by Ryan Graudin
“And then they started shooting?” Yael asked.
Herr Förstner nodded. “We tried to explain, but it made no difference.”
Behind her, Miriam was translating the discussion from German to Russian. The execution-squad leader gave another grunt: far more uncomfortable than the first.
When Yael asked about a radio, Ernst Förstner’s expression did not flinch. “I do have equipment for contacting the headquarters in Germania. I can take you to it, but first I want a guarantee of amnesty for myself and my men. I want the executions stopped.”
Yael looked to the seven judges as Miriam translated this request. “Can you promise this?”
Their stares were as varied as those in the execution line. Traces of mercy jarring against no cold blood here. One of the nameless officers motioned to Ernst Förstner’s faded Wehrmacht uniform. “Ask him how many of our comrades he killed in the war.”
Yael didn’t. “How many Germans did you kill?” she shot back. “How many of your comrades will die if we don’t contact Germania and your army goes plunging toward Moscow without intelligence?”
None of the Soviet heads had an answer for her. They muttered among themselves instead.
“There’s hundreds of prisoners, and we can’t afford to leave whole units behind to guard them,” Pashkov reasoned, loud enough for Yael to hear. “What will we do with the men?”
“Herr Förstner tells me there’s a labor camp north of here. They’ll have enough fences to contain your prisoners of war until Novosibirsk can arrange a tribunal.” Yael shuddered at the thought but kept talking. “Amnesty for the members of the resistance and no more death. You can agree to this?”
More mumbling. More war without rules stares, old wounds rising to the surface of their whispers. It took some minutes, but finally they fell silent. Miriam looked to the resistance leader.
“The comrade commanders agree to your terms,” she told him in German.
Ernst accepted the news with a nod. “Then it would be my pleasure to take you to the radio.”
They made a strange parade through Molotov’s scorched streets: eight high-ranking Soviet officers, an albino girl, a stretcher, and an Axis Tour double victor (Yael refused to leave Felix and Luka behind in the square), plus several Soviet guards (despite everything, they were still prisoners). Adele’s brother stayed asleep, a blanket pulled over his recognizable features. Luka was once again using his jacket as a hood, which drew just as much attention as his regular face. He bumped into Soviets and bodies alike, mumbling apologies neither the soldiers nor the dead could appreciate.
At the head of all this: Ernst Förstner. The resistance-cell leader led them to a wooden house that looked as if it had been ripped from its foundations and rattled about. Its wood was unpainted, the borders carved with elaborate details of diamonds and flowers. A swastika flag hung in the front window.
“Please forgive the details,” Herr Förstner said as he unlocked the door. “It’s important to blend in, as you well know.”
The dwelling’s inside was just as jumbled as its facade. The front room was stacked with a decade’s worth of Das Reich newspapers—ragged, yellowing editions disintegrating against a bearskin rug. The sofa could have doubled as a museum piece, if its velvet hadn’t been worn bald by so many sittings. An upright piano blocked the side window: keys stripped of ivory, its lid spattered with candle wax. Adolf Hitler’s portrait was propped halfheartedly above an ash-clogged fireplace.
The Führer’s voice was there, too. It was the first thing Yael heard when she stepped inside. Red, red as ever, crackling through the Reichssender’s airwaves. The screen showed Adolf Hitler sitting in his high-backed chair, looking just as he had in the Imperial Palace ballroom. Just as he did in Yael’s dreams.
The sight of him—so frenetic and unbearably alive—sent a new rush of hatred through Yael. If she’d had a gun, she would’ve pointed it at the television, taken the shot all over again.
“Irmgard?” the resistance leader called down the hallway. “It’s me!”
“Ernst? Oh, thank heavens! The others were telling me what was going on in the square.…” A woman peered out from one of the rooms, a pistol as aged as Ernst’s uniform in her hand. When she caught sight of the newcomers, she froze.
“It’s okay, love,” Herr Förstner explained. “They promised us amnesty.”
At this she rushed down the hall, into her husband’s arms. “I thought you were dead!”
“It was… a misunderstanding,” Ernst said into his wife’s shoulder. “They killed Lutz and Günter. They might have shot all of us if one of Reiniger’s operatives hadn’t stepped in. She arrived with some of the Soviets. Convinced them we could help.”
“Ernst tells me you have a radio with an Enigma machine.” Yael tried not to sound too frantic, but television Hitler’s promises of crushed traitors (embroidered in his needle-tip precise elocution) weren’t helping. “May I see it?”
“Of course, of course.” Irmgard was aflutter—proof of her husband’s survival made her movements whole stones lighter as she pulled away from Ernst, hitched up the hem of her dress, and picked through the newspapers, stepping over ADELE WOLFE PULLS AHEAD AT CAIRO CHECKPOINT and GERMANIA PREPARES TO OBSERVE FÜHRER’S 67TH BIRTHDAY, all the way to the piano. Here the woman bent down, pressing the instrument’s pedals in a quick pattern. The wood panel of the base swung away, revealing not strings but knobs and speakers. Irmgard flicked these to life, then turned to the Enigma machine.
“Today is… April eighth.” Irmgard arranged the rotors into the day’s correct combination. “There. Now we’ll be able to understand what comes through.”
Yael bent down into the gutted piano and took stock of the machinery. This radio was more complicated than Vlad’s shortwave setup, but nothing she wasn’t equipped to handle. She turned the dials to the correct frequency, trying to ignore the scarlet stab of Hitler’s voice over her shoulder, trying to pretend there wasn’t a lump of worry pearling inside her throat.
April 8. It had been six days since the failed assassination. Six days since the real Hitler first appeared on screens all across the Reich to declare himself immortal. History, Yael realized, was on a loop, as awful and repeating as the Chancellery Chat behind her. Just as Hitler had thwarted the first Valkyrie’s bomb at the Wolfsschanze, so had he survived Yael’s bullet. Both times Hitler had announced his providential resilience for all to hear. Both times he’d called for a settling of accounts, vengeance in the form of bullets and blood.
It had taken less than twenty-four hours for the original Operation Valkyrie to plummet into a series of brutal executions. Why should the second attempt prove any different?
Irmgard punched a greeting into the Enigma machine, jotting down the resulting code in pen and handing it to Yael. “Here. Use this to hail them.”
Yael cleared her throat as best she could, then read the letters aloud in bursts of five: “BRTJX. UGZJZ. EALST. QGJRW. G.”
… Nothing…
Of course, Yael hadn’t expected an immediate response. If her message had gotten through, it still had to be unscrambled into its true form:
VALKYRIE NEST, DO YOU COPY?
After that, an answer needed to be composed and encrypted. These actions took time.
But should they take this long?
The whole room listened, wordless. Luka had made a small throne out of the newspaper piles, biting his lip as he leaned into the crumbling pages. Irmgard’s pen was still pressed to paper, blotting her notepad. The Soviet officers were a tableau of stretched patience. Ernst eyed the guards as they settled Felix’s stretcher onto the bearskin rug, weapons at the ready. Miriam picked her way toward the piano and leaned above Yael, forehead pressed into its keys.
… Still nothing…
There was only so long Yael could wait. Only so many times her heart could leap inside her chest just to be met with silence. A vision of Henryka’s ransacked office kept shoving into her thoughts: Map ripp
ed from the wall. Radios smashed against the concrete floor. Gestapo picking through years’ worth of the resistance’s files…
.…
The radio crackled and then—Kasper’s voice! Yael recognized it in an instant. The sound—made tinny by thousands of kilometers and electronic speakers—crumpled her chest. She listened, breathless, as her fellow operative rattled off his own letter series. Irmgard typed these into the Enigma machine. Out the new letters came, which the woman respaced, and punctuated with her neat penmanship:
COPY. WHO IS THIS?
Write down, encode, recite an answer:
MOLOTOV CELL. VOLCHITSA.
CHAPTER 25
Chaos did not even begin to describe it.
Henryka needed more ears, more radios, more, more, more. News kept spilling in faster than she and the four operatives could listen, much less record or pass along. Over it all, the Führer’s post-assassination Chancellery Chat was airing on repeat on the przeklęty Reichssender: “I am not dead.… Despite their best efforts… Despite their best efforts… I am not dead.”
Over and over, on and on. Thirty times an hour. Twenty-four hours a day. As much as Henryka loathed Adolf Hitler’s words and still-alive-ness, she refused to turn the television off. She was too afraid she might miss some vital clue.
The resistance wasn’t dead either, despite the recovered Führer’s best efforts. In the space of days, five countries had been reborn, claiming their place on Henryka’s map: Great Britain, the kingdom of Iraq, Finland, Turkey, Italy (the southern half, boot heel to midcalf; north of Rome was still tangled with thin-yarn fronts, battles in progress). Henryka colored in their borders with much less joy than she should have. These victories did not surprise her. The British Isles and the Italian peninsula still held bitter memories of the initial war. Both were a hotbed of pins on her map. It hadn’t taken much for the regions’ wider populations to join the rebellion. Iraq, Finland, and Turkey had all been ruled by Reichskommissariats spread thin, where the National Socialists’ infrastructure could not survive resistance without additional support from Germania.
Five countries won. Six, counting Egypt.
But these victories weren’t enough.
The rest of the map was drowning in red chaos. Death plotted out with thumbtacks and string. The resistance in Paris had taken a vicious blow. Its leaders captured, defamed, executed on the spot. Once-Poland and once-Austria’s uprisings were floundering, if not completely dead. Moscow’s resistance was locked in grid-tight urban warfare, its attempts at breaking into the Kremlin and arresting the Reichskommissar continually rebuffed. But the biggest of Henryka’s worries loomed much closer to home, just a few meters above, tearing apart Germania’s streets. The moment the Führer’s declaration of not-deadness had appeared on people’s televisions, the city spiraled into pandemonium.
General Erwin Reiniger was still alive. (Thank God.) As soon as Henryka had radioed the news of the Führer’s survival, Reiniger and his men had retreated from the Volkshalle to a more defensible position, north of the river Spree. Many of the other conspiring generals followed. Others, upon learning of Hitler’s survival, lost heart, shifting their allegiances before their names could be pinned to any conspiracy. In the end, the divide was strangely matched. Waffen-SS and fealty-bound Wehrmacht men fought against the rebels. Germania’s citizens hunkered inside old air-raid shelters as the city tore itself apart.
There were no bombs yet. The Luftwaffe remained grounded, in part because its commander-in-chief, Hermann Göring, remained in Reiniger’s custody. The main airfield, in the northern town of Rechlin, was under National Socialist control, as were many of the planes and their pilots, but Henryka doubted Hitler was foolish or desperate enough to raze half of his own capital.
Germania was a line drawn in the sand, festering violence. There was no clear offensive. No solid defensive. Just building-to-building combat. Streets taken, blocks lost. On some corners, the swastika hung high. On others, it was burning. Even now Henryka could hear gunshots, staccatoing between the crackling radios. Reiniger had ordered her to evacuate the map room, but Henryka refused. Without this communication center, the resistance would fall apart altogether. She’d labored too hard, too long, to let something like death frighten her away.
She presented this choice to Kasper, Brigitte, Johann, and Reinhard: Stay or go, live or (probably) die. All four remained at their posts, sleeping only a fraction of the hours and subsisting on stale slices of bread and food that came out of cans.
As for Adele… more than once Henryka considered releasing her, but it couldn’t be denied that the girl was a liability. She’d seen too much of their base of operations, and who knew how many things she’d heard through that door. They’d gone this long without being discovered. (None of the movement’s defectors had been people privy to the beer hall basement’s location.) They had to keep every advantage they had.
So Adele remained trapped inside a closet while the calls kept pouring in: victory, defeat, victory, defeat. The Third Reich was crumbling away at the edges, yet becoming more concentrated at its core. Among the incoming reports were those about the Waffen-SS units moving through the countryside, quelling any resistance they could find. Henryka marked their locations on the map with tiny double Sieg rune pins. The capital was ringed in a noose of black lightning. One that was drawing tighter day by day.
Germania’s bloody stalemate could not, would not, last.
Kasper and Johann kept answering the radios. Brigitte and Reinhard kept tapping away at their cipher machines. Both tasks were Sisyphean. Transmissions were coming in a relentless stream, too many to answer, let alone rest from.
Kasper, in particular, was exhausted. Out of all the map room’s operatives, he’d slept the least, receiving report after report, dictating strings of code to Reinhard in a flat voice. But something about Kasper’s current call seemed to spark him: The young man’s face went electric when he read Reinhard’s unscramble. He tore off his headphones, held them out for Henryka.
“You’re going to want to take this,” he said. “It’s from the Muscovy territories. The cell in Molotov.”
Molotov. Henryka had to double-check her map to confirm what she knew of the city. It lay a couple of hundred kilometers west of the Ural Mountains and was one of the last significant settlements before the Lebensraum faded into a no-man’s-land of massacred villages and struggling potato farms. The resistance there consisted of slave laborers and disillusioned settlers—men and women forced out of the central Reich by lottery.
“Good news?” She hoped.
“I think it’s Yael.”
“Volchitsa? Is that you?”
While Yael’s breath hitched at the sound of Kasper’s voice, she actually burst into tears at the sound of Henryka’s. The woman was exhausted, her syllables wavering the way they did when she forgot to sleep. Too often Henryka favored the resistance’s cause over self-care, too often Yael had seen the Polish woman’s hairline edged with brown roots, eyes bruised with countless waking hours.
“It’s me,” Yael managed. “I’m here.”
I’m here. We’re all still here. The knowledge stole Yael’s oxygen away and kept stealing it, replacing air with saltwater tears. It wasn’t until this moment that she realized how strong the fear of her friends’ deaths had grown. How like a shadow it followed her…
“We shouldn’t—” Was Henryka crying, too? It certainly sounded that way. A series of sniffs managed their way through the speakers. “We should go back to code. We don’t know who might be listening.”
Encryption codes weren’t meant for flowing conversations. It was infuriating, really, how slowly their exchange crawled. But the information being passed between Molotov and the beer hall basement was too precious for enemy ears.
Yael offered her own report first, trying to cram the past six days into as few words as possible:
REAL FÜHRER IN GERMANIA. BALLROOM HITLER WAS SKINSHIFTER DECOY. EXPERIMENT 85 STILL AC
TIVE. NOVOSIBIRSK ARMY INVADING MUSCOVY. INTENDS TO RECLAIM FORMER SOVIET LANDS.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Miriam was doing her due diligence as Comrade Mnogolikiy, translating the messages into Russian for the Soviet officers. The men stood in their red-star uniforms, scattered constellation-wide throughout the front room. Yael could see them cataloging the furniture, trying to determine how many of the Förstners’ possessions originally belonged to slaughtered Soviets.
The minutes stretched. Yael kept finding things to say. Adolf Hitler’s television speech started anew at least half a dozen times. Irmgard continued tapping answers out of the Enigma machine. Ernst made a tray of tea, complete with biscuits. Luka ate his share with great relish. (“Have you tried these?” He tossed one to Yael, which clipped her shoulder in a spray of crumbs. “Worlds better than veggie goo!”) The Soviet officers grew increasingly restless, shifting their weight from boot to boot.
Comrade Commander Pashkov was the first to speak. “Ask what’s waiting for us in Moscow. That’s the reason we allowed this radio exchange, no?”
“Patience!” Yael snapped in Russian, even though her own supply was running short. She, too, wanted to know everything, but keeping Henryka informed was her priority. Who knew where her discoveries on Experiment 85 and Novosibirsk’s army might lead?
But eventually she ran out of information to thread through the Enigma machine. It was time to
REQUEST A STATUS REPORT ON GERMANIA AND MOSCOW.
Henryka’s messages began leaking in, painting a picture of a tipping-point landscape. Everything was on edge: pessimistic failed putsch, optimistic civil war. Hitler’s resurrection had spooked a good number of Wehrmacht soldiers back into the National Socialists’ ranks, but not enough to abandon all hope.
“What of the road to Moscow?” Comrade Fox Brows asked once Miriam finished translating the details of Germania. “How many National Socialist forces can we expect to encounter?”
