The Pathfinder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Mayhew

  The Pathfinder

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Margaret Mayhew was born in London and her earliest childhood memories were of the London Blitz. She began writing in her mid-thirties and had her first novel published in 1976. She is married to American aviation author Philip Kaplan, and lives in Gloucestershire. Her other novels, Bluebirds, The Crew, The Little Ship, Our Yanks, Those in Peril and I’ll Be Seeing You, are also published by Corgi.

  www.booksattransworld.co.uk

  Also by Margaret Mayhew

  BLUEBIRDS

  THE CREW

  THE LITTLE SHIP

  OUR YANKS

  THOSE IN PERIL

  I’LL BE SEEING YOU

  and published by Corgi Books

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409057819

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  THE PATHFINDER

  A CORGI BOOK : 0 552 15241 2

  First publication in Great Britain

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Corgi edition published 2002

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Margaret Mayhew 2002

  The right of Margaret Mayhew to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For Moira and Colin

  Acknowledgements

  I should especially like to thank Sir John Curtiss, who flew in the Berlin Airlift, for suggesting it as a subject for a novel and for his kind help. I am also grateful to Geoff Smith, Alan Melvin and Phyllis Parsons who all served at RAF Gatow during the Airlift, to Dr Helmut Trotnow and his staff of the Alliierten Museum in Berlin, and to Han Geurts and Hans-Gerd Troue for their translations. Ann and John Tusa’s superb book The Berlin Airlift has been my bible. My thanks, as always, to Diane Pearson, my editor, and to my husband, Philip Kaplan.

  Foreword

  At the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allies – America, Russia, Great Britain and France – divided up the defeated Germany between them into four separate zones, each occupied by one of the Allies. Berlin, the capital city, which lay a hundred miles inside the Russian zone, was similarly carved into four sectors. The subsequent disagreements between the western Allies and the Russians over the control and administration of the new, post-war Germany threatened a Soviet blockade of all land and waterway access to Berlin, leaving only three narrow air corridors for the western Allies to supply their sectors of the city.

  The seeds of the Cold War had already been sown.

  Prologue

  1943

  The target was Berlin. The Big City. Headquarters of the Third Reich. Hitler’s lair. The black heart of the enemy. If it hadn’t been such a bastard of an op, it would have been a positive pleasure. So far they’d clobbered Essen, Düsseldorf, Bremen, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, Bochum, Hanover, Kiel and done a couple of fairly boring trips to Italy. They were all the same to him. You flew there, you dropped your bombs, you got the hell out as fast as you could and flew back again. But Berlin had a particularly nasty reputation. First, it was a bloody long way away and, second, it was much better defended than most. New radar devices, decoy targets, fighter flares and a whole lot more flak guns. The chop rate was pretty high. As Harrison and his crew rode out in the truck he knew they were all jumpy, though naturally they didn’t show it. Nobody ever showed fear. Not done. Personally, he’d stopped worrying about dying round about their fifth op. Given the known odds, it seemed more or less inevitable that he’d buy it, sooner or later.

  They clambered up into the bomber and he settled himself in the pilot’s seat, went through some checks and started up the four engines, one after the other. The Lancaster rolled out onto the perimeter track and joined the queue of other bombers heading for the marshalling point. Waiting to turn onto the runway, he went through a whole lot more checks before it was their turn to take off. In the beginning this had been the moment when he’d always wondered whether they’d make it back to earth alive; now he didn’t give it a thought. All that was in his mind was the job in hand. The laden bomber started down the runway and he increased power until she lifted from the ground and rose majestically into the night.

  They crossed the enemy coast north of Bremerhaven and then turned east over the Elbe, droning on across a blacked-out Germany towards Berlin. As they approached the target, searchlight beams groped for them and flak exploded round them, tossing the aircraft violently like a ship on a stormy sea. He held her as steady as he could for his bomb aimer until their load of high explosives tumbled out and fell towards the target. As he turned the Lancaster away hard to port he glanced down for a second at the city below: at a great mass of leaping flames that lit up the buildings and the streets and the river; at a raging inferno. Serve the bastards right, he thought. They asked for it and, by God, they’ve got it. They sowed the wind and now they’re reaping the whirlwind.

  She crouched in a corner of the cellar with her hands pressed over her ears. In the opposite corner, her mother was clasping her small brother close against her, shielding him with her body, and, near them, her grandmother and grandfather were clutched tightly in each other’s arms. Her other brother was standing defiantly upright shaking his fist at the ceiling and shouting. She couldn’t hear what he was saying but she knew he was cursing the British Royal Air Force, using up all the bad words he knew. She cursed them, too, for the hideous suffering they were inflicting night after night, and for the merciless destruction of the city; for the deaths of thousands of defenceless old people, women and children, and for the hundreds more who would be dead by dawn. On and on it went. The whistling shriek of bombs raining down, the ear-splitting explosions, the seismic shaking of the ground beneath her. The paraffin lamp on its hook was swinging violently to and fro. Another terrific explosion close by brought down a cloud of debris and dust and at another, closer still, the lamp went out, leaving them in total darkness. She began to pray, babbling the words to herself, Oh God, in Thy infinite mercy, spare us. Mary, Mother of God save us . . .

  The next explosion was so great that, at first, she thought a bomb had come right through into the cellar. She lay stunned, the breath knocked from her body, unable to move. She could hear her grandmother screaming hysterically and her mother’s voice trying to calm her. Then she could hear the roar and crackle of flames overhead and feel heat fierce as from a blast furnace penetrating into the cellar, sucking at her lungs, choking her. Her mother was shouting now, telling them
to get out. Hurry, hurry, hurry. She struggled to her feet. Her little brother was thrust into her arms. Take Rudi, Lili. Look after him, whatever happens. She stumbled up the cellar steps after her other brother and into the courtyard. The apartment building was a mass of flames and they ran out into the Albrecht Strasse, into a tunnel of fire. The flames were leaping across the street from one building to another and a great wind was blowing a blizzard of charred paper. She saw a woman framed inside a window on an upper floor, her hair and clothes alight; saw her jump and crash onto the pavement and burn. People were running down the street with bundles of belongings, fleeing from hell. She ran, too, with her brothers. Ran and ran down to the banks of the Spree.

  One

  1948

  The convoy of British army lorries left Hanover shortly after first light on a morning in early April. Harrison travelled in the leading vehicle, up in the cabin, and the driver, a tough-looking corporal, was somewhat surprised to find himself sitting beside an RAF squadron leader. ‘Thought you’d’ve gone in by air, the comfy way, sir.’

  He would have thought so, too, but he had no intention of discussing it with the corporal or of satisfying his curiosity. Instead he lit a cigarette and smoked in silence, staring out of the window. He was glad to have left the city behind. Seeing the massive destruction in central Hanover, close up and at ground level, had been a more sobering experience than he had expected. By the end of his second wartime tour with the squadron he had notched up a good number of ops there and revisited it later as a Pathfinder, marking the targets for the bombers coming after. He’d come to know Germany rather well by night from the air and had flown over it low in broad daylight in the first months after the war was over, taking ground crews on a kind of Thomas Cook’s sightseeing tour. The army corporal was, apparently, reading his thoughts.

  ‘First time you’ve ’ad a close-up at what the RAF did to the Jerries, I expect, sir? Clobbered them good and proper, didn’t you? You and the Yanks. With Bomber Command yourself, were you, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A quick sideways glance at his wings. ‘What did you fly, sir?’

  ‘Lancasters mainly.’

  The corporal nodded. ‘One of the best, sir, an’ no mistake about it. You can keep your ’alifaxes and your ’udsons an’ all the rest of ’em, an’ those Yankee Flying Fortresses an’ Liberators. The Lanc ’ad ’em all beat – that’s the way I see it.’

  He was inclined to agree. He’d loved flying the Mosquito for its sheer daredevil speed but the Lane would always have a special place in his heart. Strong, sturdy, reliable. Mile after mile, hour after hour, op after op, ploughing steadily through night skies, through swarms of fighters and barrages of flak and coming back home battered but unbowed. With his crew, at least. Their luck had held out.

  ‘I was in the Desert myself, sir. With Monty,’ the corporal went on. ‘We ’ad respect for Rommel and ’is lot. They fought decent. Don’t know as I feel the same about any of the rest of the Jerries – not after ’earin’ an’ seein’ what they done in them camps, an’ all that. The SS an’ them Gestapo blokes. Wicked, I call it. A crime against ’umanity. I reckon they deserved everythin’ they got from us, an’ more.’

  Again, he agreed but he didn’t say so. The man wanted to talk and, if given any encouragement, would probably chatter all the way to Berlin.

  ‘First visit to Berlin, sir? On the ground, that is.’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Wait till you see it, sir. Blimey, they really copped it. Bad enough what we an’ the Yanks done, but the Ruskies went an’ finished off the job somethin’ shockin’. You wouldn’t ’ave wanted to be a Berliner when they came marchin’ in, specially not a fräulein. Not from what I’ve been told. Never ever felt sorry for a Jerry till I saw Berlin. Stayin’ there long, are you sir?’

  ‘No idea.’ They hadn’t told him because they’d had no idea themselves. He’d been summoned by the CO and told that he was being posted forthwith to RAF Gatow in the British sector of Berlin as an operations officer, responsible to the wing commander in charge of flying. Apparently the Russians were making life increasingly difficult. Their Yak fighters were buzzing RAF aircraft, doing aerobatics in British air space and generally playing silly buggers and, on the ground, garrison supplies passing through Russian hands were being deliberately held up with some flimsy excuse. Nothing particularly new about that so far as he could see; the Russians were a tricky bunch and had been all along. The Red Army had stolen a march on the western Allies and been the ones to take Berlin, and they’d acted like a dog with a juicy bone ever since. He distrusted them as much as he distrusted the Germans and that was saying something.

  He watched several miles of uninteresting countryside go by. Flat fields with some kind of root crop growing, pine woods, the odd, dilapidated farm here and there. A depressing scene under dull, grey skies. An old woman and an old man, dressed in shapeless black peasant garments, were toiling away in a mucky yard. The man wore a beret, the woman a headscarf knotted under her chin and both turned to watch the convoy pass. He half expected them to scowl and shake a fist but their faces were blank – wiped of all emotion.

  The corporal had noticed the old couple too. ‘Still in shock, some of ’em. Can’t believe they didn’t win the war, like ’itler promised them they would. It’s given them somethin’ to think about all right.’

  The pre-war autobahn stretched ahead, pitted with bomb craters; the convoy snaked its way slowly past them. Three years since the war had ended, he thought, and the country was still on its knees; still in ruins. He felt no sympathy whatever for her people but the stark fact was that if Germany wasn’t helped back on her feet she would be easy prey for the Russians, and Communism would spread even further west across Europe.

  ‘How far to Helmstedt, Corporal?’

  ‘Another forty miles, I reckon, sir. There’ll be a nice little Ruskie reception committee waitin’ for us. Last trip I did they went through everythin’ with a toothcomb an’ kept us ‘anging about for hours. They’ve been givin’ us the real runaround lately.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  His CO in England had been quite specific. ‘The Russians want us out, Michael. That’s it in a nutshell. They’d like the Allies to pack up and get out of Berlin so they could take over the whole damn city, as well as their part of it. And they’re up to all kinds of games to try and squeeze us out. We only have one road, one railway and the canals to get supplies across their zone of Germany to our sectors in the city, so they’re having a lot of fun slowing up our freight consignments, impounding barges, stopping trains, turning back our vehicles at the border with any old trumped-up pretext . . . And we have to cross their zone. Berlin’s slap bang in the middle of it. There’s no other way.’

  ‘Surely there was a signed pact with them about access at the end of the war?’

  ‘Believe it or not, there wasn’t – not for overland. Apparently we trusted them. A gentlemen’s agreement. Staggering, isn’t it? There was some kind of cobbled-together arrangement about the waterways – not that the Russians are taking much notice of it. The only firm guarantee was for three air corridors twenty miles wide and they’re not safe either. That Russian Yak that collided with our Viking coming into Gatow had been buzzing it, though the Russians flatly denied it, of course. Even tried to make out it was our fault.’

  They had both stared at the map of Europe on the wall of the CO’s office. The four zones carved out of a defeated Germany by the victorious Allies at the end of the war had been dotted in heavily with black ink: the British zone in the north, the French in the south-west, the American to the south and the Soviet to the east. The capital city of Berlin – itself divided into four Allied sectors – lay one hundred and ten miles inside the Russian zone, a tiny island in a large Red sea.

  ‘They’ll only let seventeen trains through each day and the railway’s jammed up with stuff, so we’ll be taking this lot of RAF chaps in by road, together
with garrison supplies. Boat from Harwich to The Hook, train to Hanover then a convoy along the autobahn from Hanover to Berlin.’ The CO had tapped a forefinger on the map. ‘This is where there’s likely to be trouble: Helmstedt. That’s where the road crosses over into the Soviet zone. They’ll try anything: papers not in order, road blocked, some daft new permit needed. We’re sending in some pretty useful bods on this trip – controllers, radar operators, electricians, mechanics. That’s why I’m asking you to go along with them, Michael, and to take charge. Make sure there’s no monkey business along the way. Don’t put up with any nonsense from the Russians. Get our people and the supplies there asap.’

  The Russians at the border would be armed – to the teeth, he’d been warned. He carried his old service revolver and the last man at the back of each lorry had been given a rifle to brandish with menace, if necessary. Only one Russian officer and one soldier were supposed to go on board to inspect papers. Any more and they were to be thrown off, but no shots were to be fired.

  ‘So, you’re expecting trouble, Corporal?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve been doin’ this trip backwards and forwards for months and every time they’ve got somethin’ up their sleeve. Crafty lot, they are. They make out the autobahn’s bein’ mended, or it’s got blocked, or somebody’s papers aren’t in order or we haven’t got some stupid licence . . . You wait an’ see. Still, there’s a NAAFI on our side so we could stop an’ get a cup of tea first, sir, if you like. Cheer us up a bit.’

  ‘No, we’ll press on straight through.’

  ‘Like I said, sir, I don’t think we’ll be doin’ that exactly.’

  He could tell that the corporal was grinning to himself.

  At Helmstedt the convoy left the British zone and crossed the few hundred yards to join a long queue of other vehicles – Allied and German – waiting at the barriers at Marienborn which marked the start of the Soviet zone. The Russian foot guards had closed faces and sub-machine guns slung across their chests. The corporal whistled through his teeth. ‘Not what you might call charmers, are they, sir? Never a smile, let alone a joke.’