A Thousand Suns

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Of course, but below ground, sir. Now please . . .’

  A rogue shell from the Soviet bombardment landed only half a mile away with a thud that was more felt than heard.

  ‘All right . . . all right,’ said Dr Hauser anxiously.

  The soldier waved the staff car on, and it began to pick its way slowly down the cleared gap in the road, headlights off.

  ‘The Reich Chancellery took several hits some weeks ago. It’s no longer used, but we have cleared the access way to the basement. We have power and lights below, but until we get down there,’ the soldier produced a flashlight, ‘we’ll have to use this.’

  He headed swiftly towards the steps leading up between the twin columns of the main entrance. As he jogged up the steps, the bouncing flashlight made giant shadows from the columns dance across the enormous marble walls.

  Inside, they passed a machine-gun post discreetly hidden within the shadows of the interior. Two more men of the Leibstandarte manned it; they nodded silently at the Feldwebel as he passed by with Dr Hauser following. They entered what was once the large marble-covered foyer. The torchlight picked out only the floor, covered in an inch of white plaster powder. As they walked swiftly across the floor of the foyer, they kicked up plumes of dust that the gusting breeze grabbed hold of and whipped up into little cyclones near the high ceiling.

  ‘This way, sir.’ The soldier led him towards a door that led to the mezzanine floor. He opened the door and the pair of them descended a metal staircase to a basement, which was full to the ceiling with wooden boxes.

  ‘What’s in these?’ Hauser asked.

  The Feldwebel reluctantly engaged the question and panned his torch beam across the stacks of crates and boxes. ‘Documents, records from the Chancellery building. They moved most of the important things from the floors above us down here before it was hit.’

  The soldier proceeded down the stairs, and they wound their way tightly through the floor of boxes to the entrance of the basement. The soldier pulled open the door and the faint yellow light from a wall lamp inside illuminated them. The soldier snapped off his torch.

  They walked swiftly down a second flight of stairs to the basement, and along a narrow corridor, the walls painted a drab olive colour and lined with pipes and cables and yet more storage crates. The soldier pointed to the end of the corridor.

  ‘Down there.’

  Dr Hauser saw a solid-looking iron door guarded by two more soldiers. They sat behind a small wall of sandbags and jumped to their feet at the sound of the Feldwebel and Hauser approaching.

  Dr Hauser pointed towards the door. ‘Is that -?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the door to the bunker.’

  The Feldwebel presented himself to the guards. ‘I have Dr Karl Hauser, he’s expected for a meeting at twenty-one hundred hours.’

  One of the guards picked up a phone and carefully announced the name and meeting time. He listened to the response and nodded once before replacing the phone.

  ‘You’re expected. Door one is Matador.’ The guard pulled back a bolt on the iron door and pushed it inwards. It swung slowly and heavily. Hauser could see it was at least a foot thick.

  The soldier led Dr Hauser down a short flight of concrete stairs. At the bottom they stood in a corridor cluttered with stacked supplies of tinned vegetables.

  ‘This is the Führer’s pantry,’ the soldier said, noticing Hauser’s curiosity. They continued down the corridor, weaving through the pallets of supplies and stacked tinned foods, until they reached what looked like a submarine bulkhead. To one side was a red telephone handset. The Feldwebel picked it up.

  ‘Matador,’ he said quietly.

  Immediately Hauser heard the sound of metal sliding against metal, and, with a heavy clunk, the door unlocked and swung inwards.

  ‘I stop here. Go through and one of his personal staff will see to you,’ the soldier said. He gestured for Hauser to proceed through the door.

  The Doctor stared at the open bulkhead into the dimly lit corridor beyond. The concrete floor of the corridor inside had been covered with a thick rug, but the drab olive paint of the walls continued onward.

  The corridor stretched for fifty or sixty feet and ended with a spiralling metal staircase. Off the corridor on either side he could see several wooden doors. On the right a door was open and he could see into what looked like a bedroom. A concrete windowless cell half-heartedly decorated with pieces of coloured paper stuck to the walls.

  Children’s drawings; a house, a tree, a horse, flowers.

  He heard the voices of children coming from inside. With no warning the door opened fully, a woman came out of the room and headed up the corridor. Hauser could see the children inside, playing a card game, one of them lying on a rug on the floor colouring a picture with coloured pencils. She looked up at him and smiled.

  Hauser took a deep breath.

  These must be Goebbels’ children.

  He had heard that Goebbels and his family had only recently moved in, to be closer to the Führer at this crucial time.

  With little warning it finally hit Hauser that somewhere in this maze of rooms was their leader, mere yards away from him, perhaps separated only by one wall, or a door. Spatially, he was closer now to Adolf Hitler than he had ever been, despite having been a supporter for nearly seventeen years. He had only ever dreamed of being this close.

  Hauser imagined he could sense the magnetic power of the man, the aura, drawing him in, bidding him to step forward into his inner sanctum. Hauser momentarily resisted the urge, desperate to make this moment of delicious anticipation last as long as possible. To be shortly in the company of the Great Man, to have the Great Man, attentive, listening to him . . . to him! Hauser felt a tremulous shudder of excitement ripple down through his body. This was the reward for so many tireless years of devotion to the great cause.

  Dr Hauser had been an active card-carrying member of the party since first he’d heard the Great Man speak. In his opinion, that made him part of the ‘old guard’. He had even volunteered to join the SS at the outbreak of war, but his ‘special skills’ had proven an obstacle to joining. He had been refused on the grounds that his academic and research work could benefit the Reich far more than his physical contribution as a soldier could.

  So Hauser, reluctantly and with some bitterness, had served his country living and working alone. He had worked in isolation on a chalkboard, in a ten foot by ten foot office in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, an annexe of the University of Berlin. He could talk to no one about his work and was given the task of checking and duplicating the notes and calculations of Professor Werner Heisenberg. Every day of the war he had spent a little time at a café nearby, reading about the spectacular victories of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, and cursing his role in the war as little more than a clerk double-checking the simple arithmetic of another mathematician. Hauser had grown to hate the slanted and florid writing of Heisenberg, the flamboyant tails on his Ys and Gs; the elaborate depiction of mathematic symbols suggested a man who was easy in the company of others, a man who could effortlessly climb the hierarchical ladder and speak with ease to those at the very top.

  He resented the man.

  Heisenberg was good, but not brilliant. His work was reliable and consistent, Hauser rarely found any mistakes in his calculations. But he was definitely not the genius he thought he was.

  At the heart of Heisenberg’s work was the task of determining the minimum mass of U-235 required to produce the chain reaction of fission. The man had produced this lengthy calculation several dozen times, and each time the answer had pointed to unfeasible masses of this substance, tons. And yet the fool Heisenberg had persisted, securing additional funding for his work, attempting to construct a small reactor in Straussburg.

  Hauser hadn’t been able to believe the utter stupidity of the man: the futility of the process was staring him in the face with every iteration of this same calculation.

  Tons.
<
br />   To produce a ton of U-235 one would need to extract a hundred tons, refined from 10,000 tons of enriched ore. Hauser wasn’t even sure that the whole planet contained that much of it. By March 1944 Hauser had convinced himself that the process of nuclear fission having a practical use either as a weapon or a power source was a stillborn science, and he was beginning to suspect that Heisenberg was merely extorting funds for his own private use.

  It was during 1944, one wet and overcast afternoon in March, that he uncovered the pre-war research notes in the archives of the University of Leipzig of a Jew called Joseph Schenkelmann. He had been a student of Heisenberg’s while he had been a Professor of Theoretical Physics there in the 1920s. Reading the man’s notes and carefully following the path of his calculative trail, Hauser had been able to understand that something amazing was possible. The stupid and arrogant Heisenberg had made the same mistake over and over.

  The arithmetic was correct, but he had made several erroneous assumptions in his work.

  If he’d had the humility to double-check his own work he might have seen that it wasn’t tons of U-235 they needed, but only a few ounces. If the chain reaction could be accelerated enough at the beginning, that is. There was the trick, and this Jew Schenkelmann, this clever little Jew, had spotted that.

  On that cold and wet afternoon everything had changed.

  ‘You should go in now, this door needs to be sealed,’ said the Feldwebel.

  Hauser looked at the man in uniform; he had a soldier’s face, bereft of intelligence or emotion.

  Little more than a shaved monkey dressed in a black uniform.

  Hauser felt pity for him, and the millions of other shaved monkeys on this planet that passed themselves off as homo sapiens. Amongst these retarded homo erectus creatures lived only a few people intelligent enough to deserve being considered genuine human beings. Hauser had known the Führer was one of these rare people since the very first sentence he had heard the man speak.

  Hauser nodded and then stooped slightly as he entered Hitler’s bunker. As he straightened up beyond the bulkhead, the soldier grabbed a handle and pulled the heavy iron door closed with a solid clunk.

  The woman he had seen earlier returned down the corridor and entered the children’s room. She closed the door and the chatter of young voices was instantly locked away.

  ‘Dr Karl Hauser?’

  He jumped a little. A smartly dressed young lady stood to the side of the door in a corner with the benefit of very little light. Her hair tied up in a bun and a slim build, Hauser guessed she was in her early twenties.

  ‘My name is Traudl Jüng. I am one of the Führer’s private secretaries. Will you come this way, please?’

  Traudl led him down the corridor towards the spiral staircase at the end. He passed by one of the paintings on the wall, a watercolour scene of a stream in a wood; in the corner was scribbled ‘Adolf Hitler June ’25’.

  This is real, Karl Hauser . . . not a dream any more.

  Traudl turned round to look back at him.

  ‘He is in the map room right now, Dr Hauser, in a meeting. But he knows you are here and will see you in his private study shortly. It’s this way.’

  They reached the spiral stairs, and the secretary led, modestly holding the hem of her skirt to the side of her leg as she took the steps one at a time upwards. Hauser’s eyes took in what was still visible of her stockinged legs. His mind so often distracted with numbers, he had had little time in his life to consider other matters, those things that it seemed most men’s minds strayed from rarely. But watching the young woman’s slender legs bend and stretch with every step, he felt the faintest charge of arousal.

  The spiral stairs took them up one floor, and Hauser found himself staring along an identical corridor with metal doors on either side.

  ‘It’s on the left here.’

  The woman tapped on a door. ‘Ma’am?’ There was no answer. ‘Miss Braun?’ Again, there was no answer. She opened the door slowly and entered.

  Hauser followed her inside. The room was small and with little content. In one corner stood a coat rack. On it hung a leather coat, a cane rested against the base of it. To his left, a door was ajar and Hauser could see a bed. The touches here and there suggested it was a woman’s bedroom. A German Shepherd was curled up asleep on the bed.

  ‘Blondi! Off!’

  The Shepherd’s tail thumped guiltily against the bed-covers. She clambered off and curled up on a rug on the floor beside it.

  Traudl wagged a finger at the bitch. ‘You know you’re not allowed on there. Ba-a-a-d girl.’ Blondi’s tail continued to thump guiltily against the floor and her ears tucked down.

  Traudl noticed Hauser looking past her into the bedroom. She pulled the door shut with a disapproving frown and reached for the handle of another door ahead of them.

  ‘Here, this is his private study. He will be along shortly, Dr Hauser.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied automatically.

  Frau Jüng studied him for a few seconds before adding, ‘He never conducts meetings in his study. Never.’ With that she pulled the door open to reveal the small room.

  Hauser found himself holding his breath as the door swung open to reveal the study. It was a volume of space privileged enough to witness the most private moments of the Führer.

  A desk, a standard lamp, a leather chair, a second chair and, behind the desk, a bookshelf laden with bound notebooks. It was as Hauser would have imagined such a room: simple, uncluttered, a reflection of the Führer’s brilliant mind with no space for unnecessary embellishments or decoration.

  ‘Please take a seat.’

  Hauser entered the study, a room no more than ten feet long and eight feet wide, and settled himself down on the chair in front of the moderately sized desk. The young woman nodded at him before leaving the study and closing the door.

  It took him a few minutes to realise he hadn’t experienced quiet like this in a long time, an almost complete absence of sound, except for the thudding of his heart and the faint and constant hum of a diesel generator in the bunker somewhere nearby.

  The project had started only six months ago. Hauser had managed to pass on his discovery of the Jewish mathematician’s work to the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and amazingly, with a little investigation, the Jew had been tracked down to one of the munitions factories along the Rhine, where he had been working for the last two years. In a matter of only a few days, Hauser swiftly found himself placed in charge of a fast-track project to produce the world’s first atom bomb, while, to his immense satisfaction, Heisenberg’s fruitless and expensive programme was immediately mothballed. Speer had visited Hauser’s modest lab on a number of occasions to receive updates from him on the weapon’s progress during this period of time, but with the construction of the bomb nearing completion, Albert Speer had asked to review the design papers once more.

  Hauser had done his best to expunge from the documentation the Jew’s frequent references to the risk of a runaway chain. But he suspected Speer must have found something in there somewhere. The Armaments Minister had attempted to raise the subject with Hauser; there had been a meeting arranged between them today to discuss his ‘concerns’. But then, at the last moment, Hauser had been informed that the plans had been changed, and that the meeting was to be with Hitler himself. Speer was no longer to be a part of the project.

  Hauser had both sighed with relief that Speer was gone and shuddered with elation at the thought of meeting the man.

  The door handle rattled as someone outside took hold of it and began to turn it. He heard a muffled voice - two, a man’s and a woman’s. Hauser shuddered anxiously as he recognised the man’s voice as unmistakably Hitler’s. He heard both voices talking in lowered, soft tones, an exchange of pleasantries between two people, intimate. The muffled exchange ended and the door to the study opened.

  Hauser immediately stood to attention, heart pounding like a piston engine in his chest. He brought his heel
s together in his best rendition of the formal military greeting. ‘H-Heil Hitler.’

  Hitler held his palm out beside his head, returning the salute tiredly. ‘Yes . . . yes. Please sit down.’

  Hauser did as the Führer asked. He sat down promptly while carefully studying Hitler as he settled himself in the leather chair behind his desk. He was wearing a white shirt and a black tie with his initials in gold discreetly stitched onto the tongue. His top button was undone and the tie had been loosened a little. Over the shirt he wore a beige, woollen cardigan with leather patches on its elbows. Hitler poured himself a glass of water from a decanter on the desk, his left hand trembling enough that a few spots of water splashed onto the desk.

  Hauser was disturbed to see how tired and beaten he looked. The Führer looked nothing like the proud figure standing tall in the news pictures; it was a feeble old man that sat before him.

  ‘Dr Karl Hauser, Albert Speer has been briefing me on your work. I have been following your progress.’ He leaned forward, his hands gathered together under his chin. ‘You must understand, time is the most important thing for us now. The Russians are very close and our men have orders to hold out till the last. This buys us a little respite, perhaps we have only two or three weeks before they reach the centre of Berlin.’

  Hitler closed his eyes and his lips seemed to tremble ever so slightly as he prepared himself to ask the next question. ‘Is the project on schedule?’

  Hauser could see the anxiety in the Führer’s face. Time, of course, was everything now, the only currency worth anything. ‘The raw materials we needed have been produced, and the bomb is being assembled now. Nine, perhaps ten, more days, my Führer. It is exactly on schedule.’

  The transformation was almost instantaneous. Hauser watched as Hitler suddenly beamed with joy and slapped his thigh merrily. ‘Wonderful! Marvellous!’ Hitler sat back in his chair, exhaling with obvious relief. ‘Good . . . good. I knew that God would grant us time to salvage this war.’ Hitler paused, reflecting for a moment. ‘It saddens me that Speer has deserted us, now that victory is so close at hand.’