The Leader And The Damned

by Colin Forbes

  Roessler recorded the signal and only then did he begin to transmit Woodpecker's latest message about the present German order of battle. All on the 39-metre band. All was well with RR's world.

  NDA FRX... NDA FRX.. NDA FRX.

  At the Dresden Signals Monitoring Centre in Germany the call sign came through clearly. Walter Schellenberg, chief of SS Intelligence, listened on the spare set of headphones while Section Chief Meyer personally recorded the signal passing through the ether.

  'It's stopped! You've lost him. This is the suspect call sign?'

  'It is,' Meyer confirmed. 'It's taken me months to track it down. All I can say at the moment with the resources at my disposal is the transmitter is located somewhere along a line from Madrid through Geneva, Lucerne and Munich...'

  'Can't you narrow that down?'

  'If you're asking me to guess - and at present it is no more than a guess - I'd say it's located in the

  Geneva-Munich sector.'

  'And it is a rogue transmitter?' Schellenberg persisted.

  'I've checked the lists of all our call signs - hundreds of-them - and it's not one of ours. It's the same man, too. I've come to recognize his fist...'

  'Let me think a minute.'

  Walter Schellenberg had been appointed Chief of SS Intelligence as successor to Reinhard Heydrich when the latter had been assassinated by a team dropped into Czechoslovakia for that express purpose.

  A tall, handsome and well-dressed man - he invariably wore civilian clothes - Schellenberg was one of the few Nazi leaders who could be described as a genuine intellectual, who preferred using brains to jackboots. Off his own bat - with Hitler's full approval - he had assigned to himself the task of hunting down the Soviet spy inside Germany he was convinced was passing to the Kremlin full details of the Fuhrer's military planning.

  Faced with such a task, an experienced gamekeeper - or spy-catcher - concentrates on the spy's weakest point, his system of communication. The method had often succeeded in the past. It required patience and determination - qualities Schellenberg possessed in full measure.

  'You need use of our advanced mobile monitoring system,' he suggested.

  'With that we could get a cross-bearing - pinpointing the precise source of the transmitter,' Meyer agreed. 'Could I suggest where it should be positioned?' he enquired.

  'Tell me and it shall, be done,' the SS chief assured him.

  Meyer thought Schellenberg was a fine fellow. Despite his exalted rank he talked to you like an equal. Always smiling, charming, affable, not like some of the other thugs who came down from Berlin and threw their weight about.

  True, Schellenberg had a downward curve to his lower lip which suggested ruthlessness. But a man • like that shouldered enormous responsibilities. Drawing up a chair, Schellenberg sat down and waited patiently while the section chief considered his question.

  For Schellenberg, Meyer was a valuable instrument. You handled him with finesse and consideration, as you would a Stradivarius. Meyer could hold the outcome of the war in his hands if he tracked down this rogue transmitter. Schellenberg was convinced it was the route along which Germany's most cherished secrets were being passed to Moscow.

  'Strasbourg,' Meyer said eventually after consulting a large-scale map of Europe on which he had traced the line, Madrid-Geneva-Munich. 'That's where I'd like the mobile monitor...'

  'And another half-dozen men here allocated purely for your own use?'

  'That would be a terrific help. It would save time...'

  'Time is what we don't have. You are right. And always this call sign is on the 43-metre band? Then nothing more?'

  'That's right. I think for the main transmission he switches to another waveband. We have to find that waveband. The extra men should do it.'

  'Splendid! Splendid! I leave it to you, Meyer. Since you'll be directing a larger unit there will be promotion, extra pay, of course.'

  This was another Schellenberg tactic. Dealing with anyone important to him, the SS chief always left them in a good mood, a mood of gratitude. It ensured their loyalty and support. And what Meyer had said was of great significance, confirming Schellenberg's growing conviction not only that clever Meyer had found the rogue transmitter, but also that the Soviets were involved.

  It was known in the SD - SS Intelligence - that Russian agents used this little trick in wireless communication. Send out the call sign to make the initial contact on one prearranged waveband. Then switch to a second - also prearranged - waveband for transmitting the main signal.

  Schellenberg cast one swift look round the vast floor divided up into glass, sound-proof cubicles. Inside each sat a radio monitor checking his own apportioned waveband. Dresden was the most efficient monitoring system which existed in the world at that time. He left the building and spoke to no one until he was seated beside his aide, Franz Schaub, in the car -which would take them to the airfield and the plane for Berlin.

  'I'm pretty sure it's Switzerland, Franz. I've thought so all along. Why I don't know. Flood the place with more agents. I want them concentrated on Masson's lot. If Meyer can only give me proof, I have Masson by the balls. But why Switzerland?' he repeated with some exasperation.

  As with most human activity, the outcome of great wars is often decided by eccentric characters.

  The set-up in the summer-autumn of '43 was crazy.. The Red Army should have achieved total victory all on its own by the end of the year, rolling all the way to the Channel. It had everything going for it.

  On the Eastern Front two million German troops confronted five million Russians. By numbers alone a less tough and determined Wehrmacht would have been overwhelmed.

  In addition, by this time, the German military machine was directed from the Wolf's Lair by a pseudo-Hitler with little of the military flair of his predecessor. Their main similarity was the new Fuhrer's stubborn insistence on getting his own way.

  On top of all these advantages, which should have handed the war to Stalin on a plate, the mysterious Woodpecker (via Lucy) was telling the Generalissimo in the Kremlin the movement of every German division. It should have been child's play to win, but the man with the withered arm, the ex-student from a seminary in Georgia, still couldn't pull it off. The Germans fought like tigers.

  In Dresden Herbert Meyer, armed with his new resources, worked like the proverbial beaver to locate the rogue transmitter. Thirty years old, he should have been in the infantry or with the Panzers. But, like Goebbels, he had a club foot.

  Tall as a beanpole, he had a head like a church mouse. A timid man, he had been the butt of his contemporaries at school. They had nicknamed him 'The Mouse', and the hated appellation dogged him in adult life. It may well have been this experience which led him to choose the solitary trade of watchmaker in peacetime.

  Fate plays odd tricks on mere human beings. It was The Mouse's skill in working with precision instruments which eventually landed him in the great Monitoring complex at Dresden. He was the ideal man to hunt down Lucy. Chance and Walter Schellenberg had placed him in this unique position to decide the outcome of the Second World War.

  The Mouse was now waiting to hear that the huge mobile monitoring system had been installed in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg. Then he could really get down to it and pinpoint the elusive transmitter he had nicknamed The Ghost.

  In Lucerne, The Ghost - RR - continued to live practically off coffee and four hours' sleep a night. To catch the morning tram to the Vita Nova Verlag, studiously ignoring the loitering bodyguards who changed positions daily. To eat a sparing lunch, a meagre dinner.

  All this was a chore prior to his real work which started late in the evening. The transmissions coming in from Woodpecker were longer now. Consequently, the signals to Moscow were also longer.

  In his own quiet way, fussed over by the devoted Anna, RR was happy. The Swiss now thought him so important they provided this comforting protection. And after Kursk he knew that Stalin was listening to him. What more could a man want o
ut of life?

  'The Germans are smuggling in even more agents,' Masson warned Hausamann as soon as he arrived at the Villa Stutz and threw off his raincoat. 'Something very serious is taking place...'

  Happiness was the last emotion Brigadier Roger Masson was experiencing. Hausamann, swivelling round in his chair away from a desk littered with papers, watched the counter-espionage chief.

  'What are these agents doing?' Hausamann enquired - and received the last reply he would have expected.

  'Nothing! Nothing at all! They are staying at hotels in Berne, in Geneva, in Basel. Not Lucerne as far as we know, thank God! They are so obviously waiting, Hans!'

  Hausamann placed a pencil between his teeth, revolved it, and then asked: 'Waiting for what?'

  'Hans, that is the hell of it. I don't know! It all smells of Schellenberg, or some devious master-plan

  'You could kick them all out,' Hausamann observed. It was what he would have done.

  'Then they send in a fresh detachment! Maybe next time we don't track them all. Maybe they slip through the net and we don't know they're here. Now that, Hans, would be very dangerous...'

  'What could Schellenberg be up to at this stage of the game?'

  'Another development has taken place which I don't like...'

  Masson kept pacing round the room as though staying in one place for more than a few seconds was anathema. Hausamann could never recall seeing him so agitated.

  'You know what this development is, Hans? Schellenberg sent me a personal message through Gisevius, the German Vice-Consul. He says he may wish to meet me very shortly - preferably on Swiss soil. It's nerve warfare. Or is it? Has he some ace concealed up his sleeve...'

  'Wait for him to play it...'

  Masson was still not listening. Hausamann would have bet a large sum his visitor had hardly registered a word said to him.

  'I'm sure all this concerns Lucy in some way, Hans. I know my Schellenberg. If he ever finds out that we are protecting the man sending the German order of battle to the Kremlin we might as well take straight to the mountains. The Wehrmacht will kick in our front door the following day...'

  'What I have never been able to work out,' Hausamann began briskly, deliberately changing the subject, 'is why Woodpecker routes his signals via Lucy. Why not radio direct to Moscow?'

  'That is something which has always puzzled me,' Masson replied. 'I'm probably worrying too much. Schellenberg himself may never make the connection.'

  'You know, Schaub,' Schellenberg remarked to his aide in his Berlin office, 'I think I must be wrong about this Swiss thing. They would never dare to let anyone act as a post office to re-transmit our Soviet spy's signals to the Russians. The line Meyer drew on his map went through Munich...'

  'You think Munich is his headquarters?' Schaub enquired.

  'When Meyer comes up with the solution I think the answer may well be Munich, or somewhere outside the city. Now we must emulate the infinite patience of our excellent Meyer so let us turn our attention to other business, as the Fuhrer would say …'

  Neither Intelligence chief - Roger Masson or Walter Schellenberg - dreamed how long ago the communications system had been planned. Lucy - RR - was, in fact, acting as a post office for the onward transmission of signals between Woodpecker and Moscow in both directions.

  In Soviet Intelligence jargon, Lucy was a cul-de-sac. A dead end. In case of emergency. Should the German monitors ever locate Lucy it would divert their attention from the original source of the signals - Woodpecker, operating from the highest level inside the Nazi apparatus.

  This diversionary device had been planned so long ago - way back in the 1930s when Yagoda held Beria's post as head of the Ministry for State Security.

  The Soviets had sown so many seeds in so many lands. Some, as they foresaw, fell on stony ground and came to nothing. It was the seeds which flourished that poisoned the wells of the West. Tim Whelby, burrowing his way upwards in London with his charm and habit of listening often and saying little. Woodpecker, Yagoda's crowning glory, scaling the summits in Hitler's Germany...

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  'Oh, I don't know about that,' said Len Reader, 'he's just out of sorts. Not up to this kind of lark. He's one of the blue-eyed pilots from 1940. That was a million years ago — the Battle of Britain. Maybe he needs a woman,' he added with a wink.

  'You bastard. ,.!'

  Paco's response was venomous. Crouched down beside Lindsay she had been dabbing the Englishman's feverish forehead with a cold damp cloth. Standing up suddenly, she drew back her right hand to slap Reader's face. He grasped her wrist in mid- swing and grinned.

  'Don't tell me you've gone soppy over him, because I won't swallow that one. You're a real woman, you need a real man...'

  'You are interfering with my patient...' The mild voice spoke from the entrance to the abandoned hovel. Reader swung round and faced Dr Macek who went on smiling as he regarded the Englishman through his rimless glasses. 'That I can't allow. You realize if I summon Heljec I can have you shot? Sorry to put it in such crude terms …'

  'Bugger the lot of you creeps...'

  Reader let go of Paco, his face flushed with annoyance. He walked out quickly, still holding the sten

  gun.

  'We've just got rid of an expert in crude terms,

  Paco said as she massaged her wrist where Reader had gripped her. 'I said at the beginning I didn't like that man...'

  'And how is our patient?' Macek enquired, coming forward and frowning as he looked down at Lindsay who lay with his eyes closed on a makeshift straw palliasse. 'Sweating like a pig as they say. Unfortunate phrase...'

  Paco waited while Macek examined the Englishman. They were many miles, many weeks, away from the gorge where Colonel Jaeger had turned the tables on Heljec. Lindsay's glandular fever had grown steadily worse. He had become so weak and feverish a makeshift stretcher had been cobbled together at Macek's insistence and two Partisans carried him.

  Their new temporary headquarters - one of a recent dozen - was a village of single-storey stone houses of the poorest kind. Perched halfway up the side of a mountain in Bosnia it rose in a series of steps, roof upon roof. Abandoned by the inhabitants who had fled before the advance of a German column, it was cautiously re-occupied by Heljec's Partisans.

  By now they had made up the numbers lost in the firelight with Jaeger. In his more conscious moments Lindsay had seen the new men coming in. It was a weird phenomenon - they seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He had commented on it to Paco.

  'Heljec has a reputation as an aggressive leader who never gives up,' she had replied wearily. 'So they come from scores of miles to find him, to join him as long as they have weapons. Weapons and ammunition are the Danegeld you need for him to accept you.'

  Gustav Hartmann had been with them that night. He joined in the conversation. Unusually, he seemed depressed.

  'They enjoy it, you see, Lindsay. Fighting. Killing It has been going on for centuries in this accursed cesspit of Europe. They don't mind who they fight - just so long as the killing goes on. Read the history of the Balkans. Short of an enemy, they fight themselves. Croat against Serb, and so on. Tonight the news for you is good, for me it is bad, for all three of us it is terrible...'

  'I don't understand,' said Paco.

  By now they had come together almost as a small group of intimates. Lindsay, the Englishman; Hartmann, the German; and Paco, part-English, part-Serb. Dr Macek was not yet a fully paid-up member of the club, but he had visitor's rights.

  'Reader,' Hartmann explained, 'brilliantly hides his transceiver by night and transports it by day on one

  of the mules. He has bribed the mule-train driver with gold. He keeps in touch with the outside world.

  Stalin has driven back the Wehrmacht along the whole front. So, Lindsay, for you it is official good news. For me it is official bad news. You see?'

  'No, I don't,' said Paco. 'You ended up by saying that for all three of us it is terrible
...'

  'You believe in crystal balls?'

  Hartmann took out his pipe and sucked at it enviously. There was no question of lighting it. Heljec had shot one of his own men who had started a bonfire to warm his freezing hands when the temperature had dropped after nightfall.

  'Crystal balls? Seeing into the future?' Paco cocked her head to one side and peered quizzically at the German. She had come to like Hartmann. 'Can anyone do that?' she asked.

  'Maybe in dreams we see what we would give an arm not to see.'

  'Now he talks of dreams...' Paco spread out both hands towards Lindsay propped against a rock in a gesture of helplessness. 'He is making fun of me, Lindsay...'

  'I think that when people look back in forty years' time from now,' Hartmann continued, 'they will see what a catastrophe it was to permit Stalin to roll over half, maybe most of, Europe. Generations yet unborn will have their lives blighted by this war.'

  'The wise man speaks,' said Paco, pulling his leg. 'Let him go on, interjected Lindsay.

  'Wise man, go on...'

  'People forget history. Today England fights Germany. England's great enemy was once France, before that Spain. I think England's real ally is Germany, that the day will come when she will realize this. Germany will realize it, too. But how much of the home of civilization - Europe - will have been lost?'

  'The whole shooting match,' said Lindsay and fell unconscious.

  'Care for a bit of foreign travel, Whelby?' Colonel Browne asked.

  'Would it be for long, sir?'

  Whelby forced himself to maintain his usual offhand manner, to conceal the shock Browne's suggestion had given him. The idea of no longer being Browne's deputy, of being exiled to a distant outpost away from the centre of operations didn't suit him at all.

  He had been summoned urgently to Ryder Street and it was close to midnight. So far as he knew the only two occupants of the building now were himself and Browne. And the caretaker downstairs who unlocked the front door and locked it again after he entered the building.