to his chest, he shook with the earth and tried to think of something beautiful. Madeleine came to mind, but she was dead. Another shower of human flesh.
When it became clear that the barrage was over, he stayed where he was, shaking gently to and fro, feeling the burn of uncried tears.
A few minutes later, walking aimlessly up the street, he came upon a young officer he hadn't seen before. The man was foaming at the mouth, talking gibberish, and several of his subordinates were standing there looking at him, not unkindly, but with a sort of grim impatience.
Both military policemen had been seriously injured. 'That'll teach 'em to get this close to the front,' one grenadier joked in Paul's hearing.
The Tigers were unscathed, their crews sufficiently humbled by their irrelevance to be moving out. The village would be abandoned, which seemed just as well, as there wasn't much left of it to defend.
The panzergrenadier lieutenant had also been slightly wounded, and the shock had apparently removed any inhibitions he had about taking charge. When darkness fell they would withdraw into the woods that lay west of the village, and try to shake off the Russians with a night march into the west. The Lightning Tower April 18 – 20 T he PS-84 transport rumbled down the sparsely-lit runway for what seemed an eternity, before bouncing itself hopefully into the sky. The four men glanced at each other, feeling, for the first time, the solidarity of danger shared. Even Kazankin gave Russell a rueful smile, and he was probably the designated executioner.
It had been a day of waiting, first for news of their inflatable boat, and then for departure. Their dinghy had eventually shown up somewhat the worse for wear, having collected two bullet holes crossing the Oder crossing. They'd been patched to Kazankin's satisfaction, and survived a trial inflation. There had been better news from the front – the German defences on the Seelow Heights had been penetrated, and Zhukov's tanks were on the last lap of their thousand-mile journey to Berlin. It seemed unlikely that they would reach the city in time for Lenin's birthday, but they were only a couple of days behind schedule.
These had been the day's high points – the four of them had spent most of the morning poring over maps, checking their equipment and endlessly rehearsing contingency plans for when things went wrong. Russell had then spent several hours watching the Soviet bombers run through their routine: taking off and heading south, returning two hours later for another bellyful of bombs, taking off again. There had been 80,000 Germans in Breslau when the Soviets surrounded the city in February, and each receding plane would subtract a few more. Like a fist that couldn't stop hitting a face.
Now, as their transport droned on towards Berlin, he wondered how badly the German capital had suffered. He had seen aerial photographs of the destruction, but somehow they hadn't seemed real, and whenever he imagined the city it was the old Berlin, the one he had lived in, that appeared in his mind's eye. The one that wasn't there anymore.
He would soon have a new picture. His task was to guide the team to the Institute that night, get them back before dawn to the safety of the Grunewald, then move them on to the Hochschule on the following evening. Their last stop, as Nikoladze had told him that afternoon, would be the railway yards outside Potsdam Station, where an underground cell of German comrades was still in contact with their Soviet mentors. They would hide out there until the Red Army arrived.
In case of accidents or misunderstandings, the members of the team had letters signed by Nikoladze sewn into their jackets. These testified that the holders were on an important mission for the NKVD, and demanded that any Red Army soldier who ran into one or all of them should both provide any necessary protection and immediately notify the relevant authorities.
In the meantime, there was the small matter of the Nazi authorities. How tight was their grip in these final days? One could hope that the demands of the front had thinned the police presence in Berlin, though it seemed more likely that all of the bastards would be needed to keep the population in order as the Russians approached. But who would be out on the streets – the Kripo, the military police, the SS? All of them? As Nikoladze had reluctantly admitted, their knowledge of the restrictions placed on foreign workers was several weeks old. Would the four of them be challenged as they made their way across the city, or simply taken for granted?
How easy was movement, come to that? Were any trains or trams still running, or had they been bombed to a halt? And if public transport continued to function, were foreign workers still allowed to use it?
Not to worry, Russell decided, as the plane took a sudden lurch – the parachute drop would probably kill him.
They seemed to be veering northwards now, and he thought he could detect the faintest of glows in the eastern sky. They'd been hoping for more, but the recently risen quarter-moon was concealed behind a thick layer of cloud, and the drop looked set to take place in almost total darkness. That might lessen the chances of their descent being spotted, but there didn't seem much point in arriving unnoticed with a broken neck.
The minutes ticked by. The pilot was under orders to draw a wide arc around the southern outskirts, in the sanguine hope that Berlin's air defences would all be narrowly focussed on the approaches used by the British. So far, it seemed to be working – no searchlights had leapt to embrace them, and neither flak nor fighter had sought to blow them away.
'Five minutes,' the navigator shouted from the cockpit doorway. Russell felt his stomach lurch, and this time it wasn't the plane.
Kazankin and Gusakovsky were instantly on their feet, checking their harnesses one last time. According to Varennikov, both men had served with the partisans, and had ample experience of landing behind enemy lines. He was in excellent hands, Russell reminded himself. Up until the moment that they no longer needed him.
Varennikov, he noticed, had lost his usual smile, and was tugging at his own harness with what seemed unnecessary violence. Kazankin took over, testing each strap, jollying the young physicist along. Satisfied that his charge was under control, he gestured Russell to his position at the front of the queue. A position that Russell realised was logical – jumping last, the two experienced men would have a better shot at working out where everyone was – but it still seemed a bit like punishment.
'One minute,' the navigator shouted.
The door was wrenched open and the wind swept in, causing the plane to rock, almost blowing them over. Recovering his balance, Russell looked out and down. There were no lights, no hint of land, only a writhing pit of darkness and cloud. 'Oh shit,' he muttered.
'Go!' the dispatcher yelled in his ear, and out he leapt, childishly intent on pre-empting the helpful shove. Proud of himself, he forgot to pull the ripcord until several seconds had passed, and then tugged at it with a ferocity born of panic. As the chute burst open the quality of darkness suddenly shifted – he had fallen out of the clouds and into the lightless air beneath. There was still no sign of a world below, and no sign of other chutes above.
As he drifted down he noticed that the sky to his right was slightly lighter. The hidden moon, he realised, and felt strangely comforted – there were shades and dimensions, an east and a west, an up and a down.
The world below took form and shape, one second a blur, the next a faceful of wet grass and the smell of loamy earth. He lay there for a second, checking his body for pain, and almost shouted for joy when he realised there was none. He had done it. He had jumped out of a plane in total darkness and lived to tell the fucking tale.
But where were the others? He gathered in the chute, rolled it up, and looked around for somewhere to stuff it. There was nowhere. A flat open field stretched into nothingness in all directions. There were no trees, no moving shadows, no sounds of other humans. His three companions had been swallowed by the night.
First things first, he told himself – work out where you are. The paler sky away to his left had to be the east. He sought confirmation from his Red Army compass, but there wasn't enough light to read it. Still, it had to be the east. And since the plane was flying roughly northward when he jumped, his companions would have hit the ground further to the north. 'Somewhere over there,' he murmured to himself, turning on his heels and peering hopefully into the gloom.
Should he go looking for them? Or wait for them to find him? They knew when he had jumped, and should have a pretty good idea of where he was. And if they didn't show up in, say, twenty minutes, he could head for the rendezvous point they'd arranged for exactly this contingency.
Or perhaps not. Was this the moment to abandon his new Soviet buddies? They'd gotten him into Berlin – well, almost – and there was nothing more he needed from them. Not this week, in any case. And he was fairly sure that they intended to kill him before the week was out. So why hang around?
