He tipped it over and rainwater dribbled out. Carrick said, his voice a whisper, ‘That’s good, sir. It was holding water – it means it’s sound. Know what I mean, sir? It doesn’t leak.’
But he had nothing to boast of. The river in the Brecon mountains had been a fifth the width, maximum, of the Bug, and the flow had seemed strong when the officer candidates had crossed it but that strength was little compared to the rush of the Bug when he had sat above it. The plan was his. He, Carrick, had suggested it, had not kept his mouth shut. The punt, on the bank and at his feet, seemed so small, fragile, for the job.
‘With this boat, Johnny, it will happen? We can cross?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He saw, in that faint light from the moon scudding in the cloud base, that Reuven Weissberg had gone to the front of the punt and lifted it. Carrick asked for a minute’s delay, moved off and went into the trees a few yards down the lake’s bank. It didn’t seem a big action to him, or a matter of great importance. He took off his coat, dropped it, and was satisfied that his actions couldn’t be seen. Then he unbuttoned his shirt from neck to waist, and tugged at the Velcro on the straps. Not big and not great.
When he was back, that minute used up, he took a grip on the punt, and the weight was shared. They started to go back the way they had come.
On the little screen, Bugsy had the co-ordinates. With the numbers there was a green light that was constant, not flashing, and the numbers hadn’t changed. Also on Bugsy’s lap was the map, and he used a pencil torch with a small, narrow beam to check the coordinates against a location. He dozed and drifted into sleep, then out of it. If the co-ordinate numbers changed and the bug moved – as it had earlier – the light switched to red. He had its position.
In the minibus, Adrian and Dennis had taken the front seats. Every few minutes one of them would wake and Bugsy would put a hand on the shoulder, lean forward and murmur in the ear of whichever had woken to get back to bloody sleep. The poor sods needed it. Fantastic, they’d been, with their foot surveillance and vehicle tailing, and they needed the rest. His bug worked a treat.
Bugsy was beside Mr Lawson, the guv’nor, squashed up against the door while Mr Lawson had a full two-thirds of the seat. He’d tried a couple of times to shift him further back across the seat, once with the gentle prodding of his elbow and once with the sharp use of his toecap, but had failed to achieve more space for himself. In the back, behind him and wedged in with the bags and the gear, the jump seats folded away, were Deadeye and Shrinks. Shrinks slept, but not Deadeye. Bugsy thought that if they were going to repeat this caper and sleep in the vehicles again, they’d need to get to a ditch or a stream and get some dhobi done. He’d have smelled pretty grim on his own, but there were six in the minibus and the accumulation of them, their socks and underwear stank it out. Socks and underwear needed washing. Well, no one had known how long they’d be gone.
The light stayed constant and the figures on the screen did not alter.
Bugsy would not have thought envy a sin, merely something that disturbed the equilibrium of colleagues thrown together on an operation. Mr Lawson, as was right for the guv’nor, was in the minibus, in a position to react at speed to information thrown up by the screen. The car was free. The two vehicles were off the main road now and had found a safe, out-of-sight parking place in a camping area about halfway between the river and where the bug beacon now was. Well, the car had been free … The girl had gone to it … The lanky lad, the guv’nor’s sidekick, had headed there too. Maybe one was in the front and the other was in the back. Maybe they were in the back together. He didn’t know, but he felt that little surge of envy at the thought of them – nice girl, and good at what she had to do. His wife said the only females he fancied were the ones in his lofts, those that could fly fast.
The figures on the screen did not change. Neither did the green light go to red.
Dawn came, and they gathered. With the first low rays of sunshine, they came back to the central point that equated with the longitude and latitude numbers given in the coded message.
The formation along the bank had seen Mikhail and Viktor take the two furthest reaches of the Bug river, and two hundred metres from each of them had been Reuven, their avoritet, and the Englishman they mistrusted. At the centre point, overlooking the river and the Belarus frontier marker, was Josef Goldmann … The instructions had been quite clear. The men from Sarov should only approach the far riverbank, in darkness, and should signal their arrival by torchlight. No flashes, no signal had been given.
For the last three hours, an eternity, they had been spread out over eight hundred metres of the Bug’s westhern bank. Had he been a Catholic or an Orthodox believer, Josef Goldmann would have said he had ‘lapsed’, or become ‘agnostic’. The Jewish faith for him had never existed, not as a child and not in adult life but – almost – he had prayed to see a light wink on the far side, or to hear a shrill whistle from Viktor or Mikhail. There had been no signal, and he was at the meeting point to which they returned, and hidden behind him, under dead branches, was the boat, ridiculously small, that Reuven and Johnny had brought, and with it the length of coiled rope. What had been not a prayer but a fervent wish and a hope had not been answered. Josef Goldmann could not remember when, if ever, he had been so cold, so miserable and so near to despair. The hours had slipped away, darkness and moonlight had become a grey smear, then the lowest beams from the sun had pierced the trees on the far side. Dearly, he wanted to take his mobile from his pocket, dial the numbers and hear Esther’s voice, but he dared not disobey the order given him.
They came coughing and spitting, stretching and grunting, cursing the new day, all except Johnny. The Englishman, his own man and saviour, was quiet, withdrawn. Josef Goldmann noticed that Johnny’s jacket was unfastened and his shirt unbuttoned, and thought it extraordinary on a night when rain had laced down on them between the isolated moments when it had stopped and the moon had been visible and had lit the river.
He sensed the exhaustion in Reuven and Johnny. Before they had taken their spread positions, Reuven had spoken briefly of bringing the small boat from a lake by the village of Okuninka, carrying it through an expanse of forest so that its keel did not scrape a track, dragging it on the road and hiding at the side if cars came, manhandling it through the forest and past the old campsite where the killings had been done, and bringing it to the Bug bank. He had thought it incredible, a feat of strength … but the boat was so small and the river so wide, its flow so awesome.
Josef Goldmann, teeth chattering, said to any who might listen to him, ‘Perhaps they will not come.’
Viktor, surly, answered, ‘They will come. I arranged the detail. They will come.’
‘Perhaps they can’t come – an accident, a delay. A change of heart and—’
Viktor said, ‘If they don’t come, I’ll go to them and break every bone in their bodies. They’ll come.’
‘A change of heart and the realization of what they’re doing. Why do those men want a “million American dollars”?’ He realized he was babbling and that his words, Russian and English, were jumbled. ‘How can they spend a million American dollars? I don’t think they’ll come.’
He had seen, as he had spoken of money – the scale of it – in English, that Johnny Carrick’s eyebrows rose a fraction, and then he had looked away fast. Maybe, too, Viktor had seen it. Of course, Johnny Carrick didn’t know what would come across the river, if they reached it, didn’t know what was worth one million American dollars.
Reuven said, detached, ‘It’s very simple. We watch again this evening.’
‘So, we wait. What shall we do for twelve hours till the evening? What?’
He thought then that Viktor eyed him with contempt, that Mikhail sneered, and Reuven didn’t bother to answer him, and he thought that this purchase and sale had broken them, split apart the bonds of their group. It would never be the same again. Together they had climbed so high and so fast in Perm and
Moscow, and Reuven had climbed higher in Berlin, while Goldmann had soared in the City of London.
He heard Reuven say to Johnny Carrick, ‘Come with me, walk with me.’
‘Yes, sir.’
They were gone, lost among the trees.
Now Josef Goldmann scoured the far bank of the Bug until the sun’s intensity burned his eyes, and knew they should never have travelled to this place, but could not say why he felt a gathering fear for what they did and its consequences.
The journey that was Reuven Weissberg’s life was a thread of cotton unrolled from a spool.
Carrick stood at the edge of the trees, with the forest behind him, and listened. He heard a story told without emotion.
The cotton’s thread had been anchored here, and it had made a great loop but had come back and now the spool was empty. In front of him was an old rail head. From the junction one track continued into the forest he had walked through, trailing after Reuven Weissberg, but near to him now was a spur in the track, a siding that came to an end in the winter-yellowed grass and beyond the last sleeper was a buffer, a crude steel frame to which a heavy plank was fastened. He believed that everything governing the life of Reuven Weissberg had started and would end here.
He was told of the camp, two kilometres from the village of Sobibor, that had been built on this site. A place for the living and a terminal for the walking dead had been built here under the terms of Operation Reinhard on virgin ground and beyond the sight of witnesses. When completed it was a killing ground. It had no role for forced labour, only for extermination. Those to be murdered were Jews.
He saw two wooden homes, one brightly painted in soft green, and learned that they had been called the Swallow’s Nest and the Merry Flea by the German officers of the SS units at the Sobibor camp: they were now the homes of men working in the forestry industry. He saw a raised platform beyond the spur track’s buffer. Great piles of stacked pit props lay on it, and open freight wagons were already loaded high. Jews had been brought to that platform from Holland, France, the Polish ghettoes, German cities, towns in Belarus and Ukraine and invited to step down from their transports. On that platform, where sunshine now fell, the Jews had descended and started the walk to their deaths.
As he listened, Carrick waited for Reuven Weissberg’s voice to break, but it did not. He was told the story in a monotone. He wondered if passion, at this place, would have been disrespectful to those who had been herded off that platform.
He was not a Jew, and Carrick struggled to understand the enormity of the deaths of a quarter of a million people. They went down a path of raked sand, walked between new-planted pine trees, and it had been named the ‘Road to Heaven’. The system of killing worked, the quiet voice in his ear told him, because the victims in the last minutes of their lives had been ‘docile’ and had gone ‘like sheep’ where he now trod. There were stones laid between the new pines on to which had been bolted inscriptions: ‘In memory of my mother [a name], my father [a name], my grandmother [a name], my grandfather [a name], my grandmother [a name], my grandfather [a name]. May your souls be bound up in the bound of life.’ They came to a clearing, had come past a block of harsh stone, square and dominating, and a statue on a plinth of a twice-man-sized figure that held a child against a hip. It was ravaged by weather, and the sharpness of the sculptor’s chisel was blunted. In the clearing a huge circular shape, a mound, was covered with fine white chippings. The shape was where the ashes of a quarter of a million souls had been gathered, heaped.
Birds sang. The wind rippled the tops of the pines and rustled the birch leaves on the forest floor.
There were no fences, no barracks huts. The killing was described to him, but the chambers into which the gas had been powered were gone and no sign of them remained. He closed his eyes as the story was told of the deaths, of the engine’s rumble, of the geese squawking, of the final gasped notes of the anthem sung behind the sealed doors. After the silence and the switching off of the engine, he saw the doors of the chambers opened by emaciated worker ants who served to live another day, and the carrying away of the rigid bodies. And saw, also, a line of women at benches sorting the discarded clothes and suitcases of those who had come in ignorance or in terrified submission on the trains to Sobibor.
Carrick vomited. There was little food in his stomach but he retched bile and the cough scraped his throat. He saw the woman at the bench, Reuven Weissberg’s grandmother, and she handled clothes still warm from their contact with those now dead. The bile gleamed at his feet. When he was finished, when there was nothing left in his stomach to bring back, he felt ashamed of his weakness, and kicked dead leaves over the mess.
Here – at this camp alone, at Sobibor – there had been a revolt and a break-out. At no other camp, he was told, had that happened. Trees grew where the fences had been, where the mines had been spread and where the compound for the work-prisoners was sited. The watchtowers had long been taken down. He listened to the soft murmur of the wind in the trees, and heard the cheerfulness of the songbirds. He heard the name of Pechersky, the Russian officer, the Jew who was a leader, and in Carrick’s ears was the hammer of machine-guns, the rippling blast of detonated mines, the panic and screaming of those who ran towards the trees. Above everything, in his closed eyes and deafened ears, was the slowly summoned sight and sound of abject cruelty.
He thought that in his life nothing had prepared him for this place, and for the quiet telling of the story of those who had charged the wire. And climbed it. And gone through the mines to reach the trees. He thought he walked in a place of history. Words jumbled in his mind. They were courage and desperation and fear and hunger and exhaustion. It was made a place of history because here people had fought back against impossible odds. He was told then of more deceit, betrayal and a greater deception.
They were in the trees and the monuments of the camp, what scraps remained of it, were behind them. Carrick thought they followed a cotton thread laid long before as Reuven Weissberg recited without hesitation, as if it had often been told him.
We had spent the night in the forest. Always Samuel held my hand. He gripped it. I would have wanted, in that darkness, to lie down. I craved sleep. I had no strength, we had no food – I only realized when night came that what little food I had had from the morning had been in my coat pocket, which had ripped when we went over the wire. I had lost the food.
He would not permit me to lie down, to sleep. He kept moving, tugging me along. He was searching for Pechersky, for the Russian group of which he was a part. It could have been four or five hours that we had walked, stumbled, among the trees in the darkness and then we saw, both of us, that we had circled the camp and were back, almost, where we had started from. I could have wept, but he did not, so I stopped the tears. All of that strength had been wasted, but we began again.
I had told Samuel that I came from the town of Wlodawa, to the north, a few kilometres, but also confessed to him that I had never before been in this forest and had no knowledge of it. I could not help or guide him.
Sometimes we heard shots in the night, and then we would veer away. Twice we heard the voices of Germans and Ukrainians. We found people who were wounded; they had injuries from the mines or the machine-guns in the watchtowers. They had crawled on their stomachs into the trees. We came upon a man who had no leg, and another who was blinded by shrapnel. Both begged that we stop and help them – but we moved on. They cursed us. We heard their curses, growing fainter, as we left them. We were the living, and were whole, and it did not seem necessary to stay with them and help. What help could we have given them? The camp had taught us to help only ourselves.
Dawn came. Rain fell in the forest that early morning. Now we saw more who had achieved the break-out. Now, also, we saw through the upper branches of the trees that a small aircraft circled the forest and it was low enough for us to read the markings on the wings. Now shots came more often. The dawn light, of course, was from the east. To the east was th
e Bug river. It seemed right, the solution, to go east in the trees if we were to find Pechersky and Samuel’s friends. Each group we came upon – three or thirteen, and one of thirty persons – recognized Samuel and his Russian uniform, begged him to lead them, and each time he held my hand firmer and broke clear. He said to me that the bigger the group, the greater the danger of the Germans finding us. I didn’t argue. There were some we met in the forest whom I had known for weeks, even months – they had shown kindness to me, had shared with me, had comforted me, but I didn’t return, then, the kindness, the comfort. We were animals. We loved only our own lives.
I think we must have been near to the river, perhaps a kilometre from it, when we found the group led by Pechersky. With him and his Russians there were forty others, mostly Jews from Poland. Pechersky was the leader, it was obvious. There was a confusion of voices until he spoke. Then there was silence as he was listened to.
The word from Pechersky was that all the bridges over the Bug were guarded by detachments of Field Police, that more Germans were now sweeping through the forest, that units on horseback had arrived to make the search more efficient.
Most of the day we stayed in that place. More fugitives had come. At the sight of Pechersky their faces, every one, lost the lines of fear and were lit again with hope. Pechersky was the saviour. During the day, the group would have grown to about seventy. All of us knew we owed our lives to him.
Many said there was no chance of survival if they were not close to Pechersky.
In the late afternoon, Samuel was waved forward.
He had released my hand. I think the feeling had gone from it, leaving it numb, because he had held it so tight and so long.
I watched him go into the inner core of the group. He stepped round and through the Polish Jews, who huddled near to the Russians. He was taken right in, near to Pechersky. It was not Pechersky who spoke to him, but others among the Russians. It was where the leadership was and the weapons, and they were the men who had not been inside Sobibor long enough to be exhausted and starved. There was talking, but so quiet that the Jews in the outer ring did not hear. Twice I saw Samuel shake his head very violently. For a few seconds he looked away from them and towards me, but I couldn’t see what he thought. The Russians he had been speaking to shrugged, as if a matter had been discussed and an answer had not been found. Then he came back to me.
Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093) Page 40