The Contract

Difficult to see the Trabant saloon as the supreme success symbol of a citizen of Barleber village. Would have been the star of his life, and perhaps that was why it was parked outside the front door of the house and not garaged behind the back fence where it would have been unseen.

A bloody good thing that it had been at the front, because that was where Johnny had found it. Not a car you'd drive down Cherry Road for a boast.

Don't knock it, Johnny, it's taking you clear of Magdeburg.

Erica's hair pin had opened the door for Johnny. From under the drawn curtains and upper windows of the house he had silently pushed the car a hundred yards away down the road. Then the pin again, inserted into the slot of the ignition and the engine had spluttered long-sufferingly. Otto Guttmann had been given the back seat and been told to lie down as best he could across it so that only two occupants would show. Erica beside Johnny and holding through the open window a white handkerchief.

That was the justification for haste at this early hour. A medical emergency. A young man driving a young girl, and any who saw the speed- ing car would think only of a person in pain, a person in need of help.

They might have had time, Johnny believed, to block the main roads, but not the secondary routes. The red ribbons on his map he avoided, and also the yellow marked roads where possible until he was forced into the town of Haldens- leben. Small and deserted on a Sunday morning.

Comrade Honecker leered from the hoarding outside the FDGB building. Once Johnny chuckled grimly to himself as a racing green and white car of the polizei hurtled by him heading towards Magdeburg.

Calling reinforcements to the city. So far so good, Johnny.

It was a pretty road out of Haldensleben, winding through woods and curling on slight hills.

There was no talk in the car, no attempt at conversation, because the Stechkin rested on the seat under Johnny's thigh. He had taken the gun from his waist as he had first driven away, tried it on his lap and it had slipped, decided against asking Erica to hold it. The gun maimed his passengers' confidence, slipped them into silence. And if Johnny knew it, then so could Erica and her father realise that each time they swept round a blind corner then that might be the place where the block was in position.

Strangely calm, Johnny felt, as if he had found fulfilment, as if at last he approached some personal summit. Onto the crucial steep slope, and the mountain high, high above him. Through Suplingen, through Ivenrode, and the light haze was creeping on them and the headlights could be cut and the need for more speed from the car because they had lost the shelter of roadside trees for wide fields. One more wood and that would be the limit of the Trabant's usefulness.

The hamlet of Bischofswald was hardly more than a collection of high, brick farm buildings beside a railway station. A small private place.

Home for half a dozen families who would work a Landwirtshaftliche Produktiongenossens… collective farm to you, Johnny… what a bloody mouthful. Six hundred hectares of potato and beet, and a small patch beside each house that could be called the peasant farmer's own, for growing the vegetables that he could take to the market to pay for his luxuries, for his soap and his meat and his wife's best dress… Steady, Johnny, dreaming. More trees, more woods. He looked at the dashboard, at the kilometre figures, snapped out his sums and subtractions. Far enough for the car, far enough for pushing their luck.

He swung the Trabant off to the right and bounced it on full power across the giving compost of the forest floor. Away between the trees until he saw the hollow a hundred metres from the tarmacadam. Otto Guttmann out, Erica out. Johnny plunged the car down, braced himself against the wheel for the last bruising impact. He slid the Stechkin into his waist, slammed the door shut behind him, and ignored the other two as he set about his work. Into the boot by pulling forward the rear seat. It was a chance and he was rewarded; many cars that travelled the north German plain carried a spade that could be used in winter to dig snow from behind the wheels. He tossed it without comment to Erica. There was a towing rope, and that too he took. Next to the bonnet which he lifted and then he began to rip systematically at every foot of wire and cable that he could reach. From the trunk of a birch tree he tore small, leafy branches and methodically brushed at the tyre imprints.

Johnny walked back a few yards towards the road then looked again at the place where the car rested. Not good, not bad, the best that he could manage.

'All on foot from here. I reckon we're eight miles from the border, and that means five miles from the Restricted Zone. We start quick and we get slower as we come close, slower and more careful. I want to get into the Restricted Zone at dusk, be near to the Hinterland fence by the time we rest…'