The Man in the Bunker
For Madeleine, with love
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
What Happened to the Witnesses?
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Rory Clements Readers’ Club
Letter from Author
Copyright
Chapter 1
August 1945
They skirted the slumped remains of a Panzer, its blackened gun barrel twisted sideways like the crook of an elbow. Collingham stuck a cigarette in his mouth and inspected the packet. ‘God damn it, we’re clean out, Mr Harper.’
‘I’ll stop there.’ The driver nodded towards a ramshackle stall at the side of the road, fifty yards beyond the tank. A few miles away, threatening cloud banked over the Alps, but here in the foothills and lakes of southern Bavaria, the sky was clear and bright.
In another time, Randy Collingham could imagine coming here for a holiday, but he’d have to disregard the darkness bred and nurtured in these pretty villages and towns, and he wasn’t sure that he could stomach that. Too many horrors lurked beneath the surface of those still waters and in those snow-capped peaks.
He got out of the passenger seat, leaving the door open, and strode towards the rickety trestle table on which random items were laid out to tempt buyers: an old box camera, a Hitler Youth dagger, two bottles of milk, a large bottle of beer, an Iron Cross medal, a typewriter and some potatoes. The stallholder was a thin woman in her fifties. Her dress was tattered and torn and her left eye was haunted and restless. The right eye was missing; beneath the empty socket, scars rained down across her cheek.
‘Zigaretten, bitte. Haben sie Zigaretten?’ Collingham said. He knew she’d have some stashed away; cigarettes and dollars were the only universally respected currencies in the ruins of the Third Reich.
‘Five dollars,’ she said in English. ‘For pack of ten.’
‘You’re not allowed to use dollars, only scrip.’
She sneered. ‘Keep your scrip.’
‘OK, two dollars for pack of twenty.’
She shook her head then looked away.
‘What make you got, Fräulein?’ Broad and tall, he towered over her. The conqueror and the conquered. But he could see she did not fear him. Did not even respect him. Good, he liked that defiance.
‘English cigarettes. Very best – straight from Naafi.’
‘OK three dollars – for twenty.’
‘Eight dollars.’
‘What? I pay a fraction of that at the PX!’
‘Then go to the PX, Ami. I got kids to feed.’
Collingham took out his wallet and slapped down a five-dollar bill. ‘You drive a hard bargain, sister. Take it or leave it.’
The woman shrugged, pulled out a single pack of Senior Service from her concealed stash behind the table, tore open the seal and removed eight cigarettes. ‘Twelve zigaretten for five dollars. A bargain, yes?’
The American laughed and accepted her offer; he could no longer do the arithmetic. He shoved the pack of twelve into his shirt pocket.
The woman touched the medal, then the dagger. ‘You like souvenir, Ami? Perhaps you like Nazi guns? I got a Luger, full working order with bullets – only twenty-five to you.’
‘Not today, lady.’ He walked back to the car, climbed in and pulled the door shut. ‘Come on, Mr Harper, let’s go and catch ourselves a retired dictator.’
*
There was a lot of blood on the road. A boy in leather shorts was kneeling beside a girl in a dirndl, her body splayed awkwardly. Two bikes, one of them twisted and broken, lay a few feet away on the verge. Collingham’s eyes were fixed on the girl. She wasn’t moving. Even from two hundred yards away he feared she was dead.
‘Stop the car, Mr Harper.’
‘Are you sure, sir?’
‘Of course, I’m sure.’
They had only gone two miles since haggling for cigarettes. The road was clear of traffic. Apart from the occasional wreckage of tanks and other vehicles, this region south of Munich was largely undamaged by the mass bombing in the last weeks of the war, and so there was little to detract from the beauty of the countryside. Randy Collingham wound down the window and tossed out the stub of his cigarette. He was in a hurry, but not so much that he wouldn’t stop to help an injured child. As a father of three, how could he do otherwise?
Agent Denis Harper pulled the big black Opel Käpitan to a halt. The boy in the lederhosen rose to his feet and the two men in the car could see the horror in the lad’s face. That and something else – relief, perhaps, that assistance had at last arrived.
The boy was running to them, begging for help. ‘Hilf mir bitte. Hilf mir.’ His tanned chest was bare beneath the straps that held up his leather shorts. ‘Meine Zwillingsschwester ist verletzt.’ My twin sister is injured.
Collingham tried to comfort him, told him they would do what they could, then he pushed forward and knelt beside the girl. Her head was roughly bandaged by the boy’s white shirt, now red with blood. She was covered in blood, on her arms, legs and face. Her fair, braided hair was thick with gore. He couldn’t see what injuries she had. Her chest was moving, but her eyes remained closed and she seemed to be unconscious. Touching her throat with the back of his hand, he felt a pulse. He turned to the boy and spoke in fluent German. ‘What happened?’
‘We were cycling home. A lorry clipped her. It didn’t stop. Perhaps he didn’t know what he’d done.’
‘Well, she’s alive, but we’re not medics. We’ll take her to hospital.’
‘Yes, please, sir, her head is bad.’
Special Agent Collingham was weighing his options – Third Army HQ at Bad Tölz or the CIC medical centre at Garmisch? Maybe the latter; it was closer. ‘Come on, help us carry her to the car. Gently.’
The conflict in Europe had been over for almost four months. The blackouts were gone and the lights were on. It had been a good war for Special Agent Randy Collingham, but he had lost friends. Parachuted behind enemy lines in late 1943, his language skills had served him well. So had his expertise in sabotage. He had evaded the Gestapo, but good comrades had not been so fortunate and he had scores to settle. This mission, to find the most wanted man in the world, could go a long way to getting even. And then he’d go home to North Carolina and hope that Jill and the kids recognised him.
In the meantime, there had to be a place for compassion and humanity, otherwise what had the fight been about? Whatever the reluctant Harper might have to say on the matter, Collingham was not a man to walk on by. Harper was a colder fish; he had no one back in the States and would happily carry on here. But the slaughter had stopped. Life had to start again – the sort of life where neighbour helped neighbour and men didn’t ignore the suffering of those less fortunate.
‘Agent Harper, help us.’
The two men and the boy raised the girl’s limp body and eased her into the rear seat of the big car. Collingham’s head told him they had to get to the hospital at speed; his heart told him he should be trying to administer some aid, clean up her wounds to see what injuries she had sustained. His head won. Time was crucial. Both for the girl – and for their mission.
‘Drive, Mr Harper.’
They were in the front passenger seat. The children – probably aged twelve or thirteen – were on the bench seat behind them. Collingham tore his white shirt into strips and handed them to the boy to use as more bandages to staunch the bleeding.
‘Danke sehr.’
They were the last words Randy Collingham heard. A single bullet drove a hole into the back of his skull, deep into his brain. A second bullet came a split second later, entering Denis Harper’s head at an almost identical angle. The two men slumped forward in their seats. The horn was blaring, the car sliding right onto the verge, just past the bicycles.
The girl in the dirndl was sitting up now, grinning as she wiped the coagulating pig’s blood from her pretty face and fair hair. ‘We did it, Siggy.’
‘It was easy, Hildy. You were wonderful. Come, let’s get our bikes. Time to go.’
Chapter 2
Peace. At last it really felt like peace. Johnny was riding on Wilde’s shoulders, madly waving his arms in the air as they galloped along Grantchester Meadow. Johnny was laughing himself silly and so was his father.
It had been a very special day. He had shown the boy his rooms in college, introduced him to the porters and Bobby the gyp – his college servant – and then he had taken him to the boxing gym in the south of the town. Johnny had put on a tattered pair of boy’s gloves – the smallest available, but still far too big for a five-year-old – and together they had spent half an hour giving the punchbag a good hammering.
‘The lad’ll be beating you soon, Prof,’ the trainer had said, grinning broadly.
‘Don’t I know it, Joe. He’s a tough one.’ Pride surged through Wilde’s heart. This was every man’s dream, a son who could protect himself in an unkind world.
‘Not a bad size for his age. I wager he’ll be a middleweight like you.’
Wilde and his son had been Joe Spinks’s only two customers. The trainer had told them it had been reasonably busy in the gym during the last two years of the war when the area was packed with servicemen, many of them American, but now everyone seemed to have other matters on their mind. Men were being demobbed, people were restarting careers or education, life was returning to normal with a rush.
‘I’ll tell my new undergraduates about the place, Joe. Bound to be one or two of them who fancy a bit of sparring. You’ll soon build up again.’
‘And you’ll bring your boy here regular? Can’t start them too young, you know.’
‘That might not be the way Mrs Wilde sees it, I’m afraid. I’ll talk to her.’ He knew what her answer would be, of course. Wait until he’s a bit older, Tom. Let him choose for himself. He’s too young.
‘What about yourself, Prof?’
‘Oh, I’ll come along, but I may not be in great condition.’
‘You look lean enough to me.’ Joe ranged his eyes over Wilde’s six-foot frame. ‘Barely eleven stone. You’re verging on beanpole.’
Wilde knew it was true. His trousers were, indeed, a little on the loose side, but he wasn’t alone in that after six years of wartime rationing. Still, he felt strong enough. He appraised Spinks, a former champion. ‘You look as if you’ve lost a couple of pounds yourself, Joe.’
After the gym, Wilde and his son had walked hand in hand towards the river. Cambridge was slowly regaining its mellow, peaceful pre-war character. There were still bombsites, of course – houses turned to rubble, roads badly damaged – and it would almost certainly be like that for years to come, but at least the sandbags around public buildings had been removed.
They ambled along beside the Cam to Grantchester for a glass of lemonade, cheese sandwiches and a slice of cake, all of which Lydia had packed for them. It was a warm day, but few people were out enjoying the meadow. At the village of Grantchester, they played catch with an old, threadbare tennis ball, then lazed by the river, looking for frogs and fish, and tossing a bit of crust to the ducks. Best of all was a dazzling multicoloured light that flashed before their eyes under the overhanging trees.
‘What was that, Daddy?’
‘You’ve just seen your first kingfisher, Johnny. The most special bird in the world.’
‘But where did it come from? Where did it go?’
‘It came from its secret nest and it’s gone to catch fish for its supper. Come on, let’s go home and tell Mummy about it.’
Wilde had spent most of the past three years in central London in a senior advisory role with the Office of Strategic Services – America’s wartime intelligence outfit. He had been given no title and he hadn’t wanted one, for he still thought of himself as a professor of history.
Yet it had been a fine time, starting small with a handful of enthusiastic but inexperienced amateurs, and ending up with a vibrant powerhouse of intellect and ideas. Some of them wore uniform, some dusty sports jackets and soup-stained ties, some wore smart skirts or flowery summer dresses. For the most part, rank didn’t count, nor did gender. After a shaky start in 1942, they had become an effective intelligence unit.
He would miss the clever, charming, oddball bunch of men and women at the top of the organisation. And he would never forget the courageous operatives who volunteered to be parachuted behind enemy lines, sometimes to their death. They had all been bold, innovative people – and his years with them had, in many ways, been the time of his life.
But that was then, and this was now. This was the peace and he wanted to put the war behind him. In college, the blackouts were gone, the static water tank had been removed from the old court and the civil servants who had taken up residence for the duration were moving back to Whitehall.
Wilde had quit the OSS and was preparing for the Michaelmas term. He still wasn’t entirely sure how many undergraduates he would have; he supposed most of them would be battle-hardened ex-servicemen who had postponed or interrupted their courses for the duration of the war. Some would have scars and medals for valour, some would have nightmares. They would include captains and majors who had grown accustomed to giving orders rather than receiving instruction. They would be very unlike the fresh-faced young men straight from school that had been his usual intake. Could be interesting. How would the disparate groups get on with each other?
He was also dusting down the book he had been writing on the Jesuit priests who risked their lives coming to England in the late sixteenth century. He was only a third of the way through the work, but he felt full of energy for the task ahead. It was a story well worth telling, a natural rounding-off to the successful books he had written on Walsingham and Cecil from the same period.
His publisher had been calling him these past two weeks. ‘The public are hungry for new works, Tom. They’ve had enough of Nazis and all that jazz. They want some solid English history. The Tudors are the thing. But keep it shortish – paper’s in extremely short supply.’ Well, that was all fine but it wasn’t going to be ready any time soon. He’d have to go through all his research again, so it would be eighteen months at the very least, but more like two years.