Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “He was telling me, this policeman, how pleased he was to be in Haifa. He said that when he was a schoolboy it was one of the places he used to visit with his finger when he traced a route from Gibraltar to Australia without ever having to leave the British Empire except in those places where the Almighty has placed water for the convenience of the Royal Navy.

  “Look, it can be done. It can be done two ways. There’s the long route where you don’t have to bother to visit Haifa. You arrive in Egypt at Alexandria and head south through the Sudan, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa to Cape Town. From there you have to get a ship - even an Englishman can’t walk on water - to Mauritius (where the British would really like to send all us troublesome Jews or is it Madagascar?) and on via the Cocos archipelago and Christmas Island to Australia.

  “Or there is the land route of my new friend’s school days. After Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus - a couple of hops those - you put your finger on Haifa and go from there to Trans-Jordan, to Iraq, to Persia - that’s one they’ve added since my Englishman was at school - to India to Burma to Malaya to Singapore to Northern Borneo to New Guinea and across the Papua strait to northern Australia.

  “Of course, nowadays there might be a few problems. You’d be lucky to get to Haifa from Malta without being sunk and from then on the barbarians are at the gates almost everywhere you look. Even before he leaves Palestine our poor Englishman might come across people, all sorts of people, who don’t believe he should be here at all. Some of them are Jews, bad Jews, naughty Jews,” - he flashed a grin - “and some of them are those people who listen every night to what the Mufti of Jerusalem broadcasts from Berlin. And the further east of Suez he goes, the worst it gets. Persian bandits, famine and riots in India, the Japanese strutting around Singapore and Mandalay as if they owned the place. They’re even in New Guinea and the Australian government is saying, ever so nicely to Mister Churchill, that the Yellow Peril looks like its heading for Darwin and they might have to let him sort Rommel out on his own. They need their boys back from the desert. More barbarians at a different gate you see...”

  Jacob was a bit startled by this. Most of his half-brother’s lectures he knew by heart because he always tried them out on his family first. But he hadn’t heard this barbarians at the gates business before. Were the Jews of the Yishuv supposed to welcome these barbarians - even the Germans? Is that what David meant? Even his father didn’t want that and his views on the British seemed to change by the hour.

  It was almost noon and, though the stonewalls of their classroom were thick, and the boys lightly clad in their uniform of khaki shorts and white open necked shirts, they were beginning to feel the heat. Here and there pupils masked their faces into what they fondly imagined were expressions of rapt attention and let their minds range freely over the things that really mattered to them: these were girls, exam results, and in some cases putting on the uniform of their colonial masters and getting involved in the war which also involved thoughts of grateful girls.

  A fly droned. There was again the distant thrum of an aircraft engine. David Haratvi would have been dismayed to learn that his young half-brother was lost in a treacherous reverie that had put him into a blue uniform and the cockpit of a Spitfire from which he shot down one Nazi after another. When Jacob returned to earth it occurred to him that the barbarians must be those Arabs who follow the Mufti. In his first year at the school, when most of the world had still been at peace and rumours of war incomprehensible to an eleven-year-old, they had learned about the Dark Ages that followed the return of the legions to Rome.

  Now he had heard his father and many others say that a new Dark Ages had overtaken Europe. Even Asia. Was David rejoicing in this? Did he welcome the victories of those who would destroy his own people because he wanted every Jew to come to Palestine? Did he?

  6 - The Templer

  In a stone built apartment house on the slopes of Haifa’s Mount Carmel, high above the city he had been born in, the Templer paced and coughed and listened to the drone of the same aircraft that had caused young Jacob Maeltzer to take off on his Spitfire daydream. He paced stiffly and his cough was of the dry, rasping kind. Beneath the thin summer shirt he had borrowed the outline of the crepe bandage wound around his torso was clearly visible.

  Crouched behind the pilot and navigator in the narrow fuselage, the Templer had been allowed to watch the other five Junkers 88’s that had accompanied them from Rhodes, hardly visible in the gathering dusk, peel off for their diversionary raid on Haifa harbour. Twenty minutes later they had made two passes over a darkened Hattin before the crew spotted the olive wood beacon’s faint flame and he had eased himself forward to drop from the trapdoor escape hatch in the cockpit floor.

  The Templer had never parachuted before and there had not been time to teach him more than the rudiments of landing. For a moment he had balked, dry mouthed with the terror of it, peering through the goggles his kindly Luftwaffe instructor had insisted he wore, at the orange pinprick two thousand feet below. Then the navigator’s insistent hand had returned to his shoulder, downward pressure, almost pushing.

  He had dropped with a sigh into the chilling tug of the slipstream only a couple of seconds too late. They had rigged a static line for him so that he did not have to open the parachute himself by pulling a ripcord. The crack of the canopy opening, the feel of straps tightening around his thighs, all came as promised. But afterwards he blamed his momentary loss of nerve for just missing Hattin’s small table top summit to land with a terrible rattle on one of the streams of loose scree that decorated its upper slopes.

  For ten metres or so he had tobogganed face down along that ancient and bumpy bed of cooled lava until his collapsed chute caught on a rock and served him well for the second time that evening. He had managed to protect his face with his arms but the stones tore great rents in the flying overall he was wearing over the Luftwaffe uniform he wore in case of immediate capture. If he fell into the wrong hands it was intended, along with false identity tags, to allow him to masquerade as a downed navigator from one of the Junkers and entitled to prisoner of war status rather than the customary fate of a spy in civilian clothes. He was to tell his interrogators that his aircraft had developed engine trouble and crashed into the sea. Proud as he was of his waistline, the Templer doubted that he looked sufficiently youthful to pass as average aircrew but it was better than nothing.

  When Josef Lang, Haratvi’s missing friend, found him he had his chute rolled and was sitting on a flat rock with a hip flask in one hand and a Walther in the other ready to share his brandy or shoot and scoot depending on the circumstances. Or so he told himself though he suspected the landing had left him too damaged to run very far.

  Overhead the prolonged moan of the departing Junker’s twin engines had seemed treacherously intent on alerting the entire countryside. They made it even harder to detect the footfalls of the men closing in on him. Later he discovered that Lang had insisted they all wore tennis shoes, something the Jew had learned from his eccentric Major Wingate. When they got close he made out the silhouette of one of the Schmeissers they had dropped from Athens two weeks before.

  “I hope that weapon’s not cocked,” he had said in English, always the preferred language between them.

  “You!” Lang had said, easing back his cocking handle and ordering the others to do the same.

  The Templer struggled to his feet. “Like a drink?”

  “Lokhaim,” said Lang before taking a perfunctory nip from the proffered flask. “Welcome to Eretz Israel.”

  Even now, almost a week later, when he thought of this greeting the Templer was still quite shocked. Being aware of what your pupil believed in and hearing it casually articulated on a moonlit Galilean hillside was quite another thing. Not that he cared where Lang imagined he was living as long as Palestine’s physical state remained unalterably terra firma. Undoubtedly the best part of parachuting was having done it.

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p; They had hidden his chute in a crevice in the rocks. Lang had informed him that the other one from the weapons drop was cached somewhere nearby but he had not been able to find it in the dark. Both would be collected as soon as he could arrange it. The Templer was surprised to learn that two weeks after the drop the first chute had not yet been recovered. It was true that during Lang’s training they had always stressed the obvious: parachutes should be hidden as best you could and the dropping zone vacated quickly in case their descent had been spotted and a search was closing in. But if you were as confident, as Lang had been, that the place could be used again then it must be cleaned up. What if the British had discovered the first chute a couple of days before his arrival and began to send regular patrols there after dark? The Templer bit his tongue. He didn’t want to start on a carping note. Possibly there were local problems he was unaware of.

  They had picked their way down the hill to where a farm truck full of melons was waiting. Lang had allowed the two younger Jews accompanying him to walk ahead before asking the Templer to what they owed this unexpected pleasure. When the German told him why he was there Lang had immediately pointed out that it wasn’t so easy otherwise they would have long since done it themselves. The Templer said he was fully aware of this which is why he thought they might need a little assistance, only too conscious as he walked his careful walk down hill that he must look more like a man in need of help than about to dispense it.

  Now, as the memory came back to him, he pulled up his shirt and began to scratch the healing grazes beneath the bandages. They had been put on by a cluck-clucking old German Jewish doctor Lang had spun some story about a fall in a secret Haganah camp for illegal immigrants, Poles and Hungarians, which would explain the Templer’s German, the lingua franca of Mittel Europe, and his rudimentary Hebrew though this was better than he made out.

  “But will a Jew mistake me for a Jew?” Growing up in Ottoman Palestine Arabs had sometimes assumed he was Jewish but he could never recall a Jew making the same mistake.

  “You mean a fine goyish looking gentleman like yourself? Only with envy if he’s been told you are a Jew,” Lang had assured him.

  And sure enough, the elderly practitioner in a crumpled white suit and the edge of a velvet yarmulke peeping beneath his panama, had seemed quite taken in, inquiring if his family might soon be joining him. Once he had heard the Templer’s dry cough he had soon diagnosed a broken rib or two and when the patient remembered the way he had rattled over that scree he knew he was right. In his youth he had done at least as much on a playing field.

  As far as the Templer was concerned, the most irritating consequence of his landing was not his injuries, which would heal soon enough. It was that somewhere on the Hattin he appeared to hav lost a clever little aide memoire the Sicherheitsdienst’s technical boys in Athens had, at his request, prepared for him. It wasn’t crucial and the chances of anyone discovering its true purpose were even more remote than finding it in the first place. Nonetheless, its loss was a bad start. Even more so because it contained something that had been inserted in case Lang failed to meet him. Under no circumstances should it have been written down and he should have had more faith in his ability to memorise it. As a schoolboy, it was the same doubt that had led him to sneak a crib sheet into an important examination with painful consequences. He couldn’t count the times he had searched the many pockets of the torn flying overalls and the Luftwaffe uniform, turning them inside out, squeezing the lining, before Lang had, quite rightly, insisted on their immediate incineration. Attempts to persuade himself that it had been left on the Junkers while rearranging what he would be jumping with were defeated by a clear memory of the comforting feel of its outline as he patted down his upper body to make sure all was in place and buttoned up.

  So when, two days after he had dropped, Lang had returned to the Hattin to collect the parachutes he had gone with him. He knew he would have no peace of mind if he did not at least attempt a search. Lang was convinced he was making a fuss about nothing and told him so. Its camouflage, he said, sounded impenetrable and its loss was nothing that a message to Athens would not put right. The Templer had been too embarrassed to tell him about the additional item it contained, such an amateur’s lapse.

  They got to the Hattin by the late afternoon wearing khaki shorts and shirts bearing the shoulder flashes of the Jewish Settlement Police and their eyes shaded by the Australian style slouch hats with which the British had equipped the JSP. Their papers, which would not have passed serious scrutiny, indicated they were from the northern Galilee for it was not unknown for the hard pressed Palestine Police to deploy this Jewish home guard outside their neighbourhoods. Much to Lang’s annoyance his people had refused point blank to complete their costume with the JSP’s big Webley service revolvers in their leather holsters - apparently required for other things - so both of them had stuffed the holsters with socks and carried their flat little Walther PPK’s in a pocket of their long khaki shorts.

  Their transport was the same small Ford truck they had used to pick the Templer up. Not far from the end of the main Haifa -Tiberias road they turned onto a dirt track just about wide enough for one vehicle and followed it until it petered out into a hollow. There they parked and started walking.

  As soon as he began to experience, for the first time in daylight, the Hattin’s barren, wind-swept emptiness the Templer understood the hopelessness of his quest. It could have been blown miles away. Having circled the buttress of the volcano’s clogged mouth they approached it from its southeast side so that the German could examine the particular slope of scree thought most likely to be the one he had fallen down until snared by his parachute.

  The same tribe of weasels that would spook Calderwell’s horse the following day had caused the Templer to start as they took one look and, squeaking in terror, fled for their dugouts. Their presence was added proof, if any was needed, of the hopelessness of his quest. If the wind had not carried it off the animals might well have used it to furnish their nests or perhaps even consumed it - he was uncertain of their diet. The sooner they had made a proper job of burying the parachutes and were back in Haifa the better it would be.

  They went back up towards the plateau to the spot where Lang had cached the grey-green chute that had brought the weapons canister down. “Are you certain this is the place?” the Templer had asked.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to an arrangement of half-a-dozen stones on a rock. “I placed those stones to mark it was five paces to the left under that rock there.”

  “Perhaps some animal pulled it out,” suggested the Templer, thinking of the weasels.

  “Then where is it? Did they eat it? I mean, they wouldn’t have gone flying in it would they?”

  For a moment this sarcasm had quite shocked him. Was this insubordination really coming from the respectful Lang so grateful for all the help he was getting? He realised he should have expected it. This was Lang’s territory and he would have to prove himself worthy of being treated as an equal let alone fit to command. “Why don’t we see if my parachute is where we left it?” he suggested.

  They clambered over the boulder strewn spur that dropped away from the filled crater, the volcano’s last cough. With a couple of stones Lang scattered the crows for long enough to see the dead nanny goat and her kids. The lizards woke from their dragon dreams and retreated into tiny caves. Then suddenly there he was, crouched with his back to them, the breeze plucking gently at the long tail of the black and white chequered keffiyeh headdress falling on the back of the dark Bedouin style cloak he wore over a white cotton jellaba.

  The Templer’s first reaction had been to tiptoe away; but behind him Lang dislodged a pebble and the boy whirled round and then fell on his knees with his hands in the air because the Jew had his Walther trained on him. “Put the gun away,” ordered the Templer, suddenly in command after all. Lang reluctantly lowered the pistol and made a half-hearted attempt to cover it with his other hand.

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sp; The boy, assuming the older man’s seniority, turned and spoke to him in guttural gusts of Arabic, still on his knees, tears welling in his eyes. The German had to tell him to slow down. His Arabic was as good as any language you learn well as a child but it was some time since he had the opportunity to use it.

  “He thinks we’ve come up here looking for him on behalf of the Inglizi police,” he told Lang. “He says he’s sorry but he didn’t realise the silk tents were so valuable. When he heard the police were looking for him he came here to get the second one he found and bring it to us but now it’s gone.”

  “You believe that you believe anything,” said Lang. “More likely he thought the second chute would pay his bus fare to Damascus. Tell him we want that chute now. No more of these lies.”

  The Templer found himself doing as he was told. “He says he’s looked everywhere and it’s gone.”

  “Then we better finish this and go,” said Lang. His voice was flat, matter-of-fact.

  The Templer told him to wait and started asking the kind of questions which, if the boy had not been so scared, should have indicated that whoever he was dealing with it was not the police, not even the auxiliary police. What had he done with the first parachute? How had the police learned he had taken it? Did they know he had found it in this place?

  “Enough,” said Lang.

  The boy was explaining how he had given part of the first chute to his married sister to make clothes when in a couple of strides Lang was on top of him, his right arm outstretched. Before his ears filled with the sound of the gunshot the Templer saw a red blot appear on the boy’s forehead and then watched him topple over. Outraged crows, which had been hopping back towards them, bounced airborne cawing their protests.

  The German went to him and tried to hold his head up but his right hand came away wet and sticky from the blood and brains in the mushy exit wound.