Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16) Read online

  I reported to the Bonn boss, Willi Waldstein. He told me that trouble was starting over the East Berlin explosion and that the presence of Big Eye had been confirmed as having been aboard the airliner from Gatwick. He said, “The East Germans, backed by the Kremlin, are laying the blame upon Britain and West Germany.”

  “Klaus Kunze,” I said, “fs a West German. I’m sorry, Herr Waldstein, but this looks like sticking.”

  “You think it was Klaus Kunze?” He looked sick.

  “I’m sure of it — or almost sure.” I paused. “Do you know what the casualties were, in East Berlin?”

  “Not precisely. It is believed that many thousands have died — very many thousands. The hospitals are being besieged by persons who fear contamination. The dead are still in the streets.”

  “Still?” The explosion had taken place yesterday; the streets of East Berlin must be pretty fruity. Klaus Kunze had a lot to answer for, and he would answer in the name of Adolf Hitler. I was about to leave and try again to get through to Brigadier Trotton when the scramble line called and it was Max from London. He asked for me. I took the receiver. “Shaw,” I said.

  “I’ve had word from Washington,” Max said.

  “Yes?” I hadn’t liked the sound of Max’s voice.

  He said, “When they got the East Berlin report, they checked certain stocks. There’s a large batch of Big Eye unaccounted for. The CIA did a fast investigation … they now admit, some of it’s believed to have entered South America — and Britain, too. And here’s something else: I’ve just been told by Scotland Yard that a big demo is believed to be planned by our own domestic Nazis, date as yet uncertain, venue somewhere on the south coast — that’s all that’s known as of now.”

  I asked, “Do I understand you see a connexion between this demo and the Big Eye?”

  “Yes, I’m very afraid I do, and I mean afraid. Look what happened over East Berlin. There’s another obvious connexion, Shaw. Do I need to say more?”

  I said, “I don’t think you do.” The brain again! Max cut the call, leaving me to ponder. That demo: date unspecified. I reckoned it was going to tie in with the arrival of the brain in West Germany, when all the international parties would unite in a big bang. For Britain, the south coast could be the catalyst, though the scatter of death chemicals doesn’t usually go with demos; it depended what was meant by demo, this time. It would come simultaneously perhaps in West Germany — in Spain too, possibly, where there were still plenty of Franco supporters plus a Fascist outfit called the New Force. But Britain came first: Big Eye over the densely populated south coast didn’t bear thinking about. And why the south coast anyway, apart perhaps from the density? Most of our would-be dictators outside London were concentrated in the big cities of the Midlands — Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Leeds and so on. Or maybe they’d spread unnoticed. If only I could have kept hold of Jason Clutch; he seemed prone to reappearances, however, and he might well crop up again. In the meantime I was stymied and it was a nasty feeling. I didn’t know where to turn next. Felicity Mandrake was still missing and Jason Clutch might know where she was. There was just a chance that Klaus Kunze would also know, but Klaus Kunze was probably at sea somewhere between South America and West Germany; and I was in no mood to appreciate that that fact did have the virtue of giving me time. It was rather negative. I remembered Brigadier Trot-ton of the Military Police and I rang through to his office. I made my apologies and asked about the corporal.

  “Dead,” Trotton said.

  I offered my condolences. I was surrounded by death, it seemed. Hitler had always meant death.

  Trotton said he had something interesting to show me and he would be glad if I would come right away. He would send more transport. I declined that offer; once had been enough, and now I preferred to be more anonymous. I would drive myself: I raised an eyebrow at Willi Waldstein and he nodded. He would provide a car. Trotton passed directions and I rang off. Trotton, I thought, had sounded extraordinarily solemn with an undercurrent of what I can only call horrified disbelief when he’d spoken of “something interesting”. I was all agog, and lost no time in driving out from HQ in a 6D2 Mercedes.

  *

  I was checked by a redcap at the main gate of Division and saluted through. I pulled up outside a large square building surrounded by heavy decorations of chains supported by bollards, the latter beautifully white-washed; the British Army doesn’t change all that much. As I stopped, a man in a tweed jacket appeared at the top of some steps and gave me a wave: Brigadier Trotton himself. He took me to his office and brought out a bottle of whisky and a siphon.

  “You’re going to need it,” he said, pouring two stiff drinks.

  I told him I’d been intrigued by his tone. I asked if he would now elaborate.

  “I’ll show it to you first,” he said. “You’ll get the impact better. We’ll go for a drive when you’ve had enough Dutch courage.”

  I grinned, sitting back in a comfortable leather armchair. “I’m a one-drink man on duty,” I said.

  “Me, too.” He knocked his back and I did likewise. He picked up a deerstalker from his desk and opened the door for me. I was feeling oddly excited. Trotton said he would follow my example and not use his staff car, but his own. I offered mine, but he preferred to drive himself. We went round to the back of the office block and got into a Volkswagen estate. Saluted with ceremony through the main gate, Trotton headed south, fast. He was a lousy driver and he scared me stiff with his overtaking. As we went, he pumped me about the brain, and I told him as much as I thought fit. He agreed with the governmental posture: governments were best off in the background in matters of this kind, which were essentially dirty. And he had a good deal of respect for 6D2. He was kind enough to say so. He added that what I was going to be shown could be reported to my own HQ, but for his part he was not intending to make a military matter of it. I asked why.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  We drove for a little over two hours and Trotton kept his wicked speed up. In darkness we stopped on the fringes of the Black Forest and as we got out into bitter cold and a whine of wind I thought of witches and demons and werewolves with large and small Ws. All manner of nasty things dwelt, in folklore, in the German forests … but in fact we were in a derelict town, a place that seemed to have been left behind, left in the state it had been found at the end of the war in 1945. This, Trotton confirmed. It had never been built up again, he said. Progress had gone elsewhere, by-passing smashed-up Neckarburg. Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Reutlingen and other towns had returned to prosperity but not Neckarburg. Dogs and cats lived here, and the occasional wolf prowled, and there were a handful of human derelicts, tramps and bums and such, who eked out an existence in roofless hovels.

  “It’s a good place for them,” Trotton said.

  “The tramps?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t referring to them!”

  “What, then?”

  He gave a grim laugh and said, “The Werewolves, my dear chap.”

  I shivered. Naturally, it had been obvious that there was a neo-Nazi connexion in our drive, but the use of the word made the surroundings somehow bleaker and more fraught with some fearsome menace, as though a pack of age-old half-human werewolves might emerge suddenly from mythology, manifesting from the pitch blackness, from the forest, with slavering jaws and green phosphorescent eyes.

  “Where do we go?” I asked.

  “Just follow me. Keep close. I have a torch but I don’t want to use it. Watch where you walk.”

  I tried to do just that, but the darkness was virtually total and my feet went into icy puddles, muddy puddles, and I tripped over discarded sheets of corrugated iron, piles of rotten wood, lumps of what felt like coal, old railway lines and God knew what else. Trotton was a fast walker as well as a fast driver. Now and again a disturbed and angry cat would spit venom before streaking off at speed, and an occasional dog would bark and then howl. We saw nothing human at all, none of Trotton’s down-and-out
s, though we walked the devil of a long way. I think it must have been about five miles; Trotton kept on adjuring me to move as quietly as possible and it was obvious he hadn’t wanted to bring the car closer in even if he could have driven it through all the debris of a once-thriving town. Here and there we passed buildings that in the darkness of night looked intact, but Trotton said daylight would prove they were not. Roofs gone, windows ditto, walls about to fall down; rusted machinery inside — factory complexes in the days of the Third Reich, part of the industrial surge that had provided the wealth and vigour of Nazi Germany.

  On we went, neither of us speaking as we began to come up near one of those apparently intact buildings. Trotton was making right for it; it looked like a warehouse, a huge one, long and high and immensely forbidding in its aspect. Trotton put a hand on my arm. “Watch it,” he said in a whisper. “We have to be sure no-one’s about. Don’t make a sound if you can help it.”

  We went ahead and kept pretty quiet and when we had reached the building Trotton stopped again and gestured me to do the same. He listened, remaining motionless for almost five minutes by my watch. I listened too; we heard nothing and Trotton beckoned me on again. The atmosphere was appalling, a feel of death and decay. Maybe I’d developed psychic tendencies; the feeling I had was to prove accurate enough as to past facts. Trotton moved for a door and creaked it open. As a matter of fact, that door didn’t creak as much as I’d imagined it might after so many years of apparent disuse and neglect.

  We went inside and the feeling grew worse. The cold ate into my bones, together with something else, something unspecified that I couldn’t name but which made the hair rise and send tingles down my spine.

  Then Trotton flicked on his torch. It was a powerful one and its beam went right to the end of the big building, which I assessed as being no less than a couple of hundred metres in length and maybe fifty metres wide. There was no silent machinery but neither did it feel empty in the sense that a totally abandoned warehouse ought to feel. And down at the far end, extending back a shade under halfway, was a gigantic cylinder, long and of substantial circumference. This narrowed towards an entry, where big double doors stood wide open.

  “What is it?” I asked, puzzled, though I shouldn’t have been.

  “An oven,” Trotton said.

  I didn’t tick over. “Some sort of disinfestation process?”

  Trotton drew a deep breath. “Hitler might have called it that a gas oven,” he said. “Or gas chamber, more precisely. Jews, for the disposal of. This area was one of the early concentration camps, and this building was the gas disposal chamber. You know the rest of that story.” He shifted his torch-beam. “Look,” he said.

  I looked. The beam was resting now along a kind of side tunnel that ran into the shady distance beside the death cylinder. I saw the most ghastly and harrowing piles of debris that I had ever seen. Some looked like ashes, others like heaps of bones. There was a patina of dust over them all, a heavy layer, nearly forty years’ accumulation, disturbed in parts.

  “How did you find this place?” I asked in little more than a whisper.

  Trotton said, “We were on an exercise here, using the town to acclimatise the troops to urban warfare — shooting round corners, you know the sort of thing. Some of my redcaps found this area and set up a provost post.” He paused. “They soon realised what it was, or had been. And I’m not so sure about the was.”

  I looked at him. “Meaning?”

  He said, “Come over and see for yourself.”

  He led the way to the chamber entry. He moved one of the doors. It shut easily, no protests from neglected metal. It hadn’t been neglected at all.

  “No rust,” Trotton said. “All very clean and bright inside. And traces of recent greasing. It’s all been kept up, ready to go again. The only thing that’s missing is the gas supply, and I dare say that wouldn’t take long to re-connect.”

  *

  We walked the long way back to the brigadier’s car. I had a lot on my mind; I doubted Trotton’s statement that it had all been kept up. I reckoned it had been recently resuscitated, and when I put this point to Trotton he didn’t disagree. If that was right, then the Werewolves were getting ready for the return of Hitler’s brain and once it was back they expected all the old times to return with it, the death chambers and all. I remembered what the West German Minister of the Interior had said back in Bonn: that Britain was ripe for something to replace the failed democratic way of life; and I thought about the many manifestations of the anti-democratic urge, the race tensions and the riots, the NF, the SWP. There was any amount of hate festering beneath the surface. The actual manifestations were merely the burst boils. If Hitler’s brain-power spread to Britain, as that Minister had seemed certain it would, then the extermination chambers might follow on. In Britain, for Jews read immigrants and socialists. The ovens would be kept pretty busy. I told myself that the gas chambers were old hat now, that our own dictatorphiles would find a less Germanic method and resort instead to the firing squads; but I didn’t wholly convince myself. I’d seen that frightening chamber with my own eyes and I couldn’t forget it.

  We drove back into Bonn. I switched my thoughts to the south coast of England. Big Eye was a much more efficient killer than any number of gas chambers, but it wasn’t selective. I was dropped at Trotton’s barracks in the early hours and took over my Mercedes and drove on for Bonn, where I was being accommodated at 6D2 HQ. I went to bed after checking with the duty officer and despite all the worries and traumas I was asleep within minutes of turning in. I woke late; I was woken by one of the girl secretaries, with a file of bumph. She drew the curtains and daylight streamed in.

  “The shipping lists, Commander,” she said, and left me to them. I rubbed the remains of sleep from my eyes and rang down for coffee, plenty of it, with rolls and butter and marmalade. Then I got down to some close study, the solving of what looked like a kind of crossword, or maybe a jigsaw. There were far too many ships leaving South American ports and bound for the Western Europe seaboard. Plenty for the West German ports, and I had to take into account France, Belgium and the Netherlands as well. I couldn’t say what date Klaus Kunze might have left Chile and the thing looked utterly hopeless. Even the arrival of breakfast didn’t help. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and got nowhere. The covering of the ports and frontiers was going to need all the police and troops, British included, in West Germany. The one thing, the one sensible if largely frustrating thing to do, was simply to keep both ears to the ground and follow the Werewolves; and then do what I could to nab the brain before they got their dirty claws on it. Someone in the higher echelons of the pack would most probably be in the know as to where the brain was to enter the country, since once it did it would need to have a strong guard mounted over it.

  I got dressed and went along to Willi Waldstein’s office. It could have been tactless with a name like his, but he had to be told, so I described what I’d been taken to see outside Neckarburg, and he went very pale.

  “It will be the same all over again,” he said. “Before, I escaped it. I was a baby … the war was almost over, and the guards were frightened. I was spared. My mother and father were not — so many years they had remained hidden, to be found at the last. It was so cruel. This time I will not escape.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t be defeatist, Herr Waldstein. You make it sound as though it’s already happened. It’s not going to happen!”

  “No. Perhaps not.” He sounded far from convinced; he was reliving that dreadful past. A baby he might have been, but he’d grown into a child, a thinking and remembering Jewish child, in the passing shadow of it all. He would have heard the stories at first hand, and he knew what had happened to his parents. West Germany could go under to the new Nazis by sheer inertia brought on by memories of what had been too overwhelming to fight back at.

  I roused Waldstein from his nightmare by saying, “I’m leaving Bonn, Herr Waldstein.”

  He lo
oked up. “For London?”

  “No. Berlin.”

  “East or West?”

  “West, in the first place. If I’m led to the East, which is doubtful, then I’ll go in.”

  He nodded. “You may take the Mercedes if you wish. Otherwise — ”

  “I’ll take the car. I like my independence. To forestall your next question, Herr Waldstein, when I get to Berlin I’ll aim to pick up some Werewolf tracks.” I told him why, told him how my thoughts had been projecting. He agreed; but his own thoughts were still in the gas chambers. He was more rocked than I’d feared he might be. I supposed it had never occurred to him that any of those filthy death chambers were still in existence at all, let alone all set to kill again.

  *

  I did the journey in good time and was in West Berlin soon after four p.m. All 6D2 maintained in the city was an agency, but it was a good one and there was an availability of communications worldwide on security lines. After reporting in I booked myself a suite in the flashiest hotel available; I have always found that when you want to make contact with the nastier villains, the place to go is the most expensive hotel. In today’s world, money and nastiness and villains go together; the tax system must have something to do with it. After the routine bug-check of my accommodation I went down to the cocktail bar and, like in Santiago, sat on a stool at the bar. I asked for a large Scotch. Unlike Santiago, the barman wasn’t the chatty sort; he was morose and appeared not to like the British, even to the point of disregarding my next order. He attended to one of his own countrymen instead, then retired to his cash register which he was no doubt busily engaged in defrauding. The West German at the bar was fat and flabby and could have been a pouf; so could the barman. I looked around; the place was reasonably full considering the hour, but not overly so. They looked a dull bunch but I didn’t read anything into that. Villains can look dull enough, so can Nazis — or Werewolves. I’d been told in the Bonn HQ that the pack included, along with the hooligan element, plenty of humdrum lawyers, doctors, accountants and so on. They were the brains behind the noisy louts in the leather jackets and thus the more dangerous.