We dragged Günter over the cobbles and flung him on the open back of the truck. It was like hauling a sack of coal.
‘Drive, Will! I’ll look after Hoffmann.’
I jumped up on the tail. Collins climbed into the cabin. He tried the engine twice before it spluttered into life. Then we were off, rattling and banging, careering round the corners, heading for the harbour. Something like glee coursed through me. We hurtled out along the dark line of the pier. I prayed we didn’t skid off into the drink. Günter was awake again, groaning. His leg was thick with blood. We slammed to a halt by the dear old Swan.
Way behind us flashlights split the dark. Shouts bore down on us. Together we grabbed our unwilling passenger and dragged him off the truck and on to the ground. The tide had gone out and the deck of the boat was some six feet below. By luck we’d left enough play in the mooring lines or The Swan would have been dangling from the pier. We looked at each other. The hue and cry was closer. We took shoulders and legs and swung him over. He seemed to fall for ever before landing with a massive thump and a yelp on the mound of tarpaulin. I tugged at the lines and together we wrenched them clear.
‘Jump!’ I called. We landed on deck, and sprawled in a heap. Gunter was alive and groaning. I didn’t feel sorry for him. I just wanted him alive long enough to give me some names.
‘Bind his leg. I’ll get going.’ I darted to the wheelhouse. The boat was already swinging out from the wall but we were being pushed backwards by the tide towards the enemy lights. I turned the big motor over and it rumbled into life. You beauty. I pushed the throttle halfway open, not wanting to stall, and started steering us away from the wall. We were making progress but it didn’t seem enough. The shouts were getting closer and the first shots were fired.
Steadily we began to gather speed. I put the throttle full forward and heard the engine groan and lurch. A bullet shattered the window behind me, but I could see the line of the end of the harbour wall. Ever faster we pulled away and finally we were chugging out to the main river. I kept the throttle wide open until we were sure we weren’t being followed. I thumped the wheel. This was what it was about. Not endless rounds of interrogation.
‘We did it, Will! We did it! Well done, man!’
There was no answer.
‘Collins! Will! Are you all right back there? Has he stopped bleeding?’
I called a couple of more times. I could see Günter lying flat on his back. Collins had turned a rope round his thigh above the wound. I couldn’t see Collins. Then the cabin door pushed open. Collins slumped across the frame.
‘Sorry, sir. Sorry. Caught a stray.’
I knocked the throttle back and let the boat steer its own course. I knelt down. I dragged him further inside.
‘Will, Will? Where are you hit? Point to it.’
He brought his arm up and levered himself on to his side. ‘Back. In the back,’ he grunted.
I turned him to the light and could now see the hole in his old jacket and the surrounding stain.
‘Will, you need to hold on. Can you lie down in here? Let me help.’
I eased him fully into the cabin and pulled him so that he could lie out fully. He was moaning softly now, and I could see the blood leaking all round him. I found a rug and jammed it under his head. There was no exit wound on his chest. I was helpless to stop the internal bleeding. I turned back to the wheel and gunned the engine to its max. I was careless of obstacles. His one chance was getting back to Hamburg as fast as possible. But it was eight hours away.
I kept glancing at him. He coughed once or twice and blood came up. Then he lay quietly for some time. I though he was gone. His eyes flickered and he called to me.
I shut the throttle down and knelt by him. His hand was out, groping. I took it and held it. I eased his blond mop back from his forehead. I lifted up his head and shoulders and cradled him in my lap.
‘Sir?’
‘Douglas. It’s Douglas.’
‘Douglas. It was worth it, wasn’t it?’
‘It was, Will. It surely was. Now just hold on. We’ll get you home.’
He smiled and gripped my hand tight. Then slowly it slackened and his body sank in on itself in a great sigh.
So many men under me had died. I’d thought I was inured to it. It seemed to get worse. I thumbed the wet from my eyes and laid his head down gently.
I left him there and went out to see how Günter was. He was alive. His leg seemed to have stopped bleeding. I undid the rope so his leg didn’t drop off and stuffed the wound with a silk flag from the locker.
‘Cold. Cold,’ he managed.
I went back into the cabin and took the blanket off Collins. I tossed it over Günter. Then I dragged the tarpaulin right over his body. If he lived, I’d make bloody sure he coughed up every sordid detail of the northern rat line. To make Will Collins’s death worthwhile.
I went back into the wheelhouse and pushed open the throttle. If we hit a wreck, so be it. The Swan’s bows bit into the water and flung white spray back at me as we sped on to morning.
THIRTY-ONE
I made an untidy landfall. To be precise I rammed the pier. But it got attention. The sergeant and a squad of men came running. They found me lying in the wheelhouse half dazed from the crash, half mad from lack of sleep. They got me to my feet, and I dangled between two troopers.
‘Take care of him,’ I croaked as they manhandled Collins’s still body out on to the pier. ‘Be gentle.’
‘We will, sir. We will. What about this fella? Who’s he?’
I turned and looked back at the pile of tarpaulin with Günter’s head sticking out. He wasn’t moving. I called out to the man uncovering him. ‘My prisoner. Is he dead?’
‘Not quite, sir.’
‘Get him to the guardhouse. Get him a medic. Before he dies I want some information from him.’ I turned to the sergeant. ‘The biggest mug of tea you can manage. With a big splash of something strong in it.’
It took two days before Günter was well enough to be interrogated. I was waiting for him on Friday morning in the little room next to the cells. He’d been transferred here the day before. And it was here, in the cells, that I missed Will Collins most. I even turned to look for him sitting behind me.
They brought in Günter Hoffmann. He was limping and his left leg was heavily bandaged. They plonked him down on the hard chair opposite me, on the other side of the table. He looked diminished. I was back in my true colours. Günter’s lip turned up when he saw me, saw my uniform.
‘I knew it,’ he sneered.
‘How? Not that it matters.’
‘The pair of you. Especially the pretty boy. You didn’t look like you’d been on the run for over a year. I’ve seen enough coming through.’
‘Was that it? Too healthy?’
‘The Totenkopf Division. You said the commander was Obergruppenführer Priess. He was the second last. At Linz it was Brigadeführer Becker.’
‘Don’t tell me you were there?’
‘No. But my brother died with them on the Warsaw front.’
‘I made a bad choice, then.’
He smirked.
‘But I have you. And I’m here to offer you a choice. Your neighbours in the other cells are camp guards from Ravensbrück. They’re on trial for their lives. Next week a number of them will be found guilty and they will be sentenced to hang.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘You can choose to die with them on the scaffold, or you can tell me all about the northern rat line.’
‘You can’t do that! I’m a civilian!’
‘You’re whatever I say you are. For the moment, you’re a spy. Your Nazi pals murdered our spies in Ravensbrück. Tomorrow I can prepare papers which show you were an NCO at Ravensbrück. We have enough witness testimonies to go round. I can have an inch-thick file made up for you showing the atrocities you committed.’
‘That’s illegal!’
I laughed. At first it was a forced l
augh. But then it became genuine. I finally pulled myself together.
‘I had no idea you were a comedian, Günter. Let’s make this simple. We won. You lost. You take your medicine. And, by the way, I might just have you hanged anyway for the death of my friend.’
I watched him think. I watched the fear settle on his face and the realisation grow that I was deadly serious. The interesting thing is, I was. I was perfectly ready to concoct a case that would send this man to the gallows. What a long way I’d fallen.
‘So even if I tell you something useful, you might still do me in?’
‘Depends on the quality. Roll the dice, Günter. Roll the dice. I don’t really mind where they fall.’
I waited, arms folded, gazing at him, watching him do the calculations. Sweat beaded his brow and he reached for the cigarettes I’d placed in front of him.
‘Ask me,’ he said.
I reached for my pad and pencil.
‘Who set up this rat line?’
‘Our schoolmaster, Josef Erlichmann. He ran the Hitler Youth. He knew my opinions. Knew my brother died fighting the Reds. He said some good men needed help to leave the country. To keep up the fight against the Bolshies. He gave me money to arrange a boat.’
‘Where did a teacher get the money?’
‘He’d been approached. He said there was an organisation.’
‘Called?’
‘No name. I know nothing about it, except the papers came from Switzerland.
‘When did it start?’
‘Early ’45. He brought the first one to me. I hid him in my cellar under the bar. It took three weeks for the documentation to come through.’
‘Documentation?’
‘Passports, references from the Red Cross.’
‘The Vatican?’
He nodded.
‘Then what?’
‘We had to wait for the weather. Then the boat left on the night tide. It was a fishing boat. Plenty of fish in the North Sea.’
‘Where did it go?’ Though I could guess.
‘Scotland. Edinburgh.’
‘You mean the port of Leith?’
‘Exactly.’
‘That wasn’t their final destination.’
‘No. They were taken to Glasgow, then the Americas. You see, I asked if I could use the route. You know, in case they came after me. Left it a bit late, didn’t I?’
‘Someone was waiting at Leith?’
‘The teacher had a transmitter. He could warn them when the boat went north.’
‘Who was the local contact in Leith?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘You used the same boat, same fisherman?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Doesn’t matter now. You shot him.’
Bugger. If I believed him. ‘One moment.’ I got up and walked out of the cell. ‘Sergeant!’
The duty NCO ran over. ‘Sir?’
‘Get a platoon together and send them to Cuxhaven immediately. I don’t care how you get there. Boat or bike. Both is better. Just get there as fast as you can. They’re to pick up the local schoolmaster, Josef Erlichmann. And the barman at the Angel’s Wing. Find out the names of the fishermen friends of the prisoner. Bugger it. Bring them all in. Every man who owns a boat. At the double!’
‘Sir!’
I went back into the interrogation.
‘You said in the bar that you’d sent about twenty through?’
‘It was twenty.’
‘How many got all the way through?’
‘All the way?’
‘America. North or South.’
‘How would I know? There was a hiccup in the line last year.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We were told to stop sending anyone. Back in February or March.’
‘Why?’
‘The line got stuck or something. I never heard why.’
‘Was that the time when Suhren went through?
‘Just before.’
‘How many of the twenty had you sent by then?’
‘A good dozen.’
I imagined a conveyor belt running from occupied Germany through Cuxhaven, north to Leith, through Glasgow, then boat to New York. Somewhere past Cuxhaven the belt had jammed. A contact arrested?
‘But a further eight showed up after the suspension of the line? Like Suhren?’
‘That was the trouble. They kept coming and we couldn’t send them on.’
‘What did you do with them?’
‘I hid three in my cellar. Suhren was one. The others were scattered around the town.’
‘But you eventually got them out?’
‘The teacher had to plead with someone. He argued it was better to get them to an unoccupied country than let them get caught here.’
‘What are their names?’ I had my pencil poised.
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m not good with names. Honest. I’ll do my best. Can I have a bit of paper and a pencil? I work best that way.’
I tore off a sheet and dug out another pencil. I drew a line across the middle and pushed the paper and pencil over to him.
‘This is the really important bit, Günter. Above that line, I want a list of the dozen who went through before everything got stuck, last February. Put the second batch of eight below it. The ones that got stuck here for a while.’
I sat and folded my arms. Günter laid his big arms on the table and took up the pencil. His tongue came out as he concentrated. I felt like an adjudicator at finals.
‘No pressure, Günter. Give me names and you can live.’
THIRTY-TWO
The court met on Monday 3 February to deliver its sentences. It hardly seemed possible, but the numbers of spectators in the Curiohaus appeared to have doubled. The air was steamy, the tension palpable. One by one the defendants were made to stand and the verdict and sentence read out.
Schwarzhuber, Ramdohr and Binz were sentenced to death by hanging, as were three fine members of the medical profession: Rosenthal, Schiedlausky, and Treite. A fourth wasn’t around to hear his fate. Dr Adolf Winkelmann had decided to skip his rendezvous with Albert Pierrepoint by dying the previous Saturday. His sixty-year-old heart had given out under the pressure of the trial. I wish I could say it was due to the guilt of knowing he’d sent some 4,500 women to the gas chambers, but he’d never shown remorse. Five others including Greta Bösel got the same judgment and sentence. All eleven would be taken to Hameln for execution, two by two on the gallows. Very economical.
Martin Hellinger, the dentist, was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He looked up at me as the verdict was read out and gave me the barest nod. I handed Günter Hoffmann over to our Military Police. They could do what they liked with him. The platoon I’d sent to Cuxhaven had come back without Erlichmann the schoolmaster; he’d vanished. Of the fourteen grumbling fishermen they rounded up, none admitted to trawling further north than the Dogger Bank, far less excursions to Leith.
That night, Iain, Sam and I met for a celebration drink. It felt more like a wake. Which of course it was. A pre-emptive one for the condemned and a belated one for Will Collins. I found when I was writing to his father that I’d got out of the habit. All I could do was assure him that his son’s death hadn’t been in vain. Had it?
There should have been some sense of triumph or at least relief that justice had been served. But remembering the ashen faces of the women with the numbers on their chests as they were told – one by one – that they would hang brought only despondency. As if we were compounding their inhumanity with our own.
Late in the evening I found myself telling Scrymgeour that he wasn’t as much of a prick as I’d expected. He put his arm round my shoulder and told me neither was I. Sam smiled on us like a fond aunt.
It wasn’t quite the end for Sam, Iain and me. There was no sense of exultation or even release. The legal team had a colossal amount of paperwork to finalise and cross-reference to help with the next trial. I
was trying to make sense of what I’d wrung out of Günter.
I sent a confidential message to Sillitoe at MI5 telling him of my breakthrough and asking him to watch Leith. But I could give him no details. The Firth of Forth offered a long shoreline, north and south. The escapees could have landed anywhere.
Günter had managed to come up with fourteen names out of the twenty: eight above and six below my line. Günter couldn’t recall the names of four of the first batch of twelve, the ones that might well have already passed through Scotland. Of the names below the line one was Draganski, the other Suhren. In addition there were two mystery women identified below the line.
‘You really can’t remember their names?’
‘It’s not that. I never knew them. Nor their ranks. One was in charge. It was obvious by her bearing. You know what officers are like. She came with a younger woman. They refused to talk to me. I think the schoolmaster knew. They were given priority.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Their documentation came through in three days. The teacher was always calling his contact to see if the line was reopened. He wanted them gone.’
‘This Draganski. Why did you go to such trouble for a junior SS guard?’
‘It wasn’t for him. He was guarding a more senior officer.’
‘Suhren?’
‘Langefeld.’
I checked the other names he’d given me. ‘Hauptsturmführer Klaus Langefeld?’
‘That’s how it worked.’
‘Do you know Langefeld’s background? His SS role?’
He shook his head.
‘Who were the other senior officers?’
‘I didn’t always get their rank.’
I telegraphed the names to Sillitoe, but it was pointless. They were hardly going to use their real ones, and I had no descriptions except Suhren’s. I sent all fourteen names off to our team in Berlin asking urgently for details, including photos if possible. I included Dragan to check how much he might have changed by the time I encountered him in Glasgow. Günter had mentioned hair dye and beards but it would be hard to change the shape of a face. I told Berlin to pay particular attention to the second batch, the eight who might still be stuck in Scotland; though we knew Dragan was now a permanent fixture there. I asked if they were aware of any senior woman or women on the run who might fit the sketchy outline of the Cuxhaven pair. After that I could do nothing more than wait for details to come through. I phoned and sent telegrams daily. Berlin seemed to have no sense of urgency that more deaths could follow in Glasgow as the cornered rats fought to save their skins. I was equally worried that the rat line could unblock at any moment and the escapees could get through to freedom in the Americas – rendering Collins’s sacrifice meaningless. It would be particularly galling if Suhren got away after what Odette Sansom had said. After what he’d done to her three SOE colleagues.
Douglas Brodie 03 - Pilgrim Soul Page 17