Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

He could see the captain looking from the turret wheelhouse. The man wore a close-fitting fur cap and his meaty hands gripped the metal apron of the turret. He was not smiling.

Neither were the other crewmen, all of whom wore heavy canvas coats with thick fur collars and carried PPSh sub-machine guns with fifty-round magazines.

‘ Hur mar du! ’ Hildebrand shouted again, waving stupidly and all the while weaving like a drunkard as compensation for the movement of the deck beneath his feet.

The captain turned to the one of the fur-coated men standing next to him.

The man smiled.

The captain laughed. He raised one hand and swiped it through the air in greeting.

‘That’s it,’ Hildebrand muttered through the clenched teeth of his smile. ‘Keep moving, Bolshevik.’

The engine of the Moshka growled and the boat moved on, dematerialising into the salty mist.

Hildebrand tried to swallow, but his throat was so tight that all he could do was hold on to a cable and lean over the side in order to spit. As he moved, the binoculars swung out on their leather strap.

His heart practically stopped. He had forgotten completely about them.

He wondered how the Soviets could possibly have disregarded the sight of a pair of German Navy binoculars hanging around the neck of a Swedish trawler-man. The answer, it seemed clear to him, was that they hadn’t. He reached into the wooden trunk and removed a Panzerfaust. Never having fired one before, he wondered how accurate they were.

Hildebrand peered into the black, waiting for the Moshka to reappear out of the gloom and for the night air to be filled with the racing lights of tracer fire as the Russian guns tore his ship apart.

But the Moshka never reappeared.

He imagined the Russian captain, weeks or even years from now, waking from a dream in which he suddenly realised his mistake.

Once more Hildebrand broke into a smile, only this one was not conjured out of fear.

Just then, something flickered across the mottled white disc of the moon.

Immediately, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and glimpsed the fiery exhaust of the V-2, trailing a white line of condensation across the firmament. And something else, which he had never seen before. Between the chalky vapour trail and the blowtorch heat of the rocket, Hildebrand perceived a glittering light, as if the universe had inverted and he was not looking up but down into the depths of the sea and the V-2 was no longer a mass of arc-welded technology but a huge and elegant sea creature, followed by a retinue of tiny fish, illuminating its path with their silvery bodies.

‘Diamonds,’ whispered Hildebrand. And he was so transfixed by the great beauty of this moment that it was only when the V-2 had crossed directly above his head, at a height of about one kilometre, that Hildebrand realised it was not descending, as all of the other rockets had done. ‘Are you sure we’re in the target area?’ he barked at the helmsman.

The wheelhouse door opened and Hildebrand was forced to repeat himself.

‘Yes,’ answered Barth. ‘Why do you ask?’ But even before Hildebrand could reply, the helmsman noticed the V-2 as it passed over their heads.

‘Shouldn’t it be losing altitude by now?’ asked Barth.

‘It should,’ answered Hildebrand, ‘as long as we’re in the right place.’

‘We are, Ka-Leu. I checked.’

‘Which direction is it going?’ asked Hildebrand.

‘North,’ replied Barth. ‘Due north.’

Hildebrand clambered down the ladder into the hold.

‘Is everything all right?’ asked Grimm, removing his headphones.

‘A chart!’ shouted Hildebrand. ‘Find me a chart of the area.’

Grimm fetched out a map and laid it on the table, sweeping aside a collection of pencils, protractors and decoded Enigma transcripts.

Hildebrand studied the chart, tracing one finger along the north-south line until it came to a stop at the island of Bornholm, 50 kilometres away. ‘Son of a bitch!’ shouted Hildebrand. ‘I think we’ve just declared war on Sweden.’

‘Bornholm is actually Danish,’ said Grimm.

‘Never mind who it belongs to! Just send a message to the general and ask him what the hell is going on.’

As Pekkala slowly made his way through a bowl of sorrel and mushroom soup which Valentina had brought him, he suddenly felt that he was being watched.

Glancing up, he caught the eye of an ancient, thickly bearded man who was staring at him.

Embarrassed to have been spotted, the old-timer smiled awkwardly and returned to eating his own meal.

This was not the first time that Pekkala had experienced the strange, prickling sensation that the gaze of a stranger was upon him.

Some, like the old man, who had once been a guard at the Winter Palace of the Tsar, recognised his face from long ago. Others had heard only rumours that this quiet midnight visitor was known across the length and breadth of Russia as the Emerald Eye.

Pekkala had been born in Lappeenranta, Finland, at a time when it was still a Russian colony. His mother was a Laplander, from Rovaniemi in the north.

At the age of eighteen, on the wishes of his father, Pekkala travelled to Petrograd in order to enlist in Tsar Nicholas II’s elite Chevalier Guard. There, early in his training, he had been singled out by the Tsar for special duty as his own Special Investigator. It was a position which had never existed before and which would one day give Pekkala powers that had been considered unimaginable before the Tsar chose to create them.

In preparation for this, he was given over to the police, then to the State Police – the Gendarmerie – and after that to the Tsar’s secret police, who were known as the Okhrana. In those long months, doors were opened to him which few men even knew existed. At the completion of his training, the Tsar gave to Pekkala the only badge of office he would ever wear – a heavy gold disc, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Across the centre was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disc and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large, round emerald. Together, these elements formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. Pekkala never forgot the first time he held the disc in his hand, and the way he had traced his fingertip over the eye, feeling the smooth bump of the jewel, like a blind man reading braille.

It was because of this badge that Pekkala became known as the Emerald Eye. Little else was known about him by the public. In the absence of facts, legends grew up around Pekkala, including rumours that he was not even human, but rather some demon conjured into life through the black arts of an Arctic shaman.

Throughout his years of service, Pekkala answered only to the Tsar. In that time he learned the secrets of an empire, and when that empire fell, and those who shared those secrets had taken them to their graves, Pekkala was surprised to find himself still breathing.

Captured during the Revolution, and after months of interrogation at the Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons, he was convicted by the Bolsheviks of crimes against the state and sent to labour camp at Borodok, to serve out a sentence of no less than twenty-five years.

Pekkala had been a prisoner for nine of those years when a young, newly commissioned officer in the Bureau of Special Operations came clambering through the forest of Krasnagolyana to deliver the news that Pekkala’s sentence had been repealed, but only on condition that he agreed to work for Stalin, just as he had once done for the Tsar.

As a gesture of Stalin’s good will, the officer brought with him a satchel containing two trophies which had been taken from Pekkala at the time of his arrest, and which he was now authorised to return.