‘This plane is flying to Russia?’ Carter asked in amazement.
‘Not quite that far, my friend, but close enough that you might hear their balalaika music.’
A man jumped down from the cargo door, a clipboard hugged against his chest. He was one of the pilots and wore an olive green gabardine flight suit, the cuffs tucked into a pair of black sheepskin-lined flight boots. ‘We have a small problem, Mr Dasch,’ he said.
‘What problem?’ asked Dasch.
‘As you know, sir,’ explained the pilot, ‘since there appears to be no provision for refuelling once we land, we are carrying our own gasoline for the return journey. This has taken up a significant portion of our cargo space but, more importantly, it has also limited the weight of cargo we can carry. According to my calculations’◦– he held out the clipboard◦– ‘if we try to load every case on board, we will be dangerously over our weight limit for the kind of flying we are going to have to do. If we unloaded some of the crates—’
‘No! You’ll already be one short!’ Dasch pointed to the corner of the hangar, where the crumpled box was still leaking whisky. ‘You could unload some of the fuel.’
For a moment, the pilot’s face froze. ‘Then we would not have enough to make it home.’
‘Surely there must be some place where you can refuel,’ said Dasch.
The pilot thought for a moment. ‘There is a small commercial airstrip not far off our route. Planes come and go from there all the time. The man in charge is an old friend of ours. He can sell us fuel and make sure our plane is not recorded on the manifests. But it might mean a delay in our return.’
‘How much of a delay?’
‘A day. Perhaps two.’
‘I think I can spare you that long,’ said Dasch.
It took another hour to load the plane and for the pilots to conduct their pre-flight check. By then the sun had gone down, and the deep and sleepy green of the pines all around them vanished into coal-black silhouettes.
When the great doors of the hangar were finally rolled back, the stars were already out, balancing like Christmas ornaments upon the jagged treetops.
Dasch walked outside, followed by Ritter and Carter. It was cold, and a light wind rustled through the tops of the pines, filling the air with a hiss like running water, as if the moonlit runway were, in fact, the ruffled surface of a lake.
The engines of the plane fired up, exploding from the cavern of the hangar. The wedge-shaped chocks beneath the wheels were pulled away and, by the glow of a light in the cockpit, Carter could see the pilot and co-pilot, their heads cocooned in flying helmets, eyes fixed upon the instrument panel in front of them.
The cockpit light was extinguished and then the plane began to move, the great buzz saws of its propellers flattening the grass as it manoeuvred out of the hangar.
‘I meant to bring champagne!’ Dasch shouted over the bone-rattling thunder of the engines. He took Carter gently by the arm. ‘See if you can find an unbroken bottle in that crate. We ought to celebrate with something, after all.’
Carter made his way back into the hangar. The main lights had been switched off, and only a few bare bulbs along the walls lit the huge space. The men who made up the ground crew had already set off on their bicycles down the road that led out of the forest, clattering on metal rims for lack of rubber tyres.
Carter knelt down in front of the box. The lid had been nailed shut, but the drop had jarred it partly open and it required only a little effort to remove the wooden slats covering the whisky bottles, which had been packed in straw. Three of the nine bottles on the top had shattered, and Carter had to be careful as he moved aside the jagged shards of broken glass. The smell of the whisky drilled into his senses with a sharp mustiness that reminded him of new leather. He noticed that one of the slats had split in such a way as to reveal a hollow centre. No wonder it snapped, thought Carter, if they’re going to use such cheap materials. He prised it back carefully to avoid getting splinters in his wrist as he lifted out one of the unbroken bottles. The fragile slat snapped again where it had been nailed to the body of the case, coming away so suddenly that Carter almost lost his balance as he crouched there in the dimly lit corner of the hangar. As he regained his balance, something fell to the floor just by his feet. Glancing down, he realised it was a bundle of money. At first he thought it had tumbled from his pocket but, as he picked it up, ready to stash it back into his coat, he realised that the money wasn’t his. It was too crisp. Too new. In fact, it wasn’t even German currency. Peeling away one of the notes from the bundle, he found himself squinting at a Russian twenty-five-rouble note, its bluish-green tint underlaid by corn-pollen yellow, showing the face of Lenin on one side, and the hammer and sickle crest of the Soviet Union cupped between two sheaves of wheat, as if by hands at prayer. Fanning his thumb through the stack, he saw that they were all twenty-five-rouble notes. He picked up the broken piece of wood and shook it, and another slab of money slid out into his hand. Studying the wood, he could see that the slat had been cut in half, hollowed out and glued back together before being sanded so that the seams were almost invisible.
Carter looked around him in case someone else might have seen. But there was no one else in the hangar, and the attention of Dasch and Ritter was taken up by the plane, which had come to a stop at the beginning of the runway. Off to one side, Carter could see the tiny orange sun of Dasch’s cigar.
Carter’s pulse was thumping in his neck as he pocketed the bills. He rose to his feet and was halfway out of the hangar before he remembered the whisky. He spun around and ran back to grab a bottle, arriving at Dasch’s side just as the C-54’s wheels left the ground. For a moment, it looked as if the plane wasn’t going to clear the trees, but then it wobbled into the sky and, keeping close to the ground, soon vanished beyond the saw-toothed horizon where the runway dissolved into the blackness of the forest.
Dasch turned to Carter, his teeth starkly white in the darkness as he smiled. ‘You almost missed it,’ he said.
Carter handed over the bottle.
The cork was soon removed and the whisky passed around.
‘I wonder how much the Russians pay for this,’ Dasch said. ‘I ought to start making it myself.’ He took a drink, growling at the fire in his belly, then pressed the bottle against Carter’s chest.
Carter took it from him and knocked back a mouthful, but his mind was racing so fast that he barely tasted the alcohol. Smuggling whisky he could understand, but why hide Russian money in the crates? Dasch obviously had no idea about the roubles, so why keep it secret from him? Why hide one crime inside another? It made no sense to him at all.
When the droning of the plane’s engines had faded at last into the night, Ritter and Carter slid the hangar doors shut and returned to the car, where Dasch was already waiting.
For a while, as the car slipped along the muddy track, nobody spoke. Only when they turned again onto the main road back to Cologne, mud from the wheels spattering against the cowlings, did somebody finally talk.
‘Well, Mr Carter,’ said Dasch, ‘what do you think of my new toy?’
‘You were right about needing a bigger map,’ replied Carter.
‘My thoughts exactly,’ replied Dasch, and he lit up another cigar.
…
Back at the compound, Teresa was there to meet them. She did not ask where they had gone or what they had seen.
Dasch stepped inside his office to collect a briefcase full of paperwork. Ritter followed him in, leaving Carter alone with Teresa.