‘Please,’ Anton gasped, his fingers clutching at the Gestapo chief’s hand, trying to release himself.
Müller dropped him, then stamped the hard leather sole of his polished black shoe into his balls.
Anton screamed in pain and doubled up. But Müller wrenched him back to his feet.
‘One of three things has happened, Anton: you have lied and Coburg was never here, or Coburg has swum away, or someone else has collected him.’
‘He must have swum away. Or maybe he hailed a passing boat. It’s just possible. Do you not think that might have happened?’
‘Why would he do that if he was in hiding?’
‘Perhaps he became scared. I don’t know. I really wish I knew. I’m so sorry, Herr Gruppenführer. We’ll find him. I’ll make it up to you and of course I will not charge you the full amount we agreed.’ Even as he was speaking through the pain, tears streaming from his eyes, he was blinking, sure he could see something across the water in the distance. Another boat. He pointed. ‘Look, Herr Müller, look – a boat.’
‘So what?’
‘Travelling away from us. Don’t you see? As if it had been here on Huggorm. He must be on that boat.’
*
Wilde and Harriet had waded ashore and found Coburg lying in the open, close to the rocky inlet where Skoog had anchored the boat. He was shivering and his skin was blue and cold to the touch, but his eyes were open and he seemed aware of their presence.
‘What’s happened to him?’ Harriet said, horrified.
‘I don’t know? Snake bite? There are a lot of them around.’
‘This is far worse than an adder bite.’
‘Whatever the cause, the sooner we get him medical attention the better.’
Together, they had carried him to the boat and placed him gently on a bunk bed in the cabin. His left hand clutched the handle of a slim briefcase like a hawk’s claw. It was also secured to his wrist by a knotted cord. Anders Skoog took one look at the sick man and pronounced his verdict. ‘He’s in shock, professor. I can see where he has been bitten by an adder – look how the ankle is black and blue and swollen – but this is not a normal reaction.’
They waited no longer. There was nothing they could do for him here. Now they were heading back to the mainland at speed. The only good news as far as Wilde was concerned was that the injured man was conscious and halfway lucid.
Coburg clutched at Harriet’s hand. ‘Thank God you came, Harriet, thank God. I thought I was going to die. My throat . . . it was so swollen . . . I couldn’t breathe.’
‘You’re safe now, Rudi. We’ll look after you.’
‘I trod on Eichmann. I killed him, but he had already got me.’
Wilde intervened. ‘OK, Herr Coburg, don’t try to talk. You’re going to be OK.’
‘Harriet . . . you came for me.’
‘I said I would, didn’t I?’
‘Thank you, thank you . . . I don’t deserve it.’
Outside the Arethusa’s cabin, on the gleaming wooden deck, Skoog was at the wheel, his grandson’s beautiful boat cutting majestically through the still waters. He was talking loudly, and they weren’t quite sure whether he was addressing them or himself; their thoughts were elsewhere and they weren’t really listening. ‘I have been bitten by snakes myself,’ he was saying. ‘One time in Australia – now that was bad, unbelievably painful and I was sick for days. I tell you, they have some bad snakes there. But adders? Who would have thought an adder could cause such an injury? They are usually no worse than the sting of a bee. Nothing to concern anyone.’
Harriet was mopping Coburg’s brow with water from a flask. Wilde watched her in nurse mode and for the second time in twenty-four hours was surprised to see how tender she was. She had spoken scathingly about the German, but there was doubtless some affection in her ministrations. This time it most certainly did not look like an act.
‘It is too late for anti-venom serum,’ Skoog continued. ‘He needs medical care now. To get the fever down. And then bed rest, lots of bed rest. It could take many days or even weeks to get over an attack like this. But I think he will survive. If his breathing is better, then he is over the worst of it.’
Wilde accepted this prognosis with relief, but there was a ‘what if?’ in his mind. They were heading for the mainland as fast as Skoog could manage – but what if Anton or the other searchers, the man named Müller, for instance, were also looking for Coburg? Even if they were to get Coburg to hospital, how would they protect him there?
Even more alarming, how could they get him to the airfield in time for the flight on the Mosquito to England?
*
Heinrich Müller peered through the binoculars. The only person he could make out was an ancient man with white hair at the wheel. If anyone else was aboard the boat in the distance, they must be below decks.
Then another head popped out of the cabin. A taller man with windswept hair. It was not Coburg, he was certain of that. Perhaps there were others inside the cabin. Yes, Coburg was surely there. He had to be there – for it was the only hope there was.
He smacked Axel Anton on the back of the head with the palm of his hand and the Swede let out a grunt of pain as his head jerked forward. ‘Faster, Anton, faster!’
‘I have it at full speed, sir. You don’t need to hit me.’
‘You think that was a hit? You’ll find out what a hit is if you don’t go faster. I want to see who’s on that thing. I see two men, but even from this distance I can see that neither of them resembles Rudolf Coburg.’
Anton rubbed the nape of his neck. ‘Don’t worry, Herr Gruppenführer, we will not let them out of our sight. But there are many shallows in these waters. We have to take some care, for we cannot afford to go aground.’
‘Are we making progress? Will we catch them?’
‘They have a fast boat, sir. Whoever is at the wheel knows these waters.’
Müller turned to his Gestapo men. ‘Either of you two ever drive a motorboat?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Huber said, clicking his heels. ‘My family has a little cruising boat on Lake Constance.’
‘Take the wheel, then, Huber. Just follow the line of the boat ahead – I think they know the shallows. Keep to their line and we should be safe.’
Anton didn’t want to let go of the wheel. As Huber appeared at his side, he protested. ‘No, this is my boat – and I know these islands.’ He looked beseechingly at the Gestapo chief. ‘Please, Herr Gruppenführer!’
Müller shrugged. ‘You let me down, Anton. Anyway, I think we will go a little faster with less ballast.’
Anton froze in horror. The muzzle of the SS-Gruppenführer’s Luger pistol was pressed hard against his chest. It was the last thing he saw. Müller pulled the trigger twice and two 7.65 parabellum bullets pumped into his heart. Anton crumpled, his dying sigh lost in the summer breeze.
Müller looked down at the body without emotion, then nodded to the second of his two junior officers. ‘Felberg, throw this piece of shit overboard.’
Chapter 33
Coburg’s left hand was still gripping the handle of his leather briefcase. They had found him like that, on the shoreline rocks, under a warm, late-summer sun. He was half-dead but he wasn’t going to let go of the case. His fingers were long and bony and they held on to his precious possession as if even death would not part him from it.
Now, deep into the voyage back to the mainland, there was still no sign that he intended to ever release his grip.
‘Are they in there, the papers?’ Wilde asked Harriet when she stood back from her efforts to soothe his fever.
She nodded.
‘I’d like to take a look at them.’
‘There’s no hurry.’
‘Still, I’ve come all this way on the back of what you told me – I’d very much like to look at the evidence.’
‘Go ahead then, if you can get them off him. He doesn’t seem inclined to release his hold.’
I
n the end, Coburg simply didn’t have the strength to resist and Wilde gently untied the cord and prised the briefcase from his talon-like fingers. The German’s eyes were wide and imploring, but he said nothing.
‘I need to look at this, Herr Coburg. Don’t worry, your property is safe with me. We’re on your side.’ Wilde snapped open the case and slid out dozens of foolscap pages, efficiently pinned together into different sections with large paper clips.
Coburg nodded in resignation. ‘They tell you everything,’ he said in perfect, though accented, English. ‘The whole story. Müller, Eichmann, Eberl . . .’
Wilde placed the papers on a small fixed table and began to go through them. The paper on top was a hand-drawn map of what used to be Poland but was now divided up into districts of occupation and given new names denoting their changed status as integral parts of the Reich – the General Government, Bialystock, Warthegau. Within these areas, camps were clearly indicated by a black cross and a tiny skull. The crosses were fiercely inscribed in black ink as though stabbed with a sharp-nibbed pen.
Beside each camp was a single word: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Janowska, Auschwitz. Harriet had mentioned some of these names, but otherwise they meant nothing to Wilde. Given what he already knew, however, their purpose was all too clear. The inked skulls, the crosses and the testimony he had heard second-hand from Harriet told him that these were the Nazi death factories.
The chart was also a spider’s web of railway tracks from major cities and what appeared to be holding camps, each leading ineluctably to the end of the line.
He looked through the other pages; they were official documents with printed headings of the RSHA – the Reich Main Security Office – and the department involved, Referat IV B4. Each was stamped with the words STRENG GEHEIM – top secret. Wilde spoke enough German to get the gist. These were official orders regarding requisitions and deployments of railway carriages, locomotives, drivers and guards. To the innocent eye, their import was not immediately obvious, but Wilde had a pretty good idea what they referred to. The figures, too, were informative. Each carriage of each train had a number beside it. With a chill, he realised that the figure referred to the human consignment on a specific transport. These cattle cars all seemed to contain upwards of a hundred people, so a train forty carriages long might hold 4,000.
The details of these transports were for internal consumption only, and never supposed to see the light of day. They were there because, despite everything, the Nazis still adhered to the correct Teutonic way of doing things. Everything must be in order, everything must be properly recorded – even their own insane acts of cruelty.
Then came papers headed as draft minutes of a conference held in a villa at Wannsee near Berlin and dated 20th January of the present year. It was an area of Germany that Wilde knew. On page one was a list of attendees, which was headed by the late Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and thus overlord of both the Gestapo and the SD. Wilde did a quick calculation; this conference had taken place less than five months before Heydrich’s assassination in Prague by two agents sent from England. Wilde scanned through the other names but only two caught his eye: Heinrich Müller and a man called Adolf Eichmann, which sounded like the name Coburg had mentioned.
‘Is it possible we are being followed?’ Skoog said from above.
The words broke Wilde’s concentration. He turned and saw Skoog at the entrance to the cabin. He wasn’t sure that he had heard the old seafarer’s question correctly. ‘What did you say, Skipper?’
‘I merely wondered whether it was at all possible anyone might be following us. Only, I have noticed that there is always a boat half a league behind us, and it seems like it might be the same boat. It is travelling at a not dissimilar speed to ourselves, which is unusual in these waters, for we are going at a good rate.’
Wilde hurriedly shuffled the papers back into the briefcase; time enough to study those in detail at a later date. But even at first sight, he knew they told a devastating story. This trip from England had not been in vain. He handed the briefcase to Harriet. ‘Did you hear what Skoog just said?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t like the sound of it.’ He joined the old man at the wheel and peered back along the sleek wooden deck to the distant craft which Skoog had indicated. ‘How long has it been behind us?’
‘At least ten minutes, perhaps all the way from Huggorm. I can’t say for sure.’
‘Is it gaining on us, do you think?’
‘Certainly not by much. You can’t race through some of these narrow channels otherwise you risk being grounded, and no one knows these waters better than me. So we are going fast enough to keep our distance, I think, and I am sure we will beat it to Ekberg harbour. Why? Are you worried, professor?’
Wilde borrowed Skoog’s binoculars. He could see three men aboard the pursuing boat, three complete strangers. He handed the binculars back. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is someone else who would like to find our passenger. Someone who does not share our good intentions towards him.’
‘Then I have a challenge – and I love a challenge. I’ll lose them.’
*
The visibility was perfect, yet the Solpalats lost the Arethusa. ‘Where is the boat, Huber? I can no longer see it.’
‘I think it has changed direction, Herr Gruppenführer. Somewhere among those islands ahead of us.’
‘Give me the chart,’ Müller ordered the other Gestapo man, Felberg, who had been standing at Huber’s side doing his best to navigate. The officer clicked his heels and obediently held the large nautical map out to his master. Müller took it without acknowledgement, then spread it on the deck and got down to his knees to study it. After a few moments scanning the chart, he turned back to Felberg. ‘Where do you think we are now? Which way did they go?’
The junior officer pointed to one of the larger islands. ‘We have passed this one, Vindo, and I believe the settlement we saw on the left was Boda.’
‘There was a channel there on the left – a narrow strait,’ Müller said. ‘They could have gone there.’
‘Yes, Herr Gruppenführer.’ It did not do to contradict Heinrich Müller. ‘That is quite possible.’
‘But you’re not sure?’
‘The boat was out of our line of vision when it disappeared, sir.’
Müller turned his attention back to the man at the wheel. ‘Huber, what do you think?’
The young officer chose his words with care. ‘Your suggestion that they went down the channel may well be correct, Herr Gruppenführer, but I think I would have seen them. In truth I have a strong instinct that they would have turned to the right immediately after that channel and headed for all those small islands to the north. The chart shows them as an impossible labyrinth, sir, the ideal place for a good steersman to lose himself. I fear our chances of locating them among all those rocky outcrops are remote, and our chances of hitting shoals and becoming grounded are greater. If they are trying to lose us, that might be the option they would choose. That is what I would do in their place.’
‘Good thinking, Huber.’
‘But if I may say, sir, with respect, I have had another thought.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘If they are trying to lose us in the maze of islands, that does not mean they have changed their ultimate destination.’
‘Go on, Huber.’
‘Well, it might be possible that they have only recently concluded that they are being pursued – in which case we might be able to divine their true destination from their direction of travel until this point. That means we could arrive in port before them and await their arrival . . .’
‘And their likely destination? What do you think?’
‘The little harbour of Ekberg looks quite likely, sir.’
Müller peered at the map again and stabbed his small finger at the map. Ekberg. Of course, that was the place they had gone to meet the woman who put him in to
uch with Axel Anton. Yes, indeed, Huber was almost certainly correct.
‘Good man, Huber. If this comes off, I am recommending you for promotion.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘If not, of course . . . well, I leave that to your imagination.’ Müller winked at the steersman. ‘Only joking, young man.’
*
Skoog had suggested taking Coburg straight into the heart of Stockholm, where there was a fine hospital, but Wilde and Harriet were unhappy at the prospect.
‘Isn’t there one nearer your home port, Skipper?’
‘Well, there is one some way further up the coast. Would you like to go there?’
‘I think it’s safer,’ Wilde said.
‘OK, then. But that will take us an extra hour or more. I thought you were in a hurry. What about our local doctor’s practice? That would save a lot of time – and he is a fine physician.’
Wilde glanced at Harriet. She nodded.
‘Good,’ Skoog said. ‘Then that is much more simple.’
*
Huber steered the motorboat into the small harbour of Ekberg. This was easy for a man with his boat skills; his father had taught him well.
‘You two, tie up,’ Müller said. ‘And then we wait and watch.’
The other boat arrived three-quarters of an hour later, with two men visible – one at the wheel and another at his side. They looked like the men he had seen before through binoculars. Müller was surprised it had taken them so long and had begun to think they had chosen the wrong destination. But once he saw the vessel, he was as certain as he could be that this was the boat they had been following. No sign of the Englishwoman and Coburg, though. Either they were in the cabin or he had been pursuing the wrong boat all the way from Huggorm. Damn that Anton. He very much desired to kill him again.
*
Wilde jumped ashore with the mooring rope and tied up firmly and expertly. Then he helped Skoog on to land. The old man was struggling now after spending so many hours at sea. Wilde took him slowly, step by painful step, to the bench where they had found him that morning.
A Prince and a Spy Page 27