Authors: Paul Dowswell
Alex looked on in helpless horror.
This is it
, he thought. A cold-blooded execution. First Vater, then me. He could not bear to look and screwed up his eyes.
Frank stared at the wooden floorboards, thinking this was the last thing he would ever see. His heart was thumping so hard. Where the hell were those two West German policemen? They should have been right behind him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Kohl had moved to the side of the room. What on earth was he doing?
Kohl switched off the light. In the darkness the intruder was backlit by the street light in the courtyard below and appeared as a silhouette against the curtain.
Now everything happened at once. Kohl drew a bead on the figure and squeezed the trigger of his pistol. Just as he fired his target darted swiftly from his hiding place. The window shattered and glass skittered down to the courtyard below. The woman in the apartment above cried out in alarm. The intruder began to shoot blindly in Kohl’s direction. With plaster and wood splintering and disintegrating around him, Frank hurriedly crawled to Alex and pushed his son’s chair over, out of the line of fire.
Disorientated by the noise of the shots, and the now piercing screams of the woman upstairs, Kohl’s survival instinct told him to flee. He slammed the door, ran out of the flat and leaped down the stairs, taking them three at a time. On the first-floor landing he ploughed straight into Franz Hübner and his colleague with such force he knocked both of them over. As they staggered to their feet a second figure ran past and out into the street. They were so stunned they noticed little more than a flash of orange trousers.
Shots rang out in the street. Hübner and his colleague hurried out to find a crumpled figure in the rain-drenched gutter. It was a young man with the bright orange trousers. He was bleeding profusely from his abdomen. The man tried to stand up and stagger away, but he collapsed again immediately.
With Kohl and the intruder gone, Frank found the light switch and hurried over to Alex. He lifted him and the chair up gently and gingerly removed the gag from his mouth.
‘I thought he was going to shoot you,’ Alex said, as his father untied him. ‘And who was that other man?’ He felt sick and his hands were shaking. He didn’t know if he would be able to stand up unaided.
They had both heard the commotion on the stairs and the shots in the street and by now the landing outside the open door to the apartment had filled with frightened residents. One of the crowd, a woman in her thirties, was hysterical – perhaps she was the upstairs neighbour.
They were safe now there were people around. Frank went to the door and called for someone, anyone, to call the police.
‘They’re here already,’ said a gruff older man.
Hübner had rushed back up the stairs two at a time. He looked relieved when he saw Frank. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked breathlessly. ‘Is your son there? Is he all right?’
‘No thanks to you,’ said Frank. ‘What the hell kept you?’
Hübner held his hands open. ‘I’m sorry. We had to make sure he didn’t spot us. That would have been fatal for you both.’
He walked into the apartment and put an arm on Alex’s shoulder. ‘Can you walk or do you need a stretcher?’ he asked.
Alex croaked, ‘I need water.’ His arm felt as though it might have fractured where he had landed on it when Frank knocked his chair over, but now he was free he could feel his strength returning.
‘When you’re ready, take him downstairs to wait for an ambulance,’ Hübner said to Frank.
Alex stumbled downstairs, past the bewildered stares of the other residents. Some of them asked what had happened, but he felt too stunned to reply. Frank had to hold Alex tight as his son was unsteady on his feet.
They waited in the apartment lobby, oblivious to the comings and goings around them. In a few minutes the ambulance arrived. Medics came and gave Alex a blanket and the two of them sat underneath it in the flashing blue and red lights of the emergency vehicles that now crowded the street.
Frank had not hugged Alex like that since he was ten or eleven. It seemed simultaneously years ago and only yesterday. They waited in a daze for the medics to stabilise the wounded stranger. Whoever he was, he had saved them from Kohl.
While they were waiting for the ambulance to leave to take Alex to the nearby hospital, Frank remembered the dossier. He went up to the apartment but it was now full of police and detectives carrying out forensic work, and they wouldn’t let him in. Hübner came out and assured him they already had the dossier wrapped in an evidence bag.
‘Once the ambulance has left, then we will have to take you down to the police station. But use the phone here to call home first, if you like. Let your family know what’s happened.’
Frank made a quick call home. When Gretchen came on the line, the whole room heard her cry out with relief. He wanted to cry too, but he felt embarrassed surrounded by all these police people.
Hübner came down with him to wait with Alex. When the ambulance men called over for Alex, Hübner put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about your father,’ he said. ‘We know what’s been going on.’
Gretchen and Geli arrived at the hospital within half an hour of Frank’s call. The doctor told them Alex was in shock and dehydrated, with bruises on his arm and wrists, and abrasions on his mouth. They would keep him in overnight but he was certain he would be fit to be discharged after breakfast the next morning.
Alex was especially pleased to have his family around him. Both of them stayed with him through the night. He slept fitfully, waking with a start several times, dreaming that he was back in the chair.
An ambulance took the three of them home the next morning. They immediately switched on the radio to listen to the news. A Red Army Faction terrorist, Ronald Sommer, had been arrested after having been shot by police in Kreuzberg last night. He was still in a critical condition. There was no mention of Kohl or the Ostermanns.
Hübner came round later that morning and they were all delighted to see Frank amble in after him.
‘I’m all right,’ said Frank. ‘They’re not going to hold me.’ He seemed years younger and smiled quite naturally – something none of the family had seen since their arrival in West Berlin.
Hübner called for their attention. ‘I have a few things to tell you but first we have to search your apartment.’ A small team of technicians arrived. They found five minute listening devices concealed around the apartment, and photographed each in its hiding place before removing it. The Stasi had done an extremely professional job, explained Hübner. It was no wonder the Ostermanns couldn’t find the bugs when they looked for them.
When the technicians left, Hübner stayed behind. First he asked them not to talk to the newspapers. This was a delicate matter, he said, and they wanted the enemy to know as little as possible about what had happened the night before. He also made it clear that if the story did come out, they would have to prosecute Frank Ostermann for industrial espionage.
For now, charges against Frank would be dropped. He had given them a thorough account of his actions in West Berlin and had obviously been acting under extreme duress. The fibre optics file had not been lost. The Stasi had not been able to make use of it. No actual harm had been done. His department were currently scrutinising the records of all Siemens employees in the West Berlin office, and interviewing them, to try to ascertain who else was working for the East Germans.
Siemens were not so forgiving. The BfV had explained that Frank was being blackmailed and that no details of their dossier had actually been taken to the East. But they had insisted on pressing charges, until the BfV had told them it was essential to keep the whole operation secret. It made everyone in the West look bad.
Kohl had escaped. For now, explained Hübner, the family could stay in their apartment. It might be expedient to move them out of Berlin where the Stasi could not abduct them so easily. But Hübner thought it unlikely this would happen. Through no fault of his own, Frank’s cover had been blown. He had acted as they had instructed. This was an operation that had come to an end. His hunch was that they would leave him and his family alone.
Erich Kohl returned to Normannenstrasse to file his report. He wondered, a little queasily, how far he would be held responsible for the failure of this operation. He noted in his account how he had been able to get Frank Ostermann to steal the Siemens dossier and how everything had gone to plan until the intervention of the mysterious gunman. West Berlin radio news indicated the man was Ronald Sommer, a Red Army Faction terrorist. He was known to the International Sektion at Normannenstrasse.
Theissen called him into his office that morning for a thorough debriefing. ‘Our Red Army Faction contacts tell us Sommer was acting alone,’ he told Kohl. ‘His girlfriend had been killed in a shoot-out with the police just before the February arrests. Sommer still believed it was you who had betrayed them.’
Kohl cursed. ‘I knew I had hit him because he stopped chasing me. I should have gone back to finish him off.’
‘He may not live.’
Theissen was being unusually cold with him, Kohl noticed. He suspected this would mean an end to his West German operations. It was a shame. He would miss what the West had to offer.
As Kohl opened the door to leave, Theissen spoke softly but clearly and gave a little wave. ‘
Sieg Heil, Herr Schneider.
’
Kohl’s blood froze in his veins.
The last thing Erich Kohl saw as he was frogmarched from his office was the smirk on his secretary’s face. He had been several days now without a visitor to his basement cell and had nothing to do but sit in these sparse white walls and contemplate his fate. Would they despatch him with a single shot to the back of the neck – a blinding flash of agony and then eternal darkness. Or would they use the guillotine? He’d heard your head lived on for a few seconds, maybe even a minute after it had been cut off. He wondered how much it would hurt, falling from the lunette into the tin bucket.
Theissen had often mentioned the fate of Oleg Penkovsky – the Soviet Colonel caught spying for the West. His KGB colleagues had told Theissen he had been fed into a basement furnace, feet first. What a fine example to the rest of them, Theissen would chuckle, then remark that he hated traitors almost as much as he hated Nazis. Maybe Theissen had something equally imaginative lined up for him?
Ilse Grau arrived at Comrade Minister Erich Mielke’s open door on the top floor of Building Number 1 with his breakfast. She was relieved to hear no answer when she knocked. She peeked round the door. His chair was empty. Sometimes the Comrade Minister would be absent for ten or fifteen minutes at that time of the morning. As instructed she proceeded to place his eggs, bread and coffee on the side of his desk. She also cast a quick eye on the documents that lay before her. One particularly caught her eye concerning Unterleutnant Erich Kohl – not least because Mielke had scrawled LIQUIDATE boldly at the bottom. She had no time to read more, but she knew Kohl. He was one of the more unpleasant customers at the canteen. She also knew a man in Blaschkoallee who paid her generously for any information she had gleaned from her day to day work at Normannenstrasse.
Alex had found Hübner’s reassurances compelling, so he was acutely disappointed that Frank and Gretchen decided it would be safer for them all to leave Berlin and go to West Germany. Alex and Geli both argued forcefully that they should stay. ‘We’re settled here, we like it. And you like your job, Mutti,’ said Geli.
‘And it’s Christmas,’ said Alex. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to spend Christmas here, without another upheaval. All those strangers in a new town to get to know.’
Frank was especially surprised that they were so keen to stay. ‘Alex, you’ve been kidnapped. They said they could have you back in the East in an hour. Doesn’t that worry you?’
Alex shrugged. ‘Hübner’s right. They’re done with us. I want to stay here.’
But Frank and Gretchen were determined to go.
A few days before they intended to leave, Franz Hübner paid them another visit. Alex was slightly irritated to see him as he was glued to the television watching the
Apollo 17
moon landing and the American astronauts’ excursions on their extraordinary Lunar Rover. Alex liked the fact that one of the crew, Harrison Schmitt, had a German name.
But Hübner had some good news. He told them the BfV understood that Kohl had been taken off Western Operations. He was hazy about what had happened to him, but he let the Ostermanns know that he certainly wouldn’t be bothering them again. Besides, with Frank’s cover blown, any further harassment would be purely vindictive. He was sure the Stasi had more important priorities for their agents in the West. It was enough to persuade Frank and Gretchen to stay.
Alex went to bed that evening feeling pleased. He did not want another upheaval in his life. But he found himself awake again in the early hours, thinking about Sophie Kirsch, and how she had betrayed him. Of course Frank had told him all about the Stasi and Kohl and the Siemens job. But Alex couldn’t figure out why the Stasi would deliberately set them up to escape and then put their lives in danger with a shoot-out at the border. As his father said, Normannenstrasse was a vast place. Maybe one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. Sophie could have tipped off one department, who arranged the ambush, without the other lot – the ones Frank was working with – knowing about it. He’d give anything to know what had really happened.