die Stunde X

by Shaun Stafford

  “Look, you people have already formed your opinion as to what I am,” Scott snapped defiantly, “and nothing I say or do is gonna alter that opinion.”

  “Herr Cazelot, that is not true,” Rauter said with a frown. He looked at his comrades, then back at Scott. “We have arrested three hundred or so suspects tonight. Some of those men and women might have irrefutable proof that they are not connected with Combat UK. If that is the case, then they will walk free tonight … this morning, whatever,” he corrected himself with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Now, Herr Cazelot, surely you wish to answer these charges brought against you?”

  “I’m saying nothing,” Scott said determinedly. He would’ve folded his arms, but one of them was broken. Besides, it would’ve been a pointless gesture. The Germans were not interested in posturing – they were only interested in the truth.

  “Herr Cazelot,” Rauter said, unfazed, “I would like you to look at these photographs. I would like you to identify the men and women in the photographs.”

  “I’m saying nothing,” Scott snapped.

  He hardly saw the movement. Before he knew it, Keitel was standing beside him. His powerful hand gripped Scott’s broken forearm and squeezed gently. Scott cried out in pain and shut his eyes.

  “Herr Cazelot,” Rauter said, speaking as though Scott were an errant schoolchild requiring discipline, “surely you can see that we require answers. Now, please, take a look at these photographs. We will start with photograph one.” He placed the piece of paper in front of Scott. “Who is the lady in the photograph?”

  “That’s … my sister,” Scott answered, looking at the photograph. Keitel loosened his grip and took a couple of steps back. But he was ready to pounce again should the need arise.

  “Your sister? Mmm, beautiful lady. Do you have a name for her? An address?”

  “She’s not a terrorist,” Scott said.

  “Is she not? Well, Herr Cazelot, what about you? Are you a terrorist?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know that your sister is not a terrorist? How do you know that she is not being questioned at this very moment?”

  “Look, she’s my sister, she’s only twenty-five. She’s engaged to be married. She’s not a fucking terrorist!”

  “What about her future spouse?”

  “What?”

  “Herr Cazelot, I require the name and address of your sister and her future spouse, if that is not too much to ask.”

  “Why? What are you going to do to her?”

  “What makes you think we are going to do anything to her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Name and address?” Scott didn’t answer. “Herr Cazelot, we have ways and means of finding out where somebody lives. It would take us ten minutes, but I can promise you that I would not be a happy man if my time were to be wasted in such a manner. I require her name and address so that I may run a security check on her.” Scott saw that he was beat, and so he nodded his head.

  “Rachel Cazelot, 27 Maistrasse.”

  “In London?” Scott nodded his head. “And her future spouse?”

  “Same address.”

  “Thank you, Herr Cazelot. That was not painful, now was it? And as a matter of fact,” Rauter said, turning over a page in the file, “that fits in with our information. The lady in that photograph is indeed your sister and we don’t believe she is involved in terrorist activities.”

  “Then why go through this charade?”

  “Herr Cazelot, please do not use that tone when speaking to me,” Rauter said politely, before taking a couple of drags from his cigarette. He pointed to the sheet of photographs. “Now, the second photograph, if you please.”

  Scott identified thirteen people for the Gestapo officers. All of them were either family members or work colleagues, and he felt that the information he had given Rauter was already known to him. Finally, a fourteenth photograph was laid down in front of him.

  It was a close-up shot of him standing in one of the aisles in the Denkmalhalle. There was a man with him – Otto Günther. Scott stopped his eyes from widening, but he sensed that Rauter knew he’d shocked him.

  “Herr Cazelot, that one was taken two nights ago, inside the Adolf Hitler Denkmalhalle. Could you identify the man in the photograph with you?”

  “I’ve never seen him before in my life,” Scott replied, half-expecting Keitel to leap onto him and pull onto his broken arm. He didn’t.

  “So how do you explain the fact that he is standing so close to you?”

  “He must’ve been there at the same time as me.”

  “Do you often visit the Denkmalhalle? Unusual place for an Engländer to visit.”

  “I have a lot of respect for Adolf Hitler,” Scott said, barely able to keep a straight face.

  Rauter laid another photograph in front of Scott. In this one, he was patting Otto on the shoulder. Physical contact. It didn’t look accidental.

  “Herr Cazelot, how do you explain that?”

  “Now I come to think of it, yeah, I did see this bloke in the Denkmalhalle,” Scott said, nodding his head. “Asked me about the memorial statue. I think he was an American or something. A tourist. I was just … seeing him off.” Scott smiled at Rauter.

  Rauter smiled back, and laid down a third photograph. In this one, Otto could be seen handing the envelope to Scott. “I suppose, Herr Cazelot, this American gave you a package containing US dollars for your valuable assistance?”

  Scott smiled weakly.

  “Herr Cazelot, his name, please.”

  “I don’t know”. Keitel grabbed his arm, squeezed it tightly, and pulled Scott to his feet. Scott screamed out in agony as he was dragged to the locked door, beyond which lay unexplored territory.

  Scott realized he was going to find out exactly what was beyond that door.

  46

  Rauter looked at the horizontal bar from which countless prisoners had been suspended, and then at Scott, who stood in the middle of the interrogation chamber, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. The prisoner’s left arm was swollen to twice its width, and to suspend him from the bar would probably prove to be too much.

  Rauter didn’t want his prisoner passing out.

  “Keitel, hang him from his feet,” he instructed, and Keitel and a young, fresh-faced SS-Unterscharführer lifted Scott up, tipped him over, and, climbing onto chairs specifically for the purpose of stringing up the prisoners, fastened his ankles into the manacles.

  Scott swung back and forth, his arms hanging down, the fingers seven or eight inches from the drainage grid below. Rauter smiled, satisfied, and took a seat at the table in the corner of the room. Loritz was already seated. Keitel and the Unterscharführer stood on either side of the prisoner.

  For five minutes, nobody spoke. Keitel kept pushing Scott gently His face was red, and his left arm was swelling even more, the bruising deepening.

  Finally, Rauter decided it was time to talk. He glanced down at the photograph of Scott and the unknown man, and then looked at the prisoner suspended from the bar. “Herr Cazelot, how are you feeling?” Scott didn’t answer. Keitel punched him in the kidneys, not hard enough to wind him, but enough to make his gasp. “Herr Cazelot, how are you feeling?” Rauter said, blandly repeating the question.

  “Fine,” hissed Scott, saliva dripping from his mouth and flowing into his eyes.

  “Good, good,” Rauter said, clapping his hands. “Now, Herr Cazelot, do you feel like answering the question I put to you earlier, concerning the man in this photograph?” He held up a ten by eight blow-up of the print in question, and courteously turned it upside down so that Scott could see it better. “A name, Herr Cazelot, is all that is required. There is no need to be so stubborn.”

  “I don’t fucking know him!”

  Keitel, who now had a rubber truncheon in his hand, swung it into Scott’s right arm. Scott gasped out and swore. Keitel struck him again in the same place, but Scott’s arm was already beyond sensing any f
urther pain. Nonetheless, he jerked instinctively with the blow.

  “Herr Cazelot, a name for this face,” Rauter said. He was still holding up the photograph. “Come come, now why would you not wish to give us his name. Could it be that you have some dark secret you have not told me about? Could it be that he has some dark secret? Perhaps he is a Jew or a homosexual? Perhaps he was paying you a bribe? Is that the case? If it is, Herr Cazelot, then you would be advised to tell us the whole story. Then perhaps we can let you go?” Rauter looked Scott in the eyes and smiled. “Now, who is this man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rauter raised an eyebrow and sucked in his lip. He gave a slight nod, and then Keitel struck Scott with such a blow on his right arm that the ulna and radius bones cracked. The noise could be heard across the torture chamber, a sound like the snapping of bamboo canes.

  Scott screamed in agony. Both his arms were fractured now, and the Germans were not ready to stop. More saliva dripped from his mouth and oozed up his face to his eyes.

  “Shit,” hissed Scott.

  “You know, Herr Cazelot, you are proving to be a very tough nut to crack,” Rauter said impatiently, “but our man here has ways of cracking all kinds of nuts.” At that, Keitel slammed the truncheon down between Scott’s legs.

  Scott howled as the wind was knocked out of him and he felt the dull throbbing ache across his stomach. He vomited, the puke falling from his mouth and splattering down the drain beneath him. Chunks of it flew across the room, but missed Rauter and Loritz by a few feet.

  Rauter, who had seen this kind of thing before, simply said, “Herr Cazelot, a name, if you please.”

  Scott didn’t answer. He would need some time to recover. Rauter got to his feet and nodded to Keitel, who hit Scott once again with the truncheon, grinding the fractured bones of his right arm together.

  Rauter heard Scott gasping as he left the torture chamber. Loritz was following. The two men made their way to the main offices. On the way, Loritz asked, “Do you think he will talk, mein Herr?”

  “Do they ever?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not very often,” Rauter said, “and this Cazelot fool seems to have a remarkable resilience towards pain. No, Loritz, I do not think we will be getting any information out of him. Which is why I will allow SS-Sturmscharführer Keitel to beat him to within an inch of his life before we execute him. I want him to experience pain, Loritz, like he has never experienced before. It will be the last thing he remembers about his life.”

  “It will not get us our information, Herr Standartenführer.”

  “But it will make us feel better,” Rauter said as they entered the offices. He laid down the file on the large table that was the office’s centrepiece, in amongst other files from other Gestapo officers. Officers were talking amongst themselves, arguing, deliberating. They all had problems. They all had suspects in the interrogation chambers, or Verhörzimmers, and clearly some of those suspects were not talking.

  Rauter slammed a fist on the table, causing some of the officers to stop their conversations and glance at him across the room. He was the most senior officer in the room, but that didn’t stop some of the other men from frowning. They had problems too. He wasn’t the only one.

  When the other officers resumed their conversations, Rauter said, “I know he is hiding something. The person in this photograph has to be somebody very important. He named everybody else.”

  “All the innocents,” Loritz said. A young SS-Obersturmführer wandered over and looked at the photograph to which Rauter was pointing.

  “Yes, and he will not name this man, which would suggest that this man is not innocent. You say that this photograph has been run through our main suspect files?” Rauter asked.

  “It was crosschecked with over two-thousand photographs of known or suspected dissidents and terrorists from around the Reich, Herr Standartenführer. There was no match.”

  “Excuse me, mein Herr,” the young Obersturmführer said.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I may be able to assist you.”

  “Really? How?”

  “I recently moved to the Geheime Staatspolizei from the Sicherheitsdienst.”

  “And?”

  “And the man in that photograph used to work in my office.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He is SS-Obersturmführer Otto Günther.”

  “He is one of ours?” Rauter mumbled in disbelief, picking up the photograph. “Are you certain of this?”

  “Yes, mein Herr, quite certain.”

  “Loritz, check this photograph with personnel,” ordered Rauter. “If it matches this Günther, then there will be no further need to question Cazelot.”

  “Yes, mein Herr,” Loritz said, taking the photograph and disappearing.

  “Thank you for your assistance, Herr Obersturmführer,” Rauter said to the young officer. “If your information proves to be correct, then I shall ensure that you are justly rewarded.”

  The young officer nodded his head in appreciation, but by then, Rauter was already on his way out of the room.

  If the man in the photograph was Günther, an SS officer, then that would be a serious blow for the party. To have a traitor in such a position would not look good.

  Added to that, it would mean that the Gestapo, instead of tracking down dissidents and terrorists, would have to take a closer look at itself, and at the Sicherheitsdienst. It would mean that every Gestapo officer would regard his colleagues with suspicion.

  It would not be good for morale.

  If Günther was a traitor, then Rauter was looking forward to seeing him bleed.

  47

  The Orpo vans and the Gestapo BMWs rarely ventured into the estates in the suburbs where the Germans lived. They had no cause to. So Otto Günther would ordinarily have had no idea that a large scale operation was being mounted. But he knew, because he had looked out of his bedroom window while his wife was in the bathroom.

  He lived in Grossberlinstrasse, on the south side of the London, in a street of detached houses that had been built only ten years before. For a half a mile around, only Germans resided, and their small suburb of Vorortberlin was separated from the English residential areas by a pair of autobahns that intersected each other, one of them the Londonzentrumautobahn.

  Vorortberlin was positioned on a low hill, artificially constructed in the early Fifties, and had once been home to a German fort. The fort was demolished in the Seventies, and the houses built in the Eighties, but the view remained the same. A great deal of London’s city centre could be seen. The skyscrapers, the new builds, the monuments, all presented a fascinating view that, at night, seemed to come alive with thousands of lights twinkling across the horizon. It was as though the sky of stars had dropped to earth.

  Otto watched the lights, as always, and immediately saw the flashing blue lights that belonged to the vehicles of the Ordnungspolizei. Like most people, he knew which lights belonged to which emergency service. Blue for the Orpo and the Kripo, the normal police force; green for ambulances; red and blue for the fire department; and red alone for the Gestapo.

  There were hundreds of blue lights, flashing their way down streets that would soon be cast in darkness as the Elektrizitatswerk switched off the street lighting. Otto knew where the English suburbs were, and he knew that the Orpo were moving in there. Then he caught a flash of red, over to his right, in a patch of darkness.

  Then more red, all across the city, lighting up like small fires, flashing their way in amongst the blue lights from the Orpo vans and the orange street lights.

  Gestapo.

  The Gestapo were moving in, and in large numbers.

  Otto opened the double-glazed window, and the faint sounds poured in. Sirens, wailing like evil banshees. And like banshees, those sirens would bring news of death. Death for the men and women the Gestapo would be arresting.

  It was clearly a large scale operation. It was difficult to count the
numbers, but Otto believed he saw more than fifty pairs of red lights. The blue lights were far too numerous to count.

  His wife came into the darkened room, walked across to the window, dressed only in a short nightshirt. Otto didn’t turn to look at her, not even she wrapped her arms around his bare stomach and unbuckled his trousers.

  “What’s the matter, Otto?” she asked, as his trousers dropped to his knees. Still Otto did not answer. He didn’t even flinch when her hand reached into his underpants, and she wasn’t concerned to see no immediate reaction as she played with him.

  He gradually began to stiffen, but still said nothing, not even when his wife dropped to her knees before him. Still he gazed at the flashing lights, as though he were in a hypnotic trance. Across the city, men and women were being arrested. An operation of this scale would only be mounted against terrorists. Against Combat UK.

  And somewhere amongst those flashing lights lived people he knew. Or rather, more importantly, people who knew him. Scott had assured him that only he and Liam knew of Otto’s involvement, but Otto didn’t really believe him. Somebody else had to know.

  And that somebody was probably being taken to an interrogation cell, where Otto’s name would be beaten out of him.

  Otto grasped his wife’s hair, pulled her up to face him. He kissed her passionately, led her across to the bed and virtually threw her down before pouncing on her, spreading her legs harshly and entering her.