These days, Gerhart was the closest thing Paul had to family. His father John Russell had deserted him in 1941; his mother Ilse and stepfather Matthias Gehrts had died in a car crash the previous year. His stepsisters were alive as far as he knew, but Paul hadn’t seen them since their evacuation two years ago, and the relationship had never been really close. He hadn’t spoken to his mother’s brother Thomas since their argument about his father almost three years ago.
‘Here he comes,’ Gerhart interjected. A mechanic was walking towards them, the machine-gun over his shoulder.
‘Is it fixed?’ Paul asked.
The mechanic shrugged. ‘Seems to be. I just a filed off a few micrometres. Give it a proper test in the woods – random gunfire this far behind the front makes people nervous.’
Paul hoisted the gun over his own shoulder. ‘Thanks.’
‘No problem.’
They walked back through Diedersdorf’s empty streets. The young recruits on broom duty had vanished, but a Waffen-SS staff car was sitting in the otherwise empty square, and the gruppenführer sitting in the back seat turned a surprisingly anxious pair of eyes in their direction.
‘He’s seen the future, and it’s not looking black,’ Gerhart joked.
The sweet-sucking youths had also moved on, and the road running north was empty. After about a kilometre they turned off into the trees, and followed the winding track to their position on the eastern edge of the wood. The unit’s two cruciform-mounted 88mm anti-tank guns were dug in twenty metres apart, covering the distant Seelow-Diedersdorf road, which curved toward and across their line of vision. The first few Soviet tanks to bypass Seelow would certainly pay for their temerity, but those coming up behind them… well, their fate would depend on whether or not Paul’s unit received another shipment of shells. They currently had nineteen, and two of those would be needed to destroy their own guns.
They’d been here for over two months, and the dug-out accommodation was as spacious as any Paul had known in his short military career, three steps leading down to a short tunnel, with a tiny command post on one side and a small room full of bunks on the other. The ceilings weren’t exactly thick, but they were well-buttressed, and even a direct hit should prove survivable. The half-tracks they needed to move the guns were parked a hundred metres away in the forest, and heavily camouflaged against a sighting from the air. They had fuel enough for sixty miles between them, which seemed unlikely to be enough. Then again, if no more shells were delivered, the guns would become effectively useless, and they could all ride back to Berlin in a single vehicle.
It had been a quiet day, Sergeant Utermann told them. The artillery barrage had been shorter than usual, and even less accurate – nothing had fallen within a hundred metres of their small clearing. There’d been no Soviet air raid, and three Messerschmitt 109s had appeared overhead, the first they’d seen for a week. Maybe things were looking up at last.
‘And maybe Marlene Dietrich came home,’ Gerhart added sarcastically, once they were out of earshot. Utermann was a decent man, but a bit of an idiot.
Out in the clearing Hannes and Neumaier were kicking the unit’s football to and fro. Hannes had found it in a Diedersdorf garden the previous week, and had hardly stopped playing with it since.
‘Shall we challenge them?’ Gerhart asked.
‘Okay,’ Paul agreed without much enthusiasm.
Greatcoats were found for posts, and two men from the other gun team cajoled into making it three-a-side. Paul had played a great deal as a child, and had loved watching his team Hertha. But the Hitlerjugend had turned the game into one more form of ‘struggle’, and he had always gone to the Plumpe stadium with his dad. A wave of anger accompanied that thought, and before he knew it he was almost breaking Neumaier’s ankle with a reckless tackle.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, offering the other boy his hand.
Neumaier gave him a look. ‘What happens to you on a football pitch?’
‘Sorry,’ Paul said again.
Neumaier shook his head and smiled.
The light was starting to fade, but they played on, engrossed in moving the football across the broken forest floor – until the Soviet planes swept over the trees. They were Tupolevs, although right until the last moment Paul was somehow expecting Sergeant Utermann’s Messerschmitt 109s. Like everyone else he dived for the ground, instinctively clawing at the earthen floor as fire and wood exploded above him. He felt a sharp pain in his left leg, but nothing more.
A single bomb, he thought. Turning his head he could see a wood splinter about ten centimetres long protruding from the back of his calf. Without really thinking, he reached back and yanked it out. His luck was in – there was no sudden gush of arterial blood.
Two large trees were in flames on the western edge of the clearing, where Gerhart had gone to collect the ball. Paul counted the figures getting to their feet, and knew that one was missing. He scrambled to his own and rushed across to where his friend should be.
He found Gerhart lying on his back, a shard of wood driven deep into his throat, a bib of blood spread across his chest. Sinking to his knees, Paul thought he caught a flicker in the other’s eyes, but they never moved again.
It seemed at first as if the DC-3 had landed in a forest clearing, but as the plane swung round John Russell caught sight of a long grey terminal building. The legend ‘Moscow Airport (Vnukovo)’ was emblazoned across the facade in enormous Cyrillic letters, beneath an even larger hammer and sickle.
He had expected the Khodynka airfield, which he had last seen in August 1939, decked out with swastikas for the welcoming of Ribbentrop and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He had never heard of Vnukovo, and hoped it was closer to the city centre than it looked.
A wooden stairway on wheels was rolled out to meet the plane. It looked like something left over from the siege of Troy, and creaked alarmingly as the passengers stepped gingerly down to the tarmac. The sun was still above the tree line, and much warmer than Russell had anticipated. He joined the straggling procession towards the terminal building, a concrete edifice with all the architectural interest of a British pillbox. The constructivists would be turning in their graves, he thought, and they wouldn’t be alone. As Russell had discovered in 1939, trips to Stalin’s Soviet Union were guaranteed to disappoint those like himself who had welcomed the original revolution.
He joined the end of the queue, thinking that on this occasion a sense of ideological let-down was the least of his worries. First and foremost was the question of whether the Soviets had forgiven him for refusing their offer of hospitality at the end of 1941. After his escape from Germany – an escape which German comrades under Soviet orders had died to make possible – Stalin’s representatives in Stockholm had done their best to persuade him that Moscow was an ideal place to sit out the war. They had even plucked his old contact Yevgeny Shchepkin out of the international ether in a vain attempt to talk him round.
He had explained to Shchepkin that he wasn’t ungrateful, but that America had to be his first port of call. His mother and employer were there, and when it came to raising a hue and cry on behalf of Europe’s Jews, the New York Times seemed a much better bet than Pravda.
What he hadn’t told Shchepkin was how little he trusted the Soviets. He couldn’t even work out why they were so keen to have him on board. Did they still see him and his rather unusual range of connections as a potential asset, to be kept in reserve for a relevant moment? Or did he know more about their networks and ways of operating that he was supposed to? If so, did they care? Would he receive the Order of Lenin or a one-way trip to the frozen north? It was impossible to tell. Dealing with Stalin’s regime was like the English game of Battleships which he and his son Paul had used to play – the only way you found out you were on the wrong square was by moving onto it, and having it blow up in your face.