“I gotta eat, Sir Roger. Kinda neglected myself the past day or so. I need coffee and food to deal with what’s ahead here. I’m telling you… I know what he’s got to say, and I sense this is a real biggie and we’re gonna need our minds cleared and primed.”
“The SDECE boys are ready to go. No one from SOE here that I’m aware of… leastways, not for the meeting.”
That didn’t surprise anyone, given that the meeting had been called only twenty minutes beforehand, the moment Rossiter got to a phone when he touched down and Cortez had dropped his bombshell.
A WAAF Flight Officer was sat across from the pair of senior men, but neither realised that she was an SOE officer, as her arrival only slightly predated that of Rossiter.
Alphonse Guiges, once of de Walle’s staff, deferred to Denys Montabeau, another of de Walle’s protégés, and the senior man rose to move into the small briefing room, ready for the eighteen-hundred start.
Christine Mann, once known as Krystal Liese Uhlmann-Schalberg, decided to follow instead of risking getting lost.
Rossiter finished the last of his burger and wiped his mouth.
“Damn, but I needed that.”
Dalziel was not yet half way through his, and decided to give up the fight as the item didn’t seem to be set up for use with cutlery.
“Shall we, Sam?”
“Yep. This is gonna blow your mind.”
Back in NATO’s Leipzig headquarters, what had become as strange was now decidedly perturbing, as Major von der Hartenstein-Gräbler of the Abwehr reported to his superiors.
Key members of the Allied Intelligence agencies simply were going missing for hours on end, something that was as worrying as it was unusual.
1800 hrs, Thursday, 20th March 1947, Allied Intelligence Special Operations Centre, die Hegerhaus, Horberg Masslau, Germany.
“OK, Major. Let’s have it, from the beginning.”
Cortez swung into his presentation, leaving out nothing, laying out the events in chronological order.
Rossiter had taken time to grab another coffee and sat savouring it as the others in the room were enlightened.
The two SDECE agents were agitated and vocal as the information on de Walle was revealed.
Also, the assassination attempt on Anne-Marie drew their real anger, both of them having worked with her when under the Deputy Head of Deux.
The briefing revealed the atomic aspirations of the Soviet Union, something that was now starker in their minds, since images and stories of the attacks on Japan had come to Europe.
Cortez started into matters surrounding the briefcase, and Rossiter focussed his mind, ready for the bombshell at the end.
The murder of Frau Hallmann and the subsequent arson aside, the trail of the briefcase was set out.
“Our British colleagues have a source in the Red Cross who was able to get the information to us very quickly.”
Cortez flicked a switch and a swiftly drawn and coloured map of a part of the USSR came into being, projected against the white wall behind the excited Major.
“This is the Volga… Stalingrad would be about here, some fifty miles to the northwest,” he pointed off the map, “of this,” he put the wooden stick’s tip on a built-up area, “The nearest town… Akhtubinsk.”
He allowed them a moment to orient themselves.
“The Red Cross were visiting a large camp in the area… and flew back from this airfield here… a mile northeast of Akhtubinsk.”
“The camp they were visiting is here,” he circled a highlighted area between a village and the banks of the Volga.
Rossiter’s eyes smiled in anticipation.
“This village is named Uspenka.”
‘Bingo!’
“That’s it?”
“Yes, Sir, Admiral. That is the place.”
“The prison camp is a sham?”
“No Sir, we actually think not. The Red Cross report from a subsequent visit detailed prisoner numbers, condition, facilities et cetera… it’s kosher. We’ve only got one set of photographs and they were taken during the camp’s construction. I believe we need proper interpretation of these photos, and more ordered a-sap, Admiral.”
Dalziel knew just whom he would call on and he sought Rossiter’s agreement, which was given without words.
The US Brigadier General had also immediately thought of Jenkins and her quiet sergeant.
Their attention had wandered for a moment, something that Cortez had spotted, so he patiently waited for them to refocus on the matter in hand.
“Here we have a tank training facility. We’ve information from our former association that it’s a long-standing camp… in fact there’s a possibility that some Allied officers visited in 1944… we’re on that right now… but there was recently a sniff that it was upgraded as a battle-training camp for tankers and armored infantry.”
The pointer covered the distance from the Nizhniy Baskunchak training camp to Uspenka.
“Around forty miles, which at first sight put it well out of the way but…”
The pointer returned to the middle ground.
“This is where many of the exercises take place, which would make Soviet tanks and armored infantry less than an hour’s hard drive from the Camp… which, by the way, we know is called Camp 1001.”
Cortez continued filling in details on what was known, more to the point, what wasn’t known about Camp 1001 and the area surrounding it.
Rossiter leant across to Dalziel, who responded by coming closer.
“Red Cross have anything more on this, you reckon? Anything not in the report?”
“We can but ask, but we simply must not attract attention with our own attention. I’ll get word to our man immediately… see what he can tell us. 1001 doesn’t jump out at me, so I suspect it’s not on the radar for anything in particular. I’ll get my staff to look through the necessary and see what we can find. Suit you, Sam?”
By the end of the briefing, there were many theories about Camp 1001, all of which needed further investigation.
The following day, a deep penetration reconnaissance mission was devised, one that would conceal the precise point of investigation.
Target-Akhtubinsk.
The Russian town would be bombed, lives lost, both Soviet and Allied, planes shot down, buildings destroyed, all for the need to have one aircraft in the attack fly a course directly overhead of Camp 1001 and Uspenka, its precision cameras recording every single detail, despite the buzzing of enemy fighters around the box of bombers desperately fighting their way home.
1127 hrs, Friday, 21st March 1947, Camp Steel, on the Meer van Echternach, Luxembourg.
“Sir, order, most immediate.”
Crisp was going over the figures given to him by Captain Bluebear, whose company had recently been on operational deployment and were pulled off the line shortly after the whole war kicked off again.
Whiskey Company were back there now and disengaging them was proving to be a major headache for Crisp and his staff.
He had only just flown back from Königsberg, where his units were allocated to the British. Each in turn rotating through their attachment to give them time in the line, and exposure to colder weather conditions.
He dropped the camp roster and picked up the new message.
“Oh shit. Thank you, Corporal.”
The messenger departed as Crisp picked up the telephone.
“Con, get yourself over here right now. We got orders to move.”
Marion Crisp chuckled.
“Yes… the whole shooting match. We’re upping sticks.”
He killed the connection and made another.