Chapter Seven

Charles Mawby, with the advantage of a diplomatic passport, was quickly off the plane and through Immigration. He walked at a busy pace through the Customs area and out onto the concourse and his eyes roved for the man meeting him. Adam Percy, SIS resident in the German capital, stood back from the waving greeters and welcome carriers who awaited other passengers from the London flight. Mawby saw him, strode forward, there was a brief and perfunctory handshake and they were on their way to the car park.

They looked what they were. The man on the ground who was the junior and at the airport to meet his chief from head office. The twinge of deference, had it been a good journey? The fact that the plane had not been delayed, the weather should hold up. With Percy driving they moved off for the autobahn heading south.

'What seems to be the form, Adam?'

'I held off calling you, Mr Mawby, until I'd lined a man for you to talk with.'

'Thank you for that.'

'We're going now to a village just the far side of Bonn, to see a man who deals in the matters we're concerned with.' The mole bulged on the left face of Percy's nose, his lips were flaccid and creased and bloodless.

In the Service his name was synonymous with dogged and persistent endeavour. 'I'd heard some years ago of this group. Bringing people out of the East for cash, it's their speciality. They deliver — I checked the man out with Bundesnachrich- tendienst.'

'Who do we deal with now at BND?'

'This was back door, an after hours request, as you wanted. The usual source.'

'Who are we seeing?'

'He's not the sort you'd have for cocktails, not a pleasing example of the human species, but that's not the job sheet, is it? His motivation would be categorised as political. A junior SS officer at the end of the war, but too junior to warrant retribution from the legal system. All the ideology was stored up and left to fester. He's a communist hater, and this is his way of goading them. He runs a small group that manages with a fair regularity to bring out unhappy citizens from the DDR in exchange for fat returns from their relatives and friends living on this side. Most of his scene of action is along the Berlin to Helmstedt autobahn.'

Mawby dived him a quick glance. 'That's possible, is it?'

'It's possible. Possible but hazardous.' Percy kept his eyes on the road.

'Not straightforward, not for people like this?'

'Hazardous, Mr Mawby, and that cannot be overstressed. In theory the DDR is obliged under the terms of the postwar Four Power Agreement to provide unimpeded motor access between West Germany and West Berlin. In effect over the last 2 years they have substantially raised the numbers of cars stopped and searched at the Marienborn checkpoint.

The two principal methods of evasion involve persons hidden in a vehicle, or those provided with false papers, forged documents and attempting to bluff their way through. They're not idiots on the border, they've a fair idea what they're looking for… there are some 500 West Germans serving time. The drivers, the fixers, the link-men, they'll testify to the thoroughness of the scrutiny at the border. There's a considerable intelligence effort mounted by the Staatssicherheitadienst that's aimed specifically at infiltrating the groups, giving them a length of rope and then strangling them.'

Perhaps even in the warm interior of the speeding car, Charles Mawby felt a faint and winnowing chill. Why did the wretched man start with the difficulties? Mawby had spoken in London of the feasibility of the concept, he had not lingered on the ruts and pot-holes in the road.

'How tight is our group?'

'How long is an Irish mile, Mr Mawby? The bad ones don't last, and this one has survived, that's on his side. Security is always going to be the greatest strain though. If nobody knows of them then they don't attract the trade, and they're commercial, so they need an order list. In a vague way they have to go out and tout for business. They have to be known, and the BND knows about our merchant.'

'You've called me over to meet this man, so what tells you he has the necessary security factor to be suitable for us?'

His politics. He detests them over there, detests and loathes them.

His whole life is kicking them, and around him are like-minded people. To you and me his pay-roll is made up of thugs and fascists

It wouldn't be simple to infiltrate that kind of group.'

'That makes sense.' Mawby sighed a bellows blast of relief. The start of the good news, but the moment was short.

'You have to understand, Mr Mawby, that if you launch with this man you can expect us to be alone with him. Even if we subsequently change stance and request it, we'll get no help from BND. The authorities aren't friendly with these people. From the Chancellor down they're condemned. They're seen as jeopardising the free flow along the autobahn, the Soviets are for ever threatening that if Bonn doesn't take a firmer hand, stamp them out, then new controls will be asserted on the autobahn. They're an embarrassment to government here, the groups stand in the way of the gradual thaw in East and West German relations, so they're just not wanted. It's not an area where we'd have active co-operation.'

Mawby turned to watch the How of growing crops and grass shudder past him, felt the trembling roar of an over- taking articulated lorry and trailer.

' I suppose we couldn't do this ourselves?' Mawby be- trayed his unhappiness.

'You could, but you take a risk.'

'Explain yourself.'

'If you have a car with a British driver and you have German passengers with German documentation then you invite inspection. You couldn't give British paperwork to Germans and just hope they weren't singled for questioning, and if it were blown…

Good grief, they'd be scuttling for cover in Outer Mongolia.'

'Quite so.'

'You have to be distant from it, Mr Mawby. Distant from the group and above everything distant from the driver, so the leads and traces back are stifled.'

Mawby looked across at Percy, but the eyes were fixed on the road. Of course he was right and he could afford to be, because it wasn't down to him, the responsibility wasn't going to find its way to Adam Percy's pudgy back.

'How long do we have, before you want the pick-up made?'

'Our man is unavailable after the fifteenth of June,' Mawby said.

'That's sharp.'

'It has to be done in that time.'

'Not much scope for rehearsal, not before the first night. You'll have to hope everybody learns their lines by the curtain lift.'

'It has to be done in that time.'

'So be it,' said Percy. 'Perhaps we should wish each other luck, Mr Mawby.'

They bumped over the cobbled streets of Bonn, were held by traffic lights, cramped by cars as they crawled towards the south side of the city. Mawby had nothing more to say, nothing before the meeting was joined.

'Will your father take any work with him to Magdeburg?'

'Only if there were something very pressing. Only if there was a problem at Padolsk would they contact him.'

'While he's in Magdeburg is he subject to surveillance?'

'A guard, a policeman watching him?… I don't think so. Never before.

But like every outsider, every visitor, his documents must go to Strasse der Jugend…'

'What's that, Willi?'

'To the offices of the City police. For the stamp.'

'Would the Soviet military be in contact with him, or GRU'

'The Red Army, yes. They will know that he is in Magdeburg. They invite him each year for a dinner, perhaps to the garrison camp of the armoured division at Bierderitz

'That's to the east of Magdeburg?'

'East across the river. The GRU, no… there is no reason for the intelligence people to watch him.'

'You are sure he is not under permanent surveillance?'

'I am certain he is not.'

'There is no policeman that is attached to him?'

'There are none.'

'We are now into the age of the tactical nuclear concept and that means the end for fixed defensive positions. With tactical nuclear armouries the Maginot thinking is gone for ever. But you can only justify nuclear reaction to conventional attack if you have lost great tracts of land and territory, and if you have major hostile concentrations to aim the missiles at. The decision to go nuclear will not be made by a field commander, not by a man in denims with four stars on his cap, it will be made by a politician with political considerations uppermost and the risk of setting off a domino run of nuclear escalation giving him nightmares. So the military men on our side have to think in terms of meeting a conventional attack with conventional defence. The order of the day will be small, highly mobile units, low density and self-contained. Our tanks would be operating in platoon formation, four or five together and they will be met by Soviet mechanised infantry with manual controlled missiles. The infantry will have all the cover they want, wrecked villages, forestry, good and hilly terrain. The missile men can have a field day, and their equipment's off the Padolsk design board. You're with me, Johnny?'

The village was tucked within the twin walls of the valley. The church and main street low in the bed beside a stream and the houses scattered indiscriminately above. The leaves were coming to the trees, the grass on the small lawns sprouted, the first flowers were opening. A quiet, private place.

Percy drove up a winding track. He scanned the gateposts of the houses for the number that he wanted. It was a split- level home, modern and freshly-painted and large. As the car drew up, there was a trembling in Mawby's legs, irritating and uncontrolled. They were a far cry from clubland, from the Service, from his home ground. He would rather have been anywhere, anywhere other than climbing from a car, stepping onto a track on the outskirts of a village south of Bonn, anywhere other than walking in this foreign place with morose Adam Percy for company. It was the expectable butterflies, first time at the sharp end for a year or so.

They went up the short driveway.

'No names, eh?'

'He won't want them,' Percy said.

Up to the front door, polished and heavy. Mawby looked behind him over his shoulder, nothing moved, nobody to observe the men in dark suits in the village setting. Percy pressed the bell button.

He was a big man who greeted them, a man of gross power and physique. A short neck, ears hugging his shoulders. A bullet head crowned with a shaven stubble of white hair. Heavy, muscled arms that stretched tight his high folded shirt sleeves. He loomed over them.

Best foot forward, Charles Augustus. Career men don't retreat, career men push ahead. Couldn't have delegated this one, could he? Couldn't have parcelled it off on Carter. This one was for Mawby. And he must not stare at the scar where a revolver bullet probably had nicked the skin high across the right cheek bone, and he must not curl his lip at the waft of cologne. You need him, Charles Augustus. More than he needs you, you need him. Just as you need Johnny Donoghue who killed a girl and never uttered a syllable of remorse. Just as you need the snivelling Guttmann. Just as you need Carter and the prig Pierce, and Smithson.

All of them needed by Charles Augustus Mawby… God Almighty, what furniture. They followed the man into a room dominated by a single picture, a massive canvas of the reclining nude, white skin, angular limbs, a bush of hair, a summit of breasts. Mawby looked away, pained. What you'd expect of the man from what Percy had told him.

But he had come to do business and so he sat in a mauve and green chair and smiled with all the warmth that he could muster.

There was the offer of a drink that Mawby declined; there was the brisk establishment of Christian names. The man called himself Hermann.

He would ask questions to ascertain the nature of the assignment, then they would discuss practicabilities, then they would talk of the price to be paid.

'Is there a date involved, Charles?'

Mawby flinched from the familiarity. 'The thirteenth or fourteenth of June.'

'How many are there to be transported?'

'One elderly man and his adult daughter.'

'Where in the DDR are they living?'

'They will be staying in Magdeburg. On the fifteenth they return to Moscow.'

'They are Russian then?'

'They are German.'

'Who will make contact with them for the arrangements?'

'That will be our responsibility.'

'They could be brought to a point where a car could meet them?'

'We would bring them to that point, yes.'

'For two persons it is difficult to conceal them in a car, they would require documentation. Who would provide the papers?'

'We would provide them with West German passports and general cover material.'

'Is the face of this man known to the DDR authorities, would his picture have been in the newspapers?'

'Never.'

'You are anxious to make it so simple, Charles, but I tell you that it is not easy.' Hermann wheezed with theatrical effect, rolling his eyes to the ceiling.

'To me it is very simple,' Mawby clipped in response.

'Not so. If it were easy then you would manage your own affairs. And you give little time for the arrangements. You have not thought of the linking of the vehicle papers with the documentation of the driver, his assistant and the passengers. Those are two reasons why it is not easy.

Thirdly…'

'Why is there the need of a second man in the car?'

'You know little of the documentation required for this journey, Charles. Any West German who makes use of the Berlin to Helmstedt autobahn is considered as a transit passenger through the DDR territory.

His passport is stamped on entry and exit. So the driver will have his pass- port stamped when he leaves West Berlin. At a suitable moment in the journey he will collect two passengers, but they do not have the stamp and that must be attached while the car is moving towards the DDR checkpoint at Marien- born. The driver cannot do that, he is at the wheel, another must be there to do it. Understand me, Charles, it is not the stamp that is the difficulty, it is the signature that goes with the stamp. The signature for the passengers who are picked up must match with that on the papers of the driver. So the driver must have an assistant and he is the man who will attach the signature, and he must work in the moving car between Berlin and Marienborn, that is their check point opposite Helmstedt. You follow me, Charles?'

'I quite understand…' Mawby doing his best to take the lecture in his stride, as no more than his due.

'Thirdly, the people that you want taken from the DDR will have an importance, or you as foreigners would not be interested by them. You are not involved with bringing to freedom your friend or your relation, you are bringing someone who is of political use to you. If the pigs there catch a driver then he will stay eight or ten years in the gaol, not happy years. But if there is the smell of political action, if he is working for a foreign power then they will make more of it, perhaps fifteen years. It is not a safe business, you know that, Charles?'

'I'm perfectly aware of that.' Mawby trying not to catch the eye of the nude.

'The price would be 25 thousand marks. Twenty-five thousand marks for each passenger that we bring through.'

Mawby stiffened, felt a sweat bead spring at his hairline. The calculations swarmed over him. Three marks eighty to the pound.

Thirteen thousand, one hundred and fifty sterling. 'That's bloody steep, Hermann, for a drive down the autobahn…'

The man was hunched in his chair, peering in surprise at Mawby. Adam Percy kept aloof.

'I did not suppose that this money would come from your own pocket, Charles.'

Mawby pulled for his rank. 'We have a certain influence in this country.'

Hermann laughed. A light, fine cackle. A small and diminutive noise from such a carcase of a man. 'Don't play with me, Charles. You have told me that an East German who is resident in Moscow will be in Magdeburg till the 15th of June, a man who interests a foreign agency.

How long would it take the Volkspolizei to identify the man you want carried? I think a few hours only. Don't make threats to me, Charles.'

Mawby rose from his chair. 'I'll have to refer the matter back.'

'But don't sit on it. And remember that it is not your money.'

'I will ring you in the evening with the answer.'

'If you accept then we should meet again tomorrow.' Hermann grinned, climbed from his chair and advanced on Mawby with a hand outstretched.

The farewells were brief. Mawby and Percy walked briskly out into the late afternoon air, the nude at Mawby's heel.

Smithson sat in his armchair with the street map on his knees, Johnny opposite him, after dinner coffee in his hands.

'Magdeburg had come through the war pretty well till January 16th in 1945, when the American air force came on the scene. Sixteen thousand people died that day and the inner city was obliterated, and I mean that.

They started again with a heap of rubble and ended up with rows of flats, functional little homes for the workers. There was pre-war industry there and that's been expanded, mostly engineering. It's a major rail centre for the south-west of the DDR. the honeypot that originally attracted the bombs. Now it's a provincial capital with all the trappings, big parks, a crop of theatres and concert halls along with new developments towards the north, Neue Neustadt, Nordwest and Olven- stedt. There's only one hotel that's offering rooms to foreigners, the International, where you'll be, which is highly convenient to us, the cat will be right on top of the mouse… Now we'll turn to the policing of the city. There will be a unit of SSD there. There is a headquarters of the Volkspolizei Bizirksbehorde, operating out of Halber- stadter Strasse 2, they're the provincial police. The town police, Volkspolizei Kreisamt, are little more than souped- up traffic men. Because of the proximity of the border there's a strong detachment of Schutzpolizei, they're security police and slightly down the ladder from SSD, also at Halberstadter Strasse. They keep their eyes open, their ears open. They look hard and they listen hard.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary had a suite of offices at Century House.

An outer room for meetings. A smaller room for his desk and easy chair.

An annexe where he had the use of a single bed if he had no wish to return to his Hampshire home or to spend the night at his club. They were light and comfortable quarters, but too recent for his taste and like many of his senior colleagues he still hankered for the old days of the Queen Anne's Gate building and its peeling glories. The evening had blanketed the London skyline below his windows, the lights eddied on the

Thames beneath. The House of Commons steeples and clock- face swam in their floodlighting. Columns of cars nudged forward on the miniaturised Embankment beneath him.

Mawby's telex still lay on the desk of his private office. A good man, Mawby, a tried and trusted man, a man with a future, who might one day inherit this upper office. The telex from Mawby requesting authorisation for the payment of 13,150 pounds sterling to a German national for the lift down the autobahn to Helmstedt. Eight months of the Deputy-Under-Secretary's salary, quite a handful for the wide embrace of 'miscellaneous'. But he had authorised it without question. If it was good enough for Mawby, it was…

The telephone warbled.

The green receiver with the scrambler distortion devices.

'Yes.'

'Fenton here.' Peter Fenton, Director of the Security Service. Rather a tiresome voice.

'What can I do for you, Peter?' The Deputy-Under-Secre- tary was guarded when in contact with his opposite number from Security.

Different men, different standards.

'Nothing that's very important… I just wondered if you felt the change of dates put out by FCO this afternoon for the DDR trade visit affected the business you were putting together.'

'You're ahead of me, Peter. I've been in one meeting after another, I haven't managed to get at my tray.'

'The visit of Oskar Frommholtz, FCO informed us because we have an escort commitment. It seems Comrade Frommholtz has asked for a change of dates. He was due here for the last week in June, that's been brought forward because he's a COMECON commitment on the original date.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary fished in his memory. 'We trying to turn the trade imbalance, they looking for a foreign protocol… Why should it affect anything we're doing?'

'The visit will coincide with the Guttmann dates. Frommholtz will be being wined and dined on Whitehall when the good scientist is nippin over the border.'

'It's a covert operation, nothing to link it with us.'

'Quite right… if it works, but it would be a pretty mess if your nursemaid were picked up… Are you still there?'

'Yes, Peter.'

'I think the PM should know. I think the PM should sanction it. That's my advice anyway…'

'I'll not give it up.'

'Nothing went into the minutes of JIC. If he's not told, and if the thing trips, they'd have our skins.'

'I'll not lose this to a politician with a weak stomach and a short future.'

'That's your decision then…'

'Thank you for calling,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary said. 'Good night, Peter.'

He replaced the receiver. Perhaps he would say something to Downing Street. Not at this time, but later, something that would not arouse curiosity. Of course there was risk, but without risk the Service died, dried on the branch. And when he produced Otto Guttmann that would rank as a rare moment of success. A success that he would not tolerate the faint-hearted to deny him. And Fenton had no right to talk of failure, damned old woman wringing his hands. The Deputy-Under-Secretary sat at his desk and read again the message from Mawby. He had authorised the payment, he had stood by his Assistant Secretary. Mawby was a good man, young and a little green, but sound for all that. Mawby believed in the plan, that should be enough for him, shouldn't it?

Security was always parsimonious in initiative, that was the difference between them and the Service. Mean, weren't they, when a bit of dash was required? The Deputy- Under-Secretary smiled. It was going to be a damned good show. He would not be balked.

With the curtains across the French windows not drawn, the lights of the sitting room lit the outside patio. From his chair Carter watched Johnny in the towelling top they had found for him and the loose trousers, listened to the thudding beat of his boots. There was an old oak garden chair on the patio. Right foot onto the chair, left foot following. Right foot onto the concrete flags, left foot following. The steady rhythm of the boots. The pumping of Johnny's breath. The press-ups. The jogging on the lawn. Only when it was quite dark, when the night had closed on the house would Johnny come back inside, and there would be a towel round his neck, and he would tramp towards the kitchen for a pot of tea.

Awesome to Carter because he was a desk man, who had not in recent years called upon the strength in his legs, the wind in his lungs. The division between them. Carter would be at the Departures desk in the airport concourse, or on the railway platform. Johnny would be flying on, Johnny would be travelling. That was the division, and Carter could not read his book as the boots pounded from the patio to the garden chair.

No movement since the patrol jeep had passed. Nothing stirred. And the ink darkness was cut savagely by the lights that fell on the fence, clasped it in false daylight, played on the sharp mesh and the attached guns.

Relief at four. Two more boys to climb the metal rungs on the inside of the tower and come to the closed platform 40 feet above the fields. Two more boys to take the places of Ulf Becker and Heini Schalke.

Open ground in front, 300 metres of grass, scythed twice a summer by workmen who were brought close to the wire and covered by the guns of the Border Guard. Open ground all the way from the electrified fence and the trip wires on the embankment of the railway line that had once served the brick works of Weferlingen, all the way to the vehicle patrol strip and the ditch and the fence with the automatic guns. Open ground.

Ulf Becker would never run on that open ground, not with Heini Schalke high and unimpeded above him in the tower. Not with Heini Schalke pulling the hard stock of the MPiKM against his shoulder and squinting with his pig eyes down the foresight.

Not here… an impossibility here.

Cold in the shadow of the tower. Cold in the night air. Gone was the heat and the touch of Jutte. Find me that place, she had said. Find me that place, she had shouted from the platform at Schoneweide. But there was no place on the ground west of Weferlingen. If he were to come on foot to the south of the village, use the Siedlung Hagholz woods for concealment and cross the road that leads to the lime works, and stay beyond the old brick buildings of the railway yards… Then there was the tower and the night- sight binoculars, then there were the lights, then there were the fences, then there were the spring guns, and still there was Heini Schalke and a hundred more in the company.

A chill eddied in the tower, carried on the wind, bitter and penetrating because the windows must be open so as not to delay them if they must shoot and because the binoculars were less effective through glass.

Jutte, it is not possible here.

Find me that place.

Away to his left he saw the lights of the approaching jeep. The border, lethal to those who intruded on its ground, was alive only with armed and watchful men.

There was a pleasing peace in the house. Close to midnight. Smithson and Pierce away to their beds. Carter back into his book. The slow hours of the late evening. The best time of the day for Johnny, when the quiet took command.

'You know, Johnny, we haven't a name for this caper, and we're under a month.' Carter looked up. 'We have to have a name for you.'

'Not a bloody Greek god, don't give me one of them.'

'Of course, lad. I've found it here, just the number.'

Johnny was amused. Johnny wondered whether Carter's hands ever sweated, whether he shouted at his wife, threw his temper at his children, whether he panicked, whether he screamed. He had seen a rough side with the boy, but that was tactical, that showed neither strength nor weakness. Carter would be escorting Johnny to Hannover, working on the fine detail of the pick-up. He'd want to have faith in this man, Johnny would want to trust him, to the full. The one who ironed the creased details of organisation… and who was filching ideas from a guide to European birds.

'What are you going to call me?'

Carter looked over the top of his reading spectacles. 'The Latin is cinclus cinclus. There are many names, different in parts of the country — water blackbird, water crow, water pyet. These are the characteristics…

"straight, fast flight. Can swim both on the surface and under water, enters water by either wading in or diving, habitually walks submerged on the stream bed." That's what we want of our lad, creeping along the floor of the river while the Volkspolizei sit on the banks in blissful ignorance. I reckon that's rather apt. They call it most often the Dipper.

I'm going to put it to Mawby. You'll be the Dipper man, Johnny. I think it's rather good…'

Johnny had not replied. There were feet drumming down the staircase.

The crash of doors being wrenched open. George's voice angry and raised and cursing.

Carter snapped his book shut, drove his glasses into his breast pocket, started up from his chair.

The door of the living room arched towards them. George was in silhouette, the hall lights blazing behind him. Half dressed, hair dishevelled, eyes wide with anger.

'He's gone… Guttmann. I can't find the bugger anywhere.'

It was Johnny who discovered the imprint of shoes in the soft earth of the flower bed beside the rainwater pipe beneath the boy's window.

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