Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

But in the coming months, as almost everyone they’d ever known in the Navy was removed from their original commission, reassigned as infantry and fed into the vast meat grinder of the Russian front, Hildebrand and his two-man crew had grown to appreciate the obscurity of their position.

Except for the fact that he had been ordered to fly the flag of neutral Sweden while carrying out his work, which meant that he would have undoubtedly been shot if Russian ships prowling these waters had ever stopped and boarded him, Hildebrand’s job was relatively safe.

The only thing Hildebrand really worried about was being hit by one of these falling monsters. The fact that these particular rockets did not contain explosive payloads was of little consolation to him, since the amount of metal and machinery contained within them, together with their terminal velocity, was more than enough to turn him, his boat and his crew into particles smaller than rain.

Although Hildebrand was no propulsion engineer, he had pieced together enough to understand that the reason for this incessant bombarding of the Baltic was all part of a search to improve the guidance system by which the V-2s were delivered to their target. From what he had seen with his own eyes, they still had a long way to go.

‘I’d better get up top side,’ announced Hildebrand. From a cabinet by the ladder, he removed a heavy pair of Zeiss Navy binoculars, with their characteristic yellow-green paint and black rubber bumpers around the lenses. They had been issued to him during his time as an S-boat commander, and if those binoculars could have trapped the memory of things Hildebrand had glimpsed through its lenses, the chalky cliffs of Dover would have glimmered into focus, and the sight of American tankers burning outside Portsmouth harbour, and of La Pallice, his base on the Brittany coast, as he returned from one of his missions, only to find that the port had been destroyed by Allied bombing.

They might have taken his S-boat from him, but Hildebrand was not going to part with those binoculars. Placing the leather cord around his neck, Hildebrand climbed up the ladder, opened the hatch and climbed out on deck.

The first breath of cold air was like pepper in his lungs.

Ice had crusted on the fishing net, which lay twined around a large metal drum balanced horizontally on a stand at the stern of the boat. Even this late in the year, the temperature often dropped below freezing. He went straight to the net and, with his gloved hand, punched at the ice until it began to come away in chunks. Such a build-up on the net was a sure sign, to any passing Russian gunboat, that their trawler was not actually doing any fishing.

The wheelhouse door opened and Barth stuck his head out. ‘Is that you, Herr Ka-Leu?’ he asked, using the colloquial abbreviation of Hildebrand’s rank.

‘Just cleaning the net,’ replied Hildebrand and, as he spoke, he noticed that their little Swedish flag, tied to a broomstick which jutted at an angle from the bow, had also been encased in ice. Hildebrand made his way over to the pole and shook the flag loose, so that its blue and yellow colours could be seen.

‘The Fuhrer thanks you for your fastidiousness,’ remarked the helmsman.

‘And I have no doubt that he is equally grateful for your sarcasm,’ Hildebrand replied.

Barth glanced up at the sky. ‘When’s it due?’

‘Any minute now.’

The watchman nodded. ‘Cold tonight.’

‘Keep an eye out for pieces of ice.’

‘We’ve hit a lot of them this trip,’ agreed Barth. ‘If we stay out here much longer, one of those bastards is going to come right through our hull.’ Then he spat on the deck for good luck and shut the door behind him.

Alone now, Hildebrand searched among the stars for the flame of the V-2. Raising the powerful binoculars to his eyes, he stared up at the gibbous moon. The craters of the Ptolemaeus range, like the shell holes of a Great War battlefield, jumped into focus.

‘Ka-Leu!’ hissed Barth.

Hildebrand lowered the binoculars.

The helmsman was pointing at something off the port bow.

Hildebrand could see it now – a chevron of white water caused by the chisel-shaped bow of a small ship ploughing through the water. A moment later, Hildebrand made out the armoured turret-shaped wheelhouse of a Soviet patrol boat, of the type known as a ‘Moshka’. They were used primarily as submarine chasers and Hildebrand had seen a number of them during his time out here on the Baltic. He had heard stories of running gun battles between Moshkas and Finnish submarines that had been caught on the surface. Unable to dive without making themselves an easy target for the Moshka’s depth charges, the Finns had remained on the surface, exchanging machine gunfire with the Russian sailors until each vessel was so riddled with bullets that both often sank as a result. There were other stories, too, of transport ships crowded with German civilians and wounded soldiers, fleeing the unstoppable Soviet advance. Hoping to reach Denmark, parts of which were still in German hands, these overloaded ships were easy prey for the Moshkas. Thousands of women and children and wounded German soldiers had been lost. Maybe tens of thousands. Their numbers would never be known.

Immediately in front of Hildebrand lay a wooden chest normally used for storing coils of rope. It now contained two Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons, a dozen stick grenades and three Schmeisser sub-machine guns – enough to give the crew of the Gullmaren at least a fighting chance if the Russian sailors became too curious. But a fighting chance was all it gave them. The trawler carried no armaments. Its hull was already weak from salt rot and worms which had bored into the keel. Its old diesel engine stood absolutely no chance of outrunning even the slowest of Russian patrol boats. Hildebrand had always counted upon the notion that the greatest defence this trawler could offer them was, in fact, its utter defencelessness. That, and the blue and yellow Swedish flag, which, thanks to his fastidiousness, now fluttered on its broomstick pole.

With the toe of his boot, Hildebrand opened the lid of the wooden trunk and stared at the weaponry laid out in front of him. As mist began to settle on the black barrel of the Schmeisser and on the dull, sand-coloured tubing of the Panzerfaust, Hildebrand tried to calculate exactly how long it would take him to retrieve one of the grenades, unscrew the metal cap at the bottom of the stick, arm the weapon by tugging the porcelain ball attached to a piece of string located inside the hollow wooden shaft, then throw it, not at the Russians but down into the radio room, in order to destroy the Enigma machine before the Russians got their hands on it.

Grimm would be killed in the blast, of course, but the Russians would have shot him anyway when they found out who he was. None of them would survive. Of that, he was quite certain.

As the patrol boat drew near, Hildebrand heard the Russian helmsman back off on the throttle of his engine. Then came a sharp command, a metallic clunk and suddenly the trawler was bathed in the magnesium blast of a search light.

With his eyes forced almost shut by the glare, Hildebrand raised one hand and bellowed, ‘ Hur mar du? ’ – the only words of Swedish that he knew.

While the Moshka’s searchlight played along the length of the trawler, Hildebrand caught sight of a heavy machine-gun mounted on a stand at the bow. A Russian sailor stood behind it, leaning into the half-moon-shaped shoulder braces, ready to chop him to pieces with its 37mm ammunition.

In spite of the cold air, Hildebrand was now sweating profusely.

The Moshka was level with them now, still moving but with its engines powered down almost into neutral.