Sam Eastland - Red Icon

The man tipped to the side and his coat, which had been neatly folded over his arm, wafted up in Zolkin’s face.

The driver shied away, eyes closed and lips pressed tight together.

Elizaveta saw a flash of silver, which she took to be sunlight off a cufflink of the stranger’s.

Then the man regained his footing and Elizaveta sighed with relief, glad that he had not ended up sprawled in the street on her account.

She walked on a couple of paces. Then, conscious that Zolkin was no longer beside her, she turned. Her first thought was that Zolkin had stopped to have a word with the stranger, but what she saw when she turned made her face go numb with fear.

Zolkin stood on the pavement, one hand held against his neck. Blood was squirting from between his fingers. His face bore an expression of complete surprise.

‘What happened?’ she gasped.

Slowly, Zolkin dropped to his knees and, with his one free hand, groped across the pavement until he sat down with his back against the wall of a house.

The stranger crouched down in front of Zolkin, reached into the driver’s waistcoat pocket and removed his set of keys and fuel-ration booklet. Then he stood and walked calmly towards Elizaveta, one hand held out as if to comfort her. His face was ghostly pale, like flesh preserved in formaldehyde.

A wave of terror swept across her mind. ‘What happened?’ she asked again, but even as she spoke, she saw the man slide a long butcher’s knife back into the folds of his coat.

Elizaveta tried to cry out, but she found that she could barely speak, and there was no one else around.

Then the stranger laid her out with a single punch, the way he had learned to drop horses, focusing his power a hand’s breadth beyond the place where he knew that his fist would connect. He had never hit a woman before and even though he could easily have killed her, he was careful not to do so. So little of his strength went into knocking her out that it almost felt gentle to him. He caught her as she tumbled to the ground. Leaving the driver to bleed to death, he bundled the woman into the boot of the Emka and set off towards Ahlborn, determined to arrive before Pekkala.

*

Meanwhile, in Stefan’s plainly furnished house in Ahlborn, Emil Kohl paced like a cat in a cage. His nerves were strained to breaking point. He had been there for over a month and, although he had anticipated that it would take some time for Stefan to make contact with Professor Arbusov, his Soviet counterpart in the field of organophosphate chemistry, he had not imagined ever having to wait this long.

Ever since his brother had left for Russia, Emil’s mind had been plagued with doubts.

He wondered if Stefan had been arrested, or even killed, or if by accident or out of curiosity he had opened the vial of soman, in which case he would have died on the spot, taking with him anyone who happened to be standing nearby. There was a third possibility, which was that Stefan had simply abandoned him to his fate. As the days wore on, this last option began to seem increasingly likely.

Emil cursed himself for having placed his faith in his younger brother. The more he thought about it, the more insane it seemed that he should have trusted him at all.

It was cold in the house. Even a small fire would have made a difference, but Stefan had warned him against lighting one, since the smoke would let people know he was there. His brother had left him with plenty of food, but almost all of it was meat. The man was a butcher, after all. The meat had been smoked with a variety of woods – oak, maple and alder – and hung in blackened strips from racks in the kitchen. The smell of it, which Emil had initially found pleasant, if a little overpowering, had now suffused into his clothes, his hair and his skin. He tasted the smoke every time he took a breath, and its stench had become nauseating.

The day after Stefan left for Moscow, Emil had been woken by the ear-splitting roar of engines. As his eyes snapped open, his first thought was that a tank was coming through the wall. He screamed, tipped himself on to the floor and crawled under the bed, just as six Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters screeched past at treetop level, heading east on their morning patrol. The whole house shook. The windows rippled as if the glass had turned to water. The vibration was still shuddering in his bones as he slithered out from beneath the bed and rushed to the window, just in time to see the planes pass out of sight, leaving behind oil-black trails of exhaust. He had heard about the new jet planes and recognised their Jumo engines from classified documents he had seen from a project designed to produce synthetic fuel. There was also the sound they made; not the buzz-saw hum of a propeller plane, but something that sounded to Professor Kohl more like a hive full of angry bees. There had been much talk, not only at IG Farben but in the press as well, of secret new ‘revenge’ weapons soon to be unleashed upon the Allies, which would turn the tide of the war. From the first mention of these Vergeltungswaffen , Professor Kohl had assumed that the Sartaman Project would feature prominently in this new arsenal of destruction. But now the fading rumble of the 262s seemed to drive home the fact that he, and his inventions, had been left out of the Fuhrer’s grand equation.

The planes returned a little over an hour later and this time Emil got a better look at their grey, shark-like silhouettes, the black German crosses almost hidden among blooms of camouflage paint, like giant, sooty fingerprints.

Two hours later, they flew past again and a third time before the sun went down, causing the house to tremble as if caught in the grip of an earthquake.

These regularly scheduled tremors became a daily fixture in Emil’s existence. He grew to anticipate them, becoming more and more agitated as the time for their arrival drew near. And if they were late, even by a few minutes, he found himself with his nose pressed to the window, peering up through the trees to catch a glimpse of them as they flew past.

This, combined with inactivity and loneliness, was driving Kohl close to distraction, but still he did not dare go outside.

As the days passed, and the time allotted for his leave expired, Emil began to dwell upon the fact that his absence would, by now, have been reported. The disappearance of an IG Farben chemist, particularly one with his level of expertise and having been involved in such delicate work, would not be a matter for the bumbling municipal police. The matter would be handed over to the Secret State Police. It was only a matter of time before the Gestapo came knocking at his door and once they got their hands on him, all chance of escape would be lost.

I can’t just sit here waiting to be arrested, thought Emil, staring out of the window at the dirt road lined with pine trees, which was his only view from the front of the house. From the back, all he could see was a small overgrown yard, filled with firewood and bordered by a tall stockade fence.

Weighing his options for the hundredth time, it became clear that there was only one possible course of action open to him now. He would return to Leverkeusen, hand over the briefcase containing the vials and confess what he had done. Of course, he would leave out the part about handing his brother a vial of soman, but if the Russians turned up with soman at some later date, he could rightly point out that they, too, had been looking into organophosphate compounds before the war and must have stumbled upon the same formula by themselves.

If the authorities asked him where he had gone, he would simply tell them he had travelled to his brother’s house and had been unable to get back because of the fighting. The lie was both simple and plausible and, as for the chemical weapons, the only thing he had really done was to stabilise a pre-existing compound, thereby making it not only easier to transport but easier to neutralise as well. Yes, he had disobeyed an order, but he had done so with the best of intentions. It was simply a misunderstanding, and, at least the way he planned to tell it, no harm had been done.