Greg Iles - Spandau Phoenix

Hans took out his cigarettes. He was trying to quit, but he still carried a pack whenever he went into a potentially stressful situation. Just the knowledge that he could light up sometimes calmed his nerves. But not tonight. Removing one glove with his teeth, he fumbled in his jacket for matches. He leaned as far away as he could from the opening to his little cave, scraped a match across the striking pad, then cupped it in his palm to conceal the light. He held it to his cigarette, drawing deeply. His shivering hand made the job difficult, but he soon steadied it and was rewarded with a jagged rush of smoke.

As the match flame neared his fingers, a glint of white flashed against the blackness of the chamber. When he flicked the match away, the glimmer vanished. Probably only a bit of snow , he thought. But boredom made him curious. Gauging the risk of discovery by the Russian, he lit a second match. There . Near the floor of his cubbyhole he could see the object clearly now—not glass but paper—a small wad stuck to a long narrow brick. He hunched over and held the match nearer.

In the close light he could see that rather than being stuck to the brick as he had first thought, the paper actually protruded from the brick itself. He grasped the folded wad and tugged it gently from its receptacle. The paper made a dry, scraping sound. Hans inserted his index finger into the brick. He couldn’t feel the bottom. The second match died. He lit another. Quickly spreading open the crinkled wad of onion-skin, he surveyed his find in the flickering light. It seemed to be a personal document of some sort, a will or a diary perhaps, hand-printed in heavy blocked letters. In the dying matchlight Hans read as rapidly as he could:

This is the testament of Prisoner #7. I am the last now, and I know that I shall never be granted the freedom that I—more than any of those released before me—deserve. Death is the only freedom I will know. I hear His black wings beating about me! While my child lives I cannot speak, but here I shall write. I only pray that I can be coherent. Between the drugs, the questions, the promises and the threats, I sometimes wonder if I am not already mad. I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth, not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for—

The crunch of boot heels on snow jolted Hans back to reality. Someone was coming! Jerking his head to the aperture in the bricks, he closed his hand on the searing match and peered out into an alien world.

Dawn had come. In its unforgiving light, Hans saw a Russian soldier less than ten meters from his hiding place, moving slowly forward with his AK-47 extended. The flare of the third match had drawn him. “ Fool! ” Hans cursed himself. He jammed the sheaf of paper into his boot, then he stepped boldly out of the niche and strode toward the advancing soldier.

“Halt!” cried the Russian, emphasizing the command with a jerk of his Kalashnikov.

“Versailles,” Hans countered in the steadiest voice he could muster.

His calm delivery of the password took the Russian aback. “What are you doing in there, Polizei?” asked the soldier in passable German.

“Smoke,” Hans replied, extending the pack. “Having a smoke out of the wind.” He waved his sector map in a wide arc as if to take in the wind itself.

“No wind,” the Russian stated flatly, never taking his eyes from Hans’s face.

It was true. Sometime during the last few minutes the wind had died. “Smoke, comrade,” Hans repeated. “Versailles! Smoke, tovarich !”

He continued to proffer the pack, but the soldier only cocked his head toward his red-patched collar and spoke quietly. Hans caught his breath when he spied the small transmitter clipped to the sentry’s belt. The Russians were in radio contact! In seconds the soldier’s zealous comrades would come running. Hans felt a hot wave of panic. A surprisingly strong aversion to letting the Russians discover the papers gripped him. He cursed himself for not leaving them in the little cave rather than stuffing them into his boot like a naive shoplifter. He had almost reached the point of blind flight when a shrill whistle pierced the air in staccato bursts.

Chaos erupted all over the compound. The long, anxious night of surveillance had strained everyone’s nerves to the breaking point, and the whistle blast, like a hair trigger, catapulted every man into the almost sexual release of physical action. Contrary to orders, every soldier and policeman on the lot abandoned his post to converge on the alarm. The Russian whipped his head toward the noise, then back to Hans. Shouted commands echoed across the prison yard, rebounding through the broken canyons.

“Versailles!” Hans shouted. “ Versailles , Comrade! Let’s go!”

The Russian seemed confused. He lowered his rifle a little, wavering. “Versailles,” he murmured. He looked hard at Hans for a moment more; then he broke and ran.

Rooted to the earth, Hans exhaled slowly. He felt cold sweat pouring across his temples. With quivering hands, he pocketed his cigarettes, then carefully refolded his sector map, realizing as he did so that the paper he held was not his sector map at all, but the first page of the papers he had found in the hollow brick. Like a fool he had been waving under the Russian’s nose the very thing he wanted to conceal! Thank God that idiot didn’t check it , he thought. He pressed the page deep into his left boot, pulled his trouser legs down around his feet, and sprinted toward the sound of confusion.

In the brief moments it took Hans to respond to the whistle, a routine police matter had escalated into a potentially explosive confrontation. Near the blasted prison gate, five Soviet soldiers stood in a tight circle around two fortyish men wearing frayed business suits. They pointed their AK-47s menacingly, while nearby their commander argued vehemently with Erhard Weiss. The Russian was insisting that the trespassers be taken to an East German police station for interrogation.

Weiss was doing his best to calm the shouting Russian, but he was obviously out of his depth. Captain Hauer was nowhere in sight, and while the other policemen stood behind Weiss looking resolute, Hans knew that their Walthers would be no match for the Soviet assault weapons if it came to a showdown.

The sergeants of the NATO detachments kept their men well clear of the argument. They knew political dynamite when they saw it. While the Soviets kept their rifles leveled at the wide-eyed captives—who looked as if they might collapse from shock at any moment—the Russian “sergeant” bellowed louder and louder in broken German, trying to bully the tenacious Weiss into giving up “his” prisoners. To his credit, Weiss stood firm. He refused to allow any action to be taken until Captain Hauer had been apprised of the situation.

Hans stepped forward, hoping to interject some moderation into the dispute. Yet before he could speak, a black BMW screeched up to the curb and Captain Hauer vaulted from its rear door.

“What the hell is this?” he shouted.

The screaming Russian immediately redirected his tirade at Hauer, but the German brusquely raised his hand, breaking the flood of words like a wave against a rock.

“Weiss!” he barked.

“Sir!”

“Explain.”

Weiss was so relieved to have the responsibility of the prisoners lifted from his shoulders that his words tumbled over themselves. “Captain, five minutes ago I saw two men moving suspiciously inside the perimeter. They must have slipped in somewhere between Willi and me. I flashed my light on them and shouted, ‘Halt!’ but they were startled and ran. They charged straight into one of the Russians, and before I could even blow my whistle, every Russian on the lot had surrounded them.”