Bright Dart Read online

  He had been posted into the appointment after commanding an armoured regiment in Italy and he had little taste for office politics. Dryland had led him to believe that Ashby was a nonentity but clearly this assessment was false. It had become quite apparent that he was a man to be reckoned with, for, in the course of one day and contrary to all expectations, he had succeeded in forming the nucleus of a team.

  Truscott looked up from the report he had been studying and smiled at Ashby. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘You obviously don’t intend to let the grass grow under your feet.’

  ‘It might just do that if those people at the Ministry of Economic Warfare dig their toes in.’

  ‘Why should they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I have.’

  ‘I think we should work on the assumption that your plan will be approved,’ Truscott said firmly. ‘And obviously as a start we 36

  shall have to provide you with office space in London so that you can keep in touch with everyone.’

  ‘But I don’t need an office in London, Colonel.’

  Truscott ignored the interruption. ‘And I propose to let you have Mrs Cole.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  A frown creased Truscott’s forehead. ‘Take it from me,’ he said decisively, ‘she’s a very competent secretary who is familiar with the War Office routine. You’ll find her a great help.’

  ‘Of course you do realise that I shall be away from London for most of the time?’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You see, I’ve arranged to train my team at Trawsfynydd.’

  ‘Where’s that, for God’s sake?’

  ‘It’s a battle camp in North Wales.’ Ashby smiled tightly. ‘I’ve got six Germans, only two of whom you could say were soldiers; the others are untrained and unfit.’

  ‘Now that you’ve brought up the subject of fitness, how’s that ankle of yours?’

  ‘The limp doesn’t bother me.’

  Truscott lowered his eyes. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said quietly,

  ‘I just wanted to be reassured.’

  ‘I’m a little out of condition from sitting behind a desk, but, it won’t take me long to get back into shape. Of course, when you stop to think about it, whether I’m fit enough for the job is irrelevant—I’m the only man who can possibly carry it through because no other officer in your department believes in Gerhardt.’

  There was a great deal of truth in that statement. From the moment he’d arrived in England, Gerhardt, like Hess before him, had been treated as a crank. Left to himself, Truscott had to admit that in all probability he would have listened to Dryland’s advice, and the plan to assassinate Bormann would have been quietly dropped. Not for the first time he wondered at Ashby’s influence.

  ‘What are we going to call this team of yours, Michael?’

  The Michael came as an afterthought and it was the first time that Truscott had addressed him by his Christian name.

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ he said.

  ‘How does Force 272 strike you?’

  ‘It sounds impressive.’

  ‘Well, that’s settled then.’ Truscott picked up the folder on his desk and leafed through the report until he came to the annexure he was looking for. ‘I see you’re still short of five men,’ he said,

  ‘all of whom have to be specialists.’

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  ‘That’s right—I was hoping you could persuade the Special Operations Executive to loan us a few.’

  ‘I’ll do my best but I can’t guarantee that you’ll get them.’

  ‘Nobody could ask for more than that.’

  Truscott closed the folder abruptly. The remark had left him with the feeling that somehow their positions had been reversed and he was mildly irritated. ‘When do you hope to assemble your Germans?’ he said coldly.

  ‘They’re on their way to Trawsfynydd now, I plan to join them this evening.’

  ‘A bit premature, isn’t it?’

  ‘We can’t afford to wait for official approval before we start training. The way things are going, within a short space of time there won’t be much left of the German Resistance.’

  ‘So what do you propose to do?’

  Ashby smiled. ‘We’ll get the BBC to send them a message of encouragement,’ he said, ‘that should start the ball rolling.’

  Pitts lived in squalor without apparently being aware of it. The net curtains hanging stiffly in the windows were grey with dirt; books which had been removed from the shelves at one time or another now lay discarded in chairs, on the floor and in uneven stacks on the drop-leaf table, and the pungent, foul smell in the room came from a much-used dirt box. One of the two Siamese cats was cleaning itself in front of the electric fire while the other, curled up behind Dryland on the back of the armchair, appeared to be fast asleep. A saucer containing a few pieces of fish and a bowl of water lay in the hearth.

  Dryland, forced to sit on the edge of his chair, was too close to Pitts for his liking. At frequent intervals a plump hand came to rest on his thigh and squeezed it affectionately.

  Pitts said, ‘You must understand that I did my best to stop it, but events were running in Ashby’s favour.’

  Dryland moved his right leg and the offending hand was swiftly withdrawn. ‘What events?’ he said morosely.

  ‘My dear boy—the war—what else? Surely you must have realised that Arnhem is about to end in failure?’ Pitts shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know of a single official in the Ministry who now believes that the war in Europe will be over this year, so perhaps it’s hardly surprising that this scheme should be received with something approaching enthusiasm.’

  ‘The Russians won’t like it.’

  ‘The Russians, Tony, are still sitting in Poland and no Allied soldier has yet put foot on German soil except as a prisoner. Our people are now in a mood to grasp at almost any straw which 38

  might bring this dreary business to a rapid end.’ He picked up his glass of port and eyed it thoughtfully. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don’t give much for his chances even though we have agreed to assist him. Most of our best men are already committed, and of those that are available I can think of at least one who is very difficult.’

  ‘And who might that be?’

  ‘Cowper.’

  ‘I don’t think I know him.’

  ‘He’s a Captain with an MC and bar; did very well in the Western Desert and Italy operating behind the lines; caused no end of trouble on the German wireless nets when he chipped in with false instructions. I’m told that at Alam Halfa he succeeded in changing the axis of a Panzer battalion so that our anti-tank gunners were presented with a perfect defilade shoot.’

  ‘And that makes him a liability?’

  ‘As far as he is concerned, the only good German is a dead one—there are no exceptions. I imagine,’ Pitts said drily, ‘that that will scarcely go down well with the people Ashby has recruited.’ He leaned forward and placed the glass of port on the occasional table. His hand again sought out Dryland’s knee and pressed it warmly. ‘The Americans have also expressed an interest in the affair, Tony, and they’ve asked if they can attach an observer to the team while it is under training.’

  ‘What good will that do?’ Dryland said cautiously.

  ‘Dearest boy, the State Department doesn’t share our schizophrenic attitude towards the Russians because Roosevelt actually believes that he has some influence with Stalin. You don’t think they will allow us to upset that special realtionship, do you? At the first hint of a deal with the Wehrmacht they’ll be on to the Foreign Office and the project will be killed.’

  ‘Ashby has hoodwinked the War Office, what makes you think that he won’t do the same to your pet American?’

  ‘Because Jack Ottaway is one of the most experienced operatives in the OSS. Believe me, he’s no fool.’

  ‘Not even an intelligent man can see through a brick wall. On the surface, he’s planning to assassi
nate Bormann, and not until the Wehrmacht opens the gates for us will the truth really be known and by then it will be too late.’

  Pitts stifled a yawn. ‘Time and again I’ve heard you say that Ashby is about to make a deal with the German High Command but there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the allegation, Tony.’

  ‘Do you think I’m a liar?’ Dryland said angrily. ‘I debriefed Gerhardt—remember? He tried to sell me the idea before he ever met Ashby.’

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  The sudden outburst startled Pitts and he recoiled instinctively.

  ‘I’m not questioning your integrity, Tony,’ he said huffily, ‘I would scarcely have argued against backing the concept if for one moment I’d thought that you had been lying.’

  An open rift with Pitts was the last thing Dryland wanted and offending him had been a stupid mistake. He held out the olive branch.

  ‘I’m sorry, Leonard,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to fly off the handle.

  It’s just that I thought you and I were in agreement.’

  ‘We are, Tony,’ Pitts said earnestly, ‘we are, dear boy.’ The hand was back again on his thigh but in a curious way he was hardly aware of it. Pitts was smiling warmly and for some unaccountable reason Dryland experienced a feeling of relief.

  ‘We must wait and see what happens, Tony. If you do get something definite on Ashby we can always warn our friends.’

  ‘In the State Department?’

  ‘If you so wish,’ Pitts said softly, ‘but I can think of other parties who have a vested interest.’

  The River Weser was low for the time of year and the current hardly disturbed the dark waters, and in keeping with this sombreness, such was the efficiency of the blackout in Minden that the buildings on either bank looked lifeless and empty.

  Four men were parked off the road in a broad expanse of meadow which flanked the river at this point, and in the moonlight it was just possible to see the Kaiser Wilhelm monument which, high up on the hillside, faced out across the Westphalian Gap at the Bismarck statue on the opposite side of the Weser. Kastner, however, was not watching the distant hills.

  For Johannes Lehr, handcuffed to a uniformed policeman in the back of the car, it was not a pleasant homecoming. His face so bore the marks of Wollweber’s interrogation that few of the men who’d known him when he was serving with the Teno battalion would have recognised him now. He was curious to know why they were parked by the river, but successive beatings had so broken and cowed his spirit that he was afraid to ask. He could only suppose that Kastner was watching the house which faced the river and in this he was correct.

  The house, partly screened by a row of trees, belonged to Ernst Osler, at one time Doctor of Philosophy and Director of International Studies at the University of Münster. In June 1917, at the age of thirty-one, Osler was serving with the 24th Saxon Division on the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge which dominated the Ypres salient. It had been common knowledge among the soldiers of his company that the British had been tunnelling 40

  towards their positions, but they had had no conception of the scale of this enterprise. In the space of two years, the sappers of 2nd Army had driven nineteen galleries under the German positions on the ridge into which they had packed a total of one million pounds of ammonal. On the morning of the 7th of June, just as they were being relieved by the 3rd Bavarian Division, these nineteen mines were exploded simultaneously. In the resultant holocaust, the better part of both divisions were decimated. Seconds later 2400 guns began to pound the survivors.

  Osler’s company, reduced to a handful of men, was the only unit to hold its ground in the face of the enemy on that dreadful morning. By nightfall, Osler, his right hand shattered by a bullet, was the only man still on his feet. Before the month was out he had been awarded the Pour le Mérite.

  Twenty-seven years later, the Gestapo, looking for a man with a crippled right hand had, as a matter of course, checked through the local records of all persons in receipt of a disability pension and thereby had found the man they were after.

  This achievement would have satisfied most men, but not Kastner. Wanting to be absolutely sure before making his next move, he had arranged for Lehr to be sent up from Dortmund so that he could formally identify the suspect. That much was straightforward, the rest wasn’t. Arresting Osler hinged on whether or not he believed that Gerhardt was just one more General running away from the shambles of the July Bomb Plot.

  It would be a convenient and comforting hypothesis if that was really the case, but at the back of his mind there was a nagging doubt. The attempt to conceal Gerhardt’s disappearance had been clumsy but his escape from Germany had been well organised. It might be that he had stumbled upon yet another subversive group, but there was just a chance that it was something else altogether.

  Gerhardt, he thought, could be an emissary of some kind.

  Kastner leaned forward, tapped the driver on the shoulder and said, ‘You stay here while we go across to the house.’

  In the darkness of his bedroom on the second floor, Osler saw the three men leave the car and move towards his house. He had been discreetly watching the car for some time with the edgy feeling that its presence was in some way connected with himself, and now suspicion had become a certainty. He noticed that the men were keeping close to one another and, as they drew closer, he recognised the short, stocky figure of Lehr who was limping badly.

  Discovery was a possibility that Osler had lived with from the day Gerhardt had escaped to England, but with the passage of time he had been lulled into a sense of false security. He heard 41

  their footsteps on the tiled path and presently the doorbell rang, but although he knew that his deaf housekeeper could not hear it, he remained there in the window as if in a trance. It wasn’t until they started pounding on the door that he went downstairs to meet them.

  The voice was loud and arrogant. It was a voice which had struck fear into the hearts of men all over Europe these last five years for all too often it was the prelude to a long journey in a cattle truck which ended at the gas chamber. The door shook as a foot slammed against it and a crack suddenly appeared in the glass panel.

  A surge of anger swept through Osler. ‘All right,’ he shouted,

  ‘all right, that’s enough, there’s no need to break down the door, I’m coming as fast as I can.’ Opening to the limit of the security chain, Osler peered through the gap. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ he said.

  ‘Police. We want to come inside.’

  ‘You have some means of identification?’

  Kastner pointed to the uniformed policeman. ‘Do you think he’s going to a fancy dress party?’

  Osler slipped the security chain, stepped to one side to allow them to enter, and then closing the door behind them, switched on the hall lights. ‘We have to be careful about the blackout,’ he said primly.

  ‘That’s not the only thing you need to be careful about.’ Kastner turned to Lehr. ‘Is this the man?’ he said sharply.

  Through lips which were still swollen, Lehr said bitterly, ‘Oh yes, he’s the one all right. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be in all this trouble.’

  Now that they were close to one another, his appearance shocked Osler. The face, covered in yellow bruises, was like an over-ripe melon which threatened to burst out of its skin.

  Kastner said, ‘I don’t suppose you recognise your friend, do you, Doctor? But he knows you and that’s good enough for me.’ A thin smile showed briefly but there was no warmth in it. ‘We have much to discuss and this is hardly the place for a serious talk.’

  Osler touched his dressing-gown. “If you can give me a few minutes,’ he said, ‘I’ll go and change.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You have a study?’

  ‘Why, yes.’

  ‘Then perhaps you would lead the way?’

  Osler hesitated, unsure of himself and then, recovering, said,

 
‘Of course. Please follow me, Herr——?’

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  ‘Kastner.’ He paused for maximum effect before adding, ‘Of Amt IV RSHA Berlin. I expect you know about my department?’

  ‘I’m aware of its existence,’ Osler said drily. He opened the study door and ushered Kastner inside. ‘Do you want your friends to remain in the hall?’

  The bleak smile came back again. ‘They are not my friends, Doctor. The man Lehr is a prisoner, the policeman is there to see that he doesn’t run away—they’re quite used to waiting in corridors.’ His eyes took in the crowded bookshelves. ‘You have a fine library,’ he said mechanically.

  ‘Unfortunately I find little time now to enjoy it.’

  Kastner dropped into an armchair and crossed his legs.

  ‘Naturally, your work for Foreign Minister Ribbentrop must be very demanding.’ He took out a packet of Chesterfields, lit one and idly watched the thin stream of blueish smoke curl up towards the ceiling. ‘You haven’t closed the door properly, Doctor.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought I had.’

  ‘That was careless of you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The lock doesn’t always catch.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Osler walked across the room and sat down behind the desk.

  He clasped his hands together to prevent them shaking, cleared his throat nervously and then said, ‘How can I help you, Herr Kastner?’

  ‘You are a very influential man.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘There’s no need to be so modest, Doctor. We all know what a superb job you made of the Katyn affair, Reich Minister Goebbels was loud in his praises.’