“Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll do that.”
“Promise me you will, Mikey, promise me.”
“I will, I promise I will.”
"Good,” he said, sounding pleased. “You’ll get out of this mess, Mikey. You’ll get out of here for the both of us, ’cause somebody’s got to. You can’t let them get away with it, not ALL this, not without somebody knowin’ what happened. It’ll make a difference. It’ll make a difference,” Eddie said as he slumped back, exhausted. “You can go now, Mikey, you can go.”
Michael heard him cock the pistol and turned his head away. He couldn’t go and he couldn’t stay; all he could do was sit there, frozen to that spot until he heard a muffled Bam! and he jumped as if he had been the one who had been shot. It seemed like an eternity before he could reach over and pry the pistol from Eddie’s limp fingers. The blue-steel barrel was already growing cold. Hoping against hope, he opened the breach and looked inside, praying he would find another bullet, but Stolz wasn’t that careless or that kind. If there were, he would have used it on himself. If there had been a third he would have shot the big German too, but there was only the one. Damn that Stolz! Damn him to hell, he thought as he put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder for the last time and crawled away. He dropped off the tailgate onto the ground and turned his face into the bitter arctic wind. It cut into him like shards of broken glass, but the pain felt good. Damned good! It froze his tears and cleared the fog, allowing him to see things with an amazing clarity.
Stolz stood there looking sheepish, as if he couldn’t quite decide how to act. However, like any good German, when in doubt, opt for cruelty. He jammed a meaty paw in Michael’s chest. “Where is my pistol!” he demanded. “Or did you miss?” Michael said nothing. “No stomach for killing a man up close like that, eh, boy? It’s not the same as it is dropping a bomb from one of your fancy airplanes, is it?”
Stolz shoved him again, harder this time, trying to reassert his authority, but Michael shoved back. Stolz was cruel, but he wasn’t stupid. The American’s eyes flared and the German felt the heat wash over him as if the doors to a blast furnace had opened.
“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” Michael whispered and he was not surprised when Stolz backed away. Michael handed him the pistol and headed toward the other prisoners. Stolz did nothing. He probably figured the young American had gone completely mad like everyone else around there. But the Russians understood. They said if you pound on a man long enough and give him absolutely nothing to live for, he might curl up in a shell and die, or he might explode. He might “grab the Devil by his coattails and hang on for the ride.”
However, Michael wasn’t crazy. He had to get out, out of Königsberg, out of Germany, and out of this stinking war. He had to live, and that would be his revenge. He would remember every hurt, every pain, and every injustice and there would be payback. He would get the bastards who did this to Eddie and to him, and to the long, long line of poor dumb bastards who came before them. He would live, and he would have his revenge.
CHAPTER TWO
The Eastern Baltic
Kapitanleutnant Eric Bruckner bent over the chart table in the U-boat’s control room, his pencil tapping a worried staccato on a pile of maps. He knew they must be close to Königsberg, but a winter gale was blowing itself out on the surface. Finding the narrow harbor entrance in these conditions would be as much luck as skill. Wiping his sweaty palms down the front of his black-wool shirt, Bruckner turned to his First Officer. “Let’s take her up and have a look, Karl,” he said with all the confidence he could muster. “Perhaps we can find a marker buoy and sneak in before it gets any lighter.”
Confidence? Over the long months at sea his voice had grown reed-thin and tired and that was a trap he couldn’t allow himself to fall into, because forty-two men depended upon him for their lives. When they sailed from Kiel just seven weeks before, his crew was half veterans and half raw recruits. Boys mostly, they were flush with the terrified excitement of their first combat patrol. As the days wore on, they became pale, unshaven ghosts with greasy black hair and sunken, blood-shot eyes. And their captain? Only thirty-one years old and already they called him “der Alte,” the Old Man.
Lookouts to the conning tower,” he ordered. “Tell them to be careful, Karl. With ice and a quartering sea, it’ll be rough up there.” And no time to lose a man, he thought. Bruckner’s plan had been to make a run into the port before first light, but the sun was already over the horizon and he would have to risk the harbor in broad daylight. In better times, he’d have given the helm to a junior officer; but not now. Enemy aircraft circled like eager hunting hawks, and even a routine port call was a deadly gamble.
“Damn this war,” he cursed. The once “glorious” Third Reich had become an insane asylum run by the inmates, and every German officer had been forced to swear a personal oath of loyalty to the head lunatic in charge. That cruel dilemma ate at Bruckner like a cancer. He shook his head and cursed his orders once again. Why? Why send one of Germany’s few remaining combat-ready U-boats racing four hundred miles to the eastern end of the Baltic, when the only targets worth firing his precious torpedoes at were far to the west in the North Atlantic? Königsberg and the rest of the Eastern Baltic ports were lost causes. Everyone with a map knew that except those fools in Berlin.
Bruckner climbed the narrow steel ladder to the conning tower. Four seamen and a young watch officer stood pressed against the bulkhead in their heavy foul-weather gear waiting for him as he stepped to the periscope. “Raise it up,” he said calmly as he bent over and gripped the handles. He rode it up, pressing an anxious eye to the lens as the periscope broke the surface. He walked the handles around in a quick, tight circle. The surface was empty, so was the sky. Thank God for small favors, he thought, as he searched the fog-shrouded horizon for a hint of the harbor, but he saw nothing.
"Surface,” he ordered, and the boat filled with the squeal of metal grinding on metal, the clanking of pipes, and the loud Whoosh! of the ballast tanks being blown dry. The deck tilted sharply upward and Bruckner wrapped an arm around the periscope to keep his footing on the slippery deck. As quickly as it all began, the boat leveled off and they were back on the surface. Hands spun the locking wheel in the hatch above his head. Strong arms pushed it open, and he stepped back as a torrent of ice-cold water poured down into the conning tower. With a heavy oilskin over his own shoulders and his Schirmmutze, the distinctive white hat only a German U-boat Kapitan was permitted to wear, pulled down tight on his head, he followed his men racing up the ladder and onto the bridge.
The sea was rough indeed. Bruckner raised his binoculars to his eyes as a large wave broke over the U-boat’s bow, sending a wall of spray skyward. It hung there, freezing in mid-air, until the gale-force wind flung it at the bridge. “Verdammt!” he swore. He was born and raised on the Island of Rugen not a hundred miles west of this very spot, the last in a long line of Bruckners to go to sea in ships. When the north wind howled, any sensible islander would be home sitting in front of a roaring fire, not on the open sea spitting at the gods. The polite Lutheran God of tenderness and mercy might be fine for a sunny Easter morning in Frankfurt; but when the winter gales raged, it was Thor and Neptune who ruled the open sea.
Some said it was a dirty business he had gotten himself involved with: sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship, firing a steel tube packed with eight hundred pounds of TNT into its hull, and sending the ship and its crew to the bottom. Whether they were British, American, or Russian, watching other sailors drown was not something Bruckner took pride in; but starving Great Britain into submission was Germany’s last hope and that was what submarine warfare came down to. He would prefer to stand on the bridge of a cruiser or battleship on the high seas, hull-to-hull, gun-to-gun, and man-to-man; but without her submarine fleet, Germany would have lost the war long ago.
“Full speed ahead,” he shouted down the open hatch over the roar of the sea.
“Mind the port engine
, Herr Kapitan,” his Chief Engineer shouted back. “She won’t take much more strain.”
Bruckner nodded, but he didn’t change his order. Once they were safely inside the submarine pen, with its blast doors rolled down and twenty feet of reinforced concrete over their heads, he’d worry about the port engine; but not before.
Their last combat patrol had been the worst. When the U-582 reached the North Sea, it was his one battered submarine against an endless armada of Allied warships. Bravery? Gallantry? More like suicide. After a week of hide-and-seek, he found a small convoy bound for Murmansk and put two torpedoes into a freighter. A third torpedo set a heavily laden gasoline tanker ablaze. It drew the Allied destroyers like an old maid screaming, “Rape!” For the next five hours, the U-boat paid a heavy price, twisting and turning deeper and deeper as rack after rack of depth charges pounded it with horrific body blows. In the end, time and luck won out. With their convoy safely over the horizon, the destroyers were forced to move on, leaving the U-582 cowering on the bottom with leaking pipes, sprung plates, a bent rudder, shattered nerves, and their lives.
“Karl,” Bruckner nudged the young watch officer standing next to him. “Pull the old Imperial battle flag out of the locker, the big one, and run it up the mast. We may be the last of the dinosaurs limping home to die; but let’s do it in style, eh!”
As he watched, two seamen ran the black and white Imperial Navy flag up the U-boat’s radio mast behind the conning tower. It sent a chill down his spine as it unfurled and snapped in the wind. This was no red and black Nazi swastika, not on his boat, because Eric Bruckner was a naval officer, not some political hack. The black cross and eagle on a field of white took him back to better days — 1941, 1942, and even 1943 when Germany’s U-boat fleet spanned the North Atlantic like a steel net waiting for a run of mackerel, sending over 3,000 Allied ships to the bottom. They almost drove England to the bottom too, almost; but not quite. The enemy countered with radar, sonar, better airplanes, and new depth bombs, and it was the U-boat’s turn to bleed. The bleeding became a hemorrhage as the German U-boat fleet suffered the highest casualty rate of any service in any war, ever. Ninety percent were lost, all of his classmates and friends, leaving Bruckner wracked with guilt. He had survived, but he was no better than the others, just luckier and long overdue.
He raised his binoculars and scanned the horizon again. There! A small red and white marker buoy bobbed up and down in the gray mist. Straining, he could dimly make out the headland beyond and the thin line of surf on the breakwater. Königsberg! He hadn’t seen the old city since he was an ensign seven years before, but the momentary thrill quickly waned as he saw the rusting hulks of three freighters, a capsized tugboat, and a destroyer lying near the channel mouth, their hulls punched full of holes.
Through the thinning mist, he caught glimpses of the once-modern port complex beyond. Its piers and warehouses had been stomped flat and lay beneath a shroud of dirty ice and snow. Along the once-busy piers and quays, the cargo cranes stood black and twisted against a leaden sky. Thick concrete slabs had been thrown up at jagged angles, and in the water below lay broken crates, rusted sheet metal, and garbage, trapped in the ice, coated with oil like the ring around an old bathtub. He had seen it all before in Danzig, Kiel, Brest, and every other U-boat base from southern France to Norway.
“Kapitan!” a nervous voice called to him from the control room. “I have the Harbormaster on the radio. He says we must heave-to and wait for the pilot boat.”
“Heave-to? Out here?” Bruckner shouted over the wind. “They must be mad! Tell them the signal broke up and that they should transmit again. By God, I wouldn’t wait out here for Adolf Hitler himself!”
In minutes, the thin black hull of the submarine sliced around the breakwater and into the main harbor, as Bruckner drew a bead on the U-boat pens at the far end. The rest of the harbor may have been flattened, but he knew the pens would still be intact. Their tall concrete walls and thick ceilings were built to take a pounding. Most of the steel outer doors had been rolled down to keep out the worst of the winter weather, but the two at the far end stood wide open.
“We’ll try those.” He pointed, hoping they would provide the U-582 with a little safety for the first time in weeks.
The distance closed rapidly as the Kapitan handled the helm with skill. They knifed across the harbor and into the narrow opening, reversing the diesel engines at the very last moment and bringing the boat to a stop a few feet from the deserted concrete pier. While the deck party jumped down and tied the boat off, other crewmen ran back to the entrance and cranked down the thick overhead doors.
Bruckner slumped back against the cold steel of the periscope housing and closed his eyes. His hair and beard were caked with ice. His face was raw from the bitter wind and the sleet. He was utterly exhausted, but for the first time in weeks he felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
Königsberg! They made it. But why?
CHAPTER THREE
Berlin
Heinz Kruger was many things, but he was no fool. The last place he wanted to be on that bitterly cold February night was the center of Berlin under the cross hairs of a hundred B-17 bombers, but Kruger had no choice. He was ordered to Berlin by no less than Martin Bormann, the secretive head of the Nazi Party and the second most powerful man in Germany. His office was next to Adolf Hitler’s on the bottom level of the Führer Bunker, far below the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery, and Kruger knew not to cross him. While Hitler might be a hollow shell of his former self, Bormann was still at the top of his game, guarding his master’s door like a good Doberman.
Only twenty-five years old, Kruger was the youngest Sturmbannführer or Major in the Waffen SS, Heinrich Himmler’s Praetorian Guard. His dress uniform was decked with medals and battle ribbons on the rare occasion he chose to wear it, and he didn’t get them by being a staff flunky, a policeman in a black leather coat, or a jack-booted concentration camp guard. Kruger was a combat infantry officer, one of the very best, and one of the most feared men on the Eastern Front. Tall and muscular, he had the blond hair, riveting blue eyes, and high cheekbones that belonged on an SS recruiting poster. But he had no time for that nonsense. The sadistic SS training schools and the Russian front had beaten that super-patriot crap out of him long ago. That wasn’t why he fought. The medals, the rank, and the war propaganda meant nothing to him. He was a stone-cold killer and a textbook psychopath who couldn’t live without the thrill of combat and the intense physical rush he got from killing other men. That was what made war so very convenient for him. He received the medals, the praise, and the rewards for doing nothing more than satisfying his own intense cravings and compulsions— things that would have put him on the executioner’s block at any other time and place.
Yes, it was a wonderful war; but all good things must end. Anyone who bothered to look could see the war was lost, and that created a unique problem for Kruger. Across the Elbe, drooling hordes of Mongolian infantry were sharpening their bayonets and waiting to take their revenge; and there were fewer than a million battered, exhausted German troops left to stop them. Old men and boys for the most part, they’d be lambs to the slaughter. That was reality, and reality was the only thing Heinz Kruger still believed in; except for Martin Bormann’s gold and a ticket to get out of this madhouse with him.
Kruger hated Berlin and hadn’t been in the capital in nine months. As he trudged through the piles of rubble and dead husks of buildings, he was shocked to see how little of it was still standing now. A hellish dark-orange pall lit the night sky and every step he took was accompanied by the dull Crump! Crump! Crump! and the bright flashes of Allied bombs falling on Potsdam, Bernau, Schonefeld, or one of the city’s other industrial suburbs. Not that the bombing mattered anymore. The real threat to Germany and its capital was from the Red Army pouring west through Poland. They were getting closer every day, and it would not be long now.
Ahead, through the smoke and haze, Kru
ger saw the blackened Corinthian columns of what was left of the Reich Chancellery, the seat of power of the Nazi regime. In its rear courtyard sat the sandbagged entrance to the Führer Bunker, Hitler’s underground command post. It was guarded by a company of the elite SS Leibstandarte, Hitler’s personal bodyguards. Everyone had to pass their muster and the Leibstandarte were uniformly arrogant to them all. Three checkpoints later, Kruger found himself at the bunker itself. Bent against the bitter arctic wind, Kruger handed his pay book and orders to the final sentry. He wore gleaming black-leather boots, an immaculate, freshly brushed, jet-black dress coat, white gloves, and white belts crossed on his chest, while Kruger stood there in a dirt-stained, infantryman’s greatcoat. Unshaven, with muddy combat boots and a soft wool campaign hat on his head, Kruger must have looked like a derelict street cleaner to these tin soldiers, but Kruger had come straight from the front. As his cold blue eyes studied the man, a cold, cynical smile crossed Kruger’s lips. What would this boy with his clean face and fingernails think when Ivan came knocking, Kruger wondered. He’d crap in those pretty black pants.
When the sentry finished his methodical examination of Kruger’s papers, he shoved them back in Kruger’s chest and pointed to the Luger pistol riding in the well-worn leather holster on Kruger’s hip. “That stays here!” the sentry demanded.
“Of course it does,” Kruger answered as he slowly straightened his tall, powerful frame and expanded his chest until he loomed over the sentry. As he did, the neck of Kruger’s greatcoat fell open and his Knight’s Cross with Swords and Diamonds flashed in the sentry’s eyes. It was the highest combat medal a German soldier could earn, the only medal Kruger ever wore, and the only one that was necessary. Kruger leaned forward, his cruel blue eyes boring in like a butcher appraising a fresh side of beef. That medal, the blond hair, and those blue eyes? The sentry had read the SS magazines and seen photographs of this legendary blue-eyed Sturmbannführer, and he broke into a cold sweat. This was no street sweeper. It was Kruger.
Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers Page 37