Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

By now, the technicians, sitting in their huddle, had noticed that something unusual was going on. Leaving their helmets, which resembled a crop of large grey mushrooms that had suddenly sprouted from the road, they came over to the radio truck.

Among them was Sergeant Behr. ‘What is it, Herr General?’ he asked.

Hagemann handed him the message which they had just received.

‘Diamond Stream,’ whispered Behr.

Soon the words began to echo among the small group of men gathered beside the radio truck.

Hagemann stared at the list of calculations scribbled on his clipboard. He had waited so long for the Diamond Stream to become a reality, rehearsing in his mind the precise array of emotions which hearing those words would evoke. But now that the moment was finally here, and so unexpectedly, the only thing he felt was nauseous.

By now, Behr had also read the trawler’s message. ‘But why would it have overshot?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ answered Hagemann. ‘The Diamond Stream must have had some unintended effect on the propulsion system. I’ll have to go over the flight calculations again. It might be a while before I know for certain what took place.’

‘Do we have any idea of where it might have come down, Herr General?’

Hagemann shook his head. ‘Most likely in the water.’

‘And even if the rocket did crash on land,’ Behr stated confidently, ‘there would be nothing of it.’

Hagemann didn’t reply. He knew that whole sections of V-2 fuselage had survived their supersonic impacts, even those which had been fully loaded with explosives. Disoriented, the general began walking down the sandy road towards the ocean, as if he meant to swim out into the freezing waters of the Baltic and retrieve the missing rocket by himself.

‘Congratulations!’ Behr called after him.

Hagemann raised one hand in acknowledgement as the darkness swallowed him up.

Far to the west, at a British Special Operations listening post known as Station 53A, located in a rural manor house in Buckinghamshire, the messages exchanged between General Hagemann’s launch site and the observation ship had been intercepted.

In less than an hour, the message had been decoded by the station’s Head of Operations, a former member of the Polish Intelligence Service named Peter Garlinski.

Garlinski, a thin-faced man with round, tortoiseshell glasses and two thin swabs of hair growing on either side of his otherwise bald head, had been en route to England in September of 1939, carrying rotors stolen from a German Enigma machine, when the Germans invaded his country. With no way to return home, Garlinski offered his services to British Intelligence. He had been at 53A ever since, rising to Head of Operations thanks to his ability to stay at his post for thirty-six hours at a stretch, monitoring the airwaves for enemy transmissions, relying on nothing more than strong tea and cigarettes to keep him going.

The capture of a complete Enigma machine from a U-boat that foundered off the English coast had enabled British Intelligence to begin decoding the messages.

For several minutes, Garlinski studied General Hagemann’s text, wondering if he might somehow have misread the transmission. He processed it a second time to reassure himself that there had been no mistake. Then he sent the message on to cryptographic analysts at Bletchley Park to await confirmation.

At the same moment as Sergeant Behr was congratulating General Hagemann, two elderly brothers on the Danish island of Bornholm were contemplating murder.

Per and Ole Ottesen were twins who lived together in a low-roofed house, not far from the village of Saksebro. They had spent all their lives on Bornholm, running a small dairy farm which they had inherited from their parents. Neither man had married and now they were both very old.

Due to poor management, the Ottesen farm had shrunk until it was only a shadow of its former self. Their father, Karl Ottesen, had once owned a hundred and fifty head of cattle, exporting not only milk but butter and cheese as well to the nearby Swedish mainland. He had been one of the first people on Bornholm to own a motor car – a 1902 wood-panelled Arrol-Johnston – and even though it could not travel far or well upon the roads of that largely unpaved island, the fact of ownership had been enough to ensure his elevated standing in the community. Lacking such ambition, the Ottesen brothers were content to let the business dwindle until only a few cows remained, whose milk produced barely enough to cover the cost of their feed.

Now they were down to one cow, an irritable Friesian named Lotti. She was blind in one eye and gave no milk and, two days before, as Ole was leading her out of the barn so that Per could clean her stall, she fastened on to the seat of Ole’s trousers and tore off a large piece of cloth, exposing the old man’s buttocks to the winter cold.

So they decided to shoot her.

Having settled upon this course, it soon became apparent to the twins that neither was prepared to carry out the deed. Lotti had been with them a long time. She was, to all intents and purposes, a member of their family.

The two men sat in spindle-backed chairs beside the fireplace, while they tried to come up with a plan.

‘Father would have done it,’ said Per.

‘He would,’ agreed Ole, ‘and there would have been no discussion, before or afterwards.’

‘You should be the one,’ said Per.

‘And why is that?’ protested his brother.

‘I have always been a gentler soul.’

‘Gentler!’ laughed Ole. ‘You son of a bitch.’

‘And what does that make you?’ replied Per.

They lapsed into silence for a while.

‘It’s got to be done,’ muttered Ole.

This time, there was no disagreement from his twin.

Ole leaned back in his chair and rummaged in his waistcoat pocket, emerging seconds later with a two-krone coin between his fingers. ‘I’ll flip you for it,’ he said.

Per squinted at him. ‘This is some kind of trick.’

‘You can flip the coin,’ Ole tossed it into his lap.

‘I get to call it as well!’

Ole shrugged. ‘You really are a son of a bitch.’

Per settled the coin on his thumbnail, then launched it into the air.

Both men watched it tumbling up and then down.

Per caught the coin, slapped it on to the top of his other hand and then fixed his brother with a stare that could have passed for madness.

‘Crown or cross?’ demanded Ole. The cross referred to a Roman numeral, fixed inside the monogram of the Danish king, Christian X. On the other side of the coin was the king’s crown.

Per’s hand had begun to tremble.

‘Go on!’ shouted Ole. ‘Choose, damn you!’

‘Cross!’ he blurted. ‘No! Crown! Cross!’

Ole lunged forward. ‘You can’t have both, you simpleton!’

‘Crown,’ Per said softly. Then slowly, he lifted his hand.

It was the cross.

‘Ha!’ crowed Ole.

‘I meant to say crown,’ muttered Per.

‘Too late now,’ answered his brother as he got up from his chair, reached above the fireplace and took down the only gun they owned, a model 1896 Krag rifle which had belonged to their father, who had served in the Bornholm Militia. ‘Make it quick,’ commanded Ole, as he handed the rifle to Per.

Per lit a kerosene lantern. Then he put on a thick wool coat with wooden toggle buttons and stepped through the anteroom, where they put their muddy boots in summer time. He closed the door behind him and then opened the second door out into the farmyard.

Sheet ice lay like mirrors in the barnyard and the old man shuffled along carefully, still wearing his slippers.

Arriving at the barn, he opened the heavy door and made his way inside. He was going to close the door again, to keep in what little heat there was, but there seemed to be no point to that and he left it open instead.