The Leader And The Damned

'The first one is Field Marshal Keitel. Very formal. The man behind is Colonel-General Alfred Jodl.'

Keitel was tall, heavily built, held his head high and had a trim moustache. He paused briefly, his manner arrogant and overbearing. Guensche had stiffened to attention.

'You are the English defector from the Berghof. You will hold yourself in readiness until the Fuhrer grants you a short interview.'

Having issued his diktat, Keitel marched off. Colonel-General Jodl was a very different man. He wore his peaked cap at a jaunty angle and there was an ironic expression in his eyes verging on amusement as he stopped and studied Lindsay. Lean-faced and clean-shaven, his manner was crisp but polite.

'Who do you think is winning this war?'

'God alone knows at the present stage..'

'I wish you had brought God with you then – so' we could consult him,' Jodl commented. He nodded to Guensche. 'Today's conference never got off the ground. Probably just as well – the generator is playing up. It was so dim in there you'd think it was night.' He turned back to Lindsay and again surprised him. 'Anything interesting in that packet you are hugging as though it contained the British Crown Jewels?'

'The Allied order of battle on the North African front.'

'In two hours come to see me! No one else has asked you about it? Not even the Fuhrer? Curious – he rarely misses a trick. You really should have brought God…'

Lindsay's mind was a whirlpool of conflicting impressions. He had a vivid picture of his brief meeting with Hitler. Recalling their long encounter before the war he had the oddest feeling – as though the

Fuhrer was exaggerating his earlier personality…'

Jodl left them with an expression of cynical disgust. Lindsay turned to check which were his quarters as Guensche spoke. 'He would be the one to notice that packet – except that I too would have expected the Fuhrer to ask the same question first. Ah, here we have someone more to your taste, I expect.'

'A slim, dark-haired girl with an excellent figure had come out of the Lagebaracke exit and was walking towards them slowly as though to give herself time to observe Lindsay. She swung her right arm; under her left she clutched a notebook.

'Christa Lundt, the Fuhrer's top secretary,' Guensche whispered. 'She was asking about you. I think you intrigued her.' He sighed. 'You should be so lucky.'

They sat facing each other across a table in the canteen and Christa Lundt immediately threw Ian Lindsay off balance. She had been sipping coffee when she asked the question.

'Are you really pro-Nazi, Wing Commander?'

She had asked the question in excellent English. Up to this moment they had conversed in German. Introduced to her by his escort, Guensche, Lindsay had been surprised when she suggested he should accompany her to the canteen inside which they were now sitting alone, apart from the waiter behind the bar who was too far away to overhear them.

'I was a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship before the war,' he replied and left the ball in her court as he drank more of his indifferent coffee.

He studied her, noted the strong nose, the firm chin and her large, slow-moving blue eyes. A tiny alarm bell was ringing at the back of his mind. All his defences were up, although nothing in his casual manner indicated his wariness.

'But that was before the war, as you say,' she continued in his native language. 'A lot of water has flowed under many bridges since those days…'

'And where did you learn to speak English so well, may I ask?' he enquired.

'Thus he evaded my question.' She smiled, a slow smile like the warming glow of a fire. 'I was eighteen when I spent time with a nice family in Guildford, Middlesex…'

'Guildford is in Surrey,' he said quickly.

'So, you are English – not a German posing as an Englishman.'

'And why should I do that in the name of sanity?'

She smiled again. He told himself to watch it. That smile of hers could undo a man. She even had a plausible reply for his fresh question.

'Because your German is so good and, if you won't think me impossibly rude, with your fair hair you look so Teutonic…'

'A worthy member of the master race?'

He was practising what he had been trained to do: carrying on a conversation with one part of his brain while the other part acted independently on a different channel – this talented and attractive creature was grilling him, carrying out an interrogation. Had Bormann put her up to it? That didn't quite fit – he could not have said why. He was deeply puzzled.

'A worthy member of the Anglo-German Fellowship,' she replied, her eyes holding his own. 'There's something odd about you, Wing Commander – just as odd things have been happening here before you landed at the end of the world.'

'What sort of odd things?'

He sounded uninterested, making conversation, but he had the uncomfortable sensation he was not fooling Christa Lundt. She had small, finely-wrought hands. Every movement was graceful. Her voice was soft and soothing. She lowered it even though the man behind the counter had moved even further way and was reading a newspaper.

'For one thing, there was a very loud explosion yesterday just before the' Fuhrer was expected back from Russia. We were told foxes had blundered into the minefield. Now that has happened before, but this explosion was very loud and to me – I have good hearing – it sounded to come from above the forest. As it turned out, the Fuhrer's plane was delayed.'

'Doesn't sound to amount to much,' Lindsay replied.

'There was a lot of activity beyond the perimeter. later that afternoon. I'm sure I heard tracked vehicles moving into the forest. Today the Fuhrer does arrive for his normal midday conference – and then curtails it. Something was wrong with the generator – the lights went dim and stayed that way. With the cloud overcast we could hardly see each other inside the Lagebaracke.'

'So, the power goes on the blink. There's a war on, in case you'd forgotten…'

'I'm not a complete fool, Wing Commander!'

'I'm an informal type. Call me Ian. May I call you Christa?'

'All right, Ian – but only when we're alone. Otherwise it must be Fraulein Lundt. Martin Bormann has tried to get me into bed a dozen times – he's succeeded with most of the other secretaries. You don't want to upset him – he's the most dangerous man at the Wolf's Lair. And he's in charge of all admin – including operation of the power supply.'

'He's the only one – who knows about the generator?'

'Well, no. Keitel and WI are both technically- minded and poke their noses into everything. Like most of us, they get so bored in this oasis of hell.' Her eyes held him. 'And we've got spy fever! The Fuhrer is convinced there's a Soviet agent inside the Wolf's Lair.' Her face went passive. 'Bormann has just arrived. He's coming to see you. I'm leaving…'

Lindsay lay on the bunk, arms folded behind his head, staring up at the heavily-reinforced roof and not seeing it. Bormann had shown him to his quarters, a small but in the cantonment inside Perimeter Two where Keitel and Jodl had their own private abodes – neither of which looked any more luxurious than the primitive place allocated to the Englishman.

He was amazed at the whole layout which reminded him vividly of descriptions he had read of prisoner-of-war camps. But he was recalling every word of his conversation with Christa Lundt. Could he trust one word she had said?

First there was the mysterious explosion which – according to Christa – had taken place overhead. Second, the business about the power dimming at the military conference was odd. Third there was something unreal about his brief meeting with Hitler. Then he remembered Christa's tale of a Soviet agent inside the Wolf's Lair. That really did destroy her whole credibility.

The heavily-muffled figure passed through the outermost checkpoint and vanished inside the mist-bound forest. It trod with almost feminine light-footedness, making hardly a sound on the crusted snow.