the Spree on the makeshift replacement for the old Kurfursten Bridge. On the other side of the Schloss the Christmas fair in the Lustgarten offered a second oasis of life and light, the carousels gaily circling against a backdrop of ruptured stone.
Another makeshift bridge and they were slaloming down Unter den Linden, twisting this way and that through the gathered piles of rubble. A mile in the distance, the silhouette of the Brandenburg gate was hardening against the night sky. As they crossed the almost deserted Friedrichstrasse, Russell began to believe they would make it.
His confidence was short-lived. There was something up ahead, something involving movement and vehicles, between Pariserplatz and the site of the vanished Adlon Hotel. Was it a checkpoint, or just some Soviet unit doing God knows what? He could see a brazier aflame by the side of the road, several soldiers warming their hands. Two jeeps and a truck were lined up beyond.
An officer had noticed them coming, and was striding out into the road, clearly intent on pulling them over.
Russell took in the scene. The brazier suggested the Russians had been here for a while, and there was no sign that they were expecting a gang of murderous American abductors — none of the soldiers were taking cover or reaching for rifles. ‘It’s just a routine check,’ Russell told Halsey. ‘Let me handle it.’
They were about a hundred metres away now, and Vinny’s foot was easing down on the brake.
‘No,’ Halsey said suddenly. ‘Don’t stop. Drive on through.’
There was no time to argue the pros and cons. Vinny did the best job he could, slowing down enough to lull the Soviet officer into a false sense of security, then ramming his foot through the accelerator. The Russian jumped aside a second too late, and cried out in pain as the wing struck his trailing leg.
The soldiers were lunging for their rifles now, and Russell hunched himself down in his seat, waiting for the first whining bullet, blessing the fate which had put him in front. It seemed an age, but then there was a sudden volley of shots, and a cry of pain from behind him. They were crossing Pariserplatz now — another hundred metres and they’d be in the British sector.
More single shots rang out, and then a burst of automatic fire. A spray of liquid bathed the back of Russell’s neck, and something heavy dropped onto his shoulder. He felt the slight shift of light as they ran under the Brandenburg Gate and into the Tiergarten. The shooting had stopped.
Vinnie pulled the jeep to a halt a few hundred metres down the Chaussee, and helped Russell get out from under the body. Halsey had taken a bullet through the nose, and bits of his brain were everywhere.
Schreier was dead as well, still clutching his photograph. He had taken two bullets in the centre of the back.
A heartfelt ‘fuck’ was Vinny’s comment on the situation. He lit a cigarette and stood there gazing out across the darkened Tiergarten.
George just shrugged, like he’d seen it all before.
Looking at the dead Halsey, Russell realised he couldn’t care less. Which was a sobering thought.
The face in the cab
Russell stared out at the city below. It was probably Leipzig, which from this height looked deceptively intact. He remembered Goebbels going there and giving one of his pep talks, spouting off amidst suitably Wagnerian ruins. Victory or Siberia! It hadn’t taken a genius to work that one out, even then.
He still felt worried about leaving Effi, despite all her protestations. In the war she’d learned to take care of herself — that was what she’d told him. And he knew it was true, up to a point; these days she took time to consider, rather than jump straight in. But there were a lot of careful people pushing up daisies.
The plane lurched again, and he told himself he’d be better advised worrying about his own safety. The way the DC3 rattled, it was easy to imagine the plane shaking itself to pieces on the ground, let alone in the winds now raging over Germany. The Soviet fighters which had shadowed the early part of the American flight had long since scurried back to base.
Their pilot announced that they were crossing the zonal border, and the turbulence abruptly vanished, as if it had been a Russian trick. Or perhaps the Americans had found a way of calming the winds. They had to be good at something.
He closed his eyes and re-ran his last meeting with Scott Dallin. The American had been furious. A dead chemist, a dead operative, the Soviets already raising merry hell with his superiors. All of which had been bad enough, but what apparently galled him most was the fact that he couldn’t blame Russell. Vinny and George had obviously corroborated his own version of the events, and correctly identified Halsey as the author of his own demise.
‘I think you’ll find he was on something,’ Russell had told Dallin. ‘If you bother to look.’
‘On something,’ Dallin had echoed, as if Russell had chosen the wrong preposition.
‘Drugs. Uppers of some sort. Cocaine would be my guess. You can get it at any nightclub.’
‘We should close them all down.’
Russell had let that pass — if Dallin had his way, he’d have razed what was left of the city. His hero was probably Tamerlane. He had never bothered with occupations.
He smiled at the thought. At least Dallin had raised no objection to his trip. On the contrary, he had seemed only too pleased to have him out of the way.
Russell wondered how the Americans would placate the Soviets. By giving them Halsey’s head on a plate, most likely. Metaphorically speaking. If the boy had parents they were in for a shock. Death and disgrace.
He closed his eyes again, and let the throb of the engines lull him to sleep. He was only expecting a nap, but when he finally woke more Soviet fighters were riding shotgun on either side of the Dakota, patrolling the skies above their Austrian occupation zone.
Half an hour later they were down, and taxiing to a halt outside the Schwechat Airport terminal building. Austria and Vienna, like Germany and Berlin, had been divided into four occupation zones, and Schwechat had fallen inside the capital’s British sector, but civilian planes of all four powers were using the runway and other facilities.
The entry formalities were just that, and Russell’s progress was only halted by the lack of a taxi or bus. On Sundays, it seemed, arriving civilians were expected to walk the eight kilometres to the city centre, and it was more than an hour before he managed to cadge a lift in a British Army jeep.
After a twenty-minute drive along mostly empty roads the driver dropped him off in the Stephansplatz, at the heart of the inner city. Russell had made several trips to Vienna in pre-Anschluss days, but the current city bore little resemblance to the one he remembered. Many of the hotels had been destroyed, and rooms were at a definite premium. It took him an hour to find one that was empty, and half an hour more to find one he could afford. This hotel was on Johannesgasse, and almost in one piece, the staircase climbing past a boarded-over rip in the wall, through which the cold wind literally whistled. His room was fine, apart from the lack of hot water.
Feeling peckish, he went out looking for a cafe. Vienna’s centre looked in better shape than Berlin’s, but not by much. There were the same, precarious-looking, lattice-like facades, the same inner walls with their scorched decorations exposed to the world. Fewer of them, perhaps, but more than Russell had expected. Either the Austrians had been daft enough to put up a real fight or the Russians had just felt like breaking things. Or both.
He eventually found a small bar. The interior reminded him of days gone by, but the same wasn’t true of the coffee. There was no heating, so at least the windows were clear of steam. He sat there for half an hour, watching well-wrapped people trudge past, all looking grim as the weather.
As he walked back down Karntner Strasse towards his hotel a jeep drove by in the opposite direction. It was flying the flags of the occupying powers, and carrying soldiers in all four uniforms. Russell had read about these international patrols in the English papers, and he wondered again how the French and Russians could bear it. A soldier’s life, as he knew from the trenches, was one long stream of banter, and here they were spending their days with no one they could talk to.
