DEATH ON WINTER'S EVE Read online

  DEATH ON WINTER’S EVE

  BY

  DOUGLAS V DOLLARD

  Copyright © 2012 by Douglas V Dollard. Kindle Edition. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For Karen, Ryan and Christian

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 The Raid

  Chapter 2 The Home Guard

  Chapter 3 Surgery

  Chapter 4 Acting Captain Whitehead

  Chapter 5 Lieutenant Mary Wellington

  Chapter 6 CIA Headquarters

  Chapter 7 Prince Ali ben Berudi

  Chapter 8 Dulles International Airport

  Chapter 9 MI6

  Chapter 10 The American Bar

  Chapter 11 A Shroud for the Dead

  Chapter 12 A Prayer for the Dead

  Chapter 13 The Tokomak Confinement Vessel

  Chapter 14 Blood in the Snow

  Chapter 15 A Distant Sound of Thunder

  Chapter 16 Someone to Watch Over Me

  Chapter 17 Aftermath

  Chapter 18 A New Dawn

  Chapter 19 Interrogation

  Chapter 20 Woman of My Dreams

  Chapter 21 Misgivings

  Chapter 22 Wing Commander Sir James Whitley

  Chapter 23 Number 10 Downing Street

  Chapter 24 The Manhattan Project

  Chapter 25 The White House

  Chapter 26 Wilton Park Prison

  Chapter 27 The Transfer

  Chapter 28 The American Turncoat

  Chapter 29 Tell Me No Lies

  Chapter 30 Internecine Warfare

  Chapter 31 This Can’t be Happening

  Chapter 32 The London Cage

  Chapter 33 A Calculated Risk

  Chapter 34 Never Quite So Alone

  Chapter 35 Temporary Reprieve

  Chapter 36 Death Before Dishonor

  Chapter 37 An Invitation to Betrayal

  Chapter 38 Where Loyalties Lie

  Chapter 39 Out of Harm’s Way

  Chapter 40 Divided Loyalties

  Chapter 41 Escape and Evasion

  Chapter 42 Chandler’s Revenge

  Chapter 43 Whitley’s Gambit

  Chapter 44 Perfidy

  Chapter 45 Chandler’s Men

  Chapter 46 Ye Olde Dog and Badger

  Chapter 47 Danesfield Cottage

  Chapter 48 Nash Rumpole

  Chapter 49 Killing Riley

  Chapter 50 Breaking into Wilton Park

  Chapter 51 Confronting Commander Whitley

  Chapter 52 Know Where to Run

  Chapter 53 Unrepentant

  Chapter 54 Whitley’s Dilemma

  Chapter 55 Cornwall

  Chapter 56 Run Your Quarry to Ground

  Chapter 57 Wellington’s Secret

  Chapter 58 Death in the Morning

  Chapter 59 Resurrection

  Chapter 60 The White House Redux

  Chapter 61 Redemption

  Chapter 62 Mole Hunt

  Chapter 63 Hide in Plain Sight

  Chapter 64 The Cambridge Five

  Chapter 65 Denouement

  Chapter 66 Contrition

  POSTSCRIPT

  Chapter 1

  THE RAID

  The Village of Marquise, Occupied France January 1944

  In the early evening hours of January 24th, 1944 the first of twelve twin-engine Heinkel He111’s sat poised at the end of a concrete runway in the village of Marquise in occupied France.

  Without warning the evening solitude was shattered as the aircrafts’ twin 660 horsepower BMW engines coughed, sputtered and then roared to life in near perfect unison. Clouds of thick white smoke belched from the engine’s exhaust as the lead Heinkel began to roll forward.

  Weighed down by a bomb load of nearly four thousand pounds the Heinkel’s pilot gingerly eased forward on the yoke. Slowly at first the heavily burdened aircraft began rolling down the runway. With infinite patience the pilot accelerated until, almost reluctantly the wheels loosed their grip on the earth and the aircraft lifted into a frigid but cloudless night sky.

  Gaining altitude the Heinkel’s pilot, Hauptmann Wolfgang Berlin smiled, easing back into the stiff metal frame of his seat. Under a full moon and unusually good visibility Berlin guided the heavily burdened Heinkel low over the moonlit vineyards and meadows of northern France. This early part of the flight was the one aspect of these missions Hauptman Berlin truly enjoyed.

  Berlin had envisioned himself piloting ever since his was a boy flying model aircraft in the fields behind his school. That had been in 1926 when Germany struggled under the burden of the Treaty of Versailles.

  In 1927 Berlin had enthusiastically joined the Hitler Youth when he was nine years old. When he was fourteen he was flying guilders. He joined the Luftwaffe in 1937 when he was eighteen after Germany had regained much of its lost economic strength due to the Fuehrer’s policies.

  Six months of recruit training, two months of studying general aeronautical subjects followed by another six months of flight training for the He 111 before he received his wings, admittedly the proudest day of his life.

  When the Fuhrer came to power in 1933 he restored the nation’s dignity. The German economy boomed, the German people recovered their pride and people were back at work. Germany was reborn from the humiliating armistice of World War One.

  The liberation of Austria, reclaiming the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, even the war in Poland instigated by Polish communists had seen Germany rise to its rightful place in Europe.

  It was true no one including the Fuhrer himself wanted this war with Britain. The British people were racially and culturally similar to Germans. It was a mistake for the leadership of Great Britain to force this war upon Germany. And now the war was progressing badly.

  The great General Rommel had suffered defeat in North Africa, General Kesselring had been defeated in the Mediterranean and the sixth army had suffered a disastrous defeat in Stalingrad in early 1943.

  Everywhere German forces were being pushed back in an ever- tightening ring around the German homeland. The war on the eastern front had bled Germany of its aircraft and the pilots to fly them.

  The four hundred strong bomber raids that pounded British cities by night and day in 40 and 41 had dwindled to these intermittent raids by a few dozen aircraft. Given the Luftwaffe’s diminished resources this would likely be one of the last raids against a British city in the war. It now seemed to Berlin inevitable Germany would loose the war. And yet the Fuehrer’s unshakable will gave him hope.

  Holding the aircraft in level flight at five thousand feet Berlin concentrated on enjoying the next forty minutes of relative peaceful flight before he must vector the Heinkel over the channel and into the waiting swarms of British night fighters and treacherous anti-aircraft flak.

  Given the Luftwaffe’s recent losses over London Berlin calculated their chances of returning to their base in France to be no better than three in five. A statistic he did not share with his crew.

  At 19:00 hours Berlin keyed his throat microphone and performed a routine radio check with each of the four members of his crew. Over the past two years German casualties had been so horrific on the eastern front boys as young as fifteen were being recruited to fill the ranks of the wounded and dead. His navigator was a mere boy of seventeen, the dorsal and ventral gunners eighteen and the baby faced wireless operator, though officially regist
ered as nineteen probably had not yet celebrated his seventeenth birthday. It was in such youthful hands the Fuhrer had placed the fate of the German Nation.

  In an act of faith Hauptmann Berlin did not share, his navigator, Oberest Heinrich Ludwinski established their return course via the radio beacon at Fecamp between Le Havre and Dieppe and onto Marquis via further beacons at Chartres and Vierzon.

  Berlin tapped the communication mike at his throat and winced as static feedback crackled in his ears. He waited until the static subsided and tried again to raise his ventral gunner, but Rouse was having difficulties with intermittent break up. Berlin tried the dorsal gunner who reported he was working to free a jammed bolt on one of the MG 81Z machine guns. A few minutes later all their communications were restored and the dorsal gunner had freed the jammed bolt in his weapon.

  The next forty minutes were uneventful. At 19:42 hours Berlin took a vector that put them on a course over the channel heading directly toward London and began climbing the aircraft in preparation for their bombing run.

  At about the same time Berlin was making his turn radar stations along the south and southeast coasts of Britain began detecting small formations of German aircraft gathering over the channel.

  Even before Berlin’s Heinkel reached the British coast he could identify rods of white light from hundreds of searchlights stabbing up through the darkness. As they flew on he noted red streaks of antiaircraft fire reaching upward in the distance. Berlin put the Heinkel on a course directly over London and continued to climb to their bombing altitude of ten thousand five hundred feet.

  The weather over the city of London was cloudless. A bad omen as it enabled searchlight crews to pick out individual aircraft with ease. Just ahead of him one of the aircraft in Berlin’s group was already locked in the brilliant beam of a searchlight.

  From the ground below antiaircraft batteries firing high velocity shells with proximity fuses targeted the helpless bomber. Within seconds the aircraft burst into flame, tumbling and spinning in a tragic ballet of death toward the ground. Berlin watched the doomed aircraft drift away hoping to spot the parachutes of crewmembers emerging from the flaming wreck. He saw none and turned away only when the aircraft exploded as it hit the ground.

  Beneath them all of London was lit with great fires. The dark regions along the Thames sparkled with pinpoints of white-hot bombs. Into the dark shadowed spaces below whole clusters of incendiary bombs fell, too many for Berlin to count. They flashed brilliantly then quickly faded to pin points of dazzling white-hot light, burning ferociously.

  The incredible heat from the fires burning thousands of feet below rose to buffet the aircraft, shaking and pushing it around as if it were a toy. Bursting antiaircraft shells assaulted the air around him sending deadly shards of steel slashing into the thin metal shell of the Heinkel’s fuselage and wings. The aircraft bucked and shook with each nearby explosion.

  As they approached their target Berlin set the automatic pilot and gave over navigation to his bombardier, Gerhardt Wiesel.

  “It’ all yours Wiesel,” Berlin shouted into his mike. The Heinkel’s bombardier keyed his mike but did not respond otherwise, so intent was he on his duties. As the doors to the aircraft’s bomb bay slowly slid open Wiesel peered intently into his bombsight, absently wiping the accumulating sweat from his forehead with the back of his gloved hand.

  Having momentarily stripped the insulated glove from his right hand to better control the sensitive sight head Wiesel had only moments before his fingers would numb from the cold and become useless. As the aircraft approached the target amid the burning city below Wiesel concentrated his attention on the reflector sight as the motors of the sight head slowly rotated the telescope towards the vertical.

  Dialing in estimates of airspeed and altitude he adjusted the sight using a set of fine-tuning dials to compensate for the aircraft’s drift rate. When the target stopped moving in his eyepiece Wiesel thumbed the release trigger loosing the Heinkel’s load of incendiary bombs over the target.

  Through his bombsite Wiesel watched as the packets of incendiaries fell into the dark spaces below him. As they neared the ground they flashed terrifically then quickly simmered down into pinpoints of dazzling white light, burning furiously.

  The aircraft, suddenly free of its heavy load of ordinance soared several hundred feet before Berlin regained control. It was time to leave and Berlin began a slow turn to his left, guiding the aircraft onto their planned course toward home.

  Halfway into a gentle, banking turn the wireless crackled and Günter, the wireless operator came on screaming into the intercom.

  “Hurricane on our eight o’clock! Hurricane on our eight!”

  Immediately Berlin yanked on the yoke snapping the Heinkel hard over to starboard and away from the oncoming night fighter. But it was too late. Seconds later explosive rounds from the Hurricane’s four twenty-millimeter cannons ripped through the Heinkel’s port side instantly killing the ventral and dorsal gunners.

  Almost immediately a second, longer burst set the Heinkel’s port engine on fire shredding the wing and destroying the port side elevator. Caught in the Hurricane’s sights the Heinkel was raked with cannon fire that tore large pieces from the fuselage, tail and wings. Raked by the night fighter’s fire the Heinkel shuddered and slewed left, the controls sluggish to Berlin’s urgent commands.

  His aircraft burning and mortally wounded Berlin fought to keep the Heinkel from spinning out of control. He keyed the intercom attempting to order his men to bail out but his mike was dead.

  Smoke billowed from the starboard engine while flames engulfed the entire wing and engine on the port side. To his lower right the Heinkel’s navigator lie in a pool of blood, his body riddled by the Hurricane’s cannons.

  Rounds from the Night Fighter’s cannons had blasted holes through the Heinkel’s greenhouse nose and cold air blasted through these in a ferocious stream. Berlin muscled the aircraft into a dive, the yoke nearly lifeless in his hands. His only hope now was to nose his crippled aircraft into a shallow dive and pray he could find an open field where he could land.

  For a third time the Heinkel fell under the night fighter’s sights. More pieces of the bomber were ripped away under the incessant hammering of the Hurricane’s cannons.

  Berlin gripped the yoke in both hands using all of his strength to hold the aircraft in level flight when an errant piece of shrapnel from his disintegrating aircraft tore into his throat eliciting an involuntary scream of pain. Blood erupted from his neck wound filling his throat, threatening to drown him in his own body fluids. He thrust his left hand over the wound to stem the flow of blood, his right hand still gripping the yoke.

  His wound fatal, Berlin still coaxed the aircraft into a controlled descent. Arterial blood spurted out between the fingers of Berlin’s gloved left hand and he was loosing consciousness. A brilliant light suddenly erupted directly in front of him but Berlin was powerless to avoid it. For several seconds the light engulfed his aircraft in an effervescent green glow and then as quickly as it appeared it dissipated.

  Streaming fire the Heinkel streaked inexorably toward the ground like a burning asteroid. Only marginally influenced by Berlin’s expert piloting skills the Heinkel rocketed low over the English countryside.

  Descending at nearly five hundred knots the earth came rushing up in a terrifying specter. A few kilometers ahead Berlin could make out open fields partitioned by rows of trees.

  With his remaining strength he coaxed the nose of his aircraft just high enough to clear the oncoming tree line and then with a crunching, bone-shattering thud slammed the flaming aircraft onto a large open expanse of snow covered earth. Skidding wildly out of control the burning hulk sped over the frozen ground spraying snow and mud high into the air as it gouged its way several hundred meters across an empty field before coming to rest a few dozen meters from a narrow, unpaved road. Behind him a long furrow marking the path of the downed aircraft lie partially in flames, di
scarded airplane parts scattered to either side.

  In an act of will Berlin loosed his grip from the yoke as flames licked up around his feet. His left hand dropped away from the wound in his neck. It was too much effort to hold it there any longer.

  He had performed his duty and cared about little else. He was beyond pain, beyond sorrow, beyond thinking about what came next. He was tired beyond all knowing. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift off into the dreamless sleep of the dying and the dead.

  Chapter 2

  THE HOME GUARD

  Wilton Park, United Kingdom

  Acting Captain Bernard Whitehead of the third brigade of the British Home Guard heard the roar of the Heinkel’s remaining engine overhead as the mortally wounded aircraft plunged out of an inky sky toward an empty field in Wilton Park.

  Racing outside the police station where the members of the home guard had gathered during the raid the fifty-five year old former member of the British Royal Marines looked up into the night sky in time to see a German bomber, its engines ablaze streak low just overhead. Seconds later he heard the screeching wail of metal as the aircraft slammed into the ground about a kilometer from where he stood.

  Captain Whitehead signaled for three of his men to accompany him in an old but serviceable military lorry and sped off in the direction of the crash site. In the distance the men could see burning wreckage spew roiling clouds of thick, oily smoke up into moonlit sky. The lorry bounced and rolled along the narrow, ice covered back roads, jostling its passengers about like loose cargo.

  From the passenger’s seat Captain Whitehead saw a bright ball of yellow and red flame leap skyward followed immediately by a thunderous blast about a kilometer to their northwest. One of the Heinkel’s ruptured petrol tanks must have exploded he surmised. Minutes later they came upon the burning aircraft in a snow covered field about fifty meters from the road.