by Noel Hynd
“Old adversaries I can deal with. People like you are more difficult,” Cochrane said. “There are times that I’d like to avoid you, like when I’m about to start a year’s sabbatical at a place I’ve always adored. Cambridge. Enemies are easy to avoid, elude, and say ‘no’ to. Old colleagues are quite another story.”
“Should I be flattered?”
“Only if you wish to be,” Cochrane said. “Do I get a weapon? I noticed you just put a Remington into your pants.”
“You’ll get a weapon in Berlin,” Goff said. “Major Pickford has everything from jet fighters to pocketknives. You’ll get what you need.”
“I assume he’s an intelligence officer,” Cochrane said.
“He’s our man at Tempelhof Airfield,” Goff confirmed. “Or one of them, anyway. And while we’re on the subject of majors, you’ll carry that rank, also. Same as you did in 1943.”
“Okay, fine,” Cochrane said, assimilating everything quickly. “Is there anything else?”
“Nope. I’m hoping you’re in and out in a couple of weeks. I have friends on both sides of the West-East frontier, so if anything goes haywire, let me know. Major Pickford will brief you on arrival. Good to go?”
“As good as ever. Just tell me one thing. Between us.”
Goff rolled his eyes. “If I can,” he said.
“What the hell is this really about?” Cochrane asked. “I’ve known Donovan, Dulles, and, for that matter, Jim Forrestal for many years. They aren’t well-known for doing things out of the goodness of their hearts.”
“You’ve turned into a jaded, old hog, Bill,” Goff responded easily. “I keep telling you. Bettina Schneidhuber was promised a route, an escape if you will, out of Germany after the war if we got that young girl to Washington. Dulles is trying to make good on the promise.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“You asked me a question,” Goff said. “I answered it. See how it plays out in Berlin. I wouldn’t lie to you. Not knowingly, anyway.”
“Bastard,” muttered Cochran with a pained smile.
“I love you, too, Bill,” Goff said. “Travel safely.”
That evening, Cochrane repacked what he would take with him and tried to sleep. Sleep came with difficulty, however, as he kept thinking of his wife and family and how the front end of his sabbatical had been sabotaged. It was not till two AM that he slept, then he was up again at seven.
Chapter 29
London to Berlin – July 1948
By prearrangement the next morning, an unmarked car with an American driver took Cochrane to Heathrow. There, his driver guided him through a circumvention of normal exit procedures. He was handed off to two soldiers and taken to a private waiting area in a separate annex where, through a tinted window, he watched the loading of an American military transport, a C-47 that was still marked with the red, white, and blue D-day invasion paints.
Workers appeared to be loading industrial parts of some sort onto the plane. It looked as if some large machinery had been taken apart and reduced to sections, then hauled onto the plane through a cargo door. The sight perplexed Cochrane.
There was a small human figure in a flight suit and pilot’s cap supervising the loading activities and examining the propellers and undercarriage of the aircraft. The aviator eventually turned and walked back toward the annex. At this point, Cochrane realized for sure what he had suspected. The aviator was a woman. Another figure joined her. This one was a man, maybe six to eight inches taller than she was. They engaged in conversation for several seconds, laughed about something, then disappeared into the building where Cochrane waited.
The woman reappeared less than two minutes later, approaching him. There was a man with her. He wore a flight suit, also.
“Mr. Lewis?” she said.
“That’s me,” Cochrane said.
“I’m Tommy Olson,” she said. “We’ve been assigned to deliver you directly to Berlin, sir.”
“Berlin directly?” Cochrane asked, surprised. “Not Wiesbaden or Rhein-Main first?”
“No, sir,” Olson said. “We’ve got some industrial equipment to deliver. We just came from the briefing. Our instructions are to get you to Tempelhof.”
“Then I’m ready to go,” Cochrane said, rising from his seat.
“You ever fly with a lady pilot before?” she asked.
“I’d remember it if I had,” he said. “No.”
“First time for everything,” Tommy Olson said. Then, introducing the man next to her, she said, “This is my co-pilot today, Mr. Taylor.’
Cochrane offered his hand. “Call me, Glenn, sir,” Taylor said.
“Call me William,” Cochrane said.
“Come on along, Mr. Lewis, sir,” Tommy Olson said. “Let’s get up into the clouds.”
Chapter 30
Germany, Soviet Zone – 1946-48
In the Soviet POW camp where Unteroffizier Heinrich Peter Roth had been held, the Russian captors would taunt their German prisoners. The Soviets would tell the Germans they were going home, line them up to get onto trucks, and then insult, laugh at them, and throw garbage at them. Then the Russians would forcibly march the German ex-soldiers back to their barracks where they had freshly urinated on the beds or in the narrow aisles. Many prisoners would kill themselves from the mental anguish.
Roth, a native Berliner from a gritty neighborhood in the Eastern Sector, had been a gunner in a tank unit. Later, when his first unit had been destroyed, he had been a foot soldier in the infantry. As the war wound down, he heard from other soldiers that his late comrades in arms, his closest friends, had all been killed either in combat or during the air bombardment of Berlin that signaled the end of the war. The units that had engaged the Red Army had been obliterated in battles, most survivors executed with pistols.
He had heard also that his old neighborhood in Berlin had been leveled in the last months of the war. He assumed that his parents, who had run a popular neighborhood café in Freising, were dead. When he had too much time to recollect, he often remembered a young girl name Katrina, a year younger than he, who had worked at a furniture factory where Heinrich had been a carpenter’s apprentice.
He had been sweet on her, and she had been fond of him. He had been a handsome young man at the time, unscathed by battle or horror, before he had enlisted in the army. Heinrich didn’t dare to even think about her. He was sure she was dead. He hoped he would never learned the details.
When Roth had been captured in Poland, Russian soldiers had thrown him in with men from other battalions and other parts of Germany. The other prisoners were rural men who often ganged up on him and stole his rations. Roth reasoned that if he stayed in the camp, his guards or the other prisoners would eventually kill him.
Heinrich waited till the mid-spring of 1948 and walked away from his camp one morning before dawn. Roth was in East Germany, seventy miles east of the small village of Fessenden that was outside of Werneuchen, a small town in Brandenburg, in the district of Barnim northeast of Berlin. He had been born in Berlin but had had an aunt, uncle, and cousins in Fessenden. Fessenden was as good a destination as any.
One thing he had learned as a soldier: always march forward. There was no alternative other than death. At least there was honor, he reasoned, in marching forward.
Roth was twenty-four years old. It was common for men to walk away from labor camps: the guards were uncaring, drunk, and more concerned with the German girls they had captured and now held hostage in a private building, a converted church. Most escapees were quickly rounded up by Russian guards in Soviet Gaz 67s, the Russian version of the Jeep. Escapees were shot on sight, their bodies dragged to the roadside or into fields, or hung on trees and left to rot or be eaten by the wolves that emerged from the forests at night. Usually, their clothing was stolen. Mutilated naked corpses lined the dirt roads westward toward Berlin.
Soviet military patrols were frequent. Roth stayed with the roads until he heard vehicles coming closer. Then
he would dive into the woods and run. Several times the patrols shot at him. Once he was fired upon by a sentry or by a German turncoat from a battered pillbox. Or maybe it was a farmer. He wasn’t sure who had fired the shots, but the bullets came close enough to hit the dirt along the road where he walked. Roth was still wearing the tattered remnants of his uniform from the war, though he had also found a piece of canvas along the route and now wrapped it around him to alter his profile. At one point, two days into his escape, a small fighter aircraft with Soviet markings flew low overhead. The pilot saw him, turned, and came after him.
In terror, Roth ran toward a ditch as the plane strafed him. He dived into the ditch as bullets just missed him and found himself next to the remains of two corpses swarming with rats. Ready to vomit, Roth climbed to his feet and hid in the tall grass and brush. The Soviet aircraft made two more passes at him. One barrage of bullets came within ten meters of him. Then the pilot gave up.
Roth still carried his military papers, which he knew he should not lose. The papers were the only thing he had that would establish his identity if he could get back to Berlin and could find anyone sympathetic to a returning soldier who had served the fatherland with honor. But the papers were also enough to get him shot because he had deserted from a Soviet camp. It all depended on whom he presented the papers to.
After four days, he arrived at the village of Fessenden where his Aunt Greta and Uncle Kurt had lived. His emotions were wound up so tightly that he could not knock on the door of the house where they had lived. He hid in the woods for three days stealing root vegetables to survive.
Finally, one morning Heinrich returned to the area near his family’s old home. He saw a bent, broken woman with a yoke over her shoulder carrying two pails of milk. It was his mother’s sister, his Aunt Greta. He couldn’t stop himself. He ran from the woods toward her. She did not recognize him and screamed to her husband, Kurt, that a deranged Russian had come to rape her.
Her husband came out of the house with a military pistol and chased him down. Heinrich stumbled. The uncle pinned him down with his back to the ground and pushed the nose of the pistol to his forehead, having every intention of blowing his brains out.
Roth begged to be killed. But before his Uncle Kurt could pull the trigger, the uncle recognized him. As young Roth sobbed and as people from the village gathered, Roth’s uncle pulled the younger man to his feet, hugged him, cried, and guided him into their home.
Heinrich had returned to a world of both devastation and energy. There was some semblance of rebuilding going on, rural farms were coming to life again. The farmland had been spared much of the fighting and bombing, but that didn’t mean it had been untouched by conflict. And Heinrich Roth was obsolete, a relic of a war that had been a crushing national humiliation. The only thing Heinrich knew was soldiering and rudimentary carpentry, not farming.
He had nothing, no clothes, no property, no job, few skills.
Everything was strange. His old world no longer existed.
His two male cousins, Hans and Erik, had been killed on the Eastern Front in 1944. His female cousin, Marika, had been taken away by Soviet soldiers in 1945 after hiding in her parents’ attic for eight months. No one had seen her since.
Heinrich stayed in the old bedroom of Hans and Erik for several days. More neighbors discovered he was there. They came over, sat downstairs, and noisily discussed him. Many were bitter. They called him a shirker and a traitor because the war had been lost and their sons died. Yet Heinrich had “come home unharmed.”
After a few days, he was able to go downstairs but he could not meet the eyes of his accusers. No one talked about the war, only the current state of things. The defeat. The disgrace. The humiliation. His uncle, who had fought in World War I, said little but often supportively touched his shoulder. His uncle seemed to understand. The older man’s eyes said what his tongue couldn’t. What all the younger people had seen in 1945, Uncle Kurt had seen in 1918.
After he regained his strength, Heinrich Roth was able to visit the two local pubs. The pubs were occasionally frequented by loud Russian occupation troops passing through, talking about their heroism, their new world of socialism, and their rough aggressive conquests of the local girls.
Roth’s uncle provided him with some of Hans and Erik’s clothing, so he could jettison his tattered uniform, which would draw attention. The people of the village soon got used to him and concerned themselves with other stragglers passing through or hiding in the forests. The Russians barely noticed him. The only one outside his family who had any sympathy was the German bartender, a man named Lucas who had a hand missing but who gave him one beer an evening and scraps from the plates of the Russian soldiers.
Lucas was older also. He had lost three sons to Hitler’s madness. He, too, understood.
In time when he wasn’t kept busy, Heinrich could think only of all his dead friends and their heroic acts, none of which were worth discussing with anyone. Depression gripped him. He knew where his uncle kept his guns. He worked up the nerve to commit suicide, the honorable exit chosen by so many Germans.
One morning there was a knock on the door. It was a local woman named Carlotta, a friend of his aunt. She was a zaftig brunette, local gossip, and war widow. But she knew everything, so she was always worth listening to.
Carlotta warned Aunt Greta that someone had ratted out Heinrich to the local police. The local police were now loyal to the Soviet army. They worked with a Soviet state security service and sought out “former Nazis, deserters, and undesirables.”
There was a bounty of two hundred marks for anyone who could find and shoot a deserter. There was now, Carlotta explained excitedly, a race on to collect.
Immediately after hearing this news, Uncle Kurt gave him a change of clothes — some of Kurt’s older farmer’s wear — and a bag with bread and carrots. Kurt led his nephew to a shortcut through the woods, a winding path that was under the cover of trees and invisible to anyone who didn’t know it by heart. The two walked until Heinrich could see a break from the woods into a clearing about fifty meters in front of him.
There they stopped.
“The path will eventually come to a clearing. You will see a road. That road will lead to a road to Berlin,” his Uncle Kurt said. “The road will enter the city between Bernau and Werneuchen. You must take it.”
The older man handed Roth an old Mauser. It was from 1908 but was still working, Uncle Kurt explained. There were three bullets chambered in the weapon. Henrich’s uncle also gave him six bullets and a small compass.
“Defend yourself as you need to,” his uncle advised him. “But always save one bullet for yourself.”
Jawohl, said Heinrich.
“May God watch over you,” he says. “To me, you are much like my sons who did not survive Hitler’s madness. Go! Berlin is to the west. Take the road. Avoid anyone in the uniform of any country. They are all killers. Those who don’t kill you with a dagger or a bullet will kill you with a bomb. Whatever you do, do not ever come back here. Now be on your way. I will always think of you as a third son. Hurry! Before the Russian police arrive.”
The men embraced quickly, then Uncle Kurt pushed out of the embrace, turned, and hurried away without looking back.
Heinrich Roth turned and walked toward the clearing that led to the road. He looked back once but his uncle was already gone, having faded into the forest surrounding Fessenden.
Heinrich might have cried but he had no tears left. Once again, he marched forward. That had been his training as a soldier. It was the only thing he remembered how to do.
Chapter 31
London to Berlin 1948
Tommy Olson led Cochrane to the loaded C-47 that sat on the tarmac at Heathrow. Taylor, who would co-pilot today, walked behind them. Cochrane boarded the aircraft first. Olson pointed to a seat against the wall between two windows immediately behind the pilot’s seat.
“Grab that seat, sir,” she said, “and strap yourself in.�
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Cochrane took his position as instructed. “Am I the only passenger?” he asked.
“That was our briefing,” Glenn Taylor said.
“Consider yourself special,” Olson added.
“I already do with a lady pilot,” Cochrane said. Both aviators laughed.
“That’s how I feel every time we lift off,” Taylor said.
“I flew with the Air Transport Command during the war, sir,” Olson said as she routinely checked her dashboard. “Was in the air for half a million miles. Haven’t had an incident yet.”
“They called her ‘the Lady Snowbird’,” Taylor said, buckling his seatbelt and giving Cochrane an over-the-shoulder glance.
“Really? Why’s that?” Cochrane inquired.
“I had some real hands-on experience with snow and ice, Mr. Lewis,” she said. “Did a lot of flying in it and always came back.”
“She’s being modest,” Taylor said. “She specialized at flying into freezing rain, ice, and snow.”
“Fascinating. Where?” Cochrane asked.
“Eastern Canada. Midwinter. Delivering aircraft for the RAF, then returning veteran planes to Oklahoma for maintenance.”
“Her very own version of ‘The Ice Capades’,” Taylor teased gently. “Flew in zero visibility with wipers frozen and rudders iced. Jesus!”
“Life is a balancing act,” Olson said. “Flying is instinctive. You’ve got every instrument that the designers can give you, but you fly with your heart and your gut,” she said.
“Damned fine work,” Cochrane said. “Lend Lease aircraft I would imagine, in and out of Canada. Manufactured in the U.S., provided to our British friends to fight Hitler.”
“Correct, sir,” Olson said.
“Whatever it takes to win a war,” Cochrane added.
“Absolutely the case, sir,” she said.
“I admire what you did,” Cochrane said. He leaned forward and gave the pilot a touch of approval on her shoulder.