When Marlene left the apartment, tears were pouring from her eyes. She went out the front way, careful not to bang the iron gate at the top. It was dusk. It would be dark very soon.
She stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street.
Very few bombs had hit this street, so she could almost pretend that there was no war, that the city around her was not mostly destroyed. She could pretend that her man was back in their apartment, sleeping after a hard day’s work. She could pretend that she was simply on her way to the market to pick up some fresh meat, perhaps some potatoes, a little lettuce, a few freshly baked rolls … Why had it turned out this way? How in God’s name had she been reduced to this?
Stiffling a sob, she headed up toward Konigs Allee, the heels of her last decent pair of shoes clattering on the pavement, her heart hammering in her chest.
She had only two choices. Certainly, remaining in the apartment with Dieter until the end for them came was not a viable option. It left her only the Resistance or the SS. She had had no problem with her choice.
The big man whom she knew only as Bernard suddenly appeared from the doorway of a partially bombed-out ruin of a building.
Her heart leaped into her throat. Her hand went to her mouth.
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
“You have found him for us, Fraulein?” the man said. He had a pleasant voice. But it was obvious he was weary.
She had done a lot of work for the Resistance over the past months. She had associated herself with any SS or Wehrmacht officer she could get close to, reporting back to Bernard whenever she had learned something. It was why she had sought out and attached herself to Schey. Until now, though, she had not had the courage to tell the Resistance about him. Somehow, despite herself, she had fallen in love with him.
“Yes,” she said timidly. She kept walking. The man had taken her arm. It looked as if they were husband and wife, out for a stroll during the lull in the bombing. It was not an uncommon sight.
“Yes, where is he?”
God help her …“In my apartment,” she said. “He is wounded.”
The man stopped her, a play of emotions across his face. “Do not go back to your apartment, Fraulein. Find someplace else to live. There are plenty of apartments empty in Berlin now. The war will be over in a matter of days, in any event.”
“What are you going to do? …”
The man pulled out a package from his coat pocket and handed it to her. They were captured American C rations. A lot of SS officers would have paid in gold for the food.
“The SS are looking for him,” she blurted, taking the food.
She felt so damned guilty.
“What for?”
“They think he has deserted.”
The man smiled. “Just go away now, Fraulein. If we need you, we will find you.” He turned and walked off in the opposite direction.
Marlene watched him go, and then she held the C ration package tightly against her breasts, and her mouth began to water. God help her, she was so hungry.
The Westland Lysander’s big Bristol Mercury engine made all normal talk impossible. Deland, dressed in olive drab coveralls over his SS colonel’s uniform, sat back in his seat, his eyes closed, although he was far from sleep. He wore a headset which connected him to the pilot. There was no one else with them.
It had been a fairly routine flight over the channel, then across Holland and into Germany. There weren’t many Luftwaffe planes up in the air any longer. There had been reports of a new-type, very fast German aircraft called a jet. But there weren’t many of them, and in the two days he’d spent in England, waiting for the weather to clear, Deland had heard that Allied bombers had taken care of the factories that made the special fuel the new jets required.
He had gone over the operation plans a hundred times in a briefing room at Tempsford in Bedfordshire, outside of London.
He was to be dropped in a field outside the village of Nauen, about twenty miles west of Berlin. It would be up to him to make his way into the tiny town where he would be met by one of the leaders of the Resistance who would provide him with the initial intelligence and his transportation. Schey had been spotted somewhere in Charlottenburg. It was going to make the job much easier. Charlottenburg was wide open, and it was to the west.
Deland never stopped to ask why, if Schey had been spotted in the Berlin suburb, the one who had spotted him didn’t go in and do the job. He was afraid of the answer he would get.
“Hey, Joe,” the pilot’s voice blared in the headset. “You about set back there, mate?” They were called the Moon Squadron out of Tempsford, and the agents they had been dropping into France and Germany and Denmark from the very beginning were all called Joe.
Deland sat up with a start. The pilot was grinning over his shoulder at him. Deland smiled and gave him the thumbs-up sign.
“Okey-dokey then; we’re just a couple of minutes to the drop zone. You can open the gate about now.”
Deland pulled the headset off and laid it aside, then undid his seat belt and pulled himself across to the port-aft perspex window and undid the latch. The cold, howling gale filled the cabin, and Deland reared back, flopping into his seat. He reached down and fumbled with the straps holding his parachute. When he had them secured, he picked up the headset.
The pilot was looking at him. His voice came over the
