Bomber, p.46
Bomber, page 46
Bodo Reuter and his lorryful of TENO men arrived on the scene of the crash fifteen minutes after it had happened. He organized a search to be sure that no diaries, log books or radio equipment had fallen clear of the main impact points. Fuchs Ueberall and another TENO man found an RAF flyer tangled into a tree only a hundred and fifty yards from the crash. He was a burly figure who smiled nervously when challenged. The two TENO men killed him with their spades.
Chapter Thirty-Two
When the illuminated glass map had been in use for an hour the lightbulbs, warm varnish and painted metal gave off a smell that mingled with that of floor polish and tense bodies. All Luftwaffe T huts had this same smell when the air battles were at their peak. The smell, the tension and the glare from the Seeburg table combined to give August Bach a dull headache. It always did. When the raids ended early, or when the bomber stream’s return route was over some other sector, he liked to stand outside the door, sniff at the ocean and let the night breeze refresh his tiredness and the darkness rest his eyes. The red blip turned gently and headed towards Utrecht. That was at the extreme eastern range of this sector. August corrected the fighter’s course.
‘He’s getting away,’ said Willi Reinecke. He followed the light dots with his wax pencil. He had traced a twisting record of inexpert attempts to intercept wherever the two lines intertwined. Now the two lines were converging once more and Willi’s pencil hovered, trying to will the fighter on to its quarry.
‘Order: increase speed, Katze Eight,’ urged August.
In the darkness Leutnant Beer was staring ahead, trying to see the target. He glanced enviously to the north where the sky was lighter. If he had them that way he might be able to see them but heading eastwards towards the banks of cumulus that made the horizon ragged and ugly there was little chance of getting the Tommi silhouetted. If any of those fellows had ever been in an aeroplane at night they would have more sympathy than this edgy bad-tempered fool who, just because he could see the red blip clearly upon the table, thought that it must shine clear and visible up here in the sky. It was so lonely here, almost like being at the bottom of the sea with only a distant flicker of light to indicate that the world is awake – or even alive.
On the port quarter there was a battery of ten searchlights that moved aimlessly, slowly changing their abstract patterns from vertical bars to a grey ghost of a pyramid that even as soon as it was built was demolished and became Vs and Xs. A lot of help they were! Beer knew that should he wander near those beams they would try to kill him.
On the starboard quarter, eighty miles away, he could see the target being attacked. Distance had drained all colour from the flares and explosions and from here they were just a steady flickering grey pinpoint.
‘He’ll never catch him now,’ said August in a long-suffering voice. ‘Order: orbit beacon at 6,000 metres.’
He switched Beer off and connected himself to the red Würzburg operator. ‘Give me another Tommi.’
‘Very good, sir. There are still plenty coming.’
Willi Reinecke had long since taken off his jacket and tie and now he stretched his arms in great circling movements that relieved the aches in his limbs. With his battered face, shaggy hair and huge shoulders he looked like a clown acting up for a circus audience. But no one laughed.
‘Is everything all right, Willi?’
Willi nodded, but August knew that all was not well. ‘There’s something wrong?’ Anxiously August looked back at the table and across at the altitude charts. Had he made a fool of himself in front of them all? Had he put that last one in at the wrong altitude and then blamed him for failing to contact? He could see nothing wrong.
‘Don’t act up, Reinecke,’ said August coldly. He knew that something was wrong, but he would not be made a fool of by a subordinate. Not even his second-in-command. Unterfeldwebel Tschol, the senior messenger – a white-haired old man from Innsbruck – was also looking at August in a way that was quite unlike his usual demeanour.
Willi tried to pull his fingers off his hands and made loud clicks with their joints. ‘It’s the target,’ said Willi finally.
‘The target? …’
‘They marked it precisely as far as we know, although some markers went down over Duisburg. The mist of the Ruhr would make a difference. Perhaps there’s a reason, but could there really be?’
‘What target?’
‘The Tommis are carrying out a precision bombing attack upon Altgarten, sir.’ Now he’d said it.
‘That’s impossible.’
‘An error … winds wrong … a marker aircraft destroyed … equipment damaged.’
‘Altgarten? The whole stream?’
‘I’m afraid so, Herr Oberleutnant.’
August tried to visualize the scene there and for a minute he did not speak. ‘Take over the table, Reinecke.’
‘Sir.’
‘Tschol, tell the telephone switchboard to connect my office phone to this number.’
Tschol took the scrap of paper but stood for a long time before acting upon the instruction. They both knew that he was giving August plenty of time to change his mind about the call. Such a thing was strictly forbidden.
‘In your office?’ said the messenger finally.
‘Yes,’ said August, ‘and they must try the other numbers if there’s no answer from the first one.’
‘It’s a court-martial offence,’ said Gefreiter Orth the telephone operator when he was told to connect the CO to a private phone number in Altgarten. His cunning little eyes glinting as he watched Tschol’s reaction.
‘It had better not be,’ said Unterfeldwebel Tschol.
‘I’ll fiddle it somehow,’ said the operator. ‘I wouldn’t drop the old man into the dirt.’
‘You’d better not,’ said Tschol. ‘If we lost him we might get that old bastard from my last station. You’d be sitting there in best uniform, pressed and clean with a cropped head, just in case some high-ranking snooper called by.’
The telephonist, dressed in vest, shorts and sandals, rubbed his stubbly chin and shuddered at the thought. He looked round at his little sanctum. Pasted upon the wall above the PBX there were a dozen nudes, a pair of baby’s shoes, a crucifix and a warning notice, ‘Feind hört mit!’ With a caricature of a big-eared Winston Churchill.
Orth was not only the most unsoldierlike man at Ermine, he was its most notorious black-marketeer. It was a well-known fact that when Orth hung the enemy-listening sign on the door it meant that the police were tapping the phones for security purposes.
‘Rotterdam? This is Luftwaffe Signals, Ermine. I want a top-priority connexion to Altgarten, Rheinprovinz. It’s by order of General Christiansen and should not be recorded in the log. If you want details ask Stabsfeldwebel Braun for a written authority. Yes, I’ll wait, but only for a moment.’
The white-haired Tschol bit his lip anxiously. ‘Is he asking this fellow Braun?’
Orth winked. ‘Braun’s one of our people for eggs,’ he explained.
When the phone rang in the cellar Anna-Luisa was half asleep, for the ventilation fans had stopped and the shelter had grown warm and airless.
‘Krefeld exchange here. Will you take an official call routed via Luftwaffe Signals Rotterdam?’
Before she could answer and even amid the crackling of the damaged phone lines she recognized August’s voice. ‘Anna-Luisa. Are you all right?’
‘Perfectly all right, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said Anna-Luisa. She was by now wide awake and guessed that August was running a great risk by calling her. ‘I … that is, Hans and myself are in the shelter of Herr Voss. Work is going on as usual,’ she added to make it sound more official.
‘Work?’ said August. ‘What are you talking about?’
She had been about to say, the air raid is going on but we are safe, but she remembered that it was a punishable offence to reveal that a place had been under air attack until three days afterwards. She knew too that security officials might be monitoring the call.
‘All is in order,’ she said. ‘Everything exactly as I promised you this afternoon.’
‘It will be as we decided,’ agreed August, cautious for the same reasons.
The noise of Sweet’s aeroplane coming across the town at rooftop height was loud enough for Anna-Luisa to hear it even in the depths of Voss’ cellar. There was a great roar as it struck the ground. It fractured into pieces of metal, each one the size and weight of a motor-car, and the pieces bounced across the fields, shaking the ground at each impact.
‘I can’t hear you, Herr Oberleutnant. There’s a scratching noise and your voice is so faint.’
‘It will be as we planned it would.’
‘Will what?’
‘Nothing,’ said August.
‘What did you say after “planned”? You said “It will be as we planned …” then what did you say?’
‘I love you,’ said August desperately and rang off. ‘Thank God,’ he said quietly to himself and he returned to the Seeburg table.
‘We have another,’ said Willi.
August took the microphone and spoke to Beer. ‘Katze Eight. Order: steer 270 for parallel head-on interception. Question: height.’
‘Announcing: height, 4,500 metres,’ said Beer.
August turned to Willi. ‘When will the Tommi start to lose height, Willi?’
‘Any minute,’ said Willi. ‘This one won’t wait for the coast; I feel it.’
‘The coloured-light stuff is Gilze-Riju airfield. Breda beyond it. Fifty miles to the Dutch coast … with this wind, say sixteen minutes.’
‘I’m going to start losing height,’ said Lambert. ‘We’ll put on a bit of speed if we do that.’
Kosher leaned forward and arranged Flanagan the cross-eyed doll more comfortably against the windscreen. ‘Can’t have Flan falling over,’ he said.
Lambert had been given the doll before his very first operational trip and it had travelled with him on every sortie. All of the crew firmly believed that to fly without Flanagan would lessen their chances of survival and Lambert had put him under lock and key between trips ever since a gunner from A Flight had borrowed him without asking permission. Lambert noticed that all of the crew would touch the battered doll at some time or other during the trip, although Cohen and Jimmy Grimm would find some rational excuse for doing so rather than admit to being superstitious. Jimmy’s wife had darned Flan’s foot last month and was making him blue velvet trousers.
Kosher returned to his navigation table and Lambert nosed down gently towards the cloud bank.
Willi Reinecke spat loudly upon his hands. August sincerely wished he would not do that – or at least not so loudly – but Reinecke’s father had also done so for luck before starting any job, and in medieval times it had been a necessary defence against the devil. What chance did August stand of preventing Reinecke from doing it? Anyway they could do with some luck, from any source available. Willi pressed the soft tip of his wax pencil upon the light blip to begin the trace. For the second time that night, Creaking Door was to begin a journey across Ermine’s plotting-table.
In the shelter a spellbound Anna-Luisa replaced the phone. Softly she sang her favourite song of the moment. It contained a promise of magic. And love, she knew, was magic.
‘I know that some time there will be a miracle
And then a thousand fairytales will come true.
I know that no love so big and wonderful can pass quickly. We both have the same star
And your fate is also mine;
You are far away and yet so far
Because our souls are one;
And that is why there will be a miracle some time
And I know that we’ll see each other again.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Gerd Böll was an expert in the strange new craft of bombed buildings. He knew that they could be divided into three main types. There were the ones that disintegrated into rubble and formed a pyramid of impenetrable debris. Then there were buildings that collapsed only at one side, so that all the floors on that side fell to the ground. The hospital had done that. Then there was this sort of ruin: the most difficult and treacherous of all. The floors had collapsed in the centre of the building so that they now formed several V shapes, jammed one upon the other and waiting for an excuse to settle lower upon a careless rescuer.
Gerd knew some of the ways of debris. He knew that a flimsy chair could support several tons of brickwork or lock with another piece of furniture to produce a miraculous cavern in the very centre of the wreckage. He knew that gas could collect in airless pockets and be dense enough to ignite a spark or overpower a man who put his head there. He knew the dangers of dripping water and he knew that a panicky person needed twice the diameter of a careful, calm one and because of that some rescue crews had been unable to return along their own tunnels. He knew the added strength of curving or crooked tunneling. In short, he was an expert.
‘No smoking,’ he told a soldier.
There was no one way to tunnel into the heap of debris which covered Voss’ cellar. Gerd Böll surveyed the whole heap of it. He peered at the piles of bricks and bits of wood. He lifted doors and mattresses to study the shape of the pile and to decide where the lines of thrust were. The top of the pile was twenty feet above street level and flattened abruptly into a plateau that had a slight bowl of subsidence. Normally he would have begun to dig as close to the ground as possible, but here at the top an old sofa and kitchen table seemed to form the entrance to a natural cavern through the rubbish. He tested it with his feet and when only a toy dog and some shattered plaster moved he decided that it was firm enough to burrow into.
He was able to get his whole body inside the wreckage by moving only a few bits of batten and breaking a chair-leg and passing it back to the men behind him.
‘Herr Böll is on his way’ he heard a soldier say. He imagined that Anna-Luisa would be taking it very calmly. She was a remarkably placid girl, Gerd thought, a schemer or a saint. No, saint certainly wasn’t the word. ‘Often debris provides a natural course for the tunneller and if possible he is well advised to use it.’ Even though he was now crawling at a more shallow angle he continued to move along the line of least resistance. He was deep inside the pile of debris when he stopped for a moment to listen to it. There were a few creaks and cracks and the shuffle of powdered plaster, but no danger signals. When he was a child he had had slight claustrophobia. The doctor had told his parents to leave his bedroom door open. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’ Gerd had overcome his fears and was proud of having done so.
‘Saw,’ he whispered. Cocking his hand back over his shoulder, he took the handle of it and working with his elbows against his chest and with the blade moving only three or four inches he was able to saw through the bookcase in ten minutes. Beyond it there were books and these he could only deal with one by one. Heine, Schiller, The Treasure of Silver Lake by Karl May, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Home Medicine, One Man’s Journey Through German West Africa, Memoirs of an Infantry General, Hay-box Cooking were all passed back to the TENO who was at his heels, and each permitted Gerd to crawl forward another inch. A pile of gramophone records cracked loudly under his elbow and a piece of fireplace cut his leg.
‘Silence,’ said Gerd, and the word was repeated back to the men at the entrance to the tunnel and then a whistle was sounded to tell passers-by to listen for the cries of the buried. But Gerd had been mistaken.
Anna-Luisa was not crying; she was sitting in an armchair with little Hansl held close to her, rocking him gently and smoothing his hair. He was asleep now, for something of the girl’s calm had reassured him. Since she had spoken with August she had played the musical box a dozen times, examined the Meissen and the silver and walked round the storehouse until she had seen it all. Now, with the oil-lamp flame turned very low – for she knew it would not get light here in the morning – she waited patiently to be rescued.
Gerd Böll made excellent progress, taking under an hour to reach ground level. Progress slowed as he went on, for Gerd preferred to jam a piece of wood or brick tightly against the tunnel’s roof to hold the wrecked house intact. When he came back he would remove his pit-props one by one. However, this made passing debris back difficult and whenever he could he packed it flat instead. There was still enough room for him to progress through the wreckage by removing only a minimum of obstructions. It was the easiest tunnel he had ever made, almost as if someone else had made it for him.
Like an archaeologist Gerd recognized the compressed layers that had once been storeys: through bathroom tiles into stair carpet and on through pieces of kitchen sink. The kitchen floor was stone and Gerd anticipated a long hard dig there, but it was simple enough. The flagstones had shattered and there was a wide pit in the soft earth. Gerd moved through the hole carefully but still he scraped his shins on the broken stone. He was at an angle of forty-five degrees now with his head downwards and it was an effort to prevent his legs sliding upon him while his hands were occupied with the blockages in front of him. Twice he did slide forward and had to use all his strength to stretch his legs out behind him to get purchase on the bricks and timber.
He was almost into the cellar when he reached the end of his easy tunnelling. In front of him there was a green metal barrier. It was two and a half feet across and circular in shape. It fitted close against the house debris, as the circular door of a safe fits into a wall. Gerd stroked the metal door and wondered what sort of household equipment it could possibly be. A water tank perhaps, but had ever a water tank been as sturdily made as this? Thick steel fixed together with massive bolts that could … A bomb, my God!
Gerd decided that it was the end of a medium-capacity bomb. A six-foot steel canister that had been dropped set for long delay with a celluloid heart full of acid eating its way through to detonate the Amatol.
