The Templar Prophecy

by Mario Reading

  ELEVEN

  Eberhard handed over the pistols unwillingly. But he had very little choice. The colonel had been told to expect them.

  ‘Come, sir. We must press on. The Ivans are getting closer by the minute.’

  ‘No, Sergeant Major. Stop. First I must change.’ Inge halted just before the Kannenberggang. She rummaged in her holdall and brought out some overalls and a pair of Luftwaffe pilot’s boots. ‘Avert your gaze please, Sergeant Major.’

  Eberhard did as he was told. But he didn’t like it. He’d never in his life been ordered about by a woman. He muttered something under his breath. He could smell the colonel’s wife from nearly two metres away. A mixture of perfume, woman and sex. He heard the whisper her dress made as she slipped it over her head. It sent another gust of scent in his direction. Eberhard desperately wanted to ease his crotch. But he didn’t dare do it in front of the colonel – especially now that he’d been forced to arm the bastard. But somehow he’d have the stuck-up bitch. Somehow.

  He glanced down at the suitcase the colonel was carrying. There was more in it than simply the document he had brought with him in the dead colonel’s briefcase. It was filled with cash, no doubt. Swiss francs, probably. Maybe even gold. Bribery money. Why would the Führer send this pair of clowns out of Berlin for any other reason?

  A plane. Money. A woman. Eberhard decided that he’d been gifted Christmas, Easter and New Year all in one.

  ‘What are your specific orders concerning us, Sergeant Major?’

  Ah. The colonel had been watching him, then? Eberhard straightened up. Pretending to obey whilst withholding his real character was second nature to him. ‘To see you both onto your plane. Then to report back to the Führer.’

  ‘Remember that. If I see you staring at this suitcase again, I will shoot you. For you, it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t know where to place my eyes, sir. That was all it was.’ So. His suspicions were confirmed. ‘The colonel’s wife, sir. She is ready.’ And so are you, you Wehrmacht shit.

  Eberhard led the way to the surface. Each step brought them nearer to the war. Explosions rocked the night. Firelight lit up the sky. Eberhard signalled to an SS soldier sheltering behind a pile of rubble. He made a cutting motion with his hand. The soldier nodded. His face looked grotesque in the half-light. He seemed half-starved.

  ‘This way.’ Eberhard led Hartelius and his wife into the night, his black uniform blending into the shadows. ‘Stick close behind me. Go where I go. Do what I do. We are five hundred metres from the Brandenburg Gate. Your plane is due east of there.’

  ‘I know very well where our plane is.’

  ‘Good. Good. Then if anything happens to me you will be safe, sir.’ Eberhard put all the emphasis he could on the word ‘sir’. He grinned as he said it, knowing that neither of them could see his true expression in the darkness.

  Halfway along the western border of the Tiergarten they came to a barricade manned by a detachment of six Hitler Youth. The oldest was perhaps fifteen years old. The youngest, ten. The boys’ eyes widened when they saw the colonel’s bars on Hartelius’s collar.

  ‘Is this way still open?’

  The oldest boy nodded. He swallowed and tried to speak, but he had not had any water for eighteen hours, and his throat seized up on him. He began to cough.

  A younger boy held up his hand as though he was still at school.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘The Ivans. We’ve heard their women soldiers cut off our…’ He ducked his head and looked towards his companions.

  ‘What? What do they cut off?’ Eberhard pushed forward.

  The boys huddled together when they saw that Eberhard was SS.

  ‘They won’t cut anything off if you kill them first. That is my suggestion to you. Kill the enemy first. That is the secret to survival. You have your weapons. You have your orders. What else is there to discuss?’

  Hartelius caught his wife’s gaze. He rolled his eyes. He gave a marginal shake of the head as if to reassure her that this madness wasn’t any of his doing. ‘Sergeant Major. Can’t we send these children back to their mothers?’

  Eberhard’s outraged look came straight from silent pictures. ‘If they move from these positions, I will shoot them. Sir. They know this. They will do their duty. This will make their mothers proud. Sir.’ Eberhard forged ahead as if the boys had already ceased to exist.

  Hartelius shook his head again and followed his wife. As he passed the last of the boys he whispered, ‘Get out of here when we’re gone. All of you. Ditch your uniforms and go back home. Tell the others. That’s an order.’

  The boy stared back at him, naked fear in his eyes.

  ‘A direct order. Do you hear me? Don’t listen to that turd. I outrank him four times over. Go and see to your mother. She will need all the help she can get in the next few days. We have lost this war. The Ivans own Berlin now. Your duties here are over.’

  Once, when the shelling approached too close for comfort, they were forced to hide in a bomb crater until the salvo diminished. Hartelius took his wife’s hand. He pressed both the cyanide tablets into it. ‘These are in case anything happens to me or the plane. Think of them as backup. The Ivans are going to behave like ravening beasts when they break through. No one will be safe from them. No one.’

  Eberhard was trying to eavesdrop on their conversation, but Hartelius didn’t care. A feeling of impending doom was overwhelming him. He felt like a man reaching the end of a long journey whose destination he neither knew nor cared about. A pointless journey that had been sprung on him as the result of a practical joke.

  When he first saw the Fieseler Storch standing on the concrete sidings of the Charlottenburger Chaussee, Hartelius thought that he was seeing a mirage. How could this possibly be? How could the discipline needed to maintain a plane in satisfactory condition have been upheld in a hellhole such as this? How come no one had made off with it in the seemingly endless fourteen hours since they had landed? How come it hadn’t been struck by a mortar or an incoming shell? Set alight by phosphorous? Broken up for spare parts?

  ‘You are lucky,’ said Eberhard.

  ‘I know we are.’

  ‘No. I mean you are lucky that nobody around here knows how to fly. How long do you think your precious Storch would have lasted, then?’ Eberhard showed his pass to the head of the SS detachment guarding the plane. The man snapped out a Hitler salute when he saw the Führer’s personal seal.

  ‘Now we get on board.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes. We.’

  ‘But you told me the Führer ordered you to see us safely into the air and then report straight back to him.’

  ‘That’s what I was told to say. This was a test of your loyalty. I am in fact ordered to come with you. To guard you until you reach your destination.’

  Inge von Hartelius stepped forward. She was frowning. This was her plane. She was its captain. Not this SS worm. As a test pilot, she was used to dealing with men who were her inferiors in rank.

  ‘You can see the size of the cabin, Sergeant Major. Look at it. Three of us will not fit in. Our maximum take-off weight is 1325 kilograms. It will be impossible to lift off with both you and the overload tanks on board. The landing strip is too short. We will need more than the usual hundred feet to get into the air. Not to mention the utter waste of fuel.’

  ‘But still. You will do it, Freifrau. These are the orders of the Führer. Somehow you will take off. Somehow you will get us to our destination.’

  Inge stared at her husband.

  Hartelius gave a brief inclination of the head. The men guarding the plane were SS, not Wehrmacht. They would obey Eberhard, not him. Now was not the time to make a fuss, he told Inge with his eyes. Once safely in the air, he would use his pistol on Eberhard. Knock him out. Inge could land in a field somewhere and they could dump him. Save fuel that way. The bastard could look after himself from then on in. They would probably be doing him a favour. />
  Eberhard caught the look that passed between them. He twitched the barrel of his Schmeisser. Better to be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. ‘You will hand me your pistols. Now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You will no longer need them once we are in the air. They will simply weigh you down. They will be safer in my care.’

  The three men of the SS detachment guarding the plane snapped to attention when they saw what their sergeant major intended. They, too, were cradling Schmeissers. As far as they were concerned, a Wehrmacht colonel had about as much clout with them as a Russian commissar. An SS sergeant major was another beast entirely. They would obey him without question. And to the death.

  Hartelius drew his pistol from his holster and handed it to Eberhard. Inge slipped the Luger from the specially made pouch in her flying jacket and did the same.

  ‘Thank you. Now I get in first. The colonel and I will share the twin passenger seats behind you. This way I can better protect the plane. You may have your pistols back when we land in Bavaria. You have only to ask.’

  Eberhard ducked under the struts and swung himself up into the cockpit. The plane creaked on its hinges. Inge and Johannes von Hartelius followed.

  Inge strapped herself into the pilot’s seat. She leant out of the staggered door and addressed one of the SS guards. ‘No one has tampered with this plane?’

  ‘No, Frau Flugkapitän. We did exactly as you requested when you landed. Both wingroot tanks have been filled to the brim with fuel – seventy-four litres in each. We have also filled the self-sealing overload fuel tank under the fuselage with a further three hundred litres. We brought the fuel in by hand, twenty litres at a time. Two of our men were killed doing it.’

  ‘I am sorry. You have all been very brave. The Führer is proud of you.’

  The guard acknowledged her words with a brief inclination of the head. ‘Using the details you gave me, I have calculated that you will have a potential range of between eight hundred and one thousand kilometres, if you fly at no more than four thousand metres altitude and at a steady speed of circa one hundred and thirty kilometres per hour. No one has been inside the cockpit or tampered with the luggage compartment in your absence. Whatever you brought in with you is still safe. Just as you requested, Frau Flugkapitän.’

  Inge wanted to weep for all the doomed and indoctrinated young men who were so earnestly defending what remained of her country. Instead she slipped on her leather flying helmet and goggles and gave a curt signal with her hand. ‘Fold down the wings.’

  The SS guards did as she asked.

  ‘Now prep the engine by turning the propeller six times anticlockwise. Slowly. Then circle the fuselage and check all the flaps manually for freedom of movement.’

  The soldiers split off into units and ran to obey her.

  ‘It is done, Frau Flugkapitän.’

  Inge glanced at Eberhard. ‘If you didn’t insist on coming with us, we could manage an almost vertical take-off. As it is we shall have to launch ourselves over the Russian lines. This is an absurd extra risk, Sergeant Major. I beg you to reconsider.’

  ‘Then order your husband off the plane. That would lighten us up considerably.’

  Inge turned back to her instruments. ‘He is the reason we are making this flight, Sergeant Major. Not you. You know that very well. He stays on, or I don’t fly.’

  ‘As you wish, Freifrau. You have a machine gun in the nose, don’t you? Use that on the Ivans.’

  ‘No. There is nothing in the nose beyond the propeller. The MG 15 is usually behind you. On a swivel. It was taken off in order to lighten the plane. It may have escaped your notice, but I am a test pilot, Sergeant Major, not a fighter pilot. Women in the Third Reich are not permitted to fly on combat missions. Although you wouldn’t know it to look at me now.’ Inge laughed and flipped the electric starter. The Storch burst into clattering life. ‘I suggest you view this plane as a woman, Sergeant Major. You can hit her, but she cannot strike you back. But I am sure that, given the particular qualities you have demonstrated to us on the way out here, you have encountered such a situation already in your life?’

  Now that she was in charge of her plane again, Inge was feeling the first clear return of hope. She had seen her son Johannes’s Max and Moritz marionettes dangling from the control stick and knew that all was well.

  ‘Take away the chocks.’

  ‘They are clear, Frau Flugkapitän.’

  Inge pulled back the throttle and the Fieseler Storch surged forward. She knew the plane intimately. She had been exaggerating when she had told the sergeant major that they would have to encroach over the Russian front line in order to take off. If she couldn’t take off within a hundred feet, and pretty much vertically, she didn’t deserve to be called a pilot.

  The moment the Storch was fifty feet off the ground and rising, Inge swung the plane away from the flak towers and north across the Spree River towards the Moabit District, which she had been assured was still held by forces loyal to the Führer. One thing she knew for a fact: the southerly Tempelhof Airfield had been taken by the Russians on 24 April, and the even more southerly Schönefeld had fallen on 22 April. Both had originally been mooted as possible landing points for the Storch and been as quickly discarded. Travel in that direction and she would be shot down by low-flying Soviet P-39 Kobrushkas. At least this way they would have an outside chance of catching the Ivans napping. Who, after all, would be expecting any more German planes out of Berlin at this late stage in the game? And at night?

  The ruins of Berlin opened out below them. The whole city seemed on fire. Little was left to the imagination thanks to the outstanding all-round visibility from the Storch cabin. Buildings burnt, or cast great shadows across other bomb-damaged skeletons of buildings. The fretwork of streets below them was thrown into even greater prominence by the retreat into rubble of the edifices and shop fronts that had once overlooked them. It seemed impossible that anyone or anything could still be living down there. The place was a wasteland.

  Inge banked left in the direction of the Havel River. As she did so, languid tracers arced towards them, fizzing past the Storch’s wing towers like streamers fired from a shotgun. If just one round struck the overload fuel tank underneath the fuselage, the plane would brew up like a tank struck by a white phosphorous shell.

  ‘My God.’ Eberhard was gazing out of the window, his eyes wide with shock. ‘This is a tragedy beyond all imagining.’

  Hartelius, who had already seen the devastation on the flight in, gazed fixedly at Eberhard. When the sergeant major bent forward to obtain a better view of the carnage, he struck.

  But Eberhard was a street fighter and a former SS boxing champion. It had been Eberhard’s prowess in the ring, rather than any intellectual acumen or leadership skills, that had led to him being promoted master sergeant. And he had been fighting, in one way or another, ever since the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. He had been expecting Hartelius to make a move – even hoping for it.

  As Hartelius attempted to ram Eberhard’s head against the metal surround of the window, Eberhard raised the cocked Luger he had been surreptitiously concealing beneath his greatcoat and shot Hartelius through the neck. The shot severed Hartelius’s spine and he died instantly.

  Inge von Hartelius reacted from pure instinct. She swung the steel lunchbox containing the two vacuum flasks backwards over her seat. The lunchbox struck Eberhard on the temple. He fell to the floor of the aircraft and lay still. Inge hammered and hammered at his supine body with the lunchbox, but the position of her seat in relation to the seats behind her made any formal attempt at accuracy impossible. Every time she struck out at Eberhard she screamed her husband’s name. But he did not answer.

  The Storch dipped to one side and then swung back across its own wake in a jerky arc. Inge let the lunchbox fall. She knew that she had to regain control of the aeroplane or she would never get her husband to a hospital. The Storch had performed a near perfect semi-circle du
ring the fracas and was now heading directly back towards the Charlottenburg flak towers. Another sixty seconds’ flying time would see her and the plane ripped to shreds.

  She levelled the Storch and took it down to just above roof height. For the next five minutes Inge flew by prayers and adrenalin alone, until she felt that they were safely out of the danger zone. Only then did she crane her head back over the seat and look down into the cabin’s semi-darkness.

  Hartelius lay in an impossible position, his head at right angles to his body. No one still living was capable of such an unfeasible contortion. Inge began to wail.

  The next fifteen minutes were lost to her. Somehow she continued to fly the plane, but it was not through any effort of will. Speed and direction appeared to have no meaning for her. Tears and mucus flowed unchecked down her face. She was as unaware of her flight position as she was of the Russian soldiers below her, targeting the Storch with their rifles, submachine guns and, in one case, a plundered Panzerfaust.

  Instinctively, intuitively, when Inge first caught sight of the moon reflecting off Schwielow Lake, muscle memory caused her to ease back on the control stick and gain a little height.

  Five minutes passed, during which her hearing slowly returned. She ripped off her flying goggles and mopped at her face with her sleeve. When she could see properly again, she set her course along the luminous strip of the Havel River, which she knew would carry her eastwards towards the American lines. Rumour had it that the US Ninth Army had reached Tangermünde. That’s where she would make for.

  As a German woman, Inge knew that she could expect no mercy from the Russians. But the Americans were a different matter.

  Now, with her husband dead, her country raped, and all her former allegiances null and void, Inge had nothing left to lose.

  TWELVE

  Eberhard regained consciousness just over an hour into the flight. This coincided exactly with the Storch’s crossing of the Elbe River into US-held territory. Eberhard, however, was aware of little more than that they were still flying in the dark – that his vision had in some way been impaired – and that a significant amount of time had elapsed between his execution of Hartelius and his return to full awareness.