Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

He had no idea if the radio man, up on the firing platform, was still monitoring the frequencies. More likely, thought Hunyadi, he is too busy doing his usual job. Hunyadi took some comfort in the fact that anyone with access to a secret transmitter would probably have sought shelter along with the rest of the city’s population, rather than stay at their post and risk being blown to pieces by the very people they were trying to help.

From time to time, Hunyadi was aware of men moving about in the darkness around him as they hauled fresh boxes of cannon shells up to the firing deck. Occasionally, someone would shine a red-filtered torch as they searched among the crates.

During a lull in the firing, Hunyadi rose up from his throne of ammunition boxes and climbed the concrete staircase to the gun platform. The air was filled with gun smoke, which seeped into his lungs and filled his mouth with a metallic taste, as if from resting a coin upon the tongue. Moving past the silhouettes of men, Hunyadi made his way through the carpet of spent shells to the chest-high wall of the platform. From here, he watched searchlights rake across the night sky, like swords wielded by some clumsy giant. In some places, dust from the bombing plumed so thickly that the searchlights seemed to break against the clouds, fragmenting their beams and angling them back to the earth. Distantly, he heard the shriek of falling bombs and then he saw the flash of their explosions, which vanished into tidal waves of smoke.

‘When you stopped firing the gun,’ Hunyadi said to a man who came to stand beside him, ‘I thought it was over.’

‘We are just cooling the barrel,’ replied the man. His features were so hidden in the darkness that it seemed to Hunyadi, still disoriented by the concussive force of the explosions, that the night itself had taken shape and was conversing with him now. ‘It’s beautiful, don’t you think?’ asked the man.

‘Beautiful?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘A terrible beauty, I grant you,’ said the darkness, ‘but a beauty nonetheless.’ He raised an arm and pointed at the sky. ‘See there!’

Hunyadi looked upwards, just in time to see a searchlight fasten on a plane. It looked no bigger than an insect, and it was hard for him to imagine something which seemed so small being capable of so much damage. Although he had lived through numerous air raids, he had always been below ground when they took place. All he had ever known of these attacks was the panic of rushing to the shelters and the distant, rumbling earthquake of the bombs as they exploded. And he was well acquainted with the aftermath, as he made his way through shattered streets, dodging fire trucks and ambulances driven by civilians wearing yellow armbands and strange, wide-brimmed helmets which made them appear like Roman gladiators. But he had never actually seen a raid in progress, as he was doing now, and he could not deny that the man had been telling the truth. There was a mesmerising beauty to this vast apocalypse.

Now two other searchlights zeroed in upon the bomber, so that it seemed to balance, helpless and impaled upon the icy spear points.

Hunyadi heard a sharp command from somewhere behind him and he turned just as the cannon fired. The roar and the sudden change in pressure shoved him off his feet. He stumbled back and fell against the wall. His head was filled with a shrill ringing sound, as if a tuning fork had been struck inside his brain. Even over this, he heard the sound of laughter and a hand reached from the dark to help him up again.

The last thing he saw before he clambered back down into the magazine was the bomber, bracketed by tiny sparks as the anti-aircraft shells exploded around its wingtips. There was a momentary smear of orange fire as shrapnel tore the bomber to pieces. Then the night became empty again, and the searchlights resumed their awkward sweeping of the sky.

The sun had not yet risen above the trees when Kirov and Pekkala, still handcuffed to the bench of the truck, were awakened by the sound of someone shuffling towards them through the leaves.

The boy named Andreas climbed in and sat beside Pekkala, a sub-machine gun laid across his lap.

His friend, Berthold, clambered into the cab, started the engine and soon they were driving down the road, heading west towards Berlin.

Andreas studied the two men, who avoided his gaze.

‘Do you speak German?’ asked the boy.

Pekkala had been staring at the floor, but now he raised his head. ‘A little,’ he replied.

Kirov kept silent.

‘We have to do what the captain says or we will get in trouble,’ explained Andreas, ‘but do you know what Major Rademacher will say when we arrive with you?’

Pekkala shook his head.

Now Andreas leaned forward. He had no gloves and wore a dirty pair of grey wool socks with the ends cut off, allowing his fingers to poke through. His pale skin and dirt-rimed fingernails stood out against the black sides of the sub-machine gun. ‘Major Rademacher will say we should not bother him with questions. He will say that we have wasted valuable fuel on this foolish errand.’

‘So you will get in trouble, either way,’ said Pekkala.

Andreas nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘And what will he say then, this Major Rademacher?’

‘Maybe he will tell us to shoot you.’ Andreas shrugged. ‘Maybe he will shoot you himself. It all depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘On whether he is drunk or sober. On whether his wife yelled at him. On whether he enjoyed his breakfast. You see,’ explained Andreas, ‘there is no rule but what he says, and what he says will be a mystery, even to himself, until he says it.’

It was mid-morning when Fegelein’s car pulled up outside the brick building in which Himmler had established his headquarters at Hohenlychen, located in the countryside not far from the village of Hassleben. The Hohenlychen compound was, in fact, a rest home managed by Himmler’s medical adviser, Dr Karl Gebhardt. Himmler had moved there shortly after Hitler’s descent into the Reichschancellery bunker complex.

The building which Himmler had taken over had a sharply angled roof, scaled like the skin of a snake with red terracotta shingles. From a height of a tall man up to the gutters on the top floor of the three-storey building, the bricks had been painted bone-white. Below that, they had been left plain. The windows on the ground floor were curiously arched, in order to allow in more light than the windows on the floors above. But Himmler kept the windows shuttered. The ground floor had once been a day room for recuperating patients, but now served as a place for Himmler to conduct his meetings with a daily stream of visitors.

Himmler himself rarely appeared before 10 a.m. His early mornings were taken up with bathing and a daily massage from his steward, Felix Kersten.

Knowing his master’s schedule, Fegelein had scheduled his visit to coincide with the moment when Himmler would emerge from his private quarters; a time when his mood was likely to be at its best.

‘Shall I wait here?’ asked Lilya, sitting behind the wheel. She was dazed and tired. Fegelein had left her sitting in the car for the entire night, while he bedded down with Elsa Batz. She had not kept the engine running, for fear of draining the fuel tank, and it had been a cold night. Even the blankets, which she kept in the trunk for such occasions, had not been enough to keep her warm. At 6 a.m., just when she had managed to doze off, Fegelein had rapped his gold wedding ring upon the driver’s side window, jarring her awake, before jumping into the passenger seat and ordering her to drive to Hohenlychen.

Fegelein cast a glance at his driver.

She looked exhausted.

He knew it was his fault. With anyone else, he would not have paused even to consider this, but Fraulein S was different. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No need to wait outside. Come in and get warm by the fire.’