The Enemy Within (29 page)

If you enjoyed
The Enemy Within
by Michael Dean, you might be interested in
Death Order
by Jan Needle, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Death Order
by Jan Needle

One

August
17, 1987

The Americans were in charge the day he died. That, at least, was something. It gave the British, on whose territory the prison lay, somebody to blame.

'What
a cock-up,' said the young man in grey slacks and a light cashmere sweater, as he sipped his beer. 'Only the Yanks could do it, couldn't they? They couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.'

His
companion, who was also dressed in civvies, nodded. He was examining the Praktica on the bar table in front of him. They were soldiers, anybody with a practised eye could tell. Their hair was short and neat, their shirt collars crisp.

'Aye,'
he agreed. 'Tony got a box of paper hankies from the cell. Souvenir. Daft prat, who does he think'll be impressed by that?'

'The
pictures should be good, though, if they come out. Have you got the hang of that thing yet?'

'I
dunno. It's only Eastern crap. I was in a bloody hurry, too. Yanks or no Yanks, if I'd been caught it would've been the chop.'

The
first soldier finished his beer. He looked at his watch, impatient.

'What
d'you reckon, though? Can we flog it, if it comes out? Let's try and find a place, get it developed. We'd better shift, mate. I'm due in barracks, half an hour.'

The
bar was filling, for the early evening rush. Outside, in Wilhelmstrasse, they saw another Land Rover go past, towards the prison. It was full of military police. It was not the first they'd seen, by any means. They eyed each other, nervously.

'Bleeding
Redcaps everywhere,' said the soldier with the camera. 'Why don't we forget it? Have another beer? The place is swarming.'

'You're
chicken.'

'OK.
What is it, anyway? A picture of a garden hut. If it comes out. Do you know how to flog things to a paper? Without being found out? Let's have another beer.'

The
man in cashmere capitulated.

'We
could take some pictures of the crowds outside, after,' he said. 'There's twats in Nazi tee-shirts there already, Tony said. They're mental, Krauts, there's no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all. They think he was a God, or something. Loony old bastard with dog's breath. Get us a schnapps as well, tight-arse.'

His
friend fished some notes from his back pocket.

'Yanks
are mad as well, though. They'll probably let them in, for souvenirs. They'll probably sell off bits of brick and barbed wire.'

Both
men became aware that people were listening to them, although they spoke in English. In West Berlin, of course, speaking English would hardly keep a conversation private. They decided to forget the drinks, move on. In any case, it was getting late. There was going to be a lot of shit flying about in the next few days, they guessed. They did not want too much of it to stick to them. As they walked along towards the prison gate-house they saw the crowds – not large yet, but growing – and they saw the queue of vehicles. 'Chaos,' said the soldier with the camera . 'Look at all those Redcaps. And the polizei. Look, there's a TV van. We've had it with the pictures, mate. We're miles too late. Hey, look – that prat's got a swastika!'

Indeed,
there was a small knot of youths in jeans and black leather, strutting up and down and shouting 'Heil'. There were several women weeping, older women, and a man in his forties was screaming something at the marchers, grabbing at their flag. In other parts of Germany, slogans had already been daubed on walls and monuments, and former SS men, white-haired and benign of feature, had sought to air their views on local TV stations and to the press. The crumbling red-brick pile, they thought, should be a monument. With its meat-hooks from which the Gestapo chose to hang their victims still intact, its sloping concrete floors to drain the blood away. The Russians, for different reasons, would have agreed.

But
inside Spandau Prison, on this summer evening, there had been little in the way of agreement for many hours. The senior officers from the controlling powers had shouted themselves hoarse, then allowed fresher throats and minds to carry on the infighting and the bitterness. Telephone messages, both scrambled and inclear, had buzzed to and from their capitals, where high officials had made decisions, then rescinded them, then begged for time to push the buck yet higher.

'We
cannot call it suicide,' bellowed a KGB colonel, his face flushed dangerously with rage. 'If it is suicide, we have failed! Since 1946 we have guarded this animal to prevent that thing, and now at ninety-three he kills himself! No!'

The
French representative, a tall lugubrious man, was calmer.

As
if it were a help, he muttered: 'Ten francs a minute, it has cost. Eight million a year. What is that in dollars? A ransom for a king.' The senior American present said: 'At least the Germans paid the bill.' He was exhausted, his voice low and scratchy. 'In any case,' he added, 'maybe it wasn't suicide. He ordered—'

A
thin-faced man three feet from him shot a glance that made him bite the sentence off. The prisoner had ordered things that morning: toilet rolls, notepaper, other items. But the thin-faced man was CIA. He had warned him to be circumspect.

The
British representative, who had shortly before been as angry as the Russian, found himself, strangely, on his side.

'You
are right,' he told him. 'Gentlemen, we must take account of what the colonel says. It is bad enough that he should have died so suddenly, although I fear it's typical of the bloody-mindedness he's always shown. But we can't let him be seen to have got one over on us. Martyrdom is possibly inevitable among certain sections of the German population, but they must not be allowed to couple it with preternatural cunning. It was not suicide. Not yet awhile.'

'Cunning
indeed,' said the Frenchman, drily. 'To hang oneself with an electric flex and yet not be a suicide.'

'We'd
better burn it,' said the grey-haired Englishman, ignoring the sarcasm. 'We'd better burn the hut, as well. We can't afford the souvenir-hunters to get their hands on anything.' He looked at the senior American, meaningfully. 'The flying boots and goggles disappeared some months ago. Unfortunate.'

'And
British soldiers were in the grounds this afternoon,' came the tart reply. 'Taking happy-snaps.'

The
Briton paled. The younger officer next to him reddened. 'True I'm afraid, sir. There was a gap before the military police got here from HQ, it took them half an hour. There'll be a search, though. Locker by locker, bed by bed if need be. We'll find anything that's been taken. Including photographs.'

'Another
thing,' said the Russian, still intensely irritated. 'The pathologist. I insist we have a joint autopsy. Physicians of all four nations.'

'Why?
What do you expect to find? Poison? You begin to sound like the prisoner himself. He complained for forty-six years that people were trying to poison him, and lived to ninety-three. The procedure is agreed. We're on British territory, for the purpose of post mortem. Stop splitting hairs.'

The
anger was surfacing once more. They had been through this several times, first in the hospital library, later in the prison, where the Soviets did not feel so threatened by the Western listening techniques. There had been too many of them, a shifting population of officers and officials, scuttling in and out of drably painted rooms. The underlying mood had slowly changed. Through excitement, to vague disquiet, to fury and frustration, to exhaustion. The British contingent, noticeably, had been bombarded with governmental signals. When the Special Investigation Branch had become involved, their role had become quickly decisive. Some things were unarguable. Procedure.

The
Russian said: 'Your pathologist is not even here. Where is he? How long must we wait?'

'He
has been located in Strasbourg. He will be flying shortly. Our top man.'

A
gleam entered the Frenchman's eyes. The boredom lifted momentarily.

'A
specialist.' He paused. 'In strange judgements, might one say?'

The
senior British officer looked at him as if he had crawled from underneath a stone.

'You
have the edge of me,' he lied. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

But
everybody else did. The younger Briton's colour heightened further. Dr Cameron, Professor of Forensic Medicine at London University and the Army's chief pathologist, had been involved in some bizarre cases, and had not always escaped with praise. A small smile lit the hangdog French face.

'The
Dingo Baby, was it not? That
pauvre
femme
convicted by a bloodstained scrap of cloth. And Mr Cameron.'

And
the rest, thought the red-faced major. Michael Calvey, Maxwell Confait, he had looked them up. One had to wonder sometimes, at the decisions of the Great and Good. But the American flapped his hand, impatiently.

'What
the hell? This time there's no mystery, is there? The old sonovabitch hanged himself, whichever way we cut it. It's not our job to get the details out, we just need consensus for a day or two. So far we've done not badly. The initial statement's issued. It can be worked over later - let the top brass make the top decisions, that's what they're paid to do. If a few thousand crazy Germans want to worship him, so be it. Who cares who signs the death certificate so long it's signed? Let's get out of here!'

'In
a week, ten days, it will be rubble,' said the grey-haired English officer. 'We're going to build a Naafi supermarket, the plans are writ in concrete. Some sort of shrine that will be! No,' he said, raising a hand to the Russian colonel. 'No arguments. We can argue afterwards. Statements can change if need be. In a case like this, there will be confusion. There always is. First we'll act, then we'll sort it out. It is our ultimate responsibility, gentlemen, and that is the British way.'

'Confusion?'
asked the laconic Frenchman.

'Decision,'
snapped the English officer.

The
Russian colonel muttered, in heavily accented French: 'Oui.
L'Albion
perfide
.
'

'I'm pooped,' said the American.

The chaos had started at about 3.30 that afternoon, and it was chaos unconfined. There were more than a hundred soldiers involved in the running of the crumbling structure that was Spandau Prison – British, French, American and Russian plus a staff of nationals from the 'interested nations'. There were Italians, Egyptians, two Poles, two Indians, a Ghanaian, a Greek, Tunisians – and all to minister to the needs of one solitary, frail, half-blind old man.

It
was a Tunisian, Abdallah Melaouhi, who had been closest to him for some months, and who had been looking after him that morning. Afterwards he was to claim that the prison log had been altered for that day, and that Prisoner Number Seven had been found dead or dying at 2.30 p.m., not an hour later. He would further claim that when he fought his way to the small garden hut having been held back by a British guard for forty minutes, there were two men in US Army coveralls already there, two men he did not recognize, as well as the American guard whose job it was to attend the old man constantly for fear of suicide attempts. The prisoner was on the floor, apparently lifeless, and the electric-light extension cable later said to have been used in the self-murder was plugged, as normal, into the wall. There were signs of a struggle, everything had been 'turned over', and he later discovered that the prison's emergency resuscitation unit had been destroyed. Shortly, the cable itself had disappeared, burnt by the British, and next day the garden hut was gone as well. So too was the US guard who had left the prisoner alone for a minute or two 'to take a telephone call' - flown back, on whose orders it was never disclosed, to the United States. Melaouhi, failing to evoke a serious response from the British, took his story to the West Berlin police, who immediately announced that they intended to investigate it as a possible murder case. The British response this time was prompt: the incident had taken place on their territory, and the West Berliners had no jurisdiction. The case was closed.

Whatever
time it started, the chaos soon became overwhelming.

The
American director, once informed, immediately ordered that the man be taken to the British military hospital, with no time for a police escort to be mustered. Although his face was blue, no one was prepared to name him dead, and as the stretcher-bearers rattled clumsily up the spiral staircase into the main cell block, as they raced along the echoing, empty building towards the gate, they pummelled inexpertly at his chest, breaking several ribs. In the ambulance, which had two miles to go and took seven minutes, a rubber tube was inserted down the patient's throat, missing the windpipe, and oxygen was pumped into his stomach, which was later found to be inflated hard, grotesque. Whether it was ninety minutes after Melaouhi saw him on the ground or thirty, the prisoner reached the hospital at precisely four o'clock, where a team of doctors had been alerted. The rubber tube was re-inserted correctly, drips were attached to wrist and ankle, heart massage continued, even life-saving methods of last resort perfected in Vietnam were used. At 4.10 Major Carabot, the duty doctor, gave the thumbs-down. They were dealing with a corpse.