamed the spanner by saying, and I paraphrase for decency: ‘Eff! The effer’s effed the effing thing!’ giving the dreaded eff-word first as a curse, then as a noun, then a past participle, and a finally a gerund, which is about as far as you can go in English. But Russian is different. You can do all sorts things to change a word, letting rip with a machine gun stream of swearing that transmogrifies the rude word again and again, until even a poet would shake his head in admiration. But you can’t put that into English because the grammatical cleverness is untranslatable and what would emerge would just look vulgar. So I haven’t tried. But believe me, it was there all the time even if I don’t write it down.

Meanwhile: ‘Come round,’ said Ulitzky, ‘Circle over the cathedral dome. Show him! Give Moscow boy a good look.’

I looked. The downward visibility was excellent. The Peshka’s fuselage sat high on the wings, and the cockpit stuck out in front and had a glazed floor. So the visibility was excellent but the view was appalling. I already knew what to expect because the Russians had shown me photographs, but actually seeing the streets full of corpses was truly grim. There were so many that it was hard to believe. On the other hand, it wasn’t an atom bomb that had been used. Not than nor any other high-explosive weapon, because everything was untouched, apart from being dead.

Ulitzky shouted in my ear.

‘They must have thought the raid was over. It was only one plane, remember. So they came out into the open, and they died.’ He looked down; he shook his head. Then he suddenly sobbed, and angrily wiped away the tears. ‘All dead without a mark on the body! Men, women, children, babies. Even the cats and dogs! Even the birds.’ He sighed, then, ‘Look! Look!’ he cried, as we flew over a walled yard. It was full of horse-drawn wagons, but all the horses lay dead beside their drivers.

‘Was it gas?’ I said. ‘There’s no damage from bombing or shelling. The city’s untouched.’

Ulitzky shook his head. ‘No. We thought of that. We asked the chemical warfare people. They said you can’t get enough gas in one aircraft to kill so many people, no matter how bad the gas.’ Ulitzky looked down; he shook his head. ‘But whatever it is, nobody can go near it. We’re safe up here, but anyone who goes there – down there,’ he said, shrugging, ‘they drop dead. Just fall down dead.’ He looked at me. ‘We lost over three hundred men that way, trying to help, to pick up the dead. Especially the little ones.’ He sighed. ‘So now we know better. Now we leave them where they fell.’ He wiped his eyes again.

The Peshka flew on, widening the circles to cover all the city. Most of the city was now empty. There was no life at all. But wherever there were people they were dead. Ulitzky wept while I looked on in horror.

‘How many was it that died, altogether?’ I said.

‘We don’t know for sure. But at least fifty thousand.’

‘Were there no survivors?’

‘Oh yes, thank God,’ said Ulitzky, and, despite being an officer in the atheist Red Army he devoutly crossed himself with the Russian Orthodox thumb and two fingers that invoked the Holy Trinity. ‘Ulvid is a big city,’ he said. ‘Over two hundred thousand people lived here.’ He blinked. He looked awkward. ‘But they’re all gone now. Sent away. The NKVD took them on special trains, to the east, so they can’t talk about this.’ He looked at me. ‘Nor you, Moscow boy,’ he said, and he raised his voice in angry emphasis, ‘
Nobody
talks
about
this
!
Understand
?’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘What about casualties? Any wounded?’

‘None. They lived or they died. One or the other.’

Ulitzky slapped the pilot’s shoulder again. ‘Comrade pilot! Enough. Show him the Nazi plane. You know where it is.’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel!’

The plane banked, the engine note dropped, and the pilot took us in a long dive, thankfully gentle. He came down very low, out over the river that bent around the city. He throttled well back: just enough power to avoid a stall.

‘There,’ said Ulitzky, ‘See?’

I saw a black line of fresh soil, torn through the green of a field. The line led to the wreckage of a German aircraft, partly burned out, and tumbled over onto its back. It was bigger than the Peshka and twin engined. But I felt a tickle of excitement. This aircraft wasn’t driven by piston engines and propellers. It was something else. It was the future. It was something only the Jerries had: a jet bomber.

‘It’s a jet, isn’t it?’ said Ulitzky.

‘Yes.’

‘We know everything about Nazi jets,’ said Ulitzky, angrily. ‘We’ll soon make them ourselves.
Better
ones
!’ Then he shrugged. ‘So what is it, Moscow boy, what do you know?’

I thought of the briefing notes I’d read. There’d been pictures too. Bletchley and MI5 knew some of what had happened to Ulvid, and had done their research.

‘It’s an Arado,’ I said, looking down at the German plane, ‘Can you get any lower, comrade?’ I said to the pilot. The pilot nodded, the engines roared, my guts squirmed and the Peshka all but scraped the wreckage on its next pass.

I turned to Ulitzky.

‘It’s an Arado 234. Single-seat, fast bomber. Very fast indeed. Supposed to be capable of five hundred miles per hour. That’s eight hundred kilometres per hour. So if it really
can
do that, it’s easily the fastest bomber in the world.’

Ulitzky whistled, and the pilot spoke. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘That’s why we couldn’t catch it.’

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Our boys in the Yak 9s. They can only do about six hundred and seventy.’

‘Did you try to intercept it?’

‘Not me – the fighter boys, at our base.’

‘What happened?’

‘They chased it after it passed over the city, Ulvid. But then it put on speed and just ran away from them.’

‘Then what?’

‘It began a sharp turn, as if to go back over the city, and then one of its engines caught fire.’

‘Were your machines shooting at it? Or was it flak?’

‘Oh no. It caught fire all by itself. And it slowed right down, and our boys closed in, and then there was an explosion in the aircraft, and the Fritz pilot blew out of the cockpit in his chair, and came down by parachute.’

‘That would be an ejector seat,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’ said Ulitzky.

‘Something clever the Germans have invented. To get the pilot out.’

‘We know that,’ said Ulitzky, ‘We know all about that. We could make them ourselves if we wanted to,’ he sneered. ‘But they’re for cowards: to abandon their planes. In the Red Army we shoot men for that!’ He slapped the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Go round again, comrade. I want Moscow boy to see everything.’

The pilot took us round again, as slowly as he could.

‘See the bodies?’ said Ulitzky. ‘They tried to examine the wreckage.’ I saw the figures – mostly Russian soldiers – that lay close to the Arado, plus one civilian and his dog: all dead, all unmarked. ‘It can’t be touched or approached,’ said Ulitzky. ‘Whatever it was that killed fifty thousand people, it came from that Nazi jet-plane, and it’s still active.’

‘What about the German pilot? What happened to him?’

‘We’ll take you to see him next,’ said Ulitzky. ‘He had some special equipment. Perhaps you can tell us what it is.’ He paused and thrust out one hand in a flat, dismissive gesture. ‘Not that we don’t know already,’ he said, and he said it in loud and angry denial. But then the bluster faded and he wagged his head from side to side. ‘Truth is, Moscow boy, we know nothing. That’s why we need you.’

*

I cringed at the noise, squinted through the smoke, tried to keep my shoes out of the thick mud, and realized why the Russians all wore jack boots. The 312
th
Reconnaissance Army Aviation Regiment’s base was part of a huge airfield shared by many other units, and the regiment’s twin-engined Peshkas were a small minority among Yak 9 and Mig 3 fighters, and huge numbers of heavily-armoured Ilyushin, Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft flying non-stop sorties, because while the city of Ulvid with its silent dead was beyond range of German attack, the airfield was not, and it was a bombed-out, shelled-brown, miniature recreation of the Great War’s Western Front. But it was so big that a German air attack, actually in progress at the other end of it, looked distant, with the black-cross Stukas howling down to bomb, as if in a film.

But mainly the base shook to the roar of Russian engines, as Sturmoviks by the dozen took off or landed, with the more shot up crashing horribly and screeching across the ground in lethal flame, so the whole field was decorated with burned-out fuselages, naked engines, dangling pipes and wires, and other fragments too smashed to recognize. Everywhere men shouted and waved, and hammered gravel into the craters and whipped horse-teams to clear the wreckage of the dead, so those still alive could take their chance to land if they could, and medic teams hauled out the wounded and ran them off in stretchers.