Katastrophe, page 1
KATASTROPHE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Spoils of War
Finisterre
Aurore
Estocada
Raid 42
Last Flight to Stalingrad
Kyiv
Katastrophe
DI Joe Faraday Investigations
Turnstone
The Take
Angels Passing
Deadlight
Cut to Black
Blood and Honey
One Under
The Price of Darkness
No Lovelier Death
Beyond Reach
Borrowed Light
Happy Days
DS Jimmy Suttle Investigations
Western Approaches
Touching Distance
Sins of the Father
The Order of Things
Enora Andressen
Curtain Call
Sight Unseen
Off Script
Limelight
Intermission
Lights Down
FICTION
Rules of Engagement
Reaper
The Devil’s Breath
Thunder in the Blood
Sabbathman
The Perfect Soldier
Heaven’s Light
Nocturne
Permissible Limits
The Chop
The Ghosts of 2012
Strictly No Flowers
Acts of Separation
NON-FICTION
Lucky Break
Airshow
Estuary
Backstory
KATASTROPHE
GRAHAM HURLEY
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Graham Hurley, 2022
The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781838938369
ISBN (XTPB): 9781838938376
ISBN (E): 9781838938390
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
À Danielle
notre prof inestimable
‘The purpose of propaganda has never been to instil
convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any’
– Hannah Arendt
Contents
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the author
An Invitation from the Publisher
1
January 1945.
Just occasionally, one of the guards would arrive under cover of darkness with a tiny morsel of rotten venison, wrapped in newsprint. He was a Ukranian, Borys. He had a distinctive cough, a rasp deep in his throat, and if you had the ears for it you could hear him coming. Werner Nehmann had the ears for it, and also the luck to occupy one of the tier of wooden bunks nearest the door.
The cough. Then the dry squeak of snow beneath the approaching boots.
The Vory, the gangster zeks who ran the hut, were playing cards beside the stove and never lifted their heads. They didn’t have to. They knew that the offering was for them, settlement for yesterday’s use of the strangling towel on the hated ex-NKVD zek who’d complained about the tiny splinters of soap in the bathhouse once too often. Little Nehmann, the Georgian with the crooked smile, would play the postman, meet the guard at the door then bang it shut seconds later, keeping the icy wind at bay. Then would come the moment when he deposited the ten grammes of weeping venison carefully beside the fan of cards on the quilt the Vory used as a table. One or two of the faces would glance up, watching Nehmann as he stepped away. Not with a shaving or two of the meat, but with the soiled sheet of newsprint.
Next day, the paper dry, he’d return from the mine and stamp the life back into his sodden feet and hoist himself up to the top bunk where the freezing air was a degree or two warmer. He was still in his working clothes – cap, padded coat, pea jacket, felt trousers. He’d sleep like this, his hands thrust between his thighs, trying to conjure warmth from the icy darkness, but for now he listened to the chatter of the Vory while he used a carefully torn length of newsprint to roll himself a cigarette.
His fingers, swollen from hunger and hopelessly bent from a year and a half at the unforgiving end of a shovel, took a while to coax every last shred of tobacco into place, but then he lay back, the cigarette between his ruined fingers, enjoying the anticipation of the struck match, the tiny flower of flame and then the harsh bite of the makhorka tobacco. Not just that but also the taste of the printing ink from the news sheet.
Had he tried to make sense of the columns on this page of the paper? Of course he had. One of them listed the output of tractor parts from a factory in nearby Magadan. Another celebrated the performance of a Shostakovich symphony at the concert hall in distant Novosibirsk. Did he believe a word of either story? Nein. But that wasn’t the point. The point was the tang of printer’s ink on the very tip of his tongue.
Did he invent this taste? Was it just another of the fictions that had sustained him for most of his working life? And in any event, did it matter? Of course not. Anything, he thought. Anything to mask the sour camp breath of sweat and old clothing, of the thin kasha that was never warm enough, of jerking awake like an animal night after night, disturbed by the faintest noise, his hair already frozen to the roughness of the filled sacking that served as a pillow, his ear instantly tuned to the howl of a wolf beyond the treeline.
Everything happened very slowly in the Gulag, he told himself. But even last year’s news, the knowledge that something out there in the real world had happened and been recorded, kept him sane. First you invent a story. Then you see it into print. And then, if you’re very, very lucky, you get to smoke it.
One of the Vory, the oldest, had abandoned the card game for the brief comforts of his concubine. The Vory called him ‘Zoika’. He was young, no more than a boy. He had the body of a ghost and he occupied the bunk below Nehmann. He offered a range of talents and in spring, for some reason, his keeper celebrated the melt by auctioning shares in Zoika to anyone with enough tobacco. Now, in the depths of Nehmann’s second Siberian winter, there was no sharing and by the time the Vory had noisily finished and rejoined the card game, Nehmann’s cigarette was nothing more than a wet stub. He looked at it a moment, then let his hand dangle over the side of the bunk. Moments later, the stub had gone.
‘Guten Appetit,’ he murmured. The little waif would eat anything.
*
Nehmann’s war had come to an abrupt end in Stalingrad, almost exactly two years ago. With the city in ruins, and the Russians accepting the surrender of General Paulus’ Sixth Army, 91,000 German troops stumbled into captivity. One of them, taken prisoner in a church, was Werner Nehmann.
Technically, he wasn’t a soldier at all but a journalist, working for Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. This distinction was lost on the Soviet arresting officer who handed him over to an NKVD apparatchik, who took one look at Nehmann’s stolen greatcoat, and his Russian leather boots, and promptly assigned him to one of the work parties digging out foundations for a primitive war memorial.
This was to be raised on one of the cliffs overlooking the still-smoking deathscape that had once been Stalin’s city beside the Volga, and in this respect – as in so many others – Nehmann was lucky. He’d suffered no wounds. Neither had he succumbed to frostbite, or dysentery, or the multiple outbreaks of typhoid that had crept into dugout after dugout as the German advance stalled. On the contrary, thanks to his comrade in arms, a gruff Abwehr spy hunter called Wilhelm Schultz, he’d been generously fed and watered, a blessing that earned him murderous looks from the endless lines of ravenous prisoners he passed at dawn every morning as his work party, bent against the driving snow, struggled up the bluff towards the memorial site.
By the time the excavations were done, it was early spring. Nehmann’s last glimpse of Stalingrad was late in the afternoon of a cold, grey day. He stood briefly in the last of the daylight, the sweat cooling under his tunic, awaiting orders
The answer was no. Next morning, along with hundreds of other prisoners, the Kazakhs shipped him across the river, marched him to the railhead and threw him into a cattle wagon. For the next eight days, it was standing room only, the prisoners huddled together for warmth, pissing through gaps in the planked floor as more of the steppe rolled slowly past. The journalist in Nehmann wanted to find out about these broken bodies. He asked questions the way most men drew breath. His curiosity was instinctive, ungoverned, insatiable. Where had they come from? What did they make of the last three months? What next for the Führer’s all-conquering armies? But these whispered enquiries, however deftly he dressed them up, fell on deaf ears.
Once a day the train would stop. The door slid open and unseen hands tossed loaves of black bread into the stink of the cattle wagon. There was a bucket or two of water as well, but Nehmann had counted eighty-seven heads at the start of the journey and the food and water was never enough. Dawn on the third day revealed three corpses, all of them still standing, denied even the space to collapse. With rough impatience, a huge Sergeant from Saxony managed to force the door open. All three men were stripped of anything remotely useful – clothing, boots – and rolled onto the trackside. No one said a word, no muttered prayers of farewell, and not for the first time Nehmann understood the vast indifference of death. It went, he thought, with the landscape. These men had simply given up, surrendering to hunger, and disease, and the rank bitterness of defeat. Three naked corpses and the featureless steppe were a perfect fit.
Towards the end of the journey, Nehmann fell to thinking about Schultz. In so many respects, in the madness of Stalingrad, they’d been made for each other. With his tiny team, Schultz had commandeered parts of a bus station as Abwehr field headquarters. The building gave them shelter and a degree of warmth, and down in the basement he’d been happy to find room for Nehmann, newly arrived at the front.
Pre-war, in Berlin, the name Stalingrad had meant nothing, and it was here that the two men had first got to know each other: Schultz the fast-rising star from Army Intelligence, part street brawler, part poet; Nehmann, the little Georgian genius rumoured to have the ear of Joseph Goebbels. They shared an appetite for beer and schnapps in a certain kind of bar, for tradeable gossip from the bedrooms of the Nazi elite, for women with class, and appetite, and a sense of humour, for anything – in short – that punctured the strutting self-importance that went with ministerial office on the Wilhelmstrasse. Long before the war had got properly underway, they’d agreed that the Thousand Year Reich was one of God’s sillier jokes, destined for an early grave. Not that anything in peacetime Berlin had ever prepared them for this.
Schultz and Nehmann had been arrested together in a church on the eve of Paulus’ surrender. Outside, it was nearly dark. Both men were facing a line of heavily armed Soviet soldiers, and both expected to be shot. Instead, on a grunted order from the officer in charge, they were searched and then separated. Nehmann had a last glimpse of Schultz as he was pushed towards a waiting truck. The big Abwehr man shook off his escort and threw Nehmann a glance over his shoulder.
‘Tante Gerda,’ he growled. ‘First through the door buys the drinks.’
Tante Gerda was a bar in Moabit, much favoured by those few Berlin scribblers who still refused to take the Nazis seriously. For once, Nehmann struggled to reply and by the time he opened his mouth, Schultz had gone.
*
The journey from Stalingrad finally came to an end. Nehmann had been counting. Four days on his feet. Four days without a shit. Four days when his brain had slowly given up the battle to make sense of what was going on. More dead bodies. More sips of icy water from the circulating tin mug. More whispered rumours that so and so, the thin guy pinioned in one corner of the cattle truck, would be lucky to make it through.
The train juddered to a halt. Mother Russia, thought Nehmann, could stretch no further east. Beyond here, the train would surely topple off the edge of the known world and end up in the sea. Men outside were shouting. The wooden door was pushed open and the faces peering up recoiled at the pile of more naked bodies readied for disposal. Nehmann was a Georgian and his real name was Mikhail Magalashvili. He spoke Russian, understood the Cyrillic alphabet, but staring out at the trackside sign in the marshalling yard, he was none the wiser. Krasnoyarsk? Where on God’s earth was that?
It was the dead of night. Open trucks took them through the deserted city centre, the bald tyres whispering on the packed snow, the driver lurching left and right to avoid the bigger potholes, the prisoners still on their feet, every back turned to the bitter wind. Already, on the dig in Stalingrad, the Russians had taken to calling them ‘zeks’. Nehmann had heard the term before and knew what it meant. ‘Zeks’ were the cast-offs on whom the Revolution depended for the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Zeks’ dug canals, felled trees, tamed hostile stretches of the taiga, burrowed into the frozen earth in search of precious minerals. ‘Zeks’ fed the great industries evacuated east of the Urals, safely removed from the German onslaught. Another name for ‘zeks’ left nothing to the imagination. ‘Zeks’ were camp dust.
Nehmann still thought they were close to the ocean, but he was wrong. The journey went on for six more days. Every four hours the truck would stop. Bread would appear from nowhere, and huge buckets of a thin, cold, buckwheat gruel called kasha, and guards would gesture for the men to exercise, drive the cold from their bones, empty their bladders or their bowels in the frosted roadside tussock. This small improvement on the days and nights in the swaying cattle truck sparked brief exchanges of conversation, and on the last night Nehmann found himself beside a gaunt figure who must have been in his fifties. He had a Moscow accent, and the delicate gestures of someone used to a life indoors.
It was the middle of the night. The road had narrowed and now it wound upwards into the mountains. The endless pine trees were mantled with snow that feathered in the slipstream as the truck rumbled past. The sky was cloudless, brilliant with stars, and many of the men gazed upwards, their eyes moist in the icy wind. The old man beside Nehmann lifted a weary arm.
‘The Dipper,’ he murmured. ‘It’s in the wrong place.’
Nehmann followed his pointing finger. The man was right. The Big Dipper was the constellation of the Great Bear, Ursa Major. Nehmann had grown up in the Caucasus, and on nights like this, perfect visibility, his father’s thick finger would often trace the tell-tale outline from star to star. The Great Bear, he warned, was Russia. The Red Army had only recently crossed the mountains and pitched their tents in Tbilisi, their presence visible on every city street. The image of the Bear over Georgia had stayed with Nehmann ever since, an astral placard, proof that Communism had terrible consequences, but those stars had always been in the north, high over the mountains. Now, it was down near the horizon, no less impressive, no less portentous, but mysteriously rehomed. God again, he thought grimly. Capricious. Forgetful. Tidying the Dipper into a corner of the night sky where it didn’t belong.
*
That first year, 1943, was Nehmann’s first taste of the region they called Kolyma. His first camp lacked even a name, and his first hut, like all the huts that followed, had been thrown up in a hurry. Every plank in the four walls had made an enemy of its neighbour. There were gaps everywhere, a nightly invitation for winter to make itself at home among bodies desperate for sleep. Warmth from the single stove never reached beyond the nearest tiers of bunks, and in any case the wood had always run out by mid-evening.
Curled up in the aching cold in his bunk, Nehmann would sometimes open one eye and watch a fellow zek creep across the rough wooden floor and settle a stolen potato in the embers of the stove. The mouldy pebble of starch would offer a couple of barely cooked mouthfuls at the very most, but the zek would stay beside the stove for hours, standing guard, his gaze fixed on the tiny mound of cooling ash. Occasionally, when the guard arrived before dawn to bang his hammer on the hanging rail to ready the hut for another day’s work, the zek would still be there, his patience a testament to hunger and perhaps optimism. Even then, Nehmann knew that the harsh metallic clang of the hammer, steel on steel, would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was implacable. It brooked no argument. In the muddle of lightly fevered dreams that served as sleep, it elbowed everything else aside.
