Alexsi flipped the cover over. Stenciled on the front was RMun 4322. Rocket Munition 4322? What the fuck was that? 43 … 43 had to be a new weapon, this year? What was new? Agitated, he tried to calm himself and search his memory. Holy fuck! The curse in Russian slipped right through his lips. RPzB 43. Racketen-panzerbüchse 43. Rocket Tank Rifle 43. The brand-new German copy of the American bazooka. It fired an antitank grenade up to a hundred meters.
An automobile pulled up outside. Alexsi rushed to the window. It was an American automobile, but painted in their dull green military color. The two men who stepped out, though, were unmistakably Russians in civilian clothes. Not the pair from Qom, but definitely NKVD.
Alexsi yanked the door open before they reached it, careful to keep his gun hand hidden behind it.
The two Russians went for their own pistols.
“Stop!” Alexsi said in Russian. “Take it easy. I’m David.”
The two Russians relaxed. “We’re from Matushkin,” the leader said.
“Quickly, come in,” Alexsi said insistently.
He practically dragged them through the door and over to the Waffenhalter. “You know about the SS sabotage team that’s still at large?” he said.
The Russians didn’t seem excited at all. “We know,” said the leader.
“Well, can’t you see?” Alexsi said, practically shouting now. “They were here. They have machine pistols, probably a machine gun, and definitely a new rocket launcher that can blow up a tank at a hundred meters. This is the second variant of the assassination plot.”
“We know of this,” the leader said calmly.
Alexsi was nearly beside himself now. “You know? Do you know that if they’re not here, they’re in the house right next to the vehicle gate of the security zone with their grenade launcher? And they’re not fucking here! If you don’t have a radio you need to get to a telephone and warn them.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the leader said.
“Don’t worry!” Alexsi shouted. “Are you mad? They’ll kill the Big Three.”
“I said don’t worry,” the leader repeated, as calm as any man who ever lived. “Comrade Stalin and Roosevelt are safe in our embassy.”
“But Churchill is flying in today!” Alexsi bellowed, as if sheer volume would pound some sense into their heads. “He’ll be driving in from the airport—” Then suddenly he stopped dead. The entire savage reality of it suddenly became clear to him, and he almost choked on the words. “You knew all about it. You’ve watched them. You’re going to let the Germans kill Churchill, and then eliminate them.”
The two Russians glanced at each other. And then the leader said, “Don’t concern yourself with things that don’t concern you.”
It had been a long time since Alexsi had been spoken to in such pure Russian. Ugadat, ugodit, utselet. Sniff out, suck up, survive. In an instant he changed his entire posture to one of perfect Russian submission. “Of course, Comrade,” he said humbly.
The two NKVD men relaxed.
Alexsi raised his pistol and shot them both.
61
1943 Teheran, Iran
As soon as he was certain the two NKVD men were dead Alexsi began rooting through the packaging and the Waffenhalter to see if there was anything he could make use of.
He had no choice now. No one knew better than he how the NKVD worked. If he hadn’t been made a party to their plot, and he clearly hadn’t, then he was already marked for liquidation as soon as it was over.
In the German debris were a few scattered rounds of 9mm ammunition that topped up his pistol magazine. In the bottom of the Waffenhalter a canvas bag with four one-kilogram slabs of TNT. Evidently unneeded and discarded. But no blasting caps or fuse. They might as well be bricks with nothing to set them off. What the hell, maybe something would turn up. He slung the strap of the bag over his shoulder.
A closed metal hand grenade case was sitting next to the open and empty ones. Inside, neatly racked end to end, were three Stielhandgranate 24. The German wooden-handled stick grenade, what their enemies called the potato masher. Out of the original eight in the case. Alexsi snatched one up and unscrewed the handle from the explosive charge to get a look at the detonator. It was not the zero-delay booby trap that would blow up in your hand. They must have had enough grenades and discarded these as superfluous.
He jammed the grenade handles into his belt and went out the door at a run.
The NKVD automobile was an American Chevrolet 1500 series. American military lend-lease. The Russians hadn’t even bothered spraying over the paint. He’d been hoping there were weapons in the vehicle, but no luck there.
Alexsi started the engine and pulled out into the road. He raced through the gears, and upon reaching the end stamped the throttle pedal down to the floor. All his luck had abandoned him. He’d been hoping that another idea, any other idea in fact, would present itself rather than driving at full speed toward a house full of German assassins, in the midst of trigger-happy Allied soldiers. Unfortunately, he could see no other option.
Alexsi clamped his hands on the wheel and flew through the Teheran intersections without a pause, as if his was the only vehicle on the road. The meter on the dashboard read 80, which he would have known was miles not kilometers even if the American engine hadn’t been protesting so vehemently.
Taking a turn at full speed against an intersection full of automobiles, he ran over an Iranian traffic policeman’s shade umbrella planted in the middle of the street. The poor man dove out of the way for his life. The Chevrolet tires screeched through the turn and Alexsi went up over the sidewalk to get around the stopped traffic blocking his path. That was the one point in his journey where he downshifted.
He sent a horse drawing a carriage stampeding in panic, only the carriage overturning stopping the animal’s flight. At the next intersection he rammed another automobile out of his path in a crunch of metal.
He was drawing near now. He plucked one of the grenades from his belt and stuck the metal cap at the end of the handle into his mouth to unscrew it. The cap off, he shook out the porcelain bead on its cord and jammed the head of the grenade into the crevice of the seat beside him.
Both sides of traffic were stopped up ahead, the road packed solid with automobiles. Alexsi swerved onto the sidewalk, pedestrians running for their lives. He could see the house now, that house he’d rented next to the gate of that goddamned Russian cloth fence. And he could see the window on the upper floor thrust open wide enough to shoot a fucking rocket through.
His chaotic arrival was certainly no surprise. The two Russian military policemen halting the traffic emptied their pistols at him as he blew by. But they had helpfully left the intersection completely empty. As he cut the steering wheel, Alexsi’s eyes caught the vehicle gate up ahead, the small caravan of automobiles stopped before it, and a famous portly figure casually standing beside one sedan smoking a cigar.
No choice now. Alexsi aimed the Chevrolet directly at the house. He grabbed the grenade from the seat, slipped the porcelain bead through the fingers of his left hand, and yanked hard to activate the friction fuse.
As the Chevrolet sped across the intersection, Alexsi opened the driver door, leaned out with only his left hand gripping the steering wheel keeping him in the vehicle, and hurled the grenade at the open window of the house’s upper floor. The windscreen glass exploded from a hail of gunfire and if he had been behind the wheel, he would have been killed. He could feel bullets flying all about. All he had time to do was dive back into the car across the length of the seat.
The Chevrolet crashed into the side of the house. The impact lifted Alexsi up and slammed him into the dashboard and then down onto the floor. It knocked the air from his lungs, and him senseless for a moment. He thought he heard an explosion, but whether it was the grenade or the car hitting the house he couldn’t be sure.
Alexsi bounced up, a stabbing pain in his side making it hurt to draw breath, and crawled through the open hol
e where the windscreen had been. Scrambling over the hood and into the house. The Chevrolet was half inside and half out. Slipping over scattered bricks and wood, air filled with dust that had not yet settled, Alexsi stumbled across the living room. A burst of machine-pistol fire from the top of the stairs said that there were definitely Germans alive up there. Alexsi jerked out his pistol and fired a few shots in that general direction, just to keep them from rushing down.
Two long machine-pistol bursts, fired from upstairs down through the floor, stitched bullets through the ceiling at him and blew plaster all over. Alexsi rolled away from the line of the burst, and a stick grenade sailed down the stairs, struck the wall, and bounced into the room.
At least he knew the house. He dove into the next room, frantically yanking one of his own grenades from his belt.
The German grenade exploded with a deafening noise and a jarring blast. Alexsi knew the drill: they’d be following the shock action of their grenade to charge down the stairs and shoot him. He bounced to his feet, yanked the lanyard to activate his grenade, and dashed back into the room, filled with a thick smog of high explosive smoke.
One thousand.
But though he couldn’t see, he knew where the top of the stairs was. Alexsi fired his pistol left-handed at the top of the stairs, wildly and inaccurately, but it was just to drive them back.
Two thousand.
The grenade fuse had burned enough that they wouldn’t be able to pick it up and throw it back at him. He hurled it at the top of the stairs, not directly to give them a shot at him, but at an angle to bounce it off the wall and into the upstairs hallway. He was ready to run in case he’d missed but it exploded upstairs.
Deafened by the two blasts, he couldn’t hear any sound of feet above. Which would have been helpful. No matter. He didn’t have much more time. With only him and his pistol against automatic weapons he would either be killed by the Germans upstairs or the Russians coming through the door at any moment.
What to do? Still a little groggy from the grenade blasts he lurched back and forth on his feet, as if torn in indecision between running and fighting. He only had one grenade and one more pistol magazine, and there would probably be another grenade coming down the stairs at him any second. This time the Germans would learn from their mistake and follow it up faster.
It was only that back and forth movement that made him realize he still had the bag of TNT slapping against his back. He’d never taken it off when he’d first jumped into the car.
Alexsi yanked the strap off his neck, jammed his last grenade into the bag head-down, and wound the strap around the bag tightly to press the TNT slabs against the grenade. He unscrewed the grenade cap, grabbed the porcelain bead, took a deep breath, yanked it up, and ran.
One thousand.
His path took him right across the front of the stairs. As he darted past it a burst of machine-pistol fire came down at him, just an instant too late.
Two thousand.
Into the kitchen. Without breaking stride he snatched up a chair, holding it in front of him like the lance of a medieval knight.
Three thousand.
Alexsi dove. The chair punched through the glass of the kitchen window and he followed it out through the opening. He landed hard, an electric jolt of pain shooting up through both elbows. He pushed himself up, to keep running.
Four thousand.
The house blew up.
There wasn’t enough explosive in the bag to blow the house to pieces, but when TNT changes from a solid into a high-velocity gas in less than the blink of an eye, the cutting force of that gas searches out the weakness in any structure. The windows all blew out and the wood and glass became projectiles on their own. The roof raised up and partially fell back in. The rest of the force of the explosion was contained within the house. The entire city block shook like there was an earthquake.
The shock wave sucked the air from Alexsi’s lungs yet again. The force of it slammed him back down onto the ground. As soon as it passed it was an unconscious act, a survival instinct that had him blindly crawling on all fours in search of safety as pieces of the house fell all around him.
Only by finally looking down did he see that he was out in the middle of the next street. The entire area was a curtain of smoke from the explosion. Alexsi realized it was perfect camouflage, and probably the only thing keeping him from being shot right then. He stumbled across the street and went to the nearest door he could see. He tried it and it was locked. Alexsi reared back and kicked it in. His mind was moving so slowly. He felt in his jacket pocket. No, his pistol was long gone, somewhere along the line. But he still had his knife. His lucky Russian folding knife tucked away in the pocket he’d sewn into his underwear long before they’d boarded the Junkers aircraft for Iran.
“Hello?” he called out in Farsi. No answer. There was a chair next to the door where you could sit and remove your shoes. He jammed it under the doorknob.
Up the stairs, cautiously, with knife drawn. No one home. Probably everyone in the neighborhood had left to visit relatives rather than be stopped and searched by soldiers every time they ventured outside.
At the top of the stairway there was a ladder leading up to a door in the flat roof. Alexsi cautiously poked his head out. There were a few chairs set up out there. With no yard the roof was where you took the air in good weather.
He crawled across the roof to avoid exposing himself, and lifted one eye up and over the edge. He saw the purple cloth of the Russian security fence and soldiers running down the street from that direction. Brownish-green uniforms that had to be Russian. An occasional fast patter of automatic gunfire. There was always some jumpy idiot shooting at shadows. But confusion was good.
The houses on the street were in a row together, so there was a line of roof stretched out before him for at least two hundred meters. And he’d always loved roofs. Alexsi began slowly crawling down the line in the direction of the security fence. He took his time.
Peeking up over the next-to-last roof, Alexsi saw a Russian soldier up there leaning out over the edge, watching the show on the streets below.
Alexsi ran a practiced eye over the Russian sentry. Then he glanced at his watch and stretched out on the roof, making himself comfortable. It would be dark in a few hours. And that Russian looked about his size.
62
1943 Teheran, Iran
The guard at the British embassy had changed over at midnight, and now it was three o’clock in the morning. The private clumped down the path that ran along the inside of the stone wall surrounding the embassy. To his right the woods of the embassy park began. His wool battle dress jacket was just a bit too light for a November evening in Teheran, so he walked fast to keep warm. His breath steamed up the cold air. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. He was dying for a cigarette, but he knew if he lit one the bastard sergeant of the guard would catch him for sure. He reached the end of his section of the wall and faced about. And found himself looking down the barrel of a Russian submachine gun.
“Not a sound, please,” Alexsi said in heavily accented English.
The private gulped.
“I mean you no harm,” Alexsi said. “If you understand me, please nod your head.”
The private nodded.
“I will need you to take me to a senior British intelligence officer,” Alexsi said. “It is very important. Do you understand?”
The private nodded again.
“Good,” Alexsi said. “You should have this.” He handed the private the PPSh submachine gun.
The private took it. He looked at the submachine gun in his hand. Then he looked at Alexsi. Then he screamed, “Sergeant of the Guard!”
63
1943 Teheran, Iran
Alexsi was still wearing his purloined Russian uniform, though the buttons that ran halfway down the shirt tunic were open, exposing the elasticated bandage binding up his broken ribs. Sticking plasters covered the glass cuts all over his face and neck. He sat
with his hands folded calmly upon his lap, and through his clothing he could feel the hard outline of his lucky folding knife. The British were no better at searching you than anyone else.
A British officer wearing colonel’s insignia sat opposite him, with a pad full of notes. They had been at it for quite some time.
The knob turned and the door opened. And the great man walked in with absolutely no fanfare. He was smoking a cigar and wearing that same ridiculous one-piece collared jumpsuit he’d had on before, with a cloth belt loosely buckled over his girth, two big breast pockets, and a zipper down the front.
Alexsi stood at attention.
Winston Churchill swung the cigar out of his mouth with a sweep of the hand. That famous voice rumbled out. “They tell me I owe you my life, young man. Give me your hand.”
With the British colonel watching him like a wary guard dog, Alexsi leaned over the table and shook Churchill’s hand.
Churchill released him, and with a gesture that was pure noblesse oblige bid him to sit down. And took the colonel’s chair for himself without a word.
Alexsi caught the aroma of the cigar. Cuban. Romeo y Julieta, Uncle Hans’s favorite, too.
“Your story has been related to me,” Churchill said, his famous lisp even more noticeable at close range. “Quite remarkable. If you don’t mind, I have a few questions of my own.”
“Your servant, sir.” Alexsi hoped that was the right English, since it came from books.
In any case, it made Churchill’s eyes twinkle with delight. Then they turned serious. “I am told you are a native Russian, is that correct? A Russian intelligence officer.”
A Single Spy Page 33