by Noel Hynd
Cochrane arrived five minutes later, having ridden to the block with Stasiuk, who would remain on the street, watching over the three vehicles. The cars were scattered in three different spots, each within view of the other. All were parked with their front tires turned sharply out toward the street with clearance from the cars in front of them. They were positioned for a quick getaway. Stasiuk, Roth, and Kern were the assigned drivers. Any of the cars could carry four passengers and all four had added extra side plating, which could stop low-caliber bullets. In the event of an emergency, get to any car and get away.
Upon entering Club Weimar, Cochrane spotted Bettina in her usual perch on the upper right-hand corridor. He bought a bottle of beer, didn’t drink any of it, and went to her table. There was an empty chair beside her as if she had been expecting someone, maybe even him. Her face was toward the stage as he sat down next to her, her head upraised slightly like a middle-aged tortoise looking for the sunlight.
“How are you tonight, my dear?” she asked him without looking.
“In good spirits,” he said. “You?”
“Never better. Do you have my traveling partner?” she asked straight off.
“He’s at Tempelhof. Waiting.”
Something in her seemed to surge.
“How do I know that?” she asked. “How am I to be one hundred and ten percent certain?”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I trust you a hundred percent. It’s the extra ten percent that concerns me.”
He laughed. “I know you too well, Bettina.”
Cochrane produced the handwritten note from Horst. She unfolded it and read it. He thought he saw her eyes widen and mist for a moment. Then the vision, or the illusion, was gone.
“So kind of you,” she said. She sighed. “Mustn’t leave evidence around though, right? Not that I wouldn’t love to keep this.”
She folded the paper in two and held it to the flame of the candle on her table. The paper ignited, a large flame erupted, flared, raged, and slowly died. She gathered the embers into the ash stay.
“My God,” she said in a husky, low voice. “I’m really going to do this?”
“You’ve done more difficult things in your life, haven’t you?”
“More than a few times, my dear,” she said. “I assume you have some support on the floor?”
“More than you’ll ever know.”
“I hope to God you’re right,” she said. “Now I suppose we just need to proceed calmly and I will disappear from the face of the German earth. Correct?”
“Correct,” he said.
Two members of the waitstaff came by and turned in their final tally. She entered some numbers from some previous receipts into a ledger. Again, everything was flowing as smoothly as silk, Cochrane noticed. He relaxed, took a census of everyone in the room, saw all parties in their preassigned places, and sighed with relief.
Yes, indeed, he was convinced. It was going to go off without a hitch.
The end of the show came. Lights went up. The on-stage talent disappeared backstage. Several dozen single men, some in uniforms, some not, crowded the floor. A few pretty German girls came out to see who was paying for extra favors.
Bettina worked quickly. She was impressive with numbers. She finished her receipts within minutes. Cochrane could tell she had changed gears. She wanted to get out of here as badly as Cochrane did.
Cochrane knew the end-of-the-evening procedure. Bettina needed to get her totals right and turn the books in to the man who sat at Kovalyov’s elbow. She fussed with some final columns of figures. He was too nervous to drink more than a sip of beer. Then she was finished. Cochrane and Bettina rose from her table.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” she said.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
“After I turn in the ledgers.”
“Where’s your travel bag?” he asked.
She reached for it and set it on the table. Cagey woman. She had used a knitting bag and left wool and a half-made sweater on top. No need to attract suspicion with a travel bag.
“I’ll take it for you, so you don’t need to come back to the table,” he said. “We’ll get away faster. I’ll meet you at the door.”
“You’re an angel,” she said. “Think of everything, don’t you?”
She leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek as she moved past him. She was on her way downstairs before he could say anything more.
Cochrane stood for a moment. He scanned the floor. He saw Anna emerge from behind the stage curtain. She wore a coat and also carried a small bag. Cochrane thought that was odd, but it was a Saturday, the end of the show week, and anything was possible.
Anna stood and looked around as if waiting for someone. She looked agitated. Alarm bells started to go off in Bill Cochrane’s head. Abruptly, he looked back to the bar area. Roth was missing. Not good. He scanned and saw Kern, loitering near the boxes of electrical connections that housed the circuit breakers and routing switches.
But Kern looked agitated, too. He was looking for Roth and couldn’t find him. Cochrane’s senses now told him that things were about to blow up, but he couldn’t fathom why. Downstairs Bettina was pushing her way through a dozen men trying to turn in her ledgers. That was fine, but when Cochrane looked back toward the bar, Kern was looking at him, motioning with his hands in a questioning manner, asking where Roth had gone.
Something was up. Cochrane couldn’t tell what.
Nearby, a noisy argument ensued at one end of the bar and spilled onto the corridor which led to where Cochrane stood. The altercation escalated to shoving and loud profanities in German and Russian. Cochrane recognized the tank commander again at the center of the dispute. The girl he had swung over his shoulders many days earlier was half-dressed and disheveled under the arm of another man and the tank commander didn’t like it. He wanted her back. A fight started. As if on cue, another one started downstairs. Two Russian officers and one girl.
The fights didn’t affect what Cochrane was there to do that night, but then again, they did. He tried to shut the noise out from what was important. He saw Bettina downstairs nearing Kovalyov. Cochrane tried to move to the bar. He would have to work around the tank commander’s argument. Then his eyes traveled downstairs again, and everything suddenly made awful sense and he knew what was about to happen, how hell was going to break out, and he was unable to stop it.
As he watched, it happened with incredible speed but seemed almost freeze-frame slow motion at the same time, like one of those tricky staccato newsreels in the movie theaters.
Anna turned from where she was standing and charged down the aisle to Kovalyov, pushing her way past Bettina. Cochrane’s eyes went wide when he saw the pistol in the blonde woman’s hand. Within two or three heartbeats, she was in front of Bettina and Roth was following her. Anna’s arm went up when she got to within two meters in front of the man who had killed her parents.
She opened fire. Her pistol exploded with three popping cracks before one of the security people hit her arm.
Kovalyov was hit, but not mortally. He screamed and clutched wounds in the upper part of his body near the shoulder. Then it was all chaos. Cochrane saw Roth draw a Mauser and fire at two of Kovalyov’s bodyguards. At least one of them was hit. The ex-colonel was screaming in agony but that was just when Kern must have jumped the bar and coldcocked the bartender because the lights went out.
Cochrane cursed wildly but rushed toward the front exit where more bedlam was breaking out. He stayed in the front entrance area long enough to spot Bettina fleeing. He called to her and she saw him. When she was close enough, he extended a hand and pulled her through the pack of bodies. Soldiers, uniformed militia and cops were running in every direction.
Cochrane arrived out on the street in front of the club. He took inventory. The Balkan bodyguards, two of them, were there and moving toward the cars. Then two uniformed Soviet soldiers emerged with guns drawn. Cochrane had one arm on Bettina, grip
ping her with his fist while his other arm held her bag.
“Come on! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yelled.
Then, absurdly, the target of it all, Kovalyov, emerged in the doorway, staggering, covered with blood, supported by cronies, and his eyes went accusingly to Bettina. He had a pistol in his hand. He lurched but was still upright with his weapon. His eyes focused not on Bettina but Cochrane. In his pain, he must have thought that Cochrane was the instigator of all of this. His pistol came up.
Suddenly, Roth appeared from the crazed crowd of people right behind the Russian. He raised his pistol, pressed it to the side of the Russian ex-colonel’s skull, and pulled the trigger twice. There were two loud bangs. The Russian’s head exploded, and his body went down.
Cochrane had seen a lot in his life, but he stood there for too many moments, dazed, alarmed, and stupefied. He lost track of Roth and Anna Schroeder in the bedlam that continued.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and saw that it was Otto Kern, imploring him and Bettina to get to one of the French cars.
Cochrane turned and ran, pulling the German lady along with him. They piled into the ghastly old Citroen, prayed that it would start, and rejoiced when the motor turned over. Cochrane looked to where the Opel had been parked, Roth’s vehicle, and saw that it was gone. The Balkan gangsters piled into the other French car and headed in their own direction. Whether they had joined the gunplay or not, Cochrane didn’t know.
Kern was the wheelman and a good one. The tires screeched and at least two Russian bullets hit the sides of Cochrane’s vehicle but didn’t penetrate the secondary armor. The shots whacked the vehicle like blows from a hammer. Cochrane pushed Bettina downward in the cramped back of the car and covered her body as best he could with his body and arms. Then a second barrage hit the Citroen.
These whacked even louder. There were three shots. Two of them didn’t penetrate. The third one did. It came through the extra armor near the rear window, shattered the glass, and ricocheted wildly through the interior of the car.
Kern at the wheel cursed wildly and swerved. Something hot hit Cochrane in his open palm. He thought it was a piece of glass or a shard of metal from the chassis of his car. But there was no hot sticky blood, so he ignored it and kept his head low. He made a fist and held onto whatever item had struck him.
Then they were away. Kern made the first turn possible to get off the block where the Club Weimar was located. He was around the corner within another fifteen seconds. Cochrane was dumbstruck over how the evening had ended, listening to the wheels of their escaping car on the rough, dark streets of East Berlin, and praying that no Soviet patrol would stop them.
Kern zigzagged through the city toward the airport. He took a final turn on what felt like two wheels. Up ahead they could see three MPs with automatic carbines at a U.S. checkpoint and beyond that, they could see the lights of Tempelhof and an incoming flight.
“Holy hell,” Cochrane muttered.
He knew that the night and the ramifications of what had happened were just beginning. He sat back, opened his hand, and realized that what he was holding was a spent bullet: small caliber, a wild shot. Had it been larger caliber it might have killed him. He placed the spent round in his pocket and kept it as a souvenir of east Berlin.
Chapter 73
Berlin to Cambridge – August 1948
Otto Kern drove the final several hundred meters to Tempelhof, made short work of the guards on duty, and guided the rattletrap old Citroen to the hangar where the evening had started. Major Pickford was there, waiting. Someone must have phoned to let him know that things had blown up, although they had retrieved Bettina Schneidhuber. Pickford was not surprised to see the three arrivals. They pulled themselves out of the car, Bettina shaken the most, Kern hardly at all, and Cochrane somewhere in the middle.
“Where’s Roth?” Cochrane asked immediately. “There’s a blonde woman with him, also.”
“Haven’t seen him,” Pickford said.
“No call? Nothing?” Cochrane asked.
“No. Where did you see him last?”
“On the street outside the club. There was major gunplay.”
“I heard. Stasiuk called it in. The Balkan guys are good. My other sources tell me the whole quarter is alive with police and soldiers. It’s Roth and whoever is with him I’m worried about. If they didn’t get away far and fast, God help them.” Almost as an afterthought, Pickford added, “Did Roth shoot a Russian Or more than one? That’s what I heard.”
“Everything happened fast. The lights went out. I’m not sure what I saw.”
“Right.”
“Well, damn it, I got Frau Schneidhuber out, didn’t I?” Cochrane snapped.
“Yes. That was good of you, wasn’t it?” Pickford said with a grin. “Congratulations.”
“It was also the assignment.”
“Where’s Horst?” Bettina asked.
Pickford interceded. “Your man is waiting in the aircraft,” he answered her with surprising kindness, given the circumstances. “It will just be a few moments.”
Cochrane turned to Kern. There had been an important fallback established between the two cargo workers. In an emergency, Roth would contact Kern or it would work the other way around, addressing each other as a “cousin” as further verification of their identity.
Contact would happen either right away, when it was safe enough after, or anytime down the road that was possible. Code names would be employed, references to a birthday party would be made to mark messages of extreme significance, the original birthday party being spy-speak for the events at the Club Weimar on what turned out to be its closing night.
Kern shook his head and gestured with empty hands. He had heard nothing obviously, because he had been the wheelman for Bettina and Bill. He hadn’t seen anything, either, exiting the club. He only knew that the Opel had been gone when he last looked.
Who knew? No one in Hangar 7, obviously.
“Sir?” came a male voice from the corridor from the airfield.
Cochrane turned in the direction of the question. There was a man in a bomber jacket. Cochrane recognized the attending pilot: Victor Marino. There was a younger, fresh-faced kid with him who wore the stripes of a Second Lieutenant, obviously a prospective co-pilot. The nameplate on his flight suit gave his name as Eberle.
“We’re cleared for takeoff to England,” Marino said. “I got a Gooney Bird ready, fueled and waiting. Air Traffic says I can priority cut to the head of the takeoff queue as soon as I have the say so.”
“Fine with me,” Pickford said. “Did you talk to HQ? General Clay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did he say about departure? Exactly?”
Marino appreciated the question. “The general said to ‘get these people the fuck out of Tempelhof and over to Cambridge-Alconbury a.s.a.f.p. before the goddam world press and the em-fucking Russians are all over us.’ That’s what General Clay said, sir. Exact words.”
“Roger, that,” Major Pickford answered. “Sounds like him.” He turned back to Cochrane.
“I think that’s a splendid idea,” Cochrane said before Pickford could say anything else. “Get them off German soil.”
Then, “You’re going, too,” Pickford said to Bill Cochrane.
“I am?”
“The three of you. You’re welcome. Get every trace of yourself out of here, Bill, and don’t let me see you here till the next decade unless we ask for you. Got it?”
“Got it,” Cochrane said, who – for the moment at least — couldn’t have been more pleased. The notion of Roth being missing soured his mood almost immediately, however, yet he was in no position to complain or resist.
Marino and Eberle then guided Bettina to the aircraft. Cochrane shook hands with Major Pickford and then ran to retrieve all his personal items from his room at Tempelhof.
Cochrane gathered his own few things within two minutes, raced back to Hangar 7 and out onto the tarmac. T
here was a pink glow in the edges of the sky beyond the floodlights of the airport and the landing strips. Cochrane forged up the steps to the C-47 that waited. He was the last one to board. The passenger door slammed shut behind him and he strapped himself into a seat against the interior wall of the airplane, just behind the pilot. He was in the same seat where he had sat when he had come to Berlin a few weeks earlier. The cargo area was only half full as Cambridge-Alconbury was an unusual destination.
Bill Cochrane leaned back. He closed his eyes in relief, but again he was tormented by the vision of Roth and Anna Schroeder if the Soviets had captured them. Their fate would be unspeakable if they were prisoners. He was uneasy with what Anna had done, trying to avenge Kovalyov’s brutality in Demmin, but he understood. It was Cochrane’s opinion that too few warm criminals had been brought to justice. How could he blame Anna for exacting her revenge and who could blame Roth for coming to her defense?
Cochrane was not a religious man, but from somewhere in his childhood, a prayer came to him. His mind went on autopilot and he prayed that they had escaped or died quickly before a more horrible death could be visited upon them.
Then, remembering where he was, what the assignment had been, and how the evening had started, he flashed his eyes open again. He settled his gaze across the cargo hold.
Two figures were mysterious at first, then came into focus.
Horst and Bettina.
They were across from him, lashed into their seats as the chatter began from the flight tower to Marino and Eberle. The plane was taxiing now. With permission from the controllers, it cut in front of several others. General Tunner, be damned, but priorities were priorities. The C-47 headed for the number one spot in line for takeoff.
Bettina and Horst stared at him, both with looks that were heavy with fatigue. Her eyes were wet, and they held each other’s hands. Yes, they realized, they were really leaving Germany. Together.
Horst gave him a stiff nod, the nod of a man who had aged far beyond his years, and a small salute with his hand. Bettina dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. Her bag, the knitted sack that had come out of the club with her, the one that held all her worldly possessions, was wedged between her feet and the wall of the plane.