The Manhattan Deception Read online

  The Manhattan Deception

  by Simon Leighton-Porter

  All rights reserved

  © Simon Leighton-Porter, 2013

  The right of Simon Leighton-Porter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover artwork

  Copyright © Berni Stevens 2013

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Mauve Square Publishing Ltd

  www.mauvesquare.com

  This book is for Wendy

  Chapter One

  Ghastly journey – so desperately tired I can barely write. City in terrible state, everyone hungry and dirty, but so good to see our dear friends again. More raids, spent all last night in shelter, fires still burning this morning near the Tiergarten. Not sure we’re doing the right thing but everyone says we must leave before it’s too late.

  *

  Berlin, April 1945

  They had spent two nights cooped up deep underground in the shelter beneath Tempelhof airport – walls running with condensation and the air thick with the sour reek of fear. A concrete tomb bathed in perpetual twilight from wire-covered bulbs that flickered to the rhythm of the bombardment: an incessant pounding whose drum-beat grew louder with each passing hour. An eternity of waiting, but at last word had come and now they were heading for the surface.

  Following the flickering glow-worm of light from the elderly Volkssturm corporal’s torch, the group of men shuffled towards another flight of concrete stairs. Georg Reiss heard a muffled thump from the darkness somewhere ahead of him. ‘For Christ’s sake be careful with those boxes,’ he shouted again. Bomb damage had cut the electricity to this section of the tunnels and unseen pools of icy water splashed over their shoes in the darkness. At the top of the stairs, they stepped over the raised sill of a steel blast door and into a lighted stretch.

  ‘Stop here,’ said the corporal from the head of the crocodile. ‘I want to make sure we haven’t lost anyone.’

  Reiss elbowed his way forward through the doorway to join him. ‘And I want to make sure those boxes don’t get jarred. There’s three years of work in there. It’s irreplaceable.’

  ‘So you keep telling me, sir,’ said the corporal, not even bothering to look at him. For the first few days of the job – tour guide on the ghost train he called it – he had tried to be polite to these people, but as the trickle turned to a flood he had come to despise them: rats deserting a sinking ship, and now he made few attempts to hide his feelings. He had made it to Etatmässige Feldwebel – regimental sergeant major in the language of the hated Tommies – in the first war: wounded three times, had refused four field commissions just to stay with his lads, and now this was how it ended. None of these cowards would make so much as a decent private soldier, he fumed to himself as he chivvied the last stragglers to catch up.

  Eichmann had been along the ghost train the week before, then the Reichsmarschall himself: scores of the bastards, some of whom he recognised from the newsreels and others not, but all spouting the same crap: “the Reich must fight on”, “we are leaving to organise the final victory”. In that case why haven’t you bought a return ticket? he always wanted to ask, but it was too late now even for cynicism. Tour guide on a ghost train: what a perfect job for a trainee ghost whose apprenticeship would soon be over. A rat scuttled out of the darkness and he aimed a kick at it – hateful bloody things, another reminder of the trenches. At least he could say what he liked now – there wasn’t even an Eastern Front to be sent to any more: it was right here on Berlin’s doorstep. He turned the yellow beam from his torch on the group and continued the headcount. Then, satisfied that everyone was there, he motioned them on.

  After what seemed like hours of wet and discomfort, they turned into a section of tunnel that was dry underfoot and fully lit. Reiss’s colleague, Max Standfluss, came forward to join him and looked in awe at the scene in front of them.

  ‘This was supposed to be where the U-Bahn would come into the terminal,’ said the corporal, continuing the script he used every time his charges reached this stop on their journey. ‘They never got it finished before the war started, and, until a month or so ago it was being used as an aircraft factory. Now look at the state of it.’ They walked on in silence, past rows of half-completed FW-190 fighters – flightless creatures, semi-clad metal skeletons without engines or wings.

  Finally the group emerged, blinking, into the cathedral-like vastness of the terminal itself. On one of the pillars next to what had once been a Lufthansa desk, an anonymous humorist had scrawled, “In the event of inclement weather, the war will be held indoors”. Even that did no justice to the immensity of the place. With their footfalls echoing around the deserted hall, the corporal led them to a door marked “VIP waiting room 17”. The atmosphere inside was like that of the shelter they had recently left – foul with the smell of fear, cigarette smoke and unwashed humanity.

  The soldiers placed the heavy wooden packing cases delicately on the ground and Reiss, a diminutive and serious-looking man in his late twenties, fussed around them like an anxious mother hen, checking once more that they were securely fastened and undamaged after their latest move. Standfluss, fifteen years older than Reiss and out of condition, slumped onto a rusty metal chair, head down, panting for breath.

  ‘I’ll leave you then, gentlemen,’ said the corporal. He turned to Reiss. ‘The lads will help you load your boxes, sir. Have a safe trip and don’t forget to send us a postcard.’

  They muttered their thanks and the corporal closed the door behind him. Back to the ghost train.

  Standfluss shifted his gaze to the group of soldiers. Hungry, frightened and miserable; little more than schoolboys dressed in men’s cast-offs, none of them much older than his own son who was, he hoped, still safe with his mother in Munich. Thank God, it’ll soon be over, he thought.

  They waited another half an hour and then the door swung open. A full colonel, the commanding officer of Tempelhof airport, strode into the room with a cursory nod to Reiss and Standfluss. As if to herald his arrival the air-raid sirens started wailing again and Standfluss looked in pity at the row of terrified soldiers in their over-sized field grey and steel helmets. All of them gazed up at the colonel in supplication. Standfluss could almost hear what they were thinking: not again, this wasn’t what it was supposed to be like, I want to go home, I want my mother. For these frightened children, for everyone in the city with a pair of eyes in their head, with the exception of hard cases like the colonel, the glory of serving the Fatherland had long disappeared and in its place just terror, dirt, hunger and everywhere the smell of decomposing bodies and broken drains.

  Their thoughts were audible to the colonel too and he glared at them in disgust. ‘Don’t just sit there. Get to your posts,’ he shouted, his voice rising to a scream. ‘You shouldn’t need me to remind you of your duty. Now move!’ They hurried away to man their anti-aircraft battery. As the last of them scrambled out of the room, a series of muffled explosions, uncomfortably close this time, caused the two scientists to shrink down into their threadbare overcoats in the forlorn but instinctive hope that it would make them smaller targets – “the Berlin twitch” the locals called it.

  The colonel turned the same expression of disgust on the two men and read the fear in their faces; a look he knew well and to which he’d grown indifferent. ‘I’ve just been told that the aircraft are holding off to the south and as soon as this raid’s g
one through they’ll be here, he said as though reading from a bus timetable. ‘Not long now. In thirty minutes you’ll be away and gone.’ He peered out of the grimy window, scanning the southern horizon. There they were: two black dots, probably about eight kilometres away, following each other around a defensive oval pattern and awaiting their turn to land. ‘But don’t you worry about us,’ he added with undisguised contempt. ‘We’ll have plenty to keep us busy when you’ve gone.’

  Then, without pleasantry or leave-taking, he turned his back on them, closed the door and marched down the corridor, his boots crunching over a carpet of broken window glass. Three doors further along he stopped, knocked and waited for the command to enter. Inside were two men; one in the uniform of a Luftwaffe major and the other, in civilian clothes, who was much older: bearded, cadaverously thin and with tired, sagging features. Next to him sat a shabbily dressed young woman with unwashed, mousy hair who was nervously fiddling with a cheap linen handkerchief. The colonel ignored her. ‘Gentlemen, the first aircraft has landed and the other two have joined the circuit. Not long now.’

  The all-clear sounded and shortly afterwards an Me-110, twin-engined night fighter, shorn of its radar antennae, its Schräge Musik upward-firing cannons and defensive rear armament, taxied to a halt outside the northern end of the terminal building. From under the cover of the building’s canopy three Luftwaffe groundcrew dragged a fuel bowser into place and while two of them worked at the pump handles, the other swung himself up onto the wing and slotted the refuelling nozzle into place.

  The major excused himself and went out to meet the pilot to whom he handed a map marked with the latest intelligence estimates of the land battle to the south and west of the city. The pilot spread it out on the trailing edge of the wing and the major began his briefing, indicating the red and black lines drawn around Berlin as he spoke. ‘Ivan’s 58th Guards Division is already round to the south of us and neither our IXth nor the XIIth Army have sent an intelligence update in the last forty-eight hours so we have to assume the worst. The weather forecast to the south isn’t great either, there’s a front dragging its heels over us and if you stay at low-level it’ll force you further west the nearer you get to Augsburg.’ His finger worked its way along the proposed track. ‘My advice would be to play it safe and head west towards Magdeburg first and then route via Nürnberg direct to Fürstenfeldbruck. Is that clear so far?’

  Without looking up from his notes, the pilot nodded and the major continued. ‘When you land, a bigwig, name of Köcher, from the embassy in Bern will be there to meet you. You are not to hand over the cargo to anyone other than him. Got that?’

  ‘What if this Köcher doesn’t turn up?’ asked the pilot.

  ‘He’ll be there, don’t worry. A convoy is coming down from Linz by road and they’ll meet you and Köcher at the airfield. They’ve all got diplomatic credentials so they can cross the border into Switzerland. Lucky bastards!’

  ‘So what is it then, this precious cargo that I’m supposed to risk my neck for?’

  The major gave a derisive laugh. ‘You should know better than to ask questions like that. Just count yourself lucky you’ve got the job. If you don’t like it, just say the word, I’ll fly the aircraft and you can stay here and take your chances with the Ivans.’

  The pilot snorted. ‘No thanks. But what am I supposed to do once I’ve got to Fürsty and handed all this stuff over?’

  Before replying, the major looked nervously over his shoulder to make sure nobody else was within earshot. ‘Well,’ he said quietly, ‘I reckon you’ve got two choices. Either you take on the entire American and Russian air forces single-handed in a clapped-out aircraft with no ammunition, no rear gunner and no radar or you park it quietly in a hangar at Fürsty and take a one-way ticket to Switzerland with Köcher and his boys, and of course with your precious cargo – just to make sure it gets delivered safely of course.’

  They watched in silence as the crew chief closed the last of the fasteners on the drop-tanks that had been converted into under-wing baggage pods. He filled in the details of the additional weight and the amount of fuel that had been added to the aircraft and then brought the paperwork to the pilot to sign.

  ‘All complete, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy with the port engine, though. You’ve got a nasty oil leak and you really ought to snag it.’

  The pilot signed the form on the clipboard without looking at it. ‘And do you have engine spares here by any chance, sergeant?’

  ‘No sir, we don’t, but I just thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Think it’ll get me to Fürsty?’

  ‘It should do now the oil’s been topped up.’

  ‘Well if it doesn’t, I’ll ask the Ivans if they’ll let me come back and complain.’

  ‘Please don’t talk like that, sir. We can still win, you’ll see. Our Führer said so.’

  ‘I wish I shared your optimism, sergeant.’

  He looked away. ‘I’ve no other choice, sir. I’ve got a wife and family in Dresden and I haven’t heard from them since February. If we don’t all stick together and see this through then we’ll none of us see our families again.’

  The pilot made no reply – he’d flown over the city a week after the raids and had seen, and worse still, smelled, the corpse-scented moonscape where Dresden had once stood. So he simply handed the clipboard to the sergeant and climbed back into the cockpit. ‘Good luck,’ shouted the major, adding the stay-behinds’ stock valediction, ‘and make sure you send us a postcard.’

  The pilot of the Me-110 taxied out and waited as the second of two battered-looking Ju-88s landed and cleared the runway. Then, under a pall of grey-brown smoke drifting from the burning city, he took off into the drizzle and set course towards Magdeburg.

  The two Ju-88 pilots parked their aircraft as close to the edge of the airport terminal as they could. The high concrete awning, built in peacetime to shelter passengers from the rain, now provided cover from a more lethal airborne threat.

  Standfluss, Reiss and the precious cargo of packing cases were squeezed into one aircraft and the two civilians were escorted to the other. The older man walked with the aid of a stick and seemed to have trouble grasping the rungs of the aluminium ladder to the cockpit of the twin-engined bomber. As he reached up, the sleeve of his jacket slid back to reveal a crudely tattooed row of numbers on his forearm.

  Once airborne, the pilot of the lead aircraft maintained a south-westerly track and then turned in a gentle arc to the north-west so that his number two could cut the corner and slot into close formation for the climb up through the low overcast. Once above cloud, the number two slid out into a tactical formation, one thousand metres line abreast, as they climbed towards their cruising altitude of three thousand metres and set course for the airfield at Schleswig. Forty minutes later and thirty kilometres east of Hamburg an allied mobile radar unit, callsign “Bandbox” detected them.

  ‘Cool Milk leader, this is Bandbox. I have trade for you. Vector one six zero, target range twenty miles heading three one zero, many, speed medium, angels one zero. Identify, I say again, identify.’

  The two Hawker Typhoons from 245 Squadron, RAF, turned south east towards their target. ‘Roger, Bandbox. Cool Milk formation steady one six zero, twelve thousand feet.’ The leader waggled his wings and in response his number two widened to five hundred yards off his leader’s port wing. The flow of information from the intercept controller at Bandbox continued and the relative bearing between the two formations remained unchanged. As the range reduced, the leader smoothly opened the throttle until the two Typhoons reached almost 400 mph. At five miles the leader caught sight of the two German aircraft two thousand feet beneath them, black specks against the milky undercast. ‘Bandbox, this is Cool Milk leader, tally-ho, tally-ho. Two bandits, left eleven o’clock low.’

  ‘Roger, Cool Milk leader, proceed as briefed. Check switches safe.’

  Leaving his number two above and astern to watch his back, t
he leader rolled into a descending left hand turn and, crossing behind the two Ju-88s, closed on the right hand aircraft with a healthy 150 mph of overtake. When he was about half a mile behind it, a brief warning passed between the two German pilots and they both waggled their aircrafts’ wings in recognition. As the pilot of the Typhoon pulled up into a steep wing-over to hold station above them, he saw the right-hand aircraft fire a white flare followed by two green ones. Moments later, the other let off a white followed by two reds. ‘Bandbox from Cool Milk Leader, I confirm these are our two friendlies. Am escorting them home.’ He closed the throttle and the Typhoon’s Napier Sabre engine responded with its characteristic volley of pops and bangs as the RPM reduced. The pilot re-applied a small handful of power and eased into loose formation alongside the Ju-88. The German pilot could clearly make out the battle letters MR-N on the side of the Typhoon and, in front of the cockpit on the engine cowling, a painted image of the pilot’s mascot, a small white terrier with the name “Binder” stencilled underneath it.

  For the pilot of the Me-110, things were not going so smoothly. Firstly, the aircraft had no radio direction-finding or beacon navigation system so he was going to have to find his way to the base at Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich by old-fashioned dead-reckoning: map, compass and stopwatch. And that meant staying in visual contact with the ground. On his preferred route the frontal system was hanging around longer than expected and low cloud forced him increasingly further west of track and dangerously close to the rapidly-approaching Allied armies.

  The town of Magdeburg loomed up out of the haze and he was about to turn left to skirt to the west of Leipzig, when, at a height of four thousand metres he came head-to-head with a formation of three US P-47 Thunderbolts. He had no idea whether they’d seen him but he wasn’t going to hang around to take any chances. Lowering the nose and applying full power, he turned hard onto a south-westerly heading and tried to lose himself in the murk before they came after him. His heart pounded and his mind went back to the unpleasant sensation he’d felt so often during his early days of flying training – he was alone, lost and without a clue what to do.