"Where is he now?" Rode asked.
"He is assigned as a sniper, attached to the 56th Regiment."
"If this mission is as critical as you say, we must make the right choice. Let's send for him. Then we can decide."
"Yes," Gruber nodded thoughtfully. "But perhaps I will go find him myself." He gave a shout of summons, and Corporal Klein shouldered his way in against the warped door.
"When the raid has ended I will require a staff car."
The corporal shrugged. "We have none of our own, Herr Oberst. The last was taken this morning by a group of Gestapo officers. I can get on the phone —"
"Find something, you idiot!" Gruber shoved the files across his desk. "And secure these back in the safe."
Corporal Klein took the folders and headed out.
Chapter 2
The 56th Regimental Headquarters was easy enough to find, crammed into the rooms of a crumbling old school. From there, Gruber's difficulty began. No one seemed to know the man he sought. Captain Alexander Braun was recently attached to the unit, and here, organization was clearly beginning to deteriorate. The adjutant had lost all the regiments paperwork in a fallback two weeks ago. The commander, an old-school Prussian with a shell-shocked gaze, was limited to muttered frustrations about his units lack of fuel and ammunition. The soldiers themselves were mostly silent, a few bantering halfheartedly about drink, cigarettes, and women — the pursuits of those who expect life to be brief, Gruber mused.
He searched for twenty minutes before being directed to a grizzled sergeant who sat cleaning his weapon at a schoolboy's desk in a corner. As Gruber approached, the man eyed the unfamiliar, well-fed headquarters officer. Gruber let his rank insignia suffice for introduction.
"I am searching for Captain Alexander Braun."
The sergeant shrugged, then spit on a rag and polished the shoulder stock of his disassembled weapon. Gruber was in no mood for interservice trifling. He moved closer and hovered, his holstered Lugar obvious in its message. There were Russians to the east and Americans to the west, but here, in the last crumbling corners of the Reich, lay some of the most dangerous men.
The sergeant, who had himself likely not seen a cleaning in weeks, put down the rag and set the butt of his weapon on the ground. "Braun. Yes. He is out on sniper duty."
"When will he be back?"
"I cannot say, Herr Oberst. He has been out for three days."
"Three days! How can a sniper team operate for such a length of time?"
"Captain Braun has set his own rules in his short time with us. He comes and goes as he pleases. And he always sends his spotter back. A lone wolf, you might say."
Gruber's eyes narrowed, considering this. "But is he effective?"
"As a sniper?" The sergeant cocked his head indifferently. "He claims many kills, but without a spotter to confirm them — who can say?"
"I must talk to his spotter. Is he here now?"
The sergeant smiled.
The journey to the front was amazingly circuitous. The sergeant led Gruber through a never ending maze of broken stone and twisted metal. At times they paused for no apparent reason, ducking into a bomb crater or behind a wall. Gruber had not been this close to the enemy since his days in France during the Great War. He recoiled as his basal senses registered long-forgotten details — the staccato echoes of gunfire, the pungent smell of cordite interlaced with death.
The sergeant moved in quick bursts, running, crawling, jumping past exposed openings. Gruber's heart raced as he mirrored each movement, knowing that the second in line had to be quicker than the first. The Russians also had snipers.
They passed a perfectly good truck that looked like it had just rolled out from the factory, probably stilled for lack of fuel. The sergeant stopped behind the burned hulk of a Tiger tank, and he pointed to a collapsed structure. Even in ruin it maintained a height of three stories. Fallen sections lay at odd angles, and the surviving walls were carved stone, ancient and ornate before the bombs had done their work. By the architecture, and the heavy granite cross lying in the street, Gruber could see it had once been a church.
"This is the place," the sergeant said. He peered once around the corpse of the tank and darted into the ruins. Gruber followed, half expecting a shot to ring out as he covered the last few meters through no-mans-land. Once safely in the remains of the building, the sergeant eased his pace. He led over piles of stone, and weaved among rows of shattered wooden pews, finally stopping in a corner where the perpendicular wall joint seemed to have held. A thick rope led somewhere above, and the sergeant yanked it three times before rappelling upward. He reached a landing of sorts, twenty feet up, and motioned for Gruber to follow.
Gruber hesitated, then grabbed the rope and clambered his way up, slipping now and again as his feet scrambled for purchase in the pockmarked wall. Out of breath, he reached the landing, a darkened slab that gave way to what looked like a small cavern. There, a single room lay solid and intact against the church's collapse, a cloistered retreat in better times. The place would be indistinguishable from the outside, as if God had spared a small refuge in the house of worship, an invisible sanctuary where His work might still be done. But as Gruber's eyes adapted to the shadows of the place, he realized he would find no men of God here.
There was little more than a silhouette at first, just back from the lone window. A man sat casually in a chair, his legs stretched out to rest on a box, the boots crossed indifferently. At his side was a table with thin, delicate legs, and on that a bottle and a glass, both shaped to hold wine.
"I see you have brought a friend, my sergeant." The voice was deep, strangely relaxed.
"Yes, Captain. This is Colonel Gruber, of the SD. He insisted on seeing you."
The man rose and sauntered toward the newcomers. As he came closer, Gruber was not disappointed in what he saw. Braun was tall, approaching Gruber's own height, and thin, like most everyone these days, but wide at the shoulders. The hair was blond, well trimmed, and the uniform strangely clean and pressed, out of place in such a dusty warren at the front. He moved languidly, and as he stopped in front of Gruber, the junior officer did not bother to come to attention.
"You are a hard man to find, Hauptmann Braun."
Braun shrugged. "Here, this is a good thing."
Close in, Gruber saw the scar — perhaps two inches, straight back along the right temple and disappearing into the hairline. It had been in the medical records, a noted wound, but no explanation. Braun held out an arm, inviting him ahead.
"Can I offer you a glass of wine, Colonel? It is a true Bordeaux, I can tell you. The priests here were doing God's work in style." He poured a glass and offered it, seeming more a landed baron socializing after a fox hunt than a sniper laying in wait.
"No, thank you," Gruber said.
Braun shrugged and put the glass to his own lips, allowing it to linger as he savored the contents. He then began to drift across the room, his free arm arcing out to their surroundings. "This church was once one of the few balanced edifices in Berlin." He directed Gruber's attention above. "The pointed arch is firmly Gothic, yet the carvings are high quality and detailed, reflecting Italy and the Renaissance. Here it was done well, probably thanks to timing — perhaps the late sixteenth century, before the Thirty Years' War." He took another sample across his lips. "You'd be amazed at the degree to which architecture is influenced by history, Colonel, the unpredictable path of events. Do you know why our entire city now smells like a sewer?"
"Not exactly."
"Decades ago our engineers thought it efficient to integrate water and sewer lines directly into the structures of our bridges. This was before the era of mechanized warfare, before anyone could imagine that aerial bombardment would target lines of transport. Now you see the result." The sniper's eyes drifted to the ceiling in contemplation. "War and uprisings. Famine and plague.