Triumph (1993) Page 16

  Taking a deep breath, Gretchko at last felt that he had something to report to Khrushchev. And specific steps to take in his investigation.

  Chapter 26

  Potsdam, 23 April

  As he hung swaying in his parachute harness, wind rushing past, Jarvick strained his eyes to see the ground rushing up in the first gray light of early dawn. He always felt as if he were dropping like a stone, weighted down by a heavy field pack, damned near a case of ammunition, grenades, the extra chute strapped to his chest, and every piece of field equipment the Army could load onto him, including a brand-new Mark VI lightweight foldable entrenching tool—a goddamned shovel.

  They were coming down in a field. Good enough. Back in Normandy half the outfit had landed in flooded swamps.

  Lots of guys drowned before they could struggle out of their harnesses, pulled down by the eighty-some pounds of crap they each had to carry.

  But this was an open field, he could see that much. Some buildings off to the right. Seem to be empty. No shooting.

  Not even flak against the planes. Maybe they're saving their ammo to get us just as we land.

  But he hit the ground with a heavy thud, rolled over, and began collapsing his chute in nearly total silence. More thuds and grunts and whispered swearing as the rest of the platoon landed. It was getting bright enough to see but still they whispered as if it were night.

  Kinder gave a single sharp whistle and they gathered around him. One of the new kids had hurt his leg; sprain or fracture, he couldn't walk on it. Kinder detailed one youngster to stay with him, another to go off and find the medics that had parachuted with them.

  "Okay," he told the remaining men, "the next wave of planes'll be dropping the heavy stuff. Spread out and form a perimeter around the drop zone."

  Jarvick fell in beside Hollis. DiMaggio, one of the replacements, walked on Jarvick's other side, slightly bent under the weight of his pack, hands gripping his rifle as if he intended to engage in hand-to-hand combat. An Italian kid from California, good-looking in a kind of olive-skinned, wavy-haired way; no relation to the ballplayer but the whole squad called him Joltin' Joe anyway.

  They got to the woods at the edge of the field, flopped down and wormed off the heavy packs. Jarvick shoved his pack in front of him as a makeshift protection. No sense digging in, they'd be moving through the woods as soon as the second drop came in. The sky was starting to brighten.

  Still no sign of Germans. For all the bombing that the flyboys had done in Berlin, just a few miles up the road, the trees here looked almost untouched. Jarvick could see new buds on their upreaching branches.

  A dull rumbling sound came up from the distance and grew into the thunder of a flight of C-47s flying almost at treetop level. That'll bring the Germans, Jarvick thought.

  Once they see those Goony Birds in broad daylight they'll know there's been a parachute drop.

  The planes dumped pallets from their cargo doors. Big colored parachutes snapped open just before the pallets hit the ground. Howitzers, antitank guns, ammo. For once the equipment landed smack in the drop zone, all except a couple of packages that sailed beyond the tree line. The flyboys did a good job, Jarvick thought gratefully.

  Less than an hour later Jarvick and the others were using their Mark VI shovels, digging foxholes along the outer edge of the woods, beside the concrete highway that ran westward from Berlin.

  "So are we in Berlin or not?" Hollis asked, puffing as he shoveled.

  "What difference does it make?" Loller said from his machine-gun position.

  Hollis was shoulder deep in the hole he had dug. Like the rest of the veterans, he would have gladly tunneled all the way back to the States if he could.

  "I wanna know if we're the first Americans in Berlin, that's what difference it makes."

  "Potsdam is a suburb of Berlin," said Jarvick, pausing for a moment in his digging, sweating heavily despite the cool of the morning air. "I don't think it's part of Berlin itself."

  "Like Oakland and San Francisco?" DiMaggio asked.

  He was sitting in the shallow foxhole he had dug, satisfied that his digging was finished.

  "More like Yonkers and New York, eh Jarvick?" asked Kaplan.

  "Right," Jarvick said.

  A flight of P-47s roared overhead, so low Jarvick could see the pilots in their teardrop canopies. The big blunt-nosed fighter-bombers had been sweeping the skies ever since the sun had come up over the trees. The men on the ground knew that any planes in the air were bound to be American.

  Kinder came hustling over to them, half bent over, dragging the left foot that had been so badly frostbitten at Bastogne.

  "Flyboys say there's a column of Kraut trucks heading this way. They knocked out about half of 'em, but the rest are comin' down the highway toward us."

  Jarvick put down his shovel and checked the action on his rifle. Up the line, Loller and one of the new guys leveled their machine gun and checked out its sights. Further back in the trees the team with the antitank gun was busily yanking the tops off ammo crates. Every man in the platoon stared anxiously down the highway, except DiMaggio, who suddenly got an urge to dig like a frenzied badger.

  Helmut Schacht had been a warrant officer in the First World War, never closer to the trenches than Hamburg.

  Now, at age fifty-nine, he had been breveted a captain and put in charge of a company of children.

  His unit of "fighters," as Goebbels called them in his radio speeches, was literally composed of teenagers who would have been considered too young for the army only a few months ago. Most of them had never fired a rifle before they had "volunteered" for service a few weeks earlier.

  Schacht felt his years as the trucks inched slowly, cautiously along the Kurfurstendamm, past stately old houses set on green lawns with pleasant trees to shade them in the summer. All empty now, their once-wealthy owners long since fled deeper into the countryside. Arthritis plagued his shoulders and back so badly that he sat stooped over in a question mark, packed in with his youthful charges. Still the pain burned the length of his spine. The past winter, without heat, without medication, without decent food, had turned his body into a purgatory of pain.

  He looked into the faces of his child-warriors. They were not children's faces any more. No grins, no hooting or joking or horseplay. God, the Mausers they carry are bigger than they are, some of them. The word was that the Russians had landed parachute troops somewhere near the park in Potsdam. Their job was to clear them out.

  Victory or death. Those were the Führer's words. Victory or death. And to back them up, Himmler had issued an order saying anyone caught attempting to surrender would be shot, and his family would be shot also. As if the Russians aren't killing enough of us, Schacht thought morosely.

  As if the American and British bombers haven't wiped out all the family I had left.

  Victory or death. He knew which it would be. Already their truck convoy had been shot up by American jabos.

  Half their force was already dead or dying in burning trucks, children lying along the highway's shoulders burned, bleeding, torn apart by bullets, whimpering for their mothers.

  The trucks stopped. Painfully, like a rusty old screen door, Schacht slowly got to his feet and peered over the edge of the truck's side. The tall old birch and elm trees of the park waved in the morning breeze a hundred meters or so up the highway, their new leaves a bright springtime green.

  Colonel Hoerner came thumping back from his staff car.

  He had lost a leg at Kursk, and his false leg fit him so poorly that he preferred to use a crutch.

  "Schacht," he commanded in a blustering, angry voice, "get your men out of that damned truck and scout the edge of the woods. I must know how strong the enemy is."

  "Yes, sir, colonel," Schacht replied, thinking. They are stronger than we are, that I can tell you now.

  The kids were jumping down from the truck and forming a ragged line when Schacht heard the pow sound of an antitank gun. He went flat on
the ground and his kids did the same. At least I've trained them that far, he said to himself. An explosion.

  Hoerner was flat on his face a few centimeters away, his face red with choler. "My staff" car! The swine have destroyed my staff car!"

  More artillery rounds were coming their way; Schacht heard the soft deadly whine of howitzer shells, saw them bursting in the air above the trucks, shredding everything with white-hot shrapnel.

  "Get away from the trucks!" he screamed to his kids, getting stiffly to his feet. Two of the boys helped the colonel up, and they all hobbled toward the shrubbery that lined the side of the road.

  Bullets were whizzing by as they tumbled through the flowering shrubs and down the grassy embankment on the other side. Dazed, Schacht looked around. Half his kids had dropped their guns in their pell-mell rush to get away from the shelling. Colonel Hoerner's crutch was nowhere to be seen.

  Through the trees, not a hundred meters in front of them, he could see a squad of enemy soldiers setting up mortars, short ugly stovepipes that would lob more death on the children caught up on the highway by the trucks.

  "Follow me," he whispered to his kids. Without looking back to see how many obeyed, he began crawling along the ditch toward the mortar squad. At least we can take them out before they kill us. We can do that much.

  With hand signals he deployed his "men" along the edge of the embankment. His back and shoulders felt like fire, but he painfully worked his Mauser to his shoulder and sighted on one of the enemy. Their uniforms looked strange, not like the Russian uniforms he had seen in photos. Their helmets were different, too.

  "Fire!" he yelled as he squeezed his trigger.

  The enemy soldiers dropped to the ground, whether hit or to protect themselves Schacht could not tell. Within seconds they were returning fire, bullets spattering dirt everywhere, death whining millimeters past his ear.

  It was useless, Schacht saw. The kids couldn't hit an elephant; most of them were hunkered down, eyes squeezed shut, terrified by their first experience of a firefight. Schacht marveled that he was not doing the same; it was his first firefight, too.

  The shooting stopped, momentarily. He could hear his own ragged breathing, somebody sobbing, whether in pain or fear or both he could not tell. No one seemed to be hit.

  Not yet. Voices drifted toward them from the woods:

  "They're over in the fuckin' ditch!"

  "Get the mortars on them."

  English! They were speaking English, not Russian! But they didn't sound like Englishmen.

  "Are you Americans?" Schacht hollered to them. "Sind Sie Amerikaner?"

  The enemy troops went quiet.

  "Amerikaner?" Schacht yelled again, "Damned right. Kraut. Americans."

  Hoerner was muttering something down at the bottom of the ditch, floundering around like a hooked fish without his crutch. Schacht carefully peered over the edge of the embankment.

  The planes that had attacked them earlier had been American, not Russian. The uniforms, the helmets.

  The voices were speaking in American.

  He put his rifle down and struggled up to his feet, hands raised over his head.

  "Schacht, you fool!" the colonel snarled.

  "Put your weapons down," Schacht said to his kids, "and do as I do. That is an order."

  Slowly the youngsters obeyed, until they were all standing along the edge of the ditch, hands upraised.

  Colonel Hoerner grabbed one of the discarded Mausers and, using it as a crutch, struggled to a standing position.

  "Schacht, the edict! Himmler's edict!"

  "I have no family left alive for the pig to kill," Schacht yelled back. Then, to his kids, "Walk slowly toward the Yankees. Keep your hands raised and we will all live through this day."

  It is my responsibility, Schacht said to himself. There is no reason for these boys to be killed. Germany will need her sons after the war.

  A pair of Americans walked cautiously out of the shelter of the trees, carbines cradled in their arms. "Okay, come on over here," one of them said, beckoning with one hand.

  Schacht understood his gesture more than his words.

  "Christ, they're just kids," said the other American.

  Chapter 27

  Moscow, 28 April

  The map room in the Kremlin had not changed at all since Stalin's death. It was next to the small conference room that abutted the late Great One's office. One could go from the office through the conference room and into the map room. No one had dared to assume Stalin's personal office for himself. The office remained closed, like a shrine. Or like a haunted chamber.

  But the map room was constantly filled with ministers and their staff assistants. Nikita Khrushchev and Viachislav Molotov stood side by side before the giant wall map of Berlin. Every street, every building was precisely drawn.

  Red pins marked the advance of Koniev's troops; white ones, Zhukov's. The Americans were in blue.

  "It's down to street-by-street fighting now," Khrushchev said. "Like Stalingrad."

  "Except that we are the invaders and they the defenders," said Molotov.

  They made an incongruous pair. Both short, almost the same height. That was where the similarities ended. Molotov was smartly dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, his thinning hair carefully combed forward to mask his receding hairline. His frame was slight, almost delicate. He took off his pince-nez for a moment, rubbed at his eyes, then perched it back upon the bridge of his nose. Khrushchev wore his usual baggy gray suit. His bald dome glistened in the overhead lights. His narrow little eyes squinted at the map.

  Neither man had known sleep for nearly thirty-six hours.

  They were following the progression of the battle for Berlin; they had taken their meals in this map room, watching, pacing, staring as the uniformed clerks picked up telephones from the bank along the table set against the far wall, listened briefly, then went to the map and moved a pin forward. Or sometimes backward.

  The Americans had gotten to Berlin first, after Patton's headlong dash from the Elbe. But once inside the city the German resistance had stiffened fiercely. Koniev had pushed into the city's southern suburbs while Zhukov demolished the counterattack at Lubben, then rolled into Berlin from the east.

  "It is only a matter of time," said Molotov, with a weary sigh.

  "And then what?" Khrushchev asked, his eyes on the pretty female clerk who had to stand on tiptoes to move one of Zhukov's units a single street forward.

  "Then it is over, at last."

  Khrushchev waggled a stubby finger in Molotov's face.

  "No, comrade. Then it begins."

  Molotov's brows rose questioningly.

  "This troika we have created cannot last. Malenkov doesn't have the strength to help us lead the country."

  As if he were hearing something he had long expected, Molotov asked, "What do you suggest?"

  "I will be elected general secretary of the Party next week. I would like you to consider taking the foreign ministry again."

  "And Malenkov?"

  "We'll find something useful for him to do." Khrushchev's heavy peasant features took on a canny look. "Make him chief of the interior ministry. Let him spend his time traveling in Siberia and the Moslem republics, inspecting dams and bridges."

  Molotov smiled, something he did but rarely.

  Khrushchev excused himself from the map room and walked down the busy corridor of the Presidium building, bustling with men and women in uniform, crossed the windswept street and stepped into the green-domed Council of Ministers building, where his own office was.

  It was somewhat calmer in the Ministers' building. Most of the people in the corridors were in civilian clothes. They all instantly recognized comrade Khrushchev and smiled their greetings to him. He grinned back at them, gap-toothed.

  Gretchko was waiting in his outer office, sitting with ill-concealed impatience on the chair beside his private secretary's desk. She had a fistful of telegrams to hand him, but Khrushchev waved
her off and motioned for Gretchko to come with him into the private inner office.

  "I'm sorry to keep you waiting, comrade colonel," said Khrushchev as he went to the broad, leather-topped desk and plopped into its big creaking chair. "The battle rages night and day, you know."

  Gretchko had asked to see him nearly a week ago. Each passing day his requests had become more urgent.

  "Now then," Khrushchev said, placing his hands flat on the desk top, "what have you discovered?"

  Gretchko took the armchair in front of the desk. "Perhaps 'discovered' is too strong a word, comrade secretary."

  Khrushchev grinned. "Ah, after nearly a week of bombarding me with requests for a meeting it turns out that your information is not that urgent after all."

  "I wouldn't say that, exactly."

  "And I'm not the general secretary yet, you know. Only the acting secretary."

  Gretchko's brows pulled together unhappily. He had a long narrow face, almost triangular, Khrushchev noticed.

  Broad brow and pointed chin. Large intelligent eyes; on a woman they would be beautiful.

  Khrushchev took a cigarette from the box on his desk and offered the box to Gretchko. "American. Good tobacco."

  The intelligence analyst took one and they both lit up.

  Waving smoke from his face, Khrushchev said, "So, what is it that you wanted to tell me?"

  "I think I know what killed comrade Stalin."

  "Not a stroke?"

  "Yes, it might have been a stroke, but it was caused by something. It was not natural."

  Khrushchev's narrow eyes glittered. "What do you mean, comrade?"

  "This is mostly supposition," Gretchko said. "There are very few facts to go on."

  "Tell me what you think."

  Hunching forward in the chair, Gretchko said, "I believe that you were right, comrade. Stalin did not die a natural death. He was murdered."

  "How? By whom?"

  "I don't know who, not yet. But I think I know how. He was poisoned—"