The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

least Herbert, could count. The transport was obviously a military one, and everything was going to be loaded onto three ships, all destined for North Korea. Eight T34 tanks couldn’t be concealed as part of the load, but otherwise everything was packed in massive wooden containers without any labels. But the gaps between the planks were just big enough to allow a signal rocket to be fired into one of the containers. And that was exactly what Allan did when he had the chance after half a day of loading.
    Smoke soon began to billow out of the container, but, helpfully, it took several seconds before the load caught fire, so Allan could get away and was not immediately suspected of being involved. Soon, the container itself was ablaze, immune to the effects of the sub-zero temperature outside.
    The plan was for it to explode after the fire reached a hand grenade or some similar item in the load. That would make the guards react like headless chickens, and Allan and Herbert would be able to get back to their barracks for a quick change.
    The problem was that nothing ever exploded. There was however an enormous amount of smoke, and it got even worse when the guards who didn’t want to go near the fire themselves ordered some of the prisoners to pour water onto the burning container.
    This, in turn, led three of the prisoners to use the smoke as a screen while they climbed over the two-metre-high fence to reach the open side of the harbour. But the soldier in the watchtower saw what was happening. He was already sitting behind his machine gun and now he fired off salvo after salvo of bullets through the smoke towards the three prisoners. Since he was using tracer ammunition, he hit all three with a large number of bullets and the men fell to the ground dead. And if they weren’t already dead, then they most certainly were a second later, because it wasn’t only the prisoners who were hit. An undamaged container that stood to the left of the one on fire also received a hail of bullets. Allan’s container held 1,500 military blankets. The container next to it held 1,500 grenades. The tracer bullets contained phosphor and when a first bullet hit a first grenade it exploded, and tenths of a second later it took 1,499 others with it. The explosion was so powerful that the next four containers flew between thirty and eighty metres into the camp.
    Container number five held 700 landmines and there was soon another explosion just as powerful as the first one, which inturn led to the contents of a further four containers being spread in all directions.
    Chaos was what Allan and Herbert had wished for, and chaos was what they got. And yet it had barely begun. The fire reached container after container. One of them was full of diesel and petrol. Another was full of ammunition, which took on a life of its own. Two of the watchtowers and eight of the barracks were fully ablaze already before some armour-piercing shells got in on the act. The first shells knocked out watchtower number three, the second went right into the camp’s entrance building and, in passing, took the entrance barrier and guard post with it.
    Four ships were berthed and ready for loading and the next salvo of armour-piercing shells set fire to all of them.
    Then another container of hand grenades exploded and that started a new chain reaction, which finally reached the very last container at the end of the row. This happened to be a second load of armour-piercing shells, and now these shot off in the other direction, towards the open part of the harbour where a tanker with 65,000 tons of oil was about to berth. A direct hit to the bridge left the tanker drifting, and a further three hits to the side of the tanker’s hull started the largest fire of all.
    The violently burning tanker now drifted along the edge of the quay towards the centre of the town. During this last journey, it set fire to all the houses along its route, a distance of 2.2 kilometres. The wind was coming from the south-east that day. So it didn’t take more than another twenty-five minutes before – literally – all of Vladivostok was ablaze.
     
    Comrade Stalin was just finishing a pleasant dinner with his henchmen Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchev in the residence at Krylatskoye, when he received news that, basically, Vladivostok didn’t exist any longer, after a fire that had started in a container of blankets had gone amok.
    The news made Stalin feel really out of