The Isis Covenant (16 page)

‘You know you asked me what was wrong before?’ She kept her voice casual and her eyes fixed on the Reichstag dome. ‘Well, there are a couple of hot-looking chicks taking an awful lot of interest in us.’

‘That happens to me all the time. Do you think they’re following us?’ He smiled at her and turned to where two young blonde women in tailored jackets and tight jeans stood twenty yards away, openly staring at them.

‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘they were at the airport. In the next carriage on the train, got off at the same station and followed us here from the hotel. What do you think?’

He ignored her sarcasm. ‘I think this is a popular place. Maybe they’re staying at the hotel.’

‘Sure and they followed us across the bridge and then back over the footbridge and never took their eyes off us the once.’

‘What do you want to do about it?’

Very deliberately, she looked the two women over. ‘I don’t take them for killers and besides, this isn’t the place you’d choose for it. Being the political heart of Berlin it has to be crawling with undercover cops. I figure that either they’re very dumb or they’re very badly trained in surveillance, or they wanted us to see them. Whichever is right, I think the professional thing to do is to go and ask them.’

‘Well, let’s do it.’

They started to walk towards the two girls, but without changing expression, the pair walked quickly away in the direction of the Reichstag. Jamie and Danny ambled to a halt and watched them go.

‘You want to follow them?’

He shook his head.

‘If they don’t want to speak to us, they don’t want to speak to us.’

‘And they might be leading us into an ambush.’ She smiled.

He smiled back. ‘That too.’

‘Hey, you said you were going to show me the Berlin Wall.’

He led her towards the Reichstag and as they crossed
an
area of tarmac in front of the building he pointed to the ground.

She studied the area he indicated. ‘That’s it?’ she said incredulously. ‘That’s the Berlin Wall?’ She was looking at a twin line of bricks running to left and right.

‘That’s it. There are still a few small sections standing, but most of it was wiped off the landscape, if not the map.’

Danny Fisher shook her head. ‘Well, I guess we should go back to the hotel and do some of that freshening up.’

‘I guess we should at that, young lady.’

She punched him on the shoulder. ‘And later I want to see a bit of this fabled Berlin nightlife.’

‘I’m pretty sure we can arrange that, but we can’t be back too late.’

‘And why would that be?’ she demanded.

‘Because tomorrow we’re going to do what we came for. We’re going to see a man about a crown.’

XIX

I STOWED THE
Crown in my rucksack and attempted in vain to follow Hartmann’s trail. Every road or alley I tried was blocked by either a Russian patrol or a Wehrmacht defence line. The artillery fire was almost constant now, with the whip-crack of the high-velocity Soviet tank guns much closer than before and Russian bombers flying low over the city entirely unmolested. Explosions rocked the ground and smoke filled every street. As I ran between the shell bursts I raged at Hartmann’s betrayal. The Crown of Isis was my sacred responsibility. Without the Eye would the Crown retain its power? Little by little I was forced back towards the bunker and found myself in Wilhelmstrasse. I took a last chance to search the rooms again, in the unlikely hope that Hartmann had hidden the jewel there before he fled, but found nothing. Close to despair, I stocked up on what supplies I could and prepared to head back towards the Reichschancellery. It was
as
I was leaving that I came across the boy
.

He was hunched in a doorway, terrified, a handsome blond child of not more than eight years old. Tears streamed down his face and he didn’t look up when I crouched beside him
.

‘
Where are your parents?
’

He shook his head
.

‘
Do you have somewhere to stay?
’

Again the shake of the head. I searched in my pack until I found some captured American chocolate and tore the wrapping from it
.

‘
Here, try this.’ His eyes widened as the scent of the sweet cocoa reached his nostrils. He snatched the chocolate and crammed it into his mouth as if he never expected to eat again. Gradually, a smile wreathed his face. ‘What is your name?
’

‘
Kurt
.’

I held out my hand. ‘Well, Kurt, come with me. I have somewhere you will be safe from all this
.’

His hand felt soft and warm in mine as I led him back to the apartment
.

When it was done, I felt nothing. It was confirmed. Without the Eye, the Crown of Isis was just a golden ornament. Hartmann had destroyed me and I vowed that I would hunt him down if it took until the end of time
.

There was no question of attempting to get out of the city alone. The only people with the power to escape the cauldron of fire that Berlin had become were the men in
the
bunker. With a heart like stone I trudged back through the rubble to rejoin Adolf Hitler
.

No one questioned my absence; only a madman or one of the true faithful would seek refuge at the gates of hell. Inside, a lethargy hung over the occupants that had not been there a few hours earlier. Then, it seemed, hope still existed, however unlikely, of a rescue by Wenck’s Twelfth Army. Now, that hope was gone. Hitler had already sent out messengers with copies of his last will and testament and Rattenhuber, who was almost affable, revealed that the party’s Golden Pheasants were planning their escape, even as they were exhorting the men of the Berlin defence to fight to the last man
.

‘
You should join them, Dornberger,’ he said. ‘Break out and link up with Schorner
.’

I talked with Colonel Weiss, aide to General Burgdorf, and he said he would be glad to accept me, but when I heard his plan to find some kind of silent electric boat and sail to freedom down the Spree I knew that I was talking to a lunatic. I decided to stay where I was and wait for a better opportunity
.

Sometime in the night I woke under a table as a nervous little man in a brown uniform and a Volkssturm armband was led past and into Hitler’s private quarters
.

‘
What’s happening?’ I asked my companion, an SS doctor called Stumpfegger
.

‘
The boss is getting married.’ He grinned and the glaze in his eyes told me he was either drunk or taking
his
own medicine. ‘Do you think he’ll take us on honeymoon with him?
’

A few minutes later the bride and groom emerged into the conference room to be congratulated by Bormann and Hitler’s generals. It was the first time I had seen Eva Braun. Despite the circumstances, she was radiant in a black silk dress, cheerful and animated with a word for everyone. The Führer, his face lined and grey, looked more like a harassed father than her husband. In the hours after the wedding the air in the bunker grew thick with tension. SS and Wehrmacht officers vomited where they lay and the stench from the toilet block was intolerable. Everyone knew that the Russians were only a few blocks away. The next act in the tragedy would soon begin. In the meantime we could only wait
.

Stumpfegger was a friend of Bormann’s and I never strayed far from his side. If any man could get out of Berlin alive, it was Foxy Martin. But at around noon on the day after the wedding Rattenhuber approached me and gave me another job
.

‘
Take two men and go with Kempka. Just do as he says and don’t ask any questions
.’

Erich Kempka was Hitler’s chauffeur and a coarse brute of a man, he led us back up the stairs and across the garden towards the Reichschancellery garage. The carcass of a German shepherd had been thrown carelessly beneath a bush beside the path. I recognized the dog as Hitler’s favourite pet
.

‘
Poor old Blondi,’ Kempka muttered. ‘Leading the way to the fucking Fourth Reich
.’

Inside the garage, gasoline cans were stacked high beside four big Mercedes limousines
.

‘
We need at least twenty,’ Kempka ordered. ‘Take them across and stack them beside the entrance
.’

‘
What are they for?’ demanded one of the SS men
.

Kempka looked at the guard as if he was an idiot and shook his head. ‘Don’t fucking ask
.’

For me, these events held no mystery. Petrol in an open space meant only one thing. I remembered the stench of decomposing bodies in a Ukrainian field; the careless unfinished business of a sonderkommando. Men, women and children. Jews. Skin stripping from the arms and legs as the militia carried them to the funeral pyres. Leaping flares of gas from exploding stomachs. Blackened long-dead figures writhing in the flames as if they were still alive. The all-pervading odour of roasting meat
.

‘
Right,’ the chauffeur said when we had finished. ‘Let’s get back inside
.’

Downstairs, we were cleared from the lower bunker to leave Hitler and Eva Braun with the men who had been with him right from the start. Bormann, Magda and Joseph Goebells and Artur Axmann, the one-armed Hitler Youth leader, who had appeared at the Führerbunker with his usual immaculate timing. About forty minutes later one of the SS door guards appeared in the upper complex and announced drunkenly to his
disbelieving
audience: ‘The chief’s on fire. Do you want to come and have a look?
’

In the nightmare that was the last hours of the bunker nothing was too surreal. Hitler’s death reinvigorated Bormann, who issued orders to non-existent armies and made his plans to break out to join the new Nazi government that had been formed by Admiral Donitz. He cheerfully announced that his first act would be to order the execution of Himmler. At the same time as he was telling his soldiers to fight to the last man, he ordered General Krebs to cross the lines and organize a ceasefire. In contrast, Goebells and his wife wandered the corridors like ghosts, their last link with reality gone. At some point during the late afternoon Stumpfegger came to sit at my side. He lit a cigarette and it shook between his fingers
.

‘
That’s it. They’re all gone,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to do it, but they said I had no choice
.’

‘
Who’s gone?
’

‘
Goebells and Magda.’ I shrugged. I had never liked the crippled little bastard and his harpy of a wife. He continued: ‘The children died first. One by one in their beds. Poison. Magda insisted.’ He started sobbing, which was odd for a man whose name was notorious for the experiments he had conducted at Ravensbrück concentration camp. What were a few children more or less?

I muttered some insincere consoling words
.

‘
You’re a good fellow, Dornberger.’ He patted me on
the shoulder
and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Stick with me. We’re going out tonight. Bormann, Mohnke and a few others. Mohnke has arranged tank support
.’

I was going to survive
.

We were due to leave at 9 p.m., but there was so much confusion that it wasn’t until two hours later that we gathered in the main entrance, Bormann, Mohnke, their aides and the secretaries. Bormann carried his machine pistol as if it was a feather duster and his fat form looked ridiculous in a combat uniform and a steel helmet. He made a little speech about sticking together and how everyone would be rewarded for their loyalty when we reached safety. No one believed him
.

By what route, I never knew, but somehow we made our way through streets raked by an apocalypse of shell and small arms fire until we reached Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. Somewhere along the way we had lost Mohnke and most of the secretaries, but no one, least of all Bormann, cared about that. The night was carved apart by tracer fire and every now and then terrified faces were lit by the flashes of explosions. It was 1 May and Germany was dying
.

Word of the planned break-out had spread and hundreds of soldiers and civilians crouched in the lee of our ‘tank support’; a single Tiger and a Sturmgeschütz IV assault gun that were to lead the attack on the Weidendammer Bridge across the Spree. I wished I had gone with Mohnke
.

Without warning, the Tiger roared out of hiding and
across
the bridge, blasting away as it went with 88 m cannon and machine guns. Astonishingly, it caught the Ivans half asleep and smashed through the first Soviet barrier. Bormann and the rest of the bunker escapees held back and then made a mad rush in the Tiger’s wake. An almighty clang rang out and the big tank first stopped, then burst into flames, eviscerated by an armour-piercing round. The uniforms of the surviving crewmen smouldered as they baled out onto the street. Machine guns opened up, mowing them down as they tried to escape, before turning their barrels on the desperate SS men, landsers and the women and children who sought their illusionary protection. Bodies tumbled like skittles and broke apart in a storm of lead and steel. A thousand must have been killed or wounded in those first minutes. I was knocked over by the blast that destroyed the Tiger, along with Bormann and Stumpfegger, but somehow we survived the holocaust of fire. I saw Axmann go down wounded. He recovered quickly, and staggered to his feet
.

Three more times we tried to break through, three more times the slaughter was repeated and the assault gun joined the Tiger as a glowing heap of twisted scrap iron. By now the SS men had forced a way across the bridge, but we were caught in a rat trap. I found myself with Bormann; Axmann, who was still bleeding from his wound; Stumpfegger, the doctor, and the Reichsleiter’s dark-haired secretary, Else Kruger. At Bormann’s insistence, we headed west, until we reached
the
Lehrtersstrasse Bahnhof. Axmann, who was no fool, decided to go it alone and set off north. I was tempted to accompany him, but I convinced myself there was safety in numbers and we headed north-east along the railway tracks. It seemed that by some miracle we had discovered a safe path through the fighting that raged like a brushfire all around us. But the illusion only lasted seconds. A sudden flicker in the darkness ahead and Stumpfegger went down with a terrible cry, torn apart along with Bormann by the burst of machine-gun fire that scythed through the party. I felt the heat of passing tracer rounds to left and right as I hurled myself to the ground and heard a clatter as something metal hit one of the tracks. Else Kruger lay beside me, still as death, but I could see from her breathing that she was unhurt. Slowly and silently we began to crawl away backwards. She gave a sharp cry and I thought she must have been hit. But when I turned, I saw that the Crown of Isis had fallen from my pack. She was holding it and staring in wonder
.