General Rode and Major Becker strode past to the hallway, ignoring him. Next came the captain. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand, and after a brief pat of his pockets, he raised an engaging eyebrow. Klein found a book of matches on his desk and offered them up. The captain lit his smoke, nodded appreciatively, then flipped the matchbook back on the desk before disappearing.
Colonel Gruber was the last to emerge.
"Corporal!"
Klein stiffened.
"These will be destroyed. Immediately!" Gruber dumped a short stack of files on his desk.
"Yes, Herr Oberst."
"Then destroy the rest. Burn them all."
Klein looked over his shoulder into the walk-in safe. The steel door was ajar, and six sturdy cabinets sat filled with what must have been a ton of classified documents.
"But sir, to incinerate them all will take—"
"Stay all night if you must!" Gruber shouted. "But do these now!"
The colonel rushed back to his office and Klein stood frozen, realizing what this meant. The end was getting very near. He locked up the vault, which could not be left open in his absence, collected the stack of files on his desk, and headed down the hallway.
The incinerator was in a separate room, three doors down. It was always stoked these days, if for no other reason than to counter the bunker's cool dampness. The heavy iron receptacle was built into the wall and glowed at the edges. Klein used the hooked heel of a poker to swing the heavy door open. Inside, the embers glowed white hot, and he tossed in the top two folders, which were clearly standard personnel files, titled with names and rank. He used the poker to adjust their burn before tossing in another, not bothering to note the name. He stirred again as manila and paper turned to cinder, and Klein reflected on the prospect of staying up all night doing the same. Not great duty, he reckoned, but a lot of grunts stuck in freezing foxholes right now would be glad to trade.
Klein looked at the last two folders in his lap. One was yet another personnel folder, but the final one was different. Not a person, but a mission or code name of some sort. Again, Gruber's words came to him. Troubling, desperate words. Burn them all! Corporal Klein looked back at the room's open door. Someone could come at any minute. Someone from another office, perhaps executing a similar command from their own colonel. Burn them all! But certainly he would hear anyone approach, heavy boots stomping across the cold, stone floor.
Klein opened the top file and scanned it. He saw a photograph of the army captain whose cigarette he had just lit. A few facts about the man's background were underlined. He shifted to the other folder, a mission dossier of some sort. Code names, contacts. He began at the top, but then footsteps stole his attention away. They were getting closer, but still down the hall. Looking again at the papers, one code name seemed to recur, in bold type again and again. The steps came near, and with a flick of his wrist Klein sent both files spinning into the fire.
"Hey!" said a familiar voice from behind. Rudi, the overweight sergeant from across the hall, tossed his own stack past Klein and into the inferno. "Something else to keep you warm, dumbass." He cackled and left.
Corporal Klein knelt at the open incinerator door and gave things one more jostle with the poker. Strangely, he saw the name a last time, the bold type slowly giving way as flames licked it into oblivion.
He wondered what the hell it meant. Manhattan Project.
Chapter 3
The Third Reich, designed to last a thousand years, in fact collapsed after twelve. On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Fuhrerbunker. Admiral Karl Donitz was named as successor, but there was little to inherit. Sporadic pockets of resistance continued across Berlin, yet the Nazi chain of command had been shattered, and it soon became clear that the only remaining task of consequence was the formal surrender.
With few exceptions, the populace of Germany shifted its mind-set — from that of fighting a war, to mere survival in the face of a new order. Guns and ammunition were discarded, replaced in the hierarchy of needs by bread and potable water. Military uniforms and identification papers were burned or buried, and civilian replacements bought, stolen, and forged. Indeed, across Europe, millions of people, both victors and vanquished, began the awkward transition to a new life.
It was under camouflage of these distractions, two days later, that Major Rudolf Becker's boat departed at midnight, right on schedule. It was a tiny craft, eighteen feet of oak that looked like it might have been bent into shape a millennia ago. Black tar was slathered along the creases and joints, and there seemed precious little freeboard above the cold Baltic that was, at least for the moment, calm. The small German motor ran smoothly, though, as the boat pushed away from a rocky strand of coastline north of Rostock.
Becker was joined by three other SS officers and the boats captain, a weathered old Bavarian who had spent the war smuggling for whoever had the most money. The plan took them to Sweden, for a join-up with an emerging association of former SS men who had already coined their name — ODESSA.
The hopeful plans were good for thirty miles. Near the midpoint of their crossing, a thick fog set in. The group didn't see the larger boat approaching, but rather heard it first. When the huge silhouette appeared it was ominously close and headed right for them. The junior SS man, a lieutenant, reacted badly. He pulled his service pistol and fired five shots into the air. As a warning, the act was as impotent as it was rash. The little boat's captain gunned his tiny motor and screamed for the lieutenant to stop, but the damage had already been done.
Aboard the larger vessel, a 110-foot passenger ferry running mostly legitimate business, the Danish captain was high and alone in the wheelhouse when he saw the muzzle flashes, slightly ahead off the starboard bow. He leaned forward to the salt-rimed windshield and barely made out the silhouette of a tiny craft sitting low on the water, headed north.
Having run this route through most of the war, he knew the waters well. And he suspected he knew who might be firing at his ship from such a tiny craft. The captain considered that his few passengers were below, insulating themselves from the cold. He considered that his boat was high at the bow — a slight turn to starboard would shield the wheelhouse from anything more. And he considered his brother, who had been strung up with piano wire by Nazi thugs, unjustly labeled as a partisan. The ferry captain gave a half-turn to the wheel and bumped the throttles forward ever so slightly.
The collision was little more than a shudder to the ferry. Underneath, the tiny runner splintered into a hundred pieces. After the collision came the propellers. Major Rudolf Becker was the only one to survive both, but the miracle was short-lived, as he was also the only one who could not swim.
General Freiderich Rode was the next to try. From a safe house near Stralsund, he kept a midnight rendezvous with an Fi-156 Stork. The utility aircraft was every bit as ungainly as its name implied. Long wings and landing gear sprouted from a boxy fuselage, and the craft flew so slowly that it could be landed backward in a stiff headwind. Despite this lack of elegance, the Stork was very good at what it was designed to do — take off from unimproved strips in 150 feet, and land in half that. It was the perfect vehicle for covert insertion and extraction.
Rode had also chosen the northern route — across the Baltic, then into an isolated sector of neutral Sweden. It had already proven successful on two previous occasions. Unfortunately, this time there were delays. Engine difficulties, according to the pilot, who by default had become his own mechanic. The crafts airworthiness in question, Rode brooded through the predawn hours as the man turned wrenches and hammered against the contraption.