Chapter 17
Basement holding cell, 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Tuesday evening, 30th September, 1939.
Captain Henry Underwood suddenly felt very lightheaded. As a trained and experienced SIS Officer this kind of operational situation should have been his bread and butter, but with the girl he had fallen in love with chained to a metal frame, bleeding and cut, beaten half to death and now dripping with heat induced perspiration, whilst being nearly roasted alive, he found his knowhow wanting.
“SS-Hauptsturmführer?” Jürgen’s voice was genuinely inquisitive as opposed to questioning.
“Huh, I erm …” Henry floundered because just as he was getting a grip of himself, Barbara’s eyes looked up from under the loose clumps of her matted and blood-soaked hair. They were eyes that had lost all familiarity, but still silently begged for his help. Did she even recognise him?
Underwood turned and stood straight, his bare chest pushed out, his slender but firm build now several inches taller than the young Scharführer, and glared.
“Do you mean to tell me that you have put this wretch through hell only to get absolutely nothing from her that is of any use to the Führer and to the Fatherland?”
Jürgen looked across at Unterscharführer Franz Müller, his subordinate, opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything.
“Well, you fucking idiot. Is that true? Will I have to report you both?” Underwood was doing a wonderful impression of incandescence.
“I erm, I …”
“Get out, get out both of you. If you think I am about to let you watch the Gestapo at work then you are sadly mistaken.”
“SS-Hauptsturmführer, we … erm we can’t just leave you …”
“Verschwinde JETZT von hier!”
The two young soldiers knew what was good for them, or so they thought, and they left Henry alone with Barbara, to wait outside the cell.
At least now he had breathing space.
“Fuck, Barb, what have they done to you?” He spoke quietly despite the aching knot of anguish in his stomach driving him crazy.
“H … He … Henry … H … help me … pl …” His lover could barely speak.
Slipping his uniform shirt back on Henry knocked on the cell door. It was Müller who opened it and much to Henry’s delight, the other trooper was nowhere to be seen.
“Keys, now soldier. I need her down off this frame and seated. If I’m to question her successfully then the whore needs to be able to think straight.”
Franz Müller was eighteen years old. A first-year army professional with very little experience. If his mother knew the sort of duties he had here in the holding cell she would be ashamed. And so, who was he to question a Gestapo officer?
With a weak smile he handed the jangling set of large metal keys over.
Henry nodded his acknowledgement and slammed the door closed shut once more.
Knowing he had little time both because of the situation but also because Barbara’s condition looked to be tumbling rapidly downhill, Henry did his best to compose himself. So that he would lose no time to any unnecessary fumbling. Henry unlocked her wrists and then stumbled backwards himself as she fell into him.
Helping her to her knees so that he could unfasten the ankle manacles, he saw that his wonderful, vibrant, seductive girl was virtually unconscious.
“Oh Barb, fuck no!” He choked down a sob, before reminding himself that he was a professional spy in a time of war, and that was no time for emotion.
As he laid her out on the dirty concrete floor he saw her battered feet. The soles cut and bruised, no doubt many of the bones splintered and the joints stretched. She would not be walking anywhere.
“Fuck!” Underwood said out loud.
The heat from the coals was overwhelming, but Henry put his uniform jacket back on and resecured his shoulder holster, grateful that he had been supplied with a Walther P38 Pistol.
It was that powerful sidearm that young Unterscharführer Müller felt at his temple as he was dragged back inside the cell. Then, as Underwood’s arm raised before it crashed down, that pistol was the last thing young Müller saw or felt before blackness overwhelmed his world.
“Okay, okay …” Henry calmed himself. He had space, a weapon … and a very immobile, unconscious, and potentially dying, Barbara.
“Fuck!” He used the same expletive again, “He needed to get out of the building and back out onto Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, where a driver had been positioned to wait inside his green unmarked Opel Blitz for Henry to appear. He checked his watch and saw that he did not have long before the Blitz would be Blitzed and its driver arrested. He wasn’t the only one taking risks.
He looked down at Barbara, and though he felt sick at her sight, forcing that from his mind, his gaze was one of analysis and assessment. He couldn’t afford sentiment and emotion as the clock ran down, he needed to figure out how to get her out of here.
With a final determined purse of his lips, after attaching the silencer to his own fire arm, and with as gentle a pull as he could, he lifted her onto his left shoulder, her naked, bloody ass shadowing his face, and took the Walther into his right hand.
He had no idea whether Jürgen,had gone for a break, or to get a more senior officer, or what … all Henry knew was that he had to move, and quickly.
There was no one at all in the shadows of the cell entrance and so he was able to move back along the corridor from where he had come with relative ease. But he knew that other, occupied, cells were awaiting him and with a naked, beaten girl over his shoulder he would not be passing them quietly.
Two more guards in the uniforms of Unterscharführer, came rushing in, and both were taken down by a kneeling Underwood, whose aim once he was free of his load was even more deadly.
As he waited for more assailants Underwood prepared himself for a last stand … but no one else came. Only the shouts from the cells could be heard. He waited, not daring to move for more than a minute.
Then …
Barbara was back on his shoulder, he was through the corridor and heading to the steps that led into the side yard, the entrance he had used on the way in.
“Halt, hör auf, sonst schieße ich!“
The German words were clear to him – they had his back covered and were about to shoot.
Slowly Henry turned to face the soldiers …
Two of them, one the young and apparently recovered Franz Müller, along with his colleague-in-arms, Jürgen, stood facing him. Slowly Henry lowered Barbara and made as if to put down his gun at the same time, except … he dropped her from several feet, which caused her to fall with a thud against the concrete … a sight that momentarily distracted the young troopers.
It was all the time Underwood needed. Two shots, both deadly fired quietly out through the silenced barrel, and now Müller’s ‘mutter’ could be proud that her son died in action.
Yanking Barbara up for a second time, this time without any gentleness or decorum, he flung over his shoulder and let adrenalin carry him and his baggage up the stone stairs two at a time. Pushing at the door that opened from the inside, he let himself out into the side yard, with Barbara still in position over his shoulder.
This side of the building was less guarded, other than by the four men he had already shot dead, and so the small side gate on what was still essentially a large domestic property by way of structure, was easily gone through and then there he was, back on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße.
“Bring deinen verdammten Arsch JETZT hierher“
Henry looked in the direction of the Blitz and nodded at the yelling driver, who was already starting the engine. As he reached the vehicle it was already moving, and so, literally lobbing Barbara into the open back and clambering in beside her, keeping his head and body well down, they made their escape.
TBC