* * *
McIntyre saw the danger at once, as Dietz skidded round the bend, tyres screeching in protest. ‘The gun!’ he cried and reached in his pocket. He had already opened the window at his side. Now he yelled above the racket, ‘Slow her down for half a mo then go like all hell when I tell you.’
Dietz nodded. He couldn’t speak. He knew he’d never get the words out.
Instead with a crashing of gears he changed into second gear. The other guards turned and stared at the car hurtling towards them. One of them shouted something angrily. Next instant they began firing wildly at the Opel. The windscreen shattered with startling suddenness. McIntyre thrust the thing he held in his hand at it. The glass fell out. Cold air buffeted Dietz on the face, but he could see again.
Now McIntyre opened the door and stepped onto the wooden running board, holding on to the roof with his free hand. With his teeth he ripped the pin from the little bomb. ‘Here, try this on for size!’ McIntyre yelled as the speeding car came parallel with the machine-gun team. The little Mills bomb sailed over the roof of the Opel. It exploded directly on the gun in a burst of angry scarlet flame. The three gunners went reeling back. A severed head, like a football abandoned by a child, went rolling across the bridge.
McIntyre pulled the pin out of the second bomb. He turned awkwardly on the running board. Behind them the guards were firing at the swaying, flying Opel furiously. McIntyre grunted and flung the bomb with all his strength. Again he landed a direct hit among the group of nearest guards. Men flew in all directions, screaming hideously, to lie on the road next to the railway line writhing and twisting in their mortal agony. Then the car was gone, turning and roaring up the cobbled hill that led through Lauenburg and to safety.
* * *
Hauptmann von Birkholz staggered groggily to his feet. Around him lay his dead and dying men, piled up like offal outside some peacetime butcher’s backdoor. The whole of his left side hurt like hell. But this was not the first time he had been in battle, and his Prussian sense of duty to the Fatherland made him forget his pain. The car had escaped. But the barges were barely vanishing into the mist. He must stop them! He must!
Slowly, terribly slowly, he raised the automatic assault rifle. It seemed to weigh a hundredweight. He had last used it in March 1918 in the great offensive which had almost thrown the Tommies back into the sea. Then it had seemed as light as a child’s toy. He aimed, swaying crazily as he did so, a red mist threatening to engulf him at any moment. He bit his bottom lip till the blood came, that old trick to keep from fainting.
Below him the barges had almost disappeared into the fog. But he knew they were there; he could hear the faint throb of their engines. His finger found and fixed on the trigger. He forced himself to control his harsh painful gasping. His knuckle whitened as he took first pressure. They were almost gone now. He pressed hard. The weapon erupted at his right hip. There was the stink of burnt cordite. Gleaming, smoking brass cartridge cases clattered to the cobbles. Tracer zipped lethally towards the river. Someone screamed and there was a splash as if a body had fallen overboard. ‘Auf wiedersehen’ Hauptmann von Birkholz said weakly, grinned and with his knees buckling beneath him like those of a newly born foal, collapsed on the cobbles…
* * *
Per Kersten groaned. He felt cold and sick. There was a terrible pain in his right shoulder as if someone were trying to thrust a red-hot poker deep into the bone. He shook his head and things came into focus. He was lying on the bank of the river, with little wavelets lapping about his feet. He was soaked to the skin and his left hand was clasped around the stump of a frozen bush, as if even when he had been unconscious he had been hanging on grimly to save being swept away by the Elbe’s current.
He made an effort. The barges had gone. Perhaps they had already reached the mouth of the Elbe where the fishing boats would be waiting for them. He did not know. But he did know that the alarm must have been raised by now. The police and perhaps the Reichswehr, the new German Army of the Weimar Republic, would be looking for them. He had to get to the other side of the River Eider where he would be safe among his own kind. They’d hide him all right until he was healed and could slip across the frontier at Flensburg into Denmark. But where was he?
Feeling sick and wretched, the tall ex-teacher pulled himself up the frozen bank, the icy mud crackling and popping under his weight like firecrackers exploding. There was a small cobbled road running parallel with the Elbe. But in the fog he could not see more than five or ten metres, and he had no idea which was the direction he needed if he were to go north to reach safety. He didn’t even know which side of the Elbe he was on. What was he to do?
For a few moments, shivering with the cold and his wound, he considered what he should do. If he was on the north bank of the Elbe he would attempt to find the nearest railway station and take a train north. He had plenty of money from the Englishman, plus twenty gold sovereigns in his money-belt. That should enable him to buy anything – and anybody – in post-war Germany. If he was on the south bank, then he’d go to Hamburg. In that great centre of corruption and Schieber – black-market grafters – he’d get someone with a car to take him beyond the Eider. But first he must find out where he was.
His mind made up he started to stagger down the little cobbled dyke road, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder and the fact that it had begun to bleed again – he could feel the warm liquid trickling down his back. He seemed all alone in the world, the only sound that of his own footsteps on the frozen, white cobbles.
It might have been minutes later, though to Per Kersten’s tortured body it seemed more like hours, that he started to enter the little hamlet. It was typical for that part of the world: a small church with a brick steeple, half-timbered brick houses and farms, where animals and humans were housed under the same long straw roof. But he was not interested in the place’s architecture, or its name – it meant nothing to him. But now as he flicked on his cigarette lighter and looked at the signpost, yellow with black lettering, he did know where he was. For below the name of the hamlet, he read it was located in Kreis Stormann, Stormann County, and that told him he was on the north bank of the Elbe. It would be Hamburg after all.
But Per Kersten was not fated to reach Hamburg. It was just then that the great, heavy, lumbering Mercedes came rolling out of the fog, its huge brass headlights transfixing him like a beetle pinned to a collector’s card. He flung his good arm up in front of his dazzled eyes. Instinctively he knew this was the end of the road. Even Hamburg’s grossest Schieber did not drive a huge Mercedes like that.
Slowly it rolled to a stop, those harsh white beams still holding him in their grip, as if he were mesmerised by them. ‘Stehenbleiben,’ a harsh voice commanded. ‘Nicht bewegen!’
Per Kersten peered through almost closed eyes. Two naval petty officers stood there, white caps set at cocky angles, stick grenades thrust in their leather belts, with pistols held in hands that were rock steady.
‘Nun,’ the taller of them commanded. ‘Hande hoch.’
‘I can’t,’ Per said weakly. ‘I’ve… injured my arm.’
‘It’s one of them, Kapitanleutnant,’ the taller of the two barked, looking over his shoulder.
‘Good… very good,’ a gentle, almost feminine, voice said from within the car. ‘Please have the goodness to bring him over here so that I can have a look at him.’
‘Jawohl, Herr Kapitanleutnant.’
‘Los,’ the bigger of the two NCOs jabbed his pistol into the Eider Dane’s skinny ribs and forced him forwards to the huge car. An interior light was switched on and Per Kersten found himself looking at one of the most evil faces he had ever seen in his life. Framed by a high fur collar, it was small and soft, with thin lips that looked as if they might have been painted, but the paint could not hide their cruelty. It was the eyes, though which were most evil – most frightening. They were hooded and dark, as if they had no depths at all, with an expression of boundless sadism.
Something struck Per Kersten and everything went black.
Six
‘Now, look Billy Bennett,’ Smith raised his voice over the squeak and slap of the oars as the big Londoner rowed mightily towards the shore. ‘Remember you’re no longer a leading hand – a hookie.’ He used the sailor’s slang for the red anchor badge which leading ratings wore on their sleeves, known in the Navy as the ‘hook’. ‘You’re just an ordinary ragged-tailed merchant seaman. Remember, too, I’m not an officer in the Royal, either. I’m just a mate in the same service. Have you got it?’
The big plump Londoner beamed up at Smith. ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he said in true Navy fashion.
Smith groaned, and looking up at the grey overcast sky above the Dutch island of Texel, said, ‘Lord, give me strength.’
They had refuelled and the Swordfish was now half a mile to the stern, protected from sight from the land by the bulk of a rusty oiler. Now Smith was on his way to the island’s little capital, Den Berg, to meet C’s contact man in Holland and receive any further orders that might have come in from London while they had been crossing the North Sea.
Now as they came closer to the little place, it seemed to be virtually deserted, at least at the quay. A couple of fellows in leather jackets and wooden shoes, who might have been dockers, were leaning against a crane, smoking listlessly. Two or three yards away a lone fisherman was busy gutting fish, while all about him gulls flung themselves around the sky, all white and screaming, to snatch greedily at the silver cod heads that lay on the damp cobbles all around his booted feet. To Smith it all seemed peaceful and in order. There were no scars here to remind the viewer that Europe had just ended the greatest war of all times.
Fascinated, for some reason he couldn’t make out, he watched the fisherman’s red, slimy fingers as they worked deftly on the catch. The thumb and index finger into the gills, the knife stabbed into the corner of the latter, the quick slice along the length of the fish, with red-grey guts erupting out of the stomach to be scooped out and thrown to the cobbles for the gulls. Smith told himself, as a sweating Bennett shipped his oars, he’d never be able to gut a fish like that even if he tried for a month of Sundays.
Bennett tied up the boat and together they clambered up the rusting, slimy iron ladder on to the quay. The two dockers, if that was what they were, and the fisherman busy with his gutting, took no notice, but continued their smoking and working. Perhaps that’s why Holland was always neutral in times of war in Europe, Smith told himself. The stolid Dutch simply minded their own business and let the other crazy fools kill themselves.
‘Come on, Bennett,’ Smith commanded. ‘We’re to look for the Hotel de Kraan and by the size of this place I don’t think it should be difficult to find. There’s probably only one hotel in the town.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Billy Bennett saw the sudden look on Smith’s face and said hurriedly, ‘I’m with yer, mister.’
‘You’d better be,’ Smith hissed out of the side of his mouth. ‘Now let’s get on with it.’
They set off towards the main street, empty of traffic save for a couple of cyclists, red-faced and muffled up to the eyes, making heavy work of riding against the wind that swept permanently across the flat, almost treeless island. Behind them one of the men in the leather coats threw away his cigarette with sudden energy. He walked across to the phone attached to the derrick of the crane used for speaking to the driver high up in his cab above, whirled the little handle and cupping his hand over the side of his mouth so that the busy fisherman could not hear, said ‘Da, Ivan gavorit…’
* * *
The Assistant Naval Attache, who had come from the Dutch capital, The Hague, to brief Smith, turned out to be one of those loud, red-faced naval officers of the old school, all spit-and-polish and no nonsense. He was a man, Smith told himself, not at all suited for the diplomatic niceties of an attache. Now he stood in front of the big tiled Dutch oven, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, as if he were back on the quarterdeck of some dreadnought and not in the ‘salon’ of this remote Dutch island hotel.
‘Well, Smith,’ he began without any preamble, once the former had introduced himself. ‘The Huns are on to us. No doubt about that. McIntyre’s Danish chaps got the barges out to sea. Lost one of their chaps overboard in a bit of argy-bargy. McIntyre thinks the Huns probably have him. Poor swine.’
‘I see, sir,’ Smith said dutifully. He had learned from long experience of senior naval officers, it wasn’t wise to interrupt them when they were in full flow. Bennett, standing guard at the door, risked a small grin. He’d already guessed what the skipper thought of Captain Walker, RN.
‘However, the conclusive thing is this,’ Captain Walker continued. ‘London signalled early this morning that the two Huns taken in Hull have confessed. Old C’s not too particular in his methods you know.’ Walker’s ruddy face cracked into a toothy smile. ‘What! Said they worked for Hun Intelligence, though since Versailles’ – he meant the Treaty of Versailles between the victorious allies and the defeated Germans – ‘the Huns are not supposed to have an Intelligence service.’ He looked puzzled.
For a moment Smith thought of the girl, lying on the old brass bed with her skirts thrown back to reveal that delightful dark V of hair and those splendid mauve silk garters. What a shame she had tried to spring her trap on him before and not afterwards! He tugged his nose ruefully, and Walker snapped. ‘You are listening, Smith, aren’t you?’
‘Yessir… of course, sir,’ Smith said hastily.
‘Now then if the Huns have still got an Intelligence service, though it was strictly forbidden for them to have one at Versailles, have they still got a Navy, eh?’
Smith did not know whether it was a statement or question. He decided to take it as a question and said, ‘But the old Imperial Navy scuttled itself at Scapa Flow when it came in to surrender two years ago now, sir.’
‘Yes, I know that, Smith,’ Walker snorted. ‘But did all of it scuttle itself? I mean in the last bit of unpleasantness there were Hun ships all over the show. They were on station everywhere – from the China Sea to off the Falklands. Have we accounted for them all, eh?’
Smith had no answer for that question. Instead he said boldly, handsome face keen and set, ‘Well, if the Germans do have naval vessels in the Baltic and try to stop us, we’ll stop ’em. I am sure of that, sir.’
‘Well spoken, young Smith. In the best tradition of the Royal. But we want to avoid any open confrontation with the Huns if possible. The Foreign Office and the frocks’ – he meant the frock-coated politicians – ‘wouldn’t like it. The word out in Whitehall is that we have to kiss and make up with the Hun, after they killed a million of our people in the last show,’ he added bitterly. ‘But there you are. That’s politicos for you, ain’t it?’
Numbly Smith nodded his agreement. Soldiers shed their blood and politicos played games in Parliament. It had always been that way and he supposed it always would.
‘Now then, Smith,’ Walker’s voice took on a lighter note. ‘I’ve got a little surprise for you before you leave. I’d like to introduce you to the person who will act as your liaison between the Polish fisherfolk, who will take the Hun stuff to the Poles, and yourself. Speaks Polish, English and German – and Russian, so I am told, fluently. Be a great help to you in this tricky business I’m sure.’
‘Yessir,’ Smith said with some interest. He had been wondering how he was going to convey his orders as the skipper of the escort craft to a gaggle of Polish fishing people who presumably wouldn’t be able to speak the English lingo. All he
had was schoolboy French and he didn’t suppose for one moment that ‘Ou est la plume de ma tante?’ would be of much help to him under the circumstances.
‘Bennett, or whatever your name is, tell our guest to enter, please,’ Walker barked.
The big fat Londoner, who was probably the sloppiest matelot Smith had ever met, clicked his heels as if he were back on Whale Island as a young recruit and barked back, ‘Aye, aye, sir! At once, sir!’
He opened the door and said something, bowing slightly – or so it seemed to a surprised Smith – to whomever was waiting outside.
A slim young man with rather effeminate features, or so Smith thought, entered. He was clad in a leather tunic, smart, but cut rather in the flashy Central European manner, wore baggy navy-blue trousers, which might have once belonged to a rather undersized matelot, tucked into very dainty, highly polished small boots.
Smith frowned.
But not for long.
‘May I introduce Lieutenant Smith of the Royal Navy?’ Walker said.
Smith stretched out his hand and took the other person’s. It was too soft for that of a man, he thought.
‘Countess Krystyna Oleksy,’ Walker added.
‘Countess!’ Smith exclaimed, looking as if he had just been stung by a very large wasp.
‘Yes,’ the newcomer said light-heartedly and whipping off the leather cap, allowed a mass of blonde hair to tumble to her shoulders. ‘And you can call me Chris, if you like. Our Polish names are very difficult for foreigners.’ Her accent was delightfully Slavic, but the English was fluent enough.
‘But you’re a woman!’ Smith stuttered, while Walker looked on, flashing those big horsey teeth of his, obviously pleased with the surprise he had just sprung.
The Baltic Run Page 6