Berlin Red Read Free Page B

– a fast, low-profiled torpedo cruiser – Hildebrand had, at first, found this new assignment so insultingly beneath him that, even if he could have told people about it, he would have kept silent. It was small consolation that they had allowed him to keep his original radio operator, Obermaat Grimm, and also his helmsman, Steuermann Barth, who, after years of having almost 3,000 horsepower at his fingertips, thanks to the S-boat’s three Daimler-Benz motors, became despondent now that all he had to work with was the trawler’s clunky, temperamental diesel.
    But in the coming months, as almost everyone they’d ever known in the Navy was removed from their original commission, reassigned as infantry and fed into the vast meat grinder of the Russian front, Hildebrand and his two-man crew had grown to appreciate the obscurity of their position.
    Except for the fact that he had been ordered to fly the flag of neutral Sweden while carrying out his work, which meant that he would have undoubtedly been shot if Russian ships prowling these waters had ever stopped and boarded him, Hildebrand’s job was relatively safe.
    The only thing Hildebrand really worried about was being hit by one of these falling monsters. The fact that these particular rockets did not contain explosive payloads was of little consolation to him, since the amount of metal and machinery contained within them, together with their terminal velocity, was more than enough to turn him, his boat and his crew into particles smaller than rain.
    Although Hildebrand was no propulsion engineer, he had pieced together enough to understand that the reason for this incessant bombarding of the Baltic was all part of a search to improve the guidance system by which the V-2s were delivered to their target. From what he had seen with his own eyes, they still had a long way to go.
    ‘I’d better get up top side,’ announced Hildebrand. From a cabinet by the ladder, he removed a heavy pair of Zeiss Navy binoculars, with their characteristic yellow-green paint and black rubber bumpers around the lenses. They had been issued to him during his time as an S-boat commander, and if those binoculars could have trapped the memory of things Hildebrand had glimpsed through its lenses, the chalky cliffs of Dover would have glimmered into focus, and the sight of American tankers burning outside Portsmouth harbour, and of La Pallice, his base on the Brittany coast, as he returned from one of his missions, only to find that the port had been destroyed by Allied bombing.
    They might have taken his S-boat from him, but Hildebrand was not going to part with those binoculars. Placing the leather cord around his neck, Hildebrand climbed up the ladder, opened the hatch and climbed out on deck.
    The first breath of cold air was like pepper in his lungs.
    Ice had crusted on the fishing net, which lay twined around a large metal drum balanced horizontally on a stand at the stern of the boat. Even this late in the year, the temperature often dropped below freezing. He went straight to the net and, with his gloved hand, punched at the ice until it began to come away in chunks. Such a build-up on the net was a sure sign, to any passing Russian gunboat, that their trawler was not actually doing any fishing.
    The wheelhouse door opened and Barth stuck his head out. ‘Is that you, Herr Ka-Leu?’ he asked, using the colloquial abbreviation of Hildebrand’s rank.
    ‘Just cleaning the net,’ replied Hildebrand and, as he spoke, he noticed that their little Swedish flag, tied to a broomstick which jutted at an angle from the bow, had also been encased in ice. Hildebrand made his way over to the pole and shook the flag loose, so that its blue and yellow colours could be seen.
    ‘The Führer thanks you for your fastidiousness,’ remarked the helmsman.
    ‘And I have no doubt that he is equally grateful for your sarcasm,’ Hildebrand replied.
    Barth glanced up at the sky. ‘When’s it