Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

The soldier’s name was Hanno Wolfrum.

He had been in charge of a convoy of trucks fleeing the advance of the Red Army towards the Baltic. Having departed from Konigsberg, the column had planned to travel due south to Pultusk, just north of Warsaw and from there to head west towards the German lines. Fearing that his route might be cut off by Russian reconnaissance units, Wolfrum sent his own scouts ahead to ensure that the roads were still passable. As they crossed the Polish border and entered the region of Masuria, Wolfrum’s scouts reported that Soviet tanks had been seen on the road to Pultusk. There were no westbound roads between him and the town, and he did not dare retrace his steps towards the north, so Wolfrum had been forced to detour to the east, towards the enemy lines, in the hopes that he could then find another route south. As the column made its way along a winding road which passed beside the Narew river, they came under Soviet mortar fire from the opposite bank. The lead and rear trucks on the convoy were destroyed, stranding the vehicles in between. The drivers and a small number of men who had been serving as armed escorts for the convoy all fled into the surrounding countryside.

Russian soldiers crossed the river, hoping to find food in the trucks. Instead, they discovered engine parts for both V-1 and V-2 rockets. As word of the discovery reached the Russian High Command, specialised troops of the NKVD Internal Security Service were dispatched to the scene. The rocket parts were quickly inventoried and transported to the rear and a hunt began for the men who had been travelling with the convoy.

By then, most of them had already been killed by Polish civilians. Wolfrum himself was found hiding in a barn by Red Army soldiers who had been out foraging. He was brought to the Alexeyevska prison camp, where he underwent weeks of interrogation.

During this time, Wolfrum was neither tortured nor mistreated. His interrogators, who were among the most skilled in the Russian Intelligence Service, were well aware that Wolfrum, in time and if properly treated, would supply them not only with the answers to their questions, but with questions which they had not thought to ask.

At first, Wolfrum claimed to know nothing about the contents of the crates aboard his trucks, but the unexpectedly civilised treatment he received put him off balance. He soon began to give up details about the convoy that showed that he was not only aware of the significance of these engine parts, but that he had been part of the team which designed them. It emerged that Wolfrum had been sent by General Hagemann himself, head of the Peenemunde programme, to the factory in Sovetsk, on the Lithuanian border, which had manufactured the engine parts and to remove them to safety before the arrival of the Red Army. In addition to this, Wolfrum had been ordered to blow up the factory before he left, a task for which he used so much dynamite that he not only obliterated the factory but shattered half the windows in the town.

Now Kirov studied Wolfrum’s appearance. The colonel’s tunic, although badly damaged during the days he had spent on the run, was made of high-quality grey gaberdine, with a contrasting dark green collar. All of his insignia had been removed by the camp authorities, leaving shadows on the cloth where his collar tabs and shoulder boards had been, as well as the eagle above his left chest pocket.

Wolfrum himself, although solidly built, looked frightened and as worn-out as his clothes. The skin sagged beneath his eyes and his bloodless lips were chapped. Kirov did not need to be told that it was not the present which terrified this officer, but the future. Wolfrum had already been in captivity for several months and was well aware that he would soon arrive at the limits of his usefulness. Whatever promises had been made by his captors, regarding his treatment in the weeks, or months or even years ahead, had only served to scour every wrinkle of his brain for information they could use. Any day now, the illusion of dignity would be set aside. Whether they put him up against a wall and shot him or else dispatched him to Siberia was all out of his hands now. In the meantime, Wolfrum answered their questions. He didn’t care what they were. The oaths of loyalty which he had taken long ago were to a country on the edge of extinction. Besides, there was nothing he knew that was still worth keeping secret. ‘You’re new,’ remarked Wolfrum when he caught sight of the major. ‘Are all the others tired out?’ Then he sipped at his tea, waiting for the interrogation to begin. They always gave him tea before these sessions and he was almost afraid to tell them how much he had come to value this miniature gesture of kindness.

‘I just have one question,’ said Kirov, ‘and I’ve been told that you might have the answer.’

Wolfrum sighed. ‘I have already explained everything. About everything. But why should that matter?’ Placing the mug on the table, he held open his hands, palms rosy from the heat. ‘Ask away, Comrade. I have all the time in the world.’

Kirov sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table.

‘What do you know about “Diamond Stream”?’ asked Kirov.

Wolfrum paused before he spoke. ‘Well now,’ he said at last, ‘perhaps there is something you don’t know about me, after all.’

‘And what might that be?’ asked Kirov.

‘That I worked on the Diamond Stream project.’

‘What did the project involve?’ he asked the colonel.

Wolfrum paused. Each time he gave up a new fragment of information, it seemed to him he took another step towards a line beyond which there could be no going back. But he had lately come to realise that the line had been crossed long ago. ‘Diamond Stream is the code name for a guidance system for the V-2 rocket. If it had succeeded, we could have dropped one down a chimney on the other side of Europe.’

‘If?’

‘That’s right,’ said Wolfrum. ‘It was a wonderful idea, but that’s all it ever was. I don’t know how many test shots we fired in the months before I was captured, but I can tell you that every single one of them failed. The mechanisms we designed were too fragile to withstand the vibrations of the rocket in flight.’

‘Do you think it could have worked,’ asked Kirov, ‘even if only in theory?’

Wolfrum smiled. ‘Our theories always worked, Comrade Major. It’s why we gave them such beautiful names. But that’s all it is, just a theory, and likely all that it will ever be.’

A few days later, a truck pulled up before the gates of the British Propulsion Laboratory, located near King’s Dock in Swansea in the south of Wales.

The town had once been a thriving port, but German air raids, which took place mostly at night during the summer of 1940, had reduced much of the docklands to rubble.

The propulsion laboratory, which dealt primarily in steam-driven turbines for powering the engines of battleships, had been one of the few businesses to survive the bombing. This was by virtue of the fact that its large roof, whose dew-soaked slates gleamed in the moonlight, had served as a homing beacon for the attacking squadrons of Heinkels and Dornier bombers. The pilots of these planes had been given strict orders not to damage the roof, and the laboratory had remained intact.

Soldiers of the Army Transport Corps unloaded a crate from the back of the truck. The heavy box was placed upon a handcart and brought inside the red-brick building. The soldiers were joined by two men in civilian clothing, who had accompanied the crate from the moment it had arrived in the English port city of Harwich two days before.

One of these men wore a trilby hat and a brown wool gaberdine coat. He was tall and wiry and sported a pencil-thin moustache. The man made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was carrying a revolver in a shoulder holster.