Nordenham’s main railway station stood elevated on a dyke above the river Weser. It was an October afternoon and a family stood waiting for a train. The large station building, the platform and the latticed ironwork were sharply etched by a late-autumn sun that was bright but lacked any warmth.
They stood – the father, the mother and the child – at the far end of the platform. The father was tall and lean, in his mid-thirties. His longish, thick, almost too-dark hair was brushed severely back from a broad pale brow but rebelled in a fringe of curls that frothed on his coat collar. The black frame of long sideburns, moustache and goatee beard emphasised the paleness of his complexion and the vermilion of his mouth. The mother, too, was tall: only a few centimetres shorter than the man, with grey-blue eyes and long bone-coloured blonde hair that hung straight from under a knitted woollen hat. She wore a tan ankle-length coat and a vast colourful macramé bag hung on long straps from her shoulder. The boy was about ten, but tall for his age, obviously having inherited his parents’ height. Like his father, he had a pale, sad face under a mop of curling, discordantly black hair.
‘Wait here with the boy,’ the father said firmly but kindly. He pushed back a stray strand of ash-blonde hair that had fallen across the mother’s brow. ‘I’ll approach Piet alone when he arrives. If there’s any sign of trouble, take the boy and get clear of the station.’
The woman nodded determinedly, but a cold bright fear sparkled in her eyes. The man smiled at her and gave her arm a squeeze before moving away from her and the boy. He took up his place in the middle of the platform. A Deutsche Bahn railway worker came out of the maintenance office, dropped down onto the track from the platform, and sauntered diagonally and with complacent arrogance across the rails. A woman in early middle-age, dressed with the expensive tastelessness of the West German bourgeoisie, exited the ticket office and stood about ten metres to the man’s right. The tall, pale man seemed to pay no attention to any of this activity; in reality his eyes followed every move of every individual in the provincial station.
Another figure stepped out of the ticket office and onto the platform. He, too, was a tall, lean man, this time with long blond hair scraped back into a ponytail. His thin, angular face was pock-marked with the ancient scars of a childhood illness. Again, his movements and expression were intended to be casual and disinterested; but, unlike the dark-haired man, there was an intensity, a nervousness, in his eyes and an electric tension in every step he took.
They were now only a metre apart. A broad smile dissolved the dark-haired man’s severe expression like sunshine through clouds.
‘Piet!’ he said enthusiastically but quietly. The blond man did not smile.
‘I told you this was inadvisable,’ said the blond man. His German was tainted with a sibilant Dutch accent. ‘I told you not to come. This was not a good idea at all.’
The dark-haired man did not let the smile fade and shrugged, philosophically. ‘Our whole way of life is inadvisable, Piet, my friend, but it is absolutely necessary. And so is this meeting. God, Piet … it’s great to see you again. Did you bring the money?’
‘There’s been a problem,’ said the Dutchman. The dark-haired man glanced down the platform to the woman and the boy. When he turned back to the Dutchman, the smile had gone.
‘What kind of problem? We need that money to travel. To find and set up a new safe house.’
‘It’s over, Franz,’ said the Dutchman. ‘It’s been over for a long time and we should have accepted that. The others … they feel the same.’
‘The others?’ The dark-haired man snorted. ‘I expect nothing from them. They’re just a bunch of middle-class wankers pretending to be activists. Half-involved and half-afraid. The weak playing at being strong. But you, Piet … I expect more of you.’ He allowed a smile again. ‘Come on, Piet. You can’t give up now. I … we need you.’
‘It’s over. Can’t you see that, Franz? It’s time to put that life behind us. I just can’t do this any more, Franz. I’ve lost my faith.’ The Dutchman took a few steps back. ‘We’ve lost, Franz. We’ve lost.’ He took another few steps back, opening up the space between them. The Dutchman looked anxiously from right to left and the dark-haired man mirrored his glances, but could see nothing. Nonetheless, he felt a tightening in his chest. His hand closed around the Makarov nine-millimetre automatic in his coat pocket. The Dutchman spoke again. His eyes were now wild.
‘I’m sorry, Franz … I’m so sorry …’ He turned and began to run.
It all happened within a matter of seconds, yet time itself seemed impossibly stretched.
The Dutchman was shouting something to someone unseen as he ran. The railwayman leaped towards the mother and son, a glittering black automatic in his outstretched hands. The bourgeois housewife dropped down onto one knee with astonishing agility and produced a handgun from inside her coat. She aimed at the tall dark-haired man and screamed at him to place his hands on his head.
He snapped his head around to check the woman and the boy. The woman’s hand was rammed deep in her shoulder bag and the front of the bag burst open and burned as she pulled the trigger of the Heckler Koch MP5 machine pistol that she had hidden inside. Simultaneously, she pushed the boy sideways and down with a violent shove. The burst from the Heckler & Koch ripped angrily at the chest of the fake railway worker’s overalls and tore open his face.
The blonde woman spun round, swinging the machine pistol, still in its ripped and smoking macramé bag, to bear down on the GSG9 cop dressed as a housewife. The policewoman snapped her aim from the man to the woman and fired twice, then twice more. Her shots hit the boy’s mother in the chest, face and forehead and she was dead before her falling body crashed onto the platform.
The man saw the woman die, but there was no time for grief. He heard the screaming of a dozen GSG9 officers, in helmets and body armour, as they flooded out onto the platform from inside and around the sides of the station building. A group of them were gesturing furiously for the Dutchman to stop running and get out of their line of fire. The policewoman now swung her pistol to bear on the dark-haired man again. He struggled to free his Russian Makarov from his coat pocket and, when he did, he did not aim it at the policewoman or any of the GSG9 troops.
The policewoman’s first bullet ripped into his chest at exactly the same moment that his round smacked into the back of the Dutchman’s head.
Franz Mühlhaus – Red Franz, the notorious anarchist terrorist whose pale face had stared out at frightened West Germans from wanted posters from Kiel to Munich – fell to his knees, his arms hanging at his sides, the Makarov automatic lying limply in his half-open hand and his chin resting on his bloodstained chest.
As he died, he could just see, on the fringes of his failing vision, the pale face, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed in a silent scream, of his son. Somehow, the dying Red Franz Mühlhaus found the breath to utter a single word, thrown out into the world with his final, explosive exhalation.
‘Verräter …’
Traitors.