The Ian Fleming Files (28 page)

“Jawohl, Herr Krupp,” came the efficient female voice through the grille.
 

A lightning bolt crash-landed outside setting an ancient oak ablaze in
the front courtyard. Krupp went to a window to investigate as a whistle
shrilled and sentries gathered and started organizing an impromptu fire
brigade.

The door opened and Emile Franken plodded in, a meaty bald-headed thug
with goat-like features. Tough, cruel, very ugly. Otto tried not to betray his
feeling of repulsion as he contemplated the replacement for the man he had just
murdered.

Krupp beckoned Emile forward like one might a child.

Emile lumbered over, his legs two small tree trunks.

“Agent Otto,” said Krupp, “meet your new partner in crime: Emile
Franken.”

Otto stiffed a smile. Emile screwed his grotesque features and leered at
Otto with a crooked rictus grin. Otto suddenly missed Kurt.

Krupp clapped his hands. “Alzo, gentlemen. Your mission is simple. Fly to
Cairo, find the traitor Ugarte and bring me back his head. Fraulein Lustbaden
is to be brought home alive. Head intact. You have two days.”

Wolfgang Krupp waited until they had left and then went over to his desk,
picked up some papers, pulled a chair closer to the fire and set his drink down
on a low glass coffee table. The table’s frame was teak and carved with an
antelope head at each corner.

In his hands he held a file. The file had a shiny black cover with raised
silver lettering in Gothic font that spelled out
Geheime Staatspolizei
(Gestapo). A thick blood-red band ran horizontally across it in the center and
in the band was neatly painted in white letters ‘IAN FLEMING.’ In the top
left-hand space there were the letters ‘S.G.’ in white, and under them ‘
Streng
geheim
,’ the equivalent of ‘Top Secret’.

Krupp opened the file and took out a large envelope containing
photographs which he emptied on to the glass surface of the table. He picked
them up one by one and looked closely at them by the undulating light.

The first was dated 1940. It showed a handsome naval officer at the mouth
of the River Garonne in France surrounded by refugees, stationed at the top of
narrow stone steps leading down to the water where tenders awaited.

The next was dated 1943. It was blurred, but of the same man. He was at a
dinner table looking to the side at something and the image appeared to be a
candid. A miniature matchbox camera, guessed Krupp.

The third photograph was undated. It was a blown-up passport image.
Details popped out. The steely gaze, the dark features, the thoughtful brow
that met a crooked broken nose. It was a handsome face but there was a coldness
to it that was striking. The face of a killer, thought Krupp. He smiled
wickedly to himself, raised his whiskey tumbler to his mouth and was about to
take a greedy gulp when the door rattled open and Frau Krupp entered with an
irate look.

“You’re sending Otto and that oaf to Cairo?”

“I want that perfidious dog’s head on a stick.”

“They look like Laurel and Hardy.”

“Looks are deceiving, mother. The oaf is quiet and deadly, tremendously fast
in spite of his bulk, and has the strength of three men. He is our insurance
policy against failure.”

She stepped closer to him, a little too close, straightened his doublet,
let her hands smooth the sleeves and fussed with his sweaty hair. “What of the
other traitor? Did you tell them to fetch her?”

“Maria? Traitor is not the right word, mother.”

“She didn’t just run away, Wolfgang. She defected.”

“She’s just a girl. She doesn’t know about such things.”

“Wolfgang, you are so naive. She used Ugarte to change sides. She has
eyes and ears. She sees the scared SS men crawling to you for passage to
Africa, hears the whisperings of Parsifal…”

“Mother you chased her away,” said Krupp curtly.

Frau Krupp narrowed her eyes at him. “Love-struck fool. I thought I
raised you to see people more clearly. She didn’t leave you, she left her
country. It was a defection, boy.”

Wolfgang tensed, patted his hair back down and suppressed a desire to
lash out. Through a forced thin grin he said, “Well, she’s gone now. So there’s
no need to talk about her anymore.”

“Let’s hope not. With what she knows she could prove very dangerous in
the wrong hands.” She spoke in a low wicked whisper: “Perhaps Laurel and Hardy
might bring two heads back rather than one?”

Before he could answer there was a short rap at the door and Krupp’s
statuesque platinum blonde secretary Anike Asplund tentatively extended her
swan-like neck in.

“Zeiss and Stransky just landed.”

Krupp nodded and she withdrew.

“It is not too late to tell them to destroy her when they discover
Ugarte,” said Frau Krupp, eager to get a decision.

Wolfgang sighed, snipped the end off a cigar and decided to change the
subject. “For a Corporal and a Captain, Zeiss and Stransky require a great deal
of reassurance.”

“They want to be sure this plan will work,” his mother said assertively,
focusing her laser mind on the new topic. “For them, failure means ignominy and
execution by firing squad. The same fate will befall their families. The
Gestapo will shoot anyone related to them.”

“What of me, mother? You think I will get a pardon?” He laughed. A high,
brittle affair.

“You have Parsifal. We will be long gone before any suspicion falls.”

“The less said about that the better. Especially with Zeiss and Stransky
lurking.”

“Dear son, you do not have to tell me about the need for discretion. It
is for this very reason that I want to see any loose ends tied up.”

He knew what she was driving at and threw her a bone: “Let’s see how far
Otto Platz and Emile Franken get in Egypt. They might drown in the Nile for all
we know. If they find the two snakes I will ask them to detain Maria. As for
Zeiss and Stransky, this plan they are pushing will not work and I intend to
inform them of this tonight.”

Frau Krupp arched a brow. “You have an alternative proposal?”

Wolfgang Krupp smiled cryptically at his mother revealing emerald-cut
diamond crowns that caught the wavering firelight and sparkled.

THE SUN was all but invisible behind a thick cloud cover as a Sikorsky
“Hoverfly” thumped its single three-bladed main rotor over the deck of the HMS
Tantalus
,
a long-range ocean-going submersible with twin eight-foot propellers berthed in
a floating dock in Holy Loch. A swell had raised the water levels of the cove
and a whirling dank grey fog shrouded
Tantalus
in Arthurian mystery.
Signal flares burned amid the gloom as the mini copter descended into the
ethereal atmosphere.

Inside the cramped aircraft, Ian Fleming stared down at the great black
shape and braced himself for the touchdown. A huge winch hook flopped onto the
deck and a helmsman scrambled to attach its steel cable to the pulley, securing
the whirlybird as it steadily alit. Fleming emerged from the rickety contraption
ducking his head unnecessarily to avoid the rotor before standing upright to
feast his eyes. It was his first look at a diesel-electric engined submarine
and
Tantalus
was a beaut.

A gangway extended from her hold hatch to the quayside where crewmen were
unloading deliveries from trucks. A jumbo derrick strained as it hoisted a
passel of crates holding canned goods and bulk supplies. About eighty feet back
from the bows the huge conning-tower reared ten feet above the deck where the
skipper was monarch of all he surveyed, presiding over the scene from his iron
pavilion, barking orders to officers below via a megaphone. Midway up the sides
of the conning tower and jutting out like fins at right angles were the
swept-back auxiliary diving planes of the submarine.

A young submariner saluted Fleming and led him across the conning tower
to Lieutenant Commander Hugh Stirling Mackenzie, DSO, RN.

With his peaked white cap, immaculate white tunic and slacks, rigid gait
and pursed stiff upper lip, Mackenzie epitomized the classic British naval
captain. But in manner he was anything but. He was relaxed and genial, frank
and communicative. An illustrious career had engendered a sort of cheerful
imperturbability and his expansive personality made him one of the most beloved
sub captains in the fleet. The crew had absolute, implicit confidence in him.

Fleming snapped a respectful salute and shouted over the downwash of the
copter. “Permission to come aboard, sir.”

Mackenzie allowed a slight avuncular smile to form at the corners of his
mouth before shouting back, “Permission granted, 17F.” He turned to the young
sailor. “Commander Fleming is joining our patrol of the Mediterranean for
acclimatization purposes.”

The boy tried not to look flustered.

Mackenzie continued. “He will be stationed on a submersible when this
damned war ends and has very wisely elected to take this opportunity to
familiarize himself with the unique environment.”

Fleming suppressed a smirk. The mariner’s face had turned pink.

“Why am I telling you this?” asked Mackenzie rhetorically, as his
audience of one felt his cheeks burn. “So I don’t have to repeat myself.
Savvy?”

The boy looked at him and tried to read his eyes. “Aye, aye, sir.”

Mackenzie beamed. “Escort Commander Fleming to his cabin.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”  

Mackenzie gave Fleming a wink and the NID agent returned the sly grin,
happy to see an old friend, one for whom he showed a significant degree of
respect. A brisk salute and then Fleming followed his escort below deck as the
Sikorsky whizzed past overhead and noise levels became tolerable.

“Watch your step,” said his pimply guide. “It’s a mite slippery
hereabouts.”

Fleming was careful not to put a foot wrong as he negotiated the gently
oscillating walk-way, the mighty vessel rocking perceptibly at its moorings
from the tug of the harbor swell. They climbed down a small ladder and crouched
to proceed along a thirty-foot long narrow passageway. Fleming tried to keep up
with the nimble submariner who knew just when to duck and stoop, when to
flatten himself against a side panel and when it was safe to speed ahead. They
descended aft negotiating a maze of pipes past racks of unfamiliar equipment,
twirling safety lights, techs busy at stations, arriving eventually at a small
steel door.

The boy snapped the latch and stepped back. There wasn’t room inside for
two. Salutes were exchanged and the mariner scurried off down the chute-like
passageway.

Fleming squeezed his six foot plus frame into the space which was the
size of a phone booth with a built-in cot, a folding washbasin, a small
writing-bureau and chair, a locker, a panel of instrument dials above the bunk
and nothing else. He unfolded the cot and flopped down, pinching the bridge of
his nose.

Submersion signals wailed, the ululation compounding Fleming’s migraine
pain tenfold. He plugged his fingers into his ears as the walls vibrated. The
sirens ceased, three bells pealed sharply and the torturous clamor was over.
There was an almighty ruckus as the engines bellowed to life and cavitation
noise echoed. Fleming cupped his ears this time and waited for the loud
thrumming to ebb.

Outside, the twin props started turning and
Tantalus
began to
submerge. A patrol boat escorted her to sea.

Later, Commander Mackenzie would write in his log: “At 20:25 hours (time
zone -1) HMS
Tantalus
departed from Holy Loch for her outward voyage to
Cairo. She is to perform a brief patrol along the Portuguese coast on the
passage to Port Said.”

The T-class long range patrol sub glided through the freezing water of
the Atlantic Ocean like a massive iron shark.

Ian Fleming was in his stateroom supping weak tea from a tiny mug as the
dismantled components of his Belgian made Browning H-Power lay on the unfolded
cot before him. The Browning had replaced the Colt last year and for a month,
before the powerful implement was banned, Fleming enjoyed raising the ire of
his club’s management by splintering the balsa targets to smithereens in a
single thunderous sally. It was a mean, powerful weapon chambered for 9mm
cartridges, and featured a high-capacity 13-round magazine.

He had packed in a hurry and didn’t have time to clean and oil it. As
they were not due to berth in Port Said for twelve hours, he thought that this
would be a good way to kill time. But his head pain had increased as they
submerged and the air pressure tightened around his cranium like a clamp. Now
the task seemed almost overwhelming. He finished his cold weak tea, scrunched
his eyes and concentrated.

First he ran a copper wire brush through the inside of the Browning’s
barrel to break loose grime and powder residue, reciting the words of his
favorite manual as he toiled.

“To prevent wear and tear on the working parts of your pistol, keep it
clean and properly lubricated. A dirty, dry pistol, or one which has been
over-oiled and allowed to gather dirt will have stoppages that may make it
useless in battle. A failure of your pistol in battle may cost you your life.”

He set the bore down to dry on a clean rag beside four screw heads which
had been inspected and scrubbed with an old toothbrush. Next came the feed
system. The detachable box magazine, which had been emptied earlier, was wiped
down with an oily rag. He peered inside, removed the follower and spring and
cleaned the interior. Satisfied, he placed the box and its parts aside and
reached for the tarnished muzzle, examined its flutes and grooves and selected
a thin-tipped scraping tool to remove the buildup of gunk in the lines.

He thought about the mission. He first heard about Parsifal last summer.
Its primary purpose, as he understood, was running the underground railroad for
fleeing SS officers looking for discreet passage to German East Africa where
there existed a thriving community of dissident Nazis forging new, anonymous
subtropical lives as gentlemen farmers across the savanna. He once saw an
internal NID memo that said over forty-thousand high-ranking Nazi officials had
already been ferried to Tanzania. Whatever shipping lanes and air channels
Parsifal now commanded would be lost when the war officially ended and German
officers who could see the writing on the wall were tripping over themselves
for one-way tickets on the Parsifal Express.

Smuggling war criminals over the Atlantic was one thing but assassinating
the most protected individual in history? Fleming knew precisely what was
entailed because the subject of “Why don’t we just put a bullet in Hitler’s
head?” was a perennial chestnut floated and torpedoed roughly once every six
months or so in the Section 17 Monday morning staff meeting. There had been
over twenty-five murder plots against Hitler that were known. Almost all were
foiled by the Führer’s erratic schedule which was half-planned and
half-improvised. Hitler was dangerously mercurial and amounted to a permanent
moving target.

Fleming knew of a double-agent in the German High Command who strapped a
bomb to his waist and was prepared for martyrdom only to see his target zip
through an art exhibit in ten minutes instead of the scheduled forty-five. The
would-be assassin had to defuse the timer in the lavatory and was lucky to
escape undetected. Those who had been caught had been hanged with piano wire.
Hitler was too insulated, too unpredictable and there was the usual aura of
majesty and invincibility that naturally dissuaded some iconoclasts from
shattering the idol.

When the tide of the war turned in 1943, all active Allied assassination
plans slowly ground to a halt. It was agreed that Hitler would destroy himself
and that time and money was better spent elsewhere. Conversely, domestic plots
for regicide increased, from German resistance groups like The Edelweiss
Pirates, and from within the German military as high-ranking officers like
Wilhelm Canaris, Claus von Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow and Hans Oster
either clung to the belief that a German victory was still possible or refused
the cowardly option of a fugitive life farming on the equator.

Fleming drizzled gun solvent on a cloth swatch and with a cleaning rod
ran it through the barrel to pick up powder fouling salts from the bore.
Something was nagging at him. He set his work down and opened his slim document
folder and extracted a manila envelope labeled ‘KRUPP, W - 17F TOP SECRET.’
Inside was a sheaf of documents which he riffled until he found the internal
NID biography on Wolfgang Krupp. He propped it open and looked back and forth
at it as he worked.

It said:

‘FRIEDRICH MAXIMILLIAN GOTTLOB WOLFGANG KRUPP.’

And underneath, in lower-case type:

‘
Ministerpräsident
of Alderney, Commandant of Lager Sylt
concentration camp, Colonel 7th Panzer Division, former Minister of Armaments
and War Production for the Third Reich 1939.’

Fleming tried to get comfortable in the comically small cot and read on.

‘Krupp was born in German East Tanzania to a Prussian soldier turned
farmer. He inherited money when his father died and invested in diamond mines.
After cornering the industry, Wolfgang returned to Germany at 25 and invested
in state businesses. He was the third richest German for the 1930s. He famously
rebuked Adolph Hitler in public and instead of imprisonment was appointed
junior Minister of Armaments and War Productions. The appointment lasted 43
days. His subsequent demotion to caretaker governor of Germany’s sole British
territory Alderney was widely regarded as a political banishment. Krupp has
since regrouped and is believed to be the leader of Parsifal, a secret
anti-Hitlerian Nazi organization with the agenda of assassinating the Führer
and replacing him with a military junta.’

 Fleming skimmed the rest of the biography. There was a clipping
from the society pages of
Stadt
dated March 1, 1938. A young, handsome
Krupp was at dinner with an elegantly dressed young woman. He looked surprised
and angry at the shutterbug’s intrusion. The headline read “Germany’s Most
Eligible Bachelor.” Fleming narrowed his blue eyes at it and held it to the
light of the tiny porthole to get a better look at the woman and recognized her
as a teenage Maria Lustbaden.

Fleming’s gaze lingered and then he turned to the internal notes on
Krupp.

‘DESCRIPTION: Age about 36. Height 5ft 8in. Weight 165 lbs. Eyes, dark
brown. Hair blond.

DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Three emerald cut 2 carat diamond dental crowns on
lateral incisor, bicuspid and second bicuspid. Cataract flaw right iris
center-left. A .45 caliber bullet scar upper left chest.

MISCELLANEOUS: Krupp is fluent in over 40 different African tribal
languages including Maasi, Sukuma and Makonde. He is an expert on Tanzanian military
history and has published academic papers on East African weaponry. He is an
avid fencer and collector of exotic blades...’

The sub suddenly lurched and Fleming braced himself for the klaxon but
the dreaded peal never came. He set the Browning barrel down and lit a
cigarette. The rush of dopamine fixed his thoughts and gave him clarity,
helping him to hone in on what was needling him. With a litany of failed
attempts on Hitler’s life, including one or two whispered disasters with the
NID’s name on it, what was it that had Churchill’s Boys so rattled? What
evidence was there to suggest that Parsifal might succeed where the likes of
Colonel Stauffenberg had recently failed? The only possible explanation was
that Godfrey, Hargreaves, Blake and Dilly, the snake, knew something that he
didn’t.

Something that scared them.

The contents of the top secret dossier Godfrey gave him lay splayed on
the bed beside the gun parts. Fleming shuffled through the papers that he had
already read twice. Was there something he missed? He paused. Where was the
letter Ugarte sent to America seeking asylum? The one that was intercepted by
Bletchley Park. The missive was not included in his mission packet and was
nowhere to be seen in Hut 8 when he was briefed. There was no mention of it in
the file. Ugarte must have sprinkled a taste of what he knew in the note,
deduced Fleming. That was it. The traitor had set some bait, the Boys bit and
here he was stuffed in a sardine tin on his way to roast in North Africa.