Spandau Phoenix. Greg Iles
Читать онлайн книгу.
the language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went to work.
“Achtung!” they bellowed. “Go home! Haue ab! This area is clearly marked as dangerous! Move on! It’s too cold for gawking! Nothing here but brick and stone!”
These efforts convinced the casually curious, who continued home with a story of minor interest to tell over dinner. But others were not so easily diverted. Several old men lingered across the busy street, their breath steaming in the cold. Some feigned boredom, others stared openly at the wrecked prison or glanced furtively at the others who had stayed behind. A stubborn knot of young toughs—dubbed “skinheads” because of their ritually shaven scalps—swaggered up to the floodlit prison gate to shout Nazi slogans at the British troops.
They did not go unnoticed. Every passerby who had shown more than a casual interest in the wrecking operation had been photographed today. Inside the trailer being used to coordinate the demolition, a Russian corporal carefully clicked off two telephoto exposures of every person who remained on the block after the German police moved in. Within the hour these photographs would find their way into KGB caserooms in East Berlin, where they would be digitized, fed into a massive database, and run through a formidable electronic gauntlet. Intelligence agents, Jewish fanatics, radical journalists, surviving Nazis: each exotic species would be painstakingly identified and catalogued, and any unknowns handed over to the East German secret police—the notorious Stasi—to be manually compared against their files.
These steps would consume priceless computer time and many man-hours of work by the East Germans, but Moscow didn’t mind asking. The destruction of Spandau was anything but routine to the KGB. Lavrenti Beria himself, chief of the brutal NKVD under Stalin, had passed a special directive down through the successive heads of the cheka, defining the importance of Spandau’s inmates to unsolved cases. And on this evening—thirty-four years after Beria’s death by firing squad—only one of those cases remained open. Rudolf Hess. The current chief of the KGB did not intend to leave it that way.
A little way up the Wilhelmstrasse, perched motionless on a low brick wall, a sentinel even more vigilant than the Russians watched the Germans clear the street. Dressed as a laborer and almost seventy years old, the watcher had the chiseled face of a hawk, and he stared with bright, unblinking eyes. He needed no camera. His brain instantaneously recorded each face that appeared in the street, making associations and judgments no computer ever could.
His name was Jonas Stern. For twelve years Stern had not left the State of Israel; indeed, no one knew that he was in Germany now. But yesterday he had paid out of his own pocket to travel to this country he hated beyond all thought. He had known about Spandau’s destruction, of course, they all did. But something deeper had drawn him here. Three days ago—as he carried water from the kibbutz well to his small shack on the edge of the Negev desert—something bilious had risen from his core and driven him to this place. Stern had not resisted. Such premonitions came infrequently, and experience had taught him they were not to be ignored.
Watching the bulwarked prison being crushed into powder, he felt opposing waves of triumph and guilt roll through his chest. He had known—he knew—men and women who had passed through Spandau on their way to the death factories of Mauthausen and Birkenau. Part of him wished the prison could remain standing, as a monument to those souls, and to the punishment meted out to their murderers.
Punishment, he thought, but not justice. Never justice.
Stern reached into a worn leather bag at his side and withdrew an orange. He peeled it while he watched the demolition. The light was almost gone. In the distance a huge yellow crane backed too quickly across the prison courtyard. Stern tensed as the flagstones cracked like brittle bones.
Ten minutes later the mechanical monsters ground to a screeching halt. While the senior British officer issued his dismissal orders, a pale yellow Berlin city bus rumbled up to the prison, headlights cutting through the lightly falling snow. The moment it stopped, twenty-four soldiers dressed in a potpourri of uniforms spilled into the darkening prison yard and broke into four groups of six. These soldiers represented a compromise typical of the farcical Four Power administration of Spandau. The normal month-long guard tours were handled by rota, and went off with a minimum of friction. But the destruction of the prison, like every previous disruption of routine, had brought chaos. First the Russians had refused to accept German police security at the prison. Then—because no Allied nation trusted any of its “allies” to guard Spandau’s ruins alone—they decided they would all do it, with a token detachment of West Berlin police along to keep up appearances. While the Royal Engineers boarded the idling bus, the NCO’s of the four guard details deployed their men throughout the compound.
Near the shattered prison gate, a black American master sergeant gave his squad a final brief: “Okay, ladies. Everybody’s got his sector map, right?”
“Sir!” barked his troops in unison.
“Then listen up. This ain’t gate duty at the base, got it? The Germs have the perimeter—we got the interior. Our orders are to guard this wreckage. That’s ostensibly, as the captain says. We are here to watch the Russians. They watch us; we watch them. Same old same old, right? Only these Ivans probably ain’t grunts, dig? Probably GRU—maybe even KGB. So keep your pots on and your slits open. Questions?”
“How long’s the gig, Sarge?”
“This patrol lasts twelve hours, Chapman, six to six. If you’re still awake then—and you’d better be—then you can get back to your hot little pastry on the Bendlerstrasse.” When the laughter died, the sergeant grinned and barked, “Spread out, gentlemen! The enemy is already in place.”
As the six Americans fanned out into the yard, a green-and-white Volkswagen van marked POLIZEI stopped in the street before the prison. It waited for a break in traffic, then jounced over the curb and came to rest before the command trailer steps. Instantly, six men wearing the dusty green uniform of the West Berlin police trundled out of its cargo door and lined up between the van and the trailer.
Dieter Hauer, the captain in charge of the police contingent, climbed down from the driver’s seat and stepped around the van. He had an arresting face, with a strong jaw and a full military mustache. His clear gray eyes swept once across the wrecked prison lot. In the dusk he noticed that the foul-weather ponchos of the Allied soldiers gave the impression that they all served the same army. Hauer knew better. Those young men were a fragmented muster of jangling nerves and suspicion—two dozen accidents waiting to happen.
The Germans call their police bullen—“bulls”—and Hauer personified the nickname. Even at fifty-five, his powerful, barrel-chested body radiated enough authority to intimidate men thirty years his junior. He wore neither gloves, helmet, nor cap against the cold, and contrary to what the recruits in his unit suspected, this was no affectation meant to impress them. Rather, as people who knew him were aware, he possessed an almost inhuman resilience against external annoyances, whether natural or man-made. Hauer called, “Attention!” as he stepped back around the van. His officers formed a tight unit beneath the command trailer’s harsh floodlamp.
“I’ve told anyone who’d listen that we didn’t want this assignment,” he said. “Naturally no one gives a shit.”
There were a few nervous chuckles. Hauer spat onto the snow. A hostage-recovery specialist, he plainly considered this token guard detail an affront to his dignity. “You should feel very safe tonight, gentlemen,” he continued with heavy sarcasm. “We have the soldiers of France, England, the United States, and Mother Russia with us tonight. They are here to provide the security which we, the West Berlin police, are deemed unfit to provide.” Hauer clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m sure you men feel as I do about this, but nothing can be done.
“You know your assignments. Four of you will guard the perimeter. Apfel, Weiss—you’re designated rovers. You’ll patrol at random, watching for improper conduct among the regular troops. What constitutes ‘improper conduct’ here, I have not been told. I assume it means unsanctioned searches or provocation between forces. Everyone do