Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

'I've been at Aschau.'

We were alone in his quarters. I had noted his service revolver among some gear on a chair and I was standing where I could block him if he went for it.

Reaction wasn't total. I hadn't expected it to be. All he knew now was that I was a bit more than an aviation psychologist attached to the A.I.B. head tilted, a degree sideways and a degree forward. He knew who I was not; he didn't know who I was.

'Yes?'

I said: 'Die Zelle is finished.' But of course he would need more than that. He would want proof. 'Kohn, Gross, Langmann, Schott, all of them. Finished.'

Total reaction now, much earlier than I'd expected because he still didn't have any proof. But within half a minute I hardly recognized him: the shock had aged his face and sharpened its resemblance to his father's.

;Thank God,' he said.

I had to think about that. The unexpected was coming up all the time and I tried to recognize familiar facts but there was only one with relevance. Nitri had said in the car: He's enormously brave. For a man with his record of courage his nerves had needed a lot of tranquillizing: a woman a night, so they said.

Then I got it.

'Pushing you too far, were they?'

He said nothing. His face had lost all colour and his eyes were vacant: in the way of a drowning man he was reviewing his life and if I had spoken again he wouldn't have heard or understood.

After a long time he said numbly: 'Yes. I tried to tell him. But he said a part of the new Germany was in my care. That was what he said.'

'In your care?' I was getting fed up. 'And thirty-six pilots, one after the other — were they in your care too?'

Abstractedly: 'That was Wagner.'

'Oh really? Nothing to do with you? Christ, I wouldn't want your conscience, Rohmhild.'

Wagner wasn't much surprise. I'd already checked on him, coming into the air-base. He'd left here two days ago. Rotational duties: he'd be down at Hankensbuttel now, the next one round the ring.

'I did it for him.'

'What? Oh, for Kohn. You're all the same — you can never do anything for yourselves, there's always got to be some kind of a tin god telling you what to do. Then you'll do anything. When did they tell you, the Rohmhilds?' Because it must have been like that.

'When I was fifteen.'

'Well that was a bloody silly thing to do.'

Puberty is no time to tell someone he's got a genuine father lost on the other side of a lot of barbed wire: he'll want to find him. I wondered if Kohn would ever have allowed that. He'd had no choice. The Rohmhilds had thought it was the right thing to do.

I said: 'When did you first meet him?'

'On my nineteenth birthday.' But his answers weren't coming as fast as that. He spent a lot of time staring at nothing. 'I went across the Wall on a holiday pass and tried not to come back but he made me.'

'Was that when it happened?' He stared at me, trying to connect. 'Was that when he offered you the sacred task of assisting in the re-creation of the beloved Fatherland and all that balls?'

Something like anger came into his eyes: I'd kicked half a temple over and there has to be a place to pray in when you worship a god. Distinguished flying record, the Iron Cross as a lieutenant, so forth. And a face to show for it: the face of the mutilated martyr. They'd had young Rohmhild-Kohn across a barrel.

'It was later. A year later.'

'What was your job? Recruiting Wagner?'

'Yes.'

More than that. For the past year he'd been Die Zelle's contact inside the Luftwaffe, monitoring pilot-reactions, listening to the A.I.B. wreckage-analysts, checking on their West German counterpart team, passing it all through the wire with people like Guhl as a courier. Linsdorf was the main base where the Striker-crash investigations were going on.

'How much longer were you going to keep it up?'

'It was not in my hands, after Wagner had worked out a way to-'

'Oh all right, but you had all the information, didn't you, you knew who was next on the list? What was it? Drugs? Hypnosis? A nerve-gas?'

'I don't know.'

'Of course you know!'

'He didn't tell me!'

'Damn your eyes — how was it administered?'

His head had swung away as if I'd hit him. From somewhere he was trying to rescue reason and re-arm himself but there was no defence against what I had told him: that Die Zelle was finished. The divine orders from the god in the temple had been to engineer the death of young man like himself who flew the same plane and lived the same life, and his subscription to opposing loyalties had finally cut him in two, just as all Germany was cut.

If I stopped now I'd never get it from him. 'What was his method! Wagner's method!' Because London wouldn't go in immediately: she'd said the Berlin run was normally scheduled for the fifteenth of every month, 'It was a tablet.'

'Where? Where did he — '

'In the tube of sedatives — '

'Oh Christ, as simple as that?' They were out there rebuilding whole aeroplanes. 'What was it, the fifth in the tube, the sixth? How many sedative doses before the big kick, Rohmhild? One every flight? How many flights a day? How many days?'

He stood shivering and I turned away. He didn't have to answer: the answer was on the map, the ring on the map. Wagner spent an average of five days at every main Striker base. His duties were rotational and death was rotational: Russian roulette. He would alter his time-pattern so that he would never be present at any given base when a crash happened. Pick the next man and get out, just as you light a fuse.

And the stuff could be anything, a quick-acting depressant using the normal effects of high-altitude and oxygen-breathing as a catalyst: that would be essential because they had to come down hard enough to make analysis impossible. Ferris: You saw that crash so you can imagine what the pilot looks like afterwards. Quick-acting and short duration: I had asked Philpott what attitude the Striker would adopt if the pilot lost control and hadn't switched to automatic. Nose down, four or five degrees. From sixty thousand feet, all the way into the ground.

He was standing looking out of the window but I knew that nothing was familiar to him any more.

'How long have you been at Linsdorf?'

'Six months.'

'Got a transfer here did you?'

He said nothing more. But it was six months ago when the West German analysts and the A.I.B. had set up Linsdorf as the centre of their operations. The eye and the ear of Die Zelle had requested transfer.

'Who's next, Rohmhild?'

He didn't answer, perhaps didn't hear. His silence gave me time to think and suddenly I knew that I was missing something important: I didn't know what it was but the natural thing happened and my thoughts focused on the one area still unexplained. Rohmhild had been so vulnerable when I had come here and I had assumed it was due to the strain of standing by and doing nothing while they came out of the sky one after another at Gunzburg, Spalt, Laubach, Linsdorf 'Rohmhild.' Wagner gone. Rotational. The taint of kerosene in the draught from the windows. 'Who is next?' I swung him round and his face opened to the shock of the attack: he'd even forgotten I was here, and forgotten why.

'Artur Boldt.'

Geschwaderkommodore, Linsdorf. Now airborne, I dragged at the door and began running and was halfway to the control tower when I heard the shot but kept on going, the odd thought flashing to mind that Nitri was off the hook now. The pilots heard it from the crew-room and came out to see what was happening and one of them called to me but I went on running. Concrete apron, dry ice in the shallows, a flight of steps, steel banister, the door.

They were surprised to see me. Green glass filtering the light. I told them to get him down, do it now, catch him before he reached his operational ceiling (because it could be a part of the trick, normal effects of high altitude as a catalyst), said I was with A.I.B. and we'd located the fault because they weren't too quick but that one worked all right and they started calling him up.