Estocada

by Graham Hurley

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And those VIPs include Hitler?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then shoot him down.’

  Dieter stared him. His hand found the stein again.

  ‘Shoot him down?’ he whispered. ‘Hitler?’

  ‘Yes. It can’t be hard. Not if they trust you. Not if you have access.’

  ‘And Keiko?’

  ‘You’d trigger a revolution. A coup. Everything would change. In some people’s eyes you’d be a hero. And those same people would have the keys to Gestapo headquarters.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘How do I know I can trust you?’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘But you know these people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have their names? Their confidence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they really want Hitler dead?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tam leaned forward, his hand on Dieter’s arm. ‘These people exist, believe me. And I can arrange for you to land at a foreign airfield. France? Belgium? Denmark? Your choice. But it has to be done quickly. Before something happens to that lady of yours.’ He found a scrap of paper and scribbled the address of his hotel. ‘Take your time. Think about it. Then let me know. You’ll do that?’

  Dieter looked up. The ghost of a smile came and went. Then he nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  *

  Tam spent the following two days awaiting word from Dieter. The phone never rang, neither was there any sign of any message at reception. Maybe he’s been called away, Tam thought. Or maybe he’s got cold feet and decided to forget their conversation ever happened. Shooting the Führer down was a very big step for any Luftwaffe pilot, especially someone as feted as Dieter Merz, but Tam had glimpsed the desperation in his eyes when he talked about Keiko and suspected that there was a great deal more to Dieter’s story. Life in Hitler’s Reich could be undeniably brutal. Maybe there were other reasons why the Führer plunging to earth might be the answer to a young flier’s dreams.

  Bella made contact at the end of the Friday afternoon and appeared at the hotel shortly afterwards. Her colleagues from the embassy, she said, were doing the best to handle the developing crisis. After the fireworks at the Zeppelinfeld, Hitler had held an all-night conference with three of his top generals. No one was privy to the details but everyone knew that there was only one subject on the agenda. Hitler had already demanded uprisings in the Sudeten, needing a pretext to march his armies east. Now, it seemed, he needed to be certain the Wehrmacht invasion plans were sound.

  ‘It gets worse,’ Bella said. They were sitting in the small courtyard behind the hotel, enjoying the last of the sunshine. ‘The Cabinet have mobilised the fleet, which is a good thing, but they’ve also asked Henderson to deliver a verbal warning to both Ribbentrop and Hitler.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Telling them we’ll support France.’

  ‘You mean go to war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Henderson never delivered his little message. He thinks it’s bad tactics. He says he knows Hitler. He insists he knows what’ll happen. The man will just blow up. If you want a war tomorrow, then Hitler will gladly oblige. That’s his thinking and God knows he might be right. Better to wait until Sunday’s speech, Henderson says. After which things might be clearer.’ She checked her watch and got to her feet, her coffee barely touched. ‘There’s another meeting at six. I had to lie to get out of the last one.’

  Tam looked up at her. He was still thinking about Dieter Merz.

  ‘We’ll meet later?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She bent quickly and kissed him on the forehead. ‘One day we’ll make it to Seville,’ she said. ‘God willing.’

  *

  Tam spent the evening alone, half-hoping Dieter might turn up at the hotel but there was no sign of him. He went to bed early and slept dreamlessly until dawn. On Saturday the city was full of Hitler Youth, fit-looking adolescents with brutal haircuts and a hunger for the big occasion. Tam watched them marching and counter-marching across the Hauptmarkt, while various Nazi luminaries – fatter, older – looked on. When the display was finally over, an elderly man hobbled slowly across the cobblestones. He settled himself at Tam’s café table with a sigh, his gnarled old hands resting on top of his stick, and ordered a bock. At length he turned his gaze on Tam.

  ‘You must be the only man in Nuremberg without a uniform,’ he said. ‘Apart from me.’

  That night, back in his hotel room, Tam began to worry about Dieter. They’d been discreet over the beers they’d shared. The bar was virtually empty and there was no chance that they’d been overheard. Conversationally, Tam had certainly taken a risk or two but he’d sensed that he was pushing at an open door. Georg had been right. Dieter Merz wore his heart on his sleeve and that heart belonged to his Japanese lover.

  Tam was half-asleep over a copy of Völkischer Beobachter when he heard footsteps outside his door. He stiffened for a moment, then checked his watch. Nearly half-past ten. The knock, when it finally came, was light. Tam got to his feet. It was Dieter. He slipped past Tam and told him to close the door. He was clearly nervous.

  ‘What is it?’

  Dieter put his finger to his lips and then looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Mikro?’ he mouthed.

  Tam nodded, said he understood. He tore a leaf from the writing pad beside the bed. Dieter scribbled a note. It was very short. A single sentence. I’ll do it.

  Tam nodded, took the pen.

  Hitler? Kill him? he wrote.

  Dieter looked at the note and then folded it into his pocket.

  ‘Ja,’ he said, making for the door.

  Tam caught him before he left the room. There were a thousand questions he needed to ask. They could find somewhere quiet, somewhere outside. They could discuss this thing in detail, plot times and opportunities, spot flaws in the plan, make sure there was provision for Dieter’s escape afterwards, but Dieter was adamant. He to go. He had to be somewhere else. Tomorrow maybe, back here at the hotel after the Hitler speech. Then they could find somewhere suitable.

  In the end, Tam looked him in the eyes, patted him on the arm and said goodnight. Only later did he realise that Dieter still had the note they’d exchanged.

  26

  NUREMBERG, 12 SEPTEMBER 1938

  Bella had invited Tam to the Diplomats’ Enclosure at the Zeppelinfeld for the Hitler speech that would close the Party Rally. Tam arrived at noon, as instructed, joining the swirl of suited guests. With Bella’s help, he spotted Henderson at once. He was sharing a table with Goebbels, making cheerful small talk with a long line of spectators queueing for his signature on a pile of cards. Pretty girls in Austrian dirndl dresses mingled with the crowd, carrying plates of sweetmeats and pastries. This could be a giant picnic, Tam thought. Not the prelude to a speech that might plunge Europe into war.

  He asked Bella about the cards. She made her way through the eager press of excited men and women and returned with an example.

  ‘A souvenir,’ she said. ‘Cherish it.’

  Tam was looking at the card. It was a sepia study of the Hauptmarkt with ranks of Hitler Youth beaming at the camera. Strength Through Joy City, September 1938, read the inscription across the bottom. He turned the card over. Two signatures, one of them Henderson’s.

  ‘And this one?’ He showed the other signature to Bella. It was indecipherable.

  ‘Goebbels,’ she said. ‘They’re brothers-in-arms.’

  *

  Hitler mounted the tribune in mid-afternoon. The huge crowd responded with a roar of welcome and a forest of eagerly raised arms. Hitler beamed out across the giant arena, his legs slightly apart, his right arm raised in an answering salute, his sheer presence stilling the crowd. There followed a moment of complete silence, a moment of anticipation and deep res
pect, and Tam gazed at him, knowing that the memory of this moment would stay with him for ever. The press of the diplomats around him. The faces in the crowd below. A light wind stirring the flags around the Zeppelinfeld.

  Hitler nodded, a gesture – Tam thought – of quiet satisfaction, and then stepped towards the microphone.

  ‘Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht! For the first time you stand here as soldiers of the Greater German Reich…!’

  Loudspeaker towers carried his voice to the far corners of the arena. Half a million people strained to catch every word, every nuance, every bellowed clue to the nation’s destiny. Hitler was picking up speed now, his fist pummelling the air, his voice rising, warning his people, his Volk, of the blood-soaked alliance between the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Germany, he warned, could be imperilled by enemies like these. They need to be confronted, challenged, soundly beaten. Otherwise the nation faced ravishment and rape. Minutes of racial abuse followed, glistening hunks of red meat tossed to the crowd, and watching the faces below Tam wondered how many of these people really felt that badly about the Jews and the Communists. In the end, he thought, you simply went along with it. Which is probably where the real dangers lay.

  After a while, the sun still hot, Hitler paused to clear his throat and address a new set of demons. Mention of the Versailles Treaty and the bastard child it had fathered on the Greater Reich’s eastern border had a number of nearby diplomats reaching for their notepads. This was the heart of the speech. This was what they’d come to hear and transcribe and report back to their masters.

  ‘We Germans have an obligation,’ roared the Führer. ‘And we will never take that obligation lightly.’

  Three and a half a million Germans, he said, lived in the Sudetenland. But with them, over them, loomed seven million Czechs. And those Czechs had business with the Sudetens. They were hunting them down like animals. They were beating them until they bled. They were creating a situation, a crisis, that Germany could no longer ignore.

  Hitler turned briefly to glare down towards the Diplomats’ Enclosure. Work on the West Wall, he announced, was nearly complete. He began to stab the air, unloosing a torrent of statistics. Half a million labourers. A hundred thousand tons of gravel a day. Four lines of fortified defence works fifty kilometres deep. Germany, he roared, was impregnable.

  Tam glanced at his neighbours. Some were still scribbling notes. Others, staring up at the figure behind the microphones, were visibly uncomfortable, understanding only too well the implications of this diatribe. Other nations are provoking Germany at their peril. The Greater Reich will have her way in the Sudetenland and doubtless in the rest of Czechoslovakia. Not for the love of war, nor of conquest. But in the name of justice.

  ‘We shall stand by our Volksgenossen,’ Hitler’s fist drove into his open palm. ‘We shall come to the aid of our comrades, our brothers. Let there be no mistake. Because Germans must be free!’

  The crowd erupted. Tam closed his eyes. Thunder, he thought. Followed by a great deal of rain.

  *

  Estocada. Dieter Merz sat in the cockpit of the Bf-109, the canopy still open, his ground crew making a final round of checks to ready the aircraft for take-off. Flying time between the airfield outside Nuremberg and the Zeppelinfeld was a handful of minutes. The controller who would wave him towards the grass runway was bent over a radio. In contact with the Zeppelinfeld, he was awaiting a signal that Hitler’s speech was heading for its climax. Dieter’s orders called for a single pass over the heads of the crowd as they saluted their Führer once the speech was over. This was a tribute scored for half a million delirious spectators and the wider world beyond, dreamed up as an end-of-rally surprise by Goebbels and Goering. Even Hitler himself didn’t know.

  Estocada. For days and nights since the evening in the bar, Dieter had been putting Moncrieff’s proposal to the test. In theory, the Englishman was right. Dieter had the motive and the means, and in the shape of Hitler’s many aerial excursions to the four corners of the Reich, untold opportunities. Through Georg, or perhaps even Hans Baur, he could lay hands on the Führer’s flight schedule. Loading live ammunition wouldn’t be a problem because he regularly visited the firing range to polish his gunnery skills. All it would take, therefore, was the kill itself. An unarmed, undefended Ju-52 was a target even a child couldn’t miss. Get the approach right, come in really close, and it would take a matter of seconds to cripple the aircraft and kill everyone on board.

  He sat back in the sunshine, trying to imagine the tri-motor steadying in his sights. He’d attack from beneath, probably the port quarter. He’d open fire at a hundred metres, maybe less. He’d shoot for the engines on the wings. That way, with full fuel tanks early in the flight, there was every chance the aircraft would dive away, rolling on its back, a ball of flame. A single burst, he thought. The thrust of the true matador. Estocada.

  And afterwards? Moncrieff had talked about fleeing to Belgium or France or even Denmark. With a full fuel load and careful preparation he could be out of German air space within the hour. Doubtless controllers would send aircraft to intercept him but with the new Emil and his box of Spanish Civil War tricks, he’d simply outrun and outgun them. He smiled to himself, aware of one of the engineers approaching. He was thinking about the afternoon he’d played with Ribbentrop’s son, staging mock dogfights in the child’s bedroom. Easy, he thought. So easy.

  The aircraft rocked as the engineer climbed on to the wing. Then his face was beside the open cockpit. The Zeppelinfeld had signalled ten minutes to the end of the speech. Time to fire up.

  Dieter nodded and reached for the master switch. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t resolve the only question that remained. With Hitler dead, could the Englishman really guarantee Keiko’s release?

  *

  Taller than everyone else, Tam gazed up at the tribune stand. Hitler was addressing his soldiers now, just the way he’d begun the speech. The Wehrmacht, he said, had a sacred duty to defend the Volk. And the Volk, in turn, owed a debt of national gratitude to the everlasting courage of the brave guardians pledged to defend them.

  The crowd, once again, roared their approval. They’d spent a whole week in the fantasy world that was Nuremberg. They’d celebrated the Greater Reich day and night. They’d attended folk festivals, gymnastic displays, concerts, picnics and countless march pasts. Every event was calculated to cement their collective conviction that Germany was on the move and that nothing could stop her, and here in the early autumn sunshine, was the final proof that the Reich was destined for even greater glory. Heil Hitler! they bellowed. Heil Hitler!

  *

  Dieter was at a thousand feet when the controller ordered him to begin the run-in. Dieter acknowledged the message and dropped the nose. Through the shimmering heat haze he could see the arena ahead, the fat oval of flagpoles, the bowl of the Zeppelinfeld black with hundreds of thousands of the faithful.

  He pushed the throttle to its limits and held it there as the huge crowd grew larger and larger. At the far end of the arena, flanked by endless columns, was the tribune stand familiar from a thousand newsreels. Black against the whiteness of the stonework stood the lone figure of the Führer.

  Dieter’s eye swept over the instruments. Airspeed 670 kph. Altitude 143 metres and unspooling fast. He looked up again, the mouth of the area lunging towards him, faces beginning to turn, fingers pointing, Hitler growing bigger and bigger. For a second Dieter held the gunsight steady on the tribune stand then, almost too late, he lifted the nose and coaxed the aircraft into the sweetest of rolls as it soared towards the blueness of the sky. In the privacy of the cockpit, he was grinning. Rolls denoted victory. You performed a roll when you’d killed someone.

  Estocada.

  *

  ‘Jesus!’ It was an English diplomat, one of Henderson’s team. ‘That was bloody close.’

  Tam eyed him for a moment, struck by how suddenly the little plane had come and gone. Dieter, he thought. As elusive and quicksilver as
ever.

  Bella was talking to the diplomat. Henderson had called a meeting for an hour’s time to dissect and analyse the Hitler speech before composing a report for the Cabinet Office but already a consensus was emerging. He hadn’t declared war, which was something of a relief, but his direction of travel was unmistakeable. Within weeks, maybe days, the put-together little country that was Czechoslovakia would be part of Hitler’s Reich.

  ‘You want to come with us? I could maybe smuggle you in.’

  Bella appeared to be inviting him back to the embassy team’s hotel. Tam shook his head. He’d have nothing to contribute except the now obvious fact that Hitler meant what he said. How the Cabinet, the French, the whole world chose to react was their affair. For now, he had one last card to play.

  Tam shook his head and made his apologies. Then came a pressure on his elbow and a grunt in his ear. He half-turned, sensing already who it might be.

  Schultz.

  *

  He had a car parked on Grossestrasse and a driver Tam had never seen before. Crowds were already flooding out of the Zeppelinfeld. Schultz told the driver to move. He and Tam were sitting in the back.

  ‘Goering enjoyed your company,’ he grunted.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. His liver must be made of iron.’

  ‘Just like the rest of him. He doesn’t believe the English will lift a finger, by the way. He’s with Ribbentrop now. And Hitler. He thinks the Czechs are there for the taking.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s right.’

  ‘You, too?’ He sounded slightly shocked.

  Tam still had the signed card from the Diplomats’ Enclosure. Schultz recognised Goebbels’ signature at once.

  ‘Who’s the other one?’

  ‘Henderson. Our ambassador. They were handing these out to German Sudetens who’d come to listen to Hitler. They made a good team, Goebbels and our ambassador. First you get the card. Then you get the country.’

  Schultz offered the card back. Tam told him to keep it.

  ‘You were right about Hitler,’ Tam said. ‘The only way to stop him is to kill him. What if that were to happen?’