Fleming bent over the glasses again. Could it be that the enemy was developing a dual-role rocket fighter, one that could hit the Fortresses at twenty-five thousand feet, then swoop down over Allied lines and deliver ordnance at phenomenal speeds against tanks, command bunkers and bridges? Silently, without warning…
If he were an EAEU field officer like Bowman, perhaps he would have put it down to an abnormality on the print. But after several months of analysing reconnaissance shots in the Bunker, he’d learnt fast. He was sure it was a bomb, but that wasn’t enough.
He breathed in slowly and tried to think it through.
Staverton’s briefing notes had been specific. Immediately upon identification, Fleming was to send the coded message. The Old Man did not want any half-hearted crap. He had tagged the aircraft as the latest Messerschmitt rocket fighter, that would do for now. If it was a fighter-bomber, he would find out when he arrived at Rostock.
The mission left no room for uncertainty. Rostock was caught between the advancing Canadian First and British Second Armies and the Soviets’ Second Belorussian front, pressing westwards at an incredible pace. It was touch and go who would get to Rostock first. Current estimates put the Western Allies two days’ march away from the German test establishment. The Russians were probably three to four days, but they had been known to storm through fifty kilometres of enemy territory in twelve hours under Marshal Rokossovsky’s leadership.
If the Russians discovered that British paratroops had leapfrogged beyond their frontline troops to take Rostock, there would be one almighty diplomatic row. Churchill promised Staverton that he would try and hold off Stalin, but he could only stall for so long. It would therefore be up to Colonel Jewell’s paratroops to take Rostock, hold it for long enough to airlift the 163 out, and then retire with the help of the Royal Navy from Rostock’s Baltic shore.
Once the airfield was secured, Fleming’s hand-picked unit was to fly in, supervise the dismantling of the 163 and fly it out.
Fleming had the solution as he lifted his face off the stereoscopic pairs.
Bowman had been standing in the corner of the room watching intently for his reaction.
“I want this message sent to London straight away,” Fleming said, scribbling on a pad. “Transmit it in morse, twice. No encryption. That’ll tell Staverton we’re in business.”
Bowman hesitated. “You all right?”
Fleming did not answer at once. He hardly heard the question. He just wanted to sleep.
“Yes,” he replied at length. “Listen up, Bowman. I think that your ‘smudge’ is a bomb strapped to the wing of that thing. If I’m right, Staverton should know about it as soon as I’ve made a positive identification at Rostock. If the 163C does turn out to be dual-capable, I’ll see to it that you get word from the airfield. Then I want you to put a call through to the Bunker and tell Staverton. It’s important that you do it straight away.”
Bowman took the scrap of paper and ran through the rain to the communications hut, some fifty yards away.
“The star shines in the East.” The message was quite innocent, but there was one man in an office deep below the streets of Whitehall for whom it would have a special significance.
Long after the message had been sent to the Bunker, Fleming lay back in the deep armchair in Bowman’s office and tried to snatch some sleep. Everything was in place, but it was hard not to think about the things that could go wrong.
Staverton’s signal had come from London, acknowledging his identification, confirming that the mission was to go ahead. A second reconnaissance Mosquito had flown over Rostock an hour previously and checked that the 163 was still there. It had not moved from its position on the tarmac, although Fleming was quite ready for the Germans to wheel it into one of the hangars, out of the bitter temperatures that still hit the Baltic coastline in early spring.
Bowman had been busy during the past hour getting together a small team of engineers who could accompany Fleming to Rostock. Outside, Fleming could hear work continuing on the Halifax tugs and gliders, and the constant drone of engines as aircraft taxied to their dispersal points in readiness for the off signal that would be given in just over eight hours’ time. But it was not the sound which kept Fleming awake.
He was afraid of death, not because of the pain and suffering — he had already beaten those two enemies on the hospital bed — or through fear of what lay beyond. He did not want to die because he did not want to leave Penny behind with only a couple of lines on a letter to tell her that perhaps they did have a life together after all.
And all he could see was her running away from him, into the night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Siberians had been searching the forest floor for a clue for the past two hours, but had turned up nothing which could point them in the direction of the Waffen-SS terrorists.
Malenkoy had been sitting in the back of one of the trucks at the spot where he had been ambushed earlier that day waiting for news of progress over the radio. The last bulletin had been made by a young officer who sounded clearly jumpy at having to scour the dark wet forest for a tiny group of bandits who could be anywhere by now.
Malenkoy pulled back the canvas flap at the rear of the lorry and peered at the darkening sky. Normally they would have had a little more light at the end of the day, but the ever gathering rain clouds had precipitated the onset of dusk and he knew he had no choice but to summon back the Siberians and resume the search the next day. If the Germans decided to press on during the night the chances of picking them up tomorrow were even more remote, but what could he do? His men marching through the pitch-black wood with torches to light their path would present easy targets if the SS decided to turn and fight. They would have to be recalled. He only hoped that the Siberians weren’t baying for blood, for rumour had it that they could turn on their own officers when they were pulled off the scent.
Malenkoy flicked the power switch and gave the call sign which signalled a general return to base.
It was raining heavily, but the rivulets that ran down the officer’s neck, soaking his coarse grey shirt, did not bother him. The attention of SS-Obersturmführer Christian Herries of the Britische Freikorps was seized by the two maps spread out on the ground in front of him, but he couldn’t work out what the hell they meant.
Both charts showed the same topography to identical scales. Chrudim, in the south-east of the map, stood out as being the largest town, although it was closely followed by Branodz, some forty kilometres away to the west. The rest of the two and a half thousand kilometre area was covered by a forest which clung to the slopes of the broad range of hills that separated the two towns. Herries could see that they would reach their own lines quicker if they followed the network of valleys that criss-crossed the area, but he also knew that the valleys would contain the largest troop concentrations and thus they had to be avoided where possible. Their only real chance lay in sticking to the hills and moving under cover of the trees. It would be an unpopular route with his severely weakened men, but it would make them hard to find for Ivan.
It was the positions given for the Red Army that bothered him. They were different on each map, even though both charts showed the same date in their top right-hand corners, clearly indicating that they were both still current. But were they valid? What was confusing was the fact that one showed the huge concentrations of tanks and troops ringing Chrudim that he had just witnessed with his own eyes one hour before, while the other did not, having instead an almost identical armoured build-up depicted around Branodz. Herries would have dismissed it altogether had not the route back to his own lines depended on whether Branodz was heavily fortified or not. If the Red Army was there in the same strength as it was at Chrudim then he would have to give it a wide berth and that would add at least another day’s march to the trip. One thing was quite obvious whichever of the two maps told the truth: Ivan had close on half a million troops in the area and Herries wanted to be as far away as possible when the tanks rolled towards Germany.