‘Well, whatever it is, we aren’t going to find it in here,’ Sarah said decisively. She zipped her black and green Gore-tex jacket to the neck and dragged the hood over her red-streaked hair. He followed suit and they got out of the car into the rain. The rucksacks were stowed in the boot and they checked the contents before setting out. They decided to start their search in the centre of the gorge, on the grounds that whoever had hidden the painting would have done so at one of the less accessible spots. ‘You’re sure you’ve got the compass? I have the feeling that once we get into this shit we’re going to need it.’
He showed her the perspex-encased dial and a pack of sandwiches wrapped in plastic. ‘We’ve enough food so we won’t starve to death until next Tuesday.’ He wiped the rain from his face. ‘I don’t think we’ll have to worry about dying of thirst.’
‘You don’t say.’
Their route took them along a forest track that led in the direction of the river. Five minutes after they set out, a white minibus drove into the car park and eight men in wet-weather gear jumped from the rear led by a man almost as broad as he was tall. Ensuring the minibus screened him from the road, Gustav took a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol from the floor of the bus, rotated the selector lever to ‘safe’ and pulled the cocking handle back to empty the chamber. Guns were the tools of his trade, but he thought the compact, matt-black Heckler had a rare dangerous beauty. This model, the SD1, had been developed for use by border guards during the Cold War and was fitted with a suppressor. It weighed less than three kilos and was small enough to be easily concealed. The stubby silencer added three inches to the length of the gun, but was remarkably effective, as he’d found when he’d topped four ragheads in a row outside Fayzabad. Stupid bastards stood around like dummies while he took them out one at a time. Frederick wouldn’t have been happy to see so much firepower, but Frederick wasn’t here. Gustav didn’t intend to take any chances with Saintclair and the girl. The purple bruise over his left eye was a throbbing mass of pain. These people were owed. He slung the weapon around his neck by its leather strap and zipped his jacket over it. The others were armed with pistols, the Sig Sauer 266, standard German police weapon. Gustav ordered them to gather round as he spread a large-scale map of the Braunlage area on a nearby picnic table. He didn’t like the look of this fucking jungle, but Frederick had sounded uncharacteristically alarmed when he heard the Englishman had visited the Oderteich and insisted they hit them at the first opportunity.
‘All right, you know my feelings about this.’ He ran his finger over the line of the Oder gorge. ‘It’s a shithole in there, but we have our orders. Ideally we take them before they descend into the gorge, but if that’s not possible we split into two teams as discussed. Like a game shoot; beaters to the north with Jurgen, the gun line to the south under Werner. I will direct from above using the tactical radio and flush them out if necessary. Ideally we want them alive, but the important thing is to recover what they have with them. Anybody fucks up and they’ll have me to deal with. Are we clear?’
‘What if they start shooting? They killed Arnim and shot Hans.’ It was Jurgen, the Hamburg bully boy who liked to think he was tough, but one of these days would find out different.
‘It won’t happen,’ Gustav said dismissively. ‘They’re amateurs. Arnim was a fluke.’
‘But if it does?’
Gustav thought about that. It was true that he owed them for Arnim and when it came right down to it, Frederick said the priority was to recover the journal.
‘If they fire on you, kill them. But I want that book.’
XXXI
8 MAY 1945. We were so close, I could see the snow-caps of Switzerland shimmering in the distance. They hit us just after dawn between Saulgau and some one-horse hamlet that wasn’t worth a name. A unit of half-starved SS stragglers and Hitler Youth holdouts who nobody had bothered to tell the war was over. I was in the second jeep, with the three Nazis in the back and Stan at the wheel. Commanding the first, Lieutenant Al Stewart had survived parachute drops in Sicily, Normandy and Holland, but like me he was worn out by war, the instincts that had brought him through half a dozen firefights and won him the Silver Star shaved wafer thin by a cocktail of exhaustion, constant fear and overwound tension. A month ago, even a week, he would have seen the little beech wood and sensed danger, but not today. The war was over, the sun was shining and I could hear his laughter blown back by the breeze from a hundred yards ahead. At least he died happy. The smoke trail of the panzerfaust came streaking from his left front and I screamed a warning I knew was wasted breath. The rocket hit the jeep square on the engine block and flipped it on to its back, throwing three of the occupants clear and crushing Al’s body beneath its two thousand pounds of steel. Even as Stan swerved into the roadside and I threw myself into the ditch I consoled myself that my friend had almost certainly died in the explosion. But one of the occupants had survived because I could hear him screaming. I’d heard that scream before, from a man who had been crushed by a Tiger tank in a street in Arnhem, and I knew that, whoever it was, I’d be burying him before dusk. If I lived. At the moment, that was an open question. My mind was in combat mode now, that instinctive, three-dimensional calculating machine that takes you above the action and allows you to work out angles, fields of fire and dead ground without conscious thought. Our ambushers continued to pour fire into the stricken jeep and the bodies of the men who’d occupied it; at least one MG-42 and probably a Schmeisser machine pistol and a couple of rifles. Combat mode told me this was an opportunist attack, or I would already be dead, crushed beneath my own jeep or burned, eviscerated and riddled with bullets, in that overkill that war is so fond of. If they’d had time to set up a proper ambush they would have done it so that the panzerfaust hit the first jeep and the MG-42 took out the second simultaneously. The fact that they hadn’t meant they’d probably reached the edge of the woods just as the jeep arrived and someone had decided it was too good a chance to miss. Bad luck for Al, good luck for me. That was the way it went. They’d been so focused on their target that they didn’t even know we were here, but that couldn’t last for long.