Five Past Midnight
Page 35
He set another clump of fabric on fire in a second pipe, then flicked his hand to extinguish the match when it began to cook his fingers. He tossed it aside and lit another, and in the next few minutes set all the wadding on fire.
Next, Sergeant Kahr engaged the fans, but at a low speed, not so fast as to extinguish the pipe fires, but enough to move the black diesel smoke from his fabric fires through the system and into the bunker. He pulled his gas mask from its box and put it over his head.
And now he waited. The entrance buzzer sounded again, and he heard a muffled, "Sergeant Kahr. Open the door."
But still he waited, listening to the fans as they filled the bunker with smoke. Black haze began pouring into his room through the grates. Once again up came his wristwatch. Five minutes more, and he would turn his attention to the green pipes. He sank into his chair and glanced at the bags of flour. Pounding at the door became louder. "Sergeant Kahr." One voice, then three voices, all yelling his name. Fists beat on the metal door and the buzzer sounded again and again. He waited.
20
THE BOMBERS had come from the northwest, then wheeled over the Havel River, and had followed its tributary, the Spree, into the center of Berlin. The city offered a bomber pilot's dream: unmistakable landmarks close to the target. Dead center in the vast expanse of the Tier- garten was the Victory Monument, and at the northwest corner of the Tiergarten was the burned-out Reichstag and, just south, the Brandenburg Gate. These structures stood out like beacons. The target—the government quarter—lay at the east end of the Tiergarten, and the route to the quarter was as clear as the creases on a B-24 navigator's palm.
The bombing run was unusual for the Americans in the spring of 1945. They came in low—at two thousand feet, unheard of for B-24s— and they came with only twenty planes. And these twenty planes aligned themselves like ships of the line, rather than in their box formation. They roared over the Reichstag and over Joseph Goebbeb's home and across Unter den Linden, right into the Mitte between Wihelm- strasse and Mauerstrasse, precisely on target, bomb bays open and sticks falling.
A swath of chaos and destruction on the ground chased the planes' shadows. Upper Wilhelmstrasse buckled and then turned over as if by a giant plow. The Science and Education Ministry disappeared in a cloud of dust and fragments. The Justice Ministry received two bombs through its roof, and every window and door blew out in bursts of fragments, followed by its front wall, the stones crashing down onto Wilhelmstrasse.
On Mauerstrasse the Paris Restaurant ceased to exist in a white flash, nothing remaining larger than twisted forks. The House of Furniture also vanished, leaving only a crater filled with furniture splinters and shiny brass drawer handles. On Wilhelmplatz a water main was exposed, and torrents of water swept across the plaza toward the Chancellery. The walls of the Chamber of Culture cascaded to the street, and the floors sank one on another like spoons placed in a drawer. The Finance Ministry was hit for the second time in the war. Half of the building was blown out onto Kaiserhofstrasse, and fire swept through the remaining half, fueled by rows of document-filled filing cabinets. The enormous Postal Ministry building was instantly transformed into a knot of wreckage. Hotels and shops and apartments were shaken or blown or vacuumed apart, and then fire swept into the remains.
The earth lurched and reeled. Shock waves sped through the ground like a shaken blanket. Superheated air swept along the street, yanking off awnings and signs, sucking out windows, and carrying deadly debris. Power lines collapsed and lay across the street, sparking and hissing. Automobiles were tossed about like windblown leaves. Cobblestones and bricks rained down. Some light poles were bent double, others were ripped from the ground. The iron picket fence with its gilded spikes that had protected the Propaganda Ministry flew through the air like spears. Timbers and pipes and masonry shrieked and groaned. Ribbentrop's Foreign Office—just next to the Reich Chancellery—was torn in two. And just south of the Chancellery, the Transportation Ministry suffered three direct hits, gutting the building. The trees on Kaiserhofplatz—opposite the Vossstrasse motor entrance to the Chancellery—were stripped of their new spring leaves.
Then the planes were gone and the bombs had spent their fury. An eerie quiet settled over the area, broken only by the crackle of fire and the occasional beam or post giving way. Scents of cordite and sewage and plaster dust and newly turned dirt were carried away from the target area by the wind.
Berliners hiding belowground could not have known then of the careful placing of the bombs. Ruin had been vast in the Mitte, but not one bomb had sailed into the Reich Chancellery or its garden.
They were left alone. They were left for Jack Cray.
21
GENERAL EBERHARDT ran up the steps from the bomb cellar below the Air Ministry, four RSD men behind him. They emerged at a service entrance on Leipziger Strasse. They sprinted east along the street toward the intersection, dodging the new debris and craters. Eberhardt carried a radio in one hand and a pistol in the other. His troops were armed with Schmeissers and rifles. The air contained the sharp odor of high-explosive residue. The all clear had not yet sounded, and no one else was on the street. Eberhardt knew another team would be closing in on the Teller Building from the other direction, further east on Leipziger Strasse.
Eberhardt personally could cover only one of the five potential firing sites, as he well knew. But he prayed Jack Cray would choose this one, the six-story office building with a view of the Chancellery's motor court entrance. This building was Eberhardt's best guess, the most likely of the five sites, the one Eberhardt would choose were he up to such business. He wanted to be the one to waylay the American commando.
With a combat team, Otto Dietrich was covering another site, and was hoping with a fervor equal to Eberhardt's that his—Dietrich's—spot would be chosen by Cray. Because of the knife at his throat near Katrin von Tornitz's home, Dietrich had gained an animosity toward the American unusual in someone as professional as he was. Eberhardt had humorously chided Dietrich about it, but the detective would not be amused.
At first Eberhardt's plan was to hide in the Teller Building's cellar during the bombing run. Then he determined that was probably where Cray would keep himself safe—-presuming this building was his firing site—and so the general had chosen the nearby Air Ministry. And now he had to hurry. He stung his ankle on a brick, but kept running, turning left and right through a maze of overturned automobiles and skirting a new crater at the intersection of Wilhelmstrasse and Kaiserhofstrasse. He passed a human torso—no head, no legs—belonging to someone who had risked that the bombers would not hit the government quarter today. Glass shards lay over the street like dew on grass.
An RSD sergeant from the other team was already at the Teller Building's front door. He held his submachine gun like he knew how to use it. It was not for a general to be the first through the door, and Eber- hardt knew it and so did his men. He did not have their proficiency, which he had made sure was unequaled in the German services. When Eberhardt nodded, the RSD troops rushed into the building and began up the stairs, their weapons in front of them. The rear of the building— which was a wall shared with the neighboring restaurant—had been exposed by the bomb that ruined the restaurant, explaining the scent of horse stew in the Teller Building's lobby.
Eberhardt was breathing through his open mouth when he reached the sixth floor. His men—younger and more fit—were already inside the room that overlooked the Chancellery's motor entrance. The general swore to himself when he saw they were milling about, their weapons at ease. Desks and filing cabinets filled the room. He had been wrong. Cray had chosen another site. Other RSD men were searching the rest of the floor. Through the window Eberhardt could see the Chancellery's motor entrance three blocks away.
He put the handset to his mouth and dispensed with radio protocol. "This is Eberhardt. Anything at number two?"
A crackling voice. "No, sir. Nobody."
Eberhardt demanded, "Number three?"
He called out the other numbers, each a potential firing site, his scowl deepening as each team reported seeing nothing.
Then one of his soldiers entered the room, holding a scoped sniper's rifle, a Mauser with a thick barrel. Eberhardt groaned, but only to himself.
"I found the rifle two rooms down, sir. This was with it." The soldier handed Eberhardt a piece of paper.
The general read aloud, " 'You can have this rifle back. I won't be needing it.'"
And then—his face crimsoning—General Eberhardt understood why Dietrich had taken a personal dislike to Jack Cray. And Eberhardt knew he and Dietrich had been wrong—perfectly and wildly wrong— about Cray's plan.
22
THE INTERCOM on Sergeant's Kahr's desk was buzzing and the telephone there was ringing and it sounded as if SS guards were working on the steel door with a pry. Kahr had helped design the door, and he knew it would hold for the few more minutes he needed. Black smoke was coming through the ventilator grates, the same smoke that was pouring into all rooms of the bunker, and it was getting thicker.
Kahr coughed into his mask. The two filter canisters hung almost to his belly. With levers he engaged the fan box that pushed air through tbe red system. He played with a dial until the fan was moving air at half capacity. Then he twisted the valves on the water pipes, closing down the bunker's sprinkler system.
He opened a grate over the uppermost red pipe on the wall. Air flowed through the pipe in a steady stream, but it too was smoky because the red backup system was drawing air from the bunker and returning it to the same place. Kahr ripped open a flour sack, glanced for the last time at his wristwatch, and then started pouring flour into the pipe. It fell in a steady stream, and was just as quickly sucked away along the pipe. After only a few seconds his first bag was empty. He lifted the second bag, balanced it on his knee to yank out the thread, and spilled its contents into the pipe. And then the third bag, then the fourth, pouring steadily, the white powder disappearing down the pipe. He emptied the last bag. And now the flour began to drift back into his generator- ventilator room through the air ducts.
Kahr brought out his box of matches and scratched a match against the score.
23
FOREIGN MINISTER RIBBENTROP struggled with his gas mask. A strap was caught on his ear. He wrestled with it, swearing and coughing. Finally the goggles were squarely over his eyes. He lit a cigarette, perhaps figuring no one would notice, and he lifted his mask momentarily to draw on it.
Keitel had found the captain of the guard, an SS-Hauptsturm- führer who was overseeing three men working a pry bar at the generator-ventilator room door. Keitel yelled at them to hurry, then tugged at his high collar and gulped the blackened air. He jammed his thumb against the door buzzer again and again.
The bombing raid had just ended, and the bunker had stopped its trembling. But it was filling with acrid black smoke that obscured the walls and ceiling. Fumes gushed from the grates along the hallway.
"Keep at that door." The guard captain began walking the hallway, demanding at each door, his voice muffled by a gas mask, "Report any fire."
Martin Bormann emerged from the conference room and held a handkerchief to his mouth. Bormann was called the Brown Eminence because of his cunning and his brown uniform, one of the last of the Old Fighters to wear brown. An SS orderly rushed up to Bormann to give him a mask. Bormann pulled it over his face.
On the guard captain's orders, guards had assumed their emergency stations. At each end of the center hallway an SS guard wearing a gas mask stood near the door, a submachine gun in his hands. Another guard stood precisely in the middle of the hallway holding a pistol, and yet another posted himself outside the door that entered Hitler's conference room and bedroom, the guard's Walther ready and his head— hidden under a gas mask—moving left and right like a metronome.
Smoke was thickest near the ceiling, and the throng appeared headless to Minister Goebbels, who was shorter than everyone else in the hallway. General Speidel helped one of the Führer's secretaries into a mask, then gestured that she should kneel to get below the densest smoke. Gasping, another secretary stumbled into a folding table, spilling three bottles and a deck of cards onto the concrete floor. One bottle shattered, and wine sped along the floor. The pilot, Baur, lifted his mask to wipe his eyes with his fingers.
Noise in the bunker was ear-rending. The ventilators had again started their dentist-drill whine, pushing smoke into the area. The Führer's dog, Blondi, howled and barked at the smoke as it paced in front of the conference room door. The SS crew frantically worked on the ventilator room door — metal on metal — and the door squealed in protest. Goebbels had found someone to yell at — a hapless Propaganda Ministry aide — whom Goebbels, it was suspected, employed for that very purpose because he had no luck shouting at his wife. The gramophone played a piano solo, one of the Führer's favorites, Schumann's Kindenzenen, too loudly. And all the coughing and swearing and arguing — all of it echoing in the long concrete tunnel.
Alfred Jodl stepped into the hallway, breathing stertorously, tears running down his rounded cheeks. He called, "We must evacuate. Give the order."
"No, sir," replied the guard captain. "Our orders are to remain belowground if at all possible, and it is still possible."
Jodl was six ranks above the captain, but the captain was in charge of bunker security. Jodl abruptly turned away, bumping into Minister Speer, who was standing in the middle of the hallway staring through his mask goggles at a ventilator grate with evident detachment, his hands clenched behind his back, the smoke still flowing from the grate. He knew of the backup system because he had helped design it. Black smoke was rushing from half the grates. The other half was not in operation, not moving smoke or fresh air.
The crew at the ventilator room door jammed the pry bar's blade into the space between the steel door and the steel frame, but it was a question as to whether the door or the pry bar would give first. Two guards yanked on the bar, but it lost its purchase, and the guards had to catch themselves to prevent spilling backward. The captain plunged the bar again into the crack.
Smoke flowed from half the grates, now darker and more dense. It hid the ceiling, and more of the acrid haze was sinking toward the floor. Keitel could not restrain himself. He marched over to the guard captain. "I order you to evacuate the Führerbunker, Captain."
He let up on the pry bar. "Sir, there is no fire belowground."
Keitel's chin went up. The dueling scar on his cheek was magnificent, even in the smoke. "I will not stand for impudence from a…"
"If there's no fire, we stay here." A new voice.
The captain was relieved to see RSD General Eberhardt, who had just entered the bunker. Eberhardt's countenance was grim. He slipped the straps of a gas mask over his head.
"Eberhardt, we cannot breathe this air," Keitel said. "It is time to leave the bunker."
Not wanting a trace of self-pity to color his words, Eberhardt spoke carefully and firmly. "I have failed to stop the American commando. He is still out there, and I have no doubt he is nearby."
Keitel's black scowl dissolved as he coughed, a rattling hack that bent him over so that his medals hung away from his coat, and that ended in a whistling wheeze. He managed, "Look around, for God's sake, Eberhardt. We can't stay down here. We'll suffocate."
General Eberhardt's voice was weary. "Your mask is secure against the smoke, sir."
Still staring at the ventilation grates, Albert Speer said, rather idly, his words lost in the tumult, "What's that new material? Chalk dust? Coming from the second set of vents."
Speer did not have long to wonder, and perhaps no one else belowground noticed the white powder.
At that instant, in the locked ventilator room, Sergeant Kahr dropped the match into the green pipe and slammed shut the cover.
The flour-air mixture in the pipes ignited. Fire roared through the syste
m.
The guard captain heard the muffled explosion, and turned from the ventilator room door to see fire pour out grates that lined both long walls of the bunker hallway, flame rushing into the hallway from six grates and spilling to the floor.
He opened the sprinkler valves at his station in the corridor, twisted both valves to their fully open position. A few drops of water came from overhead sprinklers, but nothing more.
"Extinguishers," yelled the guard captain. He pushed the nearest SS guard's shoulders and pointed at the door to the kitchen wing. The guard hurried through the door for them.
Fire pooled in the hallway beneath the grates, then spread across the floor like rushing water. A secretary screamed. Speer removed his jacket to try to douse one of the lakes of flame. A patch of rug caught fire. An orderly turned to run but knocked the gramophone off the table, and it shattered on the floor. The dog fled. Smoke was thick and choking. Fire crawled up the cement walls, blackening them. Flames leaped about, as if searching for combustibles. A gilded chair that had been under a grate was a ball of flame. The air temperature in the bunker rose quickly. More screams and confused shouts.
The guard captain punched the TeNo button on a wall box, then, not satisfied, lifted a telephone handset from the wall. He yelled into it, "We need fire and TeNo crews in the Führerbunker immediately." He listened a moment, then added, "I don't give a goddamn if your entire building just blew apart. I mean right now. This is no drill."
Eberhardt caught the guard captain's eye. Patches of fire were along the hallway and in many of the rooms. More fire coming from the grates. But perhaps this was the worst of it. The smoke was dense, but everyone had gas masks. With jack Cray outside, Eberhardt was still reluctant to order the bunker evacuated, despite the heat and smoke and turmoil. The guard captain understood, and nodded his agreement.