Spandau Phoenix

by Iles, Greg

  “Yosef?” Stern said. “Yosef, what’s happened? Where are you?”

  “In the professor’s room! Just after we left Natterman, someone came in here looking for the papers. A woman. I used the phone because she blew the professor’s radio to pieces. He’s hysterical!”

  Stern touched the bulge in his pocket where the three Spandau pages lay. “Yosef, stay where you are. Stay on the line.”

  “The telephone’s ringing in Apfel’s room,” Gadi said, pressing the headphones to his ears.

  “Yosef,” Stern instructed, “wait five seconds, then start calling suite 811. Make certain the professor is ready, and keep trying until you get through.” Yosef rang off.

  Hans jumped a foot off the bed when the ringing telephone fulfilled Hauer’s prediction.

  Hauer glanced at his watch: eight p.m. exactly. Hans darted between the beds and snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Sergeant Apfel?” said a male voice.

  “Yes!”

  “You know the Voortrekker Monument?”

  “What? Wait … yes, the big brown thing. I saw it as I drove into town.”

  “Be there tomorrow at 10 a.m. Come alone. 10 a.m. Do you have that?”

  “The Voortrekker Monument. Ten in the morning. Alone. What about my wife? Will Ilse be there?”

  “You be there. If you’re not alone, she dies.” The caller broke the connection. Hans dropped the receiver onto the floor, his face slack.

  “Well?” said Hauer. ‘What did they say?” Hans stood silent for several seconds. “They want me to meet them tomorrow,” he said finally. “At the Voortrekker Monument.”

  Hauer nodded excitedly. “That’s a good place for us. Very public. That’s where I’ll lay out our terms for the exchange. What time is the rendezvous?”

  A strange calm seemed to settle over Hans. His eyes seemed unfocussed. He sat down hard on the bed.

  “What time, Hans?” Hauer repeated softly, his eyes straying to the door. “What time is the rendezvous?”

  Hans looked up, straight into his father’s eyes. “Six,” he said in a robotic voice. “Six p.m. at the Voortrekker Monument.”

  Down the hall and around the corner, Gadi Abrams shook his fist in triumph. “The rendezvous is at six,” he murmured, “at the Voortrekker Monument. Apfel’s off the line, but I didn’t hear him hang up.” Gadi pressed the headphones to his dark head. “No phone ringing. Come on, Professor—” Suddenly Gadi jumped up and pulled off the headphones. “The professor can’t get through! Apfel didn’t hang up the phone!”

  Stern forced himself to think clearly. His well-planned operation was unravelling around him. Snatching up the phone, he tried to call Yosef and the professor. “Busy,” he said. “They’re still trying to reach Hauer. That means the stairs won’t be covered.”

  “Aaron has to stay at the elevator box,” Gadi said quickly. “You’ve got to keep trying to reach the professor. That leaves me to cover the stairs.” The young commando picked up his Uzi and started for the door. He had not heard it open. With the mute surprise of a man watching the earth split open at his feet, Gadi watched a small round fragmentation grenade rolling toward him through the foyer. The door slammed shut. “Grenade!” he shouted.

  While Stern—a veteran of three desert wars and countless guerilla actions—jumped over and took cover behind the far bed, Gadi Abrams proved the boast he had made minutes before about the Sayaret Matkal commandos. With the reflexes of a gifted soccer player, he stopped the grenade’s forward motion with his right foot, then kicked it sideways into the bathroom. Then he hurled himself backward into the space between the two double beds.

  Hauer was leaning out of the door down the hall, straining his ears for the slightest sound, when Swallow’s grenade exploded in the bathroom of room 820.

  “Donnerwetter!” he roared. “What the hell was that?”

  Reaching back blindly, Hauer wrenched Hans through the door. “Stay with me!” he commanded. “And don’t use your gun unless you absolutely have to!”

  Hauer dragged Hans toward the fire stairs, away from the explosion. They crashed through the metal door at speed, careening headlong down concrete steps like teenaged hoodlums. As they passed a large, red-painted 5, Hauer caught hold of Hans’s jacket and pulled him against the wall. He clapped a hand over Hans’s mouth and listened for any sound of pursuit. At first he heard only their own ragged gasps. Then a slow creak, as of someone attempting to silently open a disused fire door, echoed through the stairwell.

  When the crash came, Hauer knew that their pursuer had given up all hope of stealth. He shoved Hans downward and charged after him. They took each flight in two leaps, only lightly touching the rails as a guide. On the third-floor landing Hauer grabbed Hans and growled a dozen words into his ear, then slipped through the fire door while Hans continued downward. Hauer drew his stolen Walther—then he recalled his own warning to Hans. The explosion upstairs would draw all attention to the eighth floor. If he fired the unsilenced Walther here, he would certainly draw some attention to himself. With a curse of frustration he slipped the Walther back into his pocket and waited.

  Four floors above him, Yosef Shamir flung himself down the stairs like a man possessed. From the moment he’d gotten off the telephone with Stern, the young commando had been hauling his instincts. Stern had ordered him to stay put, but from what Natterman had told him, Yosef feared that the woman with the machine pistol was now on her way up to find Stern. Leaving Natterman to complete the call to the Germans on his own, Yosef had raced upstairs to help Gadi and Stern. He had reached the seventh floor when he heard the door just above him crash open. He slipped quietly through the seventh floor door just in time to see Hauer and Hans rush past him down the stairs. With a sudden sick feeling, Yosef realized he was probably the sole remaining link to Stern’s quarry. The young Israeli bounded down the fire stairs with no regard for safety, his mind only on regaining contact with the Germans.

  When the steel edge of the fire door materialized in front of him like a phantom, time slowed down. Yosef twisted his body to avoid the deadly obstacle, but he simply couldn’t move fast enough. The door caught the side of his forehead, opening a three-inch gash and dropping him like a stone on the landing. Hauer threw his weight against the third-floor fire door and forced Yosef’s unconscious body out of the way, then knelt to examine him. He didn’t recognize the face, but he hadn’t expected to. Yosef’s pockets were empty. No wallet, no coins, no clue to his name or nationality. Even his clothes had no labels. On impulse Hauer took hold of Yosef’s head and lifted it to search for the tattooed eye … a scream of agony rebounded up through the stairwell. A man’s scream. Then a pistol shot exploded.

  “Jesus!” Hauer cried. He dropped Yosef’s head on the concrete and raced down the steps after Hans. As Gadi Abrams came to his knees and levelled his Uzi at the smoke-filled foyer, the first spray of bullets from Swallow’s Ingrain tore into room 820. Gadi hit the floor and cursed in fury. Either the gunman was using a silencer, or the grenade had blown out his eardrums. Beneath the far bed he saw Stern speaking into his walkie-talkie.

  “Aaron, this is Jonas. We are pinned down here. Please respond.” Stern waited while Gadi rose up and peppered the door with a burst from his silenced Uzi. “Aaron!” Stern tried again. “Please respond!”

  “He can’t hear you!” Gadi shouted. “Too much concrete between him and us! We’ve got to storm our way out, Uncle! We’re going to lose the Germans otherwise. It’s the only way!” The young commando leapt to his feet.

  Feeling a surge of adrenaline unlike any since the ‘73 war in Sinai, Jonas Stern clutched his own Uzi, rose up, and followed his shouting, blasting his nephew into the smoke of battle.

  Hauer found Hans on the garage landing, standing silently over a corpse. The body was blond and fair-skinned and looked about thirty-five. Its right hand gripped a pistol.

  “I told you not to use your gun!”

  “I didn’t!” Hans shot back.


  Then Hauer saw the knife. The German knife from the sporting goods store. It was buried to the hilt in the d man’s left side. “I’ll be damned,” he said. He fell to his knees and searched the dead man’s clothes. He immediately found a British passport—which he placed in his own pocket—and a wallet, from which he removed the money. Robbery was the most plausible option under the circumstances. He glanced quickly behind the dead man’s ears for the Phoenix tattoo, but saw no mark. It took a considerable effort to dislodge Hans’s knife. Hauer wiped it clean on the corpse’s jacket, then slipped the knife into his belt.

  “Who is he?” Hans murmured.

  “Worry about it later. Let’s go.”

  As Hauer turned and grabbed the door handle, he felt motion behind him. He turned again, then froze. Hans had snatched up the corpse by the collar and he was screaming, screaming in German at the top of his lungs: “Where is she, goddamn you? Where is my wife?”

  Gadi and Stern burst out of room 820 to find an empty hallway. A strange, cloying scent lingered in the air. Perfume. “Who the hell was that?” Gadi shouted. “The Germans? They must be in one of these rooms.”

  “They’re gone!” Stern called from the door of suite 811. “Come on!” Together they raced to the elevator. As the doors slid shut, Stern tried again to reach Aaron at the elevator-control box. “Aaron!” he cried. “Forget the elevator! Try to stop the Germans! Aaron!”

  In the concrete basement of the hotel, Aaron Haber heard Stern’s crackling commands as: “Aaron! … elevator! … Stop the Germans!” Dutifully, the young Israeli threw the switch that stopped the elevator between the fourth and third floors. When the car jolted to a stop, Stern and Gadi stared at each other with ashen faces. Gadi punched the button to open the door, but got no response. He tried to pry the doors open with his Uzi, but they wouldn’t budge. Whirling around in fury, he saw no one. Stern had sat down on the floor of the elevator and leaned against the veneer wall, his eyes closed.

  “Child’s play,” he said softly. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  Hauer wrenched the rented Toyota over to the curb in front of a government sandstone office building. He leapt out of the car, ran to the left front wheel well, and crouched down. Eight seconds later he was back beside Hans, holding a heavy paper packet covered with duct tape. The packet held the Spandau papers and the photos Hauer had shot during the afternoon.

  “So much for the Burgerspark,” Hauer said. “We’re not going back to the Protea Hof, either. Our passports are obviously blown.”

  Hans rocked back and forth in the passenger seat.

  “That explosion sounded like a grenade,” said Hauer. “Who in hell could have thrown it? The kidnappers?”

  “We got out,” Hans muttered. “That’s all that matters. We just have to stay alive until the rendezvous tomorrow.”

  “We need cover,” said Hauer. “This time we ignore our friendly cabbie’s advice, though. This time we’re going to a real fleapit. Somewhere we won’t need any identification at all.”

  Hans nodded. “How do we find that?”

  “Just like we would in Berlin.”

  Hauer let in the clutch and pulled onto Prince’s Park Straat, then turned southwest onto R-27. He slowed at each intersection and peered down the side streets. He knew what he wanted: garish neon, street people, liquor advertisements, the howl of bar music. The universal siren song that draws the lonely and the bored and the hunted to the dark marrow of every city in the world. From what Hauer had learned already, he suspected it would be easier to find such a place in Johannesburg than in Pretoria. But he knew that anonymity could he had anywhere for a price. With Hans watching the streets fanning north, he drove on.

  8.26 p.m. Horn House: The Northern Transvaal

  Alfred Horn sat beneath the greenish glow of a banker’s lamp in his dark study. Opposite him, immersed in shadow, Pieter Smuts awaited his questions.

  “They’re gone?” Horn said quietly.

  “They’re gone.”

  “Comments?”

  Smuts glowered from the shadows. “I don’t like Major Karami. I don’t trust him. I think it was a mistake to show him the plutonium. It was a mistake to show him the Phoenix mark.”

  Horn laughed softly. “Is there anyone you do trust, Pieter?”

  “Myself. You. No one else.”

  “You must have a little faith in human greed, Pieter. The Arabs want the weapon too desperately to risk losing it through treachery. Now, what of the cobalt case?”

  “Can’t be done, sir. Not in ten days.”

  Horn let out a sigh of exasperation. “What about using a standard cobalt jacket?”

  Smuts shrugged. “It would work, but the Libyans would realise what they were dealing with. They’d probably receive the jacket before the strike. The only way we can fool them is by having the bomb case itself seeded with cobalt. And our metallurgists are having serious problems doing that—it’s far from done. It’s the rush, sir. If we could slow down a bit, go back to the original plan—”

  “Out of the question!” Horn snapped. “I may be dead in twenty days. The British are coming for me, I’m certain of that.” What will the bomb do without the cobalt?”

  “To be honest, sir, the short-term damage will be just as severe without it. And with the prevailing winds in Israel at is time of year, a direct forty-kiloton strike on Tel Aviv may well take out most of the population of Jerusalem with radiation alone.”

  Horn nodded slowly. Smuts reached out of the shadows and laid four video cases in the pool of light on Horn’s desk. “There,” he said, “is the proof of Libyan involvement. I must ask again, sir. Why trust or use the Arabs at all? My men and I can place the weapon in Tel Aviv ourselves, and can use a standard cobalt jacket. Your original goal will be accomplished with half the risk and twice the likelihood of success.”

  Horn shook his head. “Not half the risk, Pieter. You would be at risk. I cannot allow that. Besides, Israeli Intelligence is very good. This must be a genuine Arab attack. Only that’ll bring about the outcome I want. If the Libyans fail, you will get your chance. But we’ll speak of that no more for now. Tell me, what of our German policeman?”

  “I made the call myself. Sergeant Apfel took it. I think Hauer might be with him, but it doesn’t matter. One of my men is meeting Apfel tomorrow morning at the Voortrekker Monument. We’ll kill Hauer there if he shows up, and we’ll have both Apfel and the papers here by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Horn toyed with his eyepatch. “And what has dear Lord Grenville been up to?”

  Smuts wrinkled his nose in disgust. “He’s spoken to no one outside the house. I’m monitoring all the phones to make sure. He’s got his eye on Sergeant Apfel’s wife, though, I can tell you that.”

  Horn’s face hardened. “See that he makes no trouble for her.”

  “I’ll see he makes no trouble for anyone ever again.”

  “Not yet, Pieter,” Horn said gently. “We’re not sure of anything yet.”

  “He asked me again if he could go up in the tower.”

  Horn smiled wryly. “Robert is a good boy, Pieter, but he’s mixed up. We don’t want him to know all do we?”

  Smuts snorted. “Have you seen that runny nose? He’s using what he’s selling.” The Afrikaner drew a short, double-edged dagger from the sheath on his belt. “I tell you, one false step and I’ll cut his balls off and feed them to him with parsley.”

  Horn cackled softly. “Gute Nacht, Pieter.”

  Smuts stood and sheathed his knife. “Good night, sir.”

  As the Afrikaner passed Ilse’s bedroom, he listened at the door. He heard nothing. Had the hall light been on, he might, have noticed the dark bloodstains on the carpet. But it wasn’t, and he didn’t. He moved on. He had a treat waiting in his room. A village girl from Giyani—a virgin, if the headman could be believed—no more than thirteen, and black as coal dust. Alfred Horn’s Aryan princess could sleep the night in peace; Smuts knew what he liked: kaffir girl w
ith the smell of coal smoke still on her. When he first came into the bedroom, he liked to ask if they’d brought their passes with them. Sometime they were so scared they broke down and cried—a good way to set the tone for the evening.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  5.56 A. M. Jan Smuts Airport. Johannesburg

  The South African Airways 747 landed with the dawn.

  Asv the jet taxied up to the terminal, Kripo Detective Julius Schneider collected his flight bag from the overhead compartment and prepared to deplane as quickly as possible. Twelve hours was too long to sit in a seat booked for a dead man. Schneider edged his bulk into the crush of honeymooners, big-game hunters, and businessmen jamming the aisle, all the while wishing that Colonel Rose could have managed to get him a military flight. He took a deep breath when he finally made it out of the aircraft. The anxious passengers and the South African summer heat had combined to produce a singularly unpleasant closeness, even at dawn.

  “What a change,” he muttered, thinking of the snowdrifts he’d left behind at Frankfurt. He slung his flight bag over his shoulder and headed for Customs.

  Standing in the long queue, Schneider looked impatiently at his watch. He wanted to get to a telephone as soon as he could. If he was lucky, he thought, he might trace Hauer’s and Apfel’s false passports to a hotel before they got moving for the day. He wondered what Hauer was doing now.

  Schneider did not know Hauer personally, but he knew his reputation. He figured a lone wolf like Hauer would keep an open mind long enough to listen to his arguments about Phoenix. Schneider didn’t give a damn about the Spandau papers; all of Rose’s ranting about them meant little. What Schneider wanted was to sever all contact between Wilhelm Funk’s neo-Nazi fanatics in West Berlin and their Stasi counterparts in the East, and then to drive both Phoenix groups back into the dark hole from which they had sprung. His instincts told him Dieter Hauer was the man to help him do that.