Dust filled Oster’s nose and mouth, and he tried to ignore the impulse to cough. What would he have given now for a glass of water? Not the local water that ran alongside the streets in gaping, unprotected gutters called qanats but the pure water that ran off the glacier in his home town in the Austrian Alps. It was typical of the British that they should pipe down the only reliably pure supply of water in Teheran, and then sell it by the gallon to their friends. A nation of shopkeepers, indeed. There were plenty of water carts in and around Teheran, but none of the other embassies trusted these. Which was just as well, he thought. The British sense of hygiene and commerce was going to be their downfall.
Nearly all of Teheran’s horse-drawn water carts had been made by an Australian company, J. Furphy of Shepperton, Victoria, and had arrived in Mesopotamia with Australian troops during the First World War, before being sold on to Iranians when the Australians had left the country. The Iranian drivers of these water carts were notorious sources of unreliable information and gossip, with the result that the word “furphy” had become a local synonym for unfounded rumor. On Oster’s orders, Ebtehaj had purchased a Furphy from the owner of the Cafe Ferdosi, and a Caspian pony from a local horse trader. The Furphy had then been taken to the pistachio warehouse in Eshtejariyeh, where Shkvarzev and Schnabel set about converting it into a mobile bomb.
The tank part of the water cart was made of two cast-iron ends, thirty-four inches in diameter, and a sheet steel body rolled to form a cylinder about forty-five inches long. Filled with 180 gallons of water, the Furphy weighed just over a ton and, carefully balanced over the axle to distribute the weight, was a fair load for a good horse. The frame of the cart was made of wood and fitted with two thirty-inch wheels. Water was poured out of the tank from a tap in the rear, and poured in through a large lidded filler hole on top. It was a simple enough job to use this filler hole to pack the empty Furphy with nitrate fertilizer and sugar, thereby making a bomb that was about half the size of the largest bomb in general use by the Luftwaffe on the eastern front-the two-and-a-half-ton “Max.” Oster had seen one of these dropped from a Heinkel, and it had destroyed a four-story building in Kharkov, killing everyone inside, so he calculated that a well-placed bomb weighing more than a ton was easily capable of bringing down one small villa housing the British embassy.
Oster froze as he heard the muffled sound of Russian voices. At the same time, he saw, in close-up, Shkvarzev’s hand tightening on his submachine gun. The German could hardly blame him for not wanting to be taken alive. A particularly harsh fate was said to await all of Vlasov’s Zeppelin volunteers: something special devised by Beria himself, at Stalin’s express order. Oster didn’t much care if Churchill and Roosevelt survived the explosion, but the prospect of killing Stalin was something else again. There wasn’t a German on the eastern front who wouldn’t have risked his life for a chance to kill Stalin. Lots of Oster’s friends and even one or two relatives had been in Stalingrad and were now dead-or worse, in Soviet POW camps. Stalin’s assassination was something any German officer would be proud of.
