Triumph (1993)

by Ben Bova

  Hitler's speech grew more somber. A rumble of bombs and shells shook the bunker. He glanced up at the concrete ceiling, both hands balled into fists.

  "From the beginning," he said, "I have known that this would be a life-or-death struggle for the German people. I knew it at the time of the Putsch in 'Twenty-three. I knew that if the German people would follow me fearlessly with all their strength, we would conquer the enemies that surrounded us. I would lead them to true greatness, to a Reich that would last a thousand years, bigger and more glorious than any empire the world has ever seen!"

  No one said a word. There was no sound in the bunker except the muted roar of the bombardment going on overhead.

  "But the German people have failed me," Hitler said, with a bitter shake of his head. "They lack the strength to be true rulers. They lack the will to persevere and conquer no matter what the obstacles. Very well! They have failed."

  "Let them perish. If they cannot be the rulers then they deserve to be extinguished from the pages of history. Let them perish, I say! Let the entire nation be destroyed, all of it, down to the smallest village and farmstead. I could have led them to greatness but they have failed. Now they deserve to be wiped out, erased totally. I want every building destroyed, every factory leveled, every bridge blown up."

  "The Bolsheviks and the traitorous British and those mongrel Americans must find nothing! Nothing! I bequeath them a Germany that is dead and burning. That is what the German people deserve and that is what I will give them."

  "Not a stick is to remain standing, do you hear?"

  He was not screaming, as he so often did when he worked himself into one of his tirades. This speech was cold and calm, absolutely chilling to all who stood there, the champagne going flat in their glasses, their faces white, their mouths hanging open.

  Eva Braun could not hide her sobs and she ran from the room. Hitler sagged onto the stool that Bormann held for him, shaking his head and muttering to himself. All the others, even Goebbels, began to file out of the room in stunned silence.

  But as they headed toward their private quarters and personal fears in the dank underground bunker. Hitler clutched at Bormann's arm.

  Pulling him away from the others, Hitler said softly, "I have a special duty for you to perform, Bormann."

  "Yes, my Führer?"

  Lowering his voice even further, Hitler said, "It must be kept totally secret. No one else must know. Only you and me."

  Bormann nodded as if he knew what was coming.

  Whispering now. Hitler said, "If worst comes to worst, if the Russians break in here and threaten to capture this fortress . . ." he hesitated, glancing around to see that no one was within earshot. "I want you to shoot me."

  "But we are driving the swine backward."

  "Better to be dead than a prisoner of the Bolsheviks,"

  Hitler continued, as if he had not heard Bormann. "You are to shoot me, and Miss Braun, as well. We have discussed this. She says she will take poison, if it comes to that, but she is a woman and weak. You must make certain that neither of us falls into the hands of the Russians. We must not be taken prisoner."

  "I understand," Bormann said.

  "Goebbels will take care of himself and his family. I know him. He has already acquired the cyanide capsules for his wife and each of his children."

  "Surely, my Führer, things will not get that bad. Your counterattack—"

  "Perhaps it will succeed. Perhaps not. In war we must be prepared to make sacrifices. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes, my Führer."

  "And burn my body afterward. Scatter my ashes to the winds. If the German people are not strong enough to conquer their enemies, then I will die among them and leave nothing for our enemies to gloat over."

  Genthin. 22 April

  Staff Sergeant Al Rosenberg sat on the lip of his Sherman's turret hatch as they rumbled through the town. He should have been happy, but as he looked out at the rows of three- and four-story houses they were passing a growing anger simmered inside him.

  House after house showed the white flag of surrender.

  White towels, while tablecloths, even whole bedsheets were dangling from the upper story windows as the long row of dust-covered tanks clanked through the town.

  It's been this way since we broke across the Elbe, Rosenberg grumbled to himself. Fucking Krauts giving up without a fight. All we have to do is show up and they quit.

  Rosenberg had been among the troops that had liberated Buchenwald. He had not been able to sleep without seeing those emaciated, horror-ridden prisoners of the Third Reich. Their crime had been that they were Jews. Their punishment had been the crudest hell that any human being had ever devised.

  And these fine Aryans, these people whom Hitler had declared to be a warrior race, fit to conquer and enslave the whole world, now they were quitting without a fight.

  Rosenberg's guts churned with rage. Come on and fight, you bastards. Take a shot at me. See, I'm perched up here out in the open. You must have a couple of soldiers hiding in some basement. Maybe a sniper up in the church tower there. Come on, shoot at me! Just one shot. Give me a reason to pop back inside and start pumping cannon shells into your goddamned smug-ass houses. Let me kill a few of you, you murdering sonsofbitches. Just a few. Like maybe a million or two.

  Then he thought, Berlin's less than fifty miles up the road. They'll fight when we get to Berlin. That's where the Kraut army's waiting for us. Hitler, too. They say he's still in Berlin.

  Wait for me, Adolf, he prayed fervently. Wait for me in Berlin, you cocksucking bastard. Just wait for me to get there.

  Chapter 25

  Moscow, 22 April

  It still felt odd to Molotov to sit at the head of the table. After so many years, his whole lifetime, really, of watching Stalin run things, now he sat at the head of the table.

  But he did not rule by himself, of course. The one thing that they had decided on immediately upon Stalin's unexpected death was that there would no longer be a one-man rule. The committee would run things, in true Soviet fashion.

  That was why Beria had to go. He would have stepped into Stalin's shoes at once. He would have started his own reign of terror until he felt satisfied that no one was left alive who might oppose him. Nikita cut him down before he could act against us. It was kill or be killed, pure and simple.

  Now, as the legitimate prime minister of the Soviet government, Molotov sat at the head of the table. Closely flanked by Khrushchev and Malenkov.

  "The commanders in the field cannot simply go running off on their own," Khrushchev was saying. "That way will lead to chaos and defeat."

  "Defeat?" Malenkov almost sneered. Always chubby, he seemed to have gained weight in the few days since the Great One's untimely death. "The Hitlerites don't have enough left to defeat anyone. It's merely a matter of time."

  "And lives," Khrushchev added pointedly.

  Malenkov shrugged.

  Molotov knew he held the balance of power between the two men. Malenkov was in favor of allowing Koniev to race for Berlin. Khrushchev wanted to order Koniev to help eliminate the Lubben salient that the Nazis had driven into Zhukov's lines.

  "Comrades," he said, "may I remind you that at this very moment General Patton is scarcely seventy kilometers from Berlin? Do we want to see the Americans snatch the prize away from us?"

  Khrushchev started to reply, then thought better of it. He sank back into his chair, grumbling something under his breath. Malenkov smiled at the prime minister. My god, Molotov thought, he almost looks like a woman when he smiles that way.

  "Then it is decided?" Molotov asked. "Koniev continues on to Berlin while Zhukov deals with the Nazi salient on his own."

  "Yes," Malenkov said immediately.

  Khrushchev scratched at his bald pate, then reluctantly answered, "Yes."

  Molotov let a small sigh of satisfaction escape his lips.

  Now to get to Berlin before the Americans do.

  Malenkov felt
satisfied. Koniev was an old friend, and an important ally in the struggles to come within the Kremlin.

  Khrushchev kept the disappointed frown on his face, but he thought to himself that Zhukov represented the Red Army much more so than Koniev. The top officers adored Zhukov and distrusted Koniev. Let Koniev go to Berlin;

  Hitler's desperate forces trapped inside the city will make the battle a bloody shambles. When Koniev's troops bog down inside the city Zhukov can come to his rescue and snatch the glory from him. Meanwhile Zhukov will keep the respect of the officer corps, and I will keep Zhukov bound closely to me. When push comes to shove, when I make my move against Malenkov, I will have the best part of the army behind me.

  Khrushchev had to exert an effort of will to keep from smiling. Malenkov will have Koniev, but how surprised he will be to find that Koniev will have no one to back him up.

  A few blocks northeast of the Kremlin, past the huge and echoingly empty GUM department store, Ivan Petrovitch Gretchko sat at his desk in the Ministry for State Security, frowning unhappily.

  Gretchko was a colonel in the MGB. And a deeply puzzled and worried man.

  He sat in his office, slowly smoking a thin cigarette and staring out the window. He paid no attention to the few people walking on Lubyanka Square outside or those sitting on the benches, enjoying the warmth of the wan April sun. He did not even pay the slightest attention to the pair of women who had opened their winter coats, showing nothing but abbreviated bathing suits beneath so they could catch as much precious sunshine as possible.

  Gretchko's eyes saw nothing of this because his mind was concentrating furiously on the problem. The problem.

  There was nothing else on earth that occupied his attention these past ten days. Not even the turmoil within the Ministry since Beria's death. MGB officers were being reassigned, transferred, even sent to the front lines. Several of his friends had disappeared altogether; the rumor was that they had been sent to Siberia, either by Malenkov or Khrushchev.

  Or perhaps one of the other high-and-mighty ones in the Kremlin. Everything was upside down. No one knew who was really in charge.

  None of that bothered Gretchko, even though he knew he should be worried about his friends, his associates, his own position within the Ministry. But he resolutely kept those fears out of his mind, concentrating instead on the problem, the problem of Josef Stalin's death.

  Could it have been murder? Assassination? If so, by whom?

  Gretchko was not a detective in the usual sense. His normal job was analysis of intelligence reports. While popular novels and films dealt with spies and their romantic adventures, Gretchko knew that the business of intelligence depended on analysis more than spying. Any dolt or drunkard or homosexual could be turned into a spy by bribery or bullying. Or flattery. Or even for supposedly higher motives.

  It always astounded Gretchko how easy it was to get a man or a woman to turn traitor. He had nothing but contempt for such people.

  No, spying meant nothing without analysis. There were thousands of agents out there, millions of them, perhaps.

  All digging and worming and weaseling scraps of information and then sending it on to Moscow. Most of what they sent was nonsense or actual misinformation planted by the enemy. Even the good material was useless by itself. It took careful analysis to piece together all the little scraps until they made a coherent picture. Gretchko pictured himself as a master craftsman, an artist, even: taking the minuscule gleanings from all around the world and creating a clear and accurate picture from them.

  His favorite form of art was mosaics. His favorite relaxation was jigsaw puzzles.

  It was the report from England that worried him. By itself it meant little. But put it together with other factors and a picture began to emerge.

  The Americans sent a small sample of something called plutonium to England nearly two years ago, just before the Tehran Conference. Gretchko had only the vaguest idea of what plutonium was, or what the Americans were doing with it. He knew of the Manhattan Project and the effort to make a bomb powerful enough to level an entire city. How the bomb worked or what made it so powerful was not a matter for his department.

  He had learned, however, that this plutonium stuff was deadly. Like radium, it gave off invisible rays that could kill a man. A microscopic amount of it could be fatal. You did not have to swallow it, either. Just stand in its presence long enough and the rays would kill you. How long? No one seemed to know. Gretchko had spoken to medical doctors and university scientists. None of them knew anything specific enough to be of help.

  The worst part of his problem was that he had to work on it by himself. No one else seemed to care. Only Comrade Khrushchev, who would soon be elected Secretary of the Communist Party. He was the only one in the Kremlin, in the entire government as far as Gretchko could tell, who wanted an investigation into the Great One's death.

  "You must act alone, comrade Gretchko," Khrushchev had told him, the morning when Stalin's death had been announced.

  "Surely you don't suspect that someone would murder the Maximum Leader!" Gretchko had blurted.

  Khrushchev surveyed him with narrowed eyes that seemed to penetrate to Gretchko's soul. "You are a good and honest man, comrade colonel. That is apparent from your record, and I can see it for myself."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "When a great man dies as suddenly as comrade Stalin has," Khrushchev said slowly, "it is wise to examine the cause. In all probability you are correct, and his death was natural. But we must leave no stone unturned, comrade. If it was not a natural death, then we have a traitor in our midst. A traitor at the highest level of the Soviet state."

  "I see, comrade."

  "Leave no stone unturned, colonel. Not even a pebble."

  But he's made me work alone, Gretchko thought, taking a long drag on his cigarette. He's relieved me of all other duties and given me carte blanche to go wherever I must and interview anyone I wish. Yet I have no aides, no assistants.

  And I must report directly to Khrushchev in person. Not even written reports will do. I must speak to him face-to-face.

  Who does he suspect? He will not say. But obviously he suspects one of his comrades in the Kremlin.

  Gretchko did not trust Khrushchev, the man who had Beria shot, one of the men who are purging the MOB. He is attempting to take over the ministry, that seemed certain.

  So are the others; control the MOB and you control the country. Who will win this struggle? Will they tear the MOB apart while they battle over it? Beria had been a powerful leader; ruthless, yes, but a man who protected his own people. The ministry had grown enormously under his leadership. And Khrushchev cut him down as soon as Stalin died. Was Beria the one Khrushchev suspects? Am I supposed to find out that my former boss was the traitor?

  Is this a test of my abilities? Of my loyalties?

  Gretchko sat pondering the different possibilities until long after the sun had set. I am playing with dynamite here, he knew. If I find that Beria was a traitor it will make an even worse shambles of the MGB. It will be like the purge trials all over again, except that this time we will be in the dock. Or what if I find that Molotov or one of the other ministers was the murderer? A man could get himself killed that way.

  He spun all the factors around in his mind and always came to the same inescapable conclusion. He had to push ahead with his investigation and let the chips fall where they may. You're the best analyst in the MGB, he told himself.

  That's why comrade Khrushchev picked you for this job.

  Now you must show him that he picked the right man. And if narrow-eyed Nikita truly is moving to capture all the Kremlin for himself, then you can rise to the top with him.

  Perhaps.

  The hell of it was that he could not get a fresh autopsy of Stalin's body. The doctors had performed one immediately after his death, and then quickly embalmed the Great One's remains in preparation for placing him beside Lenin in the tomb built into the Kremlin's wall. Not even
Khrushchev would authorize another autopsy.

  "You'll have to do your best without one," he had told Gretchko. "The medical report was quite detailed. We can't open up the body again, not unless you have a specific idea of what you're looking for. This is Josef Stalin we're speaking of, not some cadaver in a medical school."

  At last Gretchko got up from his desk and stretched, arms raised to the ceiling, spine popping like a string of firecrackers.

  The report from England. He walked to the window and looked down on the square, deserted now in the early evening darkness.

  Why would the Americans send plutonium to the British?

  Just before the Tehran Conference. Suppose they wanted to assassinate Stalin. The British especially are antirevolutionary reactionaries. Churchill himself represents all the evils of the old imperialist system. Roosevelt is more progressive, yet he himself comes from the privileged class.

  Standing by the window, Gretchko let his chain of reasoning play out. Was there something at the Tehran Conference that was significant? Then he remembered the newsreel pictures of Churchill handing Stalin a sword—the Sword of Stalingrad.

  Could that have been an assassination weapon? Is it possible that the sample of plutonium the Americans sent to London was put inside the Sword?

  Gretchko shook his head. The Sword had been in Stalin's possession for nearly two years. Would the plutonium take that long to kill him? The little he had learned about how radium kills told him that no one would last two years under the lash of those deadly rays.

  But did Stalin have the Sword near him all that time?

  Was it near him when he died? Those were questions that had to be answered.