“You!” he gasped as his eyes bulged and his round face turned crimson. His fingers went to the hilt of her knife. He grabbed it and tried to pull it out, but she would not let him. His effort only twisted the blade and cut him even deeper as he felt his own warm blood pumping out between his fingers. The knife must have severed a major artery. Wool coat or not, the wound was mortal. It was only a matter time. How ironic, he must have thought as he looked down. With all those ribbons and medals on his chest from battles from France to Moscow, he would meet his end in a back alley in Berlin at the hands of a murderous local whore. He stumbled backward into the alley, growling, determined to get away, only to find Scanlon blocking his way. The two men stared at each other, both round-eyed and unsure, until the Colonel realized this newcomer must be with the woman.
“You… bastard,” the German hissed as he lunged forward and wrapped his bloody fingers around Scanlon’s throat. He could not move. The German was big and strong. Dying or not, the fury of his attack caught Scanlon completely off guard. With the handle of the knife sticking out of his ribs, it was amazing that the man was still upright. Somehow, he willed his remaining strength into his fingers as he tried to crush the American’s throat. Face to face and their eyes only inches apart, the German’s hatred and anger washed over Scanlon as if he’d been standing in front of the open door of a blast furnace. If the big bastard was going to die, he had decided he was not making the trip to hell alone.
Scanlon grabbed the Colonel’s wrists and tried to pry them apart, but they would not budge. Locked together, swaying back and forth, Scanlon saw spots dancing in front of his eyes. He felt his knees buckle. Finally, desperately, he head-butted the German square on the nose, and drove him backward until he lost his balance and toppled over. They fell together onto the pavement with Scanlon on top, his weight driving the dagger in even deeper. The SS Colonel uttered a last, loud, painful grunt before he went limp and those large, angry eyes glazed over. Finally, the big bastard was dead.
Scanlon rolled off him and lay on the ground, coughing. He took a series of deep, rasping breaths until his head cleared and the spots in front of his eyes faded. He turned his head and was stunned to see Hanni kneeling next to the Colonel’s lifeless body, already picking through his pockets for his papers and money.
“Do not look at me like that,” she snapped at him, her eyes cold and pitiless. “Do not dare!”
She was right, he realized. He should not judge her; but at times like these, she scared the hell out of him and he realized he barely knew her at all.
Despite all that Hanni had been through in her life and the things she had done, it never ceased to amaze him that she remained the eternal optimist, while he was the one who descended into nervous pessimism. “It’s only a matter of time before they catch you,” he said, realizing he had fallen hopelessly in love with her. The only thing his incessant warnings accomplished was to start another of their increasingly frequent arguments. He tried to persuade her to leave with him for the west when the time came, but she refused to even consider it.
“I know what I am doing, Liebchen. They aren’t going to catch me, not yet; because it is not written in the Book,” she said with that infectious smile of hers. “We each have our page in the Book of Life and it shows when our days are up. My page has not been written on yet, not yet. It is as bright and clean as the day I was born.”
However, Ed Scanlon was from New York, from the streets of Manhattan. He was not an optimist, and he sure as hell was not a mystic. “When I leave here, you’re coming back to England with me,” he insisted.
“You know I cannot do that,” she said fondly. “So, enjoy our time together and do not worry about me. I do not, and you should not either.”
However, he did, and he never stopped worrying about her.
CHAPTER THREE
As dangerous as Leipzig was in the fall and winter of 1944, with nightly Allied bombing raids, Gestapo manhunts, and the inherently suicidal nature of their work, Ed Scanlon found the city to be deeply magical. Even into late 1944, the Innenstadt, the bustling old city center, retained a semblance of its tree-lined squares, broad boulevards, and steep-pitched tile roofs. Until then, there had been only minor damage to the statues, the fountains, the old city hall, and the baroque splendor of the Thomaskirche. Soon, however, the full fury of modern war would pound Leipzig into a pile of brick and rubble like all the other German cities. It had not happened yet, but those days were coming.
Since the dark ages, Leipzig had been Germany’s progressive and open doorway to the Slavic lands to the east, known throughout Europe for its trade fairs and international exhibitions. While Munich, Frankfurt, and Nuremburg were the cradles of right-wing extremism, Berlin and Leipzig nurtured the radical left, intellectuals, and internationalists. It thrived on its own unique blending of street vendors, smugglers, baroque churches, freethinkers, publishing houses, Bach cantatas, spies, the avant-guard, modern abstract painters, musicians, Socialists, furriers, peddlers, rich merchant bankers, Jews, and the Socialist and Communist parties. Despite Hitler’s best efforts to crush its spirit, Leipzig remained a center of that radical culture.
Hanni Steiner was a fifth-generation child of the city, and she passionately reflected its spirit. When Ed Scanlon fell in love with her, he knew he was breaking all the rules, but she soon became as attracted to him as he was to her. No doubt, it was the raw emotion and adrenaline of that time and place, but they came together like two cold, lonely people leaping into a roaring fire. Hanni became Scanlon’s all-consuming passion, beyond any reason or logic; but she was always the wiser of the two. It was not that she held back, not an inch, but she knew from the beginning that their affair could not last. It was something to warm the void she felt inside, something to be savored and enjoyed for as long it lasted, but that was all it could ever be. Regardless of how much she wanted to love him, there was no telling what the next day might bring or what she might be ordered to do. That was her punishment for being a realist. In the end, she knew it would all come crashing down on them, so she let it burn all the hotter, making use of whatever remaining time they had. It was a distinction he never did understand. In those weeks and months with her in Leipzig, he thrived on the pressure, the excitement, the danger, and most of all on her. They filled him to the brim like the gas flame beneath a hot air balloon. Inevitably, however, that relentless pressure took its toll.
“Liebchen, this is a very lonely life we lead, and a terrible one,” she told him. “Look at us. We were wrong to fall in love like this. We’re becoming twisted, ugly monuments to the stupidity of it all, and it is doing far worse things to you.”
Scanlon denied it, of course, but even he could feel the irritability and tension building inside him. He was not sleeping and he was not thinking clearly. He began to drink and lost his temper far too easily. She was right. The signs were all there. He was heading for a breakdown. That came during those four terror-filled days and nights he spent in Otto Dietrich’s basement.
When it happened, it left him shattered.
When a man becomes exhausted and distracted, as Scanlon had by then, he gets careless, reckless, and begins making mistakes. They were small ones at first, but they grew and multiplied with a grim inevitability. That was how he was caught.
He, Hanni, Will Kenyon, and Isaac Kronke, one of Hanni’s men, had gone out at midnight for a routine reconnaissance mission through the rail yards, as they had done a dozen times before. Their objective was to quietly inspect the trains and rail cars parked there and leave a present or two behind. The city was blacked out. The moon would not rise until after 4:00 a.m., allowing the freight trains to park for a few hours to refuel and give the crews a rare chance to rest. Dressed in dark clothing, they began at the far end of the rail yard and worked their way back car by car. In the winter of 1944, with a critical shortage of rolling stock, anything and everything that passed through Leipzig was of high value. It was only a matter of picking out a few g
ood ones. Sometimes it was flatcars with Panzer tanks headed east. Sometimes it was towed artillery and disassembled airplanes. Sometimes it was boxcars full of ammunition and canned food. Often, they could tell the contents from the chalk markings scrawled on the side of the rail car, by the stenciled labels on the wooden crates inside, or by the shape of the tarpaulins draped over the vehicles and machinery. Still, the plan was to get in and out without being noticed or setting off an alarm. Whenever they found a juicy, high-priority target, they would mark the roof of the car for prowling Allied fighters the next day, or hide some explosives inside timed to detonate long after the train rolled out of town.
That night there were five trains parked in the dark switchyard. Three were long, mostly composed of boxcars headed east, while two were much shorter trains headed back west. Hanni and Isaac slowly worked their way up the two outer lines of rail cars, while Scanlon and Will Kenyon took the three inner ones. There were a few guards around, but they were mostly old men and young boys who had been drafted into the Home Guard and sent to the rail yards to watch for the occasional thief or deserter. Further, it was a bitterly cold winter night and it was comfortable for the guards to think this was Germany itself, the Fatherland, not one of the occupied countries with their disloyal local populations. Their greatest concerns were freezing to death, a stray bomb from a B-17, the rampaging Red Army headed their way, and breakfast. Like the poorly trained and unmotivated reservists in any army, their level of alertness was very low. The last thing they worried about was enemy agents and saboteurs. The guards could easily be spotted standing in clusters out of the wind or hiding in a box car, smoking, arguing, stomping their feet and clapping their hands to keep warm. It would take dumb bad luck to be caught by these clowns, Scanlon scoffed, but that was exactly what happened.
He was crouched low, slowly working his way up the left side of a long dark line of boxcars while Will Kenyon was doing the same, one row over. It was when Will stuck his head inside the open side door of a boxcar that all hell broke loose. Several guards had apparently chosen that one to hide out. They saw Kenyon backlit in the doorway, before he saw them. Thinking it was one of their pals coming back with hot soup, one of the guards called out, “Franz! Du bist spat…” You are late. Kenyon quickly pulled his head out, but it was already too late for him, too. “Haben Sie cigaretten, Franz?” Do you have a cigarette? another guard asked. “Franz? … Franz? … Halt! Wer is da?” Halt! Who is there?”
The guards scrambled to their feet, but by then, Kenyon was already sprinting away down the gravel rail bed, eager to disappear into the dark. Two of the Volks Grenadiers tumbled out of the rail car after him, fumbling with their rifles. Fortunately, they wore thick gloves and they were armed with old bolt-action Mausers from the last war rather than one of the newer semi-automatic rifles or one of the infinitely more deadly Schmeisser submachine guns that the SS carried. Nonetheless, the dark night was suddenly split by the “Crack! Crack! Crack!” of rifle shots.
The standing order that they had all agreed on was if anyone triggered an alarm, they should all scatter into the darkness, each taking the shortest path out of the rail yards and into the dark city streets beyond. If one of the team was injured or captured, no one was to compound the problem by going back and trying to help. Those were great rules; but for Scanlon, the three gunshots changed everything. The guards were probably more scared than Will. It was highly unlikely that any of them got off a well-aimed shot, but a bullet caught the lanky Brit in the leg and knocked him down with a loud grunt. He rolled under a boxcar, crawled to Scanlon’s side of the coarse gravel, and tried to stand. Scanlon was fifty feet away when he saw Will fall a second time, grabbing his leg. Instinctively, the American turned and ran back as shrill whistles blew all around them.
He grabbed Kenyon and pulled him to his feet, but the Brit shoved him away. “Get out of here, you damned fool,” he groaned, but Scanlon ignored him and threw him over his shoulder. “Put me down, Scanlon, before you get us both killed!”
“Oh, shut up and hang on,” was his only answer as he sprinted down the rail bed carrying the lanky Brit as they heard more whistles blow. Two boxcars ahead, Scanlon saw another open door. “Here,” he said as he dumped Kenyon inside. “Get back in the corner and stop arguing with me,” he said as he pushed the door shut and pulled out his Walther pistol. Knowing he had only seconds before the guards closed in, Scanlon ran and beat his fist on the side of several boxcars to draw the guards further away before he ducked between the next two cars. Climbing over the coupling, he sprinted away down the next aisle, only to run straight into another Volks Grenadier who suddenly stepped out of the shadows in front of him.
“Halt,” the German screamed as he tried to raise his long-barreled rifle, but Scanlon raised his pistol faster. He shot the guard in the face and never broke stride, jumping over the man’s falling body before it even hit the ground. Unfortunately, that guard had not come alone. Two of his companions were right behind him. They burst around the far end of the rail car and collided with Scanlon. The three men fell in a twisted heap on the gravel, punching and kicking anything that moved. Scanlon lost his grip on his pistol and struggled to get up, swinging wildly at the dark shapes. His fists struck both men, but one of them had managed to keep his grip on his rifle. He swung it like a baseball bat, and when the heavy wooden stock connected with the side of Scanlon’s head, the lights went out. For the American, his brief fight was over, but the two Germans were not finished. Badly scared and battered, with their dead companion’s body not fifty feet away, they began to pummel Scanlon. One continued beating him with his rifle butt while the other kicked him in the side with his hobnailed boots.
When Scanlon finally regained consciousness, he realized he was no longer in the rail yard. He was naked, lying on his back on a cold, wet concrete floor. He tried to open his eyes, but the left one would not focus and was nearly swollen shut. He had a pounding headache and his left side hurt like hell. Inventorying the other moving parts, he ran his fingers down his ribs and realized they were badly bruised and several were probably broken. He turned his head, ignoring the pain. The walls, the floor, and even the ceiling were made of bare, unpainted concrete, badly chipped and scratched. Sunk in them were large I-bolts festooned with chains and manacles. If it wasn’t for the more modern concrete and a single, bare light bulb dangling from the center of the ceiling, he might think he was in a medieval torture chamber.
Scanlon laid his head back down on the bare floor. The walls below the I-bolts bore many old, dark stains. Blood? Perhaps, but as far as he could tell, it wasn’t his. His head pounded, and even that small, dim bulb felt like a blinding searchlight shining directly into his eyes. As he closed them and lay back, the terrible realization set in that he was in a jail cell. No, it was a lot worse than that. From the descriptions he had heard, Scanlon knew this was one of the infamous interrogation cells in the basement of Gestapo headquarters in downtown Leipzig — the favorite stomping grounds, so to speak, of Otto Dietrich. A medieval torture chamber? Maybe it was.
It was well over an hour later that the Chief Inspector himself came to call. “My compliments to the Volksturm,” he said as he slowly circled Scanlon for a moment, studying his prostrate form. “They are a filthy, half-drunken lot, but it usually takes me a day or two to get my special guests into this condition. Breaking you down the rest of the way should be a fairly easy task now, Captain Scanlon — easy for me, but not so easy for you, I am afraid.”
Scanlon had to admit that Otto Dietrich did not look or act as he expected a Gestapo thug to look or act, at least not in the beginning. Tall, dapper, and distinguished, the Chief Inspector wore well-tailored, double-breasted business suits, an expensive tie, and a puffed silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He claimed he would not be caught dead in a black SS uniform with its silver piping, death’s head emblems, and black leather jackboots. “Too over-the-top, and definitely not my style,” he said. With his long, aquiline nose, pe
ncil-thin moustache, and black, well-oiled hair combed straight back off his forehead, he brought to mind Basil Rathbone, Errol Flynn, or one of the other 1930s movie stars. However, their performances were make-believe and projected on a silver screen, while Otto Dietrich’s stage was a basement interrogation cell and his performances were all too real.
Movie-star affectations aside, in the beginning Scanlon found Dietrich surprisingly literate, personable, and even well-mannered. Under different circumstances, he might have even liked the man. For starters, he claimed to be a Nazi on paper only, one of the “March Violets” as they were called, who joined by the thousands in the spring of 1933 immediately after Hitler came to power. Prior to then, he had been a career policeman, a tough street cop who came up through the ranks in festive, pre-war Berlin, and an experienced homicide detective to boot. However, after four days of brutal pounding in his basement, Ed Scanlon realized that Otto Dietrich was the most ruthless, cynical, and amoral bastard he had ever met.
“Well, I see you are finally awake,” he began with a smile. “Those louts in the rail yard gave you quite a thrashing and you had me very concerned for a while. What else can you expect from the German working class, especially after you murdered one of their friends.”
Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers Page 4
