by Greg Iles
had finally got the hang of the Vulcan. The fiery stream of slugs
intersected the JetRanger amidships and nearly cut it in two before the
fuel tank_ blew. The chopper fireballed like its sister ship, blasting
wreckage all over the runway.
Burton threw himself over Diaz as the shrapnel tore the asphalt all
around them. Without waiting for any further fire from the Vulcan, he
took hold of the Cuban, heaved him over his shoulder like a sack and
started slogging toward the Wash. If that gunner's still watching the
fireball, he thought, we might just make it. But if he saw me jump,
he's sighting -in on us right now. Ten meters to the edge ... seven ...
ton sped up, leaned forward ...
He leaped.
The two men tumbled head over heels down the steep slope and skidded to
a stop at the edge of a raging flood.
Burton made sure Diaz wasn't about to be swept into the water, and then
he glanced around for a hiding place. The Cuban caught his sleeve and
pulled his face down close.
"Gracias, " he coughed. "Gracias, English."
Burton looked down at the tough little Cuban. Diaz's camouflage shirt
was soaked with dark blood, but his lips and eyes showed the trace of a
smile. "Don't thank me yet, lad," the Englishman said quietly. "It's
going to be a long bloody night."
With the stealth that had carried him safely through four wars and
countless intelligence operations, Jonas Stern made his way back to the
bedroom he had briefly shared with Ilse.
His brain duummed wildly. He had to get back to that telephone.
He had scratched a mark deep in 'the library door with his broken fork
so that he could quickly find the secret room again. But would he get
another chapce? Horn's security chief would surely check the bedroom
soon. The Afrikaner would naturally assume that "Professor Natterman"
had tried to escape with his granddaughter. And when he found Stern
waiting here, what would he think?
Would he believe that "Natterman" had sat like a rabbit in an open cage
while his granddaughter risked her life to escape?
Stern had heard Horn's promise to spare Hans Apfel's life, but he
doubted if the old man's clemency would extend to Ilse's "grandfather."
To survive the next few minutes, Stern knew, he would have to find some
plausible reason for having stayed behind while Ilse fled. Boot heels
were already pounding up the hall when he remembered the Zinoviev
notebook. Snatching it from inside his shirt, he darted to the little
writing desk, mussed his hair, and opened the leatherbound volume at the
middle.
The boots stopped outside his door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Stern did not look up when Smuts opened the door. He pored over the
thin black volume as if it were a lost book of the Bible. The Afrikaner
stood silent for some time, watching him.
"What are you doing, Professor?" he said finally.
"Reading," Stern muttered.
"I can see that," snapped Smuts. "Where is your granddaughter?"
"I have no idea."
"How did she get out of this room?"
Stern looked up at last. "She picked the lock."
"With what?"
"A fork from your dinner table, I believe."
Smuts frowned. "Why didn't you go with her?
Stern shrugged. "She is young, I am old. With me along she would have
little chance of escape. Without me ... who knows?"
"She did not escape," Smuts said, smirking.
Stern sighed and let a hand fall from the desk to his knee.
"Will you bring her back to me, please?"
"Impossible. She must pay for her insolence."
Recalling Horn's promise of mercy'to Ilse, Stern suppressed a smile as
he brought a hand to his forehead. "She's only a young girl who wanted
to find her husband. Where is the crime in that?"
"Herr Horn will decide," Smuts answered stiffly. "I think you're lying,
Professor. You tried to escape and failed, didn't you? You ran into
the shields."
"You underrate my devotion to history, young man." Stern laid a hand on
the Zinoviev notebook. "This volume is a treasure-a lost fragment of
history. Already I've learned things my colleagues would trade a limb
for."
Smuts shook his head slowly. "You're past it, old man.
You can't see anything, can you?"
"I see that this book is far more valuable than the rubbish Hans found
at Spandau."
"I'll tell you what that book is, Professor," Smuts snarled.
"It's your bloody death sentence. Only one man has read that book and
remained alive, and you've already met him."
Smuts reached for the doorknob. "Enjoy it while you can," he said, and
went out.
Stern stared at the closed door. He knew he could pick the lock again,
but the Afrikaner might be waiting for just such an attempt. He took a
deep breath and rubbed his temples.
He was sweating. Sixty seconds ago he had seen something so shocking it
had wiped the ghastly Nazi shrine room from his mind.
It was the book. Zinoviev's notebook. The moment he had opened it, the
moment before Pieter Smuts marched into his room, Stern had seen the
strange black characters marching like foreign soldiers down the page.
Cyrillic characters.
Paragraph after, paragraph of laboriously handwritten Russian covered
the left-hand page. And on the right-neatly typewritten on an old
German machine-Stern had seen what he prayed was a German translation of
the Russian handwriting. But what had so shocked him-what had blown
everything el e out of his mind-was his nearcertainty that the Cyrilslic
characters had been written by the same hand that wrote the "fire of
Armageddon" note warning of danger to Israel in 1967. The same note
which had said the secret of that danger could be found in Spandau.
Now he leafed quickly through the thin volume. The pages-twenty in
all-were merely sheets of heavy typing paper glued amateurishly into a
leather spine. The same strange configuration over and over: first
Russian, then German. Stern could not verify his intuition about the
author of the Spandau note. The note was in his leather bag, back in
Hauer's room at the Protea Hof But he did not need to verify anything.
He knew. He closed the black notebook and reread the name on the cover:
V V Zinoviev. Who was this mysterious Russian? How was he tied to the
Rudolf Hess case? If Zinoviev had warned Israel in 1967 of some
apocalyptic danger, had he voluntarily given this book to Alfred Horn?
Stern shivered with a sudden rush of deja vu. Alfred Horn.
The name buzzed in his brain like a swarm of bottleflies. Where had he
seen it before? In some intelligence report? On some tattered list of
Nazi sympathizers crossing a desk inTel Aviv?
He forced his mind away from the question. He forced himself to think
of the telephone, the phone that waited in the bizarre Nazi shrine room.
To think of Hauer and Gadi, waiting anxiously for his call. He had to
make contact with them. Yet in spite of Ilse's warning about a nuclear
weapon, in spite of his conviction that Israel actually was
in danger,
Stern felt oddly certain that the key to the whole insane business-both
past and present-lay within the thin volume in his hand.
If the papers Hans Apfel found in Spandau Prison proved that Prisoner
Number Seven was not Rudolf Hess, what did this strange book reveal?
Horn had said-it related to May of 1941. Did this book, finally, reveal
the secret of Rudolf Hess's real mission to England? Did it name Hess's
British contacts? Did it reveal the full scope of the threat to Israel?
Could it silence the maddening hum at the back of Stern's brain when he
heard the name Alfred Horn?
This notebook, he thought, not the Spandau papers, is Professor
Natterman's Rosetta stone of 1941. I only hope I live to tell the
oldfool about it. Stern opened the black cover and began to read: I,
Valentin Vasilievich Zinoviev, here record for posterity thefacts of my
service to the German Reich, specifically my part in the special
operation undertaken in Great Britain in May 1941 known as "Plan
Mordred. " I do so at the request of the surviving Reich authorities,
to the best of my ability, adding or omitting nothing.
I was born in Moscow in 1895 to Vasili Zinoviev, a major in the army of
Alexander II. At seventeen I became a soldier like my father, but after
rising to the rank of sergeant I was recruited into the Okhrana, the
Tsar's secret police. I was promoted rapidly there. Some of my
colleagues criticized my methods as overly harsh, but no one denied the
results I achieved. Looking back on the bloodbath of 1917, I believe
many of those same colleagues would say that my methods were not harsh
enough. But they are dead now, and that is another story.
When I received word in 1918 that Tsar Nicholas II and his family had
been executed by the Bolsheviks, I decided to make my way to Germany.
Strange to choose the vanquished nation as my sanctuary, but I did. Of
all the Western nations, I had admired Prussia's military most. The
journey was a nightmare. Europe was a shambles, but by using Okhrana
contacts I finally managed to pass through the frontier into Poland.
From there I had little trouble.
Germany was in chaos. The people were starving. Armed gangs roamed the
streets at will, preying on the unwary and stripping returning soldiers
of their decorations. Chief among these gangs were the Spartacist
Communists. I could scarcely believe I had fled Lenin's revolution only
to find more of the same madness awaiting me. Quickly seeing how things
stood, I offered my services to a band of Friekorps, one of the groups
of German ex-officers and enlisted men who were trying to reestablish
order in their country. The Friekorps leadership appreciated my special
talents and put me to work immediately.
These were farsighted men. Even at that early stage they were planning
for the next war At their request I refrained from joining the Nazi
Party throughout Adolf Hitler's rise to power They preferred to use me
as a "cat"s paw" whenever actions were required where absolutely no risk
of being traced back to the Party could be tolerated.
Because the chief enemy of the Nazis was the Communist Party, I proved
invaluable, and soon came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, Reichs
hrer of Hitler's newly created SS.
.M Though I never developed more than the most superficial personal
relationship with this strange character I admired his efficiency.
Himmler saw to it that some of my Okhrana methods were taught to members
of his counter intelligence unit-the SD. It was through these endeavors
that I came to know a promising young officer named Reinhard Heydrich.
Because of what happened later, I should mention my service in Spain. In
1936 I accompanied Germany's Condor Legion to Spain, to help
Generalissimo Franco in his struggle against the Republican Forres-which
were actually controlled by the Spanish communists and a few generals
borrowed from Stalin. I served as an interrogator, my chief
responsibility being interrogation of communist prisoners. It was this
eighteen-month period that would later rise up to thwart my greatest
mission, but who could foresee it then?
Back in Germany, I worked closely with Heydrich on a special program
which I had helped initiate after the 1919
communist uprisings in Germany. Because yet another world war seemed
inevitable, certain Nazi leaders expressed a desire that we should
infiltrate not only the German Communist Party, but the communist
organizations in those countries likely to be enemies of Germany in the
next war By 1923 we had put a large number of agents in place, and by
1939 we had the most extensive anti-communist intelligence network in
the world. There were losses and defections, of course, but the
strategy remained sound.
Two years later (January 1941) Hitler informed Heydrich that a powerful,
highly placed clique of Nazi sympathizers existed in England, men who
wished to arrange a peace treaty with Germany. These Englishmen claimed
to be in a position to seize their government, if only two obstacles
could be got out of the way. The main obstacle was Winston Churchill,
who considered Adolf Hitler his personal nemesis.
The second was King George VI, who, unlike his dethroned older brother
was a fervent anti-Nazi. Hitler's English sympathizers saw this
dethroned brother-then called the Duke of Windsor-as a malleable
alternative British monarch.
Hitler charged Heydrich with removing the human obstacles to this
alliance, and Heydrich naturally turned to me. Because an Anglo-German
alliance would virtually guarantee the destruction of Stalin's regime, I
volunteered immediately.
Heydrich's plan, though complex in execution, was simple and ingenious
in theory. We would assassinate both Churchill and the king, then lay
the blame on our archenemies the communists-just as the Nazis had done
with the Reichstag Fire! To accomplish this, Heydrich envisioned using
one of the British communist cells infiltrated by our agents. He asked
if I thought we might dupe one of these groups into carrying out the
assassinations for us, and I must admit that I expressed pessimism. The
revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939
had disil&sioned communists around the world; consequently, I considered
the chance of finding western communists still fanatical enough to
attempt a suicide mission very small But Heydrich was undaunted On his
orders I set to work bringing his plan to fruition.
The communist cell I chose for the operation was based in London, and,
from our point of view, was under the command of one Helmut Steuer-a
former Wehrmacht sergeant. This Helmut deserves special mention, for
he-like the unit he had created-was uniq Helmut had@ been spying on .
communists since Munich, where he was "sole survivor" of the massacre at
the Hauptbanhof.
When he "fled" to Britain (on our orders) the British communists
welcomed him as a hero. His bond with them was so strong that when
these communists went to Spain to fight in the International Brigades in
1936, Helmut went with them.
Heydrich could not believe it. It was an insanely dangerous thing for
Helmut to do, but I understood. He was a young man then, a man of
action, and he craved danger In Spain he fought heroically for the
Republicans, all the while feeding to the Fascists information on the
movements of the very armies he was fighting in! Helmut lost an eye at
Guernica, and probably because of the accuracy of his own reports! It
was truly a miracle that he survived at all, yet his service in Spain
made him irreproachable in the eyes of his English comrades. After
returning to EnglandStern stopped reading. His heart was pounding. He
put his finger to the paper, traced the sentences backward and read
again: Helmut lost an eye at Guernica "My God," he muttered. "I've
found you out at last. Alfred Horn ...
You're not Rudolf Hess, and you're not'Zinoviev either."
Stern's mind raced as he tried to assimilate this new information.
There actually was a Helmut involved in the Hess affair-just as the
Oxford draft research had claimed. Professor Natterman would be
extremely disappointed to hear it! Stern heard himself laughing. It
all fits, he thought with satisfaction. I simply couldn't accept the
idea that Rudolf Hess had survived the war, that he had wormed his way
into South A ica's power elite, and I was right!
.fr "Well," he murmured, "let's find out exactly what Helmut the great
German spy did during the war." Stern picked up reading Zinoviev's
narrative where he had left off-.
After returning to England, Helmut-on our ordersorganized his own
communist cell. It was small (six men, not counting Helmut) and every
man had been seriously wounded either in the Great War or in Spain. In
his communiques Helmut called them his Verwunden Brigade-the "Wounded
Brigade. " These men had come from the British working class, and no
men everfelt more betrayed by their government than they- The flower of
their generation had been slaughtered in the Great War, yet they had
survived.
And when a neighboring republic was threatened by a newly risen German
monster, their government had not only turned its back, but disparaged
its sons who went to defend the democratic ideal that their friends and
brothers had died for in the Great War There is no hatred like that of