At the sharp report of Wilde’s pistol, they instantly stopped and dropped to one knee. Their leader made frantic motions with his right hand for them to get lower. With a flick of his other hand he detached two men and pointed uphill in the direction of Wilde and the gunfire.
*
They were coming to get him. A guttural voice, barking an order. He crouched low beneath a fallen oak bough. A burst of sub-machine gunfire shattered the chill night air. A thousand birds flew from their perches in wild, uncomprehending panic. Wilde hugged the soft, leafy ground.
Two men came back up the slope, sub-machine guns slung low.
From his cover, Wilde fired again and again. How many bullets did he have left?
The advancing gunmen recoiled at the sound of his shots. Another burst of bullets spewed from their muzzles.
Below, he could see the militia moving again, their semi-circle fanning out so that the flanks were twenty yards ahead of the centre. They had reached a pond, no more than a hundred yards from the big house. Without pausing, they broke down the tall, chestnut fence in front of them, passing through the gap to open land. Wilde pulled the trigger again and his shot rang out, harsh and short. He heard another shouted order.
The only advantage he had was that they had no idea what weapons or ammunition he had; no idea that he was alone. He pulled the trigger again. Nothing. The magazine was empty. Had they heard the telltale click? If so, he was done for.
From down below, on the far side of the pond, there was a sudden manic hail of gunfire. But it wasn’t aimed at him. A hand grenade exploded, then another. The crack of more gunshots. Wilde crawled to the left, through the thick layer of leaves. From below, the sound of bullets and explosions came in intense bursts. There were groans, a few screams. Then silence.
*
Joseph Saddlesmith and his wife lived in one of the new houses, in the area of Great Park known as the Village, beside the Crown Estate Office and the workshops. Like everyone else who lived there, he was an estate worker, and like most men of his generation, he had been a soldier. He knew the sounds of war.
It was just after midnight. Like every night, whatever the weather, he was out walking his fox terrier before turning in. As usual, he strolled up past the little village store, then turned south until he reached Dark Wood, allowing the dog to run free. As he entered the copse, he stopped abruptly and called her to him. From across the Great Park, perhaps a mile or two, perhaps less, came familiar sounds, echoing from the trenches, down the years. Saddlesmith’s heart began to race. He couldn’t breathe. He started to tremble; then his whole body shook, his legs began to buckle. He put a hand down to steady himself on the dog’s back, and fell to his knees.
He had no idea how long he knelt there. When he regained his wits, he got to his feet and stumbled on. What was happening?
*
Vladimir Rybakov and the other men of the Romanov-SS Division never stood a chance. They were cut down like corn before a scythe. Most of them died very quickly. With a bullet in his left leg and two in the left shoulder, Rybakov fell to the ground and survived a little longer. Long enough to see a British officer standing over him, pointing a revolver at his face.
‘Russki,’ he said, and raised his own Russian-made pistol in a shaking hand. The British officer’s bullet blew a hole in Rybakov’s heart.
*
From his cover, Wilde watched with a strange mixture of horror and relief: horror at the brutal, shattering rattle of sustained gunfire, the screams, the deaths; relief that the attack had been so swiftly countered.
By now, the whole area was bathed in floodlight from the back of a pair of army trucks. In the glare, he could see the ground in front of them, littered with dead. The attackers had been completely outgunned; met by an overpowering onslaught of fire.
But the attackers were not all accounted for. Wilde had watched as two men slipped away into the dark of the trees and the thick covering of the rhododendron bushes. He had seen them go and he knew who they were.
He stayed crouched in darkness, away from the harsh electric glare of the army floodlights. He considered emerging from the bushes with his hands up, but there was no guarantee he would not be shot in the aftermath of such carnage. Instead, he slid back further and crawled towards the bushes into which Dorfen and Sawyer had disappeared.
His thrust his empty pistol in his pocket. He had no torch, no way of signalling to the troops below the danger that remained. His only weapon was a blunt penknife.
He moved through the night on pale moonlight and instinct. He had seen Dorfen’s torch, before it disappeared into the undergrowth. From the arc of the chestnut fence that marked the boundary of the private land, Wilde guessed they were heading towards the house. Not far ahead he could hear the rustle of leaves, the spring of young branches. Whispered words.
*
Hartmut Dorfen was two steps ahead of Duncan Sawyer. There was still a chance to salvage the operation. If he and Sawyer could get to the other side of the house, it might not be guarded. A bullet through a window. There was still hope.
Blood dripped from Dorfen’s left hand where half his thumb had been blown away by a bullet. The pain was burning through his hand; he ignored it. His tongue went to the false tooth made of glass; one hard bite and the cyanide would kill him in seconds. It was a fallback; he could not afford to be taken alive. No one must have proof of German involvement in this operation.
On the other side of the maze of bushes and to the right was a chapel. The main building, lights blazing in the windows, stood in front of him. In the driveway, a black Rolls Royce was parked among other cars, and a pair of army troop carriers. The whole area was swarming with soldiers.
Dorfen switched off his torch and halted. Sawyer stopped behind him. Ahead of them was a small garden complete with a tiny cottage: the little princesses’ playhouse.
‘What now?’ Sawyer whispered.
‘We wait. They will appear. Then we will kill them.’
‘It’s suicide.’
‘Does that worry you, my friend?’
‘You know me better than that.’
There was a sound behind them. Dorfen gripped Sawyer’s arm with his uninjured right hand.
‘Behind us,’ whispered Sawyer. He looked down at Dorfen’s left hand, thick with blood. ‘I’ll go.’ He thrust his Russian-made Tokarev TT-33 pistol into his jacket pocket and, taking a long-bladed knife from his belt, crept slowly back along the path through the rhododendron bushes.
*
Crouched in the undergrowth a few yards away, Wilde’s eyes had become accustomed to the cloying gloom. He heard a rustle of undergrowth, then saw the flash of sharp steel. He was already twisting sideways as it came thrusting down like a bolt. The blade missed his body and plunged into the soft earth.
He had never known himself capable of such anger. He knew now how men, in the rage of battle, could maim and scalp. Killing alone was not enough. His right fist hammered into the side of Sawyer’s head. The blow caught Sawyer square on the temple and he fell awkwardly, stunned, yet still holding the haft of his dagger. Wilde was up now. He leapt on his assailant, knees on his chest, desperately trying to break Sawyer’s grasp on the knife. Sawyer’s fingers were slippery and he was dazed from the blow. Wilde tore the weapon from him and raised it, gripped in both hands.
The point hovered for a split second above Sawyer’s startled face. Wilde faltered. Sawyer momentarily regained his senses and began scrabbling at his pocket. A pistol? Wilde’s hand continued its journey, diverted downwards from the face, and thrust the blade deep into the exposed throat. Blood gushed out in a fountain. Sawyer’s mouth gaped open as though crying out, but it was nothing but a gurgle of blood. The rattle, panic and fury of imminent death.
Wilde pulled the blade out. In the dim moonlight, he felt down the dying man’s body until he found the gun. He began to crawl forward again.
*
The prime minister and the Duke of York were leaving fr
om a doorway at the side of the house where the official cars were parked alongside the army vehicles. At their side were two servants in the soft green livery of the Windsor household. But others surrounded them: men in military uniform. Within a few moments, Stanley Baldwin, pipe in mouth, and Prince Albert, with cigarette in hand, would both be in the line of fire of Sturmbannführer Hartmut Dorfen.
They were twenty, perhaps thirty, yards away. Dorfen raised his PPD-34 to his chest, his shredded thumb thudding with pain. It was a Russian sub-machine gun, a new design, captured in Spain, fitted with a 71-round drum magazine. Seventy-one bullets, to be fired in six lethal seconds. A spray of lead that would certainly kill both the prince and the prime minister and all of those around them: the armed soldiers, the grey-suited officials, the chauffeur bowing as he opened the back door to the Rolls Royce for Baldwin. And then, perhaps, he would make his escape. If not, then so be it. He would have done his duty.
He sensed something behind him. He turned to motion Sawyer down and came face to face with a ghost, a man he had already killed in a little side alleyway in the town of Cambridge.
‘Put your weapon down.’ Wilde aimed Sawyer’s pistol straight at Dorfen’s face.
Dorfen laughed, turned back and pulled the trigger.
*
Wilde fired, but he was too late. Dorfen was down, tumbling forward, the PPD-34 discharging its drum of bullets into the earth beneath him, his molars crunching involuntarily into the cyanide pill. Wilde’s own bullet went over the German’s head and smacked into a tree some seventy yards away. Dorfen was already dead, a neat little bullet hole in his head from the scoped rifle of a British Army sniper on the roof of Royal Lodge.
Wilde dropped the pistol and threw his hands up in surrender. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t shoot!’
Twenty or more soldiers had their guns trained on him. They remained silent. Wilde looked down at the body by his feet. A rectangular scrap of paper lay in the mud. It must have fallen from Dorfen’s pocket: a photograph of a man and three young women, happy and smiling on a summer’s day, outside the majestic, turreted stones of a Cambridge college.
It was over.
Except it wasn’t. Lydia Morris was still missing.
*
Just before half-past midnight, on Timberlodge Hill, not far from Royal Lodge, Joseph Saddlesmith was stopped by two men in army fatigues, carrying Lee Enfields. They glanced at his flat cap and his dog, and told him to go home and say nothing to anyone.
Had no one else heard the shooting? Why was no one else about? In the morning he would tell his wife what had happened. No doubt she would nod as she made his breakfast and got the children off to school, but she wouldn’t believe him, not until she read it in the newspaper. A gun battle in the middle of Windsor Great Park? Soldiers with Lee Enfields? Just another bad dream, Joe.
Perhaps no one would believe him. Perhaps he had dreamt it. Better, perhaps, to say nothing. He’d keep his counsel as the soldiers had said he should. A soldier still at heart, Saddlesmith obeyed orders.
SUNDAY DECEMBER 6, 1936
CHAPTER 38
Kholtov tried to lie still in the cold, heavy mud. He could hear the car on the long farm-track from the main road and he could see its light. He was a hundred metres away from the track; even so, he wasn’t safe.
The car stopped at the cottage. He could hear the car door opening and shutting and then Eaton’s footsteps entering the half-derelict building. It would not take him long to discover it was empty.
There was nothing to be done but to stay still, endure the savage cold and the never-ending pain. He could not run, nor could he hide. In his pocket, he had a pistol, but Eaton, too, would be armed. He would only use the gun if he had no option. Until then, all he could do was lie here in the thick, fertile earth of this desolate field and hope that the Englishman did not find him.
*
Philip Eaton cursed. God damn this night. For hours, he had been engaged in frantic telephone calls at the Bull, both to Terence Carstairs at the office and with more senior men. It was only when word came through from Carstairs that an attack had been foiled at Royal Lodge that he could relax. He had told Carstairs to go home and get some sleep. Meanwhile he would tend to his other business: the bloody Russian and his gold.
He swung his torch in a great arc, its beam sweeping across the landscape. A low mist hovered barely a foot above ground. He moved away from the track into the muddy field. The soil was thick and at each step his shoes seemed to accumulate more mud.
God in heaven, how had Kholtov managed to get away? He had left him unconscious, his left ankle a wreck, his body broken. Had someone come to him and taken him away?
Walking back to the cottage he shone his torch low, looking for footprints, but there were none. At the edge of the field he thought he detected flattening of the earth, as though someone or something had dragged itself, slug-like, across the surface. But after a few feet, he lost the trail amid the furrows.
Dawn was hours away. Even if Kholtov was still here, there was no chance of finding him until then. If he was already gone, he couldn’t wait to find out. He switched off the torch and strode back to the car. Carstairs would have to get back to his desk. A bit of old-fashioned detection was called for.
*
When Kholtov heard the car driving back along the farm track to the road, he began to crawl again.
To dull the pain he tried to empty his mind, but the memories came anyway. He thought of Barcelona where he had first met Philip Eaton. Everyone knew The Times journalist worked for the British secret service, sending reports from Catalonia back to London. Slutsky had been told by Moscow that an eye was to be kept on him, but he was not to be harmed. No one wanted to provoke the British; their Royal Navy was already patrolling too close to the coast for comfort.
The British Consulate had told Kholtov that Mr Eaton would most probably be found at the Continental, one of the city’s grand old hotels. Kholtov found him in a sumptuous suite, drinking good brandy and eating a meal in solitary splendour. This was not a place for the masses, even in a town supposedly ruled by the proletariat.
Eaton had invited Kholtov to sit down. ‘Why have you come, Mr Kholtov?’ he asked after Kholtov had introduced himself. ‘Do you have a story for me?’
‘A story?’
‘As you know I am a correspondent for a British newspaper.’
‘I do not have a story,’ Kholtov had said. ‘But I am going to England. And it is possible we might be able to help each other when I am there.’
‘I doubt you will be very welcome in England.’
‘That is where you can help me.’
‘Are you going to tell me more?’
‘In my own way. I need to make certain contacts before I go.’
‘You already speak English.’
‘Yes, I learnt it well. I have spent a good deal of time in your country.’
‘Not killing people, I trust. There seems to be an awful lot of killing here in Barcelona these days, and you Ogpu or NKVD men – whatever you call yourselves these days – always seem to be in the vicinity of the bloodshed.’
Kholtov had laughed. That was the curious thing about the British: you could actually find yourself being charmed by their upper classes. Such a thing could never have happened in Russia. That did not mean, of course, that he trusted Eaton. One thing the NKVD had taught him was to put your trust in no one unless absolutely necessary. ‘My hands are as clean as any man’s, Mr Eaton,’ he said. ‘And I am sure we can forge a relationship of mutual benefit. If you help me with a certain matter, then I will reveal a secret of great import to your country.’
‘What sort of secret?’
‘A conspiracy. I hear things – from both sides, republican and nationalist. The lines are porous. An old man with a donkey can pass from fascist territory to ours, and back again. I have been in Cartagena recently. I heard something there. And I have heard more here, confirming it.’
‘Yes?’
‘There is a Russian militia.’
‘Well, of course, there are whole battalions of Russians here in Spain, including you and your friend Abram Slutsky, Mr Kholtov.’
‘No, not here with the republicans. On the nationalist side, with Franco’s rebels. The Nazis have sent a White Russian militia to them. They are in the region of Huesca.’
‘That is certainly vaguely interesting.’
‘But there is more. This militia is being withdrawn. My source tells me they have another mission, a secret mission. In England.’
Suddenly, Eaton was listening. ‘What would White Russian fighting men be doing in England?’
‘I will tell you when I have safe passage to England.’
‘Not good enough. If you have any information about this militia’s mission, I need to know it now.’
Kholtov shrugged. ‘And then I have no bargaining tool.’
‘If we wait until you arrive in England, it may be too late.’
‘No, there is time enough. And before that I will give you a name. Just one name.’
‘Yes?’
‘It was overheard in a discussion between two SS officers. It is a name I have never heard before, but perhaps it will mean something to you.’
‘Try me.’
‘I will call you as soon as I am sure you have arranged entry to England for me.’
‘Tell me now.’
Kholtov had grinned. ‘All I will tell you is that there is a link to your great university town, Cambridge. I know it well. Let us meet there – I can see friends, do some business perhaps.’
Eaton was not entirely happy, but the smile still hovered around his eyes and lips. ‘I will do what I can. See if I can pull a few strings. But I will expect that name before you arrive – and the full story when we meet.’
‘Then you have a deal.’
They clinked glasses. Eaton would get Kholtov into England, but he would expect much in return. It was not a perfect solution, but it was the best he could do.
‘Do you need a train ticket to Perpignan?’ Eaton asked. ‘I can help you with funds.’
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