S.S. officer closely, concluded he’d had some seizure or stroke. Schenker was gripped with terror. He wanted to crawl down off the bed and to Eva’s feet. Tears flowed down his face and he blinked them away. He was only partially successful. Kincaid and Regan came in and stood over him.
‘Too bad,’ said Kincaid, staring down at the helpless soldier.
‘We could cut the footage, re-shoot with just you,’ suggested Regan.
‘Died as a result of wounds sustained helping all of us escape,’ Kincaid decided.
Sharing a look, they leant over him, pulling the pillows from behind his head.
‘A posthumous Iron Cross for you, bud …. ’
The last thing Thor Schenker saw was the pillow coming down over his face. His very last thought was that Eva had his Luger.
The ME-109s were at the end of their operational range and banked away from the flying boat, leaving it unescorted over the Gulf of Finland. Behind it lay Russia; its army on the verge of defeat, their cities ablaze and leaderless; a nation on the brink of ruin.
The radio operator had heard that Schenker was dead, from a stroke apparently. He was unsure what to do next. He was just a secret policeman watching Kincaid. It had something to do with the girl, though. The communications between Schenker and Berlin were private and the line between Gestapo and the Waffen S.S. was distinct. You just didn’t cross it. He watched the fighters regroup in formation and dive back toward the cursed land. He decided to say nothing about the S.S. Officer for the moment and returned to fine-tuning the bandwidths. In his headphones a message arrived. It was repeated in a loop over several minutes. Looking up at the pilots, he tapped them on the shoulder and when they looked around he wrote on his pad: U-Boat 806. He responded in code that the message had been received and they were awaiting co-ordinates.
The American transport had ploughed straight through the storm, its engines screaming in protest. It had dived and recovered alarmingly, pitching everyone into the air and clattering them off the airframe.
The pilots and navigator kept pointing to their watches and giving the thumbs up between nosedives with big toothy smiles to the passengers. The Americans had laughed about the team insisting on maps to study as if the answers would jump out of the cartographer’s lines.
‘If we ever go to war with these guys, we can beat them just by hiding all their maps!’ the navigator quipped to the pilots.
The sky ahead was murky but it was alive, lit up with lightning streaks and the clatter of hail-stones. For all they knew they could be ten feet above the ground heading for a mountain. Another bout of turbulence plunged the plane downward before tossing it upward to the hoots and hollers of the pilots. Kravchenko shook his head. These cowboys were actually enjoying this. Tyumen will have found the train by now and he would be labelled a fugitive unless they decided the wolves had dragged his corpse into the forest. He looked at his companions all hanging on for dear life. No-one was making eye-contact because they were focused on the new mission, trained professionals cut loose from their world with no purpose except to chase a millionaire body-snatcher into Finland.
Kravchenko had served in Finland two years earlier fighting at Salla and respected the Finns as resourceful fighters. The Germans on the other hand he had no compassion for, nor had he shown any mercy until today. These Germans could’ve killed him and he acknowledged a blood debt. As soon as he had Lenin back, he would return with him and help these Germans cross the Swiss border.
Olga felt ill. She held Kant’s hand, almost tearing the flesh with her nails. She found herself watching the Russian, the enemy. His facial swellings had gone down, leaving bruising around his eyes. His hand had been cleaned and dressed by the navigator and he was poring over a map with tiny islets around the Gulf of Finland. He tipped her a knowing wink. She just kept staring at him, then through him.
Sunlight burst through the windows as the transport cleared the storm. One side of the cockpit’s window had a spider’s web of cracks, and the starboard engine sounded in trouble. It had a racking cough and smoke was pouring from the propeller housing. The pilots and navigator whooped for joy, turning around to their passengers to shout in unison, ‘Next stop Finland, folks!’
‘Great,’ muttered Kant, ’we’re flying with the bloody Marx Brothers.’
Chapter 12
U-806 broke above the surface. The sunlight glinted off her lines, giving her a menacing aspect. She had been built in Hamburg in a top-secret dock away from the main Kriegsmarine shipyards and, on completion, berthed in Saint-Nazaire away from the main North Atlantic wolf-packs. She had slipped out under the cover of night unnoticed as the French Resistance was focusing its intelligence on the main Atlantic U-Boat fleet.
She now cruised toward the rendezvous point three miles off the fortified Finnish island of Suomenlinna. Remaining above the surface allowed her batteries to recharge and gave the crew a few hours to enjoy the sunlight and fresh air.
A prototype designed for this mission, her forward bulkheads were reinforced and the interior stripped down to the most basic of requirements. The exceptions were the bridge, her torpedo room and the forward hold. These were designed to house and maintain the sarcophagus on its final trip.
Kincaid had paid for U-806's construction in gold bullion and had spared no expense throughout this enterprise, right down to the hand-picked crew. All were seasoned North Atlantic submariners. Her Finnish Captain; Jakko Ahtisaans, knew the surrounding eight islands and sounds like the back of his hand. He had hunted down and sunk three Russian U-Boats during the invasion two years earlier. Though not a supporter of Nazi-ism, he did relish the command of a state-of-the-art German boat and a very generous pay-day if he was successful. Even Kincaid knew that this team for the final leg wasn’t expendable.
She was above all sleek and swift, her design spec to cut and run deep rather than stand and fight. As she had been ‘chartered’ by Kincaid from Bormann and Hitler, the Kriegsmarine was unaware of her operational status. Outside of the Propaganda Ministry and Himmler’s staff headquarters no-one knew anything about her. As far as Admiral Doenitz was concerned, she was still on a drawing board in an office somewhere.
From the conning tower Ahtisaans scanned the surrounding sea with high powered binoculars, pipe wedged tightly in the corner of his mouth. A few fishing vessels and transports were visible on the horizon but, apart from them, for miles there wasn’t a ship in the vicinity. To the west he spotted a bank of clouds. Probably the remnants of a storm over Russia; it hung menacingly out to the horizon.
Enjoying the taste of tobacco between draughts of fresh air and sea salt, Ahtisaans checked his watch; it was 8.40am. His beard was tobacco stained and his teeth were the colour of the pipes that pumped the water through the vessel. Below, the radio operator had locked onto the flying boat’s signal and was guiding it in.
The clear azure sky above thundered as the four 1,400 hp Bristol Hercules engines brought the flying boat down onto the sea, its wake surging back making the U-Boat see-saw momentarily. The fresh provisions would be transferred first, then the delicate operation of transferring the sarcophagus would begin. Ahtisaans nodded to his radio operator to notify Berlin that they had made the rendezvous. He cranked the coding device and began transmitting directly to the Reichschancellry
In a private dining room below the Reichschancellry, Himmer, Goebbels and Goering raised their champagne glasses in a toast. By sheer luck and perseverance, Vladimir Illich Lenin was in German hands. Kincaid and Regan had done it. This was going to be the big surprise for Hitler, a tribute from the glorious forces fighting in the East. Each man was gambling on this tipping Russia toward capitulation or at the very least a steep ransom.
Intelligence out of Moscow had been compromised which meant the train had been found. The high ranking mole was probably dead or talking at the hands of the NKVD. Somehow Schenker’s intelligence about Eva hadn’t come to light. Her true identity was still being dredged up from the floor of a torture room of the S.S. Hauptamt.
As it stood, Russia was still playing catch-up.
The first of Regan’s sealed cameras had been returned and were being processed for shipment to Hollywood for editing and distribution.
Goebbels outlined the next stage of the mission, in Oslo, where the sarcophagus was to be unveiled in the
