Berlin Red (16 page)

On the night of 12 April 1945, Kirov, Pekkala and their guide found themselves strapped into uncomfortable metal seats in the unheated cargo bay of a Junkers transport plane.

Pekkala looked around at the aircraft’s curved frame supports, which arched down the bare metal of the interior walls, giving him the impression that he had been swallowed by a whale. Just then, Pekkala could not remember whether the story of Jonah had actually taken place or if it was simply the invention of some long-dead holy man, intended to steer the listener towards some greater truth which now eluded him.

The Junkers had been captured the year before when Russian troops overran an airfield near Orel. Since then, it had been used in several missions that involved dropping supplies or spare parts to Red Army soldiers encircled by the German Army.

On this occasion, however, the cargo was human.

Beside Pekkala sat Kirov. For the fifth time, the major was checking his parachute. Still echoing in Kirov’s head were the words of the jump instructor who had met them at the airport and having described how they would be jumping from the aircraft, went on to explain that, if his chute failed, he would reach a terminal velocity of approximately 110 miles per hour, the speed at which he would strike the ground, whether he fell from 500 or 5,000 feet, and that when he did strike the ground, he would break every bone in his body, even the tiny ones in his ears. In spite of the matter-of-fact delivery of this information, the instructor had meant this to be reassuring, since it would all be over in a second and there would be no time for feeling any pain.

Kirov, however, was having trouble seeing it that way. As he peered at the various straps and clips, he realised that he had no idea whether the parachute had been correctly assembled or not, and he was afraid to touch anything in case he accidentally rearranged or broke some important part, which would cause him to be gelatinised on impact.

He cast a scathing glance at Pekkala, who did not seem at all troubled by the fact that they would soon be hurling themselves into space. In fact, to judge from the look on Pekkala’s face, he appeared to be looking forward to it.

Muttering curses he knew no one would hear above the rumble of the Junkers’ engines, Kirov went back to checking his equipment.

Opposite them was their guide, a grim-faced man with a German accent, who introduced himself as Corporal Luther Strohmeyer.

One year before, Strohmeyer had been an Untersturmführer, or lieutenant, commanding a much reduced company of Panzer Grenadiers from the SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’. During the same vast clash of armour in which his present mode of transport had been captured, Strohmeyer had been ordered to lead a frontal assault on a town called Fatezh. His orders were to attack without any preliminary bombardment of the town which, since it involved traversing a wide expanse of open ground, was tantamount to suicide. Assuming that there must have been a mistake somewhere up the line, Strohmeyer took matters into his own hands and ordered a mortar barrage on Fatezh. The Soviet defenders, surprised and out-gunned, immediately retreated, enabling Strohmeyer and his men to capture the town without a single casualty.

For this, Strohmeyer had expected an Iron Cross 1st Class at the very least, or perhaps even a Knight’s Cross to hang around his throat.

But this was not what happened.

It emerged that Strohmeyer’s company had been selected as a diversion for a much larger attack taking place to the north. He and his men were to be sacrificed. None had been expected to survive. As a result of Strohmeyer’s successful capture of Fatezh, he was charged with failing to carry out an order in the spirit in which it was given. He still had no idea what that really meant. The result, however, was exile for the duration of the war to a group known as Parachute Battalion 500, formed largely out of troops who, after disgracing themselves in one way or another, had been stripped of their rank and decorations and bundled into a military formation for whom survival was an even more remote prospect than it had been for them when they were regular soldiers.

In May of 1944, the battalion was sent to capture the Communist partisan leader Tito in his remote mountain hideaway near Dvor in western Bosnia. Not only did the battalion fail to capture Tito, but more than eight hundred of the thousand men taking part in the mission were killed or captured, thanks to a tip which the Communists had received before the battalion had even set out on their mission.

The man who tipped them off was Luther Strohmeyer, who had passed a message through an informant at the camp where the battalion underwent parachute training. Driven by bitterness at how he had been treated, the fanaticism with which Strohmeyer had entered the war on the side of the Fascists transferred almost seamlessly to the Communist cause.

Only rarely, in the months ahead, would the guilt of what he’d done emerge from the dark corners of his mind to torment Strohmeyer. Then images of the men whose deaths he had assured would flash behind his eyes and he would twitch and jerk his head, as if someone were holding a lit match too close to his face.

As soon as his feet touched the ground in Bosnia, he deserted to Soviet troops stationed in Dvor. From there, he was transferred to Moscow and cautiously welcomed as a hero for his role in saving Tito’s life.

Since then, in his work for Soviet Counter-Intelligence, he had taken part in several missions inside Germany, all of them involving parachute drops behind enemy lines. What he had learned from these jumps was not only the technique of hurling himself from a plane travelling 500 feet above the ground but also the fact that, when the time came to jump, he was never afraid. Strohmeyer did not know why he wasn’t terrified at moments like this. He knew he ought to be. Before he climbed aboard the plane, and later, after he was safely on the ground, nightmares would crowd his head like flocks of starlings taking to the sky. But as soon as the plane left the ground, all terror ceased and where it went and why, Strohmeyer had no idea, nor did he care to know.

This mission looked to be no different from the rest. A native of Berlin, Strohmeyer had volunteered to escort the Russians into and out of the city, along with the person they had been sent to rescue. He knew nothing of the mission itself, nor did he have an inkling about the identities of the men who sat before him now or the person they had been sent to extract. All he knew was the location of a safe house on Heiligenberg Street in the eastern district of Berlin and the time of the rendezvous, at noon three days from now. Although the men he was escorting were aware of the date, the actual location of the safe house had been shared with him alone by the tweed-jacketed British diplomat named Swift who briefed him on the task which lay ahead. On operations like this, it was standard procedure to compartmentalise information so that no one man knew everything. That way, if anything went wrong and one of them was captured, the entire mission would not be jeopardised.

There was one significant difference in the orders he had been given this time. On his way to the airfield, the NKVD officer who had prepared Strohmeyer for the mission instructed him to shoot both of the men he was guiding into Berlin in the event that, on the homeward journey, either of them showed any reluctance to return to Soviet lines. Exactly what constituted reluctance, Strohmeyer was not told. He had the impression that the Kremlin would rather these men did not survive and yet, clearly, they were needed for the task. One thing the NKVD officer had made clear was that under no circumstances was any harm to come to the person they were rescuing from the city. Strohmeyer knew without having to ask that his own life depended on that.

It was painfully cold in the belly of the plane. In addition to the clothes they would wear on the ground, the only protective garments they had been issued were brown cotton overalls, over which the heavy parachute harnesses had been strapped. Lulled into dream-like stupors by the frigid air, each man disappeared into the catacombs of his own thoughts.

After two hours in the sky, they were startled by a sudden, sharp rattling sound against the hull of the aircraft. This was accompanied, a second later, by a high-pitched whistling of air.

The Junker’s engines snarled as the pilot jammed the throttle forward.

Pekkala felt a weight, like chains draped upon his shoulders, as the plane began to climb rapidly.

Kirov glanced at the stranger who was to be their guide, hoping for some kind of explanation.

Strohmeyer pointed at the fuselage just above Kirov’s head.

Turning, Kirov glimpsed a line of puncture marks, through which the wind was whistling in half a dozen different pitches, as if played by a mad man with a flute.

A moment later, the cockpit door opened and a man in a sheepskin-lined flight suit appeared. ‘We’ve just crossed the Soviet lines,’ he shouted at them. ‘We took some ground fire from our own side, but it hasn’t slowed us down. We’re over Germany now. Be ready when the light comes on!’

Kirov stared enviously at the man’s flight suit, then looked up at the two jump lights, one red and one green, like knotted fists of glass.

Even as he looked at it, the red ‘prepare-to-jump’ light burst into colour.

Hurriedly and with his heart-beat pulsing in his throat, Kirov unbuckled himself from the seat.

The other two men did the same.

Carrying the heavy rope of their static lines, each man clipped himself to a rail running like a spinal cord down the centre of the roof.

The co-pilot opened the side door and the cargo bay filled with a howling rush of icy air, which drowned out even the perpetual thunder of the engines.

Strohmeyer, who was first in line, walked forward, pulling his static line like a leash, until he stood opposite the opening. Outside, in the pre-dawn gloom, he saw shreds of cloud sweep past and glimpses of landscape far below.

The red glow vanished and, in the same instant, the cargo bay was flooded by the emerald flash of the jump light.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Strohmeyer took two paces forward and flung himself head first through the opening. He extended his arms and legs into a spreadeagle attitude in the peculiar and dangerous fashion taught to German paratroopers. Then the static line, anchored to the middle of his back, came taut. The jolt on his spine almost caused him to faint. As the chute deployed, his legs swung down and he hung like a marionette, drifting now towards the ground.

Passing through a cloud, his clothes became instantly soaked with moisture. By then, the plane was barely audible.

Glancing up, he could just make out the dark silhouettes of the other two parachutes.

Directly below him lay a village. It appeared to be mostly intact although it was still too dark to tell for certain.

The thing he would never forget about these parachute drops was the silence, and how slowly he seemed to fall at first. But the closer he came to the ground, the more the speed seemed to pick up and he realised now that he was heading directly for a grove of trees, in the centre of which he could see the spire of a church.

Remembering the instructions of the jump master who had taught him back in Hungary, Strohmeyer jammed his legs together, hooking his feet, one around the other, so as not to straddle a branch on his way in. At the speed he was travelling, an injury like that would be fatal.

Beyond that, there was little Strohmeyer could do but brace for the impact and hope that his chute did not become entangled in the branches.

He tucked his legs up to his chest as the flimsy top branches clawed past him. He drifted over the largest of the trees and laughed out loud when he realised he had cleared the grove. He was coming down in a ploughed field, the best possible place to land. Strohmeyer barely had time to wonder at his luck when he spotted a thread of black running horizontally across the path of his approach.

The shroud lines of his parachute made a loud zipping noise as they connected with the power line and the silk canopy ruffled as it snagged against a telegraph pole.

As the electric current burst through his back and exploded through the soles of his boots, Strohmeyer had no sensation of actually reaching the earth. The last thought that passed through his mind before his body seemed to fly apart, atomising into the night, was that neither of the men travelling with him had any idea where they were going.

As Pekkala drifted down over the ploughed field, he kicked his legs like a man riding a bicycle until he hit the ground and tumbled forward on to his knees in the soft earth. In a second, he was up, pulling in the lines of his green silk chute. Soon, he had gathered it into a large, messy bundle. Removing his harness, he carried it to a nearby hedge and stuffed it in among the brambles until it was hidden from sight.

After hours of breathing the thin, greasy-smelling air inside the cargo bay of the plane, the damp, leafy scent of the earth filled his lungs like incense in a church.

He looked around. The wind had carried him some distance from the town but he could still see the church steeple, rising up above the trees. He could see neither Kirov nor their guide and, for a moment, he struggled against the fluttering of panic in his chest at the thought that he was lost and entirely alone.

Drawing the Webley from its holster on his chest, he made his way across the field, mud clogging his boots, until he reached a bank of grass. From there, he set off towards the church.

He had not gone far when he spotted the silhouette of a man standing on the churchyard wall, waving to him.

It was Kirov.

Neither man could hide his relief at having found the other in the dark.

It took them a while longer to locate the guide.

As soon as they spotted the man’s chute, wafting in the night breeze like some strange, aquatic creature, Kirov set off at a run to help the man, whom they could see lying motionless on the ground.

‘Stop!’ hissed Pekkala.

Kirov skidded to a halt and turned.

‘Don’t even get near him,’ warned Pekkala. ‘He’s hit a power line. The current has grounded through his body.’