Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

Reinhardt stared at the map a moment, feeling a sudden wash of nerves as he contemplated how close he suddenly was. Reinhardt felt someone behind him and turned to see Claussen standing in the doorway, his face drawn tight.

‘I think we have trouble, sir,’ he said quietly. There was a window with a view onto the street. ‘There.’ Following his finger, Reinhardt saw a Feldgendarmerie unit parked, two motorcycles with sidecars. There was one man standing by the machines, his uniform dirty and lined with white dust. ‘They came down the Kalinovik road about five minutes ago,’ said Claussen. ‘Don’t know if they’re after us, but I got the strong sense they were in a hurry. They went into the Feldgendarmerie post right after they arrived,’ he continued. He paused, as if waiting for Reinhardt to say something, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘Where to, sir?’ he asked.

‘The 121st was in Brod,’ Reinhardt said after a moment. ‘West of here, bit less than half an hour’s drive if we’re lucky.’

‘I don’t think we should take any chances,’ said Claussen, panning his eyes across the street. ‘There’s a parking lot around the back. I can meet you there. I doubt they’re looking for me.’

Stepping out into the back of the building, Reinhardt passed through a crowded parking area, trucks and cars and troop carriers in serried rows. There was a wall and fence of dry-looking wood topped with a twist of barbed wire along the length of the parking area where it ran along a lane around the back of the headquarters. He made himself walk easily past the vehicles, skirting a platoon of soldiers as they boarded trucks under the hoarse instructions of a sergeant. He lit a cigarette as he came up to the sentry at the back gate, just as Claussen pulled up in the lane. Reinhardt saluted the sentry as he went past, ignoring him but feeling himself tense up as he waited for a challenge, but none came.

Claussen pulled away gently, bumping the car over the rutted lane past dishevelled houses that seemed to sag under the weight of unkempt roofs. The place reeked of despondency, the whole town seeming to be holding its breath, as if in expectation of more violence than it had already suffered. After a few minutes’ driving, they found the tarred road that ran through the centre of town, with the Drina a long stone’s throw to their right. ‘Left, now,’ said Reinhardt, unfolding a map, ‘then find somewhere to pull over.’

The houses petered out into a jumble of scrubland, and Claussen pulled over in front of a house with a gaping hole in its second floor. The two of them looked at Reinhardt’s map. ‘The 121st is somewhere along this road, leading south from Brod,’ Reinhardt said. ‘To get there we’ll need to get through the crossroads at Brod, and there’s bound to be controls there. If those Feldgendarmerie came down the road from Miljevina,’ he said, his finger tracing the road that headed south from Sarajevo and then swung east and ran through Trnovo to Foca, ‘and if they’re looking for us, then chances are the controls may have been reinforced.’ He paused, running his eyes over and over the map, looking for a way, any way, to get through Brod. If Thallberg had been with them, he might have known a way, or he would probably just have taken them through any control, trusting in the authority of the GFP.

‘I’ve got no bright ideas, sir,’ said Claussen. ‘I don’t know this country at all, but’ – he paused, looking back over his shoulder – ‘that platoon is coming up behind us. We might tag along with them. Safety in numbers.’ The trucks clanked past, open-topped and filled with soldiers, some of whom glanced over at them incuriously, and Reinhardt nodded at Claussen.

The sergeant accelerated the kubelwagen after them, keeping a short way back as the road wound along the steep sides of the hills along the south bank of the Drina. Ahead, one of the soldiers flicked his cigarette butt out into the road, where it bounced and sparked. Reinhardt followed it as it rolled to the side of the road and saw movement out of the corner of his eye behind them. Shifting in his seat to look back down the road, he saw a flash of grey through the trees.

‘Trouble?’ asked Claussen, as he straightened in his seat.

‘I think those motorcycles are behind us.’

Claussen glanced into the kubelwagen ’s wing mirrors. Reinhardt could hear them after a moment, the high pitch of their engines getting louder and louder. ‘It’s those two, sure enough,’ said Claussen, tightly. He shifted the car to the side of the road and waved them by. They went past in a surge of noise and dust, the rider of each sidecar holding on to a mounted machine gun. The second one seemed to pause, just a moment, the passenger’s eyes lost behind his goggles as he looked at them. Reinhardt went cold, a chill erupting all over him as he forced himself to remain still, and then the motorcycles were onto the road ahead of them. Reinhardt’s breath came short and high as he waited for them to stop, to pull them over, but they caught up to the trucks, weaved around them, and were gone.

Claussen puffed out a breath and exchanged a wry look with him. Reinhardt laughed, an explosive release of tension, and Claussen laughed back. The sergeant shook his head. ‘Like geese before Christmas, the pair of us,’ he snorted. Ahead and below them, a cluster of buildings stood inside a tight bend in the Drina, the river flowing up from the south and swinging sharply to the east. A road wound out of a steep-sided valley ahead of them and split, one fork continuing south on the far bank of the river, another crossing the Drina over a stone bridge. From here, they could see that the crossroads was busy, vehicles backed up on all three of its forks.

‘Not out of the woods yet, seems like,’ muttered Claussen as he followed the trucks down into the town, which, apart from the military traffic through it, seemed abandoned.

‘Listen, Claussen, if it goes bad, you say you knew nothing. Understood? You were just following my orders to drive me here.’

Claussen did not look back at him. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we, sir?’ he said, as he braked behind the last truck. They moved forward slowly, the soldiers in the truck in front engrossed in a card game, and Reinhardt’s nervousness grew as they crawled through the town and then over the bridge. They could see the checkpoint up ahead on the far side: sandbagged machine gun emplacements, a half-track, a tent with a radio mast. ‘Here they come,’ said Claussen, softly. A Feldgendarme walked up to the cab of the truck in front, said something to the driver, then waved it on. The truck pulled away, following the others as they went south. Reinhardt saw what he took to be one of the two motorcycles with its crew parked by the tent as the Feldgendarme waved them up, standing in front of a block of concrete placed in the road at the end of the bridge.

‘Papers.’ The Feldgendarme’s eyes were hard and focused under the brim of his helmet. He checked their documents, then handed them back. ‘Very well, proceed.’

Claussen pulled away, then paused as a convoy began passing in front of them. A space opened up between a truck and a pair of Kettenkrad half-tracks, and at a nod from Reinhardt, Claussen slipped the kubelwagen into the convoy. Reinhardt craned his neck to look in the mirror but saw no one at the checkpoint paying any attention to them, and then it was gone. He breathed out and exchanged a look with Claussen. The sergeant shrugged, no words needing to be said, the release of tension almost palpable.

The road ran almost due south here, clinging to the steep western bank of the Drina, the river flowing up from Montenegro down a narrow gorge thick with trees. The tarred road petered out soon after Brod, becoming a dirt track the engineers had resurfaced and reinforced in places. The trucks lifted plumes of white dust into the air, and Reinhardt and Claussen were soon covered in it until the sergeant was able to overtake them, and then the road was open to them, unrolling before them like a ribbon in twists and turns around the sides of the gorge. It was midafternoon, now, and very hot.