He was inside now. He was trying not to look at the door to her room for he knew that it would only take a glance for it to open. But he had to see, he had to know what they were doing to her. He had to save her. The door swung on its hinges and he saw the soldiers on her, writhing over her, tearing at her clothes. He tried to turn away, to avoid her twisted face as the men in brown uniform went down on her again.
Then they finished, laughing at him as they pulled up their trousers and walked from that room. When they had gone he rushed to her, but the bed was a sea of flames and he couldn’t get near. She was still alive, calling to him, while all he could do was stand there and sob and cry out her name.
“Yulia!”
Boris Shaposhnikov, Hero of the Soviet Union, found himself wailing like a baby in the early hours of the dawn that was breaking over Moscow, calling out his wife’s name again and again. He felt weak and sick, as he always did after the dream had gripped him and thrown him around the bed like a rag doll.
And then his mind returned to the calm and ordered discipline for which it was known and admired by all those who saw him by day. Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff, friend and adviser to Josef Stalin himself. Shaposhnikov, the inscrutable, who had never been known to make a mistake in his life.
Except one.
But they would pay this time. It had taken twenty-five years for him to execute his revenge, but it was worth the wait. Archangel was almost complete. It was now only a matter of days.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kruze lay in the darkness, his eyes open, trying not to think of anything in particular, but his thoughts always returned to her. It bothered him that he could not shake her from his mind. His two days in London had been intoxicating — pulling the boy from the picture house, the rush of feeling for Penny. But now he was back at Farnborough, the EAEU, and the two worlds could not go together.
That she was still technically married to Fleming bothered him less than the fact that because of her he was now just like all the others. Unfaithful wives, families that had been evacuated to the far reaches of the countryside to escape the flying bombs. All the uncertainties, the problems of domestic life. The confusion and the fear that always returned after a pilot had had one too many beers in the mess.
His detachment from that world had so far kept all his faculties razor sharp. Until now he had lived on that edge, so fine between life and death, which kept him the best up there, invulnerable. And now Penny had entered his life and he loved her and cursed her for it at the same time.
He swung himself off the bed and groped his way to his trousers, slung casually over the back of the chair the night before. He walked over to the window, wiped the chilled condensation off the pane and stared out. The predawn mist still hung thick over the airfield and it looked the sort that wasn’t going to clear when daylight came. Part of him wished he had stayed away.
He shook his head, switched on the light and pulled on the rest of his clothes. He moved to the basin, ran the tap and splashed the freezing water onto his face. He felt old, much older than his twenty-nine years, but the features under the mop of fair hair that came back to him from the mirror were still brown from the years of working under the hot African sun. The eyes were still a deep, shining blue. There were lines on his forehead that he hadn’t previously noticed, but then perhaps he had not really cared before.
He pulled on his cap and strolled outside, glad to get away from the confines of his room. There was an air of expectancy about the station. He had been dimly aware of it when greeted by Mulvaney, the station commander, the previous evening. He was chirpier than usual, smug almost. It was infectious, the others had caught it. There was definitely something in the air.
The crackle of cutting equipment interrupted his thoughts. Even though there was some light, he still could not see the huge sheds for the mist. He knew that shifts of mechanics had been toiling through the night to try to unmask the secrets of aircraft that still patrolled the skies above the disintegrating Reich.
Kruze reached the great sliding doors of the hangar and found the small access hatch.
The brightness of the place almost blinded him. On his left, fitters scrambled over a four-engined Halifax bomber, making it ready for its next flight to test the new radar jamming equipment contained in the black box in the belly of the aircraft.
Next to the great bomber lay the Me 110 he had seen there a few days before, its crosses and swastikas in the process of being removed for a set of Royal Air Force roundels. Stencils were taped to the wings, the fin, the fuselage. The smell of oil-based paint and thinners was heavy. Two great heaters at each end of the hangar blasted out warm air, which remained trapped beneath the roof, despite the numerous cracks in the corrugated iron panelling.
Moving down the line, Kruze came to the Junkers he had flown against Fleming during his last dissimilar combat test. The memory brought a momentary crease to the furrows by his eyes. Then the feeling was gone, leaving only the professional interest in what was being done to the armed reconnaissance aeroplane.
The wing skin had been removed, the panels lying on the ground beside him, buckled in parts where the stress from his over-zealous aerobatics had acted on the airframe. Two aircraftmen shone torches over the main spar that ran the length of the wings, checking for signs of fatigue. Others stripped the Jumos down, laying the intricate pieces of the cylinders carefully into boxes, numbering them for easy reassembly. Unlike aircraft at other RAF stations, the aeroplanes with the EAEU at Farnborough did not come with manuals.
Kruze found Broyles at the far end of the hangar lying on his back under the jacked-up frame of the Fieseler 103 that Bowman’s team had discovered on a small satellite airfield in Denmark a few weeks before. The Chief swore as a nut slipped from his greasy thumb and forefinger. Kruze retrieved it from the floor and handed it back to him.
“Morning, Chief. You ever sleep?”
Broyles squinted against the glare of the arc lights. “Sleeping’s for pilots and officers, Mr Kruze. I’ve got to keep these bloody things in the air.”
Kruze laughed. “Cigarette?”
Broyles slid out from under the tiny wing of the Fi 103.
“Thank you, sir,” he said, wiping his hands on his boiler suit before pulling out a Lucky Strike from the proffered pack.
“Up a bit early yourself, aren’t you Mr Kruze?” Broyles’ oil-streaked watch told him it was a little before five o’clock.
“Couldn’t sleep, Chief. You know how it is.” Concerned that Broyles might ask him why, and suddenly bereft of any easy answer, Kruze looked down at the Fieseler.
Bowman’s outfit had been attached to a Canadian infantry regiment in the forefront of the drive into German-occupied Denmark. Of special interest to the EAEU was a satellite airfield at Grove where, according to resistance reports, a newly formed unit of KG 200 was being trained on a specially adapted, piloted version of the Fi 103, better known outside the Reich as the Vi doodlebug. What the EAEU found at Grove chilled them. The Germans were close to declaring the Fi 103 Reichenberg IV operational. Instead of fielding a flying bomb with an often unreliable guidance system against the Allies, the Nazis’ refined system would permit the destruction of high priority targets thanks to the specially trained pilot staying with the missile right to the end. Staverton wanted to know how it worked, down to the last nut and bolt.