David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Then Hoffman heard another sound, nearby on the platform this time, a groan of machinery followed by a whirring and rattling noise. He looked over towards the ammunition elevator and saw the first 128mm shell emerge, then watched three boys struggle to carry it to the nearest gun. As a tactic against the Soviet advance, it was a futile gesture. The tanks would be under the guns’ minimum elevation by the time they were ready to fire. But he and the battery commander had devised the plan to keep the Feldgendarmen convinced that they would fight to the end, and to provide a distraction. The gunners would fire ten rounds a minute until the ammunition was expended. The noise and vibration inside the tower would be horrendous.

He saw the battery commander crawl out from the shaft, streaked in oil, his head wreathed in a blood-stained bandage. The man immediately hunched down and set to with a wrench unscrewing the fuses as each new shell appeared, surrounded by crouched boys. Hoffman knew that the remaining ammunition for the big guns had been time-fused for high-altitude airburst, and the fuses would all need to be reset. It was of no consequence now, as it was the noise of the guns that would create the distraction. But Hoffman saw that the gun crew were in their own world, locked into their drill in this final act. The commander looked up for a moment, gazed around frantically, not seeing him, and then hunched over again. Hoffman had a sudden cold realization. He was going to have to do this alone.

Then he felt it, a strange brushing sensation, barely perceptible, an unsettling feeling that seemed to come from all directions at once. The soldiers who had been in battle called it the devil’s breath, the wind caused by the blast and suck of thousands of exploding shells. He looked towards the Reichstag, but the Tiergarten had disappeared in an eruption of dust and smoke. Soon the creeping barrage would reach the flak tower. He looked south, and saw the ripple of flame from the Soviet howitzers on the horizon, then the multiple fire-streaks of Katyusha rockets. In moments the sound would reach them, the pulverizing roar of artillery, the shriek of the rockets, sowing terror just as the siren in his own Stuka dive-bomber had once done.

What he had seen in the street outside was just a probing attack. Now all hell would be unleashed. He felt his chest tighten. The whole earth seemed to be shaking. He watched men and boys scurrying around him, seeking shelter from the onslaught to come, in a blur.

Another smell assailed his nostrils.

It was the smell of fear.

Hoffman ran back towards the entrance to the spiral staircase that led into the bowels of the tower. A cluster of shells burst in the grounds of the Zoo, sending shrapnel clattering like hail against the concrete below. From their new positions the Russian gunners were finding the range, aided now by forward artillery spotters in the ruined buildings in sight of the tower. Hoffman glanced at the flak gunners loading the breech of the nearest twin 128mm gun, its barrels aimed towards the street below. He prayed that they would have enough time to fire their salvo and give him the distraction he needed to get out with a white flag. He saw the boy in the lederhosen, helping to heave another shell towards the breech. Let him survive. The din suddenly became horrendous: the roar of tank engines, the rattle of tracks, the crack of tank gunfire, the rippling boom of howitzers, the screaming salvos of rockets, the noise echoing and rolling through the open doorway. He lurched inside and heaved the steel door shut, closing off the worst of it. The stench of seething humanity wafted up to him. He suddenly felt terribly claustrophobic. He had to get out of this place.

As he turned to go down the spiral stairs, he heard the clatter of someone running up from below. A helmeted face appeared under the one bare bulb still lit on the upper stairway, and stopped, breathless. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant.’ It was his orderly, an elderly Volkssturm wearing a faded First World War tunic. The man leaned forward, panting, holding his stomach, looking half-dead. ‘You must come at once. To your room. Important visitors from the Reich Chancellery. A prisoner under escort.’

The Reich Chancellery. Hoffman stopped on the stairs. What the hell did they want? He clenched his teeth. ‘Who is it?’

The soldier’s skin was pasty, like porcelain, and there was a numbness in his eyes. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant, I don’t know. I really don’t know. One of the Feldgendarmen grabbed me and sent me up to find you.’

‘All right. How many?’

‘Five, I think. Two SS guards, two senior-looking officers and the prisoner, bound and hooded. They came through the cable tunnel from the L-Tower. That’s all I know.’ The soldier’s voice cracked, and he slumped against the wall.

Hoffman took a deep breath, and swallowed hard. His throat was still burning from the acrid air outside. ‘All right. Go back to your duties. Don’t give the Feldgendarmen any reason to pick on you. There’s going to be a lot of killing soon. Get on.’

The soldier gave a faltering salute and stumbled back down the stairs. Hoffman followed him, clattering down as fast as he could. The stench was indescribable. He passed the entrance to the hospital and glimpsed bloodstained operating tables inside. Part of the hospital was an emergency Sanitatsraum, a maternity ward. The vibration of the guns had pushed women into early labour, as if life were frantically regenerating in the face of extinction. He had heard the screams of women giving birth in the night and the wail of a baby, so at odds with this place of death.

He thought about what his orderly had said. In his room. All he could think of was the crates with Schliemann’s artefacts from Troy. In the last hours of the Reich, had they come to claim their remaining loot? But with a prisoner? He reached the second-floor landing. He could see the throng of civilians below, in the emergency lighting now provided by the backup generator. The stairwell funnelled the noise upwards, a sound like the engine room of a ship, humming and pulsating. Above it he heard the occasional shriek, then a snatched voice of reason as someone tried to bargain for space, for food. Two days ago he had watched families arrive in their best clothes, carrying cardboard suitcases with thermos flasks and sandwiches. Now they surged up the stairs like a nightmare image, pressing against the line of Feldgendarmen who held them back. This was the truth of Goebbels’ Volksgenossenschaft, ‘patriotic comradeship’. These were the ordinary people of Berlin, the women who had waited in vain for their soldier husbands to return, the children, the elderly who thought they had endured the worst of war a generation ago. Two well-dressed women suddenly disintegrated into a vicious fight over a scrap, snarling and scratching until one of the Feldgendarmen slammed his elbow into them and they fell back into the melee, screaming. Hoffman remembered a line from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. First comes food, then morals. Only for so many of these people, morality had been sucked out of them by the Nazis long ago.

He approached the door to his room. The two Feldgendarmen had gone, and had been replaced by two men wearing Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and forage caps and carrying Sturmgewehr-44 assault rifles. Their lapels carried the round Sonnenrad sun-disc symbol of the SS Nordland Division, the same symbol Hoffman had seen in the floor at Wewelsburg Castle. One of the men put up a hand, swathed in a bandage and missing a thumb, and Hoffman halted. He suddenly felt uneasy. Perhaps he had been wrong about the Schliemann treasure. Maybe they were here for him. Had he given them some excuse, failed in his duty somehow? He remembered what he had left on the crate. His diary. He had never imagined that anyone would return to that room before the Russians arrived. If a Feldgendarm or SS man still loyal to the Reich saw even one page of it, then it was all over for him. He felt a cold trickle of sweat run down his back. A voice barked inside, and the soldier missing the thumb beckoned him forward. At that moment a shudder rent the tower as one of the big flak guns fired. Hoffman knew that the worst vibration was a whiplash effect a second later, and he instinctively put his hands to his ears. As he did so, the soldier deftly undid his holster and took the Luger from him. Hoffman dropped his arms and walked into the room. His heart began to pound. So this was it.