LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Four

      The huge layer of cold air that was approaching Altgarten moved eastwards across Europe at twenty miles per hour. As it moved, the cold front’s sharp edge chiselled under the unstable humid summer air and levered it skywards to form thunderclouds. There was thunder too and lightning and in places rain. Eighty miles north-west of Altgarten the rain fell upon the IJsselmeer, the great inland sea that opened the heart of Holland to the northern storms. At first the rain was light and constant, dropping from the low nimbostratus cloud like black columns that propped up the sky. Then came the rain from the cumulonimbus, falling ten miles, right through the nimbostratus, and crashing in great sheets upon the rough waters of the IJsselmeer. The wind had veered to the north and sudden gusts of it pushed the rain horizontal. It deluged the little lakes near Utrecht. Hundreds of ducks, herons and hundreds of other water-birds sheltered miserably along the water’s edge and under wooden piers from which even the anglers had departed. At Kroonsdijk the rain beat upon the farm-style buildings and the duck pond and hammered the flat cobbled and asphalt causeways, so that fine spray rebounded like tall white grass.

      In building number thirty-one the rain awoke Oberleutnant Baron Victor von Löwenherz when even the thunder had failed. He looked at the clock; it was ten o’clock Central European Summer Time and the barometer had fallen dramatically. He reset the barometer, for when the pressure started to rise and the wind steadied and backed he would know that the cold front and its line squalls had nearly passed. Löwenherz took a close interest in the weather, for he was a pilot and Kroonsdijk was a Luftwaffe night-fighter airfield.

      The military installations had been designed to look like Dutch farm buildings. The big roofs that sloped almost to the ground and the timber exteriors disguised concrete block-houses. The shutters painted with gay peasant designs were made of six-millimetre steel. Instead of a rectangular fire hydrant tank, here was an oval pond, and upon it the Luftwaffe had installed ducks to complete the illusion. Grazing near the runways were herds of pantomime cows made from lath and plaster. The subject of jokes and derision, they were enough to deceive the air cameras.

      Outside the window, motor vehicles and beyond them twin-engined fighter aeroplanes were parked under the trees. Nothing had been left to chance. This site had been selected, surveyed and decided upon, the architect’s plans had been completed and all was ready, three years before Holland was invaded. Now Kroonsdijk had become a key factor in the air defence of Germany. It lay upon the direct route from the bomber airfields in Eastern England to the heart of industrial Germany, as a toll-gate on a dark busy road.

      It was not surprising that Oberleutnant Baron Victor von Löwenherz had many times been photographed for the Nazi magazines Der Adler and Signal, for he was the personification of National Socialist propaganda – although they often chose to omit his title, for the new Nazi state had created its own aristocracy. Tall, slim and elegant, his hair was blond and by this time of year the sun had turned it almost white. His face had the sharp-edged, bony look that sculptors invent and his teeth were white and even.

      He jumped out of bed and did his physical exercises: twenty press-ups, eight hundred paces on the spot, knees high, stretching, knees bending and arms flinging, watched with deadpan interest by the young bulldog that was lying in its usual spot under the writing-table. Löwenherz’s room was small and rather dark, for windows were kept as small as possible to reduce the danger from blast and shrapnel. In one corner was an iron bedstead with grey blankets which he now carefully remade, folding each corner neatly and expertly as he had done every morning since he joined the Army as an officer cadet in 1937.

      For well over three hundred years the Löwenherz family had supplied soldiers to Prussia. A Heinrich Löwenherz had served under the mighty Wallenstein and shared his grim defeat by Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen in 1632. But Heinrich’s son had become a senior officer in the Kriegskommissariat of the Great Elector and had lived to see the Swedes driven from the battlefield of Fehrbellin some forty-three years later.

      There was a painting of Heinrich on the staircase of the house in Grawiec. A pale-faced man with the Löwenherz nose and dark, broody eyes. His beard and moustache are trimmed in the Spanish style and he is wearing the broad lace collar and red sash even upon his breastplate and leather fighting clothes. As a child, Victor had been frightened to go past it down the stairs, especially after dark when there were only flickering candles to light the hall and the howl of wolves came from the hills above the village.

      In the First World War Baron Hans-Georg von Löwenherz – Victor’s father – had lost an arm at Langemarck, Ypres, serving with the Prussian Guards, and had gone on to become a staff operations officer. After the war he had taken command of one of the secret instruction schools that the Reichswehr formed to replace the Military Academy forbidden by the peace treaty.

      It was natural that Victor should go into the Army and although he had never been truly happy as a cadet he could look back upon it with pride and pleasure. Tucked into the corner of a silver-framed portrait of his mother there was a fading snapshot taken in Austria – at the time of the Anschluss. Five smiling cavalry officers, their caps bearing the commemorative Brandenburg dragoon eagle of which they had been so proud. The following day, in Linz, they had caught a glimpse of the Führer himself. A month later Löwenherz had been transferred from the Army to the Luftwaffe and was a part of the intensive aircrew training programme that followed the Munich Agreement.

      He looked again at those boys who had been his close comrades through the agonies of cadet school. They’d teased him mercilessly when they heard of his application to become a flyer, but they’d come to the railway station at four-thirty in the morning to bid him goodbye. He looked at their childish faces; the amateur photo was creased and faded. One was buried in Narvik, another had been crippled in an amphitheatre near Sparta, the third was an Oberst on Manstein’s staff at Army Group Don. The fourth was commanding a Bewährungs-kompagnie (a suicide unit for enemies of

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