The Moscow Option

It was past midnight when there was a sharp knocking on my door. I opened it to see Templeton, dressed in a hat and topcoat, peering at me.

My first thought was that Father had been killed in action and he had come to inform me, immediately followed by a flash of shameful hope I might be right. As a boy, I had lain awake in my bed sickened and fascinated by fantasies of his death, and in recent months my mind had slipped back into this reflex of momentarily wishing for the worst news. At first it had disturbed me, but now I dismissed it for what it was: just a trick of the mind exacerbated by the tensions of the war.

‘Meet me in the lobby in five minutes,’ Templeton said, and there was a look in his eyes that spoke of conspiracies rather than condolences. ‘In full uniform, please.’

I nodded and shut the door. Having dressed hurriedly, I raced down the carpeted staircase, wondering what would await me at the foot of it.

I had arrived in Helsinki a few months earlier, and was not enjoying it. I’d had a frustrating war. Shortly after leaving school I had been recruited into the Special Operations Executive, and had been put through rigorous training. After narrowly missing out on taking part in several operations, Father had arranged for me to be attached to the platoon guarding Churchill at Chequers. This sounded impressive, but the novelty of being close to the man as he chomped his cigar and chugged down brandy soon faded – the job mostly consisted of patrolling the house and grounds with a Tommy gun, and following him in a convoy of trucks and motorcycles whenever he went for a stroll.

I had finally seen some real action in 1944, when I was dropped into France as part of a Jedburgh team, but the operation had been cut short after just a few weeks when it had become clear that the cell we had been sent to contact had been betrayed to the Germans.

After that, I’d been sent out here. I suspected Father had heard something about my time in France and had had a word in someone’s ear to whisk me out of the line of fire. In 1941, before the Legation in Helsinki had been evacuated by the Finns and relocated to Lisbon, he had briefly served as the military attaché out here, and I’d visited him and helped out around the place during one Long Vac, delivering messages in between the endless cocktail parties.

Finland had by now surrendered to the Soviets for the second time but we had yet to restore diplomatic relations with them, so rather than returning to the Legation I had been posted on to the staff of the Allied Control Commission, which was operating out of the Hotel Torni, a hideous watchtower-like building overlooking the centre of Helsinki. The Commission had been established to supervise the Finns’ compliance with their armistice with Moscow and, although Allied in name, was almost completely dominated by the Russians. There were two hundred of them and just fifteen Brits, who were under firm instruction from London not to antagonize the Russians. Finland was part of the Soviet sphere, at least until the end of the war.

None of the Brits spoke any Finnish, and it had been deemed a sound idea if someone could be found who did. My previous few weeks flitting about the Legation had presumably been on file, but nobody seemed to have realized that while my mother was a Finn, she was in fact a Swedish-speaker. As a result, I was fluent in Swedish but knew no Finnish at all.

On arrival, I had discovered that it made little odds anyway. The British contingent was led by Commodore Howie of the Royal Navy, but I reported to Colonel Colin Templeton, an old friend of Father’s from Cairo whom I’d met a couple of times on school holidays. Officially the Army’s representative, he was in reality an SOE officer and, despite being given the rank of lieutenant-colonel, I was his dogsbody. With every passing day, I resented the position all the more. My few weeks in France had nearly got me killed, but I had finally tasted action and was desperate for more. I was twenty years old, and the war was still raging elsewhere in Europe, while I spent my days in a hotel typing up the minutes of meetings about the minutiae of diplomatic protocol.

‘Is it Japan, sir?’ I asked Templeton as we stepped out of the hotel lobby and into the chill night air. The Americans had just fire-bombed Tokyo, destroying half the city, and I had spent the day collating reports on the situation. But Templeton shook his head.

‘I’ll explain in the Ghost,’ he said, as we showed our passes to a sentry and crossed the courtyard.

The Ghost was a battered old Chevrolet, a former Finnish Army staff car that he had commandeered for his personal use. Every inch of its exterior had been whitewashed, including the windows, a legacy of its use at the front early in the war. Templeton had left it in this condition partly because he enjoyed the eccentricity of it, and partly because the camouflage suited his purposes. His instructions from London were for his presence here to be as invisible as possible: in a city often covered in snow, the Ghost allowed him to do just that.

It wasn’t snowing now, but as many of the surrounding buildings were white the car still lived up to its name. Templeton’s chauffeur opened the door and we were soon gliding through the city, cocooned behind the thickened frost of the glass. He wasted no time in getting to the point.

‘When you were here in ’41, I understand that you and Larry flew across to Stockholm by seaplane.’

I nodded, puzzled. My father and I had made the journey several times, in a couple of old single-seater Supermarines. Father had always been a racing fiend, and didn’t much care if it was on land, air, water or a combination. I had relished the expeditions as opportunities to spend more time with him, but after a while had realized that he was using them to look at the possibility of moving Mother to an asylum in Stockholm. He did this a few months later, and there she had remained ever since. It didn’t surprise me that our trips had ended up in my file, but I couldn’t fathom why they were relevant now.

Templeton ignored the question. ‘A few hours ago, our Russian friends here received a message from their consulate in Mariehamn, which is the capital of a group of demilitarized islands known as Ahvenanmaa in Finnish and Åland in Swedish. The place belongs to Finland, but is Swedish-speaking.’

I knew of it – an archipelago at the entrance of the Gulf of Bothnia. I had never been there, but some members of Mother’s family had a summer residence on the western side. This was my immediate thought. It took me a few moments more to take in the other implication of what Templeton had just said: we had intercepted the Russians’ message. If he was listening in to the Soviets’ telephones in the hotel, I had severely underestimated him.

‘The Russians’ message was as follows,’ Templeton said briskly. ‘Yesterday evening, a body was discovered washed ashore on the Åland islands. The local police have identified it as being that of a German naval officer by the name of Wilhelm von Trotha.’

Corpses of naval officers being washed ashore? As the car jostled along, I examined Templeton’s face to see if it was some sort of elaborate joke. But he was looking at me intently, apparently waiting for my thoughts on the matter.

‘Could it be a provocation, sir?’ I asked. Shortly before heading to France I’d heard talk of an operation in which we had secured a body from a morgue in London, dressed it in the uniform of a Royal Marine and landed it on the coast of Spain with a cache of false letters to fool the Germans into thinking we were planning to target Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily. It had worked like a dream, but the Jerries would, of course, have realized that it had been a ruse, so perhaps someone had thought up a revenge plan.

‘That was my first thought, too,’ said Templeton. ‘But it looks like this could be genuine.’ He reached inside his coat and brought out a wodge of paper, which he unfolded and spread out on the upholstery between us. It was a large sea chart of Finland. After scanning it for a few moments, he pointed to a spot on the eastern archipelago labelled ‘Degerby’.

‘This is where they found the body. As you can see, it’s very isolated: if someone deliberately placed a body there, the chances of it being discovered would have been exceptionally slim. More significantly, we know that this chap von Trotha was, in fact, the captain of a U-boat, U-745, which we have been tracking for some time. It left Danzig in December, and on January the eleventh it sank one of the Russians’ minesweepers here.’ He pointed to the map again, to a small island off the coast of Estonia. ‘And it was last observed somewhere around’ – he shifted his finger to a spot just west of the Gulf of Finland – ‘here.’

‘When you say “last observed”, sir, do I understand that we believe the boat is out of action?’

‘Yes. Its last signal was on the fourth of last month, and we suspect it was accidentally sunk by one of the Germans’ own mines, either on that day or soon after. If so, the body may simply have floated ashore on the currents. As a matter of course, we would probably be interested in this chap, but we have also had information, from impeccable sources, that his U-boat was carrying a very special cargo: a new form of mustard gas. Mustard gas is a viscous liquid, of course, but this has apparently been mixed together in such a way as to make it even thicker, so it won’t be affected by the temperatures in this part of the world. They call it “Winterlost”, and if our sources are to be believed it’s very strong stuff indeed – roughly twice as powerful as the usual variety.’

I didn’t ask how he knew any of this, but guessed that the positions and dates were from the submarine tracking room at the Admiralty, and that the information on the mustard gas on von Trotha’s U-boat had come from captured crewmen of other vessels.

‘Despite all that,’ Templeton said, ‘it could still be some sort of deception operation mounted by the Germans. But we don’t want to take any chances – and neither, it seems, do the Russians. The consulate in Mariehamn has been instructed to send someone to this island to secure von Trotha’s personal effects before he is buried. We think they may also be sending one of their agents from Stockholm, perhaps under cover, but I’ve yet to receive confirmation of that. We don’t know whether they are aware of the U-boat’s special cargo – we haven’t informed them – but we need to beat them to the corpse regardless.

‘Our chemical warfare bods are of the opinion that this Winterlost would be an extremely dangerous weapon if turned on us – and also a very useful one for us to study. I’ve been in intensive signals with London for the last few hours, and they have instructed me that it should – indeed, must – be investigated. So I want you to get to this chap’s body and see if he has any information on him that gives a more accurate indication of the location of U-745 than its last signal – and then bring back the mustard gas.’

I stared at him for a few moments. Through the whitewashed windows, I could just make out the Finnish countryside rushing by: dark impenetrable forests stretching into the distance.

‘I thought you said the U-boat was believed to have been hit by a mine, sir.’

Templeton knitted his brows. ‘Yes, but you’ve diving experience, haven’t you?’

So that was what it was about. In early 1944, I had responded to a call for ‘volunteers for hazardous service’ sent out by the Royal Marines Office at the Admiralty. I had duly been summoned to report to HMS Dolphin in Portsmouth harbour, where I was informed that I would be trained as a diver for midget submarines. After several weeks of training in a deep tank, I had been cleared for the next stage and sent with fifteen other men to Loch Cairnbawn in the far north of Scotland, where the details of the operation in question had finally been revealed to us: the Navy had managed to put the German battleship Tirpitz out of action in September, and were now training to attack the Laksevåg floating dock in Bergen.

As part of the provisional crew, I had been put in and out of the new ‘X-Craft’, wearing a claustrophobic diving suit nicknamed the ‘Clammy Death’ as I learned the art of oxygen-diving. But after just a few weeks in Scotland I was told that I hadn’t been selected to take part in the operation. Bitterly disappointed, I’d been sent back into the arms of SOE, who had a training establishment in Arisaig. After a few weeks of lugging backpacks around the mountainside and being taught unarmed combat and other esoteric skills by a purple-nosed Scot, I had been sent to the Parachute Training School in Ringway, and shortly after that had finally been cleared to take part in an operation and dropped into France.

I gave an abridged version of this to Templeton and he listened intently, his eyes flickering in the shadows.

Very briefly, I wanted to say, and I’d hated every minute of it. But instead I mumbled a ‘Yes, sir.’

He smiled softly. ‘Good. I’ve got you all the requisite gear, anyway. And we know the Jerries often bring their boats in very close to the shore, so with any luck it should be relatively easy to get to.’

It was true that the German U-boats often hugged coastlines, and the Russians had captured one of them in shallow waters in these parts last summer. They had raised it and discovered a new type of acoustic torpedo on board, some details of which they had shared with us. But there was no guarantee that this particular U-boat had also sunk in shallow waters.

‘You’ll have a wireless set,’ said Templeton. ‘So once you have the location, signal back and I’ll judge whether or not a dive is worth risking.’

‘What about the Russians?’ I asked. ‘Presumably they’ll already be on their way from Mariehamn, if they haven’t already reached it.’

‘We don’t think they’ll set out until dawn – they’ve no reason to suspect their message was intercepted. We also think it will take them a while. The archipelago is made up of thousands of tiny islets and is fearfully tricky to navigate by boat if you don’t know it well, especially as quite a bit of the water is frozen over at the moment. All being well, you should be landing on the island’ – he glanced at his wrist-watch – ‘in about three hours’ time.’

Despite his confidence, I didn’t like the sound of any of it. I’d wanted action, but I hadn’t envisaged anything as hairy as this. Although Åland was, technically speaking, Allied territory, I was being sent to poach a weapon from right underneath the Russians’ noses, and I didn’t think they’d be overly understanding about it were they to catch me. The Russians weren’t to be trusted. In the summer of ’42, two Service agents armed with wireless sets had landed in Catalina flying boats at one of their bases in Lake Lakhta. The plan was for the Russians to insert them over the border into Norway, where they would monitor German naval movements along the coast. But the Russians had instead imprisoned both Service men for two months and then dropped them into Finland instead, where they had promptly been caught by the Germans, tortured and shot.

‘What if the Russians do get there first, sir?’ I said, trying to make my tone as unconcerned as possible. ‘Or if I arrive at the same time?’

Templeton gave a small nod. He leaned forward and picked up something from between his feet that I hadn’t noticed earlier: a leather briefcase. He pulled it onto his lap, unfastened the clasps, and brought out a fawn-coloured shoulder holster with a Browning 9mm pistol resting inside.

‘I don’t anticipate any trouble,’ he said, ‘but take this with you just in case.’

‘You must get to the submarine before anyone else,’ he said, snapping the case shut and stowing it between his feet again. ‘If anyone gets in your way, you have my permission to eliminate them.’

After about an hour’s drive, we took a narrow road through a pine forest until we finally reached a small, secluded bay. We stepped out of the car and trudged towards a wooden hangar shielded by vegetation. Inside, a small seaplane sat silently under a mass of green and brown camouflage. It was a three-seater, one of the Norwegians’ naval reconnaissance craft and, like the Ghost, had seen better days. Templeton said it had been used by the Norwegians against the Germans, then briefly by us and then by the Finns against the Russian subs along this stretch of the Baltic. According to the conditions of the armistice the Soviets had laid down, it should have been sent up to the north of the country to aid the Finns in their enforced mission to flush the Germans out, but Temple ton had managed to keep it back from his Russian colleagues and arranged for it to be secreted here. ‘Good craft are hard to come by,’ he said with a sly smile.

We removed the scrim and he quickly showed me around it, but I’d flown seaplanes and time was of the essence. The plan was for me to land at the small jetty at Degerby, where the body had been reported. The local police there would no doubt be expecting a boatload of Russians from Mariehamn, but Templeton felt confident they would believe the Soviets had shared the information with their Allies, so I should be able to bluff my way through. I hoped to God he was right.

Templeton’s chauffeur removed a suitcase from the car, and Templeton took me through the contents: 24-hour rations, Benzedrine tablets and a Siebe Gorman Sladen Suit – the ‘Clammy Death’ that had given me nightmares in Scotland. It had a breathing apparatus and twin aluminium cylinders that would provide enough oxygen for six hours, and I would be able to take it down to a depth of around thirty feet. Templeton seemed confident this would be the case – part of me hoped he was wrong and I would have to abort the operation.

But I kept such thoughts to myself, and climbed into the cockpit. Templeton showed me the wireless set, giving me the frequencies I would need to reach him. He didn’t say where he would be, but presumably it wouldn’t be too far away. Then he shook my hand solemnly and trudged back to the Ghost, a stoop-backed man in a topcoat and hat. His chauffeur opened the door for him and they set off down the road again. I watched as the car disappeared from view, then positioned the holster with the pistol under my left armpit. It felt heavy, and the leather of the holster cold even through my battledress.

I took a breath and examined the instruments and gauges around me, then strapped myself in. It was time to get going.

The Baltic lay beneath me, patches of ice glowing faintly in the moonlight, but I had no idea which part of Åland I was over, or even if I was over it at all. Templeton had marked Degerby on the chart, but the scale was too small and I had the growing sense that I was going around in circles. The wireless set wouldn’t help: Templeton wouldn’t have made it to his location yet and I didn’t dare land.

A sudden gust of turbulence slammed me against the side of the cockpit and I desperately tried to keep my hands gripped on the control column, fighting down the panic as my mind was filled with the consequences of failure. Templeton would have to send a signal back to London: man down, operation unsuccessful, please send replacement agent, this time make sure it’s someone with an ounce of bloody . . . And then, just as suddenly as it had hit, the wind subsided. I slumped back in the seat, my forehead soaked with sweat and my heart still racing, and managed to right the craft. Glancing down again, I realized I had dipped dangerously low. The ice was interrupted here and there by islets, and I glimpsed miniature coiled pine trees and pinkish rocks beneath the patches of ice. But there, over to the west, a lonely dot of orange light glowed like the tip of a cigarette. I consulted the chart, and did some quick calculations in my head.

I headed for it, lifting the nose but decreasing airspeed, and the shoreline began to take a sharper shape, until I could make out small wooden cabins dotted among the trees. A jetty came into view and I wheeled into a wind current and brought her down as gently as I could, the waves kicking up in a luminous curve of white spray. I lined up with the jetty and slowly brought her to a standstill, then climbed out.

I took in a lungful of air, savouring the freshness and the smell of the water, and then exhaled, my breath misting. I anchored, and took in my surroundings as the sweat finally started to cool on my skin. I was in a small bay, and it looked so peaceful in the moonlight, the water a perfect mirror reflecting the shoreline, that it was hard to imagine such a thing as war even existed. The wind had now vanished, as suddenly as it had appeared just minutes earlier.

The jetty led up to a rocky plateau, on which I could make out the outlines of some low buildings. I began walking towards them, but as I approached the shore I saw a silhouetted figure standing a few feet ahead of me. Before I had a chance to react, the figure had stepped forward, and the harbour lighting illuminated a stout man in a coat and cap with a deeply weathered face.

‘Kjell Lundström,’ he said in a deep baritone. ‘Chief Constable of Degerby.’

I offered him my hand. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Dark. I’ve come about the German.’

His grip was hard, even through my thick gloves. ‘We have been expecting you. But I understood that Colonel Presnakov was to come by boat. We received no word of a seaplane.’

‘Presnakov is on his way,’ I said, replying in Swedish. ‘I’m a British officer from the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki.’

He didn’t answer for a moment, taking this in. Then he said: ‘I didn’t know Helsinki had been informed.’

‘A last-minute change of plan,’ I said. ‘Someone higher up the chain of command decided it was important, and it wasn’t my place to argue. I’m no happier about it than you are – I’d rather be asleep in my bed.’

He smiled at that, and I breathed an inward sigh of relief. My cover had, at least for the moment, been accepted.

‘Your Swedish is excellent,’ he said, as he helped me off the jetty and onto the rocks. ‘Have you been here before?’

Lundström didn’t reply, but I sensed he was satisfied with that answer. Russians were hated in this part of the world, so he no doubt felt more comfortable with a Swedish-speaking Brit with connections to the place, however tenuous they might be. He led me up a narrow pathway through the pines until we reached a small wooden shed, painted red with white window frames in the traditional style.

‘Shall I show you the body, then?’ he said, and now it was my turn to smile – it was a truism that Finns never wasted words, and even though these islands were Swedish-speaking it seemed that some of the Finnish spirit had rubbed off.

It was a waiting hall: freezing cold and lit by a single bulb, with two low benches against one wall. There was a long table in the middle of the room, and on it, half covered in a tarpaulin sheet, lay the corpse. I asked Lundström how many others had seen it, and he told me that so far only himself, his son, who acted as his assistant, and the coroner who had conducted the autopsy had done so.

‘And the men who found him, of course. Two fishermen. They were out at Klåvskär when they saw something dark sticking up through the ice. One of them called me, so I took my son out to have a look.’

‘Oh, yes – it’s a few inches thick. We use picks to check it as we go along. That was what we used to get him out, in fact. Because what they’d seen was his head poking up through the ice, so we used a pick to cut him free. We put him on a sled and brought him back here for the autopsy. Drowning and exhaustion, the doctor said.’

I tried to imagine these grim tasks being conducted just a few hours earlier – the trek across the ice with the corpse on the sled.

‘It’s on the other side of this island.’ He reached into a pocket and brought out a chart, which he unfolded and held up to the light. He bit his lip while he searched it and then, after a few moments, pointed a stubby finger triumphantly at a spot to the east and gestured for me to take a look. ‘This was where they found him, in fact: Skepparskär.’ I stared at the miniscule dot. Templeton had been right. It couldn’t possibly be a provocation: there would have been no guarantee anyone would ever find the body in such a location.

Lundström folded the map back up and replaced it in his coat. ‘He will be buried in the village church tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They have a special section for foreigners washed ashore.’

‘This is the seventh this winter. We had one coming from Riga in almost exactly the same spot in November. The currents move from the Estonian coast straight here.’

So it wasn’t such an unusual spot to find a body. But still – two fishermen chancing by? I wouldn’t base a deception operation on it. And seven bodies in one place was not all that many. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, scattered around the Baltic from sunken ships.

I nodded at Lundström, and he leaned forward and drew the tarpaulin to one side, revealing the body. I caught my breath and crossed myself. My country and his might be at war, but this had nevertheless been a fellow human being, and ideologies no longer counted for anything – at least, not for him.

He had been a tall man, perhaps six foot. His cap and boots were missing, but the rest of his uniform was intact, although it had been unbuttoned, presumably for the autopsy. The body looked to be in good condition, the hands and feet bare but unscathed, and not even frozen. The head was another matter. This was what had caught the fishermen’s attention, and I understood why. It was a hideous shade of dark grey, and the left eye was badly disfigured, perhaps from having hit a rock or something similar. His throat, mouth and nose were covered in blood, some of which looked fresh. Lundström noticed my curiosity.

‘He was wearing a life-jacket, but it was frozen to his back. When we turned him over to take it off, the blood came pouring out of him.’

I nodded, and bent a little closer. Beneath the frozen horror I could make out the remnants of an aristocratic face, a sweep of hair, a moustache and a small beard. Templeton had told me that the Admiralty listed von Trotha’s date of birth as 1916 – could this man have been twenty-nine? It was hard to tell.

There were no goggles or escape equipment. I tried to think what must have happened. Had he gone up to the conning tower to check something, and then they’d hit a mine? He could have been thrown into the air and then fallen into the sea, only for the currents to carry him up here.

I lifted the identity disc from his neck and read: ‘Wilhelm von Trotha. Seeoffizer 1936.’ That must have been when he passed out. His effects had been placed in a wooden box next to him, and I sifted through them, feeling uncomfortably like a looter. There was a pocket watch and a wristwatch, both edged with rust.

I saw he was right: the hand was sweeping slowly around the face. How long could he have been in the water, then, for the mechanism not to have frozen? Templeton had said his last signal had been over a month ago. Was it possible he had been in the water that long? I picked through the rest of the items: a folding knife, a pen, several reichsmarks, a nail file. I glanced at his hands. His nails had turned black, but his fingers were long and slender. For some reason, I suddenly saw him as a character in a Tolstoy story, the officer in his dazzling uniform visiting his country estate, playing the piano and then returning to his naval base and to the bowels of his craft.

I took a deep breath and returned to the pile of effects. There was a gold tooth – a relative’s, perhaps? – a small mirror and, yes, there it was, just peeking out . . .

It was yellow, slim, with ‘SOLDBUCH’ printed on the cover in Gothic text. These, I knew from my training, were given to all German military, and contained the bearer’s service record, vaccination and other medical details, as well as space for their own entries. Templeton was hoping von Trotha might have written down what cargo his boat was carrying, and left clues as to where it might have sunk. I picked up the book and waved it at Lundström.

I opened the booklet, and as I did, a loose sheaf fell out and fluttered to the floor. I bent to pick it up, and my heart started beating faster. It was an envelope.

There was a knock at the door, and I placed the envelope in my coat pocket. I nodded at Lundström, who went to open it. A boy with a pale bony face, perhaps a year or two younger than me, entered the room.

He was tall, fair-haired and wore a blue civilian suit and greatcoat, both of which looked like they had been made in Savile Row. He had a fleshy, sallow face and pale green eyes, which coolly took in the scene: two men hunched over a corpse. I felt myself shrink into my skin.

Lundström’s son bowed briefly, and shut the door behind him. The wind whistling through a crack in one of the window frames suddenly sounded like a howling hurricane.

The man hadn’t shown any sign of having heard Lundström’s question. His eyes continued to scan the room, absorbing and processing all the available information, until finally he turned to Lundström, a fixed smile on his face, and extended a leather-gloved hand.

‘Jasper Smythe, Second Secretary at the British Legation in Stockholm. Who does the seaplane belong to?’

‘Me. Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Dark, from the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki. Would you mind if I see your papers? I wasn’t told of anyone from Stockholm being sent here.’

‘Please show me your papers,’ I said firmly, ‘and tell me who sent you here, and for what purpose.’

I moved my hand fractionally to my underarm. He registered the movement, and by a small inclination of his head showed he was not going to upset the precarious situation, and asked if he could remove his identification from his coat. I nodded in return, moving my hand to the barrel of my gun.

I shot him as soon as I saw the glint. The bullet hit him full in the chest, and a cloud of red mist rose from his coat, then dissolved, leaving his lapel splattered with blood. A moment later, his legs crumpled and he fell, landing on his knees. His eyes stared out, frozen in astonishment, and then he toppled forward, his head thudding dully against the floor.

The stench of cordite rose in my nostrils as I stared down at him, the sound of the shot still ringing in the air. My stomach was hollow, and my hands were shaking. With an effort I placed the Browning back in the holster. It had all gone terribly wrong, and I suddenly thought of how Templeton would react when I told him. He had said I must stop anyone who got in my way, but still I’d failed him.

I looked up at Lundström, whom I’d forgotten about, and saw fear in his eyes – he was worried he might be next. I quickly leaned down and pulled open Smythe’s coat, doing my best to avoid the widening pool of blood and matter. His left hand was a mess of gristle and bone, but the forefinger was largely intact, and it was wrapped around the trigger of a Luger.

‘He was going to shoot me,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘He was a Russian agent. You understand that, don’t you?’

Lundström pursed his lips together and drew his breath sharply. I recognized the gesture as one Mother had sometimes used. It meant yes.

I pulled the Browning back out of its holster and crept down the path leading to the jetty, my heart thudding fast. Lundström had said he was expecting a Presnakov – had there just been a change of personnel, or had the NKVD taken over because they knew about the Winterlost, and sent an agent disguised as a Brit? More importantly, had ‘Smythe’ come alone?

As I neared the jetty, I saw that there was a small motorboat tied up next to the seaplane. There was nobody in it, and I searched it quickly: it was empty. A bird circled above me, then swooped down and lit on one of the seaplane’s pontoons, squawking some threat to the fish below. Then it lifted its wings and soared away, leaving just the sound of the waves lapping in the darkness.

I returned to the waiting hall, where Lundström was in the same position as I’d left him. He was in shock, but it passed as soon as I’d explained the situation to him: the Soviets would soon be wondering what had happened to ‘Smythe’, and would send someone else out to investigate. He immediately suggested that he arrange for Smythe’s body to be buried along with von Trotha’s in the nearby church. If the Russians sent someone else, he would deny all knowledge of having seen Smythe and they would have no choice but to take his word for it. They might suspect foul play, but there was always the possibility Smythe had suffered a mishap in the journey over here, and they wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise or kick up any sort of a fight – after all, the dead man had supposedly been a Brit, not one of theirs. By the look on Lundström’s face, he would enjoy stonewalling the Russians.

I agreed, and shook his hand, then returned to the seaplane. Von Trotha’s sealed orders revealed what Templeton had suspected: U-745 had been carrying a new form of mustard gas, Winterlost, which was stored in a special compartment in the vessel’s main storeroom. In the last entry in his notebook, dated 5 February, von Trotha had given his coordinates. I plotted them on the chart and found they were very close to a tiny island called Söderviken, just south of the Finnish port of Hanko. Presuming that the U-boat had been hit somewhere nearby, it might be in shallow enough waters for me to reach.

I took the wireless set out of its suitcase and crouched on the jetty with it, shivering as the wind snapped the rod aerial back and forth. I sent the signal to Templeton to say I had the coordinates and that they were close by, but didn’t get any response. I checked the connections and sent the message again, and this time the ‘dah-dit’ came back in my earphones: proceed as planned.

I climbed back into the seaplane, stowed the set and strapped myself in, trying to steel my mind to the job ahead. It was coming up to six o’clock as I took off again, and a faint light was creeping into the sky. The ice stretched out for a few miles east of the archipelago, then broke up into open water. I flew as low as possible, looking for landmarks on von Trotha’s chart, but apart from the occasional islet or rock the seascape seemed almost featureless, and I started to worry I would get lost again. I considered taking one of the Benzedrine tablets to wake myself up, but decided that fatigue wasn’t the problem – if anything, I needed to calm down.

I finally spotted a small lighthouse and hovered above it as I searched for it on the chart. Having found it, I arrived about an hour later at the point von Trotha had marked, and landed in a squall of rain just as dawn was breaking. I climbed into the cumbersome diving suit and sealed it with the clamp, then went through all the checks with the breathing apparatus and the oxygen cylinders, fighting down my mounting sense of claustrophobia – Clammy Death, indeed. For one shaky moment, I fancied I saw a shape in the distance moving towards me over the water, but then it vanished; it was just a trick of the light. I remembered the lines of poetry one of the other lads at Loch Cairnbawn had always muttered to himself at this point:

Our plesance here is all vain glory,

This fals world is but transitory,

The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

I shuddered, then dismissed it from my mind. I had enough oxygen for six hours, I had used this type of equipment before, the Soviets were no longer a threat and the objective was at hand. I checked everything again one last time, then adjusted the mouthpiece and nose-clip, opened the cockpit door, clambered down to the pontoons and slipped into the dark water.

My eyes were stinging from the lack of sleep but all my senses bristled as I drifted through the silent world, staring out through the small window of the facepiece. Shoals of ghostly white fish flapped around me, their eyes and the tips of their fins glowing eerily, and I longed to reposition the mouthpiece, as one edge of it was cutting into my gums. It took me over two hours to find the boat, by which time my legs were exhausted from kicking and my arms felt numb. It was not quite on the shoreline, but in the stretch of islets leading into it. I remembered Templeton’s words: ‘It should be relatively easy to get to.’ Yes, it had been – if you weren’t the one doing the diving.

The U-boat looked vast, and as though it had been there for years rather than a month. Seaweed had already begun to wrap itself around the conning tower, and several inches were already buried in drifted sand. I approached it very slowly: Templeton had told me it could carry fourteen torpedoes and up to twenty-six mines. It looked to have been split roughly into two parts, with most of the damage in the middle section.

I swam past the gun deck and then floated down towards where I thought the main storeroom should be. The whole section was scrunched from the damage, but there was a narrow gap in the main hatch and, with some difficulty, I managed to haul it open and swim through.

It wasn’t the storeroom, but the crew’s quarters. The men were already starting to bloat, but I could see that some of their hands and chests looked like they were rotting away, and realized with a fright that they were burns, and that the mustard gas canisters must have leaked. Templeton had told me I had to obtain the canisters by any means, but we hadn’t discussed what would happen if my only way of doing so would involve coming into contact with their contents, which could be fatal. I cursed myself for being so intimidated by his briefing that I hadn’t asked such a basic question, but it was too late for that now.

I turned away from the sight of the men, and as I did I saw the canisters. There looked to be twenty or thirty of them: large steel drums with ridges around the centre. I could see where the lids of a few had come away and a yellowish-brown liquid had started to seep out. The operation was a bust. There was no rescuing any of this for Templeton – it was too bloody dangerous. But perhaps I could secure the place so that the Soviets wouldn’t be able to get hold of the stuff either? I looked around and saw that several lengths of steel piping had fallen away from the walls. I leaned down carefully and picked one up. Could I block off the hatch? I looked towards it, and my stomach seized at the sight.

I quickly swam towards it, willing myself to breathe normally and keep calm. The currents must have swung it shut after I’d swam through, and it now seemed to be completely jammed. I shoved my shoulder against it, and it buckled slightly – but stayed put. On the third shove, when it still didn’t open, I realized I was going to die. I was shut at the bottom of the Baltic with these corpses, and before too long would become one myself. All I could think was how unfair it was that my life should end here. I hadn’t experienced anything yet – I’d never even been in love. I kicked my legs at the hatch in a final frantic gesture, and the hinge moved forward and caught a current, and I rushed through the tiny space before it sealed behind me again, slamming shut finally on the occupants of U-745.