Dominion

Chapter Fifty-Two

THE FOG HAD GRIPPED THE CAPITAL for three days now; it felt as though it would never end. Gunther had bought a white facemask in a chemist’s. It didn’t make much difference though; the fog made his throat and nasal passages painfully sore and he had an almost constant headache. He didn’t take painkillers, they made little difference and he thought they dulled the mind. On the evening after the news of Hitler’s death Gunther groped his way home late in the evening. Goebbels, the new Führer, had made a speech extolling all that Hitler had achieved – the restoration of German greatness, her mastery of Europe, her destruction of Stalin and the settling of accounts with the Jews. The fulfilment of Germany’s historic destiny. He had spoken of the magnificent funeral that would be held in Berlin in a week’s time; in the meantime Hitler’s body would lie in state at the Reich Chancellery, where already huge crowds were starting to queue outside. But Goebbels had said nothing of the continuing war in the East. It had been left to Himmler, in a broadcast of his own a couple of hours later, to speak in his slow, toneless voice of Germany’s need to destroy each and every last stronghold of the Russian subhumans.

Every radio and television in the embassy had people crowding round it. And already SS and army people were grouping together, talking quietly. Gunther sensed that if there was to be a struggle for power, it would come quickly.

Gessler, after his initial shock at the Führer’s passing, had quickly recovered control of himself, refocused. He took Gunther up to his office, sat behind his desk, confident and energetic again. He said, ‘If there’s any change in policy towards the Russian war, or moves against the SS, we are ready to strike. In the name of Adolf Hitler and his legacy.’

‘This could turn into a civil war,’ Gunther said quietly.

‘They’ll lose. The whole boneheaded upper-class stiff-necked lot of them. We’ve got a million SS forces, all the Gauleiters and most Party members on our side.’

‘Has Speer said anything?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What about Bormann?’

Gessler waved a hand dismissively. ‘Now Hitler’s dead he counts for nothing. Bormann doesn’t matter.’ He leaned forward. ‘But our mission does, more than ever now. I should have some more news very soon, about where Muncaster’s people are being picked up.’ He smiled. ‘I have a phone call booked to Heydrich himself. I will let you know the result. I am Heydrich and Reichsführer Himmler’s lieutenant in this embassy now, more than ever.’

Later that afternoon Gunther had interrogated Drax again; he had told him about how they had abducted Muncaster from the hospital. He said, a note of satisfaction in his exhausted, rasping voice, that the cell system the Resistance used meant nobody in each operating group knew anyone outside their own cell. Drax told him about the woman who had accompanied them. She was from Eastern Europe and called Natalia; that was all he knew. Again, it was barely more than Gunther already had in his file; even her name was probably a pseudonym. He could see from the weary satisfaction in Drax’s eyes that he knew these titbits would not help Gunther. Throughout the conversation he had coughed, putting his hand to his bandaged chest, which obviously hurt him. The doctor told Gunther that Drax had internal bleeding and would probably not last long. They should get him across to Special Branch soon, so they could at least question him about the Civil Service spy ring before he died.

Gunther told him, ‘MI5 are unravelling the network in your Civil Service. As usually happens in a wide-ranging enquiry, they’ve found a couple of people who have caved in. One of the names they gave us was a very senior man in the Foreign Office. Sir Harold Jackson.’ Gunther saw from the flicker in Drax’s eyes that he recognized the name. ‘When Special Branch went out to arrest him at his house in Hertfordshire, he and his wife stood on the doorstep and fired at them with shotguns, then turned them on themselves. We think he was the leader of your cell.’

Drax did not respond. Gunther smiled thinly. ‘Well, that side of things doesn’t really matter to us. We’ll hand you over to Special Branch shortly and they can talk to you further about it.’

‘Why haven’t you handed me over already? Why did you question me again? You haven’t got Frank Muncaster and the others yet, have you?

‘We will, soon.’

‘You’re a quiet man, aren’t you?’ Drax said, his blue eyes bright in his deathly pale face. ‘You like to sound so reasonable. But what you did earlier, to Carol, my parents, you’re from hell!’

Gunther stood up and leaned over Drax, whose breath already stank of his approaching death. ‘Does it never occur to you, Mr Drax, that if you had spent your life getting on with your work, living an ordinary life and minding your own business like an ordinary, reasonable man, none of what happened to your parents or your work colleague would have occurred? It was your decision to betray your government, to join a bunch of murderous thugs. Yours.’ He stood up. ‘You don’t see it, do you, people like you? That all you’re doing is standing against the tide of historical destiny. Which, by the way, is about to drown you.’

He got up and walked out of the cell.

In the evening, Gessler had more news for him. Radio traffic from Sussex suggested a lot of Resistance communications there. ‘I have serious resources working on the Isle of Wight. They’ve all been turned over to me. By Heydrich, earlier.’ His thin chest expanded with pride for a moment and Gunther realized that if it came to a conflict between the SS and the army Gessler would fight to the end for the SS vision, as he himself would. Gessler said, ‘We’ll get them. We’ll get them all.’ Then he frowned. ‘Speer’s made a speech in Berlin now, by the way, about the need to slow down recruitment of foreign workers for the war industries. And he spoke about employing women – yes, women – to reduce our demands for labour from France and other countries under the 1940 Treaties.’

‘He’s trying to stem the discontent there.’

Gessler shook his head. ‘There’s more to it than that. He’s softening us up for a peace with what’s left of Russia. Him and Goebbels. Goebbels understood the Jewish threat, but never the Russian one. Well, we’ll see about that.’ He looked at Gunther. ‘I don’t think there’ll be any developments on our mission for a some hours. Then things will probably move very fast. Go home to your flat and wait for news. Try and get some sleep,’ he added. ‘You look exhausted.’

After he had groped his way home through the fog Gunther sat and watched the BBC. The newscaster spoke in respectful, sepulchral tones of Germany’s loss; although it was night and snowing in Berlin long queues had indeed already formed outside the Chancellery. The news was followed by a respectful biography of Goebbels. Gunther switched the television off and thought about the difference Hitler’s death would make in Britain. The British would hope for a stable regime under Goebbels, and no doubt for a settlement with Russia. Looking for an easy life as usual, he reflected bitterly. The British didn’t understand race, they understood national and Imperial pride and that was halfway to racial pride but they had never gone the whole way down that road. With time, if Mosley took the premiership, perhaps. He thought of civil war in Germany, the army against the SS. Even if the SS won, Germany would be terribly weakened. And after all they had achieved.

He had had a Christmas card from his son yesterday, a picture of a Christmas tree in Sevastopol, a letter inside. Michael said his mother and stepfather had been forced to have their Ukrainian servant arrested for stealing silver spoons that had once belonged to Gunther’s mother. She was to be hanged. Michael had said it was a shame but his mother had told him these things are necessary.

Gunther thought of Hans, his twin. He remembered that first Christmas when he came home from the Russian front. He remembered them speaking, with sad conviction, of how the Russian war was a historic climax of the fight between inferior and superior races. The racial hotchpotch of Eastern Europe which the Germans had stormed through was an abomination, a cesspit. Races couldn’t mix, must never mix. Hans had spoken of how he had seen thousands of Russian prisoners, captured in the great 1941 pincer movements, penned into giant encampments on the steppe, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and left to die of hunger and thirst. He had seen the prisoners digging holes in the earth to escape the rain and cold. ‘You could smell the camps for miles,’ he had said. ‘They just reverted to an animal state.’

And yet, Gunther thought, the Russians were still fighting. And with some help from the Americans soon, from what Adlai Stevenson said. All Germany’s resources, all these years, had been ploughed into that war. If they had had better generals, what things they could be doing with Russia’s resources. If they finally won in Russia they could still build a new Europe, every country allied to Germany, but devoted to its own race and nationality. Perhaps then Germany could use its great rockets to go into space, perhaps put men on the moon. One day, he thought, we will.

He slept for several hours, an exhausted, dreamless sleep. He was wakened at seven a.m. by the telephone, Gessler’s assistant summoning him back to the embassy. He put on his white facemask and stumbled his way back through the fog. It was only just getting light and few were about yet; there was complete silence all around. He felt suddenly disoriented, as though he were alone in a great, endless void. He fixed his attention on the faint yellow glow of a streetlight ahead and told himself angrily that he must stay calm, not give way to ridiculous fantasies. This was just bad weather, the lights and machinery of civilization were all around, just temporarily hidden by the smog. One day, given long enough, no doubt German scientists would be able to change the weather, too.

Gessler, in his office, was full of confidence once more, eyes shining bright behind his pince-nez. Gunther noticed that his desk was tidy again. He waved a piece of paper on which he had scribbled some numbers. ‘We’ve located the submarine, Hoth,’ he said triumphantly. ‘We know where it’s going to surface! They’re being picked up tonight.’

Gunther felt his heart lift. ‘How? How did we get this?’

‘Partly thanks to you!’ Gessler beamed. Gunther was his golden boy now. ‘It was you that guessed a submarine would be picking them up, you that tricked Drax into revealing that it would be somewhere an hour from London. Every listening station on the Isle of Wight has been searching for transmissions concerning a submarine pickup since yesterday, and now they’ve just got it! Intelligence people, our SS people. There’s been a sudden burst of radio traffic. Muncaster and four others are being picked up from a cove at a little place called Rottingdean, in Sussex, at one a.m. tomorrow morning. Unless the weather gets rough, which we’re told it won’t.’

‘They managed to decipher the message?’

‘Yes. Thank God the British have given us all their Bletchley Park technology since 1940; smart that we made that a secret part of the Treaty. The Americans still have no idea we’ve broken their codes. Muncaster and his people will be sitting ducks.’ He beamed.

‘And we’re telling the British nothing.’

‘No. Nor anyone outside the SS.’ Gunther leaned back in his chair. He said slowly, ‘So now, with luck, Muncaster will fall right into our hands.’

‘Yes. There’s no fog on the coast, the weather will be bright and clear. A boat will take them off the beach at half past midnight, some local man. He’ll ferry them out to the submarine. It’ll be on the surface. Risky for a foreign sub, shows how important this is to the Americans.’

Gunther felt a moment of pure, joyous satisfaction. He ticked the names off on his fingers:. ‘Muncaster, Hall, Fitzgerald and this Natalia woman. The fifth is probably Fitzgerald’s wife.’ He looked at Gessler. ‘How will we do it, sir?’

Gessler folded his hands across his flat stomach. ‘It’ll be our operation, an SS mission out of the embassy. I want to send you down there, with some good men, half a dozen if I can lay my hands on them. I thought of sending Kapp, who was at Drax’s interrogation.’

Gunther nodded agreement. ‘He looked a useful man.’

‘I’ve been studying the maps, and we’re sending someone down to spy out the land now. The place, Rottingdean, is nothing more than a village in a fold between the cliffs, just a small cove. You hide there and then get Muncaster and his people when they arrive.’ He looked at Gunther seriously. ‘But we’ll have to play it carefully, we don’t want the British getting any wind of this.’ His tone became less enthusiastic. ‘They were going to start transporting the Jews on to the Isle of Wight today but the fog’s put paid to that. From what I hear they’re going to leave it till after the New Year now. I wonder if that could be politics. There’s a rumour that Rommel told Beaverbrook there wasn’t any hurry with the transports.’

Gunther frowned. ‘The army have never objected to Jew transports before.’

‘No, but they’ve often needed a push from above, from the Führer, heaven rest him. You know what they’re like, saying it’s a distraction from winning the Russian war, taking up resources.’ He stared at Gunther again. ‘Everything has changed with the Führer’s death. If there is going to be – God forbid – a change in policy in Berlin, the Waffen SS are ready to fight the army. And if that turns into a long struggle, I’m told that what Muncaster knows could be very important.’

Gessler looked at Gunther seriously. ‘Heydrich knows what it is and he’s told me now. It’s about nuclear weapons. The Bomb. The biggest prize of all, and it could be about to fall into SS hands. So that’s why the mission is even more of a priority now. I was authorized to tell you.’ Gessler smiled. ‘See how trusted you are.’

To be able to do this, Gunther thought, for Germany, for his son, the memory of his beloved brother. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.

Gessler coughed. ‘William Syme will be coming with you.’

Gunther sat up. ‘Is that wise, sir? If Muncaster were to say something, if Syme even got a hint of what he knows—’

‘We need an Englishman there. The local police will be told there’s something going on and to steer clear, they’ll be reassured that a Special Branch man will be coming down to deal with it. And Syme knows as much as anyone about Muncaster and his crew. And if he did get any knowledge he shouldn’t – well, we spoke before about the option of disposing of him.’

Gunther felt an unexpected stab of regret. Gessler noticed, and inclined his head. ‘I thought you didn’t like him.’

‘I don’t. But he’s helped us a lot on this.’ Gunther took a deep breath. ‘But if it comes to that, it won’t be a problem.’

‘I want you to keep Syme close, during tomorrow’s operation and afterwards. I want you to bring him back here to the embassy. With Muncaster and his friends.’ His eyes stared into Gunther’s. ‘Do you have any difficulties with that?’

Did they mean to kill Syme after all? Had they decided he knew too much already? It seemed hard, but this was war. ‘No, sir,’ he answered.

‘When you bring Muncaster in I want you to assess him first, Hoth, weigh up the best ways to interrogate him before he gets sent to Berlin. Remember he’s not – normal.’

‘Yes, sir.’ This was the sort of work Gunther was confident with; and it would be interesting to discover how Muncaster’s mind worked, how and why it had malfunctioned. A thought occurred to him. ‘What about the Bennett woman?’

Gessler waved a hand. ‘Oh, we turned her over to the British yesterday afternoon. She’ll probably get a secret trial, then five years in Holloway,’ he laughed. ‘Five years and a finger gone. Do they give women corporal punishment here? I can’t remember. Anyway, they’ll probably think what we’ve done to her is enough.’

‘What about Drax?’

‘Special Branch have him. We let his parents go. I doubt he’ll last long now.’