house he had silently pushed the car a hundred yards away down the road. Then the pin again, inserted into the slot of the ignition and the engine had spluttered long-sufferingly. Otto Guttmann had been given the back seat and been told to lie down as best he could across it so that only two occupants would show. Erica beside Johnny and holding through the open window a white handkerchief.
That was the justification for haste at this early hour. A medical emergency. A young man driving a young girl, and any who saw the speed- ing car would think only of a person in pain, a person in need of help.
They might have had time, Johnny believed, to block the main roads, but not the secondary routes. The red ribbons on his map he avoided, and also the yellow marked roads where possible until he was forced into the town of Haldens- leben. Small and deserted on a Sunday morning.
Comrade Honecker leered from the hoarding outside the FDGB building. Once Johnny chuckled grimly to himself as a racing green and white car of the polizei hurtled by him heading towards Magdeburg.
Calling reinforcements to the city. So far so good, Johnny.
It was a pretty road out of Haldensleben, winding through woods and curling on slight hills.
There was no talk in the car, no attempt at conversation, because the Stechkin rested on the seat under Johnny's thigh. He had taken the gun from his waist as he had first driven away, tried it on his lap and it had slipped, decided against asking Erica to hold it. The gun maimed his passengers' confidence, slipped them into silence. And if Johnny knew it, then so could Erica and her father realise that each time they swept round a blind corner then that might be the place where the block was in position.
Strangely calm, Johnny felt, as if he had found fulfilment, as if at last he approached some personal summit. Onto the crucial steep slope, and the mountain high, high above him. Through Suplingen, through Ivenrode, and the light haze was creeping on them and the headlights could be cut and the need for more speed from the car because they had lost the shelter of roadside trees for wide fields. One more wood and that would be the limit of the Trabant's usefulness.
The hamlet of Bischofswald was hardly more than a collection of high, brick farm buildings beside a railway station. A small private place.
Home for half a dozen families who would work a Landwirtshaftliche Produktiongenossens… collective farm to you, Johnny… what a bloody mouthful. Six hundred hectares of potato and beet, and a small patch beside each house that could be called the peasant farmer's own, for growing the vegetables that he could take to the market to pay for his luxuries, for his soap and his meat and his wife's best dress… Steady, Johnny, dreaming. More trees, more woods. He looked at the dashboard, at the kilometre figures, snapped out his sums and subtractions. Far enough for the car, far enough for pushing their luck.
He swung the Trabant off to the right and bounced it on full power across the giving compost of the forest floor. Away between the trees until he saw the hollow a hundred metres from the tarmacadam. Otto Guttmann out, Erica out. Johnny plunged the car down, braced himself against the wheel for the last bruising impact. He slid the Stechkin into his waist, slammed the door shut behind him, and ignored the other two as he set about his work. Into the boot by pulling forward the rear seat. It was a chance and he was rewarded; many cars that travelled the north German plain carried a spade that could be used in winter to dig snow from behind the wheels. He tossed it without comment to Erica. There was a towing rope, and that too he took. Next to the bonnet which he lifted and then he began to rip systematically at every foot of wire and cable that he could reach. From the trunk of a birch tree he tore small, leafy branches and methodically brushed at the tyre imprints.
Johnny walked back a few yards towards the road then looked again at the place where the car rested. Not good, not bad, the best that he could manage.
'All on foot from here. I reckon we're eight miles from the border, and that means five miles from the Restricted Zone. We start quick and we get slower as we come close, slower and more careful. I want to get into the Restricted Zone at dusk, be near to the Hinterland fence by the time we rest…'
'What is the Hinterland fence?' asked Otto Guttmann. An out of place animal, he seemed, bristle coming to his drawn cheeks, tie slewed sideways, suit crumpled.
'Five hundred yards from the border there's an electrified fence, that's the Hinterland.'
'You can take us through an electric fence?' A spark of awe from Erica.
'… Or under it, or over it. It runs damn near the whole length of the sector. We have to cross it if we are to get to the frontier.'
'What is at the frontier?'
'When we get there, when we're near it, that's the time to talk about the frontier.'
Erica persisted. 'Have we done well so far, Johnny?'
'We've done well, and it's all still in front of us. You've seen nothing yet, just a few lamps and sirens…'
They started to walk. Johnny took his bearings from the gathering sunlight. The same procedure as before. Erica on one side, Johnny on the other, husbanding the strength of Otto Guttmann.
'Why do you do this for us?' the old man asked.
'It's my job.'
'I say again, why. 3'
'It's the job I was given…'Johnny said. 'A contract I was given…'
'By people who were not worthy of you, who did not provide the car.
Why not abandon us, make good your own escape?'
His voice was close to Johnny's ear, and his tone was gentle in age, persuasive in pitch. No witnesses, no tape recorders, nothing to recall and keep in perpetual memory what Johnny might say. No justification for a further lie.
'I have to do it, Doctor, it's a way back for me. It shakes off my past.
You know in battle, in combat, some men go far up the road towards their enemy and get medals for courage, most of them go that far so as not to be called cowards…'
'We would never accuse you of cowardice,' Otto Guttmann said quietly.
'We shouldn't talk any more,' clipped Johnny. 'The sound carries a long way. We make enough noise already.'
They had started at a brisk pace. Johnny had no complaint.
In the Long Gallery at Chequers where the previous evening he had heard of the breakdown of the DIPPER plan, the Prime Minister played host to Oskar Frommholtz, Trade Minister and Politburo member of the German Democratic Republic. The two men were alone with the Downing Street interpreter.
The Prime Minister had showered, had then taken breakfast in his room, had telephoned the Deputy-Under- Secretary for the latest reports.
He was told of the flight of Willi Guttmann. He knew that the Magdeburg police radio had broadcast descriptions of a British passport holder travelling under the name of John Dawson, and of Doctor Otto Guttmann and his daughter, Erica. He knew that checkpoint searches at Marienborn had reduced motor traffic on the Berlin road corridor to a trickle. He was given a brief outline of the East German manhunt to draw in the tatters of the mission.
So the meeting demanded of him now by the Trade Minister was the first of the crisis that would break about his shoulders. And crisis it was, he had no illusions. Much greater than the dismemberment of the adolescent relations between the United Kingdom and the German Democratic Republic. That could be coped with, managed. That was inconsequential to the wider crisis. The damnable incompetence of those people over in Germany would involve him in the recrimination of the Chancellor in Bonn. The Federal Republic was involved because DIPPER had launched from their territory, utilised their nationals, avoided the channels of co-operation. A wretched business the whole damned thing. There would be reverberations in Washington, they were always fast enough to raise questions of the efficiency of their British cousins when an intelligence mission was bungled. If the European newspapers sniffed at the scandal of a botched operation and printed, then the domestic protection of the D notice was invalidated, and the story of failure would slither into the British media. The escape of Willi Guttmann was the final straw. God, how could they have been so stupid?
Stupid and arrogant.
Questions in the House would follow that he would have to evade and sidestep, queries as to his control over the mechanics of government.
There would be a great communal titter. Eisenhower had faced it, he had been confronted with a downed spy plane and a pilot who talked freely in Lubianka gaol. The President of the United States had the name of Gary
