Berlin Red (2 page)

At that same moment, at the end of a dirt road on the windswept island of Usedom on the Baltic coast, a haggard-looking German officer stood looking out at waves which tumbled from the mist and rode hissing on to the pinkish-grey sand.

Clenched between his teeth was a short-stemmed briarwood pipe, in which he was smoking the last of his tobacco.

Another man, wearing the uniform of an air force non-commissioned officer, trudged up the road and came to a stop beside the officer. ‘General Hagemann,’ he said quietly, as if unwilling to intrude upon his master’s thoughts.

The officer removed the pipe from his mouth, clutching the bowl in his leather-gloved hand. ‘Tell me some decent news for a change, Sergeant Behr.’

‘The fog is due to lift very soon,’ Behr said encouragingly, ‘and the observation ship reports that visibility in the target area is good.’

A smile glimmered through the fatigue on General Hagemann’s face. Although he held a military rank, his heart was not in soldiering. He was a scientist by profession, and his work as head of the propulsion laboratory in the top-secret V-2 rocket facility located in the nearby village Peenemunde had taken over his life, costing him first his marriage, then his health and, he had recently begun to suspect, most of his sanity as well.

Since the first successful launch of a V-2 rocket, back in October of 1942, Hagemann had been working on a radio-controlled guidance system code named Diamantstrahl – the Diamond Stream. If perfected, the system could ensure the accurate delivery of the 1,000 kilograms of explosives contained within each 14-metre-tall rocket. The progress of the war had forced them to go ahead with launches against the cities of London and Antwerp, although, by Hagemann’s reckoning, only one in seventeen of these rockets, over a thousand of which had been fired to date, had hit their intended targets. That they had done significant damage to the cities in question was of little consolation to the general because he knew that, even now, as Germany was being crushed between the Anglo-Americans in the West and the Red Army in the East, the delivery of these devastating weapons, with the pinpoint accuracy he felt sure could be achieved, might still tip the balance of the war. And even if it was too late to avoid defeat, the V-2, in its perfected state, might still serve as a bargaining chip in negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies, rather than the unconditional surrender which would otherwise be their only option.

There was no doubt in Hagemann’s mind that the future, not only of his country but of all future warfare, depended upon the Diamond Stream project, so named because, in controlled laboratory experiments, the rocket, when functioning perfectly, would emit an exhaust stream of glittering particles which resembled a river of diamonds.

Even as fully armed V-2s were unleashed upon their targets in the west, other rockets, carrying tubes of sand instead of explosives, roared out into the night sky, destined to fall harmlessly into the waters of the Baltic. These were the project’s sacrificial lambs. By regulating the mix of liquid oxygen, alcohol and hydrogen peroxide in the fuel system – calculations which sometimes depended on millilitres of adjustment – Hagemann was seeking the perfection of his art.

This evening’s offering had been fitted with a mechanism originally intended for steering anti-aircraft missiles. The system, which was much too primitive for use in the V-2, had required so many adjustments before it could be used that Hagemann felt certain this would prove to be another failure.

Sergeant Behr handed over a clipboard. ‘Here are this evening’s specifics,’ he said. Then, he produced a penlight, which he used to illuminate the page, while the general examined the dizzying array of numbers. ‘None of these are within the usual parameters.’ He clicked his tongue and sighed. After all the years of engineering, he thought to himself, and the thousands upon thousands of experiments, and even with all we have accomplished, there always comes a point when we must stumble out blind into the dark. As he had almost done so many times before, Hagemann reminded himself not to lose faith.

‘It’s true about the parameters,’ Behr replied. ‘Some are above the normal range, and some are below. Perhaps they will even each other out.’

Hagemann snuffled out a laugh. He patted Behr on the back. ‘If only it were so simple, my friend.’

‘Shall I tell them to delay the launch?’ asked Behr. ‘If you need more time to rearrange the numbers.’

‘No.’ Hagemann slapped the clipboard gently against Behr’s chest. ‘Tell them they are clear to go.’

‘You are coming back to the ignition area?’

‘I’ll stay and watch the launch from here,’ answered Hagemann. He was afraid that his subordinates would see the lack of confidence etched upon his face. Some days he could hide it better than others.

‘
Zu Befehl!
’ Behr clicked his heels. He walked back down the road. Just before the darkness swallowed him up, he stopped and turned, ‘Good luck, Herr General.’

‘What?’ asked Hagemann. ‘What did you say?’

‘I was wishing you good luck,’ said the voice out in the night.

‘Yes,’ Hagemann replied brusquely. ‘That’s something we all need.’

He felt a sudden pang of guilt that he had done so little to keep up the morale of his technicians; not even a bottle of brandy to fend off the cold as these men returned to their flimsy, hastily constructed barracks in the village of Karlshagen, on the southern end of the island. Their original accommodations, which boasted not only hot water but a first-class mess hall and even a cinema, had all been destroyed in a massive air raid back in August of 1943. Even though some parts of the sprawling research compound had been rebuilt, the bulk of it remained a heap of ruins, and Soviet advances had recently forced the evacuation of most of the remaining staff to the Harz mountains, far to the south.

At that moment, he heard the familiar hissing roar of the V-2’s ignition engine. He could almost feel the rocket rising off the launch pad, as if the great assembly of wiring and steel were a part of his own body. A second later, he caught sight of the poppy-red flame of the V-2’s exhaust as the rocket tore away through the night sky.

Almost immediately, the misty air swallowed it up.

Hagemann turned and set off towards the launch trailer, a specially built vehicle known as a Meillerwagen.

There was nothing to do now but wait for the report from the observation ship to confirm where the rocket had come down.

He could see the tiny suns of cigarettes as the launch crew moved about, dismantling the V-2’s aiming platform so that, by daylight, nothing would remain for Allied reconnaissance planes to photograph. Even the tell-tale disc of charred earth where the ignition flames had scorched the soil would have been carefully swept away by men with wooden rakes, as solemnly as Buddhist monks tending to the sand of a Zen garden.

As Hagemann approached them, he straightened his back and fixed a look of cheerful confidence upon his face. He knew that they would look to him for confirmation that all of their sacrifices had been worthwhile.

Far out in the freezing waters of the Baltic, a wooden-hulled trawler named the
Gullmaren
wallowed in a freshening breeze. Spring had been late in coming and, from time to time, stray clumps of ice bumped up against her hull, triggering loud curses from the helmsman.

Below deck in the ice room, where a boat’s cargo of fish was normally stored in large pens, the rest of the three-man crew had gathered around a large radio transmitter.

The radio had been bolted on to a table, to prevent it from sliding with the motion of the waves. In front of this radio sat an Enigma coding machine. It bore a vague resemblance to a typewriter except where the rolling-pin-shaped platen would have been there was instead a set of four metal rotors. Teeth notched into these rotors corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, and they could be placed in any order, allowing the sender and receiver to adjust the configuration of the messages. When typed into the machine, the message would then be scrambled by a series of electrical circuits so that each individual letter was separately encrypted. This system allowed for hundreds of thousands of mutations for every message sent.

Stooped over the radio, with a set of headphones pressed against his ear, was the radio man. Against the damp and cold, he wore a waist-length, black collarless leather jacket of the type normally worn by German U-boat engineers.

Beside him stood Oskar Hildebrand, captain of the
Gullmaren
, his body swaying slightly and unconsciously as the trawler wallowed in the swells.

But Hildebrand was no fisherman, even though he might have looked like one in his dirty white turtleneck sweater and black wool knitted cap.

In fact, Hildebrand held the rank of Kapitan-Leutnant in the German Navy, and for over a year he had served as liaison officer with V-2 Research Facility back on shore.

‘Anything?’ Hildebrand asked the radio man.

‘Nothing yet, Herr Ka-Leu.’ But almost as soon as the words had left his mouth, the radio man flinched, as if a slight electric current had passed through his body. At that same instant, miniature lights fitted into the Enigma’s keyboard began to flash. ‘They have launched,’ he said.

From that moment, Hildebrand knew that he had about six minutes before the V-2 reached the target area. His task then would be to note down the point of impact and radio the details back to General Hagemann.

Hildebrand had been in this role of observer for almost a year now, shuttling back and forth across the sea and watching very expensive pieces of machinery smash themselves to pieces as they plunged into the waters of the Baltic. Originally stationed on the coast of France and in command of an S-boat – a fast, low-profiled torpedo cruiser – Hildebrand had, at first, found this new assignment so insultingly beneath him that, even if he could have told people about it, he would have kept silent. It was small consolation that they had allowed him to keep his original radio operator, Obermaat Grimm, and also his helmsman, Steuermann Barth, who, after years of having almost 3,000 horsepower at his fingertips, thanks to the S-boat’s three Daimler-Benz motors, became despondent now that all he had to work with was the trawler’s clunky, temperamental diesel.

But in the coming months, as almost everyone they’d ever known in the Navy was removed from their original commission, reassigned as infantry and fed into the vast meat grinder of the Russian front, Hildebrand and his two-man crew had grown to appreciate the obscurity of their position.

Except for the fact that he had been ordered to fly the flag of neutral Sweden while carrying out his work, which meant that he would have undoubtedly been shot if Russian ships prowling these waters had ever stopped and boarded him, Hildebrand’s job was relatively safe.

The only thing Hildebrand really worried about was being hit by one of these falling monsters. The fact that these particular rockets did not contain explosive payloads was of little consolation to him, since the amount of metal and machinery contained within them, together with their terminal velocity, was more than enough to turn him, his boat and his crew into particles smaller than rain.

Although Hildebrand was no propulsion engineer, he had pieced together enough to understand that the reason for this incessant bombarding of the Baltic was all part of a search to improve the guidance system by which the V-2s were delivered to their target. From what he had seen with his own eyes, they still had a long way to go.

‘I’d better get up top side,’ announced Hildebrand. From a cabinet by the ladder, he removed a heavy pair of Zeiss Navy binoculars, with their characteristic yellow-green paint and black rubber bumpers around the lenses. They had been issued to him during his time as an S-boat commander, and if those binoculars could have trapped the memory of things Hildebrand had glimpsed through its lenses, the chalky cliffs of Dover would have glimmered into focus, and the sight of American tankers burning outside Portsmouth harbour, and of La Pallice, his base on the Brittany coast, as he returned from one of his missions, only to find that the port had been destroyed by Allied bombing.

They might have taken his S-boat from him, but Hildebrand was not going to part with those binoculars. Placing the leather cord around his neck, Hildebrand climbed up the ladder, opened the hatch and climbed out on deck.

The first breath of cold air was like pepper in his lungs.

Ice had crusted on the fishing net, which lay twined around a large metal drum balanced horizontally on a stand at the stern of the boat. Even this late in the year, the temperature often dropped below freezing. He went straight to the net and, with his gloved hand, punched at the ice until it began to come away in chunks. Such a build-up on the net was a sure sign, to any passing Russian gunboat, that their trawler was not actually doing any fishing.

The wheelhouse door opened and Barth stuck his head out. ‘Is that you, Herr Ka-Leu?’ he asked, using the colloquial abbreviation of Hildebrand’s rank.

‘Just cleaning the net,’ replied Hildebrand and, as he spoke, he noticed that their little Swedish flag, tied to a broomstick which jutted at an angle from the bow, had also been encased in ice. Hildebrand made his way over to the pole and shook the flag loose, so that its blue and yellow colours could be seen.

‘The Führer thanks you for your fastidiousness,’ remarked the helmsman.

‘And I have no doubt that he is equally grateful for your sarcasm,’ Hildebrand replied.

Barth glanced up at the sky. ‘When’s it due?’

‘Any minute now.’

The watchman nodded. ‘Cold tonight.’

‘Keep an eye out for pieces of ice.’

‘We’ve hit a lot of them this trip,’ agreed Barth. ‘If we stay out here much longer, one of those bastards is going to come right through our hull.’ Then he spat on the deck for good luck and shut the door behind him.

Alone now, Hildebrand searched among the stars for the flame of the V-2. Raising the powerful binoculars to his eyes, he stared up at the gibbous moon. The craters of the Ptolemaeus range, like the shell holes of a Great War battlefield, jumped into focus.

‘Ka-Leu!’ hissed Barth.

Hildebrand lowered the binoculars.

The helmsman was pointing at something off the port bow.

Hildebrand could see it now – a chevron of white water caused by the chisel-shaped bow of a small ship ploughing through the water. A moment later, Hildebrand made out the armoured turret-shaped wheelhouse of a Soviet patrol boat, of the type known as a ‘Moshka’. They were used primarily as submarine chasers and Hildebrand had seen a number of them during his time out here on the Baltic. He had heard stories of running gun battles between Moshkas and Finnish submarines that had been caught on the surface. Unable to dive without making themselves an easy target for the Moshka’s depth charges, the Finns had remained on the surface, exchanging machine gunfire with the Russian sailors until each vessel was so riddled with bullets that both often sank as a result. There were other stories, too, of transport ships crowded with German civilians and wounded soldiers, fleeing the unstoppable Soviet advance. Hoping to reach Denmark, parts of which were still in German hands, these overloaded ships were easy prey for the Moshkas. Thousands of women and children and wounded German soldiers had been lost. Maybe tens of thousands. Their numbers would never be known.

Immediately in front of Hildebrand lay a wooden chest normally used for storing coils of rope. It now contained two Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons, a dozen stick grenades and three Schmeisser sub-machine guns – enough to give the crew of the
Gullmaren
at least a fighting chance if the Russian sailors became too curious. But a fighting chance was all it gave them. The trawler carried no armaments. Its hull was already weak from salt rot and worms which had bored into the keel. Its old diesel engine stood absolutely no chance of outrunning even the slowest of Russian patrol boats. Hildebrand had always counted upon the notion that the greatest defence this trawler could offer them was, in fact, its utter defencelessness. That, and the blue and yellow Swedish flag, which, thanks to his fastidiousness, now fluttered on its broomstick pole.

With the toe of his boot, Hildebrand opened the lid of the wooden trunk and stared at the weaponry laid out in front of him. As mist began to settle on the black barrel of the Schmeisser and on the dull, sand-coloured tubing of the Panzerfaust, Hildebrand tried to calculate exactly how long it would take him to retrieve one of the grenades, unscrew the metal cap at the bottom of the stick, arm the weapon by tugging the porcelain ball attached to a piece of string located inside the hollow wooden shaft, then throw it, not at the Russians but down into the radio room, in order to destroy the Enigma machine before the Russians got their hands on it.

Grimm would be killed in the blast, of course, but the Russians would have shot him anyway when they found out who he was. None of them would survive. Of that, he was quite certain.

As the patrol boat drew near, Hildebrand heard the Russian helmsman back off on the throttle of his engine. Then came a sharp command, a metallic clunk and suddenly the trawler was bathed in the magnesium blast of a search light.

With his eyes forced almost shut by the glare, Hildebrand raised one hand and bellowed, ‘
Hur mår du?
’ – the only words of Swedish that he knew.

While the Moshka’s searchlight played along the length of the trawler, Hildebrand caught sight of a heavy machine-gun mounted on a stand at the bow. A Russian sailor stood behind it, leaning into the half-moon-shaped shoulder braces, ready to chop him to pieces with its 37mm ammunition.

In spite of the cold air, Hildebrand was now sweating profusely.

The Moshka was level with them now, still moving but with its engines powered down almost into neutral.

He could see the captain looking from the turret wheelhouse. The man wore a close-fitting fur cap and his meaty hands gripped the metal apron of the turret. He was not smiling.

Neither were the other crewmen, all of whom wore heavy canvas coats with thick fur collars and carried PPSh sub-machine guns with fifty-round magazines.

‘
Hur mår du!
’ Hildebrand shouted again, waving stupidly and all the while weaving like a drunkard as compensation for the movement of the deck beneath his feet.

The captain turned to the one of the fur-coated men standing next to him.

The man smiled.

The captain laughed. He raised one hand and swiped it through the air in greeting.

‘That’s it,’ Hildebrand muttered through the clenched teeth of his smile. ‘Keep moving, Bolshevik.’

The engine of the Moshka growled and the boat moved on, dematerialising into the salty mist.

Hildebrand tried to swallow, but his throat was so tight that all he could do was hold on to a cable and lean over the side in order to spit. As he moved, the binoculars swung out on their leather strap.

His heart practically stopped. He had forgotten completely about them.

He wondered how the Soviets could possibly have disregarded the sight of a pair of German Navy binoculars hanging around the neck of a Swedish trawler-man. The answer, it seemed clear to him, was that they hadn’t. He reached into the wooden trunk and removed a Panzerfaust. Never having fired one before, he wondered how accurate they were.

Hildebrand peered into the black, waiting for the Moshka to reappear out of the gloom and for the night air to be filled with the racing lights of tracer fire as the Russian guns tore his ship apart.

But the Moshka never reappeared.

He imagined the Russian captain, weeks or even years from now, waking from a dream in which he suddenly realised his mistake.

Once more Hildebrand broke into a smile, only this one was not conjured out of fear.

Just then, something flickered across the mottled white disc of the moon.

Immediately, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and glimpsed the fiery exhaust of the V-2, trailing a white line of condensation across the firmament. And something else, which he had never seen before. Between the chalky vapour trail and the blowtorch heat of the rocket, Hildebrand perceived a glittering light, as if the universe had inverted and he was not looking up but down into the depths of the sea and the V-2 was no longer a mass of arc-welded technology but a huge and elegant sea creature, followed by a retinue of tiny fish, illuminating its path with their silvery bodies.

‘Diamonds,’ whispered Hildebrand. And he was so transfixed by the great beauty of this moment that it was only when the V-2 had crossed directly above his head, at a height of about one kilometre, that Hildebrand realised it was not descending, as all of the other rockets had done. ‘Are you sure we’re in the target area?’ he barked at the helmsman.

The wheelhouse door opened and Hildebrand was forced to repeat himself.

‘Yes,’ answered Barth. ‘Why do you ask?’ But even before Hildebrand could reply, the helmsman noticed the V-2 as it passed over their heads.

‘Shouldn’t it be losing altitude by now?’ asked Barth.