The Front (Book 3): Berlin or Bust

by DiLouie, Craig

  The team moved out. Wilkins snatched up his jungle carbine, a lighter, more compact version of the Enfield rifle, and followed. West, into Tiergarten.

  They were nine shooters, all veterans and very capable men. The colonel had told Wilkins he could pick his men, but he couldn’t choose men for this type of operation. They had to come to him.

  He’d quietly sent around a call for volunteers. To his surprise, he’d received far more volunteers than he had seats on the plane, and had chosen carefully until he’d sorted a crack squad for Chappie’s approval.

  They were the best of the best.

  With its woodland scenes, monuments, lakes, and pathways, Tiergarten must have been a beautiful sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of Berlin. Now windswept garbage rustled along the ground, the trees bare, the monuments broken by bombs, massive impact craters scarring the once pristine landscape.

  Aside from nationalist tinkering by the Prussians and then the Nazis, Tiergarten stood pretty much as it was originally designed in the 1800s, and modeled after English gardens at that.

  They found numerous tracks in the snow, both animal and human. Still no sign of the American Pathfinders, however. No ghouls, either. Smoke rose in the distance from a downed plane. The eastward wind brought a smattering of gunfire from the German drop zones. Booms resonated from the east; the British paras were assaulting Tempelhof Airport.

  Phase one of the operation, it seemed, was proceeding apace. Wilkins considered it a bloody miracle they’d all made it this far.

  They passed a broken statue of Adolf Hitler, hand raised in classical oration like a Roman senator, headed tilted toward the heavens. Now the Leader lay on his side facing the mud, his marble feet turned into rubble. Ahead, a pillar soared into the air, still proud and intact. The Victory Column, topped by the goddess Victoria, built to commemorate the nation’s victory in the Danish-Prussian War. To the south, damaged statues of Prussian kings framed Victory Avenue cutting into the park.

  So much history here, Wilkins thought. And yes, greatness. A great nation and a proud people. All hijacked by Hitler and his thugs and harnessed to totalitarianism and war. The waste of it all sickened him.

  After they’d marched two kilometers across the park, Corporal Wright spotted the army research center through the trees. The building had been constructed on a little island on the Neuer Lake, now frozen by winter’s cold.

  Chapman raised his binoculars to investigate. The facility appeared to be unguarded. He waved at Wilkins and communicated using hand signals.

  The sergeant patted Wright’s back and gestured at him to follow. Together, the two men scurried to the barbed-wire fencing. Wilkins held the wire while Wright cut it. After folding it aside to make an entrance point, Wilkins dashed to the pillbox by the entrance while Wright covered with his Sten submachine-gun.

  The pillbox was empty, the heavy steel door to the dome-shaped facility unlocked and kept ajar by snowdrift. Wilkins gave the all-clear signal.

  Chapman led the team forward.

  The research center’s top level appeared to be drab and utilitarian administrative space, complete with offices, filing room, and radio shack. Papers littered the floor, some of them burned; the people here had left in a hurry and tried to destroy the evidence as they did. The lieutenant casually tore a massive swastika-emblazoned banner from the wall and let it crumple at his feet.

  The next level underground was research space, derelict machines and long tabletops splattered with broken class and chemicals letting up an acrid stench. The squad donned gas masks just in case and kept moving, observing everything but caring about nothing. Their objective, they knew, would be on the lowest level.

  The team piled out onto the third level. There, they found bodies near a long table stacked with champagne flutes under a sign. The paras kept going, securing the level before returning to the room of the dead.

  They were scientists, around twenty men and women in pristine white lab coats. They lay strewn on the floor as if dropped from a great height. Wilkins inspected one without touching her and found no visible cause of death.

  Suicide, most likely. Or, he thought with alarm, maybe something else.

  He glanced up at the sign, which read: “Die ganze Natur ist ein gewaltiges Ringen zwischen Kraft und Schwache, ein ewiger Sieg des Starken über den Schwachen.”

  The whole of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.

  “Poor buggers just dropped dead,” Davies said.

  Wilkins jumped to his feet waving his gloved hand. He held a finger in front of his gas mask. Quiet!

  The woman Wilkins had just inspected sat up, eyes closed and face contorted as if struggling to awake from a deep slumber. Her blond hair had frayed around its austere bun, giving her a helpless quality.

  Chapman crouched in front of her. “Are you all right, miss?” he said in German.

  “No pain, no progress,” she said sleepily.

  “Get away from her, sir,” Wilkins warned.

  Her eyes flashed open as she turned toward him. They were completely white.

  “No pain,” the other scientists murmured. “No progress.”

  They stirred, some straining to rise to all fours, continuing their lethargic chant.

  “They’re infected, sir,” Wilkins said.

  The lieutenant frowned. “Are you sure? They’re blind, not dead.”

  “Sir!”

  “We have to confirm. If they’re alive, they can give us information.”

  A grizzled scientist wrapped his hands around Chapman’s ankle and bit into it.

  “Christ!” The lieutenant kicked to free himself and inspected the bite, which had failed to penetrate the leather of his boot. Another close shave.

  A scientist rose unsteadily to her feet and lurched grinning at Wilkins.

  He didn’t wait for orders. He raised his rifle and fired.

  The rest of the squad joined in, shooting the scientists in the head as they struggled to rise or crawled toward the soldiers.

  The slaughter finished, the paras stood in a cloud of smoke. The gunfire still rang in their ears. Nobody spoke, too stunned by what just happened.

  A speaker on the ceiling startled them with a loud screech. “Achtung, achtung.” The man’s calm, deep voice resonated throughout the level. “What is the disturbance?”

  Chapman and Wilkins looked at each other.

  “We heard shooting. Respond now.”

  The lieutenant pulled off his gas mask and picked up the phone. “We’re on level three. Please send help.”

  At his signal, the team took up firing positions near the stairwell.

  Nothing.

  Then: “We have orders not to leave our post. The door must remain secured.”

  “Please, comrade!” Chapman said, doing an admirable job with his acting. “If you don’t come, we’ll all be killed and our research destroyed!”

  “Nein,” the speaker blared.

  “I order you to come!”

  Nothing.

  “In the name of the Führer!”

  Nothing.

  The lieutenant hung up the phone. “So here’s the situation. There’s still a military presence in the facility, possibly SS types. Likely, they’re at the bottom level and have barricaded themselves in with the serum. Wilkie?”

  “I agree, sir.”

  “If you’ve got a brilliant idea, I’d be all ears.”

  “We may not be able to get inside to have a go at them. We don’t have time to starve them out. That leaves talking, sir.”

  “Talking?”

  “As in convince them to surrender.”

  Chapman sighed. “A nice little chin wag with the SS. Right.” He picked up the phone, chewed his mustache a bit, and set it back down. “Any more brilliant ideas on how I should do that?”

  Wilkins shrugged. “Tell them Germany surrendered?”

  “Smashing,” the lieutenant said. “Attention
any German military who can hear my voice: We are the 2nd Para Brigade with Her Majesty’s 1st Airborne Division and have arrived to secure this site. Your Führer unleashed a plague from this facility, which we believe originated here. Germany has since surrendered. The plague, however, is out of control. We ask you to surrender so that we can reduce unnecessary loss of life not only in Europe but in Germany itself.”

  Good going, Wilkins thought. The lieutenant had told the truth and kept it short and simple, ending with an appeal the man’s humanity.

  After a long silence, the speaker came to life again. “What is the Führer’s status?”

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “Waffen-Schutzstaffel.”

  SS. Scratch that appeal to the man’s humanity. He was a fanatic likely to follow his last orders to the death, no matter how ridiculous.

  “What is the Führer’s status?”

  Chapman winged it. “The Führer became infected himself. Surely, you’ve seen what happens to men when they’re infected. They go insane, they kill, they die, and then they go on killing. If you let us in, we’ll be able to cure him.”

  The SS didn’t answer.

  “Come on, man. You can save the Führer.”

  “Hang up,” Wilkins said.

  Chapman did. “What’s the ruckus, Wilkie? I’ve got this well in hand.”

  The SS had sworn to follow Hitler to the grave.

  The speaker blared again. “Remain in your present location, British. We are coming to you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GRUNEWALD

  Jäger Muller trailed Leutnant Reiser through the dense woods.

  Gaunt pines wherever he looked. Stately oak trees devoid of greenery. Light and shadow played tricks on his eyes, making him see lurching dead everywhere.

  The thrashing he heard turned out to be a terrified snow hare.

  Muller carried his rifle, bayonet, Luger, and stick grenades, along with a bandolier holding a hundred rounds and additional clips stuffed into every spare pocket. Still, he felt defenseless.

  Something moaned in the trees. He looked at the lieutenant to make sure he hadn’t imagined it this time.

  Leutnant Reiser shouldered his MP40 submachine-gun and fired a burst. The stream of bullets punched the grimacing ghoul in the head and nearly tore it clean off. The body toppled a moment later in a puff of smoke and dust.

  “Good shooting, Herr Leutnant,” Muller said in wonder.

  “Ja,” said Reiser. “Send my trophy in the next post. Los, jäger.”

  The trooper pursed his lips and followed. Damn it, did the lieutenant have to be so good at shooting on top of everything else? Did he even know what fear was?

  It was just one more thing that was intimidating about Reiser. Maybe that was how it was supposed to work. Muller feared failure more than he feared the undead. He feared being a feigling, a coward. And he feared Reiser most of all.

  Not just fear. He despised the man, found him almost entirely lacking in warmth and personality. Muller didn’t like officers in general, and not just for that. The higher up in rank you got, the closer you were to being Hitler.

  If Oberfeldwebel Wolff were here, he’d tell Muller what to do instead of forcing him to tag along in the middle of the woods, part spectator, part cannon fodder. The sergeant cared about his men as much as he did the mission. Wolff would give him the chance to conquer his fear by drawing blood with a kill.

  Reiser couldn’t be bothered. He didn’t care about Muller at all, didn’t even know his name. And every downed ghoul brought him closer to his objective.

  “Herr Leutnant, are you sure the platoon is ahead of us?”

  The lieutenant answered with a grunt. “Ja.”

  In the darkness, they’d stumbled upon the weapons container, already opened and almost emptied of weapons and ammunition. They’d armed themselves and marched east until dawn found them in this thick forest.

  Muller was certain they’d overshot the assembly area. This wasn’t a patch of woods. It was the Grunewald Forest, on the other side of the Havel River, which put them far ahead of the regiment and very much on their own.

  He was sure enough about it he opened his mouth to tell Reiser, then wisely shut it again. “Surely,” he ventured, “we should have caught up to them by—”

  Reiser raised his MP40 and fired again. Two bodies crumpled to the snow among the trees. “Los.”

  “Zu befehl.” While obedience was highly valued in the Wehrmacht, the Fallschirmjäger were expected to take initiative, especially if it meant being aggressive. “I’ll take point, Herr Leutnant.”

  He ranged ahead before the lieutenant could respond with some scathing rebuke. As long as he was out here, he was going to prove himself.

  They crossed a small footbridge over a frozen canal linking two lakes. The distant woods appeared a cloudy gray.

  Fog? No, smoke. A fire smoldered deep in the forest.

  He advanced bayonet first, ready for anything. The lieutenant tramped behind him. The woods opened up to a meadow shrouded in a thick smoky haze.

  Massive pyres of corpses smoldered by several three-ton trucks. Two German soldiers and a civilian dug through the charred bodies with their hands.

  His first thought was they were crazy. The ash was still intensely hot.

  His second thought was they were draugr.

  If he turned around and checked with the lieutenant for orders, Reiser would shoot the infected himself. Muller raced ahead to get his kill.

  As he marched, he spared a thought for the morality of it. As a soldier, he’d often questioned when it was right and wrong to take another man’s life. Then he reminded himself these things weren’t men, not anymore.

  The draugr turned at the sound of his approach. The civilian’s scalp fell forward in a bloody flap over his face. The thing brushed it out of the way with his clawed hand and let out a sound like snickering.

  Any moral qualms Muller might have had died right there.

  Then he slid into the pit.

  So focused on the draugr and the smoke, he’d completely missed the hastily dug trenches. He’d fallen into one of these to come to a skidding half on top of thick carpet of stiff, lime-covered corpses.

  Arms, legs, hands, eyes, bloody torsos, and faces, so many dead faces, all tangled together as if fused together into a single monstrous organism.

  He cried out in horror. The draugr sighed as they staggered toward him.

  Where was the lieutenant? Why wasn’t he firing?

  A hand gripped his jacket and yanked. It was Reiser. The lieutenant hauled him out of the pit. “On your feet, dumb-head! Shoot your weapon!”

  “Jawohl!” Muller raised his K98 rifle and fired with a loud report.

  And missed.

  More than panic affected his aim. Even now, he shied from killing unarmed people at close range.

  This didn’t make him a coward. This made him normal.

  Muller worked the bolt to chamber another round and fired again, with similar results. The draugr were getting too close for comfort. He backpedaled straight into Reiser, who grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved him forward.

  “Do your duty, jäger!” the lieutenant barked.

  They weren’t people. They were monsters wearing the faces of people.

  He fired again.

  The civilian spun like a top and toppled into one of the lime pits. Emboldened, Muller steadied his breathing and shot the soldiers in rapid succession.

  If he felt bad about it, that would have to wait until later.

  Right now, he felt good.

  He was alive, and they were dead. He hadn’t failed. He could do this. He turned hoping to catch some sign of approval from the lieutenant, but Reiser was already walking away to inspect the bodies in the trenches.

  Which was well and good, as far as Muller was concerned. He was glad the lieutenant hadn’t caught him looking for a pat on the head.

  He gazed down at the horrific mass of bodi
es, wondering how they ended up here. Many had their wrists tied behind their backs with rope. Nearly all had broken skulls.

  These people had been executed.

  Something was alive in the trenches. More than one thing. The mass of bodies appeared to pulse as several ghouls at the bottom tried to squirm their way out.

  “Interesting,” Reiser mused. “They have plenty of meat. Why do they want to get out and try to kill us?”

  Muller winced at the idea of people being meat. His stomach soured.

  “Because killing us is their main passion, Herr Leutnant,” he guessed. “Eating is just a part of it.”

  Reiser’s eyes narrowed, and the jäger realized the lieutenant had posed the question rhetorically to himself. Then he nodded. “That may be so.”

  Gunfire rattled to the southwest.

  “And we’re in the Grunewald, Herr Leutnant,” Muller said, pressing his luck. “That’s the regiment shooting. They’re behind us.”

  “What is your name, jäger?”

  Muller came to attention. “Jäger Yohann Muller, Herr Leutnant.”

  “We will wait here for the regiment, Herr Muller. In the meantime, investigate the trucks and let me know if they are operational.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant!”

  “Then it is back to heimatkurs for us, eh?”

  Heimatkurs, the way home.

  The Fallschirmjäger were on the move again, again homeward bound.

  For the first time, Muller felt like he had truly joined their ranks.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  REICHSAUTOBAHN

  The regiment marched out of the Grunewald Forest onto Reichsautobahn 2, one of “Adolf Hitler’s Roads” built by the Nazis after they took power in 1933. Lined with trees, this major east-west national highway cut through Berlin and would lead the Fallschirmjäger directly to Tiergarten.

  Toting his machine-gun over his shoulders, Gefreiter Steiner looked around Berlin’s Charlottenburg district like an awed tourist. The German Opera was nearby, as was Kurfürstendamm Avenue with its shops and restaurants. In the Golden Twenties, the district was famed for theater, music, and dancing.