Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

Hagemann’s mouth dropped open with surprise. ‘But that’s not true!’ he gasped. ‘More tests are required. We haven’t yet . . .’

Himmler held up one hand, commanding the general to silence. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘The need for secrecy is paramount, and I’m certain you are acting on the highest authority.’

‘There is no secret!’ blurted Hagemann. ‘It’s not ready yet! It worked once. That’s all. Before we can even install the devices, they must be properly calibrated. I’m still trying to get my hands on more components.’

Himmler was staring at him. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked.

‘In your presence, Herr Reichsfuhrer, I would not dare to be anything else.’

Himmler nodded slowly. He looked like someone waking from a trance. ‘You will keep me informed,’ he said.

It appeared that the meeting was over, almost as soon as it had begun.

Once more, Hagemann shook hands with the Lord of the SS, but at the moment when he tried to release his grip, Himmler refused to let go.

‘It is important that you understand the gravity of the situation,’ said Himmler quietly. ‘I am, as you know, in overall command of Army Group Vistula; the only force that stands between the Red Army and Berlin.’

‘Yes,’ answered Hagemann, gently trying to remove himself from Himmler’s grasp. He began to overheat. Droplets of sweat prickled his forehead.

‘If you were to look at our strength on paper,’ continued Himmler, ‘you would see a formidable presence. Tanks. Guns. Tens of thousands of combat-ready troops.’

‘Yes.’ Hagemann gave up his attempt to untangle himself from Himmler’s soft, persistent grip. He surrendered his arm, as if it no longer belonged to him and, with his free hand, wiped away the sweat which had leaked into his eyes and blurred his vision, distorting Himmler’s face into an Impressionistic smudge.

Now Himmler stepped even closer, his emotionless grey eyes fixed upon Hagemann’s face. ‘But if you were to see what is actually there on the ground,’ he said, ‘you would realise how little of Army Group Vistula actually exists. It is a legion of shadows, and shadows will not stop the enemy. But your rockets can, at least long enough to allow us to forge a truce with the western Allies. The Americans, the British, the French – they all realise that we are not the true enemy. The enemy lies to the east, General, the Bolshevik hordes who will, without your help, seek to wipe us from the face of the earth. Now,’ he smiled faintly, ‘have I made myself clear?’

Hagemann, tasting the salt of perspiration in the corners of his mouth, could only nod.

At last, Himmler released him. ‘Go now,’ he said.

Hagemann staggered out to the waiting staff car. Within a few minutes, they were on their way south towards Berlin and the dreary forest track where the general had left his crew. He imagined them there still, sitting on their helmets in the rain and waiting for him to return.

‘No medal?’ asked the driver.

‘No medal,’ said Hagemann. He was staring at his hand, as if to reacquaint himself with it. The marks of Himmler’s fingers still showed upon the chapped skin of the general’s knuckles.

‘I heard there was a medal,’ the driver said to the man in the passenger seat.

‘That’s what I heard, too,’ replied his friend.

The driver glanced in the rear-view mirror, his eyes making contact with Hagemann’s. ‘Maybe next time,’ he said.

Back at his headquarters, Himmler had not yet left the room where his meeting with the general had taken place. Instead, he paced angrily back and forth upon the Persian carpet, breathing in short whistling breaths through his nose. From his pocket, Himmler removed a small, leather-bound case containing an Iron Cross, 1st Class, which he had intended to present to General Hagemann. But the general’s denial had spoiled everything.

Now he wondered if Fegelein, who had brought him news of the Diamond Stream’s operational capability directly from Hitler’s bunker, might somehow have misunderstood. Or perhaps he was being misled. Furious at the thought that someone, maybe even Hitler himself, might have lied to him, Himmler returned to his office and called the bunker.

‘Get me Fegelein!’ he ordered.

There was a long wait. At last, he heard Fegelein’s voice.

‘Herr Reichsfuhrer!’ Fegelein shouted down the line. ‘I have just come out of the midday meeting. I will have the usual report drawn up within the hour. Was there . . .’

Himmler didn’t let him finish. ‘Did you, or did you not, hear Hitler say that the Diamond Stream was working?’

‘Yes! I did. Absolutely.’

There was a long pause.

‘Is that everything, Herr Reichsfuhrer?’ asked Fegelein.

Without replying to the question, Himmler crashed the phone down into the receiver. Then walked to the front door, opened it and pitched the medal case out into the courtyard. The case popped open and the Iron Cross, its silver edges gleaming, skittered away into the mud.

That afternoon, in the eastern district of the Berlin, not far from the Karlshorst Raceway, Inspector Hunyadi wandered slowly down the street, wearing paint-spattered blue overalls, frayed at the heels, and with a hat pulled over his eyes. He carried a metal toolkit in one hand. To people passing by, he looked like some weary electrician or plumber, walking to a job because he no longer possessed a car, or else the fuel to run it. There were many such men in Berlin, too old to be conscripted by the regular army and too young to be entirely overlooked, whose trades were valuable enough to keep them out of uniform. Most of them would have been retired by now, but there was no one else to do the work. And soon, even their trades would be abolished. In the hundreds, they were being summoned by the authorities, given armbands printed with the word ‘Volksturm’ and, after half an hour’s training in the use of a handheld anti-tank weapon known as a ‘Panzerfaust’, they were cobbled together into suicidally primitive squads whose purpose was the defence of Berlin. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but to wander the streets, drunk if at all possible, visiting old friends and taking their last tours of the city.

But if those people passing by had looked more closely, they might have noticed the way he kept raising his hand to the right side of his head, and the thin strand of wire running out of his sleeve to the small earpiece he attempted to conceal in his palm.

And they might also have noticed a delivery van, bearing the logo of a non-existent floor-tile company named Ender amp; Sohne, following slowly in Hunyadi’s path along the street. Although the van was painted to look as though its sides were made of stamped metal, the panels were, in fact, constructed out of wood. This was in order not to cause any malfunction of the radio-detection equipment contained inside it, along with two technicians, who hunched over a direction-finding apparatus known as a Nahfeldpeiler.

Ever since the radio men on top of the Zoo tower anti-aircraft station had located an Allied transmission signal in the eastern portion of the city, Hunyadi had been making his way along every street in the district, slowly closing in upon the operator.

Hunyadi had established that these transmissions were being made at regular times, either around midday or in the early evenings. He had a hunch that the operator, whoever he or she was, had been leaving their job during their lunch break in order to send messages, or else was waiting until rush hour, when the noise of buses and trams out in the street would be at their loudest, obscuring any sounds made by the transmitter.

Now it was lunch time, and the detection equipment had picked up a signal, somewhere in the area of Lehndorffstrasse. Hunyadi edged his way down dirty alleyways between the houses, searching for the fuse boxes which, for fire-safety reasons, were located outside and usually close to the ground. Among the rubbish bins, the shards of broken beer bottles and hissing, homeless cats, Hunyadi crouched down, opened the rusty metal fuse boxes and unscrewed the stubby porcelain fuses one by one.