Читать книгу Hoodwinked - the spy who didn't die - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 18

IT HAS NEVER BEEN CLEAR to me whether Yelena Mazanik was Wilhelm Kube’s lover or his maid. Some history books say the former, others the latter. One thing I have no doubt about is that if she is having sex with the Generalkommissar, the mass murderer of Minsk children, it’s not for love of anything but her country.

She certainly doesn’t hesitate when the partisans make contact with her and ask if she will help kill him. “With pleasure,” is what she is reported to have replied.

And so it is agreed that some kind of bomb with a delayed timer will be the method that gives Yelena the best chance of carrying out her dangerous mission and escaping. It is Yelena herself who comes up with the brilliant solution. “The hot water bottle,” she says. “He’s got circulation problems, so I put a hot water bottle in his bed every night to warm his feet. Can you put a bomb inside a hot water bottle?”

It takes our explosives experts only a few hours to figure it out. Moscow is providing us with small amounts of plastique and detonators to be used only for blowing up important bridges. We don’t think Stalin or anyone else around Red Square will object too strenuously if we nick off a little bit of it to blow up a German general, especially one as nasty as Wilhelm Kube!

The problem is how to get the plastique, detonator, and timing device into a rubber bottle and then fill it with hot water.

It’s a somewhat embarrassed young woman who almost immediately hits upon the answer. “A condom,” she says. Eureka! And thanks to our Nazi friends, who usually have their pockets full of them, condoms are one of the few things we’ve got plenty of around here. Put the explosive, the detonator, and the timer into a condom, tie off the top, drop it into the bottle, and then you can add the hot water whenever you want! Brilliant! Except for one problem…since we don’t know when we’ll be able to plant the bomb under Herr Kube, how do we rig up a timer that won’t go off until well after Yelena has fled?

In the end what they design is fairly simple. I have no idea exactly how it works, but they rig it up in such a way that screwing the top of the hot water bottle on tightly will activate the timer, which is made from a pocket watch. It gives whoever plants the bomb exactly one half hour to make a getaway.

All that needs to be done now is get the bomb into Yelena’s hands.

“Easy,” says Moscow, “No problem. No problem at all. Just find a partisan who can pose as a German officer. Put him in a captured car or a motorcycle with a sidecar, have him drive into the heart of Minsk, past all the checkpoints, present the bomb to Yelena Mazanik, hang around until she plants it beneath Herr Kube, then flee the city with her when the deed is done. No problem!" Or words to that effect...

The Germans used motorcycles extensively in Belarus.