Bowman looked puzzled.
“Don’t ask me how he did it, but Staverton has somehow managed to convince the top brass that we need to get our hands on the 163C, if that’s what that thing is sitting on the tarmac in your photographs.”
“So it really is the 163C, eh,” Bowman said. “They finally got that beast into production. We’ve been hearing rumours out here, but no one actually believed the Germans could do it.”
“Maybe that’s moving a little fast,” Fleming interjected. “We’re not really sure, but Staverton’s told me to find out.”
Fleming tapped the papers as he placed them on the desk. “These are Staverton’s instructions in the event there is a rocket fighter at Rostock. We haven’t got much time, so let’s have those photographs from the recce Mosquito.”
Bowman produced a cardboard folder from a drawer and handed it and a set of stereoscopic glasses to Fleming who had settled into the chair at the desk. Before he pulled out the photographs, Fleming stared out over the cold German airfield.
“If this is a 163C, two hundred and fifty glider troops will take off at dawn tomorrow for Rostock. Their objective is to capture the airfield and hold it until I can get the rocket fighter out of there.”
HQ came back to Malenkoy with the reaction that he had been dreading. It was his maskirovka and if the security of that exercise was in jeopardy, it was his responsibility to find the insurgents.
It had not taken long for the garrison commander at Chrudim to muster three hundred Siberians from the 3rd Guards Army and send them down the Branodz road to the point where he had been ambushed by the SS terrorist. And if there was one, there had to be others.
It was over two hours after the attack took place that the convoy of trucks rounded the bend in the track and Malenkoy saw the smouldering tree that had taken the full force of the panzerfaust’s detonation.
Two hours! What was wrong with the Red Army these days?
The marauding German aircraft was undoubtedly on a reconnaissance mission and if the crew had seen his dummy tanks it did not matter, even if he had not quite put the finishing touches to them. After all, that was what the maskirovka was all about. But a Waffen-SS unit seeing it from the ground would not be so easily fooled.
The Germans had to believe that the Red Army, supported by hundreds of tanks, was massing to intercept the main Prague-Berlin highway. Hitler would divert his straggling troops from the defence of Berlin to meet the threat, but when they reached Chrudim, they would find nothing — save his cardboard army.
To their immediate north, the First Belorussian front under Zhukov would exploit Berlin’s new weakness and penetrate the capital’s eastern defences, cutting off any thrust towards Chrudim at the same time.
Meanwhile, Konev’s massive flanking movement which would be launched from Branodz against the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre would hit the Germans to the south of Berlin and then swing north, reaching the capital within a week if fortune chose to stay with them.
Malenkoy, in the truck at the head of the convoy, told the driver to halt. He jumped down from the cabin and walked alone along the last fifty yards of the track to the place of the ambush. The panic that he had felt only hours before welled up in him once more. He flashed a glance to the place where the madman had stood in the middle of the road, firing at will, while his driver struggled to heave the jeep round in a two-point turn. He now saw his attacker with a clarity that had been missing in the mind-numbing moments of the ambush. He was tall, huge in fact. He had a rifle held firmly into his shoulder and he had fired single rounds at them. Single rounds, while he cowered on the rear seat! Even when he had come up from the back of the GAZ and scattered half his pistol clip at the man, he had not moved. Malenkoy’s hand moved instinctively to his holster. The cold metal of the Tokarev jolted his senses back to reality and the spell was broken.
He stepped over the boundary line that separated the road from the forest. Even though he was now only ten metres into the wood, its size and darkness chilled him. Two fucking hours! If there was a rogue SS unit at large it could be anywhere by now.
He ran back to the rear of the lead truck and spoke to a lieutenant. The young officer in turn briefed his troops in the local Irkutsk dialect that was their first language. Not all of them could speak High Russian. It was all lost on Malenkoy, who could not understand a word of Siberian.
All the platoon commanders were given a similar message. Fan the troops out and try to find tracks. Anyone who picked up the scent was to radio through to Malenkoy immediately so the search could be concentrated. As long as they found the trail before sunset, Malenkoy was confident that they would have the SS by the following afternoon at the latest.
It was now four o’clock. That gave them two hours to find out the direction in which the SS were heading.
It took little more than a minute for Fleming to identify the blurred object in the middle of the photograph as the C Model 163.
The differences between the C and its predecessor, the fully operational 163B, were subtle, but the evidence was clear after Fleming had scrutinized the recce photograph under the stereoscopic glasses.
No wonder Bowman had been unable to establish a positive identification. The photograph was grainy and the actual image of the aircraft was smaller than his little fingernail, so you had to know exactly what to look for to differentiate between the two types.
But there it was. The streamlined fuselage between the two stubby wings set against the mottled surface of the airfield made the rocket fighter look like a hawkmoth clinging to the bark of a tree. The 163G did not have quite the same bulbous body as the standard 163B, but to the untrained eye, referring to grainy photos of minute scale, the aircraft would have appeared identical.
Fleming had one last look through the glass, before he was satisfied. One Me 163C at Rostock. It seemed a tiny thing for which to launch such a massive military operation.
Later, when he asked himself why he had not noticed it straight away, he put it down to fatigue. He knew, as he tilted his chair back and examined the pitted ceiling of the old Luftwaffe ops room, that the 163C was hiding something from him. There had been an unnatural kink in the leading edge. A dark shape, a shadow, somehow familiar, but unexpected on an aircraft of this capability.
His pulse quickened.
Fleming put his face back over the framework of the stereoscopic pairs and slipped a higher power lens into the base of the device. His fingertip, looking blimp-like under the magnification of the lenses, traced its way clumsily across the airfield until it hovered by the rocket-fighter.
Not a change in the shape of the wing profile, but something beneath the wing. He could see its shadow on the concrete. Its tip was just visible; not part of the leading edge, as he had first presumed, or a trick of the light.
A fucking bomb.
A fighter-bomber for the defence of the Alpine Redoubt, one that could hit back from the sanctuary of the mountains.
He reached for the phone on Bowman’s desk, but thought better of it.
“What is it?” Bowman asked.
Fleming looked into the face of the other man, aware that Bowman would know of his reputation and had seen his excitement.
“Take another look at the aircraft. Notice anything strange under the wing?”
Bowman peered into the optical device for a long time. Fleming knew he was desperate to find something. Eventually, Bowman sat up, his face devoid of expression.
“I can’t make anything of it. The leading edge has got a funny line to it, that’s all. Could be a smudge on the negative.”