die Stunde X Read online

  Scott could not see them ever regaining their position in the country, even if the Nazis were defeated.

  If the Nazis were defeated …

  Scott saw a couple of cars disappear under the bridge and then reappear on the other side as they sped along the autobahn. He took one last look at the city, and then saw the winking blue lights of Orpo vans.

  Orpo vans. There seemed to be hundreds of them.

  Cursing, Scott stamped the bike into gear, opened the throttle, and screamed noisily from the bridge.

  The Nazis were either rounding up street-trash, or else they were finding victims for retaliatory executions. But they had no reason for retaliatory executions – not yet.

  Scott didn’t like to think what the Nazis were up to now. He just wanted to get home, to jump into bed, where he would at least feel a little safer, even if he wasn’t.

  43

  The vans of the Ordnungspolizei moved in first. The Orpo officers had no idea who they were arresting, or why. Such matters remained confidential. Only the Geheime Staatspolizei knew their targets and the reasons behind the large scale operation.

  In Wittstockstrasse, four Orpo vans, each one containing eight officers, screeched into the street, two stopping at either end to form makeshift roadblocks. Four more vans delivered their officers to positions at the rear of the houses in the street, to prevent any potential prisoners from escaping that way.

  Seconds later, the BMWs from the Geheime Staatspolizei pulled through the roadblocks, two entering at either end. Each car held four officers.

  One of them held SS-Obersturmführer Loritz, the man coordinating this particular section of the night’s operation. His BMW pulled up outside number thirty, and the doors were thrown open. The other BMWs pulled up outside different houses where other targets were located.

  Loritz, dressed in his scruffy suit and carrying an MP5 submachine-gun, led the three men from his car to the front door of number thirty. Once there, the door was kicked opened, and the four Gestapo men entered. Three other houses in the street were suffering the same fate as Gestapo officers stormed their way through the front doors, amid shouts and screams of protest.

  But whilst those teams came out holding their prisoners, Loritz and his team came out empty handed. Loritz watched as the prison van pulled through the roadblock and the three prisoners were thrown inside. He leant against the roof of the BMW and shook his head. His target had been one of the important ones.

  “Bastard!” he cursed. Up and down the street, people stood in their doorways, or looking out of windows. Some of them might’ve had things of their own to hide, but Loritz doubted it. Most likely, they were purely innocent. That was why they had the audacity to stand and watch the Gestapo do their work. If he had his own way, he’d raid every single house that was showing no interest.

  Loritz threw the MP5 through the open window into the car and turned to face Keitel. “I want that house going over again and again. Tear it apart. Understand?”

  Keitel did, and instructed a number of the Gestapo men to the search the house thoroughly. Loritz grabbed the radio handset from the car and contacted the Polizeipräsidium. Rauter was on hand to take the call.

  He asked, “How did you do?”

  “We managed to get three out of four,” answered Loritz bitterly. “The fourth one was not home.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “Cazelot. Scott Cazelot. Perhaps he got wind of the operation.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, he will know about it now.”

  “Stay there,” ordered Rauter. “He may come back.”

  “But if he has seen us arresting people in other parts of the city–”

  “He will not know why the arrests are being made, will he?”

  “Perhaps not,” Loritz said as Keitel came out of the house and shook his head. Loritz slammed a fist into the roof of the BMW. “We will wait here, mein Herr, but I will send the Orpo away.”

  “Fine.”

  Loritz said, “How long should we wait, Herr Standartenführer?”

  “Use your initiative. You are finished for the night, so there’s no hurry. I want Cazelot. We believe he is an important figure in Combat UK.”

  “Yes, Herr Standartenführer.”

  “And good luck, Loritz.”

  “Thank you. Heil Führer.”

  “Heil Führer.”

  Loritz turned to face Keitel, a scowl on his face. He glanced at his watch, shook his head. “It is almost one o’clock. Why the hell is he not at home?”

  Keitel couldn’t answer. Behind him, the Gestapo men accumulated.

  “We have been instructed to wait here and see if target four arrives. For that purpose, we will send away the Orpo vans. I want two of you – you and you,” Loritz said, pointing out two officers, “to go with the prison truck back to the Polizeipräsidium, and book in the prisoners. The rest of you will wait here with me. The Standartenführer is most insistent that we arrest Cazelot. He is an important suspect. Right, move into position. And Keitel, get the Orpo officers to move all these people back inside before they leave.” Loritz looked up and down the street. He occasionally heard the screams of the wives and children of the three men who had been arrested. “And get them to shut those people up!”

  Keitel disappeared, along with the two officers instructed to return with the prison van.

  Loritz leaned back against the car and sighed deeply. He wanted to excel tonight. More than that, he wanted a prisoner to question. Unless Cazelot arrived, that was looking unlikely. And even if he did arrive, SS-Standartenführer Rauter obviously had his own ideas about who would be interrogating the prisoner.

  Loritz closed his eyes and shook his head.

  The sounds of the street being cleared filled his ears.

  44

  Scott’s Kawasaki burbled as he turned down Heydrichgasse and rode slowly along the narrow street. The houses on either side were dark, the street lights were off. The energy conservationists down at the Englishe Elektrizitatswerk operated a policy of switching off street lights in residential areas after one o’clock in the morning. They would be off in Wittstockstrasse as well, Scott thought to himself as he reached the end of Heydrichgasse.

  At the T-junction, Scott turned left, into Ostwittstockgasse, and travelled slowly along the street, looking at the houses on either side as he rode past. These houses were three- and four-bedroom properties, detached. Luxurious for English citizens, in comparison to the elderly two-bedroom house Scott lived in.

  Jenni always wanted a larger house for when they had children, Scott thought bitterly, pulling his bike over to the side of the road and stopping. He popped up the visor, rubbed his eyes with his glove, and collected his emotions. Breathing deeply, he tried not to think of Jenni, but it was difficult.

  He could see her beautiful face smiling at one of his banal jokes, see her stern-faced whenever he forgot to clean up in the bathroom after himself. He could see her natural beauty as she lay asleep beside him …

  Then he could see her bruised, swollen face as she lay on the hospital bed. She had cried in hospital because she’d thought he would leave her. But he’d told her he loved her and that the accident wouldn’t make any difference to them. He promised he’d look after her. The doctors had stood by and listened to him making that promise to his wife.

  And then he had gone home, after kissing her goodbye, after telling her he loved her so much. She’d told him she loved him too …

  When he returned the next day, she was gone.

  They’d come in the night for her, taken her away in the back of an unmarked van to the Vernichtungslager at Chigwell. The extermination camp that doubled a concentration camp.

  All that Scott could think of as he walked from the hospital was what could have been going through Jenni’s mind as they took her away. Was she thinking about him? Was she wondering why he’d betrayed her? Or could she see that it wasn’t his fault, that he was helpless? There was not
hing he could do to prevent the Gestapo from taking her away. Nothing.

  Scott sniffed noisily, and then looked around as though he feared he’d woken the people sleeping in the houses that surrounded him. He had no doubt that somebody, somewhere, was looking out of their window, phone in one hand ready to call the Ordnungspolizei.

  With that in mind, he pulled down his visor, clicked the bike into gear, and moved off down the street.

  Wittstockstrasse was the next turning on the right, and Scott pulled into it. He looked ahead, up the darkened street. There were cars parked at various intervals, dark shadowy blobs of blackness, occasionally reflecting the moonlight in their shiny surfaces.

  As he drew closer to his own house, the engine idling, the bike freewheeling, he caught a glimpse of a dark BMW in the beam of his twin headlights. BMWs were rare, he thought to himself. They were usually driven only by Germans, and certainly they weren’t the kind of car a person living in Wittstockstrasse could afford. In fact, they were generally driven by one specific type of German.

  Frowning, he looked further up the street. Another BMW, dark, colourless, even in the beam of his headlights, was parked on the roadside. He couldn’t see any occupants.

  He pulled up outside his house, his eyes still firmly fixed on the BMWs he could see. Glancing back at his house, he saw it was dark, unoccupied. In other houses in the street, lights were on. It was late for lights to be on.

  Scott thought about the Orpo lights he had seen across the city earlier. As though they were executing a massive-scale operation.

  Scott revved the bike up, popped it into gear with his foot, and dropped the clutch. The front wheel pawed the air as he leant into the wheelie, the bike roaring down the road past the BMWs. As his front wheel dropped to the ground, he looked back in his mirrors.

  Headlights were flicking on behind him. Their beams had an eerie blue-purple tinge – the BMWs. As he reached the end of Wittstockstrasse, and turned right into Westwittstockgasse, he heard the ghostly wail of sirens, and caught a glimpse of the red lights flashing on the roofs of the BMWs, slapped into place by the occupants of the cars.

  The Gestapo were after him.

  He opened up the throttle as wide as it would go, and the engine screamed as he changed up through the gearbox. The bike accelerated quickly, and reached one hundred miles per hour by the time it was halfway down the street. The BMWs, three of them now, pulled into the road after him, and their powerful five-litre engines bellowed as they pursued him up the street, with only a small amount of wheel spin.

  As Scott approached the crossroads at the end of the street, he lowered his body onto the frame of the bike, almost melding with it as one. The Kawasaki squealed through the crossroads at one-twenty, lifting a few inches off the ground as it flew over the camber of the road, and landing smoothly as it entered Rodenbücherstrasse. Scott raised his head slightly, glancing in the mirror. The BMWs were probably two-hundred metres behind. He knew that they were also probably vectoring other Gestapo or Orpo units to cut him off.

  He hit the brakes, jamming his foot hard down on the pedal, the fat rear tyre screeching as it laid down a track of black rubber on the grey surface of the road. The bike slowed down as it approached a side road on the left, and Scott turned, the left knee of his leathers scraping the tarmac.

  Once he was round the corner, and upright, he opened up the throttle again, changing down to get some good acceleration out of the bike. Behind him, the heavy BMWs twisted and snaked as they tried to negotiate the corner. One of them bounced up onto the kerb and through a hedge surrounding the front garden of a house. It continued through the garden, ramming down the fence panels of the next garden, and only coming to a standstill as it crunched noisily into a low brick wall.

  But the other two BMWs managed to get around the corner successfully and, while they had lost ground to the Kawasaki, they still had Scott in their sights.

  Scott saw the roundabout ahead, and also two cars that were approaching it. They would be blocking his route around it. Taking his life in his hands, he moved over to the left hand side of the road where, thankfully, there was no oncoming traffic. He rolled around the roundabout in the opposite direction, screaming past the two cars. The Gestapo BMWs followed his lead, as secure in the knowledge as he was that few cars would venture out onto the roads at this time of night.

  Scott was travelling along Prinzalbrechtstrasse, which ran parallel to the Londonzentrumautobahn. Three-hundred metres away was the slip road that would take him onto the autobahn. But Prinzalbrechtstrasse was narrow, and cars lined both sides of the road. It was a hair-raising ride, travelling just over a hundred miles per hour through a passageway of steel with just a few feet to spare on either side. For the BMWs it would’ve been worse, Scott mused, and indeed as they drew closer, he was certain he could see flashes of sparks as they scraped the cars on either side.

  He reached the end of Prinzalbrechtstrasse with the BMWs having lost a lot of ground in the narrow streets, and he twisted the bike beneath him to negotiate a sharp left hand bend which would take him across the bridge and down onto the autobahn.

  As he did, the bike started to slide, and it twitched and bucked violently, slapping him into the tank as he fought to prevent it from sliding away from him completely. As he did so, he failed to make the corner and the bike went straight ahead instead, bouncing up the kerb and buckling the front wheel, almost throwing him over the handlebars in the process.

  The Kawasaki skidded uncontrollably across the wide grass verge, and ploughed through a hedgerow, ripping away small branches that cut into Scott’s arms. Finally, he was snagged on a large branch that wrenched him from the bike. The bike continued along its way for fifty metres or so, crashing over a two foot high wall and dropping thirty feet to the autobahn below.

  Scott fought to pull himself free from the thicker branches of the hedge, but he was caught up too tightly, and his left arm felt broken. He gasped and continued to struggle, however, as the sirens of the Gestapo BMWs wailed to a stop, and finally he dropped to the grass on the other side of the hedge. He started to roll, was about to pull himself to his feet and run, when a hand grabbed him, and he realized that he hadn’t got himself free. Somebody had cut him free with a large knife, which was now held against Scott’s face.

  A German voice said, “Scott Cazelot, I am SS-Obersturmführer Loritz, Geheime Staatspolizei, and you are under arrest for terrorist crimes against the Deutsches Reich.”

  Scott turned his head and looked up into the thin, gaunt face of his captor. The blue eyes looked haunted as they stared at him. Scott could only smile, and then wince as his arm started to throb.

  “Got you on the run though, didn’t I?” he said. Loritz simply glared at him, standing back as two other officers pulled Scott to his feet. “Ow! Mind the fucking arm!” Scott protested, and then immediately wished that he hadn’t. He had revealed an injury to a man who would soon be torturing him. He had shown this man a valuable chink in his armour.

  This was no game, Scott reminded himself. Not anymore. This was serious. He doubted he would come through this alive.

  But still he smiled, as they led him back to one of the BMWs. After all, there was little else he could do about the situation now.

  45

  Scott sat alone in the small interview room in the Polizeipräsidium just off Hitlerstrasse, hugging his swollen arm. On the table in front of him was a glass of water. Scott was thirsty, dehydrated even, but he wouldn’t drink. He didn’t trust the Krauts. Might be something extra in the water, he thought.

  The room was small, probably nine feet square, but the ceiling was high. All in all, the room resembled the interior of a cube, all of its dimensions identical. Scott looked upwards to the ceiling and closed his eyes, breathing in deeply, his arm throbbing painfully.

  They had brought him straight to the station, and he had seen dozens of faces, some he recognized, some he didn’t. From what he could gather, the Gestapo had organized some k
ind of purge of Combat UK suspects. Only some of them weren’t actually members of the resistance force. Scott knew that for a fact, but there was little he could do to prevent those poor innocents from being tortured and killed.

  Scott had been delivered to the interview room and ordered to sit down. Two minutes later, a glass of water had been brought in from him. The Gestapo officer had ordered him to drink it to prevent dehydration, due to his broken arm. That was the sum total of medical attention he received. Scott ignored the Kraut, who then left the room, locking the door behind him.

  Scott had had plenty of time to survey his surroundings. They’d left him alone for half an hour. The room had a single table in the centre, around which were four chairs, three of them opposite the place where Scott sat. Behind those chairs, in the far wall, was another door. He had no idea where the door led – just a nasty suspicion that beyond it was a torture chamber.

  That door was locked also – Scott had tried it.

  In fact, he’d only just sat himself down again when the door behind him opened forcefully, and three men entered. Two of them Scott recognized. One was the Gestapo officer, Loritz, who had arrested him, and the other was a man by the name of Keitel, whom Loritz had been ordering about.

  The third man’s identity wasn’t known to Scott.

  The three Germans sat opposite Scott, the unidentified man sitting in the centre. He lay down a thick file on the table in front of him, and then folded his hands across it. He regarded Scott with a smile, staring at him through blue eyes that appeared so sharp, they almost pierced Scott’s face.

  The man said, “I am SS-Standartenführer Rauter, Geheime Staatspolizei.” He ran a hand through a head of lustrous fair hair, and then took a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He took one out, lit it, dragged from it for a few moments. “You are, let me see,” he said, opening the file to reveal a page of photographs. “Ah yes, Scott Cazelot. I have been wanting to speak with you for some time, Herr Cazelot.” Scott didn’t answer. “You see, I have it on good authority that you are a very important man in the terrorist group, Combat UK.” Rauter smoked his cigarette, his powerful gaze fixed upon Scott, as though attempting to break into his thoughts. “You know, if I were in your shoes, Herr Cazelot, I might try to deny such an allegation. Unless, of course, it were true.”