Estocada Read online

  ESTOCADA

  Graham Hurley

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About Estocada

  1937. As the Reich’s most celebrated fighter ace, Dieter Merz’s fame brings him into contact with the top echelons of the Nazi regime. All he wants to do is fly, but for how long can he deny the toxic nature of Hitler’s rule?

  Scotsman and ex-marine Tam Moncrieff is recruited by a nameless intelligence agency in London to go to Germany and sound out Hitler’s resolve. Does he really intend to invade Czechoslovakia? Do his generals support him? Can the march to war be stopped?

  As duty collides with conscience, fate will bring both men together. These are desperate times calling for desperate measures. To avoid war a killing strike is needed: la estocada.

  The question is, who is the matador, who is the bull?

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Estocada

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  1 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Northern Spain, March 1937

  2 Drochaid, 12 November 1937

  3 Nagasaki, Japan, 22 March 1938

  4 London, 7 April 1938

  5 Tokyo, 13 April 1938

  6 Clacton-on-Sea, 28 April 1938

  7 Berlin, 6 May 1938

  8 Karlovy Vary, Sudetenland, 6 May 1938

  9 Dahlem, Berlin, 12 May 1938

  10 Prague, 16 May 1938

  11 Berlin, 17 May 1938

  12 Prague, 18 May 1938

  13 Berlin, 19 May 1938

  14 Paris, 20 May 1938

  PART TWO

  15 May–July 1938

  16 Berlin, 27 August 1938

  17 Berlin, 28 August 1938

  18 Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, 29 August 1938

  19 Berlin, 30 August 1938

  PART THREE

  20 Potsdam, Berlin, 31 August 1938

  21 Berlin, 31 August 1938

  22 London, 1 September 1938

  23 Potsdam, Berlin, 2 September 1938

  24 Berlin, 5 September 1938

  25 Nuremberg, 8 September 1938

  26 Nuremberg, 12 September 1938

  27 Nuremberg, 13 September 1938

  28 Berlin, 14 September 1938

  29 Berlin, 15 September 1938

  30 London, 15 September 1938

  About Graham Hurley

  About the Wars Within Series

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  La Estocada (Spanish)

  – stab, sword thrust, death blow

  To

  Richard Holmes

  (1946–2011)

  Part One

  1

  VITORIA-GASTEIZ, NORTHERN SPAIN, MARCH 1937

  La estocada. The word fascinated him, taunted him, lurked playfully at the edges of every waking day, sometimes kept him awake at night. La estocada.

  Georg’s fault. He’d seen the posters that first month when they were flying out of rough airfields in the south. Within days Georg appeared beneath the cloth awning that served as a Mess. He had two tickets. Tonight, he’d said. I’ve talked to the Oberleutnant. We have permission. We’ll take the motorbike. The one that works.

  Seville in the hot darkness. The bullring full of nationalist soldiers off duty, sweating in the heat. The rich stink of horse dung and cheap tobacco. He watched the bull swaying left and right, pawing the ground, snorting, still tormented by the picadors. He couldn’t remember the name of the matador – Rivera? Ordóñez? – but what mattered was the moment of the kill.

  That first time it came more quickly than he’d expected. The matador seemed to barely move. Neither did the bull. It looked so easy, so artful, an arm’s length between them, a moment of perfect grace as the long quick blade plunged downwards and the animal first shuddered, then buckled, his front legs giving way, blood frothing from the sudden slackness of his mouth.

  He was still staring down at the bullring. La estocada. Get everything right, he thought, and the kill is yours.

  *

  Leutnant Dieter Merz jerked awake. It had been raining again during the night and his sleeping bag was wet through from holes in the canvas above his head. A shape crouched in the mouth of the tent. Mein Katschmarek, Dieter thought. My wingman.

  ‘Aufstehen.’ Georg Messner was wearing full flying kit and the summons to get up sounded urgent.

  Dieter asked what time it was.

  ‘Nearly seven. Our Spanish friends are planning an attack. You know that. They told us last night. The briefing starts in three minutes.’ Georg tapped his head. ‘Are you crazy or something?’

  Crazy or something?

  Georg had gone. Dieter struggled out of the bag. His flying suit – leather trousers, flannel shirt, leather jacket – was as wet as everything else. Outside, in the murk of yet another dawn on this godforsaken airfield, he heard the cough of an aero engine, then a clatter and a roar as a member of the ground crew opened the throttle. One of the new Bf-109s, Dieter thought. He was shivering now, his fingers barely able to manage the buttons on his shirt, his head still full of images from the bullring. A year ago, he’d believed the promises of eternal sunshine and a life so sweet you’d never want to leave. How wrong could you be?

  He tugged on his boots and left the tent, stamping warmth back into his feet as he watched the 109 powering down. Dieter had been one of the first pilots on the squadron to fly the new fighter. He’d talked to one of the two engineers who’d shipped down from Stettin with the crated machines, a taciturn Berliner who’d cut his teeth with the Richthofen Circus in the war of the trenches. The engineer had squatted on the wing, talking Dieter through the controls. Be careful on take-off, he’d grunted. Plenty of throttle but full right rudder, otherwise this bastard will kill you. At the time, Dieter had assumed he was joking. Again, wrong.

  A hut beyond the line of parked aircraft served as both a canteen and a briefing room. Dieter made his way through the scatter of empty tents and paused outside the door. A big iron stove had been installed in the first week of January, more than welcome as this coldest of winters at last came to an end. Smoke was curling from the stub of the stovepipe chimney and Dieter caught the sweetness of the burning wood in the swirling wind. Even now, in late March, the weather was unforgiving.

  He paused, wiping the rain from his face. The door had never been hung properly and he could hear the Oberleutnant offering his assessment of yesterday’s operational flying. He’s started already, Dieter thought. Scheisse.

  The big room was packed. Pilots occupied every available chair and others were sitting on the floor. Heads turned as Dieter pushed the door open. One of the younger flyers offered a nod of welcome, while Georg rolled his eyes. With his tangle of blond curls and his crooked smile, little Dieter Merz had become a talisman with this strange outfit, impish, popular with everyone, reliably different.

  ‘You’re late.’ The Oberleutnant’s name was Gunther Lutzow. His inner circle called him ‘Franzl’.

  Dieter mumbled an excuse, found a perch on a nearby table. The Oberleutnant turned back to the map pinned to the blackboard. Dieter had lived with this swirl of contour lines for months now and was all too familiar with the scarlet crosses that tallied Republican positions in the mountains to the north. The towns of Elorrio and Durango, still held by Basque militiamen. Thin zigzag trenches in the harshness of the landscape, not easily bombed. Beyond the towering peaks lay a broadening estuary. Then came the sea.

  The Oberleutnant was complaining again about the sloth of the Nationalist Army, the timidity of Franco’s generals up here in the Basque Country, how nothing ever seemed to happen after the Condor Legio
n had done its work.

  ‘Even our Generalmajor can’t make a difference. He talks to Franco. Franco talks to his people up here. They promise an attack. Then another attack.’ Lutzow made a gesture of contempt, half-turned towards the map. ‘Nichts.’ Nothing.

  There was a ripple of laughter. The Generalmajor was a tough, bear-like ex-fighter pilot who’d led the Condor Legion into Spain. As the face of the Third Reich amongst this bunch of Carlist fanatics, Hugo Sperlle was evidently running out of patience. Only now, it seemed, had his representations found a listening ear.

  Lutzow permitted himself the ghost of a smile. He had news to impart.

  ‘General Mola assures us that he’ll be opening his offensive tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Our lads from Burgos will be bombing in relays. The objective is to fill the streets with rubble and bottle up the garrison troops before Mola’s lot go in. Our job is to clean up afterwards. The problem with the 109 engines is unresolved. Therefore we’ll stick to the Heinkels. Our allotted target? Durango.’

  Heads nodded round the room. Most of these men had spent the last few months flying the Heinkel-51s, the latest of the Luftwaffe’s biplanes, robust enough in the air but a bitch to land. The two machine guns had to be loaded manually while still flying the plane, a chore that skinned the knuckles of even the best pilots. Worse still, the bomb load was pathetic: just six ten-kilo cylinders of high explosive, a mere calling card compared to the ordnance delivered by the big Ju-52s from Burgos.

  Georg wanted to know what ‘clean up’ meant. He’d been a mathematician at university and his insistence on precision when it came to orders – as well as everything else in his life – was fast becoming a squadron joke.

  Lutzow told him to hunt for targets of opportunity. Anyone in uniform with a white tunic on his back belonged to General Mola’s army. Don’t shoot him. Anyone else in uniform, go for the kill.

  ‘And civilians?’

  ‘We’re there to make an impact.’

  ‘With respect, sir, what does that mean?’

  ‘It means that our job is to break these people’s morale. First they get bombed. Then we strafe. Mola wants his men in Durango by dusk. If you’re asking me whether that makes military sense, I have to say yes. Our job is to leave Mola with no excuses. He’s relying on us and I have no intention of letting him down.’

  Georg nodded and shot a look at Dieter. They usually flew as a pair on sorties in the old biplanes and Dieter had lost count of the times they’d pulled out of a bombing run because they couldn’t be sure they were killing the right people. Everyone told each other that war was an imperfect art form, that mistakes were inevitable, but you could slow the biplanes to a near-stall in the interests of accuracy and at those kinds of speeds you were left with some very uncomfortable images if you got the targeting wrong.

  Only last week, Dieter had machine-gunned a shepherd in imperfect visibility in the mistaken belief that his stick was a rifle and when he’d reported back, blaming the weather conditions, drifting mist on the mountainside had felt like the thinnest of alibis. Lutzow, to his surprise, had dismissed his qualms with a shrug. The fighting season may soon start in earnest, he’d said, and Franco wants to put the fear of God into these people. If his generals won’t shift their arses, then I suspect the job falls to us.

  Lutzow had returned to the map. The weather front responsible for the rain would have cleared to the east by mid-afternoon. Tomorrow morning, the Ju-52s from Burgos were scheduled to attack at 8 a.m., along with a squadron of Italian S-81s. The planes would be bombing in relays, offering no relief. The raid would open with sixty tons of high explosive dropped in just two minutes. Durango had no air defences but the Red infantry, tough Basque militiamen, would doubtless do their best to bring down the bulky biplanes with small arms fire. Lutzow didn’t want that to happen.

  ‘Get on top of these people.’ His pointer found Durango on the map. ‘Make them bleed.’

  *

  Breakfast that morning was a bowl of sweet coffee with thick slices of bread still warm from a bakery in the nearby town. Afterwards, Lutzow wanted them to take a look at Durango, high level, no hostile intent. He wanted them to plot attack lines, get a feeling for the topography of the place, imagine that they were garrison troops fleeing for the safety of the mountains. Where would these peasant militiamen hide? How best would Lutzow’s flyers flush them out, line them up nicely, send them on their way?

  La estocada, Dieter thought. The Legion wants us to toy with these people, bring them to their knees in an orgy of percussive violence, and then thrust the blade deep and put them out of their misery. He discussed the proposition with Georg and a couple of other pilots, sitting around the table closest to the stove. Georg, as literal as ever, viewed it as a matter of tactics. Tomorrow, by mid-morning, the last wave of bombers would have departed. Hopefully it would be a cloudless day. Attack, therefore, from just east of south, plane after plane, howling out of the brightness of the sun, invisible, terrifying.

  One of the other pilots wondered how much of the town would be left by then. Dieter told him it wouldn’t be a problem. He’d watched a lot of the bomber boys while flying escort duty on previous raids, and he’d got to know them even better when he’d taken a bullet in the radiator south of Burgos and made a dead-stick landing on their airfield when his engine had seized.

  They were truck drivers in the air, he said. They were in the delivery business, flew in straight lines, held a steady altitude, but they were generous by nature and would do their best to leave a morsel or two for their fighter friends. That night in Burgos, once he was safely down, they’d broken open a case of Gewürztraminer the Mess Officer had been saving for Christmas, and all for the benefit of their newly arrived guest.

  Georg, who’d heard all this before, told Dieter he was talking Scheisse. In Georg’s belief, everyone had a reputation to make and everyone knew that the Junker pilots regarded themselves as the ultimate professionals. Late to the party, their own Staffel should concentrate on doing Lutzow’s bidding, cleaning up after the main event. Did Dieter have a problem with that?

  Coming from anyone else, this challenge would have triggered a serious head-to-head. Other conversations had come to a halt as pilots turned round to see what might happen next but the sight of Dieter Merz blowing his tall cadaverous wingman a kiss sparked a round of applause. Like Georg, these men called Merz Der Kleine, the Little One, and the nickname was salted with respect as well as affection, not simply because he was small and always held his corner, but because some of the stunts he pulled in the air defied imitation.

  Berndt, a big-hearted Rhinelander of limited talents, had once tried a trick of Dieter’s that involved a near-stall at a couple of hundred metres. Alas, he’d got it badly wrong. His Heinkel had burned on impact and they’d had to wait till nightfall to pull his charred body from the wreckage. After that, even Georg – who knew his friend Dieter better than anyone – had to agree that the little imp from Ulm properly belonged in a circus. Der Kleine. Seeing is believing.

  *

  The rain began to ease after lunch and by two o’clock the cloud base was beginning to lift until the frieze of mountains to the north was plainly visible. At Lutzow’s insistence, the entire squadron – all eleven planes – were to fly in tight formation. He’d picked up a warning from Jagdgruppe headquarters that the Ivans were active in the sector immediately to the east and the last thing he wanted were needless casualties at the hands of the Russians ahead of tomorrow’s operation.

  Dieter, walking out to the waiting line of Heinkels, felt the first prickles of excitement. The Soviets were shipping their new monoplane, the Polikarpov I-16, into Spain. It was a stubby little aircraft, fast and agile, and Russian pilots flew in tight 4-ship formations, dancing through the screen of He-51s to get at the nest of German bombers inside. Dieter had flown against them on a number of occasions and knew the lumbering biplanes were no match for the I-16. The Republicans called them moscas or ‘flies’.
To the Nationalists they were ratas. Rata meant ‘rat’.

  Georg and Dieter shared the same ground crewman, a cheerful Bavarian called Hans who’d served his apprenticeship in the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke factory at Augsberg. Like everyone else on the squadron he knew that the only answer to the ratas was Willy Messerschmitt’s new Bf-109, but just now there was still a serious problem with the engine.

  Hans helped Dieter onto the lower wing of the He-51 and into the cockpit. Like Dieter, he was a big fan of American blues and they’d recently spent a wet evening together under canvas, listening to Dieter’s collection of Mississippi Delta recordings. Back home, nigger music was banned. Out here, no one cared what you listened to.

  ‘You hear about the Ivans?’ Hans was storing boxes of ammunition for the two machine guns. ‘Take care, eh?’

  Dieter nodded, said nothing. Georg was already settled in the adjacent aircraft, engine running, ready to roll. Hans jumped down and stood back as Dieter went through his pre-start checks. The aircraft trembled as the engine fired, and moments later Hans offered a departing wave as Dieter joined the line of biplanes zigzagging across the still-wet grass towards the runway. The new airstrip at Vitoria was too narrow for formation take-offs and one by one the He-51s turned into the wind before final checks.

  Dieter was number four in line with Georg behind him. He made a last adjustment to his goggles before his hand found the throttle. The He-51 was slow to accelerate, slow in the climb, slow in almost every other respect, but the big old biplane had taught Dieter everything he knew about surviving in the air and he’d come to love the feel of the machine beneath his fingertips. Halfway down the runway he eased the joystick forward, lowering the nose, bringing up the tail, and Dieter watched the onrushing line of trees beside the perimeter fence to judge the moment of take-off. One last bump and he was airborne, the biplane wallowing in the wake of the aircraft ahead. Dieter adjusted the trim and edged left for a smoother ride. A glance in the mirror confirmed that Georg was safely off.