Operation Afterlight, page 24
The man grunted and stumbled back. Stahl spun and slammed the ridge of his hand into the stunned Müller’s windpipe, but the third guard was on him now. Grabbing his coat. Pushing him back against the wall. Stronger than he looked.
Wrenching at the man’s forearm with one hand, Stahl snaked the other free and reached for the guard’s face.
His nails raked the man’s cheek before he found the eye socket. He drove his thumb in behind the eyeball, feeling the wet warmth deep inside the skull. The guard squealed, his grip loosening. Stahl’s elbow cracked across his jaw, a glancing blow, sending him stumbling back into the choking Müller while his eyeball lolled half proud of the socket.
Stahl’s other hand closed on his pistol.
His finger hadn’t reached the trigger when he felt the blow, the sudden impact of something against his shoulder that pushed him back.
Schnellinger shouted something, his own pistol raised in his hand. Stahl’s ringing ears heard nothing but the fading roar of the gunshot. The words didn’t matter, anyway. Stahl shot the officer through the base of the throat before he could repeat them.
Next, the guard. Stahl’s bullet tore through the hand that was still trying clumsily to stuff the eye back in. Exited the back of the skull. Buried itself in the blood-flecked sandbagged wall.
Weber, his eyes wide, reached out a despairing hand. Stahl put two more rounds in his chest.
That left only Müller, on his knees, clutching his throat. Tears streamed down his reddened face.
Seven seconds to kill three men and cripple a fourth. Stahl grimaced. He was slowing with age.
He took a step forward. His legs gave, and he stumbled sideways into the wall. Pain shot through him, urgent and vicious. His overcoat was wet. Confused, he looked down at his left hand. It felt cold.
Across the upper sleeve and breast, a dark stain spread.
“Müller.” It took him two attempts to get the word out. “Do you want to live?”
The man nodded, still trying to draw breath.
“Good,” Stahl said. “That is good. You are the radioman, yes? Where is your radio?”
“Next room,” Müller gasped.
“Is anyone else in this bunker right now?”
A shake of the head.
“Thank you, Müller,” Stahl said, and pulled the trigger.
The echo faded, leaving the room silent but for Brahms and the steady dripping from the guard’s shattered cranium.
Stahl shuffled across the room, keeping his breathing even to stop the darkness that wanted to encroach on his vision. Schnellinger’s vacated chair looked comfortable and inviting, but Stahl knew that if he sat down now, he might not get up. Instead, he stayed standing. It did not take long to flick through the battalion file on the desk to the right page. 19 March. 1125 local. 4x truck Königsberg to loading area D3. 1345 local. 3x truck Königsberg to loading area D3. His fingertip added bloody emphasis to the end of the record.
“Lying bastard,” Stahl spat, and kicked the dead Schnellinger in the kidneys. The impact sent a fresh shock of pain down his left side. The room blurred, as if underwater.
Shock.
Breathe, he thought. Fast and shallow.
Wait for it to pass.
He left the music playing. More gunfire in the distance, and the low drone of aircraft. He felt a bass rumble through his bloody palm as he let the wall guide him back out of the room and down the fifty feet to where the dead Müller’s radio waited. It took him minutes to get there. Too long. Longer still to get the radio working and find the right frequency, one handed only, his left arm already numb and useless.
“Pesta to Huldra,” he said, and waited.
Nothing.
“Pesta calling Huldra, how do you read?”
Silence. Just a faint hissing of static.
He checked the radio settings. It should be right, but the words were already swimming in his head. Less than seventy-hours since he had left England. That didn’t seem possible. The bullet in his shoulder was real. The smell of blood in his nostrils? Real. Everything else? Fading. Unreliable memories. Not to be trusted.
“Pesta to Huldra.” More silence, both from the radio and within the empty halls of the bunker. Maybe the sounds of gunfire had gone unnoticed or lost in the din of the front line. Maybe not. Maybe others were already closing in to finish him.
He was going to die. The realisation didn’t surprise him. Deep down, he had known when he boarded the Hudson at Tempsford. Earlier. Back in the cell at Flossenbürg with Canaris. They had both known. The Admiral had gone first, that was all.
It didn’t matter. Only Götterdämmerung mattered.
He gripped the microphone again. Perhaps they could hear him in Stockholm, perhaps not, but someone was listening. They had to be.
“Pesta to Huldra. AFTERLIGHT. I say again, AFTERLIGHT…”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Norfolk, 13 April
She found him on the control tower balcony. He must have heard her approaching, met her footsteps with a slow turn of the head. No surprise, no change of expression. She couldn’t read his eyes.
“Barton said you’d be here,” Lane said. She shivered in the wind coming in off the North Sea. The day was still too young for the new sun to take the edge off the chill. “I brought you tea.” She passed him the mug, then cupped both her hands gratefully around the warmth of her own.
“Thank you.” He took it and went back to staring out over the airfield.
“What are we looking at?”
“Everything,” Durban said. “Nothing. I wasn’t sure I’d see you again.”
“The operation isn’t over yet.”
The control tower wasn’t very tall but still towered over the rest of the airfield. She counted thirteen Mosquitoes parked in their various states of maintenance. She knew Durban’s wasn’t among them. The Uelzen after-action reports had stated, in the emotionless tones of officialdom, that two had been struck off strength. Too badly damaged to salvage. Another moved to depot for repair work. Three wounded. No mention of courage, or terror, or pain.
She took up a position next to him, a few inches apart, resting her arms like his on the railing, feeling the cold metal through the sleeves of her uniform. “Have you seen Johnny?”
“He’s still in the hospital. Lucky, really.”
“Lucky? He almost died.”
“I meant me. Lucky, that I didn’t get him killed. We missed one, and instead of thinking it through, I went in like a damned trainee and got us shot to pieces.” His gaze remained fixed on something in the distance. Perhaps a Mosquito. Perhaps something that only he could see. “I messed it up, Sarah. Nearly blew the whole bloody show.”
“That’s not what it says on the report,” Lane said. “Textbook attack was the phrase used. Complete mission success. There is talk of another bar to your Distinguished Flying Cross.”
“They can keep it.”
“You know, Napoleon once said that a soldier will fight long and hard for a piece of coloured ribbon. Medals must mean something.”
“Napoleon never flew low-level ops.”
She laughed. The wind plucked at her hair. From the look of the Wing Commander’s own locks, he had been out here far too long. The handful of RAF air traffic and operations personnel behind the tower’s windows seemed much more comfortable. “Can we go somewhere a little less breezy?”
“I like it up here. I can think, without Bony or anyone else knocking on my office door. And we have three replacement kites due in; I want to get a look at them when they arrive. No word from Stahl?”
“Not since he jumped.”
He looked at her sharply, and she realised he knew nothing of Stahl’s mission. She turned away to hide the irritation that crossed her face, partly because once again she had told this man more than he needed to know, but more because she had to keep anything from him in the first place. She glanced at the window and doors behind her. Closed. No way they would hear her through the glass over the wind, but she still lowered her voice. “Stahl has returned to Germany to locate your final target. We’re monitoring every SS frequency we have, contacting every agent network left out there, listening for signs of Götterdämmerung. Nothing yet, but at least we haven’t heard of his arrest. He’ll find it.”
At last, Durban turned to look at her. He looked older, the last few weeks putting years on his face. She wondered if the same was true of hers. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she lied. “Why, have you got something better to believe in?”
“I don’t. Could you at least tell me what he’s looking for?”
“You know I can’t, Andy.”
“Yeah, I know.” There was bitterness in his voice, she noted. It had been there since he first saw her. She knew it had little to do with his level of security access, or her willingness to share it. “How long do you think Stahl has? To find the final target location?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “If he can track it down, and if he is still alive to get the message to us… well, I still can’t say. We don’t know what timescale the Nazis are working to. All we know is that they haven’t moved it yet.” Which was also a lie, though one based on hope. Yesterday’s imagery of Pillau, taken from a high-flying P-38 photo-reconnaissance aircraft, showed the U-78 still alongside at the port. The consensus at the Joint Intelligence Committee was that the SS scientists would release the weapon only when they were ready to board the submarine and evacuate. For all their fine talk of the nation going down fighting, she doubted many of them planned to go down with it. Especially not the men with the perverted science to create Götterdämmerung, and who knew better than any what it was capable of.
But she couldn’t know for sure that U-78 hadn’t left since then, and the next PR flight wasn’t scheduled for another four hours. If the docks showed empty, it would already be too late.
Durban sipped his tea. Grimaced. “It’s sweet.”
“Barton said that’s how you take it,” she protested.
“He knows it’s not, the vindictive sod. Still, it’s hot. That’s something. How are you coping, Sarah?”
“I’m…” The abrupt change of subject caught her off guard. She sipped her tea to give her time to think. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Leaving in the way I did. Not being in contact. Not checking on you after… after Uelzen.”
“You had your reasons, I’m sure.”
“I did. And you deserve to know them.”
Lane took a deep breath. She knew that some of her hair had escaped her bun. It flicked against her face in the wind, and she absently brushed it aside, only for it to return immediately. Durban was waiting, watching. His expression showed patience but couldn’t fully hide the curiosity in his eyes. Now that she’d promised to do so, she wished she hadn’t. In three years, Durban was the only person she’d felt able to share anything with, that she’d come close to opening up to.
“I told you once that I personally sent one hundred and thirteen agents into Occupied Europe. That’s true. Maybe I didn’t sign the orders myself, and someone else would have sent them on their way if not me. But they were still mine, you know?”
“You feel responsible.”
She nodded. “The men you’ve lost, under your command. Do you remember their names?”
“Most of them. The first time I lost someone, it nearly broke me. But I learned you need to move on. It’s war, Sarah. You can’t let it break you. The best way I can keep my men alive is by being strong. Being a leader.”
“But don’t you see, Andy? That’s the difference. You lead your men into combat. I sent mine, but I didn’t go with them. I stayed here, where it’s safe.”
“You did your job. You did it well.”
“Did I?” Her eyes were damp. Doubtless, the stiff breeze. Damn Andy for wanting to stay up here when his office was warm and comfortable. “Of those one hundred and thirteen agents, eighty-five were men. Some were former military, others new to the game. They came to me fully formed from SOE, trained and ready to go. I picked the exact task, but I didn’t pick them. I remember all their names, but I never knew them. The other twenty-eight were women, and I know all of them like they were my own sisters.”
“I didn’t know we sent so many women agents,” Durban said.
“You weren’t supposed to. No one was. Those were just the ones who went to Germany and Austria from my section. SOE sent far more to France. It caused a hell of a legal mess. You see, women can’t be combatants, even though we were sending them out with pistols and explosives. A man, if arrested, might be lucky enough to be treated as a soldier, kept as a POW with rights under the Geneva Convention. The women? Spies. A spy has no rights.”
She heard a noise in the distance. Aircraft engines. Over a distant treeline, she saw a Mosquito emerge from the early morning mist, heading their way. A spare arriving. The reason Durban was up here.
He didn’t even glance at it. He kept his eyes on hers.
“One month ago,” she said, “I thought I understood. I’d made mistakes. Who hasn’t? But I’d done my job, to the best of my ability. In war, people die. I didn’t kill them, and I knew who did.”
“Stahl.”
She nodded. “Just saying his name allowed me to absolve myself of so much of the blame. I told myself every night that their blood wasn’t on my hands, but his.” She rubbed at her eyes. She had risen early to drive to Norfolk, but she knew her exhaustion went much deeper than that. “And then the bastard ruins it. It wasn’t his fault at all.”
“He pulled the trigger, Sarah.”
“Out of mercy. The ones he killed were the lucky ones. He saved them. Not me. I didn’t do a damn thing to help them.”
“Now wait a minute,” Durban said. “What could you have done? Flown in yourself and been captured too? Fat lot of good that would have done for them. You once told me I wasn’t to blame for Clive Lampeter’s death, and maybe you’re right, but do you think he would rest any easier knowing I bought it as well? No. Clive Lampeter volunteered. He fought for what he believed in. We all do. Whatever it takes. We all know the war can claim us at any time, but that doesn’t mean we walk away from it. Your agents didn’t walk away either. Don’t cheapen their sacrifice by taking their choice from them.”
Anger flared in her, then faded as quickly. She wanted to yell that he didn’t know what it was like, what she was going through, but he knew. If anyone did, it was him. The difference was that he’d been able to bury Lampeter, or at least whatever was left of him. They denied her agents even that. She knew the fate of some. A bullet in the head, Stahl’s finger pulling the trigger. The rest were dead too, most likely, and she could only hope that they had died so quickly and painlessly. She wasn’t fool enough to believe it, though. She had read too many eyewitness accounts of what the Gestapo and the SS would do to the unfortunates they captured. If any were still alive, it was only because the Germans thought they still had information to share.
No, she thought, as the chilly wind pierced her uniform, it was probably too late to help them. But she could still find them.
He broke the silence first. Lane was grateful for that. “Do you want to know the real reason I’m up here, Sarah?”
She followed the direction of his pointed finger. “That farm?” It seemed pretty enough, though no more so than a dozen other farms she had passed on her drive here.
He nodded. “Matlock Farm,” he said. “The bane of my existence. You would think that after six years of war we’d all be pulling the same way, but not there. Every squadron commander who has ever served on this airfield knows them all too well. They cause us more problems than the Germans.”
“How?”
“Noise complaints,” he grimaced. “Our aircraft are too loud, apparently. Never mind that we are trying to fight a war. They are trying to sleep. A few weeks before I took over, the squadron had an aircraft come back badly damaged from a night raid and crash just short of the runway. The rescue crews hadn’t finished cutting the bodies out of the burned-up wreckage before the complaint arrived from Matlock Farm that the explosion had woken them up.”
She stared at the farm with a surge of contempt. The pretty buildings suddenly seemed less appealing. The unkempt surrounds and the wear and tear on the barn loomed large, casting a shadow over the whole. She muttered a Polish curse under her breath. It rang oddly in her ears, a word and a language left unfamiliar by years of disuse. “Can’t you just ignore them?”
“I can, and do,” Durban said. “But then they write to Group Headquarters, or to the parish, or to the local newspaper. Everyone is too polite to tell them what they should do with their letters, so they pass them on to me with an admonishment to take more care. Part of me wants to go over there and hurl curses in their faces, and sometimes when I am on final approach, I imagine my finger reaching for the trigger for my cannons and giving them something to really complain about. But what I truly want to do is even more shocking.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to buy the place.”
She cocked her head. “Why? So you can burn it down in front of them?”
“I want to live there.”
That took her by surprise. “I never really thought of you as the farming type, Andy.”
He laughed. “I said to live, not work, though the place definitely needs more work than I’d like. I can’t imagine raising cattle or harvesting, nor do I want to try. But there’s something about that farmhouse. I see it every time I land here. Somehow, it feels like… safety. Like coming home. I can’t imagine they will keep this airfield once the war is done. Once our Mosquitoes leave, Matlock Farm will go back to being quiet and isolated. That’s the place I want. Away from all of this. Away from the memories.”
“A place to be alone?”
“I didn’t say alone.” Again, his gaze pierced her with its intensity.
She swallowed. Stared back. Below them, the Mosquito cut its engines, the roar of its engines subsiding abruptly, leaving only the silent fields and the gentle rush of the breeze. “Andy, you know…”
