Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

Nervous hallucinations set in after thirty minutes or so. They were bound to. When he topped a brow and vanished beyond it his image remained on the retinae and when he reappeared before it had time to fade out I could see two of him because he never showed up exactly in the same place on the vision-field. He wasn't going fast but it was too fast to take an accurate line through the bends and I clouted a bank before long and had to fight off the subsequent yawing-action that was set up by the springs.

Trees were the biggest hazard: they hid him suddenly if the road dipped or turned at that point and as soon as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight I was running into the trees myself and the whole lot went dark because they hid the sky as well and I was driving blind for five-second periods at sixty k.p.h. and at that speed I was covering more than eighty metres blacked out.

The only tune for thinking was along the stretches of straight road where I slowed a fraction to increase the gap and make it more difficult for him to pick up reflected light in his mirror. There were no facts to go on except that since he'd turned south from Neueburg he wasn't heading for Hanover where he was probably based and this gave me a chance to get some more information provided I could stay with him to the end of the line. There were a few assumptions, one of them reasonable: the clockmaker's must be a safe-house or a radio-point or both, but nothing more: an organization capable of half crippling the Luftwaffe's front-line strike-force and removing the Army Chief-of-Staff and the Minister of the Interior from office wouldn't make its headquarters in Neueburg. Another assumption — possibly more wishful than reasoned — was that the man ahead of me was making direct for those headquarters either in the routine duty of courier or to report on Benedikt. One thing was certain: I had to go with him.

We were thirty-one kilometres south of Neueburg on the speedo-trip when his lights vanished and I drove by the moon until some trees came and the offside of the 17M ploughed clay from the bank and struck roots and began creasing: the weight was shifting and the front tyre howled like a buzz-saw as the wing folded against it and I tried to ease over without correcting too sharply and hitting the opposite bank. Thorn and the boughs of saplings whiplashed along the bodywork and there was a dead-weight feeling to the wheel so I gunned up and dragged her clear and hit the lights on because there was the chance he wouldn't see them whereas there was no chance of dodging a head-on impact if the whole thing ran wild: without his lights and without the moon I was driving into a waste of darkness and the margin of error was the width of the car subtracted from the width of the road and it wasn't enough to get me through.

The whole scene jumped into focus as the lights came on: road-surface and grass and earth banks and a gateway and a group of elms rearing with the interplay of light and shadow swinging through their columns. It began from there: a series of rocking lunges that took the car through a zig-zag from bank to bank with the nearside rear skinning bark from an elm and the springs pitching so hard that the steering was half under control and half abandoned as the front wheels slid and struck earth and bounced away and found a grip and lost it again. Given some calculated bursts of acceleration the trim would have steadied but I was having to slow, having to brake because it was the only chance.

There were three more impacts at acute angles before I could pull up with all four wheels in a slide. As soon as movement stopped I cut the lights and hit the door open. I was in a hurry now and the wing came clear of the front tyre because it had to, because I made it, the left hand hooking to help, the bandage catching on the torn edge of the metal, some of it tearing. Then I stood and listened, seeing a patch of light flickering a kilometre away, south and eastwards.

He'd taken a branch road and that was why he'd been hidden for so long. He couldn't have seen my lights or heard the wing on the tyre because he would have stopped and doused his own lights and lain low. So there was still a chance.

It took time to come up on him again. The land was flatter, eastwards, but twice I had to light up for other traffic and once I lost him for minutes through a region of brush. Petrol fumes were filling the interior, and backdraught bringing them in through gaps in the torn bodywork: the tank had been split at some time when the rear had struck obstacles. It was a new worry but there was nothing I could do about it except coast when there was a chance, conserving fuel.

The moon was the only reference for any kind of bearing and I estimated that we were only some forty kilometres east of our north-south leg from Neueburg to the point where he'd turned off. I didn't know the area but I had looked at the map Ferris had put into the statistics folder and when the Kapitan slowed and turned across rough ground and doused its light I knew that this could only be the East German Frontier Zone.

It was a winter silence. The moon's light blanched colour away and left a bone-white landscape. There was no frost but the air was cold and very still. Far north the first murmuring came from the cloud-mass but here the land was quiet.

He had run the car into a huddle of black oblongs: the hulk of a military depot left here to rot a quarter of a century ago. When he had turned off the road I had started coasting with the engine dead, letting the last of the momentum thrust the 17M into thick bush. I pushed the statistics folder under the carpet and got out.

Ill For a minute the black outline was unbroken, then he detached himself and began walking. I drew my left hand along one of the wheel-ruts where the earth was soft at the edges, darkening the bandage, then took up the tag. I think he looked round but no more than casually and I was motionless before his eyes could have focussed. A light flickered as he checked his watch and I knew there was a rendezvous.

We walked fifty-odd metres apart. I was ready at every pace to freeze if he looked back. He didn't look back.

Between the North Sea and Czechoslovakia runs the jagged scar of the Frontier, nine hundred miles of barbed wire, trenches, watchtowers, concrete bunkers and minefields. For West Germany it doesn't exist: East Germany doesn't exist, therefore it can possess no frontier. But it is there, manned by fourteen thousand troops of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik with machine-guns, searchlights and dog-patrols. In the sensitive areas where attempts at 'exfiltration' are insistent the vigilance is sharp and every day someone, somewhere along the nine hundred miles of the Frontier, dies, a worn coat puckered by a ballet and a hand going out to break the fall of the living body that is dead before it meets the ground; and there is special leave for the man who shot him down.

The Hanover section is the responsibility of the Federal Customs and is patrolled by the Bundesgrenzschutz and the British Frontier Service. It is a less sensitive area and reliance is placed on the barbed wire and mines. It. is not the only section where vigilance on the part of the East German Volkspolizei has become cursory: since the Frontier was fortified in 1961 more than two thousand of their own border troops have themselves crossed it from east to west.

In some places the wife has rusted and the loose boards of the watchtowers rattle in the wind; the warning signs lean from rotten posts and the patrols keep to the warmth of their huts unless a sound reaches them through the winter night. But the mines are there, sown invisibly across the thirty-metre strip of desolate land. Some people still get across. There is a match-seller who sits outside the Hauptbahnhof in the city of Hanover, legless.