“Now, about the operation,” Leclerc said. The thin line of his joined hands bisected his bright face. Only Haldane was not watching him; his eyes were turned away toward the window. Outside, the rain was falling gently against the buildings like spring rain in a dark valley.
Abruptly Leclerc rose and went to a map of Europe on the wall. There were small flags pinned to it. Stretching upwards with his arm, riding on his toes to reach the Northern Hemisphere, he said, “We’re having a spot of trouble with the Germans.” A little laugh went up. “In the area south of Rostock; a place called Kalkstadt, just here.” His finger traced the Baltic coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, moved east and stopped an inch or two south of Rostock.
“To put it in a nutshell, we have three indicators which suggest—I cannot say prove—that something big is going on there in the way of military installations.”
He swung around to face them. He would remain at the map and say it all from there, to show he had the facts in his memory and didn’t need the papers on the table.
“The first indicator came exactly a month ago when we received a report from our representative in Hamburg, Jimmy Gorton.”
Woodford smiled. Good God, was old Jimmy still going?
“An East German refugee crossed the border near Lubeck, swam the river; a railwayman from Kalkstadt. He went to our Consulate and offered to sell them information about a new rocket site near Rostock. I need hardly tell you the Consulate threw him out. Since the Foreign Office will not even give us the facilities of its bag service, it is unlikely”—a thin smile— “that they will assist us by buying military information.” A nice murmur greeted this joke. “However, by a stroke of luck Gorton got to hear of the man and went to Flensburg to see him.”
Woodford would not let this pass. Flensburg? Was not that the place where they had located German submarines in forty-one? Flensburg had been a hell of a show.
Leclerc nodded at Woodford indulgently, as if he too had been amused by the recollection. “The wretched man had been to every allied office in North Germany, but no one would look at him. Jimmy Gorton had a chat with him.”
Implicit in Leclerc’s way of describing things was an assumption that Gorton was the only intelligent man among a lot of fools. He crossed to his desk, took a cigarette from the silver box, lit it, picked up a file with a heavy red cross on the cover and laid it noiselessly on the table in front of them. “This is Jimmy’s report,” he said. “It’s a first-class bit of work by any standard.” The cigarette looked very long between his fingers. “The defector’s name,” he added inconsequentially, “was Fritsche.”
“Defector?” Haldane put in quickly. “The man’s a low-grade refugee, a railwayman. We don’t usually talk about men like that defecting.”
Leclerc replied defensively, “The man’s not only a railwayman. He’s a bit of a mechanic and a bit of a photographer.”
McCulloch opened the file and began methodically turning over the serials. Sandford watched him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.
“On the first or second of September—we don’t know which because he can’t remember—he happened to be doing a double shift in the dumping sheds at Kalkstadt. One of his comrades was sick. He was to work from six till twelve in the morning, and four till ten at night. When he arrived to report for work there were a dozen Vopos, East German people’s police, at the station entrance. All passenger traffic was forbidden. They checked his identity papers against a list and told him to keep away from the sheds on the eastern side of the station. They said,” Leclerc added deliberately, “that if he approached the eastern sheds he was liable to be shot.”
This impressed them. Woodford said it was typical of the Germans.
“It’s the Russians we’re fighting,” Haldane put in.
“He’s an odd fish, our man. He seems to have argued with them. He told them he was as reliable as they were, a good German and a Party member. He showed them his union card, photographs of his wife and heaven knows what. It didn’t do any good, of course, because they just told him to obey orders and keep away from the sheds. But he must have caught their fancy because when they brewed up some soup at ten o’clock they called him over and offered him a cup. Over the soup he asked them what was going on. They were cagey, but he could see they were excited. Then something happened. Something very important,” he continued. “One of the younger ones blurted out that whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours. At this point an officer came along and told them to get back to work.”