Berlin Red (10 page)

‘Diamond stream?' Stalin rolled the words across his tongue, as if to speak them might unravel the mystery of their meaning.

‘Garlinski said he thought it might have something to do with one of the German secret-weapons programmes,' said Pekkala. ‘Is there anyone who might know for certain?'

‘We have a number of high-ranking German officers at a prisoner-of-war camp north of the city. It is a special place, where men are slowly squeezed,' Stalin clasped his hand into a fist, ‘but gently, so that they barely notice, and before they know it they have told everything. You might find someone there who still has a drop or two of information which we haven't yet wrung from his brain. You'd better send Kirov, though.'

‘Why is that?' asked Pekkala.

‘Speaking to these men requires some finesse,' explained Stalin, ‘and your method of questioning suspects is apt to be a little primitive.'

Pekkala could not argue with that, but he had one more thing to say before he left. ‘Garlinski asked me to put in a word for him.'

‘A word about what?' Stalin asked.

‘About his living conditions here in Moscow. He thinks he deserves something more.'

Stalin nodded. ‘Indeed he does, Inspector. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.'

On the island of Bornholm, the Ottesen brothers had done nothing to clean up the mess caused by the explosion the night before, and the yard was still scattered with fragments of splintered wood, old horse tack and a splintery coating of straw.

For now, at least, they contented themselves with simply observing the destruction.

The two men perched side by side upon a bale of charred hay in the middle of their barnyard. Both of them were smoking pipes that had long thin stems and white porcelain bowls with tin lids to dampen the smoke.

Emerging from their house at sunrise that morning, they had discovered, amongst the wreckage, several pieces of what appeared to be metal fins and heavy discs of metal pierced by a multitude of drill holes.

The idea that it might have been an aeroplane was quickly set aside. Where were the wheels, the brothers asked themselves. Where were the propellers? Or the pilot? No. This was no work of human hands.

By pooling their combined intelligence, the Ottesen brothers decided that it must have been a spaceship of some sort. Having arrived at this conclusion, they could advance no further in their thinking, and so they sat down and smoked their pipes and waited for events to unfold.

It was not long before three policemen arrived in a truck, ordered the brothers back into their house and then began to rummage through the ruins of the barn.

The Ottesens watched through the gauzy fabric of their day curtains as the policemen removed several chunks of mangled metal from the barn, loaded them aboard the truck and then left without saying goodbye.

Not wanting to disobey orders, the brothers remained in their house for another hour before finally returning to the barnyard.

Soon afterwards, another car showed up and two more policemen climbed out.

‘You’re too late,’ said Per, removing the pipe stem from his mouth. ‘The other lot already came and went.’

‘What other lot?’ demanded the policeman. His name was Jakob Horn and he had served for many years as the only policeman stationed at the southern end of the island. With him was a German named Rudi Lusser who, as part of the small occupation force located on Bornholm, was tasked with accompanying Horn wherever he went, and reporting everything back to Northern District Police Headquarters, located in Hanover. Lusser had been there since 1940, and he had never received much encouragement from Hanover. In fact, he had grown to suspect that his reports weren’t even being read. Now that Hanover had fallen to the enemy, Lusser was growing increasingly nervous about his prospects for the future. Lusser and Horn had never got along well. In the early days of their forced partnership, Lusser had been intolerant of Horn and of these islanders, whom he had written off as ludicrously provincial. He had made no attempt to learn Danish and relied instead of Horn’s rudimentary grasp of German. Now that the war was as good as lost, Lusser was beginning to regret his previous attitude, and he made every effort to ingratiate himself with Horn and with these men, who might soon be his captors.

Lusser beamed a smile at the brothers, as if he was a long-lost friend.

The Ottesens ignored him. They had always ignored Lusser and now they ignored him even more, if such a thing were possible.

‘What other lot?’ repeated Horn.

‘The other policemen,’ explained Ole. ‘They must have come down from the north end of the island.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘We didn’t recognise them.’

Lusser, who could make no sense of what was going on, continued to smile idiotically.

‘Did they speak with you?’ Horn asked the twins.

‘No,’ answered Ole. ‘They just told us to stay in our house.’

‘What did they do then?’

‘Took a bunch of stuff from the spaceship,’ said Per.

‘Spaceship?’ asked Horn.

‘At first we just thought it was God,’ Ole told him.

‘But then we found the metal bits,’ said Per, ‘and that’s how we knew it was a spaceship.’

‘And what did these men do with the things they found?’

‘Put them in their truck and drove away.’

‘Where did they go?’ asked Horn. ‘Which direction?’

Ole aimed his pipe stem down the road towards Arnager, a little fishing village on the southern coast.

Horn shook his head in disbelief. ‘Did it not occur to you to wonder why policemen from the north end would be down this way at all, let alone why they would head off to the south when they left here?’

It had not occurred to them.

Horn stared at them for a moment. Then he got back into the car, along with Lusser, and the two policemen raced towards Arnager.

Arriving not long afterwards, they found an empty truck parked at the quayside and three police jackets, stolen from the Klemensker station at the north end of the island, lying heaped on the passenger seat.

When Major Kirov walked into the interrogation room at the Alexeyevska prisoner-of-war camp, which was reserved for high-ranking enemy officers, he found a tall man with pale skin and greying hair, still wearing the tattered uniform of a colonel in the German Army. The colonel sat at a table, hunched in a chair and clasping a green enamel cup filled with hot tea. Except for one other chair, on the opposite side of the table, there was no other furniture in the room.

The soldier’s name was Hanno Wolfrum.

He had been in charge of a convoy of trucks fleeing the advance of the Red Army towards the Baltic. Having departed from Königsberg, the column had planned to travel due south to Pultusk, just north of Warsaw and from there to head west towards the German lines. Fearing that his route might be cut off by Russian reconnaissance units, Wolfrum sent his own scouts ahead to ensure that the roads were still passable. As they crossed the Polish border and entered the region of Masuria, Wolfrum’s scouts reported that Soviet tanks had been seen on the road to Pultusk. There were no westbound roads between him and the town, and he did not dare retrace his steps towards the north, so Wolfrum had been forced to detour to the east, towards the enemy lines, in the hopes that he could then find another route south. As the column made its way along a winding road which passed beside the Narew river, they came under Soviet mortar fire from the opposite bank. The lead and rear trucks on the convoy were destroyed, stranding the vehicles in between. The drivers and a small number of men who had been serving as armed escorts for the convoy all fled into the surrounding countryside.

Russian soldiers crossed the river, hoping to find food in the trucks. Instead, they discovered engine parts for both V-1 and V-2 rockets. As word of the discovery reached the Russian High Command, specialised troops of the NKVD Internal Security Service were dispatched to the scene. The rocket parts were quickly inventoried and transported to the rear and a hunt began for the men who had been travelling with the convoy.

By then, most of them had already been killed by Polish civilians. Wolfrum himself was found hiding in a barn by Red Army soldiers who had been out foraging. He was brought to the Alexeyevska prison camp, where he underwent weeks of interrogation.

During this time, Wolfrum was neither tortured nor mistreated. His interrogators, who were among the most skilled in the Russian Intelligence Service, were well aware that Wolfrum, in time and if properly treated, would supply them not only with the answers to their questions, but with questions which they had not thought to ask.

At first, Wolfrum claimed to know nothing about the contents of the crates aboard his trucks, but the unexpectedly civilised treatment he received put him off balance. He soon began to give up details about the convoy that showed that he was not only aware of the significance of these engine parts, but that he had been part of the team which designed them. It emerged that Wolfrum had been sent by General Hagemann himself, head of the Peenemunde programme, to the factory in Sovetsk, on the Lithuanian border, which had manufactured the engine parts and to remove them to safety before the arrival of the Red Army. In addition to this, Wolfrum had been ordered to blow up the factory before he left, a task for which he used so much dynamite that he not only obliterated the factory but shattered half the windows in the town.

Now Kirov studied Wolfrum’s appearance. The colonel’s tunic, although badly damaged during the days he had spent on the run, was made of high-quality grey gaberdine, with a contrasting dark green collar. All of his insignia had been removed by the camp authorities, leaving shadows on the cloth where his collar tabs and shoulder boards had been, as well as the eagle above his left chest pocket.

Wolfrum himself, although solidly built, looked frightened and as worn-out as his clothes. The skin sagged beneath his eyes and his bloodless lips were chapped. Kirov did not need to be told that it was not the present which terrified this officer, but the future. Wolfrum had already been in captivity for several months and was well aware that he would soon arrive at the limits of his usefulness. Whatever promises had been made by his captors, regarding his treatment in the weeks, or months or even years ahead, had only served to scour every wrinkle of his brain for information they could use. Any day now, the illusion of dignity would be set aside. Whether they put him up against a wall and shot him or else dispatched him to Siberia was all out of his hands now. In the meantime, Wolfrum answered their questions. He didn’t care what they were. The oaths of loyalty which he had taken long ago were to a country on the edge of extinction. Besides, there was nothing he knew that was still worth keeping secret. ‘You’re new,’ remarked Wolfrum when he caught sight of the major. ‘Are all the others tired out?’ Then he sipped at his tea, waiting for the interrogation to begin. They always gave him tea before these sessions and he was almost afraid to tell them how much he had come to value this miniature gesture of kindness.

‘I just have one question,’ said Kirov, ‘and I’ve been told that you might have the answer.’

Wolfrum sighed. ‘I have already explained everything. About everything. But why should that matter?’ Placing the mug on the table, he held open his hands, palms rosy from the heat. ‘Ask away, Comrade. I have all the time in the world.’

Kirov sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table.

‘What do you know about “Diamond Stream”?’ asked Kirov.

Wolfrum paused before he spoke. ‘Well now,’ he said at last, ‘perhaps there is something you don’t know about me, after all.’

‘And what might that be?’ asked Kirov.

‘That I worked on the Diamond Stream project.’

‘What did the project involve?’ he asked the colonel.

Wolfrum paused. Each time he gave up a new fragment of information, it seemed to him he took another step towards a line beyond which there could be no going back. But he had lately come to realise that the line had been crossed long ago. ‘Diamond Stream is the code name for a guidance system for the V-2 rocket. If it had succeeded, we could have dropped one down a chimney on the other side of Europe.’

‘If?’

‘That’s right,’ said Wolfrum. ‘It was a wonderful idea, but that’s all it ever was. I don’t know how many test shots we fired in the months before I was captured, but I can tell you that every single one of them failed. The mechanisms we designed were too fragile to withstand the vibrations of the rocket in flight.’

‘Do you think it could have worked,’ asked Kirov, ‘even if only in theory?’

Wolfrum smiled. ‘Our theories always worked, Comrade Major. It’s why we gave them such beautiful names. But that’s all it is, just a theory, and likely all that it will ever be.’

A few days later, a truck pulled up before the gates of the British Propulsion Laboratory, located near King’s Dock in Swansea in the south of Wales.

The town had once been a thriving port, but German air raids, which took place mostly at night during the summer of 1940, had reduced much of the docklands to rubble.

The propulsion laboratory, which dealt primarily in steam-driven turbines for powering the engines of battleships, had been one of the few businesses to survive the bombing. This was by virtue of the fact that its large roof, whose dew-soaked slates gleamed in the moonlight, had served as a homing beacon for the attacking squadrons of Heinkels and Dornier bombers. The pilots of these planes had been given strict orders not to damage the roof, and the laboratory had remained intact.

Soldiers of the Army Transport Corps unloaded a crate from the back of the truck. The heavy box was placed upon a handcart and brought inside the red-brick building. The soldiers were joined by two men in civilian clothing, who had accompanied the crate from the moment it had arrived in the English port city of Harwich two days before.

One of these men wore a trilby hat and a brown wool gaberdine coat. He was tall and wiry and sported a pencil-thin moustache. The man made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was carrying a revolver in a shoulder holster.

The other man, who sported a three-piece Harris tweed suit, had a small chin, curly hair gone grey and had not shaved in several days, leaving a stippling of white stubble on his cheeks.

The man with the pencil moustache stood in the middle of the laboratory floor and, in a loud and nasal voice, informed the dozen technicians who were working on the main floor of the laboratory that they had been dismissed for the remainder of the day.

No one argued. No one even asked why. The sight of the gun wedged under the man’s armpit were all the credentials he needed.

Only one person was kept behind: a small, bald man with fleshy lips and cheerful eyes. Instead of the faded blue lab coats worn by the other technicians, this man had put on a chef’s apron, with a large kangaroo pocket at the front which sagged with pencils, handkerchiefs and scraps of notepaper on which mysterious equations had been written.

‘Professor Greenidge?’ asked the man with the pencil moustache.

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Warsop,’ said the man. ‘I’m with the Home Office.’ And, as he spoke, he removed a folded piece of paper from his coat. ‘I’d like you to sign this, please.’

‘What is it?’ asked Professor Greenidge.

It was the man in the tweed suit who answered. ‘Official Secrets Act,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘As soon as you’ve done that, we can show you what we’ve got in here.’ He gave the crate a jab with his toe. ‘I think you’ll find it worth your time.’ Then he held out his hand to the professor. ‘My name is Rufford. I’m a member of Crossbow.’

Greenidge had heard of the Crossbow organisation although, until now, he had never met anyone who was a part of it. The organisation had been put together to study German rocket technology. It was all top-secret stuff, far beyond his own level of clearance.

‘What’s this got to do with me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a steam technician. I don’t build rockets.’

‘We pulled your name out of a hat,’ muttered Warsop. ‘Now are you going to sign the document or not?’

‘I do suggest you sign it, old man,’ said Rufford.

‘Very well,’ said Greenidge, suspecting that he had no choice. With a few swipes of his Parker pen, the professor did as he was told.

‘In any of your work,’ asked Rufford, ‘have you ever come across the mention of a project known as “Diamond Stream”?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘What would that be?’

‘Well,’ began Rufford, ‘we are hoping it might be the contents of this box.’

As Warsop unlatched the crate, a smell of mud and manure swept out into the room. Warsop reached inside and removed a gnarled piece of machinery, still clogged with dirt and threads of straw. That it had been torn from its mountings by incredible force was clear to see in the bent and shredded steel.

Warsop handed it to Greenidge. ‘See what you can make of that,’ he said.

Greenidge held the cold metal in his hands for a few seconds, but it was too heavy and he had to put it down upon a work bench. Then he took out one of the many pencils from his apron and began to poke around among a cluster of wires which splayed out of the machine like the roots of a tree wrenched from the ground. After several minutes, he stood back, tapping the pencil thoughtfully upon his thumbnail. ‘It appears to be some kind of gyroscopic mechanism, possibly for stabilising an object in flight. It’s not one of ours or I would know about it. Where did you get it?’

‘From a crash site on an island in the Baltic,’ replied Rufford. ‘That’s about all we can tell you for now.’

‘Can you at least inform me of the type of craft it came from?’

‘We think it was a test rocket that went off course, probably fired from the German research facility at Peenemunde.’

‘So it’s either a V-1 or a V-2,’ remarked Greenidge.

Warsop glanced at Rufford. ‘Might as well tell him,’ he said.

‘It is the latter,’ confirmed Rufford.

‘I thought we bombed Peenemunde,’ said Professor Greenidge.

‘We did,’ Warsop answered. ‘Just not enough, apparently.’

‘Which would imply that the mechanism didn’t work.’

‘Possibly,’ replied Rufford. ‘We’ve managed to salvage a number of rocket parts out of the recent bombings of Antwerp and London . . .’

‘London!’ exclaimed Greenidge. ‘There’s been no report of that.’

‘Ah,’ Rufford scratched at his forehead. ‘Well, you see, in order not to generate panic in the city, we have been reporting these rocket strikes as gas-main explosions. Since they come in faster than the speed of sound, the detonation actually precedes the noise of its arrival, which itself is drowned out by the explosion.’

‘How long do you think you’ll be able to keep that fiction working?’ the professor asked incredulously.

‘As long as we have to,’ said Warsop, ‘but that’s not why we’re here.’

‘Yes, quite,’ said Rufford, who seemed anxious to defuse whatever animosity was already brewing between the two men. ‘We’ve brought you this piece of equipment, because we’ve never come across anything like this before. We have reason to believe that the enemy may be close to perfecting a radio-controlled homing system for these weapons.’

‘Radio-controlled?’ asked Greenidge, and suddenly he understood why they had come to him.

Before the war, he had experimented with radio-guidance technology for weapons, but he had never been able to develop a successful prototype. His government funding had eventually been cut and he came to work at the propulsion lab as a steam-turbine engineer. Now, it seemed, the enemy had fulfilled the dream which had once been his own.

‘Any chance you might be able to reconstruct it?’ asked Rufford.

Greenidge shook his head. ‘Not from what you’ve given me. This is only part of the mechanism. If you can find me schematics, even partial ones, I should be able to make some headway pretty quickly.’

‘We’re working on that now,’ said Warsop.

‘In the meantime,’ continued Greenidge, ‘I can take apart what we do have here and should be able to tell you what is missing.’

‘Then that will have to do,’ said Rufford. ‘Have you got some place where you can work on it without anyone looking over your shoulder?’

‘Yes,’ said Greenidge. ‘There’s space in the storage room at the back.’

‘Put a lock on the door,’ ordered Warsop.

‘There is one.’

‘On the inside,’ said Warsop, ‘so you can keep out any unintended visitors.’

Greenidge nodded. ‘I’ll see to it right away.’ He shook hands with Rufford. Warsop only nodded goodbye.

‘I do have one last question,’ said Greenidge, as the two men headed for the door.

They turned and looked at him.

‘Are you sure there’s no one on the other side who knows we’ve got hold of this?’

Rufford looked nervously at Warsop.

‘Why do you want to know that?’ demanded Warsop.

‘Because if I can build it’, answered Greenidge, ‘I might also be able to build something which could defeat its purpose. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? The simple fact that we might be able to duplicate the technology isn’t going to prevent it from being used against us.’

For the first time, Warsop’s scowl faltered.

‘We’re as sure as we can be that the enemy has no idea where these rocket pieces went,’ explained Rufford, ‘but that’s never one hundred per cent. The men who brought us that wreckage took extraordinary risks in doing so, but who knows if someone saw them on their journey, or if the local authorities where the rocket came down have been able to figure out what was taken from the wreck. The way things are in Germany right now, they’ve got plenty of other things to worry about. Let’s hope this stays off their radar.’

‘The sooner you get me those schematics . . .’

‘People are working on that even as we speak, Professor, but as I’m sure you can imagine, it is easier said than done.’

When the two men had gone, Greenidge turned his attention once more to the piece of wreckage. With one finger, he moved aside the tangled spider’s web of multicoloured wires and was startled when something fell out of the mechanism. It tumbled to floor, metal ringing on the concrete. Greenidge bent down and picked it up, relieved to see the solid disc of brass had not been broken by the fall. There appeared to be some writing on it, half hidden by the smear of the same mud that coated the rest of the mechanism. With the side of his thumb, he wiped the dirt away and squinted at the words, struggling to make sense of them. ‘Lotti,’ he read aloud. ‘Beste Kuh.’