David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Hoffman stared at him, baffled. ‘Fly? Of course.’

‘Good. And you are an expert night navigator. You attended the training school last year. We saw to that. Until we meet again, Hoffman. For the new Reich. For the new Fuhrer. Sieg Heil.’

Unverzagt opened the door and was gone, pulling it shut behind him, leaving Hoffman rooted to the spot. What the hell was that all about? Was it yet another desperate scheme, another deluded fantasy of salvation? He opened his hand again and saw the symbol on the piece of paper, the reverse swastika inside a red roundel. He shook his head. It was all nonsense. Himmler would surely be dead by now. Unverzagt was unhinged, had dreamed up this fantasy in the oxygen-starved bedlam below. Hoffman’s visit to Wewelsburg would be well known among Ahnenerbe fanatics like Unverzagt, who had seen Himmler promise to induct him into the SS when the war was over. It had even made the front page of the SS newspaper. And Unverzagt would have known about Himmler’s special interest in him from all the hero propaganda feting his achievements as a Stuka ace, glorifying the wisdom of the Reichsfuhrer in encouraging him to fly at an early age. Hoffman crumpled the paper into his pocket and put the encounter from his mind. There was enough madness in here already. He picked up his binoculars, slung them round his neck and then turned round one last time to look at the place where he had spent these last hours, on very probably his final day alive. In the corner was a marble bust, lying broken and forgotten among the flecks of paint that had fallen off the wall in the vibrations. It was Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, the portrait bust that used to preside over the Troy exhibit in the Museum. Hoffman stared at the forlorn scene. What was it Bismarck had said? War with Russia must be avoided at all costs. On impulse, he came to attention and clicked his heels, then he turned and marched quickly towards the open door and the shrieking hell of the Soviet onslaught.

A few minutes after 10 a.m., Hoffman emerged on the roof inside the flak-battery command post, a circular concrete shelter like a truncated cone with walls that rose a metre or so above his height. He looked up, squinting at the overcast sky, and saw the dark pall of dust and soot that hung over the city. The sky seemed to reflect a red glow from the flames, and from the dust of millions of pulverized bricks that hung in the air like a mist of blood. Climbing up the stairs from the squalor and seething humanity below, Hoffman had thought of the medieval axis mundi, the ascent to heaven that seemed to be promised by the smudge of daylight he had seen at the top of the stairs; yet when he reached there, all he found was another vantage point over hell, as if he himself were fated to be among the orchestrators of this horror. He remembered swimming in the lakes of Bavaria as a boy, looking down and seeing the lens of sulphur that divided the living lake from the dead lake below, and never having the courage to dive through it. Here it was as if he were trapped beneath that opaque layer, cut off forever from the light of the sun. Beyond the sight of God.

He felt his nostrils burn, and the grit of brick dust on his teeth. After the atrocious stench of the stairwell, he had yearned to take a breath of fresh air, but out here it was acrid, fume-laden, and caught in his throat. Yet the pall of dust had lessened with the ceasefire of the last few hours, and he could discern other smells too: a waft of cordite from the flak guns; wisps of black markhorka tobacco, brought for the flak gunners by the boys who stole out at night from the tower to loot Russian corpses, some never to return; and the honey-sweet smell of decomposing flesh, rising up everywhere from the rubble of the city. And there was another smell, not a Berlin smell but the farmyard smell of Russia, of thousands of horses dragging supply wagons for the Red Army that snaked into the city behind the advancing soldiers and tanks, coming from nearly every direction now. Two days ago, the remaining German perimeter had been a rough rectangle five by fifteen kilometres. Now it was little more than the Tiergarten and the strongholds on either side. He felt as if he were standing on a precarious mound of solid ground in a lake of lava. Soon they too would be swamped, islands in a sea of blood, and then submerged in the red tide like some ghastly modern-day parable of Atlantis.

He pushed past crouched helmeted figures to the only officer present, a Luftwaffe Hauptmann with aviator wings on his tunic like his own, another pilot in an air force that no longer had aircraft. The man wore a battered forage cap and radio headphones that were hooked into the fire control panel. Hoffman lifted one earphone, cupped his hand and bellowed into the man’s ear. ‘Where’s the battery commander?’

The man looked up quickly, his face grey and unshaven, then gestured repeatedly with one arm. ‘The ammunition elevator,’ he shouted. ‘Trying to restart the backup generator.’

Hoffman released the earphone and looked over at the massive iron cupola that protected the elevator shaft. He and the battery commander had banked on having the big guns in action to divert attention while they went below and carried out their plan to surrender the tower. He would give the man ten minutes. No more.

He climbed up to the rim of the command post and gazed around. The concrete exterior was pockmarked from Soviet shrapnel and shell fragments. The roof was about half the size of a football pitch, with circular bastions at each corner containing the twin 128mm flak guns, and beyond that an outer curtain with 37mm and quadruple 20mm guns. Some five hundred metres beyond the Zoo tower to the north-west, he could see the top of the L-Tower, another concrete monstrosity containing the giant Wurtzburg radar that directed the fire of the guns against Allied bombers. Month after month they had come, week after week, relentlessly, American by day, British by night. Many times during his posting in Berlin he had seen the flak guns do their work, and watched American B-17s split in half and flutter down like giant silvery leaves, and the burning parachutes of British aircrew plummeting like flares in the night. But the last raid had been ten days ago, and that already seemed like another war. The barrels of the big guns had been lowered to provide counter-battery fire against the Soviet howitzers, and then to fire point-blank into the advancing infantry and tanks. Now they were at their lowest possible elevation, eighteen degrees below horizontal, poised to fire their last salvos before the Red Army stormed into the Zoo grounds below.

Hoffman shut his eyes for a moment and listened. It was the first time he had been up here and not been overwhelmed by the roar of Russian artillery and the shriek of Katyusha rockets, the ever-enclosing ring of fire that seemed to course round the city like a giant electrical current. He could hear voices on the gun platforms, hoarse with cordite, raised against their own deafness. He heard the rumble of falling masonry, like the sound of calving glaciers he had seen from his aircraft in the fjords of Norway. But he could tell that the ceasefire was beginning to unravel. He heard the harsh roar of tank engines in the distance, the sound of churning tracks. Somewhere the fighting had started up again; he heard the ragged rip of a German Spandau machine gun, a hollow echoing sound in a faraway street, then the rattle of Soviet sub-machine guns and the thud of grenades. The Russians had been using captured German Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons to blast their way through rooms, house by house, street by street. Beneath the storm of artillery and rocket fire this was still an infantryman’s war, a war of sniping, grenades, man-pack flamethrowers, desperate knife fights in the darkness, the incessant sub-machine guns. No quarter was being given by either side. He could hardly imagine what was happening to the civilians still in their homes, those who had not sought refuge in the suffocating hell of the bunkers and the flak towers like this one.