The Templar Prophecy

by Mario Reading

  Inge von Hartelius could no longer control her outrage. ‘That whore Reitsch didn’t steal my plane, did she, Johannes? You understand why I am asking you this?’ She glanced up at the ceiling in an echo of her husband’s acknowledgment that there might be listening devices. ‘As one of the few women left in this house of fools, everybody treats me as if I am invisible. Even the secretaries refuse to acknowledge me. I would like to crack their simpering heads together.’

  ‘I understand very well why you are asking me this.’ Hartelius begged her with his eyes to be discreet. ‘Von Loringhoven informed me that the lovebirds flew out in an Arado Trainer, not a Fieseler Storch. And from the far side of the Tiergarten. Also that they landed safely at Rechlin Airport. So it is still possible to get out of here if one is allowed to purchase a suitable lottery ticket.’ Hartelius pointed up at the light brackets and then to his ear. ‘Your plane is still on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. The Führer has ordered his men to keep it on standby.’

  ‘For him and Eva Braun?’

  ‘Absolutely not. The Führer has made it very clear that he means to die here with his wife.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘He and Frau Hitler were married last night. Things move fast here in Berlin.’ Hartelius lowered his voice again. ‘Though not as fast as the Ivans, apparently. They are within two hundred metres of the bunker as we speak. Only the two thousand men of the SS Mohnke Brigade stand between us and Götterdämmerung. Normally, I wouldn’t trust the SS further than I can spit. But for once we must be grateful for their crass stupidity.’

  Inge von Hartelius took her husband’s hand. ‘Why don’t we make a break for it, Joni? If we can somehow reach the plane I could still fly us out.’

  ‘What? You mean bluster our way through?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve always been particularly good at that.’

  Hartelius gave another of his barking laughs. He loved it when his wife made fun of him. He lowered his voice to match his wife’s. ‘Impossible. These fanatisch glaübig SS diehards who stand between us and Armageddon also stand between us and freedom. And all officers have been disarmed on the Führer’s direct order. If he doesn’t want us to leave, we don’t leave. It’s as simple as that.’ He squeezed his wife’s hand. ‘We have been allocated a bedroom in which to rest after our flight, Schatzi. May I suggest that we withdraw there, barricade the door and go to bed? When we hear the first grenades going off in the corridors, we can say our farewells to each other and crack down on our pills. In the interim, I know exactly what I would like to do with my remaining time on this earth. If you are agreeable, that is?’

  ‘But how can we…’

  Hartelius lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘Schatzi. No. He is safe for the time being. I promise you this. We cannot think about him. We cannot even talk about him. Saving a miracle, we are both going to die in this place. It is a certainty. I beg you, please, to believe what I am telling you. And to make your peace.’

  EIGHT

  The fourteen-year-old boy had been watching the gap between the two buildings for twelve hours now. His stomach felt as if rats were gnawing at his entrails. Each hour, the hunger pains got worse. But he had been told by the SS sergeant to wait until the first Russian tank rounded the corner, fire his Panzerfaust, and only then retreat. Failing that, he would be shot. If he knocked out the Russian tank, on the other hand, the Führer would congratulate him. Personally. And give him a medal. For he would have helped save Germany.

  The boy glanced down at his Hitler Youth uniform. He rubbed the brass belt buckle with the back of his sleeve. Then he took off his crusher cap and looked at the badge. He began polishing the buttons on his blouson.

  Yevgeny Lebedintsev grinned as he watched the boy through the telescopic sight of his Mosinka sniper rifle. He had been watching him for more than an hour, ever since he had slithered along the upper floor of the abandoned warehouse and taken up his position covering the square. When the first friendly tank approached the turning he would have to take the boy out. It would make him sad to shoot such a young boy, but it was his duty. Take him out earlier and another would replace him, but possibly in a less amenable position. This Yevgeny could not countenance. It might lose his people a Betushka or, God forbid, a T-34. And such tanks, in the battle for Berlin, could mean the difference between stalemate and victory. Meanwhile Yevgeny would wait and see if a better target came along first. If that happened he could spare the boy with a clear conscience.

  The boy reminded him of his younger brother, Valentin. Valentin was thirteen. He was the apple of their mother’s eye. If the war ran on for another two years and Valentin was taken as a soldier, their mother would pine away. It was as simple as that. So it was Yevgeny’s duty to foreshorten the war as far as it was in his power to do so. To this end he had killed 143 men. Of these, 117 had been in Stalingrad, the remainder in the seemingly endless run-up to the battle for Berlin. His teacher, Vasya Zaytsev, whom they all looked up to, had killed many more: 257 in total. But 143 was good. Good enough for one of the master’s zaichata – one of Vasya’s ‘leverets’, as his sniper students were called.

  Yevgeny caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He waited ten seconds, and then swivelled his head at considerably less than what Vasya used to call the ‘speed of a rutting tortoise’. He saw the SS lieutenant colonel dart from one ruined doorway to another. Yevgeny swore under his breath, but the expletive stemmed more from astonishment than anger. What was a shit-kicker SS officer with a briefcase and no weapon in his hand doing alone on the battlefield? Collecting for the German Red Cross?

  Yevgeny inched the Mosinka round so that the 3.5 power PU fixed-focus sights bracketed the last doorway which the shit-kicker had entered. He waited with indrawn breath.

  The officer burst from the doorway and Yevgeny shot him. The shit-kicker spun wildly round and plunged back through the threshold.

  ‘Fucking acrobat.’ Yevgeny checked the ground outside the doorway through his telescopic sight. Yes. There were gouts of blood on the ground. The bastard was probably lung shot. He wouldn’t last long.

  The boy sprinted through Yevgeny’s field of vision, almost slipping on the blood, and then disappeared into the doorway. Yevgeny grunted. ‘You’re a brave little squirrel.’ He had already reloaded. The good news was that the boy had abandoned his Panzerfaust, so that danger was at least past.

  Inside the ruined house the boy crouched over the wounded officer. ‘Sir. Sir. What can I do?’

  Obersturmbannführer Baldur Pfeidler knew that he had only minutes left to live. The sniper had got him through both lungs. Already the pain of breathing was threatening to make him delirious. He coughed up some blood. It tasted like the scrapings from a metal pannikin. It struck him as strange that his body could change from functional to dysfunctional in the space of a few seconds.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Scheuer, sir.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Seventeen, sir.’

  ‘Don’t shit with me, boy. I haven’t the time.’

  ‘Fourteen, sir.’

  ‘Anyone out there with you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So you’re the front line?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Pfeidler sighed. So this was how it was going to be? Pfeidler was the sole survivor of six officer volunteers whose task it was to carry an important dispatch from the Tiergarten to the Hitlerbunker and place it directly into the Führer’s hands. As luck would have it they had stumbled into a Russian patrol within five minutes of starting out and been massacred. Pfeidler, the only survivor, had been on the run ever since with the briefcase he had liberated from a gutshot Wehrmacht major whose name he did not even know.

  ‘You are to take this.’ Pfeidler canted his head towards the briefcase. ‘The sniper who shot me will be covering that doorway waiting for you to emerge. You must exit by another route.’

  ‘But sir? Where am I to go with it?’

  ‘You know where the
Reich Chancellery is?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Five hundred metres behind us. My mother used to clean there.’

  ‘And the bunker?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Below the Chancellery.’

  ‘Take this briefcase to the Führer. Place it directly in his hands. No one else’s. Take the Luger from my holster. If anyone tries to stop you, kill them.’ Pfeidler coughed up some more blood. This time it was lighter in colour. Bright red rather than crimson. Pfeidler knew that this was because it was mixed with oxygen from his lungs. He had only moments left. ‘When I die, take the ID tag from around my neck. You will need this to show to the SS guards surrounding the Führer. Listen to me, boy. Don’t look away. Take my medals too. These will prove to the guards who I am. They will let you through. Give them my pistol when they ask for it. You will not be allowed into the presence of the Führer bearing it.’

  Pfeidler felt a great pressure on his chest, as if a heavy man was standing on him with the full extent of his weight.

  ‘Gerda,’ he whispered.

  Then he died.

  The boy burst into tears. For a long time he sat beside the officer, weeping. His father had been killed during the Battle of Kursk nine months earlier. Now he wept both for his father and for the man lying beside him. He wept also for his childhood, and the loss of it. For his mother, and her widow’s grief. For his sister, and the broken country that she would inherit. Hans Scheuer did not understand that he was weeping for all these things. If such a thing were explained to him, he would have made a face and ducked his head to one side, laughing.

  When he was finished crying, he stood up. He had forgotten all about the sniper. He ran out through the same entrance he had entered by.

  Yevgeny Lebedintsev let the boy pass. He knew it was a stupid thing to do, but there it was. The boy resembled his brother, Valentin, too closely for comfort. Someone, somewhere, might one day spare Valentin just as he had spared the boy. Such things happened. He knew it. His mother had the second sight. She had brought him up to believe that certain things were fated.

  He watched the boy darting through the rubble but did not vary his rifle’s position. The boy’s own people would probably kill him on the assumption that he was running away. Yevgeny had seen this happen many times now. Even the Red Army’s own Commissars had been ordered to do similar things to Russian troops who funked battle. Such was warfare. Yevgeny was pleased that he had let the boy live and instead killed the shit-kicker SS officer. This was the correct way of things. He inched his way back from the blasted-out window and took up a new position further along the building. Someone would soon come to claim the boy’s abandoned Panzerfaust and he would kill them. That, too, was the correct way of things.

  The boy, Hans Scheuer, zigzagged through the rubble like a hare pursued by gazehounds. At every moment he expected to be shot in the back. At the very last instant before hurtling through the door he had remembered the lieutenant colonel’s warning about the sniper, but by then it was too late. He stopped thinking about the sniper and began thinking about the SS sergeant. He had left the Panzerfaust behind him in the trench. Such a thing was tantamount to treason. He deserved to be shot.

  Hans ran and ran. He ran until his lungs burned with the effort. He was running towards the Führer. He had been tasked by a senior officer with an important mission. The Führer would realize that he was not running away and give him a medal. He would show his mother the medal and she would be proud of him. She would rub his hair the way she did when she was particularly pleased, and then give him a gingerbread man, which he would eat with a tall glass of creamy milk, straight from the cow. All the neighbours would turn out to see his medal. Arthur Axmann himself, the national leader of the Hitler Youth, would come by to admire it. The mayor would tell Hans to take the medal back to his school and show it off in front of his class.

  Young Hans Scheuer never felt the bullet that killed him. It was fired by SS Master Sergeant Friedhelm Eberhard. He had warned Scheuer not to abandon his post until the Russian tanks came calling. Scheuer deserved to die. If everybody behaved as he did, there would be chaos. As it was, things had already descended into a state of anarchic disorder. Eberhard considered himself one of the final bulwarks of civilization against the Red Army hordes that threatened the Fatherland. Killing cowards was a necessary part of his duties. The traitor Scheuer was lucky not to have been hanged from a lamp post like the three men Eberhard and his gang had encountered the day before. The bastards had even changed into civilian clothes. But Eberhard knew a military haircut when he saw one. The court – of which he was the only functional member – had condemned the men out of hand. They had been strung up within minutes, with signs hung round their necks as a warning to others.

  Eberhard turned the boy over with his foot. He was taken aback by how little he weighed. Where had the snivelling tick found a Luger and a briefcase? And what were these? Medals? The identity discs of an SS lieutenant colonel? Had Scheuer been plundering the dead as well as running?

  Eberhard broke open the hasp of the briefcase with his combat knife. What he saw turned his skin as cold as if he had inadvertently swum through an ice current. The documents inside the briefcase were marked ‘For The Führer’s Eyes Only’. Eberhard looked around. Some of his men were watching him. Eberhard could see disgust at his action in killing the boy written all over their faces.

  ‘This traitor has been plundering the body of an SS officer. Look. He has stolen the medals and identity tags of one Obersturmbannführer Baldur Pfeidler. Here. This one is a Knight’s Cross. And this one a Close Combat Clasp in gold. The man he stole from was a hero of the Reich.’ Eberhard held out the medals as proof. He glanced down at the boy’s body. Maybe the boy had been running back to bring him the briefcase? Maybe he had made a mistake in shooting him?

  Eberhard forced the thought from his mind. In war, everything was justified if it led to victory. That’s what they had taught him during training at Bad Tölz, and that’s what he believed. Whichever way you chose to look at it, the boy had died for his Fatherland.

  ‘You. You are not one of mine. What is your name?’ Eberhard asked of one of the men standing near him.

  ‘Gerlacher, Sergeant.’

  ‘Go and take over Scheuer’s Panzerfaust, Gerlacher. The first Russian tank that rounds the corner – paff. No need to tell you what happens to cowards. You’ve just seen.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant. There is no need.’

  ‘I shall be gone for a while. I am needed at the Führerbunker. This briefcase Scheuer stole contains a document of the utmost importance to the Reich. A safe pair of hands must deliver it.’

  Eberhard didn’t wait for a reply. He started off immediately in the direction of the bunker. When next he turned back to look, some of his men were clustering round the body of the Hitler Youth boy.

  Well. They could transform themselves into sitting targets if they so desired. He had other fish to fry.

  By the time he had rounded the first corner, Eberhard had convinced himself that what he carried in the briefcase would garner him at the very least a commendation. Possibly even a promotion. Perhaps even a medal.

  But best of all it carried with it the chance of meeting the Führer himself.

  NINE

  Adolf Hitler looked like an old man. At fifty-six years and nine days old, he was developing the beginnings of a dowager’s hump from stooping, dropping his head, and hunching his shoulders. His skin was ash-coloured from lack of sunlight, and his eyes and expression were dull. He wore blue-tinted glasses. When he walked he dragged his left leg and shuffled. During the past nine months he had developed the habit of favouring his left arm following the damage his right arm had received in the July 1944 assassination plot, making him seem lopsided when he approached people.

  But for Master Sergeant Friedhelm Eberhard, the evidence of his own eyes was irrelevant. He had worshipped the Führer for so long from afar that the reality he saw in front of him bore no relation to the picture his
mind succeeded in conjuring up. To him, as he stood there in the Führer’s personal study, the man who took the briefcase from him seemed God-like. And to serve such a man was the equivalent of a divine commission.

  ‘How did you come by this item?’ There were stress lines on Adolf Hitler’s cheeks, and dried spittle at the corner of his mouth from a recent outbreak of shouting.

  ‘I took it from a dead Russian soldier, Mein Führer.’ Eberhard had pocketed Lieutenant Colonel Pfeidler’s medals and wasn’t about to give them up. After the war was over he could claim them as his own. Failing that, they might be worth money. He had tossed Pfeidler’s ID tag into the rubble, where it belonged. And to hell with the boy he had killed.

  ‘Extraordinary.’ Hitler exchanged his blue-tinted glasses for a pair of reading glasses, painstakingly checked the condition of the official seal on the document wallet, then sliced through it with a penknife. He drew out the covering letter and read it. The hand holding the letter shook like that of a drunkard, so that the letter flapped limply, like a handkerchief farewell. ‘Quite extraordinary.’ As Hitler read further, a smile crossed his face. The smile steadily grew, and Hitler seemed to grow with it, until he resembled a partially inflated caricature of the man who had ordered the invasion of Poland in 1939. ‘Bormann!’ he shouted. ‘Bormann and Goebbels. I want them in here. Now.’

  One of the SS guards standing by the study door saluted, swivelled on his heel and left the room.

  Hitler began to laugh.

  Eberhard stood aghast. What was going on? Why was the Führer in such high spirits? What could possibly have been inside the briefcase to cause such jubilation? For even Eberhard, a past master at wishful thinking, saw little or nothing to be jubilant about in the present crisis confronting the Reich.

  As Eberhard watched, Adolf Hitler cut what amounted to a caper on the carpet in front of him. In reality it looked more like the uncontrolled gyrations of a madman. To Eberhard, however, Hitler’s dance resembled nothing so much as the victory jig he had seen the Führer do on newsreels after receiving news about the capitulation of Paris to German forces in June 1940.