‘So we wait?’ Hannes suggested.
‘Yes,’ Utermann decided. ‘Unless Ivan turns up in the meantime.’
Russell had a night of anxious dreams, and was relieved when a hand shook him roughly awake. It was still dark and cold outside, but by the time they had downed mugs of tea and chewed their way through hunks of bread and jam, light was seeping over the eastern horizon. A long walk across the tarmac brought them to their transport – a Soviet-built version of the American DC-3 which Varennikov told him was designated a Lisunov LI-2. It had space for thirty men, but the two pilots were their only fellow-travellers. Five minutes after clambering aboard they were airborne.
It was Russell’s first meeting with the fourth member of the insertion team. His first impression of Lieutenant Gusakovsky was favourable – the youngish Ukrainian accompanied his handshake with a pleasant smile and seemed less full of himself than Kazankin. He was tall, good-looking and seemed extremely fit. He had, Varennikov revealed, played centre-half for Dynamo Kiev before the war.
The Lisunov had rows of rectangular windows, and one of these offered Russell a panoramic view of Warsaw as they came into land just before noon. He had expected damage – the city had been bombed for a couple of weeks in 1939 – but nothing like this. As far as he knew, there had been no fighting inside the city, but the centre looked like a giant had danced all over it. A farewell gift from the Nazis, Russell could only assume. It didn’t bode well for Berlin.
The airfield, which lay several kilometres to the south, was awash with Soviet planes, personnel and flags. The one lone Polish emblem tagged to a long row of hammers and sickles might have been an accident, but looked more like an insult. A glimpse of the future, Russell thought.
Rain began falling as they walked across the grass, and was soon beating a heavy tattoo on the corrugated roof of the canteen. Nikoladze and the two soldiers disappeared in search of something or other, leaving Varennikov and Russell to pick at the dreadful food. Working on the assumption that Berlin’s current cuisine would be even less rewarding, Russell consumed as much as he could, sealing his achievement with a stinging glass of vodka. Varennikov had brought a book of mathematical puzzles to amuse himself, but Russell was reduced to reading the army newspaper Red Star. There were several stories of tragic heroism, a few slices of that cloying sentimentality which Russians seemed to share with Americans, and a bloodthirsty piece by Konstantin Simonov encouraging Red Army soldiers to take their revenge on the German people. Russell checked the newspaper’s date, thinking that it must have been printed before Stalin’s recent edict emphasising the need to distinguish between Nazis and Germans, but it was only a few days old. Simple inertia, he wondered, or something more sinister? Whichever it was, Berlin would pay the price.
They took off again in mid-afternoon, this time aboard a smaller two-engined plane which only had room for the four of them. It was a rough ride through clouds, with Poland’s mosaic of fields and woods only occasionally visible a few thousand feet below. Kazankin seemed worst-affected by the bumpy flight: he sat rigid in his seat, carefully controlling each breath, a study in mind over stomach.
It was getting dark when they bounced back to land on another makeshift airstrip. ‘Where are we?’ Russell asked Nikoladze, as they walked towards a single small building surrounded by large canvas tents.
‘Leszno,’ the Georgian told him. ‘You know where that is?’
‘Uh-huh.’ It had been the German town of Lissa until 1918, when it found itself a few kilometres inside the new Poland. They were about two hundred kilometres – an hour’s flight – from Berlin.
Nikoladze disappeared inside the building, leaving the rest of them outside. The clouds further west were breaking up, offering glimpses of a red setting sun, and a series of Soviet bombers were dropping down onto the distant runway. ‘Where have they been?’ Russell asked a passing airman.
The man’s initial reaction was dismissive, but then he noticed the NKVD uniforms. ‘Breslau, comrade’ he said curtly, and hurried off.
So ‘Fortress Breslau’ was still standing. It had been surrounded for two months now – a mini-Stalingrad on the Oder. A beautiful city, once upon a time.
Nikoladze emerged with the news that a tent had been reserved for the team. As they walked towards it, the landing lights on the distant runway winked out. The Luftwaffe was still out there, Russell deduced. He wasn’t looking forward to the next night’s flight.
In the tent they found a sackful of foreign worker uniforms, rough dark trousers and jackets with the blue and white Ost patch. ‘Find one that fits,’ Kazankin told him and Varennikov.
The uniforms obviously hadn’t been washed in living memory, but Russell supposed that a band of sweet-smelling foreign workers might be deemed suspicious. He found an outfit that seemed a reasonable fit, and didn’t actually stink. There was a torn square of paper in one pocket with a couple of strange-looking words scribbled across it. Finnish perhaps, or possibly Estonian. A fragment of a life.
‘Will we be carrying guns?’ he asked Kazankin.
‘You won’t,’ was the instant answer.
A few minutes later Nikoladze arrived with two pieces of bad news. The Germans on the Oder was putting up a stiffer resistance than expected, and Berlin by Lenin’s birthday was beginning to look a trifle optimistic. More germane to their own operation, there was no sign of the inflatable dinghy which Nikoladze had been promised. The plan, as Russell now discovered, involved a dropping zone a few kilometres west of Berlin, a long walk to the Havelsee, and a short voyage across that body of water. A further hike along the paths of the Grunewald would then bring them to the edge of the city’s south-western suburbs.
It seemed an ambitious programme for a single night.
Paul was woken by a tap on the head. He had fallen asleep with his back against a tree.
‘Ivan!’ Neumaier hissed in his ear.
Paul could hear the Soviet infantry crashing through the wood behind them. They couldn’t be more than a few hundred metres away. Scrambling to his feet, he followed Neumaier across the lane, swung himself over the gate and joined in the headlong flight. The moon was almost down now – another few hundred metres and the night might hide them.
The field was mercifully unploughed, its owner probably somewhere west of Berlin by now. Racing across the turf, Paul had a memory of one Jungvolk instructor urging him to run faster on a weekend exercise in the country. It must have been around the time of the Berlin Olympics, because the man had screamed: ‘this is not some fucking gold medal you’re running for – it’s your fucking life!’
He caught up with Utermann, who was always moaning that his right knee hadn’t been the same since Kursk. By this time they were over three hundred metres from the trees, and no bullets were flying past their ears. Glancing over his shoulder, Paul thought he caught a hint of movement in the wall of trees behind them.
They caught up with the others, who had gone to ground in a ditch between fields. Paul had no sooner sunk gratefully onto his front than two ‘Christmas trees’ rippled into life above them, the Soviet parachute flares scattering what looked like blazing stars across the night sky. The five men kept their heads down, pressed into the wet earth of the bank. All that talk about German soil, Paul thought. And here it is, stinking in my nostrils.
As the flares dimmed they cautiously raised their heads. A host of shadows was advancing towards them.
Once the lights had flickered out, they made their way across the stream and up into the adjoining field. As they began running an excited shout rose up – one of the Russians had seen them. A single rifle cracked, and Paul thought he heard the bullet pass by. A volley of shots followed, with no more effect. They were firing blind.