Potsdam Station (21 page)

Bombers were still droning overhead.

He clambered in and out of a ditch that ran alongside the road, slipped across the narrow ribbon of tarmac, and slid down a small bank on the other side. The new field seemed even boggier, and the smell of shit grew steadily stronger as he worked his way across the waterlogged ground. The Soviet map of the area had placed a sewage farm slightly to the north-east of their intended route, so he was probably in the right area.

Above the horizon yellow-white flares crackled and danced in an almost orange sky. The word ‘devilish’ came to mind. He was walking towards hell.

If he was remembering the map correctly, another kilometre would bring him to a second, wider highway, which ran south from Seeburg towards Gross Glienicke and Kladow. The point, a kilometre south of Seeburg, where this road entered a sizable wood, had been chosen for the reunion of an accidentally scattered team.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the empty road, and another five to sight the dark wall of trees that lay ahead. A direct approach seemed unwise – there might be other locals about, and who knew what sort of strain the night’s events had wrought on Kazankin’s nerves – so he took the long way round, walking out across the adjoining field and entering the wood from the west, before working his way back to the rendezvous point.

But the only cracking twigs were the ones he stepped on, the only sounds of breathing the ones provided by his own lungs. There was no one there.

He settled down to wait. His watch told him it was almost one – they were supposed to have reached the Havelsee by one-thirty. There was no chance of that now, but he had always thought the timetable absurdly optimistic. Expecting to reach, search and get away from the Institute before a six o’clock sunrise had never been on.

He closed his eyes. His feet were wet and cold, and he was feeling his age. One war was enough for anyone. What had his generation done to deserve two?

The intensity of the bombing was lessening, and the sky above seemed empty of planes. It occurred to him that once the searchlights went off movement would again become difficult.

Noises away to his left jerked his eyes open. It sounded like footsteps coming his way. There were whispers, a louder rustle, a muttered curse. Three vague shadows moving between the tree trunks.

‘Russell,’ a voice hissed. It was Kazankin.

‘I’m here,’ he murmured, mostly to himself. ‘This way,’ he added, with rather more volume. It was hard to believe that anyone else would be skulking in this particular patch of forest.

Kazankin was the first to reach him, and his surprise at finding Russell was written on his face. He was holding a large canvas holdall in one hand, like a plumber with his tools.

‘What happened?’ Russell asked.

The Russian exhaled with unnecessary violence. ‘Comrade Varennikov decided his chute was faulty,’ he said coldly. ‘By the time we got him through the door you were long gone. We landed on the other side of Seeburg.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Varennikov said, for what was probably the hundredth time. ‘I panicked,’ he explained to Russell. ‘It was just…’ His voice tailed off.

‘We need to get going,’ Kazankin said, looking at his watch.

‘It’s too late,’ Russell told him. ‘We’re already an hour behind schedule, and we didn’t have one to spare.’

He expected Kazankin to argue with him, but the Russian just looked at his watch again, as if hoping for a different time. ‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked when none was forthcoming.

‘Get as close to the lake as we can tonight, lie low during the day, and then cross as soon as it looks safe tomorrow evening. That’ll give you most of the night to ransack the Institute.’

‘We still have time to get across the lake tonight.’

‘Yes, but the Grunewald is popular with walkers. They’ll be more chance of our being spotted on that side of the water.’

‘You think the people of Berlin are still going for walks?’

It was a reasonable question, Russell realised. And he had no idea what the answer might be. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

‘We’ll go on,’ Kazankin decided.

They crossed the road, and plunged into the wood on the other side. Kazankin took the lead, with Russell behind him, then Varennikov. Gusakovsky, carrying the inflatable dinghy, brought up the rear. They had hardly gone a hundred metres when the light suddenly dimmed. The searchlights were being turned off.

Their progress slowed, but Kazankin, as Russell reluctantly acknowledged, was good at picking a path. It only took them an hour to reach the wide and empty Spandau-Potsdam highway, and soon after two-thirty they emerged from the forest close to the road connecting Gatow to Gross Glienicke. They followed this for a while, and almost ran into trouble, hearing the raised voices of some approaching cyclists with barely enough time to find cover. The cyclists, who looked in the dark to be wearing Luftwaffe caps, had obviously been drinking, and were singing a rather ribald song about that organisation’s beloved leader. They were presumably heading home to Gatow Airfield, which lay a couple of kilometres to the south.

If the airmen hadn’t been singing, Russell thought, they would never have heard them in time.

Kazankin led them off the road and out across empty fields. There was no sign that these were being worked, either for crops or pasture. German agriculture, at least in the vicinity of Berlin, seemed a thing of the past.

Eventually they reached another road, and passed into another stretch of woodland. Russell was beginning to feel tired, and the younger Varennikov seemed only slightly more energetic. Kazankin and Gusakovsky, by contrast, looked capable of walking all the way home to the Soviet Union.

There were big houses in these woods, but neither lights nor barking dogs. The rich owners were long gone, probably up in the Alps, lamenting the fact that they couldn’t ski all the year round.

And then, suddenly, they were standing on a small pebble beach, staring out across the dark Havelsee. The lake was at its narrowest here, little more than five hundred metres across. There were no lights visible, and all they could hear were breeze-ruffled leaves and their own breathing.

Kazankin was right, Russell thought. The Grunewald was big – almost fifty square kilometres. If they ran into walkers, so what? – they were foreign labourers, looking after the paths and the trees. They should get across tonight.

Gusakovsky was already inflating the boat, although where he was finding the breath was beyond Russell.

‘On the map,’ Kazankin said, ‘there was an island a few hundred metres south of here.’

‘Lindwerder,’ Russell said.

‘Is it inhabited?’

‘It was used for test-firing rockets in 1933,’ Russell remembered. ‘But only for a few weeks. As far as I know, it was only used as a picnic spot in the years before the war.’

‘It might be a good place to spend the day,’ Kazankin said, as much to himself as Russell. ‘We would have advance warning of any visitors.’

‘A good idea,’ Russell agreed.

Ten minutes later, Gusakovsky had inflated the boat. He took it out into the water, rolled himself in, and kept it in situ with one of the wooden paddles that Kazankin had extracted from his holdall. The others waded out to join him, and somehow got themselves aboard. The dinghy seemed alarmingly low in the water, but showed no sign of sinking any lower. The two NKVD men started paddling them towards the island.

Russell sat gazing out at the barely visible shores, remembering Sunday afternoons here with Effi, Paul or both. A Berlin institution – a sail on the Havelsee, with a shore-side stop for a picnic. He didn’t think he’d ever seen the lake in darkness.

Lindwerder hove slowly into focus, a low forested hump in the water around two hundred metres long. They grounded the dinghy on a gravel beach, then carried it up into the trees. ‘Wait here,’ Kazankin ordered, and disappeared into the darkness.

He was back ten minutes later. ‘There’s no one here,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

He led them up through the trees, over the crest of the island’s slight ridge, and came to an abrupt halt. Looking down, Russell could just about see a natural hollow in the slope.

Kazankin took two small spades from the holdall, and handed one to Gusakovsky. Both men began to dig, their breathing growing steadily heavier as the minutes went by. After about fifteen, Kazankin pronounced himself satisfied.

Russell wondered how many hides like this the two men had built in their time with the partisans.

‘It’s almost dawn,’ the Russian commander said, staring up at the eastern sky. ‘We’ll wait for light to build the roof. And take another look at the maps.’

Half an hour later the roof was in place, and Kazankin was pulling the briefing material from his trusty canvas bag. There was a street map of Dahlem and Zehlendorf, an aerial photograph of the area surrounding the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and, most useful of all, a hand-drawn plan of that part of the Institute supposedly used for atomic research. The map was only a few years old, the photograph reasonably clear, and the diagram, according to Nikoladze, had been drawn by an Institute worker only three years before. Russell had seen them all at the Lissa airfield, and been impressed – the NKVD researchers had exceeded his expectations. Kazankin was no slouch either. As the Russian commander described their intended course of action, Russell felt a reluctant admiration. The man said what needed to be said and nothing more; he seemed determined and utterly fearless.

Outliving him would not be easy.

Despite sleeping with Rosa tucked into her body, Effi awoke in the middle of the night feeling colder than she could ever remember. The hospital’s electricity supply had been cut off on the previous day, and what little heating there was had disappeared with it. According to rumour, they were also running out of water. Some sort of end seemed near.

Any day now they might all be led outside and shot. Come to that, they might be shot where they were.

It was, she thought, about three in the morning. Rosa was sleeping soundly, but many of the adults seemed as wakeful as she was – all across the room limbs were shifting, murmurs and whispers being traded.

The idea of dying here, in the last days of the war, was almost too much to take. She had thought about trying to escape – she assumed almost everyone had – but not to any useful effect. Even with the end so near, the camp was efficiently guarded by locks, walls and guns. On her own, she would have preferred any risk to simply waiting, but she wasn’t on her own anymore. How many people, she wondered, had gone to their deaths with their children, when they might conceivably have saved themselves on their own? It was wonderful really, if you could say that of something so tragic.

Would she ever have a child? She had been asking herself that question with increasing frequency since her forced separation from John. Which was somewhat ironic – when they’d been together the subject had rarely been raised. They’d had each other, and he’d had Paul, and she’d had her career and her nephew. They’d never ruled out having a child with each other, but there had been a tacit acceptance that they wouldn’t, or at least not yet.

Well, if she had another birthday in May, it would be her thirty-ninth. Which might well be too late, although miracles happened. And then there was Rosa, or whatever her real name was. Effi had only known the girl for ten days, but already found life without her hard to imagine. And there was no one to send her back to. She wondered how John would feel about adopting a daughter. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt fairly confident that he’d like the idea. And Paul, if he lived, could be the grown-up brother.

The thought brought tears to her eyes. She lay there in the dark, the sleeping girl enfolded in her arms, trying not to sob.

The makeshift defence line on the eastern outskirts of Müncheberg was still in German hands when Paul’s adopted combat group reached it just before dawn. This was almost a pleasant surprise, given how over the course of the night the Russians had often seemed ahead of them.

Around fifty of them had slipped out of Worin and across the open fields when darkness fell on the previous day. Once assembled in the next patch of forest, they had struck out for Müncheberg, some ten kilometres to the west. It had been a long and twisting journey, in which the sights or sounds of fighting nearby had often dictated a change of course. Stopping to rest while the moon was up, they had watched in petrified silence as one line of enemy lorries had passed a mere stone’s throw away, the soldiers within filling the night with their songs of triumph. Only a kilometre or two from Müncheberg they had found themselves forced between two burning villages, not knowing which side was setting the fires.

And Müncheberg itself, it transpired, was soon to be parted from the Reich. According to the latest reports the Russians had broken through to both north and south, leaving most of Ninth Army in peril of encirclement. All troops were being pulled back to the Berlin defence lines, either with their own units or as members of combat groups newly formed by the military police who controlled the crossroads outside the town. Paul, to his intense annoyance, was told to join up with a new unit built around the remnants of a
Hitlerjugend
battle group. When he protested this decision, arguing that his gunnery skills would be utterly wasted in an infantry unit, he was treated to a lecture on the bravery and commitment of the
Hitlerjugend
, who could ‘give the fucking army a lesson in how to stand and fight.’