Eva (23 page)

In the light from their lamps they saw two cots standing at one end of the chamber, heaped with army blankets. It was evident that the place was well stocked with all provisions necessary for comfortable survival.

Kotsch turned to them. “This is where you will stay,” he said. “And wait.”

“You will find everything you need,” his wife said. “I have seen to that. You will not be cold. It is always comfortable down here. A little damp, perhaps, but the temperature is always the same. I have left you a deck of cards. You can play
Skat,
perhaps. You will find food and drinking water over there.” She pointed. “And several two-pound cans of carbide for your lamps. And there are books for you to read.”

“Any Karl May?” Eva asked, in a pathetic attempt at gallows humor.

“Karl—May?”
Frau
Kotsch asked, puzzled.

“It is all right,” Eva said. “I—I was only . . .” She let the sentence die.

“I have also left you a calendar,” the woman continued. She walked over to a crate and picked up a large, wind-up alarm clock. She began to wind it.

“And this,” she said. “Down here time can be distorted. You must keep the clock going, and cross out the days on the calendar. That way you will not lose track of time.”

“How long will we be here?” Willi asked.

“We do not know,” Kotsch said. “They will inform us.”

“If it is more than three weeks,”
Frau
Kotsch added, “we will come to you. We will bring news and provisions. But, until then, it is best we leave you alone. We will not go near the caves.
Gott sei mit euch
—God be with you.”

They left; their spectral shadows malformed on the gnarly walls until they disappeared.

Willi and Eva stood staring at the cave which would be their home for the next few weeks. With all the comforts, with all the provisions, and with the safety it afforded it was still a dark, dank, and depressing place.

Eva shivered. She had felt claustrophobic in the confines of the terrible sewer. Here—with the weight of the earth above her—the crushing feeling was ten times worse. She felt threatened. Imprisoned.

The next three weeks would be a harrowing ordeal, she thought dismally.

But she and Willi both knew that their real ordeal lay ahead.

At the same hour, 350 miles to the north, a German staff car threaded its way through the dark, narrow streets of the old harbor town of Flensburg on the Danish border, bound for the submarine pens of the
Kriegsmarine
at the heavily damaged naval base. The streets in this, the last bastion of the dying Nazi Reich, teemed with soldiers and were jammed with military traffic.

After passing through checkpoints and barriers, the vehicle came to a stop at an undamaged berth. In the black waters under the leaden night sky rode a Type XXI, ocean-going,
Schnorckel-
equipped U-Boat.

A short, stocky man dismounted from the staff car. Hunched in a large SS leather greatcoat, the collar turned up, effectively concealing his face, he walked rapidly to the gangplank and boarded the submarine, disappearing into its bloated metal womb.

Below, in his cramped quarters,
Reichsleiter
Martin Bormann at once felt the crushing feeling of claustrophobia crowd in on him. Grimly he clenched his teeth against it. He forced himself to ignore it. How else would he cope, once underway, with the weight of an ocean above him? It would be a long voyage to Argentina.

As he felt the powerful engines throb to life with a deep, trembling rumble he gave a fleeting thought to Eva Braun Hitler and the insufferable young SS officer with her. He regretted having lost the Hitler fortune to which the girl had been the key, but he did not have to rely on it. He had seen to it that he would never want for anything. That, after all, was the only matter of importance. Not the resurrection of the Third Reich.

He had no doubt that Eva and the young man were lying dead in the streets of Wilhelmstadt—or swinging from a lamppost.

If not, they soon would.

There was no way they could survive.

C
IC AGENT WOODROW WILSON WARD
watched the long-legged, statuesque woman walk toward him, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. What a looker, he thought. She moves with the elegance of one of the three Graces. Thalia, of course. Who the hell but she could look like a goddess at 0700 hours in the morning—without makeup? He remembered being totally smitten when he saw her in the film
Destry Rides Again.
A couple of years before the war. Marlene Dietrich. Would anyone ever believe that
she
was serving him coffee at 0700 hours in the dingy dining room of a small hotel in Regensburg? Hell, no. But that didn’t matter.
He
knew.

Marlene handed him the coffee cup. “Good morning,” she said, smiling at him. Her husky voice caressed his ears. “Here is your coffee. I know you take it black.”

“Good morning,” he said. “Thank you.”

He watched her return to the coffee urn. Some woman, dammit!

When Corps had moved to Regensburg, CIC had set up shop in a small
Gastwirtschaft
next to a theater on Maximilianstrasse, and one day Marlene Dietrich had shown up. She was in the ETO, and had been for months, entertaining the troops. He remembered, back last October, somewhere in France—at Pont-à-Mousson just north of Nancy it had been—he’d attended a USO show starring Marlene Dietrich. In the middle of a song—from
Destry
—German artillery had opened up. It came in pretty heavy. And he remembered La Dietrich calmly saying: “We had better cut this show short, boys. The Germans know I am here. They don’t like me much, and I’m sure they’re firing at me! I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” So the show was cut short and the piano and sound equipment loaded on the truck, and it wasn’t more than five minutes later that the Krauts laid a shell right on top of the damned building, blowing it to smithereens! Marlene had been calm as a cucumber. Now that’s elegance!

Apparently she preferred staying with the CIC rather than in the Officers’ Guest Quarters up the street. And every morning, first thing, she was there to serve the agents coffee. She was obviously fascinated with investigation and interrogation work. And, of course, she spoke German fluently. So they’d let her question a few suspects, and he’d been impressed with her perception and astuteness. She was one bright lady—besides being the best-looking dame in the ETO—who made one helluva cup of coffee.

She was probably the closest he’d get to glamour—as in “five-pointer-glamour case,” he thought gloomily. As he’d feared, occupation duty had quickly settled down to a routine of chasing after garden variety Mandatory Arrestees and minor War Criminals. It was now over three weeks after V-E Day, and it was still the same. He sometimes had the feeling he’d have to go through the entire two-inch thick Mandatory Arrestee & War Criminals Wanted List all by himself before they’d let him go home.

His despondent thoughts were broken off when the field telephone rang. He picked it up.

“Ward,” he said. “CIC.”

“Hope I didn’t disturb your beauty sleep, Woody, my boy.” It was Major Hall, being disgustingly cheerful.

“Who needs sleep,” Woody grumbled. “I get enough of that on the damned job.”

“Well, get your ass over here,” Hall said. “I’ve got something I want to show you. I think it’ll give you a kick. And Woody, make it
now.
I’ve got to get this thing back where I got it.”

“Coming, Mother!” Woody wailed, imitating the inimitable Henry. He hung up.

Woody threaded his jeep across the railroad tracks near the demolished Albertstrasse
Bahnhof.
He bounced along a narrow path that snaked between deep bomb craters and corkscrew twisted rails, the result of plaster bombing attacks on the switching yards by the AAF. Actually, most of the picturesque old town of Regensburg had escaped damage by the Allied air raids which had been directed mainly against the Messerschmidt factories on the outskirts of town, against the shipping basins on the river and, of course, against the railroad marshaling yards, all of which targets had been almost totally destroyed. The only real damage to the inner city had been inflicted by the Germans themselves when they blew up the famous twelfth-century stone bridge, the
Steinerne Brucke,
in a futile attempt to stop the American advance.

Tooling down Landshuterstrasse toward Iceberg CP near the airstrip, Woody reflected on the leaflet guide to Regensburg put out by HQ. “From the dawn of history,” it had stated poetically, “man has found important reasons for a settlement at this spot where the Regen River joins the Danube, Europe’s longest waterway. Numerous traces of prehistoric Stone Age villages have been found and identified, some dating back about 5,000 years.”

Fifty centuries, he mused. No fly-by-night dump, this Regensburg. A history of richness and renown, according to the pamphlet, and certainly one of violence and war, carnage and destruction. From the savage raids against the early Celtic settlements and the pre-Roman community of Radespona; through the bloody Roman conquest and the fortification by Marcus Aurelius, who renamed this center of Roman power on the Danube, Castra Regina, and in A.D. 179 built the Porta Praetorius—parts of which he had seen, still standing; through the besiegement and capture by Charlemagne; the ravages and massacres of the Thirty Years War and the devastating defeat before Napoleon’s invincible troops; to the havoc wreaked by World War II, which once again had reduced large parts of the city to rubble and ashes.

He had read the pamphlet from cover to cover. He always got a wry kick out of those War Department publications with their neat TM numbers and official Distribution Instructions. It was as if the army were catering to a group of tourists rather than a bunch of foot-slugging GI Joes. Sightseeing information and historical commentary; cultural tips and language lessons in polite conversation: “Pardon me, gracious lady, while I arrest your husband.”

Iceberg CP, which once again reunited Iceberg Forward and Rear Echelons, was located in a group of large
Kasernen
—barracks—only two miles southeast of the CIC quarters in the city proper. Once occupied by the German 10th Mounted Artillery Regiment, the complex of gray stucco buildings was virtually undamaged. The office of Major Mortimer L. Hall, CO of CIC Det. 212 was on the second floor of CP Building No. 1.

Woody’s teammate, CIC Agent Jim Mahoney, was sitting in Major Hall’s office when Woody entered. He waved a bunch of papers at him.

“One ball!” he guffawed. “One helluva ball! Ain’t that a pisser?” He shook his head in hilarity.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Woody asked drily. “Your fraternization equipment?”

“The Führer,” Jim grinned. “The great Nazi superman. One ball!”

“What he is trying so eloquently to express,” Hall explained, “is that according to the Russian report of the autopsy performed on Hitler, the bastard had only one testicle.”

“Looked all over for the missing one, they did; couldn’t find the damned thing,” Jim choked. “I knew all the time the prick was half nuts!”

Woody took the report from him. “How the hell did you get that, Mort?” he asked.

“I saw it in the office of the AC of S, G-2,” Hall said. “Somehow they got hold of a copy. Unofficially. Maybe they pinched it from Krasnov’s files. Copied it. It’s strictly confidential. I’ve got to get it back, pronto. Before Streeter comes in. But I thought you’d like to see it before I do.” He glared at Mahoney. “I hadn’t counted on laughing boy, here, horning in.” He eyed Woody. “Didn’t you come up with some joker the other day who told you about the suicides? And the burnings?”

“Yeah. That SS refugee from the Führer Bunker.” Woody nodded. He began to look through the report.

“I can only let you have it a few minutes,” Hall said. “I don’t want to get my ass in a sling.”

Woody stared at the report. He was appalled. It made sickening reading. Children—six of them—the Goebbels kids, ranging in age from four to twelve, dead by cyanide poisoning, their mouths and tongues lacerated by the glass splinters from the ampules crushed between their teeth, their little bodies twisted in the convulsions of violent death . . . The roasted bodies of Joseph Goebbels and his wife, burned, charred almost beyond recognition . . . The bloated, uniformed corpse of a general, dead by poison, his face and shaven head splotched and discolored with the spots of
livor mortis
and gashed in the violence of his death throes . . . The incinerated bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun—or rather what remained of them after the conflagration had consumed them; Hitler, his fire-seared brain and dura matter visible in his skull, which was partly eaten away by the flames and with his scorched and crumbling scrotum encasing the single charcoal testicle . . . Eva, with almost the entire top of her cranium and her facial bones seared away, her mammary glands deformed and charred—she and the Führer both identified in the only way possible, through the remaining teeth and the dental work performed on them. Eva, through a special bridge with artificial teeth and Adolf, through the extensive work on the teeth in both his upper and lower jaw . . .