Читать книгу Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse - Len Deighton - Страница 25

Oberleutnant August Bach, who knew nothing of the letter his cousin had written to him and would in fact never know of it, walked along the soft beach in the evening light. One thousand suns bounced upon the wave-tops and the sound of the sea was harsh and constant.

It was the coldness of the sea that formed the water particles in the air – twenty thousand of them in every cubic inch – by cooling it to dew-point. So along the shoreline the incoming air became cloud and moved inland and became warm enough for the cloud to disappear. Patches of mist brooded in the cold trees and made the taller dunes into tiny desert islands. On the strand where August walked the mist was churned by the wind to reveal the golden horizon and then wrap him again in its cottonwool.

Deep-rooted yellow poppies and sea-sandwort struggled for life against the shifting sand that exposed their roots one day and buried their heads the next. Along the high-water mark nature’s usual debris had collected: edible urchins like battered shaving-brushes, cuttlefish bones, channel wrack, some of it dried and blackened, the mussels pounded loose from the endless steel stakes that extended out into the ocean and pointed at England. There was other flotsam too: pieces of packing-case with cryptic stencil marks, a few dozen squashed oranges and a burned piece of yellow lifejacket. Over everything there was thick shiny oil that added a sour smell of decay to the brisk salt breeze.

Bach tapped the loose sand from his boots, climbed a short flight of wooden steps and opened the door of the shack in which he lived. At first his men had thought him mad for commandeering this ramshackle hut perched high upon the dunes. It had been an equipment store for the Dutchmen who had planted the dune grass and maintained the sea wall. Bach had had it lined with insulating material and supported on new metal beams to make it dry and free of rats. Inside there were books, a stove, a simple Luftwaffe bedstead, an old armchair and a table at which he worked. The few men under his command privileged to see the place at close quarters recognized now the wisdom of his choice. His Luftwaffe signals company numbered one hundred and fourteen men, with him their only officer. He was quite happy to live and eat with them, but men who obey orders need a chance to complain without an officer to overhear. His little hut, half a kilometre from the other buildings, gave them that chance. He unlocked the door and let himself in. His desk was placed near to the window from which he could see the beach and ocean when the weather was clear. Willi, his second-in-command, had lit the stove, for even on a summer’s evening there was dampness in the air that made the bedding cold and edged the lenses of his binoculars with tiny spots of moisture. He filled a kettle from the tap at the washbasin. The pipe rattled like a machine gun and the water was warm from its journey through the hastily laid water pipe that went along the sunny dunes to the main building.

He treasured these few moments alone as he came to terms with this environment. He remembered Anna-Luisa and felt a warm contentment at his memory of her. He knew that once the Stabsfeldwebel arrived and work began he would no longer be able to give himself to these sentimental emotions. He wiped the lenses of his field-glasses and walked to the rear of the hut. From this window he could see back across the dunes to the radar buildings and, when it was not misty, all the way along the coast to the tip of the tall radar aerials of the next Himmelbett station.

He focused the glasses upon a clump of grass and waited for the mist to move. Just a fidget of wing and a stretch of long neck was for a moment higher than the edge of a nest. The grey herons were still there on the dune side. They usually stayed close to fresh water, especially in the summer, but since this coast had been made a prohibited area the wildlife had become more active. These had laid their eggs in May. Now it was almost time to go. He wondered whether they would return next winter. He felt that they were an omen.

Satisfied that all was well with the herons, he began to change from his uniform into old, more comfortable clothes. He pulled off his high boots, using the home-made wooden clamp behind the door. When the kettle began to hum gently he called Willi on the phone.

‘A cup of chocolate, Willi,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said the man at the other end. August chopped the coarse chocolate pieces into chips, melted them in the boiling water and beat the mixture until it was frothy.

August was watching his Stabsfeldwebel marching along the dunes when the heron returned. It was a huge ungainly bird with curiously slow and mechanical wing movements that made it seem man-made. Its legs trailed behind it and from its beak there hung an eel. The bird in the nest gave a croak of pleasure and raised its head to look. Always one or other of them remained at the nest. ‘Kroink’; it circled the main buildings. Perhaps the great radar aerials attracted the birds, thought August, as it flew across the face of the Freya. White mist wove through the intricate metalwork like skeins of soft raw wool through a comb and the aerial moved gently, scanning as far as, and farther than, the enemy coast. Sometimes it even detected RAF planes that never left the English sky.

Willi Reinecke knocked briefly and waited for permission before he entered. He carefully brushed the wet sand from his jackboots and stood correctly at attention. The steaming cup of chocolate waited for him on August’s desk but first the two men enacted the ritual of salutes and greetings of rank that was a necessary prelude to all military intercourse.

Willi Reinecke was a tall thick-set man of indeterminate age. Born in Hessen-Nassau, the promise of work in the steel industry of the Ruhr had drawn him north as a young man, but, unemployed and desperate, he had finally joined the Army. He still had a lot of hair. It was greying at the sides in a distinguished way that would have looked right on a banker. As a youngster he had been quite a ladies’ man, but a grenade had exploded on a parapet while Willi was still looking over it. His nose had split open, his cheek was a maze of scars, and one ear was missing altogether, which is why he grew his hair long. A veteran of the Moscow battles, August had guessed when he had first been posted here, but the Stabsfeldwebel had growled ‘Verdun’ and only then did August realize that his second-in-command was a lot older than he liked to admit.

They had disliked each other on sight. Reinecke was a senior NCO of the old school. Twice August had seen him kick a man who had dawdled and he would not hesitate to clobber anyone who looked as if he might argue. These incidents had made the first trouble between them. At first August had tried to explain that the personnel he commanded were Luftwaffe technicians, not cannon-fodder, but that had no effect. Finally August had decided to fight with Reinecke’s weapons. He gave the amazed Reinecke a blistering dressing-down and ordered him to parade each shift an hour before their work commenced. At that time there were six shifts – manning the radar machinery was tiring for the plotters working in darkness and gruelling for the men exposed to the sea breeze – and so Reinecke found himself on parade six hours out of the twenty-four.

The lesson was not lost on the stubborn old man and, after a month of the new régime had convinced him that August was quite prepared to continue the same schedule for the war’s duration, he called for a truce. He did this when August was away on a two-day course in electronics. The Oberleutnant returned to find that the draughty little hut in which he had elected to live had been completely remade. It had been equipped with furnishings stolen or borrowed from goodness knows where and a large double-glazed window had been fitted to facilitate August’s bird-watching. From that moment the two of them had tried to work together, and in that curious way that happens sometimes to people with such contrasting beliefs and backgrounds they had become very close. When August Bach understood the man better he realized that his tyranny was matched by a concern for the welfare of his men. Willi Reinecke was not above stealing, lying and even falsifying documents to ensure that his men were properly clothed and fed.

Even more surprising was the skill that Willi Reinecke had shown in the plotting-room. For the first week or so August had used one of the younger technicians to help him plot the bombers, but Reinecke always appeared whenever there were enemy planes in the sector and finally August worked with him one night. Incredibly it was that night that the thousand-bomber raid upon Cologne passed overhead. Willi Reinecke didn’t have the lightness of touch for which the training school would give high marks. He stumbled up the steps of the ladder to the plotting-table and swore loudly when August needed silence. It was a rare night in which Willi didn’t drop his Kneemeyer measure two or three times or kick the table as he hastily gauged the speed of the bomber that the radar held in its beam. Willi’s value was in the way he could guess the intentions of the quarry. Some of them had a device that told them they were held in the invisible radar beam. These would jink and turn desperately. Willi would poise his marker over a point where he expected the bomber to go while August guided the fighter pilot on to it. It was surprising how often Willi outguessed the Tommis.

Willi Reinecke had a wife and two children. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank alcohol and lately he had shown an interest in August’s bird-watching. He was very proud of his first attempt at taxidermy and prouder still when August put it in a place of honour on his desk. In short, Willi Reinecke was a conundrum and that, more than any other thing, was what drew August close to him.

Willi removed his belt and special flak Service greatcoat with its wool lining and the stripes on both cuffs that, in the Wehrmacht, marked the company’s senior NCO. He hung it behind the door. August remained in his armchair and Willi sat erect in the seat at the desk. He nodded his thanks as the chocolate was pushed towards him. He sipped it and held his scarred hands around the cup for a moment before giving his report. He unfolded a piece of paper and read the names.

‘Two men sick since you left on Friday: one of the plotting-table orderlies – Gefreiter Path – said he had tonsillitis, but I took a look at him.’ Willi looked up. ‘He’s running a slight temperature but it’s only a sore throat. I’ve put him on light duties outdoors. That should do the trick and meanwhile he’s not breathing sore-throat bugs all around the Seeburg table.’ Again he referred to his paper. ‘The other case was Gefreiter Kick – the cook with the handlebar moustache – he complained of stomach pains. Too tender for indigestion and the wrong side for appendicitis. Regular colicky stabs of pain. I sent him into Rotterdam with the ration lorry; the hospital are holding him for observation. Meanwhile Unteroffizier Zewlinski will work the last shift until Kick returns or we get a replacement. There’s not much work on that shift except counting the stores.’

‘And you think Zewlinski can count the stores unaided?’

‘I’ll be keeping an eye on him.’

‘You are quite a physician, Willi. I’m very impressed.’

‘I’ve had a lot of cavalry experience and men are just like horses. I could always tell the horse-pox or colic (which just needed isolation and a rest) from the lymph cases and the strangles that have to be sent back down the line as fast as possible.’

‘To the slaughterhouse?’

‘Sometimes, sir.’

‘And you sent Kick back?’ Bach grinned but Reinecke didn’t.

‘We shan’t see him again,’ pronounced the old man grimly. ‘But I let Unteroffizier Zewlinski think he’d only be doing the extra duties for a day or two.’

‘I understand, Willi.’

Willi peered at his piece of typed paper again. ‘Two men to divisional signals course, three on the gas course, six men guarding the unoccupied gun site near the village with Rimm in charge of them. The cook that HQ borrowed is still there.’ Willi looked up. ‘He plays the accordion,’ he added significantly.

‘He wasn’t much of a cook,’ said Bach.

‘We should try to write him off and ask for a replacement.’ Bach nodded. ‘Three in hospital in Rotterdam including Kick, ten on leave, four on day pass, three on ration detail: one hundred and fourteen men present and correct.’

Bach nodded.

‘Two more bicycles stolen,’ said Willi Reinecke.

‘This time they are for it.’

‘The men who lost them are on open arrest. I thought you’d probably sentence them tomorrow after the cashing-up is done. Then they can go into Rotterdam tomorrow afternoon as soon as the second shift go on.’

‘You have informed the local civilian police? They got the last one back, didn’t they?’

‘Yes, sir, but riding a Wehrmacht bicycle is a risky business for a Dutch civilian. To get home one night after curfew perhaps …’

‘Yes, if you spot one outside a bar, unlocked and waiting to be stolen. It’s just carelessness.’

‘Exactly, sir. Either that or they are going farther afield in the back of one of the wagons. I have informed the military police office in Rotterdam.’

‘I will sentence them tomorrow. Air activity?’

‘Little or nothing.’

‘They are expected tonight.’

‘We had the alert. I have assigned Lemmers’ crew to the Freya and I have rearranged the shifts as you ordered. The best crews will take over their radars at midnight.’

‘It’s a short night for them. Let’s hope it’s to be the Ruhr, then they might cross this sector on the outward as well as the return.’

Suddenly August realized that Willi’s family lived in the Ruhr. Confused and embarrassed, he searched for something else to say. ‘Moonrise is …’; he tried to see the time from the chart.

‘Moonrise tonight is 00.30, sir. Yes, it will be nice to get two cracks at them.’

‘And sunrise is 05.46. They will have come and gone by 03.00, I would say.’

‘I told the crews that if the target is in the Ruhr it will be a four-hour shift. If the Tommis go farther than that, the number two crews will stand them down for a break and we’ll put them back on for the return.’

‘Good, Willi. You out-think me every time.’

Willi smiled. They both knew it wasn’t true, but it was nice to hear the Oberleutnant say it. They drank the hot chocolate. Willi knew that there was no more official business.

‘A good weekend, sir?’

‘Wonderful, Willi.’

‘Your small son is well?’

‘He runs me into the ground. I don’t know where he finds the energy.’

‘My two are the same. I’m glad to get back here for a rest.’

Willi looked round the Oberleutnant’s room. He felt privileged to be allowed into it. Even the senior officers who came on visits to the radar station were seldom invited here. On the wall above a desk cluttered with glue, wire and soldering equipment there was a sheet of white card upon which August Bach had been reconstructing the bones of a gull’s wing. Alongside it were pasted reproductions of Leonardo drawings of a wing and some photos of gulls, avocets and harriers in flight.

‘The sparrowhawk came back.’

‘Photo?’

‘I’m not as quick as you are, sir.’

‘It’s just practice.’

‘We got some interesting movements on the radar last night.’

‘Birds?’

‘No doubt.’

‘Log it all, Willi. We’re in a unique position that could make a real contribution. Until now the ornithologists didn’t know that birds flew at night.’

‘The operator made a note of the time.’

On the desk there was the blackheaded gull that Willi had wired and mounted. He hadn’t mastered the trick of folding the wings and he wouldn’t permit August to help, so like many an amateur taxidermist before him he had finally fixed them outstretched – gull at moment of alighting. Under the gull’s red feet he had put a nest with three blue-green eggs. Whatever its faults, as August had told him, ‘No one would guess it was a first attempt.’ Willi turned it round proudly.

‘You saw the heron just now?’

‘I’m going to get married again, Willi.’

‘That’s good, sir.’

‘To my housekeeper.’

‘That’s wise, sir. At our age a man wants a sensible woman, not a flashy piece of skirt.’

August smiled. ‘I’m afraid that many of my friends might say that she is a flashy piece of skirt, Willi. She’s an RAD girl, not much older than my son.’

It was Willi’s turn to be embarrassed, but August didn’t care about anything. He was enjoying the warm feeling of being in love. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of German brandy. He poured a slug of it into the Stabsfeldwebel’s chocolate.

‘Drink up, Willi,’ said August Bach. ‘Let’s think ourselves lucky that we are not flying with the Tommis. For tonight, I have a feeling, we shall have a remarkable success.’

‘Success,’ echoed Willi and drank his chocolate and brandy.

For some time they sat in silence, drinking and watching the shadows lengthen and the blurred sun drop towards the misty ocean.

‘There was no mail?’ He knew there was none. Had there been any, it would have been placed upon his desk-top as it always was. ‘None,’ said Willi.

‘He’s an inconsiderate little bastard.’

‘He’ll be all right: bright lad, lots of combat behind him. You know how quickly you’d hear.’

‘He can look after himself; I was thinking only of his promotion. He’s been a Sturmmann for over a year and the lowest ranks live like pigs in the front line.’

‘Promotion is slow in the Waffen SS units.’

‘I wish like hell he wasn’t in an SS unit,’ said August.

‘I’d feel the same if it was my boy.’

‘Only because they don’t get enough rest between combat.’

‘Of course,’ said Willi. ‘I understand.’ He got to his feet and stood correctly at attention again. ‘If the Oberleutnant permits … there are the personnel and ration returns.’ The old NCO had moved from intimate chatter to the absurd third person of the Kaiser’s army.

‘Carry on, Willi. I’ll be along soon.’

He spent a few minutes looking through a trayful of paperwork. It could all wait until tomorrow, he decided. He put on his long black leather overcoat. The wind whined gently as he opened the door.

The sea was blood-red by the time Oberleutnant Bach walked along the wet sand to start work. He walked as slowly as he could. He picked up pieces of seaweed and a tern, stiff with diesel oil. Once he thought he saw a hedgehog among the dunes and waited five minutes for it to reappear but it didn’t.

From the sea’s edge the futuristic shape of the radar aerials was awesome even to him. He could easily pretend that he had just emerged from this sea upon some Atlantis where the technics were a century ahead of anything he had known. The metal graticule, as big as a large house, that swung gently from side to side was codenamed Freya. August remembered that Freya was a Nordic goddess whose watchman could see one hundred miles in every direction by day and by night. It was a fair description of the Freya radar device and August reasoned that if he could work that out, then so could the British Intelligence. (In fact he was correct. Dr R. V. Jones worked it out and reported to the Chiefs of Staff accordingly.)

Not far away were the two shorter-range, but more precise, giant Würzburgs. They were like electric bowl fires as big as windmills. They too swung gently around the horizon but always returned – like the Freya – to point westwards to where in East Anglia the Allied bomber airfields were but half an hour’s flying time away.

Gently August put the dead tern back on the sand. It was 22.00; the Tommis were not even in the air yet and when they were the Freya would give warning. The sand crunched underfoot. He kicked a hole in it and the sea appeared there as if by magic. Eggs for tea and a walk along the silent beach in the evening sunlight; Hansl and Anna-Luisa would love it here. After the war they would live somewhere remote. This was a fine rich country. Even with a hungry Wehrmacht gnawing at it for years there were still eggs and milk and sometimes cream. A few months ago Willi had come back from Zuidland with a whole sheep. August had checked the ration returns and the petrol sheets but had found no discrepancy.

From the tops of the dunes one could see fields of vegetables and greenhouses just like Altgarten. But here in the spring they had eaten them. The soups had been brimful of vegetables and meat and he had not complained, nor even investigated. He told himself he would have found nothing amiss anyway. The truth of it was that he was a bloody awful officer. That’s why he had never risen above Oberleutnant. And that was why he was strolling along the strand with a pair of Zeiss 16 × 40s, soft shoes and an old sweater, instead of besieging Leningrad in full battle order.

Still, thought August, one war is enough for any man. In the first basinful also he had been happy. Flying his Albatros twice a day and living on good food and wine in a fairy-tale château on the Meuse. Wouldn’t any spoiled young brat fresh from university give his life for a chance like that? That’s just what a lot of them did give. Who knows why any survived, except that suddenly the brain feels anew the prick of self-preservation that deserts young men for a few years and so makes heroes possible and wars welcome.

He raised his glasses to the naval gun bunker. Upon it sat a tern. He flicked the binoculars into focus and watched with pleasure as it searched its wings and preened itself. Suddenly there was the rumble of the emergency generator being tested. The bird rose alarmed and flew out to sea until August lost sight of it.

The sea mist had thinned considerably but the light was going fast. Reluctantly he put his glasses into the case and entered the T-shaped hut and its plotting-room.

Had August been able to see eighty-five kilometres to the north he would have seen the coastal convoy and the anti-aircraft light cruiser Held continuing steadily on their course. The guns they had fired at Löwenherz and Himmel were long since cleaned and readied for action but there had been no other interruptions and, as ‘Admiral’ Pawlak had predicted, they were now halfway to the Hook. The convoy had moved closer to the coast here, for the danger from wrecks was lessened and the danger from Allied aircraft increased.

This piece of coast was still enveloped in a thin streak of mist but the sunset had turned it bright gold, ‘like a Turner’.

‘Like a what?’

‘A painting by Turner, just a swirl of golds and reds and orange, a sort of land of ghosts.’

‘You give me the creeps you do, Dikke. You know what your trouble is, you read too many books, and books will get you nowhere. Now come away from that porthole and listen to what I’m saying and we might get ourselves another ring round the gun.’

The plump boy from Königsberg went and sat on the bunk where ‘Admiral’ Pawlak with his mouth full of cheese was explaining about gunnery. On the wall of the storeroom there was a bright disc of light moving upwards as the sun sank lower and lower.

‘It’s rhythm – no one ever teaches you that but that’s the secret of a high rate of fire – rhythm.’ He broke off another piece of cheese and put it in his mouth. ‘Now take that starboard number two gun, that loader waits for the breech to clear and then leans in with the next shell just like they teach you at gunnery school. That’s all very well for demonstration work or target shooting but when you have a plane taking evasive action like this morning’s one did you’ve got to anticipate.’

‘When I was at training school, one of our crew caught his hand in the breech.’

‘Well, he must have been a slow-witted fool, Dikke, like you.’

‘That’s right, he was. That’s why I don’t try these tricks of yours.’

‘You’re a fool, Dikke. Do you want to stay a K3 all your life? Tonight I’ll take the loading. We’ll be under control from the bridge so you can be number one, I don’t care.’

‘Thanks, Admiral.’

‘Forget it, Dikke. If we are going to get our third Tommi tonight we’ll have to get a lot of shells into the air.’

The ships in the convoy were lit by the sun like golden toys on a black velvet sea. Inside the cabin the light grew redder and redder.

‘Put on the light, Dikke. I can’t see to eat my cheese.’

The plump boy did as he was told.

‘And close the port covers. You know the blackout regulations. Do you want to get us bombed?’