by Jeremy Duns
III
Sunday, 11 March 1945, Hotel Torni, Helsinki, Finland
It was past midnight when there was a sharp knocking on my door. I opened it to see Templeton, dressed in a hat and topcoat, peering at me.
My first thought was that Father had been killed in action and he had come to inform me, immediately followed by a flash of shameful hope I might be right. As a boy, I had lain awake in my bed sickened and fascinated by fantasies of his death, and in recent months my mind had slipped back into this reflex of momentarily wishing for the worst news. At first it had disturbed me, but now I dismissed it for what it was: just a trick of the mind exacerbated by the tensions of the war.
‘Meet me in the lobby in five minutes,’ Templeton said, and there was a look in his eyes that spoke of conspiracies rather than condolences. ‘In full uniform, please.’
I nodded and shut the door. Having dressed hurriedly, I raced down the carpeted staircase, wondering what would await me at the foot of it.
I had arrived in Helsinki a few months earlier, and was not enjoying it. I’d had a frustrating war. Shortly after leaving school I had been recruited into the Special Operations Executive, and had been put through rigorous training. After narrowly missing out on taking part in several operations, Father had arranged for me to be attached to the platoon guarding Churchill at Chequers. This sounded impressive, but the novelty of being close to the man as he chomped his cigar and chugged down brandy soon faded – the job mostly consisted of patrolling the house and grounds with a Tommy gun, and following him in a convoy of trucks and motorcycles whenever he went for a stroll.
I had finally seen some real action in 1944, when I was dropped into France as part of a Jedburgh team, but the operation had been cut short after just a few weeks when it had become clear that the cell we had been sent to contact had been betrayed to the Germans.
After that, I’d been sent out here. I suspected Father had heard something about my time in France and had had a word in someone’s ear to whisk me out of the line of fire. In 1941, before the Legation in Helsinki had been evacuated by the Finns and relocated to Lisbon, he had briefly served as the military attaché out here, and I’d visited him and helped out around the place during one Long Vac, delivering messages in between the endless cocktail parties.
Finland had by now surrendered to the Soviets for the second time but we had yet to restore diplomatic relations with them, so rather than returning to the Legation I had been posted on to the staff of the Allied Control Com mission, which was operating out of the Hotel Torni, a hideous watchtower-like building overlooking the centre of Helsinki. The Commission had been established to supervise the Finns’ compliance with their armistice with Moscow and, although Allied in name, was almost completely dominated by the Russians. There were two hundred of them and just fifteen Brits, who were under firm instruction from London not to antagonize the Russians. Finland was part of the Soviet sphere, at least until the end of the war.
None of the Brits spoke any Finnish, and it had been deemed a sound idea if someone could be found who did. My previous few weeks flitting about the Legation had presumably been on file, but nobody seemed to have realized that while my mother was a Finn, she was in fact a Swedish-speaker. As a result, I was fluent in Swedish but knew no Finnish at all.
On arrival, I had discovered that it made little odds anyway. The British contingent was led by Commodore Howie of the Royal Navy, but I reported to Colonel Colin Templeton, an old friend of Father’s from Cairo whom I’d met a couple of times on school holidays. Officially the Army’s representative, he was in reality an SOE officer and, despite being given the rank of lieutenant-colonel, I was his dogsbody. With every passing day, I resented the position all the more. My few weeks in France had nearly got me killed, but I had finally tasted action and was desperate for more. I was twenty years old, and the war was still raging elsewhere in Europe, while I spent my days in a hotel typing up the minutes of meetings about the minutiae of diplomatic protocol.
‘Is it Japan, sir?’ I asked Templeton as we stepped out of the hotel lobby and into the chill night air. The Americans had just fire-bombed Tokyo, destroying half the city, and I had spent the day collating reports on the situation. But Templeton shook his head.
‘I’ll explain in the Ghost,’ he said, as we showed our passes to a sentry and crossed the courtyard.
The Ghost was a battered old Chevrolet, a former Finnish Army staff car that he had commandeered for his personal use. Every inch of its exterior had been whitewashed, including the windows, a legacy of its use at the front early in the war. Templeton had left it in this condition partly because he enjoyed the eccentricity of it, and partly because the camouflage suited his purposes. His instructions from London were for his presence here to be as invisible as possible: in a city often covered in snow, the Ghost allowed him to do just that.
It wasn’t snowing now, but as many of the surrounding buildings were white the car still lived up to its name. Templeton’s chauffeur opened the door and we were soon gliding through the city, cocooned behind the thickened frost of the glass. He wasted no time in getting to the point.
‘When you were here in ’41, I understand that you and Larry flew across to Stockholm by seaplane.’
I nodded, puzzled. My father and I had made the journey several times, in a couple of old single-seater Supermarines. Father had always been a racing fiend, and didn’t much care if it was on land, air, water or a combination. I had relished the expeditions as opportunities to spend more time with him, but after a while had realized that he was using them to look at the possibility of moving Mother to an asylum in Stockholm. He did this a few months later, and there she had remained ever since. It didn’t surprise me that our trips had ended up in my file, but I couldn’t fathom why they were relevant now.
‘Are you sending me to Sweden, sir?’
Templeton ignored the question. ‘A few hours ago, our Russian friends here received a message from their consulate in Mariehamn, which is the capital of a group of demilitarized islands known as Ahvenanmaa in Finnish and Åland in Swedish. The place belongs to Finland, but is Swedish-speaking.’
I knew of it – an archipelago at the entrance of the Gulf of Bothnia. I had never been there, but some members of Mother’s family had a summer residence on the western side. This was my immediate thought. It took me a few moments more to take in the other implication of what Templeton had just said: we had intercepted the Russians’ message. If he was listening in to the Soviets’ telephones in the hotel, I had severely underestimated him.
‘The Russians’ message was as follows,’ Templeton said briskly. ‘Yesterday evening, a body was discovered washed ashore on the Åland islands. The local police have identified it as being that of a German naval officer by the name of Wilhelm von Trotha.’
Corpses of naval officers being washed ashore? As the car jostled along, I examined Templeton’s face to see if it was some sort of elaborate joke. But he was looking at me intently, apparently waiting for my thoughts on the matter.
‘Could it be a provocation, sir?’ I asked. Shortly before heading to France I’d heard talk of an operation in which we had secured a body from a morgue in London, dressed it in the uniform of a Royal Marine and landed it on the coast of Spain with a cache of false letters to fool the Germans into thinking we were planning to target Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily. It had worked like a dream, but the Jerries would, of course, have realized that it had been a ruse, so perhaps someone had thought up a revenge plan.
‘That was my first thought, too,’ said Templeton. ‘But it looks like this could be genuine.’ He reached inside his coat and brought out a wodge of paper, which he unfolded and spread out on the upholstery between us. It was a large sea chart of Finland. After scanning it for a few moments, he pointed to a spot on the eastern archipelago labelled ‘Degerby’.
‘This is where they found the body. As you can see, it’s very isolated: if someone deliberately
placed a body there, the chances of it being discovered would have been exceptionally slim. More significantly, we know that this chap von Trotha was, in fact, the captain of a U-boat, U-745, which we have been tracking for some time. It left Danzig in December, and on January the eleventh it sank one of the Russians’ minesweepers here.’ He pointed to the map again, to a small island off the coast of Estonia. ‘And it was last observed somewhere around’ – he shifted his finger to a spot just west of the Gulf of Finland – ‘here.’
‘When you say “last observed”, sir, do I understand that we believe the boat is out of action?’
‘Yes. Its last signal was on the fourth of last month, and we suspect it was accidentally sunk by one of the Germans’ own mines, either on that day or soon after. If so, the body may simply have floated ashore on the currents. As a matter of course, we would probably be interested in this chap, but we have also had information, from impeccable sources, that his U-boat was carrying a very special cargo: a new form of mustard gas. Mustard gas is a viscous liquid, of course, but this has apparently been mixed together in such a way as to make it even thicker, so it won’t be affected by the temperatures in this part of the world. They call it “Winterlost”, and if our sources are to be believed it’s very strong stuff indeed – roughly twice as powerful as the usual variety.’
I didn’t ask how he knew any of this, but guessed that the positions and dates were from the submarine tracking room at the Admiralty, and that the information on the mustard gas on von Trotha’s U-boat had come from captured crewmen of other vessels.
‘Despite all that,’ Templeton said, ‘it could still be some sort of deception operation mounted by the Germans. But we don’t want to take any chances – and neither, it seems, do the Russians. The consulate in Mariehamn has been instructed to send someone to this island to secure von Trotha’s personal effects before he is buried. We think they may also be sending one of their agents from Stockholm, perhaps under cover, but I’ve yet to receive confirmation of that. We don’t know whether they are aware of the Uboat’s special cargo – we haven’t informed them – but we need to beat them to the corpse regardless.
‘Our chemical warfare bods are of the opinion that this Winterlost would be an extremely dangerous weapon if turned on us – and also a very useful one for us to study. I’ve been in intensive signals with London for the last few hours, and they have instructed me that it should – indeed, must – be investigated. So I want you to get to this chap’s body and see if he has any information on him that gives a more accurate indication of the location of U-745 than its last signal – and then bring back the mustard gas.’
I stared at him for a few moments. Through the whitewashed windows, I could just make out the Finnish countryside rushing by: dark impenetrable forests stretching into the distance.
‘I thought you said the U-boat was believed to have been hit by a mine, sir.’
Templeton knitted his brows. ‘Yes, but you’ve diving experience, haven’t you?’
So that was what it was about. In early 1944, I had responded to a call for ‘volunteers for hazardous service’ sent out by the Royal Marines Office at the Admiralty. I had duly been summoned to report to HMS Dolphin in Portsmouth harbour, where I was informed that I would be trained as a diver for midget submarines. After several weeks of training in a deep tank, I had been cleared for the next stage and sent with fifteen other men to Loch Cairnbawn in the far north of Scotland, where the details of the operation in question had finally been revealed to us: the Navy had managed to put the German battleship Tirpitz out of action in September, and were now training to attack the Laksevåg floating dock in Bergen.
As part of the provisional crew, I had been put in and out of the new ‘X-Craft’, wearing a claustrophobic diving suit nicknamed the ‘Clammy Death’ as I learned the art of oxygen-diving. But after just a few weeks in Scotland I was told that I hadn’t been selected to take part in the operation. Bitterly disappointed, I’d been sent back into the arms of SOE, who had a training establishment in Arisaig. After a few weeks of lugging backpacks around the mountainside and being taught unarmed combat and other esoteric skills by a purple-nosed Scot, I had been sent to the Parachute Training School in Ringway, and shortly after that had finally been cleared to take part in an operation and dropped into France.
I gave an abridged version of this to Templeton and he listened intently, his eyes flickering in the shadows.
‘But you have had diving training,’ he said quietly, once I’d finished.
Very briefly, I wanted to say, and I’d hated every minute of it. But instead I mumbled a ‘Yes, sir.’
He smiled softly. ‘Good. I’ve got you all the requisite gear, anyway. And we know the Jerries often bring their boats in very close to the shore, so with any luck it should be relatively easy to get to.’
It was true that the German U-boats often hugged coastlines, and the Russians had captured one of them in shallow waters in these parts last summer. They had raised it and discovered a new type of acoustic torpedo on board, some details of which they had shared with us. But there was no guarantee that this particular U-boat had also sunk in shallow waters.
‘You’ll have a wireless set,’ said Templeton. ‘So once you have the location, signal back and I’ll judge whether or not a dive is worth risking.’
Risking my neck, he meant.
‘What about the Russians?’ I asked. ‘Presumably they’ll already be on their way from Mariehamn, if they haven’t already reached it.’
‘We don’t think they’ll set out until dawn – they’ve no reason to suspect their message was intercepted. We also think it will take them a while. The archipelago is made up of thousands of tiny islets and is fearfully tricky to navigate by boat if you don’t know it well, especially as quite a bit of the water is frozen over at the moment. All being well, you should be landing on the island’ – he glanced at his wristwatch – ‘in about three hours’ time.’
Despite his confidence, I didn’t like the sound of any of it. I’d wanted action, but I hadn’t envisaged anything as hairy as this. Although Åland was, technically speaking, Allied territory, I was being sent to poach a weapon from right underneath the Russians’ noses, and I didn’t think they’d be overly understanding about it were they to catch me. The Russians weren’t to be trusted. In the summer of ’42, two Service agents armed with wireless sets had landed in Catalina flying boats at one of their bases in Lake Lakhta. The plan was for the Russians to insert them over the border into Norway, where they would monitor German naval movements along the coast. But the Russians had instead imprisoned both Service men for two months and then dropped them into Finland instead, where they had promptly been caught by the Germans, tortured and shot.
‘What if the Russians do get there first, sir?’ I said, trying to make my tone as unconcerned as possible. ‘Or if I arrive at the same time?’
Templeton gave a small nod. He leaned forward and picked up something from between his feet that I hadn’t noticed earlier: a leather briefcase. He pulled it onto his lap, unfastened the clasps, and brought out a fawn-coloured shoulder holster with a Browning 9mm pistol resting inside.
‘I don’t anticipate any trouble,’ he said, ‘but take this with you just in case.’
I wondered how to broach the next question, but he anticipated it.
‘You must get to the submarine before anyone else,’ he said, snapping the case shut and stowing it between his feet again. ‘If anyone gets in your way, you have my permission to eliminate them.’
*
After about an hour’s drive, we took a narrow road through a pine forest until we finally reached a small, secluded bay. We stepped out of the car and trudged towards a wooden hangar shielded by vegetation. Inside, a small seaplane sat silently under a mass of green and brown camouflage. It was a three-seater, one of the Norwegians’ naval reconnaissance craft and, like the Ghost, had seen better days. Templeton said it had been used by the Norwegians agai
nst the Germans, then briefly by us and then by the Finns against the Russian subs along this stretch of the Baltic. According to the conditions of the armistice the Soviets had laid down, it should have been sent up to the north of the country to aid the Finns in their enforced mission to flush the Germans out, but Templeton had managed to keep it back from his Russian colleagues and arranged for it to be secreted here. ‘Good craft are hard to come by,’ he said with a sly smile.
We removed the scrim and he quickly showed me around it, but I’d flown seaplanes and time was of the essence. The plan was for me to land at the small jetty at Degerby, where the body had been reported. The local police there would no doubt be expecting a boatload of Russians from Mariehamn, but Templeton felt confident they would believe the Soviets had shared the information with their Allies, so I should be able to bluff my way through. I hoped to God he was right.
Templeton’s chauffeur removed a suitcase from the car, and Templeton took me through the contents: 24-hour rations, Benzedrine tablets and a Siebe Gorman Sladen Suit – the ‘Clammy Death’ that had given me nightmares in Scotland. It had a breathing apparatus and twin aluminium cylinders that would provide enough oxygen for six hours, and I would be able to take it down to a depth of around thirty feet. Templeton seemed confident this would be the case – part of me hoped he was wrong and I would have to abort the operation.
But I kept such thoughts to myself, and climbed into the cockpit. Templeton showed me the wireless set, giving me the frequencies I would need to reach him. He didn’t say where he would be, but presumably it wouldn’t be too far away. Then he shook my hand solemnly and trudged back to the Ghost, a stoop-backed man in a topcoat and hat. His chauffeur opened the door for him and they set off down the road again. I watched as the car disappeared from view, then positioned the holster with the pistol under my left armpit. It felt heavy, and the leather of the holster cold even through my battledress.
I took a breath and examined the instruments and gauges around me, then strapped myself in. It was time to get going.