fifty rows of tiny soldiers could be seen, heads black as burnt matches, then disappearing in the orange-white inferno that raced hundreds of meters down the runway.
Suddenly the second Condor, in the process of braking, tires sparking, exploded, its four nose wheels collapsing, fuselage sliding along the tarmac like the chin of some huge dinosaur on black ice, plowing into the inferno of the first plane. In the near daylight intensity of the scene, as fire engines screamed, the Koreans atop the building three-quarters of a mile away could plainly see some Communist volunteer troops in the second Condor sliding down open ramps, most of them afire, others coming down into a fuel slick that ignited seconds later, the ribbing of the fuselage now stretched against the skin of the aircraft in an X ray of the plane, the roar like a thousand Christmas trees going up. There were no screams, or at least none that could be heard over those of the sirens. A tongue of flame like a ceremonial dragon’s shot out and around the rear cargo door of the second Condor, incinerating the remainder of the fleeing troops. Then the Koreans could hear a rattling sound, becoming louder as searchlights streamed out into the night like wildly flung straws darting over the West German apartments across the bulldozed remnants of the Wall. The rattle was the sound of machine-gun fire.
“Let’s go!” said Chin.
There was shooting all the way from Treptow, East Berlin’s most southerly suburb around the East German airport, to Pankow, East Berlin’s most northwesterly suburb sixteen miles away. Most of the shooting, however, was concentrated in Kreuzberg, from where the missiles had been fired.
Outside the apartment the big crowds that had been racing down from the back-street
“All here?” Chin asked in the darkness, the sky to the east glowing a soft pink.
Each man responded. They went down to the gray BMW. “All in?” Chin asked again.
“Yes.”
“Where are the cases?”
“The trunk.”
Chin told the agent driving to pull up on the first bridge over the Teltow Canal on their way back to the trade legation offices. But there were too many people about, mainly police cars, and so they went on to another bridge, where Chin got out and ditched the two missile launchers. “Switch off,” he told the driver. He listened for a moment, thinking he’d heard footsteps nearby, but now all he could hear was the cracking and pop of the small- arms fire. “Now, look,” Chin said, stamping his feet; it was damper and colder by the canal. “You’ve all done a first- rate job. I want you to know — well—” He paused, never having been one for sentimentality but wanting to convey to his men how satisfied he was with their performance. The four of them had volunteered even though they didn’t know all the details of the job.
He shot the driver first, the man immediately behind the driver second, and then the third man, trying to scramble out the back door. The man in the center was begging for mercy, his hands up high. “Don’t, sir—”
Chin stood back a little and shot him, trying not to get anything on his coat.
In a chain reaction all along NATO’s line, phones were ringing off the hook. Fighting had broken out in Berlin, and reinforced alert had become “general alert.” At Outpost Alfa, two hundred miles southeast of Berlin, Hans Meir, who, with an American, was manning the observation tower, the scene of Hitler’s Nazis crossing the Rhine Bridge clear in his mind, knew what to do. He was no less than Samson at the pass, only instead of the jawbone of an ass with which to beat back any breach of the “trace,” he had a direct line to Fifth Army Corp’s 120-millimeter artillery batteries behind him, ready to pulverize the Soviet and East German echelons, groups of five tanks, if they dared try to punch their way through. So far it was a quiet country night, broken only by the sound of an owl. Then Meir heard at least half a dozen dull thumps some miles to the east of him.
“What was that?” asked his American partner. There was a faint pinkish glow, the size of a tennis ball from where they were. Hans Meir didn’t hesitate. Lifting the phone, he rang Alfa HQ. He couldn’t get through, the line sounding like frying eggs.
In the main Alfa hut, a mile behind in a pine wood, they were trying to contact the Alfa tower, but all they heard was static on the line. It wasn’t a line in the old-fashioned sense of radio cables but rather the elaborate fiber-optics links that were on the blink. The fiber-optic system was thought to be impregnable against an EMP, electromagnetic impulse, the kind of shock blasts given off from a nuclear explosion, scrambling all sensitive electronic equipment from televisions to defense computers.
At NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, calls were coming in from pay phones from as far south as Burghausen in Bavaria to Fehmarn in Schleswig-Holstein in the north. All computers and fiber-optic radio links between Bonn and NATO HQ, as well as all those between armor/infantry, artillery, and air forces, including ground tremor sensors, had simply gone mad, spewing out nonsense that was only adding to the general air of confusion.
In the rain-slashed darkness around Alfa One, Klaus Meir and his army buddy, Johnny Malvinsky, were watching the gap when the American, his Bronx accent markedly different from Meir’s college-taught English, said something to Meir, who thought it sounded like “ruf.”
“Ruf?” Meir said.
“A ruf,” Malvinsky seemed to say. “It’s moving.”
“Where?”
Malvinsky handed him the infrared binoculars. “Two o’clock. By the rise near the barn.”
The American was right, but it wasn’t a roof, at least not a full-sized one, more like that of a small toolshed moving, the infrared’s scope picking up spotty thermals.
“What magnification is this?” asked Meir. They were still trying to call Alfa HQ since the order had come, taking them from “military vigilance” to “general alert.”
“Usual setting,” said Malvinsky. “I didn’t change it.”
At Alfa HQ the infantry troops had come through the door of the metal hut as if there were a fire, the lift-up counter slamming back, held down by the sergeant as he kept intoning, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” The M-1s were coughing once, then there was a deep, throaty purr, surprisingly quiet to infantry used to the old M-60 Patterns. No one questioned whether it was a drill or not. They’d get their butts kicked if they didn’t do it within the required time, and suffer restricted furlough as well. Outside as they moved beneath the pines into the Bradley armored personnel carriers, thirteen men apiece, the column started off for the trace near the tower.
Facing the Fulda Gap from the east, Meir’s and Malvinsky’s opposites, members of a squad from the East German Fourth and Soviet Thirty-ninth motorized rifle divisions, saw something moving along the plain through their infrared.
“Looks like an outhouse moving,” the East German told his Russian liaison officer. The Russian agreed, but the thermal images were spotty because of the light rain that had now started. In any event, the shape of whatever they were watching was much smaller than that of a tank. Besides, in regular radio “line,” rather than fiber-optic, contact with their headquarters, they would have been informed of any unusual traffic.
The farmer driving the tractor, like many others all along the front between East and West Germany, was one of those who had agreed to work farmland in and around the DMZ provided they were given special
“And how,” his wife had asked him, “do we get across the strip?” She meant the mines, many of which had been left in place after the West and Gorby’s Moscow had ended. He told her he had mounted a roller plow on the front with loose chains to act as flails. Nothing new about the idea. Old as the hills.
