Operation Afterlight, page 18
His eyes never leaving Stahl’s face, Durban opened his desk drawer and drew out two glasses. A moment’s hesitation, and he took a third, then reached for a bottle of whisky.
“I joined the SS in 1932. Nineteen years old. A foot soldier. When we took power, I cheered with my friends. I was a leader, the one who shouted the loudest, who pushed the boundaries even when my fellow SS hesitated. Not because I thought I would gain from it, but because I believed it. Others saw, and they approved. I rose quickly. I was a street thug, but I was cunning. First, they transferred me to the SD. Counterintelligence. Then they made me an officer in time to lead men into Austria for the Anschluss.” He sighed. “The day cancer took my father, three weeks before my unit marched into Poland, his last words were Heil Hitler, and I am proud of you, Jan.”
Wordlessly, Durban rose and brought him a glass of whisky. Stahl gave only a nod of thanks, his mouth suddenly dry. The adoration in his father’s eyes, even as the light faded for the last time. Otto Stahl had not died an evil man. He had only wanted what was best for his family, which meant turning a blind eye even when the crimes became so clear that nothing could obscure them. When they even stopped trying to hide them.
Would his father have changed if he had lived long enough to know what Stahl knew, to learn the truth about Dachau and Auschwitz and the Einsatzgruppen?
He took a sip of the whisky. It burned on his lips, but he tasted nothing but ash.
“In the SS,” he croaked, “reputation is everything. Mine brought me to the attention of Heydrich, not long after the fall of Warsaw.”
Durban frowned. “Why do I know that name?”
“SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich,” Lane said. “SS-3, behind only Himmler and Hitler.”
Stahl nodded. “I could do two things better than anyone. I could find traitors, and I could kill them. Heydrich saw my potential right away. I killed my first man for him precisely five years ago.”
A vehicle drove past outside the office’s shuttered windows. For an instant, Stahl thought it was thunder, the same thunder that had rippled across the Berlin sky that night. Stahl had uncovered that a Nazi Party official had been passing internal party memos to the British SIS. The traitor was not senior, but the evidence against the man was weak and a trial would be embarrassing. Heydrich did not tolerate embarrassment. Stahl had stalked his prey on the walk from his office, following the man along the banks of the Spree, closing the gap. Two hundred metres from the Hauptbahnhof where the official’s train home awaited, Stahl saw his chance. No pedestrians, the rain and darkness blocking the view of the traffic from the Weidendammer Bridge.
It needed one blow, just one, the dagger sliding into the fleshy folds of the neck, sawing back and forth, opening the carotid. He held the choking man down with his knee while he stole his wallet, took the watch from the wrist while the hand pawed weakly at him. Then a quick shove to send the dying man into the river. Stahl had heard him thrash in the rain-lashed water, then nothing.
“It took me ten seconds,” he told Durban. “The Berlin police investigated, but within two days they decreed it a street robbery. After that, I was Heydrich’s favourite. I cannot tell you how many I killed for him.” It was his first lie since he had started his story. He could count every single one. “Not just traitors. Foreign agents, dissidents who had gone overseas to rally support against Germany, industrialists who had wealth and influence but did not show the proper respect to the SS. Some were in Germany, but not all. Three in London. One in Madrid. Two in Lisbon. Wherever Heydrich sent me. His word was law, but I never questioned an order. Not once. Until the day he sent me to spy on Canaris.”
Once again, the two listeners exchanged a look, and Stahl knew that the name Canaris meant something to them. They had been talking about him, he realised. He sniffed, irritated by their speculation. This was his story. They knew nothing of him. They knew nothing of Canaris.
“Heydrich hated how people referred to the Admiral as ‘Germany’s spymaster’.” Stahl could still remember Heydrich’s pouting, more dangerous than any other man’s rage. “He hated that the Abwehr led as the premier intelligence agency, instead of his SD. But Canaris had been his friend once. For all his willingness to humiliate the Abwehr, he was reluctant to believe me when I told him my suspicion that Canaris was working with the Allies against Hitler. He refused to sanction an assassination, fearing for his own career if his part became known. Instead, he had me transferred as a liaison officer to Abwehr HQ. My cover role was to lead joint SD-Abwehr investigations as a representative of the SD. My true task was to find the proof that would allow Heydrich to crush his rival. I began my new role in September 1941. A few weeks later, Himmler promoted Heydrich and sent him to Prague as Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, but he and I communicated secretly until the day SOE killed him.”
Durban raised an eyebrow. “Sarah?”
“It wasn’t my operation.” The words were the first she had spoken since they had entered the office. From her face, she clearly would have preferred to remain silent.
“You seem upset,” Durban said. “If he was the number three in the SS, wasn’t this a major success?”
Tight-lipped, looking straight ahead, she sipped her whisky.
“Miss Lane does not celebrate,” Stahl said, “because after SOE’s people killed Heydrich, his people killed over a thousand Czechs in reprisals. Even after death, Heydrich remained a murderer.”
“And you worked for him,” Lane snapped.
“I did.” Exhaustion washed over Stahl. At last, he felt the desire to sit down, and wished there was a third chair. His legs felt weak. Hollow, like the muscles had wasted from within. He pressed himself further back, hoping the wall could support the unnatural weight that hung suspended over his entire body. “For a year, I tried to find the evidence against Canaris. He gave away nothing. The second year, he shared things with me, but not the evidence I needed. I read accounts of the concentration camps, the exterminations in the East, the corruption at the heart of the Nazi Party itself. Canaris forced nothing on me; he just left the information where I could find it. I followed his trail of breadcrumbs, and it led me to the truth.”
His words died on his lips. The room shuddered and spun. He screwed his eyes shut and let the nausea wash over him, let it fade before opening his eyes and motioning the concerned Durban back to his seat.
“We can do this tomorrow,” Durban said. “If you need to rest—”
“I need to talk. Please, sit. And listen.” He knew he was speaking quicker now. It wasn’t conscious. The words themselves wanted to be heard. “The day I read of the Wannsee Conference was the day my belief in Hitler died. Heydrich chaired it himself. Educated men, family men who knew the law and the Bible and philosophy, calmly discussing how to exterminate an entire race. This wasn’t about the safety of the German people or raising the nation to glory after the darkness of the Weimar years. We had become the darkness. Canaris saw the change in me before I did. I was no longer the SD’s man spying on Canaris. I was the Admiral’s man in the SD.”
Durban whistled. “When was this?”
“It took some time to know for sure. But by early 1943, we both knew it.”
“You lie to yourself.” Lane stood, the blood rushing to her cheeks. “You hunted my people long after that. Hunted me. You would have killed me, the way you killed them.”
“You are right, Miss Lane. About almost everything. Why do you think I continued to kill your people, even after Canaris turned me against the Nazis?”
“Because you’re a psychopath.”
“No. Never that. I took pride in a job well done, but never pleasure. Answer me this. Would not the correct move have been to capture your agents? Question them? Find out what they knew, even turn them against you to capture more? Play SOE the way Josef Kieffer did ‘F’ Section in France? Yet, I didn’t. I shot them. A single bullet in the head. Why?”
“Because Canaris knew their names.” Durban looked sick. “He knew which agents were blown.”
“Genau,” Stahl shouted, stabbing his finger at the Wing Commander, watching how they both blinked in surprise at his sudden flaring anger. “Precisely.” He forced his voice back under control. “Every time an SOE or SIS agent gave themselves away or was betrayed, Canaris found out. I was not the only one he had brought to his cause. He had contacts in the SS, the Gestapo, even the French police. As soon as suspicion descended on a British agent, or worse still one of his own, Canaris sent for me. Gave me everything I needed to make it seem like I had exposed them, and to get to them first. Once I did, I finished them. Cleanly.”
“You murdered them,” Lane said. “Captured, they still had a chance. They could have lived.”
Stahl chuckled, forcing every ounce of his scorn and mockery into the sound, not caring that it wasn’t aimed at her at all. “Now who is lying to themselves? Let me tell you what we both know. Sometimes I was too late, and the Nazis had already captured them. A few lucky ones escaped, or died trying to. The rest they took, tortured, and sent to the extermination camps. Most are already dead. Less than one in ten will survive the war. Some died knowing that, in their agonies, they had betrayed others to the same fate. I did not allow that. I pulled the trigger that set them free, and I gave my soul so that theirs might rest.”
“How poetic,” Lane sneered. “And now you’re here.”
“And now I’m here. Because Canaris gave me one last mission. He might be dead already. I hope to one day see his face again, but I know I shall not. His parting task for me was not to arrange his rescue, or even to grant him the clean death the Nazis will surely not. It was to destroy Götterdämmerung before I take my place in Hell.”
His legs finally gave way beneath him, and he slid down to the floor until he sat on the carpet with the half-finished whisky in his hand, forgotten.
“I think,” Durban said weakly, “that’s enough for tonight.” He stood, taking Lane’s empty glass from her. She didn’t seem to notice. Stahl felt her eyes locked on him the whole time. Durban ran his hand through his hair as he stood in the centre of the room, looking at the desk, then the carpet, then Stahl’s slumped form. Finally, with a sigh, he walked over and reached for the glass in Stahl’s hand.
“Wait,” Stahl said. He had told them nearly everything, but this last one, he wished he could keep to himself. Not because it would upset them, but because saying it out loud meant accepting it as real. He snatched his glass back from Durban’s outstretched fingers and downed the contents in a single hit.
“I said my family was proud of me. Mostly, they were. One was not. My sister. As children, we were close. Inseparable. It took the Nazis to drive us apart. I know she tried. Tried to fool herself that Hitler was a good man, that the things the Nazis did were justified, the same way we fooled ourselves. She couldn’t do it. Three months after my father died, she left. No note. Nothing. All I had left was this.”
He opened his wallet, passed the photograph inside to Durban.
“She’s very beautiful,” Durban said.
“Of course, for a man like me, finding her was easy. I located her when she moved north, kept track of her when she met her husband, when they had their two wonderful girls. My nieces. I never had the courage to knock on her door, but part of me always hoped that I would get to meet them all one day when the war ended. That I could explain everything. Once I even went to the charming little house where she lived and watched her play with the girls in the local park. But they didn’t see me.”
He raised the glass to his lips, found it empty, and let it fall from his fingers.
“That house was in Hildesheim.” The words echoed in his ears, the cold metal rattle of steel and finality. “That is the price paid to stop Götterdämmerung. Now, there is only one last bill to settle.” The words faded to nothing on his lips, and he let his eyes close and his head fall back.
Silence descended, cold and complete, broken only by the clatter of Lane’s footsteps and the slam of the door in her wake.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Above Germany, 30 March
A strange thing, the moon.
Waxing gibbous, only two days from its full light, it was both ally and enemy. The glow, powerful enough to cast faint shadows from the Mosquito’s wings onto patches of cirrus cloud, aided both navigation and targeting, though Durban knew from bitter experience that nothing could make either task easy.
He scanned the sky behind them for what seemed the thousandth time, his neck aching from the effort of constantly twisting in his seat. Certainly, the moon brought a serene beauty to the night sky and a near-magical sheen to the darkened fields and towns of northern Germany twenty-six thousand feet beneath their wings. And yet he would trade it for a dark night in an instant. Difficult enough already to avoid the radars of the Luftwaffe’s night fighters, without giving them the extra help of a silhouette or a shimmer of reflected light on canopy or props.
At least it would help them pick out the barracks, and the six Dorniers in their protective revetments.
“Sir?”
Grant looked at him, and Durban realised he must have spoken aloud. “Nothing. Keep doing your checks.”
Another bad sign. He was distracted. Poetic musings on the beauty of the night and mumbled vagaries about the target, when his focus needed to be solely on getting them there. They had been lucky so far. No flak. No sign of night fighters either, possibly because the forty-three Mosquitoes hitting Berlin as a diversion had drawn the defenders further east, or because at their height and speed the Luftwaffe pilots knew better than to waste their time. Even now, with the new jet fighters making their presence known, an undamaged Mosquito at altitude was almost impervious to German defences.
That, of course, would change when they descended for their attack on the airfield. Focus would be even more important then. Still, at least for the first time in days, he wasn’t thinking about Sarah Lane.
“Time to target?”
“Four minutes,” Grant said. Confident. Secure in his ability and his understanding of the map spread out on his thigh in the moonlight. Durban gave him a nod of approval, but the young man didn’t see it, his gaze already returning to the gloom behind them. The moment he’d read his training report, Durban had believed that Grant had the talent; now, it seemed, the navigator believed it too.
“They are still with us,” Grant added.
“I should bloody hope so.” He hadn’t been able to see them all, of course. Even the brightest moon couldn’t hope to extend visibility that far. With every check, though, he caught comforting glimpses of the shapes of other Mosquitoes, their sleek contours sometimes tarnished by unfamiliar dark shapes. Half, including Durban’s own aircraft, carried the RP-3 rockets. Three-inch in diameter, four under each wing, each with a sixty-pound explosive warhead. The rest carried a mixture of bombs and napalm. As he’d signalled to Sarah, he wanted options for every eventuality.
That’s enough, he told himself. She had done her job. Three times she had contacted the squadron since the night she stormed out of his office, leaving the broken Stahl sitting on his carpet. Three signals, in writing, each dispassionate. Business-like. The way it should be.
Her last message gave the order to attack. Nothing more said.
Nothing more needed.
“One minute,” Grant intoned.
Durban moved his gloved thumb and rested it on the R/T transmit switch. The strict radio silence observed so far meant he had heard no voice in his ears since taking off, save his own and Grant’s occasional updates on the intercom. Nothing but the steady drone of the Merlin engines and the whisper of thin air passing by the cockpit.
“Thirty seconds.”
He pressed the switch. “Bolo,” he said, the prearranged codeword, just once. Then he rolled the Mosquito into a fast, spiralling dive, knowing that above and behind, the others would follow.
The profile had been Grant’s idea. The sudden change in altitude would make it difficult for the network of German air defence radars and fighter control stations to keep a good track of them, if the defences had tracked them at all. Either way, the defenders would expect them to continue to Berlin or dogleg right to Erfurt, the second diversionary target. They wouldn’t have planned for the possibility of a full squadron night attack on an obscure airfield in Northern Saxony that the Mosquitoes had already bypassed.
That was the theory, anyway.
Twenty-thousand feet. Durban felt the vibrations of the airframe through the controls, the Mosquito signalling its displeasure. Grant shot him a questioning look. Keeping one hand on the control column, he eased back slightly on the throttle with the other. “Don’t want those rockets ripped off our wings, do we?”
“Best not, sir.”
Fifteen-thousand feet. A Mosquito passed across the face of the moon, stark black against the glowing radiance. A ready victim for anyone who was looking up. If they could catch it.
Ten thousand.
“Cloud over the target,” Grant said.
“I see it. Bugger.”
For three hundred miles, the cloud had been scattered or absent. Now, looking west as they continued their rapid descent, Durban saw a smudge at ten miles, lingering over Uelzen at three thousand feet. Any relief that they would not be silhouetted against the moon lasted less than a second. Without the moonlight, the camouflaged blobs of the target revetments would be horribly difficult to spot, especially from a Mosquito flying at nearly four-hundred miles an hour only a few hundred feet from the ground.
There was a plan for dealing with cloud. He just didn’t much care for it.
“Shall I open the bomb doors?” From Grant’s tone, he wasn’t best pleased either.
“No sense waiting, I suppose.” He levelled out at a thousand feet. The others would keep going lower, but they wouldn’t attack until he had paved the way. Ahead, the looming cloud bank seemed to cast a wall of deeper darkness below it, right over the target. The expanse of the airfield just stood out from the surrounding trees, the flat ground bisected by the unnatural straight line formed by the runway.
