Jung was drooling. His teeth and gums were bared. No one spoke to him like that. He pushed the muzzle of the pistol into the old seafarer’s eye and squeezed the trigger. The man jerked back over the edge of the boat and fell onto the concrete floor with a dull thud. Jung looked down at the body with a strange longing; he wanted to kill the man again, and again, and keep killing him.

An electric current surged through him.

He watched the body for a few moments, then jumped down from the deck of the boat and kicked Schmidt hard in the torso and then in the head, marvelling at the strangeness of the transformation of life to death. How a man could stand there deriding him one moment and, the next, lie powerless at his feet. After a few minutes, when no one came at the sound of the gunshot, Jung looked around and found the office at the back of the repair shop, up a metal staircase in a glass-walled room.

The desk was covered in charts, but it was the one on top that told him everything he needed to know. A cross was inked in on a promontory between Greifswald and Stralsund, thirty or forty kilometres west of here. And on a blackboard, in chalk, the name of a trawler: Harald, with dates and times of trips and the weight of herring taken.

He had to be sure, though, so he walked with speed and purpose around the boatyard, checking the names of those boats ashore for work to be carried out and those moored at the private quay. In all, there were twenty-two vessels of various sizes and functions. None were called Harald.

Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

Wilde parked the car on a rough track deep in a wood, and they remained there, waiting for darkness to fall. According to Sunny, Schmidt had arranged to come at six o’clock, two hours after sunset, and they would meet him on a small beach between two rocky outcrops, a walk of two kilometres from here.

In the meantime, all they could do was wait in this car, cold and dejected, while the rain pattered on the windows and roof. They had crawled here from Carinhall, using farm and forest roads as often as possible, too small to have checkpoints. Even so, they had been stopped often and had passed enough traffic to tauten their nerves – long columns of troops, both motorised and infantry, farm vehicles drawn by wood-gas generator tractors, horse-drawn drays, slave workers and guest workers (only the letters on their jackets told them apart), even a few cars.

The soldiers at the roadblocks had taken a keen interest in the car. Not many American vehicles in these parts, and the name of Göring on the papers only served to increase their interest but also, fortunately, their respect for the occupants.