Gerald Seymour - The Contract

'We call these the 150 percenters,' Charlie Davies boomed. 'They're a law to themselves, they can come through the wire whenever they want to, they can come right up to the frontier marker. In all my time I've only ever known one of them step the last yard over… Hey, Fritz, don't you go wasting film, do you want me to get the lads in a nice group for you, do you want me to do that? Look at the buggers, not a flicker. The day I get a wave out of that lot, I'll bloody drop dead…'

The convoy took a chipstone road that showed the wear of the forestry lorries. The car bumped and rolled. They passed a Bundesgrenzschutz van and Davies waved and was acknowledged and then they were alone again in the vastness of the woods. With the engines killed a quiet came on them. A lonely, green, leafy place till they walked up a soft mud path to within sight of the fence. The ground on either side of the close mesh wire had been cleared years earlier but now the bushes had sprouted and the grass grown and there was only the ploughed strip and the vehicle ditch and the patrol strip to show where the fence builders had tried to halt the encroachment of cover.

Carter was beside Charlie Davies. The troops had dropped behind.

Just another stretch of border to them, and not much of a vantage point because the ground was flat, and they had been to better places and after the meeting with the Grenzaufklarer their interest had flagged.

'This was where he came on the second day, your lad, Johnny…'

'What attracted him?'

'Difficult to say. There's no permanent position here. No towers or bunkers, no mines either. That's the plus side…'

'And the negative…?'

'There's a Hinterland fence… there's a fair concentration of company garrisons all along this stretch, there's vehicles patrolling through the night and less often by day, there's SM 70s on the fence.'

Carter gazed through the mesh into the scrub beyond.

'Where should he be now, if he's coming tonight?'

'Five hundred metres or so the wrong side of the Hinterland.'

'He'd be trying to sleep, I suppose,' Carter said, a private thought.

' If I were stumbling into that lot tonight, I'd not be sleeping..'

Carter heard the crack in Davies's voice, recognised the emotion, realised that Johnny had reached and touched another man. The low pitched voices of the troops did not break into Carter's closed concentration. Johnny out there with the scientist and his daughter.

' I'll have to be here tonight…'

' I'll bring you up, can't have you running around here on your own,'

Charlie Davies said brusquely. 'But you'll have to appreciate one thing.

Till he gets to where we're standing now there's nothing we can do to help him. Whatever happens out there, nothing…'

The morning had passed. The patrol expressed their gratitude. Davies and his driver dropped Carter at the Stettiner Hof. They agreed a rendezvous time for the evening.

The Trade Minister maintained a granite faced faqade of interest as he walked with a covey of managers and shop stewards between the aisles of carburettor engines. His attention was far from the production figures and output quotas for the machinery it was hoped his government would buy. Before leaving the Midlands he had spoken to the First Secretary by telephone.

The new men, he had concluded, were a weaker and poorer breed than those of the Old Guard with whom he had come from Moscow on the last day of April, 1945, to set up the fledgeling civilian administration at Frankfurt-an- der-Oder behind the rolling advance of the Red Army.

Pieck and Grotewohl and Ulbricht would have known their minds, accepted his advice that he should return to Berlin immediately in the face of the criminal violation of the DDR's sovereign territory. But the new men were cautious, subservient. When there was a prisoner, when the net had trapped the fugitive, then he should cut short his visit.

But he believed that he had noted in his conversation with the First Secretary a growing impatience in the offices of the Central Committee at the inability of the forces of the SSD and the Schutzpolizei to track their quarry.

Doctor Frommholtz marched at the head of his entourage towards the canteen.

The Deputy-Under-Secretary was shown into the Prime Minister's private office. He had requested a meeting at Downing Street within minutes of having received a digest of Henry Carter's communication with Century House. He had been told that the Prime Minister was holding back on a scheduled meeting.

'Thank you for making yourself available at such short notice, sir.'

The Prime Minister stared at him, fascinated by the wreckage of a proud man. 'Please take a seat.'

' I'd prefer to stand and I'll be brief. We have reason to believe that the DIPPER matter will be concluded during the hours of tonight. One way or the other. We think that our man will attempt to break out of the DDR, to cross the frontier into the Federal Republic.'

The Prime Minister shuddered. He had been told before he arrived at Downing Street that many of his predecessors had found the workings and mechanics of the Service to be a narcotic. 'Are you in contact with him?'

'The prognostication is based on contingency plans made before his departure for East Germany.'

A slight smile from the Prime Minister. 'So, you're going to wave a magic wand, Deputy-Under-Secretary, cover the silk hat with a handkerchief, and then, hey presto, you're going to produce the agent safe and well and we're all to fall down before you and exclaim that the Service is the finest in the world.'

' I thought you'd want to know, sir.'

' It will be no credit to the Service if we get out of this without disgrace. It will be because of my efforts with the East Germans.'

' If we get out of this,' said the Deputy-Under-Secretary icily, 'it will be because my man successfully crosses the Inner German Border.'

'What about Guttmann? Have you written him off?' 'With the border in its present security state, we accept it is inconceivable that Dr Guttmann can accompany our man.'

' I must say, the Service's finest hour.'

' I drafted my letter of resignation at lunch-time. It will be with PUS in the morning. I've asked for it to be effective from midnight tomorrow.

Goodbye, sir.'

He had made more noise approaching the hide than he would have liked, but the poles were heavy and he lugged them with difficulty through the undergrowth. He would have left a trail, but it was close to dusk. Three larch poles, strong and straight, and an armful of young birch stems.

They sat with their arms around each other on the ground as Johnny broke cover, and their faces shone with relief at the sight of him. They would have been fearful at the sound of his approach, praying it was Johnny.

His admiration swelled tor them.

'Everything's fine. Just as we wanted.'

Otto Guttmann stared in disbelief at the larch poles, noted that the ends were neatly axe chopped into tapering, sharpened points.

Johnny grinned. 'A woodman gave them to me…'

'Gave them?'

' I think he did. He left me a nice pile to choose from…'

He saw the tension evaporating, the slow smile of understanding.

'… If he didn't mean them as a gift, he can have them back in the morning.'

The old man laughed, and the girl chuckled.

Johnny felt in his anorak pocket, reached amongst the grenades and the pistol's shoulder stock, and produced a greaseproof paper bag. 'He's a decent chap, the woodman, he gave me these for you… well, he left them for someone when he put his bag down. I scattered the paper and ripped it a bit, the bag they were in… I suppose he'll think he gave them to a fox… generous of him, whether they were for me or a fox or whoever.'

He tossed the package in a gentle arc so that it fell on Erica's lap. Her hands tore at the paper, exposed the rough bread, the protruding meat. She and her father ate ravenously, stopping only to pick at the dropped pieces that spilled to their legs.