The Striker Portfolio

The front wing rattled but the roads smoothed out when I cleared the Zone and headed north towards Linsdorf.

Clive? This is George. Listen, something's come up and we'd rather like your help. Well apparently there's one of those chaps — you know? — struck a spot of trouble in Western Germany. Yes Name's Martin and he's officially attached to the Accidents Investigation Branch working at an air-base called Linsdorf. Now this is what seems to have cropped up, you listening hard?

I ate the biscuits slowly, a crumb at a time.

Number Three? This is Beacon Nine. Will you be in Bonn tonight? Well you'll see General Schmidl, obviously. Subject: an Englishman, Walter Martin, has become wanted for murder since early hours this morning. All we need is that the good Herr General is tipped off that his K.P. branch is wasting its time: Martin was not, repeat not, responsible. They'll thus avoid unproductive search tactics. M'm? If it could be done officially I wouldn't be asking you, would I? No, we're relying on Schmidl's confidence in our integrity and that should suffice. Finally, if the Kriminal-polizei require the said Martin as witness at a later date, we guarantee his availability. Now I'll give you what details I have.

My left hand was no more than numb beneath its fresh analgesic dressing. I had slept for nearly three hours at the Rhine Army unit but there was a certain amount of natural dope trying to put me out again because I was still about twelve hours on the debit side. I kept all the windows down.

Liebermann? I have some confidential information for you. I can give you nothing of its source but I would suggest that you accept it as most reliable. Further, I would invite you to take such action as will become clear to you when you know the facts. Please listen to me carefully.

Neueburg lay to the east now and I passed the turning, making directly north. Soon afterwards I saw a cruising police patrol and felt gratitude to Ferris. My journey to Linsdorf and my business there would have been impossible or at best very difficult in smoke conditions, but the heat had been turned off Martin and I could go where I pleased. It was one of the things a director in the field was expected to do for his agent but I felt good about Ferris because there were those who wouldn't have kept up-the pressure on London until something was done.

I approached Linsdorf just before 10.00 a.m. A Striker SK-6 was going into circuit after take-off and the smell of kerosene tainted the draught from the windows.

He was in a bad way even before I told him, his nerves in his eyes, couldn't keep still, the short laugh more cynical than ever.

'We were wondering where you'd gone,' he said.

In this kind of confrontation they are not always so vulnerable and it surprised me but it was too late to change tactics and I whipped it on him right away.

'I've been at Aschau.'

We were alone in his quarters. I had noted his service revolver among some gear on a chair and I was standing where I could block him if he went for it.

Reaction wasn't total. I hadn't expected it to be. All he knew now was that I was a bit more than an aviation psychologist attached to the A.I.B. head tilted, a degree sideways and a degree forward. He knew who I was not; he didn't know who I was.

'Yes?'

I said: 'Die Zelle is finished.' But of course he would need more than that. He would want proof. 'Kohn, Gross, Langmann, Schott, all of them. Finished.'

Total reaction now, much earlier than I'd expected because he still didn't have any proof. But within half a minute I hardly recognized him: the shock had aged his face and sharpened its resemblance to his father's.

;Thank God,' he said.

I had to think about that. The unexpected was coming up all the time and I tried to recognize familiar facts but there was only one with relevance. Nitri had said in the car: He's enormously brave. For a man with his record of courage his nerves had needed a lot of tranquillizing: a woman a night, so they said.

Then I got it.

'Pushing you too far, were they?'

He said nothing. His face had lost all colour and his eyes were vacant: in the way of a drowning man he was reviewing his life and if I had spoken again he wouldn't have heard or understood.

After a long time he said numbly: 'Yes. I tried to tell him. But he said a part of the new Germany was in my care. That was what he said.'

'In your care?' I was getting fed up. 'And thirty-six pilots, one after the other — were they in your care too?'

Abstractedly: 'That was Wagner.'

'Oh really? Nothing to do with you? Christ, I wouldn't want your conscience, Rohmhild.'

Wagner wasn't much surprise. I'd already checked on him, coming into the air-base. He'd left here two days ago. Rotational duties: he'd be down at Hankensbuttel now, the next one round the ring.

'I did it for him.'

'What? Oh, for Kohn. You're all the same — you can never do anything for yourselves, there's always got to be some kind of a tin god telling you what to do. Then you'll do anything. When did they tell you, the Rohmhilds?' Because it must have been like that.

'When I was fifteen.'

'Well that was a bloody silly thing to do.'

Puberty is no time to tell someone he's got a genuine father lost on the other side of a lot of barbed wire: he'll want to find him. I wondered if Kohn would ever have allowed that. He'd had no choice. The Rohmhilds had thought it was the right thing to do.

I said: 'When did you first meet him?'

'On my nineteenth birthday.' But his answers weren't coming as fast as that. He spent a lot of time staring at nothing. 'I went across the Wall on a holiday pass and tried not to come back but he made me.'

'Was that when it happened?' He stared at me, trying to connect. 'Was that when he offered you the sacred task of assisting in the re-creation of the beloved Fatherland and all that balls?'

Something like anger came into his eyes: I'd kicked half a temple over and there has to be a place to pray in when you worship a god. Distinguished flying record, the Iron Cross as a lieutenant, so forth. And a face to show for it: the face of the mutilated martyr. They'd had young Rohmhild-Kohn across a barrel.

'It was later. A year later.'

'What was your job? Recruiting Wagner?'

'Yes.'

More than that. For the past year he'd been Die Zelle's contact inside the Luftwaffe, monitoring pilot-reactions, listening to the A.I.B. wreckage-analysts, checking on their West German counterpart team, passing it all through the wire with people like Guhl as a courier. Linsdorf was the main base where the Striker-crash investigations were going on.

'How much longer were you going to keep it up?'

'It was not in my hands, after Wagner had worked out a way to-'

'Oh all right, but you had all the information, didn't you, you knew who was next on the list? What was it? Drugs? Hypnosis? A nerve-gas?'

'I don't know.'

'Of course you know!'

'He didn't tell me!'

'Damn your eyes — how was it administered?'

His head had swung away as if I'd hit him. From somewhere he was trying to rescue reason and re-arm himself but there was no defence against what I had told him: that Die Zelle was finished. The divine orders from the god in the temple had been to engineer the death of young man like himself who flew the same plane and lived the same life, and his subscription to opposing loyalties had finally cut him in two, just as all Germany was cut.

If I stopped now I'd never get it from him. 'What was his method! Wagner's method!' Because London wouldn't go in immediately: she'd said the Berlin run was normally scheduled for the fifteenth of every month, 'It was a tablet.'