Exhaustion took over and they tried to doze as the plane clattered toward Finland.
Wrapped in a heavy flight blanket, Eva slept in her seat. Its width allowed her to curl up, the soft leather soothing. Kincaid had wandered off to his room in a drunken stupor, roaring and shouting once the drink had taken hold. Regan never seemed to sleep. Behind her eyelids, Eva thought she could make out his shadow flitting in and out of her dreams. The cabin lights had been dimmed and the Captain informed the passengers that arrival time would be in a few hours. Bad weather had forced the flying boat out by several hundred miles and it was skirting a heavy weather front over the Russian coast.
Eva woke with a start to see Schenker facing her sitting in the seat opposite. He was clearly drunk, red-eyed and blinking through the alcohol. His Luger lay on the table, gleaming under the cabin lights. Eva coiled like a cat, her fingers locating the brooch on her dress. Beneath the blankets folds, she unclasped the brooch and switched to her free left hand. She could hit the jugular as his head was tilted sideways revealing his slim razor-burned neck.
‘Frauliein De Witte, Molenaar, I’m a bit confused..’
He leant forward, fingertips touching his nose in concentration.
‘I’m not sure what you mean, Captain.’ Eva smiled sweetly as if dazzled by his handsome features. He smiled back a saccharine smirk as his drunken mind tried to reach a point.
Her hand was free of the blanket and just below the table’s edge.
‘My headquarters in Berlin detected radio disruption from this plane’s cockpit. They’ve spoken to me about this. The radio operator is one of ours and he tells me you collided with him. What were you doing in the cockpit, Fraulein?’
‘Watching the airship, Captain, it was very big and impressive.’ Her heartbeat had doubled and her reactions were becoming electric. She glanced up and down the aisle for Regan. He was five seats up with his back to her. He was jotting in his notebook.
She looked back steadily at the S.S. officer. Schenker never seemed to blink, she noticed.
‘I made further inquiries from your colleagues in the German underground. They are currently enjoying the hospitality of my colleagues.'
Eva’s blood ran cold.
‘They were very, very helpful. You are Polish, yes?’ He smiled at his brilliance, the way he teased her gently. He was getting excited at the thought of breaking her after this journey, once he’d prised her away from that stupid industrialist.
But that pleasure was for later; he had other pleasures in mind after this conversation.
Eva made no reply. She inhaled, slowly preparing to strike. She could almost see Schenker’s pulse beating in his neck. His smile seemed to stretch his jaw to breaking point.
‘You are a British agent and you’re handler is the head of a European spy network.’
‘You are mistaken, Captain,’ Eva purred ‘I’m from the Sudetenland, and I believe my racial papers, signed personally by Herr Goebbels, are in order. Before Donald Kincaid, he was a very dear friend of mine.’
Schenker’s composure slipped for a moment.
‘Perhaps, Captain, I can explain a little more carefully.’ Eva shook the blanket from her shoulders and leaned in. Schenker smiled at the way this clever seduction was unfolding. Eva slipped a leg free and ran her foot along his boot. She shifted her weight forward putting her head close. He could smell faint perfume in her hair and anticipated pulling it closer to him.
‘Have you mentioned this to Kincaid? she whispered, letting her lips linger on his earlobe.
‘It’ll be our little secret Fraulein, if you’ll be perhaps ….. a little accommodating with me?’
‘My pleasure, my handsome, naughty Captain….’
He felt a faint prick to his neck. He tried to bring his hand up to it, but it wouldn’t move. Seconds passed and Schenker's entire body went into seizure. He could see, hear and taste but his body was inert. As consciousness slipped away, he could hear Eva shouting for help.
When he came to he was paralysed. His eyes bulged in terror as air was coming in through his mouth in tiny gasps. He was lying on Kincaid’s bed, his head propped up on pillows. His eyes stared at his polished boots at the end of the bed. He couldn’t get his feet to move. Outside the room he could hear voices; a male Russian voice and the lilting inflections of Eva translating. Zbarsky was insisting he was not a medical doctor but, after examining the S.S. officer closely, concluded he’d had some seizure or stroke. Schenker was gripped with terror. He wanted to crawl down off the bed and to Eva’s feet. Tears flowed down his face and he blinked them away. He was only partially successful. Kincaid and Regan came in and stood over him.
‘Too bad,’ said Kincaid, staring down at the helpless soldier.
‘We could cut the footage, re-shoot with just you,’ suggested Regan.
‘Died as a result of wounds sustained helping all of us escape,’ Kincaid decided.
Sharing a look, they leant over him, pulling the pillows from behind his head.
‘A posthumous Iron Cross for you, bud …. ’
The last thing Thor Schenker saw was the pillow coming down over his face. His very last thought was that Eva had his Luger.
The ME-109s were at the end of their operational range and banked away from the flying boat, leaving it unescorted over the Gulf of Finland. Behind it lay Russia; its army on the verge of defeat, their cities ablaze and leaderless; a nation on the brink of ruin.
The radio operator had heard that Schenker was dead, from a stroke apparently. He was unsure what to do next. He was just a secret policeman watching Kincaid. It had something to do with the girl, though. The communications between Schenker and Berlin were private and the line between Gestapo and the Waffen S.S. was distinct. You just didn’t cross it. He watched the fighters regroup in formation and dive back toward the cursed land. He decided to say nothing about the S.S. Officer for the moment and returned to fine-tuning the bandwidths. In his headphones a message arrived. It was repeated in a loop over several minutes. Looking up at the pilots, he tapped them on the shoulder and when they looked around he wrote on his pad: U-Boat 806. He responded in code that the message had been received and they were awaiting co-ordinates.
The American transport had ploughed straight through the storm, its engines screaming in protest. It had dived and recovered alarmingly, pitching everyone into the air and clattering them off the airframe.
The pilots and navigator kept pointing to their watches and giving the thumbs up between nosedives with big toothy smiles to the passengers. The Americans had laughed about the team insisting on maps to study as if the answers would jump out of the cartographer’s lines.
‘If we ever go to war with these guys, we can beat them just by hiding all their maps!’ the navigator quipped to the pilots.
The sky ahead was murky but it was alive, lit up with lightning streaks and the clatter of hail-stones. For all they knew they could be ten feet above the ground heading for a mountain. Another bout of turbulence plunged the plane downward before tossing it upward to the hoots and hollers of the pilots. Kravchenko shook his head. These cowboys were actually enjoying this. Tyumen will have found the train by now and he would be labelled a fugitive unless they decided the wolves had dragged his corpse into the forest. He looked at his companions all hanging on for dear life. No-one was making eye-contact because they were focused on the new mission, trained professionals cut loose from their world with no purpose except to chase a millionaire body-snatcher into Finland.
Kravchenko had served in Finland two years earlier fighting at Salla and respected the Finns as resourceful fighters. The Germans on the other hand he had no compassion for, nor had he shown any mercy until today. These Germans could’ve killed him and he acknowledged a blood debt. As soon as he had Lenin back, he would return with him and help these Germans cross the Swiss border.
Olga felt ill. She held Kant’s hand, almost tearing the flesh with her nails. She found herself watching the Russian, t
he enemy. His facial swellings had gone down, leaving bruising around his eyes. His hand had been cleaned and dressed by the navigator and he was poring over a map with tiny islets around the Gulf of Finland. He tipped her a knowing wink. She just kept staring at him, then through him.
Sunlight burst through the windows as the transport cleared the storm. One side of the cockpit’s window had a spider’s web of cracks, and the starboard engine sounded in trouble. It had a racking cough and smoke was pouring from the propeller housing. The pilots and navigator whooped for joy, turning around to their passengers to shout in unison, ‘Next stop Finland, folks!’
‘Great,’ muttered Kant, ’we’re flying with the bloody Marx Brothers.’
Chapter 12
U-806 broke above the surface. The sunlight glinted off her lines, giving her a menacing aspect. She had been built in Hamburg in a top-secret dock away from the main Kriegsmarine shipyards and, on completion, berthed in Saint-Nazaire away from the main North Atlantic wolf-packs. She had slipped out under the cover of night unnoticed as the French Resistance was focusing its intelligence on the main Atlantic U-Boat fleet.
She now cruised toward the rendezvous point three miles off the fortified Finnish island of Suomenlinna. Remaining above the surface allowed her batteries to recharge and gave the crew a few hours to enjoy the sunlight and fresh air.
A prototype designed for this mission, her forward bulkheads were reinforced and the interior stripped down to the most basic of requirements. The exceptions were the bridge, her torpedo room and the forward hold. These were designed to house and maintain the sarcophagus on its final trip.
Kincaid had paid for U-806's construction in gold bullion and had spared no expense throughout this enterprise, right down to the hand-picked crew. All were seasoned North Atlantic submariners. Her Finnish Captain; Jakko Ahtisaans, knew the surrounding eight islands and sounds like the back of his hand. He had hunted down and sunk three Russian U-Boats during the invasion two years earlier. Though not a supporter of Nazi-ism, he did relish the command of a state-of-the-art German boat and a very generous pay-day if he was successful. Even Kincaid knew that this team for the final leg wasn’t expendable.
She was above all sleek and swift, her design spec to cut and run deep rather than stand and fight. As she had been ‘chartered’ by Kincaid from Bormann and Hitler, the Kriegsmarine was unaware of her operational status. Outside of the Propaganda Ministry and Himmler’s staff headquarters no-one knew anything about her. As far as Admiral Doenitz was concerned, she was still on a drawing board in an office somewhere.
From the conning tower Ahtisaans scanned the surrounding sea with high powered binoculars, pipe wedged tightly in the corner of his mouth. A few fishing vessels and transports were visible on the horizon but, apart from them, for miles there wasn’t a ship in the vicinity. To the west he spotted a bank of clouds. Probably the remnants of a storm over Russia; it hung menacingly out to the horizon.
Enjoying the taste of tobacco between draughts of fresh air and sea salt, Ahtisaans checked his watch; it was 8.40am. His beard was tobacco stained and his teeth were the colour of the pipes that pumped the water through the vessel. Below, the radio operator had locked onto the flying boat’s signal and was guiding it in.
The clear azure sky above thundered as the four 1,400 hp Bristol Hercules engines brought the flying boat down onto the sea, its wake surging back making the U-Boat see-saw momentarily. The fresh provisions would be transferred first, then the delicate operation of transferring the sarcophagus would begin. Ahtisaans nodded to his radio operator to notify Berlin that they had made the rendezvous. He cranked the coding device and began transmitting directly to the Reichschancellry
In a private dining room below the Reichschancellry, Himmer, Goebbels and Goering raised their champagne glasses in a toast. By sheer luck and perseverance, Vladimir Illich Lenin was in German hands. Kincaid and Regan had done it. This was going to be the big surprise for Hitler, a tribute from the glorious forces fighting in the East. Each man was gambling on this tipping Russia toward capitulation or at the very least a steep ransom.
Intelligence out of Moscow had been compromised which meant the train had been found. The high ranking mole was probably dead or talking at the hands of the NKVD. Somehow Schenker’s intelligence about Eva hadn’t come to light. Her true identity was still being dredged up from the floor of a torture room of the S.S. Hauptamt.
As it stood, Russia was still playing catch-up.
The first of Regan’s sealed cameras had been returned and were being processed for shipment to Hollywood for editing and distribution.
Goebbels outlined the next stage of the mission, in Oslo, where the sarcophagus was to be unveiled in the Nobel Academy. It was to be hailed as Germany’s contribution to peace and freeing Europe from the spectre of Bolshevism.
Goebbels had already dispatched Nazi Party journalists and propaganda film units to Norway's capital. As they enjoyed the champagne and canapes, the troika knew that if this worked, the Fuhrer would look favourably on them and they would continue to ride high in the echelons of power.
Kincaid was shouting instructions all over the flying boat in preparation for the transfer. He was in a foul mood. He hauled Eva by the arm down into the hold and told her to start translating. Regan appeared at his elbow, his perpetual shadow. Zbarsky studied Eva carefully. Between her factual translation she was slipping words in that were out of context with the sentence. He pieced her words together in his head ‘We…..need…to…get…..out…… now.’ He nodded in understanding. The further they were away from Russia, the harder it was going to be to get back.
Kincaid’s attitude toward Eva had altered. He was terse and cold, no longer pandering to her. The endgame was in progress and he was tying up the loose ends. This meant Zbarsky, his technical team, and Eva were now on borrowed time.
Dressed in tweeds, Kincaid’s eyes were bleary from travelling and a hangover, and his florid face completed his resemblance to an English country squire. Eva had changed into warm clothing, allowing her to slip Schenker’s Luger into the pocket of her heavy overcoat. Its weight gave her comfort. She had used one before and had checked it out in her bathroom. It had a full clip, clear breech and the trigger action was smooth. The last time she’d used one was in Czechoslovakia two years earlier, saving De Witte’s life.
Kincaid span her roughly one too many times and she pulled her arm free of his grip. ‘What the hell is wrong with you, Don?’ She stood her ground, jutting her jaw outward, staring up into his face.
Wrong-footed by her resistance, Kincaid worked himself up into a fury. He wasn’t used to being confronted, least of all by a woman. She rubbed her elbow knowing full well she’d bruise later.
‘Your job is to translate. Do it!’ He was shaking, running his hands through his hair, the rheumy eyes magnified behind their lenses.
Almost as a reflex he raised his hand to strike her but he stopped in mid-air. The radio operator was shouting down that the sea was becoming too rough to attempt the transfer. In the past hour, the wind had picked up.
Regan had stood by throughout and when Eva looked to him he winked with a sneer spread across his face.
‘Christ!’ roared Kincaid climbing up the stairwell out of the hold. He could be heard berating the crew above. The U-Boat captain wanted to move closer in-shore to calmer water. Imagine the consequences if the sarcophagus were to fall overboard between the plane and the submarine.
Eva and Zbarsky could hear the flying boat's engines starting up and the floor beneath them start to move. Looking out of the window, they could see the sky and sea beginning to turn grey.
‘Did we land or were we shot down?’ inquired Brandt as the American transport skidded to a halt.
The airstrip was a disused farm road that the pilot had been directed to by Chainbridge and De Witte. They were waiting with Captain Charles Fletchmore and four members of his commando unit from the Embassy. Fletchmore’s remaining commando
s were on the islands around Helsinki looking out for a seaplane the size of a factory.
Brandt and his men descended the steps and were greeted with military salutes. An uneasy pause followed, Brandt and his men wary of armed commandos and vice-versa. Fletchmore’s German was fluent and quickly established a professional rapport. Chainbridge and De Witte stayed back and decided on remaining nameless. Fletchmore introduced them as ‘Messers Floyd and Jackson, from England.’ Brandt knew straightaway they were running the show — British Intelligence? The word Gestapo crossed his mind. Maybe Schenker had witnessed Kravchenko’s intervention. Maybe this was another deception. Mentally he noted every British commando’s position should the shooting start. Kant had unslung his rifle and the remainder of the unit took a small step back.
De Witte sensed the stand-off and stepped forward. He directed a question to Brandt. Noting De Witte was blind, Brandt, as a courtesy stepped roughly into line with De Witte’s nose.
‘The young lady accompanying Kincaid, Eva Molenaar, how is she?’ His tone tried to sound neutral but Brandt picked up on its intensity. He realised that Eva was involved with this man. He felt a jealous tug in his stomach. The man was clearly older, handsome, had a quiet charisma and was blind. He could see the attraction.
‘She’s alive, but I think she’s running on borrowed time. She witnessed everything.’
De Witte nodded solemnly. Part of him was always braced for the worst.
After Eva had returned from Munich two years earlier where she had met the Russian Attache, De Witte had activated a double-agent in Beria’s department, a Cossack of noble blood. He had fed the details of Lenin’s transport itinerary into Berlin’s intelligence community. These details had eventually led them to Kincaid. Now she was trapped on board his private aircraft with him.
He put his feelings to one side and turned to Kravchenko. He started speaking fluent Russian, making him feel welcome, commending him on his escape.
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