But Seyss only half heard him. His ear was still tuned to he internal chorus singing his certain doom. “I beg your pardon?”
“Barracks are down the path a ways,” continued Jameson. “Sorry ’bout the mistake. Good night, sir.”
“Yes, uh, good night then.” Seyss swallowed hard, finding his mouth parched and his feet bolted to the ground. A second passed and he retook possession of his faculties. A flag raising, Jameson had mentioned. The President was coming. He’d been too shell-shocked to ask where and when. He would make it a point to check first thing in the morning. Bending to zip up his duffel bag, Seyss replaced his cap, then hurried off to catch the others.
He lay on a cot, staring at the ceiling of his old room. Directly above him was a door, nailed to the ceiling by some hapless recruit in a hasty bid to patch a shell hole. The room no longer smelled of camphor and linseed but mildew and rot. The same shells that had ruined the ceiling had rent tremendous chunks of cement from the walls. Given the barracks’ location, it was a wonder it was standing at all.
Five hundred meters to the south ran the Teltow canal, the city’s outermost ring of defense. There, in the first days of April, Marshal Chuikov had lined up all his tanks and artillery, thousands of guns in all, and for three days rained shell upon shell into the city. A quick walk through the dormitory revealed that the Russians had stripped the place bare. Nothing of use remained. Not a toilet. Not a sink. Not a faucet or a doorknob. Not a chair. Not a lamp. Not a desk or a dresser. Nothing! Even the paint appeared to have bee chipped from the walls.
Locusts!
Seyss turned on to his side and tucked an arm under his head. Someone had scratched the number “88” into the wall. The numeral eight stood for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, and repeated, it meant “Heil Hitler”. Alone in the dark, he whispered the words, needing to hear them spoken aloud once more.
“Heil Hitler.”
And in that moment, the past rushed forward and grabbed him, a relentless assault of sound and vision that stirred his soul and quickened his heartbeat.
“Heil Hitler.”
A thousand jackboots slapped the concrete in perfect cadence, their immaculate thud resonating deep in his gut.
“Heil Hitler.”
The clipped tenor of the drill sergeant’s command set him at attention, while the crisp attack of the drummer’s tattoo promised him a share of his country’s imminent glory.
Seyss closed his eyes, but sleep refused to come. The certainty of his capture and the shock of his reprieve had left him unbalanced. He needed to focus his thoughts on the future, not the past. It was difficult. As far back as he could recall, there was only war or the prospect of it. Even in his heyday as his nation’s greatest sprinter, he’d looked forward to a career as a soldier. Now the war was lost and he was forced to consider what lay ahead, what lay beyond Potsdam. Beyond Terminal.
First thing tomorrow, he would inquire about the President’s visit. If Truman was coming into Berlin, he wanted to know where and when. The opportunity might be too good to pass up.
More important was the meeting scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning at Grosse Wannsee 24. The residence of Herr Joseph Schmundt, executive vice-president of Siemens and devoted member of the Circle of Fire. Seyss wished he’d arrived a day earlier so that he’d have had adequate time to reconnoiter the site. The ambush in Wiesbaden had left him cautious. The prospect of walking into an unknown building made him antsy. Maybe it was just a runner’s aversion to relying on others.
Regardless of his worries, he would have to go. He couldn’t expect to make his way to Potsdam and do his job without proper information about the security measures implemented to protect the Big Three. At a minimum, he needed to know the layout of the Cecilienhof, a floorplan of the homes where each leader was staying, their daily schedules, and if possible, a rota of the guards stating when they changed shifts. Most of all, he needed a failsafe route across the Russian lines and into the conference area. Egon Bach had promised him all that and more.
Drawing solace from his lack of choice, Seyss finally let himself relax. There was a certain comfort to be found in the absence of alternatives. Resignation, some might call it. Duty, others. Seyss preferred fate. It had the added allure of predestination.
“Heil Hitler,” he said again, this time silently. And falling into a deep sleep, he once more returned to the past, to an eternal moment when his life stretched promisingly before him, when his happiness lay in the wicked grin of an eighteen-year-old girl and the Fatherland teetered on the precipice of destiny.
Chapter 44
The Grunewald was a picture of controlled chaos.
A dozen trucks had arrived before them, a restless, belching column of iron and steel parked beside a grass beam deep in Berlin’s largest park. Engines growling, they disgorged their human cargo. The passengers, most of whom like Judge — or rather, Karl Dietrich — were former German soldiers in transit to their homes, fled from the trucks and milled about a dirt clearing, huddled gray figures drifting in and out of the thickening dusk. Judge estimated their number to be three hundred, maybe more. It was too dark to tell. He wondered why everyone was hanging around, why they weren’t legging their way through the surrounding forest back to home and family. A second glance supplied him the answer. A cordon of soldiers ringed the clearing, every man carrying a rifle at port arms.
Concerned, Judge looked closer. A dozen GIs walked among the Germans. They carried flashlights and billy clubs, the batons to lift suspicious chins and the lights to rake unshaven faces. They were singling out the bigger men; not the tall ones so much as the ones with some meat on their bones. Most had dark hair and a certain wideness of beam and for a terrifying moment, Judge thought they were looking for him. Word had spread that he’d passed himself off as a kraut, he told himself. He’d been an idiot to think he could get by unnoticed. The GIs prodded the larger men toward a fenced-in pen that Judge only then saw a hundred meters down the road. A few Germans resisted and the prodding turned nasty in a hurry. Shouts of pain and anger erupted from every corner of the clearing. The word “arbeitspartei” was uttered and Judge relaxed a notch.
It wasn’t a manhunt. It was an impress gang.
Ducking inside the truck, he kept a tight hold on Ingrid’s hand as the other passengers jostled past and jumped from the tailgate. A mild panic overtook him, a dreary mix of self-pity and anger. He didn’t have to worry about being captured, just being stuck in a work gang.
The shouting grew louder as scuffles began to break out all over. A whistle shrieked and many of the GIs abandoned the cordon to join the foray. Ten seconds later, the clearing had devolved into a tangled braid of khaki, green and gray. Judge figured that if he and Ingrid could slip along the side of their truck, then slide in front of its hood, they could make it across the road and into the impenetrable dark of the forest beyond. He explained the situation to Ingrid, then whispered, “Stay close. No matter what you do, don’t leave me.”
Judge threw a leg over the tailgate and jumped to the ground. Lifting a hand, he helped Ingrid down. Five feet away, a guard remained as immobile as a statue. Judge stepped toward him, asking in clumsy English, “What’s going on?”
“We need some men to build us a decent HQ,” answered the guard, his jaw moving under the helmet’s lip and nothing else. “You krauts are stupid not to cooperate. Where else you gonna get three squares a day? Move along, now.”