The Fourth Protocol

“Marais says they were kept alive in the POW camp mainly by Red Cross food parcels,” Preston said, as if thinking aloud. “He also says they escaped just before Christmas. That would have upset the Germans a bit. It was usual for the whole block to be punished with loss of privileges, including food parcels. Anyone in the block would be likely to remember that Christmas for the rest of his life. Can we find someone who was there?”

There is no formal organization of former prisoners-of-war in South Africa, but there is a brotherhood of war veterans, confined to those who have actually been in combat. It is called the “Order of Tin Hats,” and its members are known as “MOTHs.” MOTH branch meeting rooms are called “shell holes,” and the commanding officer is the “Old Bull.”

Using a telephone each, Preston and Viljoen began to call every shell hole in South Africa, trying to find anyone who had been in Stalag 344.

It was a wearying task. Of the 11,000 Allied prisoners in that camp, the great bulk had come from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America. The South Africans had been a minority.

Moreover, in the intervening years many had died. Of the MOTHs, some were out on the golf links, others away from home. They got regretful disclaimers and a host of helpful suggestions that turned out to be blind alleys. They stopped for the day at sundown and started again on Monday morning. Viljoen got his break just before noon; it came in the form of a retired meat packer in Cape Town. Viljoen, who was speaking in Afrikaans, put his hand over the receiver. “Guy here says he was in Stalag 344.”

Preston took over. “Mr. Anderson? My name is Preston. I am doing some research about Stalag 344. ... Thank you, very kind. ... Yes, I believe you were there. Do you remember Christmas 1944? Two young South African soldiers escaped from an outside work party. ... Ah, you do recall it. ... Yes, I’m sure it was pretty awful. Do you remember their names? ... Ah, not in their hut? No, of course. Well, do you remember the name of the senior South African NCO? ... Good. Warrant Officer Roberts. Any first name? Please try to remember. ... What? ... Wally. You’re sure of that? ... Many thanks indeed.”

Preston put the phone down. “Warrant Officer Wally Roberts. Probably Walter Roberts. Can we go to the Military Archive?”

The South African Military Archive is found, for some reason, under the Department of Education and is situated beneath 20 Visagie Street, Pretoria. There were more than a hundred Robertses listed, nineteen of them with the initial W, and seven named Walter.

None fitted. They went through the rest of the W. Robertses. Nothing. Preston started with the A. Roberts files and was lucky one hour later. James Walter Roberts had been a warrant officer in the Second World War; he had been captured at Tobruk and imprisoned in North Africa, Italy, and finally eastern Germany. He had stayed on in the Army after the war and risen to the rank of colonel. He had retired in 1972.

“You’d better pray he’s still alive,” said Viljoen.

“If he is, he’ll be drawing a pension,” said Preston. “The Pensions people might have him.”

They did. Colonel (Rt.) Wally Roberts was spending the autumn of his life at Orangeville, a small town set amid lakes and forests a hundred miles south of Johannesburg. It was dark out on Visagie Street when they emerged. They decided to drive down the next morning.

It was Mrs. Roberts who opened the door of the neat bungalow the following day and examined Captain Viljoen’s identity card with flustered alarm.

“He’s down by the lake, feeding the birds,” she told them, and pointed out the path.

They found the old warrior distributing morsels of bread to a grateful flock of water birds. He straightened up when they approached, and examined Viljoen’s card. Then he nodded as if to say “Carry on.”

He was in his seventies, ramrod-erect, a bristle of white across his upper lip. He was dressed in tweeds and highly polished brown shoes. He listened gravely to Preston’s question.

“Certainly I remember. I was hauled up before the German commandant, who was in the devil of a rage. The whole hut lost their Red Cross parcels for that episode. Damn young fools; we were evacuated westward on January 22, 1945, and liberated in late April.”

“Do you remember their names?” asked Preston.

“Certainly. Never forget a name. Both were young—late teens, I should think. Both were corporals. One was called Marais; the other was Brandt. Frikki Brandt. Both Afrikaners. Can’t recall their units, though. We were all so muffled up, wearing whatever we could. Hardly ever saw regimental flashes.”

They thanked him profusely and drove back to Pretoria, for another session at Visagie Street. Unfortunately, Brandt is a very common Dutch name, with its variation Brand, which lacks the terminal t but is pronounced the same. There were hundreds of them.

By nightfall, with the aid of the archive staff, they had culled six corporal Frederik Brandts, all deceased. Two had died in action in North Africa, two in Italy, and one in a capsized landing craft. They opened the sixth file.

Captain Viljoen stared wide-eyed at the open folder. “I don’t believe it,” he said softly.

“Who could have done it?”

“Who knows?” Preston replied. “But it was done a long time ago.”

The file was completely empty.

“I’m sorry about that,” said Viljoen as he drove Preston back to the Burgerspark. “But it looks like the end of the trail.”

Late that evening, from his hotel room, Preston called Colonel Roberts. “Sorry to trouble you again, Colonel. Do you recall at all whether Corporal Brandt had any special mate in that hut? My own experience in the Army is that there is usually one close friend.”

“Quite right, there usually is. I can’t recall offhand. Let me sleep on it. If I think of anything, I’ll call you in the morning.”

The helpful colonel called Preston during breakfast. The clipped voice came down the line as if he were making a battle report to headquarters. “Remembered something,” he said. “Those huts were built for about a hundred men. But we were jammed in there at the end like sardines. More than two hundred chaps to a hut. Some slept on the floor, others had to share a bunk. Nothing poofy, you know, just had to be done.”

“I understand,” said Preston. “And Brandt?”

“Shared a bunk with another corporal. Name of Levinson. RDLI.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Royal Durban Light Infantry, Levinson was.”

Visagie Street came up with the information faster this time. Levinson was not nearly so common a name, and they had a regiment. The file was out in fifteen minutes. His name was Max Levinson and he had been born in Durban. He had quit the Army at the end of the war, so there was no pension and no address. But they knew he was sixty-five years old.

Preston tried the Durban telephone directory while Viljoen had the Durban police run the name through their files. Viljoen got the first lead. There were two parking tickets and an address. Max Levinson ran a small hotel on the seafront. Viljoen called and got Mrs.

Levinson. She confirmed that her husband had been in Stalag 344. At the moment he was out fishing.

They twiddled their thumbs until nightfall, when Preston reached him by phone. The cheerful hotelier boomed down the line from the east coast.

“Sure I remember Frikki. Silly bastard did a runner into the woods. Never did hear of him again. What about him?”

“Where did he come from?” asked Preston.

“East London,” said Levinson without hesitation.

“What was his background?”

“He never said much about it,” replied Levinson. “Afrikaner, of course. Fluent Afrikaans, poor English. Working class. Oh, I remember, he said his dad was a shunter in the railway yards there.”

Preston made his good-byes and turned to Viljoen. “East London,” he said. “Can we drive there?”

Viljoen sighed. “I wouldn’t advise it,” he said, “it’s hundreds of miles. We’re a very big country, you know, Mr. Preston. If you really want, we’ll go by plane tomorrow. I’ll arrange a police car and driver to meet us.”

“Unmarked car, please,” said Preston. “And the driver in plainclothes.”

Although the headquarters of the KGB is at the “Center,” 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, in central Moscow, and though the building is not small, it would be far too cramped to contain even a portion of one of the chief directorates and departments that make up this huge organization. So the subheadquarters are scattered all over.

The First Chief Directorate is based out at Yasyenevo, on the outer ring road that circles Moscow, almost due south of the city. Almost all the FCD is housed in a modern aluminum-and-glass seven-story edifice shaped in the form of a three-pointed star, rather like the logo of Mercedes cars.

It was built by the Finns on contract, and was intended for the International Department of the Central Committee. But when it was finished, the ID people did not like it; they wanted to stay close to central Moscow; so it was given to the First Chief Directorate. It suits the FCD admirably, being well out of town and away from prying eyes.

Staffers of the FCD are officially undercover, even in their own country. Since many of them will have to go abroad (or already have been) posing as diplomats, the last thing they need is to be seen coming out of FCD headquarters by a nosy tourist who might put them on candid camera.

But there is one directorate within the FCD that is so secret it is not even based with the rest at Yasyenevo. If the FCD is secret, the S, or Illegals, Directorate is top secret. Not only do its agents not meet their FCD colleagues; they do not even meet each other. Their training and briefing is on a one-to-one basis—just the instructor and one pupil. They do not check in each morning to any office, since that way they might see each other.

The reason is simple in Soviet psychology: Russians are paranoid about secrecy and betrayal—there is nothing particularly Communist about this, it goes back to Tsarist days.

The illegals are men (and occasionally women) who are rigorously trained to go into foreign countries and live under deep cover. Unfortunately, some illegals have been caught and have cooperated with their captors; others have defected and spilled all they know. Therefore, the less they know, the better. It is axiomatic in espionage that one cannot betray what or whom one does not know.

The illegals, therefore, are scattered among scores of small flats in central Moscow and report singly for training and briefing. In order to be close to his “lads,” the head of the S Directorate still keeps his office at the Center on Dzerzhinsky Square. It is on the sixth floor, three stories above that of KGB Chairman Chebrikov and two above those of the first deputy chairmen, Generals Tsinev and Kryuchkov.

It was to this unpretentious sanctum that two men came on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 18, while Preston was talking to Max Levinson, to confront the director, a seamy old veteran who had been in clandestine espionage all his adult life.

What they presented to him did not please him.

“There is only one man who fits this bill,” he grudgingly admitted. “He is outstanding.”

One of the men from the Central Committee offered a small card. “Then, Comrade Major General, you will detach him from his duties forthwith and require him to report to this address.”

The director nodded glumly. He knew the address. When the men had gone he recalled their authorization again. It was from the Central Committee, all right, and though it did not say so in as many words, he had no doubt from whom it came with that kind of authority rating. He sighed resignedly. It was hard to lose one of the best men he had ever trained, a really exceptional agent, but there was no arguing with that particular order. He was a serving officer; it was not for him to question orders. He depressed a switch on his intercom. “Tell Major Valeri Petrofsky to report to me.”

The first plane out of Johannesburg for East London arrived on time at Ben Schoeman, the small, neat, blue-and-white airport that serves South Africa’s fourth commercial port and city. The police driver was waiting in the concourse and led them to a plain Ford sedan in the parking lot.

“Where to, Captain?” he asked. Viljoen raised an eyebrow at Preston.

“The railway headquarters,” said Preston. “More particularly, the administration building.”

The driver nodded and set off. East London’s modern railway station is on Fleet Street, and directly opposite stands a rather shabby old complex of single-story buildings in green and cream, the administration offices. Viljoen’s open-sesame identity card brought them quickly to the director of the finance department. He listened to Preston’s query.

“Yes, we do pay pensions to all retired railway staff still living in this area,” he said.

“What was the name?”

“Brandt,” said Preston. “I’m afraid I don’t have a first name. But he was a shunter, many years ago.”

The director summoned an assistant and they all trooped down dingy corridors to the records office. The assistant burrowed for a while and came up with a pension slip.

“Here he is,” he said. “The only one we have. Retired three years ago. Koos Brandt.”

“How old would he be?” asked Preston.

“Sixty-three,” said the assistant after a glance at the card.

Preston shook his head. If Frikki Brandt had been the same age as Jan Marais, and his father about thirty years older, the old man would be over ninety by now. The director and his assistant were adamant. There were no other retired Brandts.

“Then can you find me,” asked Preston, “the three oldest pensioners still alive and in receipt of their weekly check?”

“They’re not listed by age,” protested the assistant, “they’re listed alphabetically.”

Viljoen drew the director aside and spoke urgently in his ear in Afrikaans. Whatever he said had its effect. The director looked impressed. “Go ahead,” he told his assistant. “One by one. Anyone born before 1910. We’ll be in my office.”

It took an hour. The assistant produced three pension slips. “There’s one who’s ninety,” he said, “but he was a porter at the passenger terminal. One of eighty, a former cleaner. This one is eighty-one. He’s a former shunter from the marshaling yards.” The man was called Fourie and his address was given as somewhere up in the Quigney.

Ten minutes later they were driving through the Quigney, the old quarter of East London, dating back fifty years and more. Some of its humble bungalows had been well kept up; others were shabby and run-down, the homes of the poorer white working class.

From behind Moore Street they could hear the clang of the railway workshops and the shunting yards, where the big trains are assembled to haul freight from the docks of East London up to the landlocked Transvaal via Pietermaritzburg. They found the house one block off Moore Street.

An old Colored woman answered the door, her face like a pickled walnut and her white hair drawn back in a bun. Viljoen spoke to her in Afrikaans. The old woman pointed toward the horizon and muttered something before firmly closing the door. Viljoen escorted Preston back to the car.

“She says he’s up at the institute,” Viljoen told the driver. “Know what she means?”

“Yes, sir. The old Railway Institute. Now they call it Turnbull Park. Up Paterson Street. It’s the social and recreation club for railway workers.”

It turned out to be a large, one-story building adjacent to three bowling greens. Beyond the doors, they passed an array of snooker tables and TV rooms before arriving at a flourishing bar.

“Papa Fourie?” said the barman. “Sure. He’s out there watching the bowling.”

They found the old man by one of the greens, sitting in the warm autumn sunshine nursing a pint of beer. Preston put his question.

The old man stared at him for a while before nodding. “Yes, I remember Joe Brandt.

He’s been dead these many years.”

“He had a son. Frederik—Frikki.”

“That’s right. Good heavens, young man, you’re taking me back quite a bit. Nice kid.

Used to come down to the yards sometimes after school. Joe used to let him ride the engines with him. Quite a treat for a lad in those days.”

“That would be the mid- to late 1930s?” asked Preston.

The old man nodded. “About then. Just after Joe and his family came here.”

“Around 1943 the boy Frikki went away to the war,” Preston suggested.

Papa Fourie stared at him for a while from rheumy eyes that were trying to look backward through more than fifty years of an uneventful life. “That’s right,” he said.

“The boy never came back. They told Joe he had died somewhere in Germany. It broke Joe’s heart. He doted on that boy, had great plans for him. He was never the same, not after that telegram arrived at the end of the war. He died in 1950—I always reckoned of a broken heart. His wife wasn’t long after him—couple of years, perhaps.”

“Awhile ago you said, ‘Just after Joe and his family came here,’ ” Viljoen reminded him. “Which part of South Africa did they come from?”

Papa Fourie looked puzzled. “They didn’t come from South Africa.”

“But they were an Afrikaner family,” Viljoen protested.

“Who told you that?”