Triumph (1993) Read online

  "Come on!" Rosenberg shouted again. "More!"

  "There ain't no more," Jimmy yelled back.

  "We're out?" Rosenberg twisted around in his seat and saw nothing but empty racks.

  "Not a shell left. We're done."

  "The hell we are! Mickey!" he called down to the driver, "put 'er in gear and move 'er straight ahead!"

  "Are you crazy?" He could hear Mickey's high-pitched voice even without the intercom. "The rest of the battalion's still pumpin' shells up there!"

  "Do it, goddammit!" Rosenberg bellowed. "Do it!"

  The tank lurched forward, slowly. The rest of 'em will run out of ammo just like we did, Rosenberg told himself. No sense letting the Krauts reorganize themselves. Hit 'em now, before they can recover from the shelling.

  "Rosenberg!" his earphones erupted. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

  "Sir? Repeat please. I've got a lot of static here. Can't hear you."

  "Get back! Stop! That's an order, Rosenberg!"

  "Can't hear you, sir. Radio's on the fritz, I think."

  "Goddammit, cease firing. Cease firing! Move forward, everybody. Move it up!"

  Kendall Jarvick had been waiting out the tank barrage from behind a house-sized chunk of masonry that had been blasted from one of the buildings on the side of the plaza.

  He and DiMaggio had hunkered down when the Germans inside the chancellery building began spraying the open plaza with heavy machine-gun fire. Then the tanks had come up and plastered the Krauts but good.

  "About time the tanks did something for us," Joltin' Joe said. Jarvick noted that the kid had become a typically cynical veteran in just a few days of hard fighting.

  He heard machine-gun fire, but the lighter kind of noise that American .50-calibers make. Peeking cautiously from the stone they were behind, Jarvick saw that a couple of the tanks were peppering the chancellery roof line. That'll keep their heads down, he said to himself, if any Krauts are still up there.

  He thought about Hollis as the machine guns chattered and the tank shells whistled past and exploded on the chancellery building. The last man in the squad he would expect to get it. There's no rhyme or reason to this killing. Grasshopper or ant or whatever, it catches up to you sooner or later.

  "Hey, they're goin' in!" DiMaggio said.

  Jarvick looked up. The shelling had stopped and the tanks were pushing through the rubble and around the pockets of infantry—some of them Russians—and heading straight for the broad stairway of the chancellery building.

  No firing from the building. Nothing but smoke drifting from the shattered remains of the facade up at the top of the steps.

  One tank was in the lead, churning across the plaza like an eager St. Bernard. It came clanking and clamoring past the spot where they were crouching. Jarvick moved out behind the tank. Tommy gun clutched in both hands. Di-Maggio hesitated only a fraction of a second, then stepped out beside him. Both men bent over slightly and stayed behind the tank's massive bulk.

  Looking over his shoulder, Jarvick saw the other tanks rumbling behind them. Soldiers climbed out of their holes and followed, just as he and Joltin' Joe were doing.

  We're going to be the first ones inside the chancellery, Jarvick suddenly realized. For a moment he felt stunned.

  Then he told himself, You've got to see everything, remember everything. This is history being made, mister, and you're right here on the spot. It's a newspaperman's dream.

  A heavy machine gun stuttered at them. Jarvick winced and ducked lower behind the advancing tank. Just don't get yourself killed, he said to himself as he slapped a fresh ammo magazine into his Thompson. That's the most important thing of all, don't get yourself killed.

  Chapter 29

  Berlin, 28 April

  Hitler was sitting in his study, attended by no one except his bride, Eva Braun. They had married that morning; Goebbels had performed the brief, plain ceremony. Then Goebbels had bid his Führer a tearful farewell and led his wife and five children to their quarters. Fifteen minutes later one of the SS guards announced that they were all dead.

  Eva sat in the corner of the small sofa, feet tucked up under her like a little girl, hands pressed to her ears. Far above them the bombardment was incessant, its once-muted roar now a steady pounding thunder that could no longer be ignored.

  "If only they would stop, even for one minute," she said.

  Hitler was staring off into space, unresponsive, lost to her. On the end table beside his armchair was a bottle of pills, a pitcher of water with two glasses, and a Luger automatic pistol. Yet his hands remained in his lap, twitching slightly.

  "The German people deserve this fate," Hitler said in a low trembling voice. "If they have not the courage and the will to triumph then they deserve to be driven into the mud and dust, exterminated once and for all. I could have led them to greatness, but they were not strong enough to follow me. Now they will all die."

  Eva got up from the sofa and went to her husband.

  Kneeling before him, she put her head on his lap.

  "I am dying now," she said softly.

  He seemed to stir. Blinking, as if seeing her for the first time, he asked, "Dying?"

  "The doctor gave me something to put in my tea. I knew this was our last day together, dear."

  Hitler gazed down at her. "Dying?"

  "We agreed, remember? I have taken the poison, just as you said I should. It is painless. It puts you to sleep, and then you don't wake up."

  Her eyes closed. She seemed to be already asleep at his feet, her head on his thighs.

  There was a tap on the door. Hitler did not answer, but the door opened anyway. A tall handsome blond SS captain stepped in, his uniform immaculate, the chiseled features of his face grave and somber.

  "Listen," Hitler said to the captain.

  The thundering up above had stopped. The captain turned his face toward the ceiling. It was quiet up there.

  "They've stopped," said the captain.

  "We've driven them away!"

  The captain shook his head sadly. "No, my Führer. They have stopped the bombardment because their troops are now assaulting our final positions. This bunker will be overrun in another few minutes. Half an hour, at most."

  "We've driven them away, I tell you!" Hitler tried to shout out the words, but his voice broke.

  The captain took his pistol from the gleaming holster at his hip.

  "What are you doing?" Hitler demanded.

  "My duty, sir."

  "No! I command you—"

  "Herr Bormann's orders, my Führer."

  Hitler tried to struggle to his feet, but Eva's dead weight on his legs defeated him. The captain fired one shot, point-blank.

  "Sir, it's dangerous up there!"

  Patton snorted at his aide. "I haven't come this goddam far to sit on my ass in the rear. Get this jeep going!" he ordered his driver. "Follow those tanks."

  The young captain grabbed both sides of the hard rear bench as the driver dug in the clutch and lurched the jeep down the rubble-covered street. He was distinctly unhappy.

  The general might want to be a bigshot hero, all the captain wanted to do was to live out this war and get home all in one piece.

  Sitting stiffly in the right-hand seat, Patton grumbled to himself about the quality of the officers they were turning out these days. Had to put that other punk kid into the line; make a man of him. Now they send me a college boy still wet behind the ears.

  They heard the sound of shelling up ahead, the crack of tank guns immediately followed by the crump of explosions and the rumble of masonry crumbling.

  "They must be right at the chancellery building!" Patton yelled exultantly over the noise and the wind as the jeep turned a corner and came out on a broad avenue. There had been a barricade here, but the tanks had obviously smashed through it. The driver downshifted and slowed the jeep to a crawl.

  "What's the matter, sergeant?" Patton groused.

  "Mines, sir. Don't want to h
it a mine."

  "Bullshit! The Krauts have been too busy retreating to lay mines here."

  "General, sir, they've had damn near six years to lay mines here."

  Patton glowered at his driver but said nothing more. The sergeant was a tough old noncom, regular Army, who had been driving Patton since the first landings in Morocco. He could by a tyrant in his way, as all good noncoms were, but his first thought was always to take the best of care of his general.

  By the time they reached the chancellery plaza the shelling had stopped. Patton saw his Shermans advancing right up to the chancellery steps. One of them even started clawing its way up the steps, clanking right up to the top, spraying machine-gun fire into the smoking darkness of the portico.

  "That boy's got guts!" the general yelled, standing in the jeep.

  The other tanks stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Bent figures of infantrymen climbed the steps slowly, warily.

  Most of them were Americans. Patton beamed at them.

  Inside his Sherman, Al Rosenberg swung the turret back and forth. Spent shell casings from his machine gun clattered around his feet. Even the trigger of the gun felt hot to his touch. On the other side of the seventy-five's breech, Jimmy was trying to wave away the acrid fumes.

  It was dark and smoky up at the top of the stairs. Rosenberg could see nothing except dead German soldiers, blasted chunks of rubble, and more dead Germans. Good.

  Infantry dogfaces came sifting through the smoke, rifles and carbines held out in front of them, cautiously looking every which way as they edged deeper into the shadows.

  One of them held a Tommy gun, Rosenberg saw.

  He unlatched the hatch at the turret's top, then took the carbine from its clip alongside the empty ammo rack.

  "Whattarya doin'?" Jimmy asked.

  "Come on," Rosenberg said, clambering up through the hatch. "Let's go see Adolph."

  Jimmy blinked, but unclipped the carbine on his side of the turret.

  "Cut the engine and stay tight, Mickey," Rosenberg hollered down to the tank driver.

  "Don't worry, I ain't movin'," Mickey replied fervently.

  Rosenberg and Jimmy fell in beside the guy with the Tommy gun. "Hundred and first airborne, huh?" Rosenberg said.

  "That's right," answered Jarvick.

  They pushed through the shattered doors of the chancellery and entered the building. Soldiers were fanning out across a huge marble-floored area with a ceiling so high it was lost in the smoke and dust.

  "Nice place," said DiMaggio tightly.

  "They did all right for themselves," Rosenberg said.

  A burst of gunfire from off to their right. Then the sullen thud of a grenade and someone screaming in bloody agony.

  "Got a couple more of the bastards," Rosenberg muttered.

  "Or they got a couple of our guys," said Jarvick.

  It took nearly an hour for them to find the stairs that led down to the bunker. They heard a few more brief firefights, but most of the time it was eerily quiet except for the glass and rubble crunching beneath their boots. Smoke drifted everywhere. The men spoke in hushed monosyllables.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into a large, low-ceilinged room with a big map of the city spread out on a couple of saw horses. Jarvick counted seven dead bodies, all in black SS uniforms.

  "This is his bunker, huh?" Rosenberg asked one of the soldiers who had come down before them.

  "This is it."

  "Where is the sonofabitch?"

  Before he could answer they heard something that prickled the hair on the backs of their necks. Men singing. Their voices muffled, but getting louder. Singing!

  Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles, uber Alles in der Welt . . .

  "What the hell?"

  "Where's it coming from?"

  Wenn es stets zu Schutz and Trutz

  bruderlich . . .

  "It's comin' closer."

  Suddenly a door across the room burst open and black uniformed SS men poured through, firing machine pistols and automatic rifles. Jarvick flopped on his belly, spraying them with his submachine gun as he fell. Rosenberg dived under the sawhorse-supported map table. Pure hell erupted in the bunker room, gunfire flashing and bullets whining off the concrete walls and men screaming, cursing.

  It was all over in less than half a minute. Rosenberg smelled blood and cordite. His hands were locked on his carbine, gripping it so tightly that his fingers hurt. Yet he had not fired a shot. Redfaced with shame and guilt, he crawled out from under the table and got shakily to his feet.

  All the Krauts lay sprawled on the concrete, dead. Jarvick was sitting on the floor, holding his bleeding leg and rocking back and forth, white-lipped with pain. Jimmy lay beside him, his face staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Rosenberg threw up.

  Within minutes the medics were in, helping the wounded.

  Jarvick grinned painfully as two husky infantrymen lifted him tenderly to his feet, his right thigh tightly tourniqueted.

  They started walking him out toward the stairs. And sunlight.

  And home.

  I did it, Jarvick said to himself, half delirious with the sudden knowledge that his fighting was over. The million dollar wound. I got it. They'll send me home now. I'm out of it.

  He did not think about history any more, or even about simple journalism. All he thought about was getting home and back to his wife. Even if they have to take the leg off, he told himself, I'm going to live. I'm going to live.

  Rosenberg watched the men take out the wounded. Others collected the dogtags of the dead. They left the Germans alone. He stared down at Jimmy's dead body. It's my fault, he groaned to himself. I made him come down here. And then I didn't even fire a fucking goddamned shot.

  "Where's Hitler?" he asked one of the soldiers. "I thought he was supposed to be down in here."

  "He is," said a corporal.

  "Where?"

  The soldier nodded toward one of the doors. So this is the face of victory, Rosenberg thought. The corporal did not look victorious. Not glad or even relieved that the fighting was at last finished. He just looked tired, drained, an old man in his early twenties who had already seen a lifetime of killing.

  Rosenberg pushed past him and rushed to the open doorway.

  A lieutenant stood in the far corner of the little room, poking through the bottles and vials on the table there.

  Adolph Hitler sat on an easy chair, arms hanging nearly to the floor, head thrown back, mouth open in a soundless "oh," a neat nine-millimeter bullet hole in the center of his forehead. A woman's body lay on the floor a few feet away, her Ups the same color as the light blue dress she wore, her eyes closed. Someone had folded her arms reverently across her chest. Rosenberg saw that the floor behind Hitler's chair was spattered with drying blood and gray bits of brain and bone.

  "He's already dead," Rosenberg said.

  "Yeah," said the lieutenant from across the room.

  "Looks like one of his own men shot him."

  Rosenberg felt the bile rising in his throat again. He swallowed it down, though, burning acid inside him. That's Adolph Hitler, he said to himself, staring at the dead body.

  That's the bastard who started this war and killed every Jew he could get his hands on. Wordlessly he unslung the carbine from his shoulder, the carbine he had not used in the firefight where Jimmy got killed. He cocked it with a loud mechanical click.

  The lieutenant had time enough to say, "Hey soldier, what do you think you're—"

  "Stinking sonofabitch!" Rosenberg screamed. He fired the whole clip into Hitler, the blast of the carbine echoing off' the concrete walls, cordite smell burning in his nostrils.

  The lieutenant dived for the floor. Hitler's body jounced and twisted, arms flailing.

  The carbine ran out of bullets. Rosenberg's ears rang in the sudden silence.

  "Goddammit, sergeant, you'll get a court martial for that!" the lieutenant yelled, climbing to his feet.

  Rosenb
erg threw the empty carbine to the floor. "The sonofabitch oughtta be chopped up into dog meat," he shouted. "He oughtta be . . ." But his voice broke and he buried his face in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.

  "Ten-hut!"

  The lieutenant snapped to attention. Rosenberg stood half bent over in front of Hitler, crying. General Patton strode into the room, growling, "What in hell was that firing ..."

  Patton's voice trailed off. His baggy eyes went from Hitler's riddled body to Rosenberg's carbine at his feet, still smoking. Then he stepped over to Rosenberg and gently pried his hands away from his tear-streaked face.

  General Patton looked into Rosenberg's eyes for a long moment.

  "He shot up the corpse, sir!" yelped the lieutenant. "He came in here and emptied the whole clip into Hitler's body!"

  Patton smiled grimly. "Can't say I blame you, son," he said softly. "I would've done the same thing myself. Sorry you beat me to it."

  "But general—"

  "Get this man to the medics," Patton snapped. "And haul this piece of garbage out of here. I guess they'll want to stuff him and exhibit him at the Smithsonian or something like that."

  It was more than an hour later that Patton emerged from the chancellery building. The plaza was swarming with troops, Americans and Russians. At the sight of his three-starred helmet and ivory-handled pistols, the GIs burst into a prolonged cheer. Patton looked surprised at first, then grinned and waved his hands over his head.

  "We did it!" he yelled. "The paperhanging sonofabitch is stone cold dead!"

  The cheering went on and on. A Russian jeep came jouncing up the steps and two officers got out to shake Patton's hand. One of them spoke English:

  "General Patton, sir, may I introduce Field Marshal Georgi Konstantinovitch Zhukov."

  Patton saw a short, solidly built man with a hard-bitten expression on his face. But his eyes were bright clear blue.

  He said something in Russian and the translator said:

  "Marshal Zhukov says he congratulates the general who captured Berlin."

  Patton uncharacteristically blushed. "Tell him that we did it together."