The Leader And The Damned Read online

  There were no street lights. The blackout was total. Even if a badly-drawn curtain had exposed a shaft of light from a window the mist would have masked it. He became aware of the squelch of his damp shoes, a gentle slushing sound. Then he realized that his own shoes were not in the least waterlogged. The sound was being made by another pair of shoes...'

  Behind him. Don't panic! Instinctively his hand touched his breast pocket under his raincoat. He shouldn't be carrying the papers he had brought away from the meeting. But he wanted to study them again in the quiet of his own office.

  He wished he had asked Tim Whelby, his assistant from Prae Wood, to join him for a drink. Whelby was proving to be a great asset. Quiet and attentive, he devoured a mountain of work. Often, while at Ryder Street, he stayed all hours at the office, going on long after everyone else had gone home...'

  Browne stopped suddenly and listened carefully. The slush of the faintly-heard footsteps behind him had stopped. It was his imagination. Bloody nerves! He was getting old and over-cautious. He stiffened his back and walked on. Where the hell was Piccadilly?

  The footsteps - treading his own deliberate pace - had resumed. He was certain of it now. Browne wished he was carrying the.38 revolver locked away in his desk. The devil of a lot of use the weapon was lying in a blasted drawer...'

  The shape like a leviathan loomed in the mist and - too late - he heard the slow chug of its engine. He walked into the side of the crawling double-decker bus, slammed his head into its bulk. His vision spun. He fell backwards, caught his foot on something upraised, regained his balance and reached forward with fumbling hands.

  There was blood on his forehead, he was certain. Nothing seemed where it should be. The thought that he was suffering from concussion flashed through his mind and then he was staggering. God! He had been walking straight across Piccadilly without realizing it! A hand from nowhere grasped his right arm firmly.

  'Are you all right? You just walked into a bus..'

  The voice expressed genuine concern, the voice of Tim Whelby.

  'Do you think I should be drinking?' Colonel Browne wondered aloud.

  'One brandy can do no harm,' Whelby replied in his gentle voice.

  They were sitting in a corner at The Red Lion, a pub just off Jermyn Street. Whelby had escorted his chief back to Ryder Street where the Colonel, despite the fact that he felt shaken up, had immediately locked the papers he was carrying in his safe. It was Whelby who had suggested they walked the short distance to the pub.

  Browne sipped at his brandy and looked round to check who else was present. It was an old-fashioned place, a solid polished bar counter, the barman at the far end polishing glasses out of earshot. An American soldier stood near the barman absorbed in conversation with a girl who looked like a high-class streetwalker.

  The smooth liquid warmed and soothed his rattled nerves. His head ached and was bruised where he had connected with the bus. Browne was trying to reach a difficult decision. By his side Whelby sensed this and kept quiet while he drank his Scotch. His presence was relaxing, Browne was thinking. They had chosen the right sort of chap for Prae Wood. Whelby was in charge of counter-espionage operations in Spain and Portugal. He drank rather a lot - but so did the others marooned out at St Albans.

  'I could have got myself killed back there,' Browne observed. His speech was slightly slurred. 'Something I'm carrying in my head - nothing written down anywhere - would have perished with me.

  'It will never happen again,' Whelby reassured him. He showed no interest in Browne's reference to a secret inside his head. `I'm going for a refill. Why don't you just stay with the one you've got..'

  Despite his headache, Browne's mind was still sharp. Any suspicion that Whelby was trying to get him drunk was dispelled by what had just been said. If anything, it reinforced his feeling of confidence in his assistant.

  'Cheers!' Whelby had returned with another large Scotch. 'Let me know when you want to go home.

  'I like it here. You can think without being disturbed by a call from Downing Street.'

  He sipped more brandy and felt even more well-disposed towards Whelby. A sound chap who could keep a secret and not blab it in some club all over London. Browne had seen enough of that. Careless Talk Costs Lives. He turned and looked straight at Whelby who returned the "appraisal with a diffident smile.

  'You should be with us for quite a while,' Browne ruminated.

  'Depends on how I handle the job..'

  'Depends on me. Getting your teeth into Jerry down there in Franco's backyard? Spent time in Spain before the war, I understand.'

  'Early days yet,' Whelby replied and left it at that.

  Browne finished off the brandy and sat up erect. He'd decided. 'A bad mistake that - not sharing Operation Eagle's Nest with anyone. He revolved his empty glass in slow circles.

  'We've sent a chap called Lindsay to meet the Fuhrer. Knew him before the war, Lindsay did.. He paused. No point in going into details as to how Lindsay had made his way inside the Third Reich. 'Point is we had to give Lindsay an escape route when he completed his mission. He has to get to Munich - the rendezvous point is that great ugly cathedral with twin onion domes..'

  'The Frauenkirche,' Whelby murmured, staring across the room. The American soldier was leaving with the girl.

  'You visited Germany?' Browne queried.

  Briefly,' Whelby replied and relapsed into silence, not looking at his companion.

  'The Frauenkirche it is. When were you in Germany?'

  Browne was more alert than at any moment since his near-fatal encounter with the bus. He was on the verge of probing Whelby's background. The latter sensed Browne's mood of revelation drifting away. He must say something.

  'I was a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. Keeping tabs on the Nazis, It's all on file...'

  'Quite so, quite so.' Browne felt he had overstepped the mark. Better get it off his chest - show Whelby he regarded him as one of his crowd. 'We have an agent, Paco - pretty silly code-name. The agent will rendezvous with Lindsay at 1100 hours - wait there for him every Monday. Get him over the border into Switzerland. Someone else should know in case I meet another bus!'

  Browne left it like that, ending with a joke which made Whelby smile again. Shortly afterwards they left the pub. Browne refused a helping hand even though he stumbled on the step leaving. Mentally he was relieved: Lindsay now had back-up. Physically he felt terrible. Splitting headache. All he wanted to do was to fall into bed.

  Four days later inside the Kremlin, Beria was again summoned to Stalin's office. The Generalissimo with the down-turned moustache, hooked nose and restless eyes handed to his NKVD chief the decoded signal addressed to Cossack from the Soviet Embassy in London.

  'As I always said, the British are putting out feelers to make a, separate peace with Hitler. This Wing Commander Ian Lindsay is Churchill's emissary.'

  'We could have him killed,' was Beria's immediate suggestion. For Beria this was the everyday solution whatever the problem - liquidate the person creating the problem. It tidied up tricky situations. Stalin shook his shaggy head and grinned maliciously.

  'Not yet! Am I the only man in the Soviet Union who looks more than one move ahead in the game? At the right moment I may hold Lindsay's mission over Churchill's head to blackmail him. And we have an alternative now. You note that signal details a possible escape route for Lindsay via Munich?'

  'So?' Beria encouraged his master.

  'Should the need arise we may arrange for the Germans to kill him for us!'

  Chapter Fourteen

  Karl Gruber of the Gestapo was short, plump, pallid - like a man who rarely enjoys fresh air, who spends most of his life cooped up inside offices. As he walked across the compound towards Bormann's quarters he wore the regulation belted leather raincoat, the soft hat pulled well down over his broad forehead.

  Behind a curtained window Bormann watched him coming without any enthusiasm. Anyone connected with Himmler was his enemy. And he
had taken an intense dislike to this new intruder from his personal appearance. Hands thrust inside his coat pockets, Gruber's lizard-like eyes swept over the compound, cataloguing data for his report.

  The location of the various buildings inside the cantonment was familiar - he had earlier studied and memorized a map of the layout of the place before leaving the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. Arriving at the door he was taken by surprise when it opened suddenly and Martin Bormann stood in the entrance.

  'Yes?' Bormann demanded.

  'Gestapo. Karl Gruber at your service.

  'Come inside! Shut the door behind you!'

  Bormann led the way into his office, walked behind his desk, sat down and indicated a hard-backed chair chosen for its extreme discomfort. Gruber sat down carefully, as though unsure whether it would bear his weight. His small eyes shifted to left and right, noting the furnishings as he produced a folder with a sheet of paper inside. A careful man, Gruber - careful to observe all the formalities in the holy of holies.

  'My identification, Reichsleiter,' he said in a hoarse voice. 'The separate document is my authority to check all aspects of security at the Wolf's Lair..'

  'I can read for myself,' Bormann interjected. 'You'll have to be careful not to get in the way...' He paused maliciously, holding back the information which would throw the Gestapo officer off balance - and Gruber walked into the trap.

  'I shall maintain a low profile,' Gruber assured him. 'I am, of course, here by order of the Fuhrer

  'God in Heaven, I know that! I myself despatched the command to Berlin which brought you here.' Bormann stared hard at Gruber who had completed his shifty examination of the room, an action which had not escaped its occupant. Bormann threw the papers back across the desk and launched his bombshell.

  'The Abwehr got here first. Major Hartmann has already spent some time checking the same problem

  -security...'

  'The Abwehr!'

  'That's what I said. Anything wrong with your hearing?'

  It gave Bormann satisfaction to watch the consternation on this fat pig's face, but that satisfaction was marred by his anxiety. Martin Bormann had found himself in an impossible position when the plane from Smolensk crashed. So far he had manoeuvred with a considerable degree of success. The problem was caused by what occurred before the Fuhrer boarded his plane for Russia.

  Intuitively Hitler had sensed the presence of a traitor inside the Wolf's Lair. What had eluded him was the source of this treason.

  'Bormann,' he had said at one o'clock in the middle of the night after ending a military conference, 'there is a Soviet spy who is operating behind my shoulder - I know he is there. We must launch a full-scale check on security at once.'

  'The perimeter defences should be strengthened?' Bormann had suggested. He got no further.

  'He is here all the time!' Hitler had thundered. 'He is one of us - some swine who is passing to the Red Army our fresh dispositions as I issue instructions! You do understand me! He must be found, this bloody swine - and strung up. No one is to be exempt from the investigation. No one!'

  'I understand,' had replied Bormann, who did not. He was swiftly enlightened.

  'Find the top Abwehr officer in the whole Reich. The one with the best record. Draft a document - which I shall sign - giving him full powers to locate the traitor. No one - no one - is to be immune from this investigation! If he wants to cross-examine Keitel he may!'

  Hitler had hammered his clenched fist on a table. Then he turned to look at his deputy, suddenly relaxing and smiling. Bormann responded quickly.

  'It shall be done, mein Fuhrer...'

  'And you, my dear Bormann, must allow yourself to be questioned if necessary. A show of favouritism could bring on you the dislike of the others..'

  'Understood!'

  'I have not finished!' Hitler's mood changed again. 'You will further request Berlin to send a top Gestapo officer to conduct his own investigation at the same time - and with the same total powers..

  The Abwehr and the Gestapo were sworn enemies. The two representatives from the different organizations would compete ferociously to be the first to identify any Soviet spy. It was a typical ploy of Hitler's to exploit rival organizations and individuals to gain results.

  As Bormann waited for Gruber's reaction to his insulting question he remembered his own dilemma when the plane from Smolensk exploded and the fate of the whole Nazi regime lay in Bormann's hands. Should he - among his other major decisions - send signals to Berlin cancelling the investigations?

  In the end he had done nothing. The last thing he wanted was any suspicion aroused in the capital that something was wrong at the Wolf's Lair. And the conspiratorial Bormann had realized it could be an advantage to throw the whole headquarters into turmoil. The investigators would provide the perfect distraction to prevent anyone studying the substitute Fuhrer too closely. A man worried about his own position has no time for independent thought.

  'I would have preferred,' Karl Gruber replied cautiously, 'to have known about the Abwehr before I came..'

  'You imagine the Fuhrer gives a damn about your preferences?' Bormann sneered. 'When you have completed your findings you report direct to me - not to Berlin. Now you may go!'

  Gruber received the order with relief. The heating was turned up high inside the but and he was sweating profusely. To show the necessary respect he had removed his hat but he was still sitting clad in his heavy leather overcoat. The belt felt tight round his ample stomach and he thought he could smell his sweat-soaked socks.

  Standing upright, he gave the Nazi salute, retrieved his hat and went out into the raw damp cold of the compound.

  'Herr Gruber, it is quite impossible to permit you to enter the precincts of the Signals Office. I have my instructions..'

  The SS officer barring Gruber's way was polite but firm. He was also tall and looked down on the short, bulky Gestapo official in a patronizing manner. Gruber's pale face coloured and he was in a state of cold fury.

  'I have my authority here. Stand aside before I have you put under arrest..

  'I have been informed by the highest authority of your powers,' the SS officer replied loftily. 'They do not include access to the Signals Office. As to your placing me under arrest, I fear it is the other way round. If you take one step more forward I shall be compelled to place you under arrest...'

  The SS officer glanced across the compound and Gruber swivelled to follow the direction of his gaze. The doorway to the but he had just left was open. Framed in the doorway stood the compact figure of Martin Bormann. Was it Gruber's imagination or could he see a bleak smile on the Reichsleiter's face?

  He walked away, full of rage. You report direct to me - not to Berlin. So Bormann had said - and so Bormann had acted to ensure Gruber was isolated inside the Wolf's Lair. Someone would pay for his humiliation.

  Mentally he went over the list of names compiled in his notebook before leaving Berlin - the list of personnel in this benighted swampland..Christa Lundt, secretary to. the Fuhrer. Yes, he would start

  there. He would give her hell...'

  'Ah, Karl Gruber. Welcome to the seats of the Mighty.'

  The Gestapo man swung round, his expression dark. Even though the ground was covered with crusted snow he had heard no one coming and that disturbed him. His temper was not improved when he saw who was addressing him.

  'Hartmann! And how long have you been creeping around here, may I ask?'

  'Long enough to give me a head start, Karl.' The Abwehr officer watched him as he stood and lit his pipe. 'You look unhappy. Won't they give you access to the teleprinter?'

  'There is something wrong here, don't you sense it?' suggested Gruber, switching tack, trying to draw out his opponent.

  'It's the mist which clings to the forest,' Hartmann responded amiably. 'Creates a depressing atmosphere and makes you imagine the end of the world is nigh..'

  'You think we are losing the war?' Gruber interjected cunningly. Just o
ne phrase - one defeatist- sounding phrase - from Hartmann and he would have him.

  'You said that - I didn't..'

  'Really, we two should cooperate, combine our forces - and share the credit when we have completed our mission.'

  Gruber was switching tack again, hoping to milk any information Hartmann might have obtained by his earlier arrival. Because he was the best - Hartmann. Gruber, no fool, was only too conscious of the calibre of this quiet, grey-eyed man.

  'I gather we have to work independently.' Hartmann sounded regretful. 'Bad luck with the signals people...'

  He turned on his heel and walked away. His final remark left Gruber in a storming rage - as it was intended to. A man in a fury commits tactical errors. With his hand on the canteen door, Hartmann glanced over his shoulder. The Gestapo officer was entering Fraulein Lundt's hut.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing...' God! You're hurting. Stop it..'

  Christa Lundt, clad in only a dressing gown open down the front, stared up at Gruber who was twisting her arm viciously. He had thrown her down on to the sofa after marching inside the but without knocking. She had been about to take a shower and had snapped at him the moment he entered.

  'Address your betters respectfully,' Gruber rasped as he gave her arm a further twist behind her back. 'You are the cow who attends all the Fuhrer's military conferences. Is that not so? Answer me!'

  'Yes,' she gasped. One moment life had been normal - now this fat slug with the shrewd, lecherous eyes was staring at the open gap in her gown. She felt humiliated. Her breasts heaved as she winced with pain and the small eyes continued gazing at them with deep interest.

  'So,' Gruber continued, still holding her helpless, 'what do you do with your notebook after you have typed out the signals and handed them in for encodement and transmission..?'