had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.
A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors.
It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the
eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human
expression of awe at the sight of largescale destruction. @tated by the
spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help
him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the
language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went
to work.
'Achtung!' they bellowed. 'Go home! Haue ah! 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@ubbed 'skinheads' because of their ritually shaven
scalpsswaggered 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 digi tized, 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
policethe 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 an 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 ev desert-something bilious
had shack on the edge of e Neg 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 offic@r 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.
