The Helsinki Pact (4 page)

“
... and then we’re
there. No distance at all. Isn’t that wonderful? ... Ulrike?
Ulrike!”

She blinked as Kai waved a hand
in front of her face, looked at the plans uncomprehendingly for a
moment, and then smiled up at him. “Yes, wonderful. But maybe if
you just explain some of that again to me ... ”

He laughed. “I’ll get you some
coffee and then we can eat and I’ll tell you all about it later.
Bernhard and Klaus said they were coming over, didn’t they? We’ll
talk about it then.”

Just after eight the doorbell
rang and Kai opened it to Bernhard who motioned downwards with his
finger and raised his eyebrows as he stepped into the apartment.
Kai banged the door shut, keeping the catch open, and then
immediately opened it silently and leaned over the rail to catch
sight of Frau Schwinewitz scuttling back to her ground floor
apartment. Moments later the street door opened and as Klaus made
for the stairs Kai noticed Frau Schwinewitz’s door opening a crack.
“At least I give her plenty of exercise!” Kai thought with
amusement as he waited for Klaus to arrive.

Dropping the catch and locking
the door fully they all shook hands. Kai again spread out the
papers on the table and turned up the volume of the
music.

“Look, guys. See what Thomas
brought me today. Look at these. This confirms everything I've been
telling you about. Look at the detail!”

“Remind me how this idea of
breaking into the subway tunnel came up.” Bernhard
asked.

“Thomas’s idea. He’s at
university in West Berlin and he uses this line regularly. He saw
the ghost stations in East Berlin because the train ran through
them although they never stopped. They were a kind of preserved bit
of the past he said, unchanged since before the war, but closed
since the Wall was put up. He wondered if it might be a way of
getting out of East Berlin. Most of the digging had been done so it
was just a case of finding a way to break into the subway itself
and then following the tunnel to a station in the West. And then I
found this apartment, about as close as you can get to the line
itself, and with that utility room in the basement.”

“Great idea! I like it.” said
Bernhard. “How far away are we here?”

“I’ve been working it out from
the plans and it’s about twenty metres from the edge of the
building here to the wall of the tunnel as it enters the station.
It looks further from the street but that’s because we’re looking
at the building itself and the tunnel’s on this side,
luckily.”

“How deep is it?”

Kai squinted at some figures on
the edge of the plan. “The base, that’s the rails I suppose, seems
to be at 28m. Our basement’s underground but only just and so that
means the floor’s maybe, what, five metres at most underground,
less probably. God! We can’t dig down that much.” They stared at
each other in dismay.

“That’s not right, though,
surely?” Bernhard said. “Sometimes when you walk along the street
at the back of the station you can hear the trains right
underneath. It can’t be 28m, it just can’t be.”

He spun round the plan and ran a
finger down the columns of numbers at the edge, then
smiled.

“No, look. 28m is the foundation,
the bedrock. The tunnel floor is ten metres here and, look, it
rises in this direction so it’s just under eight metres at this
edge, maybe nine or so in the middle of the plan. And the tunnel
roof’s five metres above the tunnel floor so that’s pretty much the
same level as the basement floor. We’ll have to dig down a bit from
the basement floor anyway, maybe a metre, couple of metres at most,
and if we keep things level we should hit the tunnel wall somewhere
in the middle, maybe two to three metres above the tracks
anyway.”

Kai slapped his forehead and
rested his head on his cupped hands for a moment then beamed
shamefacedly at Bernhard. “I was worried there, thought we were so
close and it was turning out all wrong. OK, let’s get going. It’s
not even nine, we can get started straight away, do a couple of
hours at least tonight.” Kai swallowed his coffee, grabbed his coat
and stood waiting expectantly for Bernhard and Klaus who sat calmly
looking over the plans together, occasionally sipping
coffee.

“Come on!” he urged. “We’re
wasting time!”

“Sit down Kai! Have some more
coffee.” Bernhard leaned back in his chair and smiled at Kai’s
impetuosity. “You know the story of the two bulls? One day, as an
old bull stood munching grass the young bull sharing his field came
thundering up to him. ‘Grand-dad! Grand-dad!’ he bellowed ‘There
must be thirty new heifers just brought into that field up there.
Let’s rush up the hill and shag one or two. Come on! Come on! We’re
wasting time.’ And the old bull looked placidly him, glanced up the
hill at the young cows, bent and took another mouthful of grass and
chewed it reflectively while the young bull stamped and snorted and
foamed with excitement. ‘Hmm.’ he said ‘OK, but let’s just amble up
the hill instead when we want to, save our energy, and then we can
shag the lot.’”

Kai laughed. “OK, granddad! But
why not get started? Why wait?”

“We have to break through the
floor to make a start. That’s concrete and however we do it that’s
going to be noisy. You told me Saturday’s when Schwinewitz goes to
Normannenstrasse for her weekly debriefing. She’ll be away with her
handlers all morning like the good snitch she is. That’s when we
have to break through. Now where’s that beer you promised
me?”

“Can you get sacks?” Kai asked
Klaus. “And how do we dump the soil we dig out? What about taking
to your site and adding it to the stuff being dug out there. Any
problems with that?”

“Shouldn’t think so. There’s a
dozen sacks in the van already and I can get more on Monday. That
should be plenty. They’re all marked ‘Kugia Konstruction’ so that
won’t be suspicious if anyone sees them. You might have to help me
sometimes, Bernhard. Got some wood too, struts and planks for the
tunnel supports. Let’s fetch these in later and get them to the
basement when your woman downstairs has gone to bed.”

*

By nine on the Saturday Bernhard
and Klaus were again in the apartment, drinking coffee as Kai
leaned over the rail watching for Frau Schwinewitz to leave.
Minutes later the three men, accompanied by a protesting Ulrike,
slipped down the stairs carrying a pickaxe, a stout spade and other
tools, including a small electrically driven pneumatic drill, face
mask and ear muffs which Bernhard had removed temporarily when the
construction site had closed down for the weekend.

“Why do I have to be there? I
can’t dig. I’ve got stuff to do this morning.”

“Sorry Ulrike” said Bernhard “but
we need you. Old Schwinehag may be out for the morning but we can’t
risk alerting anyone at all. Someone might come down and if they do
you need to warn us to keep quiet.”

He handed her a small piece of
wood wrapped around with wire, a push button on one side and the
other with a small plastic box covering part of the electronics. “I
need you to stand in the corridor and if you hear someone coming
just press that button firmly for a second or so. Then when it’s
all clear again, press it quickly three times.”

In the basement room the three
men stood looking at the floor, working out where to break through.
The building was old but also had been put up during a period of
cost cutting and shoddy construction and the floor carried the
characteristic crack pattern of a poorly controlled initial mix,
perhaps worsened through frost damage during some of the severe
winters when the basement was largely unused.

“Come on! Come on! We gotta train
to catch and it won’t wait. WhooooHoooo! WhooooHoooo! Let’s get
this baby goin’!” Kai sang. He pointed to a spot close to the west
wall of the room, facing towards Alexanderplatz, where the cracks
were more numerous and deeper and where a few small plugs of
concrete had pulled out and left conical dips two or three
centimetres across running in a rough arc. “What about
here?”

“Sure. Seems good as anywhere.”
Bernhard propped up the alarm box where he could see it, pulled on
the ear muffs and mouth mask, plugged in the jack drill and
switched on the power at the socket. “Better put your fingers in
your ears if you plan to stay. This is loud!”

He held the cross bar firmly in
his left hand, grasped the other handle with his right, pushed the
bit into a small cavity in the floor and pulled the
trigger.

Despite the warning the volume of
noise in the small room shocked Kai. The roar of the powerful motor
combined with the harsh thumping screech of the bit pounding and
turning on the concrete blasted off the room’s hard surfaces,
bouncing and echoing around them, defeating his fingers in his ears
and setting his teeth on edge. “Jesus Christ!”

Almost immediately the red light
on the alarm box glowed and went off. Bernhard switched off the
drill and the three stood listening.

“You two wait here till I find
out what’s going on. Maybe that woman’s back early. Best I go and
check with Ulrike.”

The corridor was empty as Kai
left the room and he found Ulrike half way up the stairs looking
worried. “God! Kai. What was all that noise? It sounded like you
were demolishing the building.”

“That’s a bit awkward if it’s so
noisy. Let’s see what it’s like in the hall.”

They walked up the stairs, opened
the door at the top and stood in the empty hall. Frau Schwinewitz’s
apartment door was firmly closed and they had to assume she was
still out being debriefed. Ulrike pressed the button on the alarm
device three times in quick succession and in a moment the dull
roar of the drill began again, reduced by the distance and the
closed doors but still clearly audible.

“Music! That might help. You stay
here in the hall Ulrike. They might as well get on with it but
watch out for anyone coming. Send the signal if any of the doors
open.”

Kai ran up to the apartment and
returned quickly with the ghetto blaster, taking it down to the
basement. The drilling noise stopped, replaced by the first track
of Never Mind the Bollocks played at full volume, the sound
penetrating the hall, somewhat muffled but still powerful, then
stopped.

“Klaus complained! Said that
racket was worse than the drill.” Kai laughed as he reappeared. “I
told him he could stand in the corridor if he didn’t appreciate
great music. Let’s hear it with the drill. Bernhard’s going to run
it more slowly to try to cut the noise down.” He pressed the button
on the alarm device three times and the shoe stamping of Holidays
in the Sun broke out, overlaid with what might have been mistaken
for an eccentric and rapid boot stamping variant, a crazed cover
version, had it not gone on insistently through the following
tracks. Kai stood listening for several minutes, walking about the
hall and up to the first floor.

“Hmm. It’ll do, I suppose. Have
to. At least it hides it a bit and maybe it won’t take too long to
break through the floor. You’d best stay up here. I bet it’ll be
Braun from the first floor who’ll come nosing around, though,
complaining about ‘that racket’ if he hears anything. You know the
one I mean, him always going on about decadent youth listening to
pop music and always making too much noise.” He mimicked a sour
face, moved his head around and whined. “‘Wasn’t like that in our
day!’ Pillock!”

He returned to the basement.
Klaus was standing outside the door, coughing. Kai entered quickly
and found Bernhard still hunched over the drill pounding away at
the floor, a hazy smoke of cement dust now filling the room and an
irregular trench connecting the pits, a little over half a circle
of about a metre wide. Bernhard grinned at him and continued
working, starting on the second half, poking into and enlarging
cracks in order to join up with the existing trench. Sometimes the
work went well, the drill blade cracking and ripping the concrete
easily and then slowing and jumping off harder elements in the
aggregate. Absorbed in his task Bernhard failed to notice the
warning light come on and Kai had to punch his arm to get him to
stop. They turned down the volume of the music and stood trying to
hear.

“Someone going out or coming in,
I guess. It’s getting on for half past ten, now, so we should have
at least a couple of hours before Schwinewitz gets back. How much
longer do you reckon, Bernhard?”

“Not long. Ten minutes maybe to
complete the circle I guess. Then we need to break that bit of
concrete away – we’ll use the sledgehammer for that, less noise,
less continuous noise anyway.”

In reality it took much longer,
the concrete being much more irregular in thickness than Bernhard
had realised. Smashing at it with the hammer or the pickaxe had
little effect other than sending chips flying and occasionally
running a crack. Ulrike had become angry at the enforced waiting,
insisted on returning to the apartment and Kai had taken her place
in the hall. It was now approaching midday. Bernhard had returned
to using the hammer drill and Kai was getting tired of hearing the
same Sex Pistols’ songs over and over. He was beginning to worry
whether Frau Schwinewitz would return before they’d finished. As
she hardly left the building otherwise that was potentially
serious. In any case, the hammer drill had to be back in the tool
store at the construction site by 7.30 on Monday
morning.