Riptide

§ 87

Stahl acknowledged Reggie’s introduction of ‘Brigadefuhrer, I’m Reggie,’ with a terse ‘Colonel’.

‘Oh… so you know me?’

‘Born Edinburgh, February 1900. Expelled from your private school over an incident with marijuana. Sandhurst 1919. Commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers 1921. Recruited to Military Intelligence 1926. Married twice, a daughter by each marriage. Despite a playboy image, your grasp of German language and history is said to be excellent. Christened Alistair, always known as Reggie.’

‘Ah,’ said Reggie. ‘And what do I call you?’

‘Stahl, Wolfgang, anything but Brigadefuhrer. The Brigadefuhrer died in Berlin on April 17^th.’

‘I see,’ said Reggie, looking ticked off. ‘Stahl it is.’

Stahl lay on the bed in slippers, pyjamas and a dressing gown. With his receding hairline, his salt and pepper colouring and the clipped, dark, moustache, he could easily have been the British officer recuperating from wounds who might ordinarily have occupied a room such as this. There was only one chair. Reggie took it. Cal stood, wondering if there was anything symbolic in Reggie’s brusque assumption of command.

‘It’s… er… not too soon for you?’ Reggie asked.

‘No. Now is as good a time as any. Ask me whatever you want.’

‘Well,’ said Reggie. ‘There was one thing in particular.’

‘Russia,’ Stahl said.

Reggie glanced quickly at Cal, and said, ‘Oh, you know?’

‘What else could be quite so urgent? You had Hess. Hess told you nothing, so you come to me. Fine. I know more than Hess.’

‘You do?’

‘Hess is “the heart of the Party”-not the brains. It’s been a while since he had that level of confidence placed in him. Russia is very much Heydrich’s dream, and what he knows I know.’

‘Oh. Jolly good. Where shall we start?’

‘Why don’t we start with you getting me a blackboard?’

‘A blackboard?’

‘They’re bound to have one somewhere or do your hospitals teach nothing? And while you’re at it, some chalk. Four different colours of chalk.’

‘I see,’ said Reggie, not seeing. ‘Chalk.’

‘I have a visual memory-let me visualise the battle plan for you, and everything else will fall into place.’

‘He’s right, Reggie,’ said Cal. ‘This is the way we’ve always done things. Wolf thinks in images. He remembers text as images.’

Ten minutes later two hospital orderlies staggered in with an easel and a blackboard and set it up. Stahl swung his legs off the bed and picked up a stick of white chalk.

Cal had seen the results of so much of the work of Stahl’s photographic memory. Lists and charts that he had reconstructed from the eidetic snapshots of the mind and forwarded to him. Once, in a rare face-to-face meeting he had roughed out a scheme for some troop manoeuvre on a single sheet of foolscap. Before he began to draw, he said, he could not have described it. Once drawn, he had burnt the sketch in an ashtray and recited the battle plan to him. It was, Cal thought, an odd relationship between image and language, a mental short-circuit, a cognitive loophole-but it worked. Undeniably it worked.

He watched as Stahl roughed in the boundaries-the Bug River, the current front line between the Axis and the USSR-the Baltic coastline-a jagged set of inverted Vs to mark the Urals-a scoop of the Black Sea at the bottom of the board. All of which amounted to a steel wall of armament around Eastern Poland, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia-now earmarked as a new circle in hell.

Stahl switched to green chalk.

‘Let us start with Army Group North.’

He drew a box up near the Baltic Sea and wrote in the name von Leeb. Reggie finally seemed to have caught on. He took a tiny notebook from his inside pocket, unscrewed the top of his fountain pen and started to jot down notes. Under von Leeb’s name Stahl began to chalk in the formation of battle-the 18^th and 16^th German Armies under von Kuchler and Busch, the 4^th Panzer Army under Hoepner-11 divisions of Infantry, supporting 10 Tank divisions… Reinhardt… von Manstein… the Panzer Army Reserve SS Totenkopf. Cal saw Reggie reach for his glasses as the chalk names got smaller and smaller with each sub-division Stahl made.

Stahl switched to the red chalk-von Bock’s Army Group Centre… his hands began to fly across the board, sometimes writing in the horizontal, sometimes the vertical as though he thought or saw in two planes at once… 32 Infantry divisions… Guderian’s Panzers. Often gaps would appear as he skipped over some name or number, only to double back seconds later, scrawling furiously, chalk snapping off and flying across the room with the speed of bullets. To blue chalk. Army Group South under von Runstedt… another 24 Infantry divisions, 15 divisions of Panzers and the Axis partners-troops from Hungary, Italy and Rumania. Reggie could scarcely keep up. His head bobbed like a doll’s on a coiled spring, up and down from the paper, weaving right and left as he peered around Stahl to the multi-coloured jigsaw now assembling itself in front of his eyes.

Then Stahl began shooting arrows across the board. Green arrows aiming at Leningrad, red arrows forking across central Poland to reunite at Smolensk in a push for Moscow, and blue arrows driving across Kiev to the Volga and Stalingrad.

It took more than quarter of an hour.

‘What’re those last two at the bottom there?’ The first words Reggie had spoken in what seemed to Cal to be an age. He’d never known the man to shut up for so long.

‘More Waffen SS regiments,’ Stahl said. ‘The Adolf Hitler and the Viking.’ Stahl no longer looked at the board-he turned his back on it. Cal was staring at it, overawed, chilled by the magnitude of it, the sheer power of what it stood for. Reggie was smiling. Not pleasure, not smugness, he thought, more like a schoolboy thrilled to have finally got what he wanted.

Cal moved closer to the board while Reggie scribbled and said, ‘Will it work? Will anything so colossal hold up once you get it off the drawing board?’

‘It’s perfect country,’ said Stahl. ‘The flat plains that stretch from Prussia to Moscow. Perfect Panzer country. The tanks will simply throttle up and roll-and when they’ve cleared a way through, there are more than three million men in uniform to follow on. Hitler thinks it will be over before winter sets in-although it might be more accurate to say that he prays it will over by then. These men have not been issued with winter uniforms. There aren’t even orders placed with the factories for any winter uniforms.’

‘Air power?’

‘The Lutwaffe will pound the Russians first. Rather like what was meant to happen here last year.’

‘How many men was that?’ Reggie chipped in, head bent over his notebook.

‘Three million. But that is a conservative figure.’

‘Could I ask you to run through it again?’

Cal looked at Stahl. He didn’t seem to resent the question-more as though he had expected it. He didn’t even glance at the blackboard.

‘Pick a column,’ he said simply.

‘Okey doh,’ said Reggie. ‘How about von Kleist’s Panzers?’

Stahl rattled it off like liturgy.

‘3^rd Panzer Korps, von Manteuffel, comprising the 14^th Panzers, the 44^th and 298^th Infantry. i4th Panzer Korps, von Wietersheim, 13^th Panzers. 48^th Panzer Korps, Kempl, comprising the nth Panzers, the 54^th and 75^th Infantry.’

‘Astonishing,’ said Reggie. ‘I don’t suppose you could recite that backwards?’

Stahl closed his eyes as though projecting an image onto the back of his eyelids and recited the entire list from bottom to top, Reggie checking every item against his notes.

‘Jolly good. Do you know, I think I’ve got enough to be going on with. I think we might take a bit of a break now, eh?’

He smiled at Cal. Cal knew he was bursting, simply bursting to tell somebody.

‘There is just one thing,’ Stahl said. ‘The date? You haven’t asked me the date.’

‘Oh,’ said Reggie, as if surprised that he might have forgotten anything. ‘Oh bugger.’

‘June 22^nd. The anniversary of the 1812 invasion by Napoleon. At dawn, needless to say.’

‘Right,’ said Reggie. ‘If you chaps will excuse me for an hour or so…’

He scuttled out.

Stahl looked at Cal.

‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘So soon?’

‘I doubt he means to be rude, but I guess you told him what he wanted to know.’

‘There’s more,’ said Stahl. ‘Much more than dates and division numbers. There are ideas in this. And an idea of Russia so big that it would shock Mr Ruthven-Greene.’ ‘Try shocking me instead.’