Agent of Death (6 page)

‘No. We’re winning the war. Even the Americans are knocked sideways by what we’re doing. And we’ve got some of the finest brains in England.’ She leaned forward. ‘People you’d be proud of: Goldbergs, Cohens, and Franks.’

‘Any Kominskys?’ I said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake! It was Jack’s
father
changed the name. He did it when they came to England.’ She sneered. ‘Anyway it’s easy for you. The English think Landau is French, and you’ve got blue eyes and Jimmy Stewart’s nose.’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘They knew I was Jewish at Wellington College.’

‘Only because you boasted about being it and punched anyone who didn’t like it. You should thank your Uncle Jack that you were at school in England and not left in Warsaw for the Nazis!’

‘Like my parents?’

‘They wouldn’t come. Jack asked them time after time. You know that. They thought they were safe at the university.’ I looked at my shoes. It was true.

‘So,’ she said, ‘How big was that bomb you dropped yesterday?’

I frowned. ‘Can’t tell you,’ I said, and she smiled.

‘It was ten tons, wasn’t it? Including four tons of Torpex high explosive.’

‘So what?’

‘Went off with a good bang, did it?’

I grinned. ‘I should say so. Didn’t half make a wallop. We felt it at twelve thousand feet.’

‘Right. That was four tons of HE. How about ten thousand?’

‘What?’

‘How about a bomb with an explosive yield of ten thousand tons?’

‘Impossible!’

‘Think so? Have you heard of uranium? And Albert Einstein?’

‘Another Jew. They get in everywhere, don’t they?’

She sighed. ‘We and the Americans are working on a project with uranium,’ she said, ‘to make a special bomb. OK?’ I nodded. ‘We believe –
believed
– that the Germans were way behind us in this effort.’ She blinked. She chewed her lower lip. She fell silent.

‘
Yes
?’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘interested at last?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, some recent intercepts …’

‘What are they?’

‘German radio signals that we pick up and decode. The point is that the Germans may have got it after all.’

‘A uranium bomb?’

‘
Atom
bomb,’ she said. ‘That’s what we call it, and we think the Germans may have used one on the Russians.’

‘So?’

‘So, we need a highly-educated man with a clever, devious, problem-solving mind, who speaks Russian, Polish, and German, who is not already doing Intelligence work, so the Russians can trust him.’

I sighed. My mother was English, my father was half-Russian, half-Polish, and they both spoke fluent German. So I’d got four languages from them, as a gift. That, and a gift for puzzle-solving. My father was a professor at Warsaw University, my mother a senior lecturer. And they loved puzzles. It was in the blood. My best time for the Telegraph crossword was seven and a half minutes.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why d’you need all that?’

‘Because we’re sending you into Russian territory,

‘
Why
?’

‘Because the Russians are so frightened that they’ve asked for our help.’ She sighed. ‘
Us
, not the Americans, because they know about the uranium project, and they’re more frightened of America than Germany. They think they can beat Germany, but not America with the atom bomb. If you follow me?’

‘Not really. They’re not fighting America.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. I shook my head in disgust.

‘Get on with it.’

‘So. You will be allowed in as the official British observer, but only as a privileged act of goodwill, and only so long as they think you are a distinguished air force officer
and
nothing
else
.’ I frowned.

‘Aren’t the Russkies going to be suspicious if I speak four languages? That’s not natural for an RAF type. They’ll think I’m one of your lot. A bloody spook.’

‘Ah,’ she said, and raised immaculately curved eyebrows, and smiled the smile of a woman who knows what others don’t.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘The thing is, David, we have our very own little set of traitors at Bletchley Park.’

I sneered in contempt.

‘Oh, no,’ she chided, ‘You don’t know how useful they are. They are intellectual communists who report direct to Moscow, and we feed them with just exactly what we want them to know.’

‘So?’

‘So Moscow believes what they say, and
they
will say that you really
are
an RAF officer with four languages. They’ll say it because it’s true!’ She paused, spread her hands in encouragement, and slowly I nodded.

‘That’s clever. Perverse but clever.’ I shrugged. I gave in.

‘So what am I supposed to observe? When I get there.’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Bloody hell.’

She looked at her watch. ‘You’re about the same size as your wing commander, aren’t you?’

‘So?’

‘So you’ll wear his tunic when you leave.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve been promoted. Congratulations.’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘Can’t you say anything else?’

‘But the wingco’s got the Military Cross. I can’t wear that.’

‘Yes, you can. And you’ll find that’s an order.’

‘But I haven’t bloody earned it!’

‘Oh, do shut up. It’ll impress the Russians. They like medals.’

She stood, looked at her watch again, put on the fox-fur, and picked up her handbag. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘No sign of the sandwiches. Let’s join Sword-and-pistol Sanders and the others. We might as well have lunch. We’ll give you some documents to read on the flight. But you are most particularly to look for anything involving a German called Abimilech Svart and something called Mem Tav.’

I nodded. ‘We were briefed about Svart, I suppose you know that?’

‘Yes. It was Bletchley that identified him as a target.’

‘What? Him personally?’

She nodded. ‘Him and pen six. It’s got something to do with Mem Tav.’

‘So what’s Mem Tav?’

‘It’s this thing the Germans have got. Possibly the atom bomb.’

‘I see,’ I said, ‘I thought you meant letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

‘Oh, but I do. Mem and Tav represent
mavet
, the Hebrew word for death. Hebrew scholars don’t write down the vowels. Just the ...’

‘Consonants. I know that. But it’s
Hebrew
. The Jerries wouldn’t use Hebrew. Would they?’

‘In this case, yes. Those intercepts I mentioned …’

‘Yes?’

‘One was a message from Svart to Hitler, boasting that Mem Tav had been used for the first time:
mit
herrlich
restultate
.’

‘With wonderful results? ‘

‘Yes. With wonderful results. Which means appalling. That’s what you’re going to investigate.’

CHAPTER 6

The
Führerboat,

At
Snorkel
Depth
in
the
Jedebasin
,

Monday
15 May
,
14
.
10
hours.

Weber forced himself not to cry out as they dragged him to safety. He knew there was no way this could be done gently. Not down vertical ladders.

Anyway, he was black SSA while they were scruffy sailors in the enemy’s khaki. So he clenched his teeth as they hauled him below, through cramped spaces, crammed face to face with those trying to help him. And slam-bang, slam-bang! Hatches closed and lock-wheels spun to shut out the light and air.

He made no fuss, but it hurt just the same: raw burns on the back of his head and shoulders; the narrow spaces stank of singed hair and wool, and the sour smoke of burned plastic from the peaks of the Kriegsmarine caps. Weber elbowed the hands off him. He’d do the rest himself. He got down the last ladder unaided and looked round. He was in the control room, a big compartment right under the conning tower.

Bright lights, shiny metal, linoleum underfoot. He’d been there many times, but never with the decks trembling to eight diesel engines as the boat went full ahead. As ever, he stared at the dials, wheels, tubes, and God knows what else. Everything was crammed with them, not a square centimetre left plain, and none of it meant anything to him. Only to the men who, at their stations in the near-chaos of a huge vessel, underway for the first time – untried, under fire, brand new; the officers yelling at the men and darting from one to another, improvising, correcting, and extemporizing.

Then every man clutched his head at the agony in his ears when the air pressure dropped hideously and the diesels screamed, as the brand new, wonder device, feeding them air while submerged, showed its flaw. The boat had dived too far, causing the valve on the snorkel, up above, to slam shut as the sea rose over it, leaving forty-eight cylinders and sixteen thousand horsepower with no other way to get air than to suck it out of the boat’s insides with almighty force. Someone spun a control wheel, the boat rose and …

‘Aaaaaah!’ Everyone screamed at the agonizing relief as the snorkel-head broke water, the valve opened, and air roared back to fill the partial vacuum.

Weber was sick and dizzy. His head was whirling and his stomach heaving. A hand grabbed him as he stumbled. It was Zapp, waiting as ever with his foul breath. Weber pushed him away. He looked up at the steel ceiling so close above his head. The boat was shaking to detonations above. You could hear it through the water. The thunder and rumble was muted, but the whole boat resonated. Then he noticed men lying on the deck around him: Captain Sohler, who was struggling to get up, and two others who were not. They were badly burned: charred black from head to heels down the length of their bodies, but only on their backs which had faced the explosion. Weber thought of toast that was burned on one side and fresh on the other.

He stared. These gravely-injured men had been in the port watch station while he and Sohler were in the starboard. The structures were different, and obviously one gave more protection than the other. It was chance. It was luck. Weber shrugged. It was the same on the East Front. Some died, some didn’t.

Then a man was talking earnestly into his face, a serious man with round glasses and a medic’s insignia. He was the boat’s senior doctor, and he was pulling at Weber’s arm. Others were gently lifting the half-incinerated men and carrying them off on stretchers, while Sohler, wobbling on his feet, was talking intently to the officer of the watch. He poked a finger at a chart. The officer saluted. Sohler spoke on, pointing at various dials and indicators. He talked for some time. Then the officer nodded, Sohler nodded, and a medic took his arm and led him off. Sohler looked back and beckoned to Weber, who followed.

It seemed a long way to the sick bay, and an awkward way, through the innards of an iron beast filled with snaking entrails of tubes and pipes and unknowable things that curled and twisted every wriggling way. And every few steps there were bulkheads with holes to clamber through, and hatches to slam shut, and men urging him on so they could seal each compartment from the next. Weber was soon staggering and, of necessity, he let Zapp support him; half carry him.

Afterwards, Weber didn’t properly remember the sick bay. It was large and clean and smelt like a hospital, and the staff wore clean, white smocks. He vomited violently several times. They cut off his clothes, and covered his burns with Vaseline and sulphanilamide, and put sterile dressings on top. He remembered that much, then Zapp heaved him face down into a bunk and put a blanket over him, and someone stabbed him with a hypodermic. He slept easily, as long has he didn’t roll onto his back. He woke when he did that, and, being half doped, he did cry out.

Zapp stood by him like a mother and tucked him in each time.

*

Sohler was attended personally by Dr Billroth, the boat’s senior medic, and once his burns were dressed, Sohler told Billroth give him something to keep him alert, because he wasn’t going to be put into a bunk like Weber … that black
Berliner
… he didn’t like Weber.

‘But, Captain,’ said Billroth, ‘you need rest, and we’ll need you later, and we’ll need you fit.’

Sohler sighed. ‘There won’t be a
later
if we don’t get out to sea. There’s only a few metres under the keel here.’ So Billroth grumbled and frowned, then handed over some benzedrine tablets. He saved face by insisting that the captain must exert himself to keep the dressings clean and undamaged. That way there’d be no scarring.

Sohler thanked the doctor and went back to the control room wearing his dress tunic. His Tommy blouse was burned and anyway the tunic was looser and slipped over the dressings. Someone found him his cap too, the cap with the white top that said he was the boat’s commander. So the men stood respectfully to attention as he passed, and he straightened his back to prove that their captain was fully himself. But it was agony getting through the hatchways and he nearly fell several times. It helped that the boat was now level, steady, and quiet, with her diesels asleep and the electrics driving the boat.

The cramped control room was full of equipment and unnaturally full of men. Not just the watch and those brought in to help, but forced-labour foreigners – slavies – in their stripes. These were still working on the navigator board, the attack sonar, and much else. Equipment was slid out of its racks and laid on small tables, and even on the deck, among a litter of tools, spares, wire, and tiny thermionic valves in their wrappings. The foreigners bowed their heads as he passed, avoiding his eyes. Sohler stared at them. They were an ugly necessity. This brand new wonder-boat was full of SSA electronics designed by Abimilech Svart himself. Much of it was so new that the slavies were not so much installing it, as developing and building it, and their task was much harder than that of technicians working with standard equipment that was proven in use. So who knew how long it would be until their work was done?

But the real submariners, the men on watch, all sat up and glanced swiftly over their shoulders, pleased to see their captain back, while
Oberleutnant
Sur
Zee,
or first lieutenant, Kuhnke stood to attention and smiled. Like Sohler, Kuhnke was a veteran but he was still glad to see his captain. The Führerboat was a marvel of design, but it had never been to sea, only floated out from its launch site and towed half a kilometre downriver into pen six for fitting out.

Sohler felt better here, which wasn’t surprising. As a boy he’d been obsessed by U-boats and the men who sailed them for the Kaiser. He’d been a submariner himself since 1935, in the tiny Type Twos that Germany wasn’t even supposed to have. He’d survived the U-boat happy times and the bad times; he was one of the few officers who’d commanded one of the revolutionary Type Twenty-Ones at sea, and now he was
feeling
the giant boat all round him, and listening to her.
That
before even looking at the instruments.

Good. Everything in order. Machinery running, lights steady, crew alert … and no more thundering explosions. Since the sea carried sound for countless miles, that meant the raid on Besuboft 1 was over.

‘So?’ said Sohler, as Kuhnke touched his cap in salute.

‘Steady at six knots, Captain. Rigged for silent running. Depth five metres, following the dredged channel, on course for North Sea as ordered, sir.’

‘Good. Anything above? Engine noise? Anything?’

‘No, Captain.’ Kuhnke blinked, ‘Er …sir? Sorry about dousing the snorkel.’

‘Huh!’ Sohler waved a hand. ‘Everyone does that. Specially in a new boat.’ Sohler nodded at the forced-labour men, ‘What about them? When will they be finished?’ Kuhnke shrugged.

‘They say a few hours but they’ve said that for a week.’ Sohler nodded. ‘It’s untried equipment,’ said Kuhnke. ‘If it works, so much the better. But otherwise …’

‘We navigate as ever we did,’ said Sohler.

‘And attack the same way,’ said Kuhnke.

Sohler shook his head. ‘Not likely. I don’t think we’ll be sinking ships.’

‘Then what
are
we doing?’ Kuhnke lowered his voice. ‘We’re obviously not saving the Führer. And where are we going?’

‘We’re taking this boat out into the North Sea,’ said Sohler, ‘then westbound, south of the Faroes and into the Atlantic, proceeding dead slow to conserve fuel.’ Kuhnke raised eyebrows in question. Sohler shrugged. ‘I don’t know where we’re going,’ he said, and he looked round the control room. He lowered his voice. ‘Where’s that other blackshirt?’ he said.

‘Zapp?’

‘Yes.’

‘With his boss.’

‘How many came aboard?’

‘I counted twenty-two blackshirts including Weber and Zapp. They’re in the starboard tube.’ Kuhnke looked closely at his captain. ‘Where we don’t go. Sir.’

‘Huh!’ said Sohler. ‘And the Mem Tav crew? How many of them?’

‘Twelve. Plus Svart and von Bloch. They’re in the port tube.’

‘Where we don’t go,’ said Sohler.

‘By order of Herr Svart,’ said Kuhnke.

‘The man himself,’ said Sohler. ‘So. There are thirty-six of them.’

‘And sixty-one of us,’ said Sohler. ‘The crew of this boat.’ They paused. They looked at each other without words, and Sohler shrugged as if to ward off the thought – even the shadow – of disloyalty.

But then Kuhnke asked a dangerous question. His voice fell to a whisper. ‘What
are
we doing, sir? What
is
Mem Tav? What’s it for?’

Sohler said nothing. This subject was strictly forbidden, and if he didn’t instantly reprimand Kuhnke, he’d be complicit in a serious offence. He thought carefully, then looked left, right, and over his shoulder in the
Deutsche
Blick
– the German Look – which wary citizens of the Reich unconsciously performed these days, before saying anything unsafe. ‘I don’t know,’ said Sohler, ‘but it’d better be good … or else!’

They nodded, and Sohler said no more because he didn’t need to. Both men knew that the war was lost for Germany. Now it was only a matter of who got raped and slaughtered by the Russians, and who got lucky and surrendered to the Yanks and Tommies.

*

Number 416 looked at the German captain and first lieutenant. They were shifty. They were talking about something forbidden. A slave worker could spot that. A slave worker was ultra-sensitive to facial expression because so were the guards at Besuboft 1. The guards were from the Politzei regiment: Jew-hating thugs empowered to deliver arbitrary beatings or refer a man for execution.

But there was no Politzei regiment aboard the submarine, and the slave workers quickly discovered that they could speak their own languages without fear. At Besuboft 1 the rule was German only when on duty. That, or lose your teeth to a rifle butt. But not here. The sailors didn’t care about languages.

Number 416 carefully snapped off one of the tiny contact pins from a thermionic valve, swallowed the pin so it couldn’t be found, and fitted the valve into a computer rack so that it looked good but did nothing. He did it so swiftly that nobody saw. He was very good at sleight of hand. He sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by tools, beside number 245, who was doing the same. They were men in their fifties; gaunt, grey, and starved, with sharp cheekbones and hollow faces. Their hands were bird claws, with blue veins and blotched skin.

They pretended to be absorbed in their work and spoke quietly in Polish. They were men who had not previously met, brought together by the sudden emergency, and just beginning to know one another.

‘So, you’re German?’ said 416.

‘Yes,’ said 245, ‘I’m German and I served in the Kaiser’s war. But they came for me anyway because I am also a Jew.’

Number 416 shook his head. ‘Don’t they know how stupid they are?’ he said. ‘If they’d embraced the Jews of Germany you’d have fought for the Fatherland. Millions of you. And men like you – a submariner.’

‘An engineer officer,’ said 245, ‘In the
Kaiserliche
Marine
. They even gave me the Iron Cross.’