Berlin or Bust

^{CHAPTER FOURTEEN} TIERGARTEN

The sun was coming up as the C-53 howled over Berlin’s red rooftops. Heavy with eighty pounds of gear, Sergeant Wilkins shambled to the door.

The light turned green.

Wilkins grunted as he bent his knees, but he was too heavy to jump. His gear snagged in the doorway, holding him fast.

He’d seen men towed by a plane in the air, battered beyond recognition until his comrades pulled him back inside. “Wait!”

Lieutenant Chapman shoved him into the wind. “Tally ho, Wilkie!”

His canteen, bayonet, and God knew what else ripped away as he tumbled forward. He remembered to twist in the air as he plummeted toward the earth like a three-hundred-pound bomb.

The parachute deployed with a crack. Slammed by the jerk, he swayed under the canopy. His general-purpose bag dangled below him like a ball and chain.

Wilkins worked his shroud lines to steer into the wind. Then he set his eyes on the ground, looking for his landing point. The Brandenburg Gate loomed to the east. The landmark oriented him.

The pilots had done their work well. He wouldn’t be coming down a chimney like old St. Nick. Right now, his biggest worry was trees.

Which were everywhere in the vast city park.

The ground rushed up at him perilously fast. He spotted one of the amber lights the pathfinders had placed to mark the drop zone. Brace for impact!

The bag struck first, followed by the rest of him in a practiced roll.

The ground broke under him, following by an electrifying shock.

He’d landed on a frozen pond. The fall had broken the ice. Freezing water covered his back and soaked into his rucksack, making it heavier. He struggled and floundered as he tried to gain purchase.

Another para hurtled out of the sky and struck the ice, going straight through.

“Bloody hell!” Wilkins screamed.

The ground appeared to swallow the paratrooper, leaving only the parachute canopy. Then the hole sucked that down too.

The ice around Wilkins crackled. He stopped moving. The freezing water burned his numbing back. That Yank paratrooper song grated through his mind, repeating the line, “Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!”

“Hello?” he gasped. “Help!”

The rest of the team was landing, thankfully on solid ground.

“Hang on!”

The voice belonged to Davies, who’d shed his parachute and rucksack and now crawled toward him on all fours.

“Can you take hold of my rifle, Sergeant?”

“A tad closer, if you please, Corporal,” said Wilkins, who’d had five years of maintaining a stiff upper lip drilled into him.

He grabbed the rifle. Davies heaved.

Wilkins rolled out of the hole. The corporal dragged him far enough for comfort and helped him shuck his waterlogged ’chute and pack.

The other paratroopers gathered around.

The lieutenant grinned at him. “Close shave, eh, Wilkie?”

“We lost a man in the ice.” Wilkins’ teeth chattered as he surveyed the team. “Brown, sir. He’s gone.”

The grin evaporated. “Damn. Well, let’s not lose you too. Dry off.”

The sergeant stripped to the waist, dried himself, and put on fresh thermals. The rest he wrung out as best he could and put back on. The men rubbed his back to get his blood flowing. Pins and needles followed by fire.

“Any sign of the Pathfinders, Lieutenant?”

“No,” Chapman said. “They laid down their beacons and lights as instructed, but there’s otherwise no sign of them. No sign of a struggle. Not even footprints.”

“It’s eerie, sir,” Davies said.

Wilkins chafed at the attention he was getting. He hated anybody babying him except Jocelyn. He shrugged off their hands. “I’m good to go anytime, sir.”

The team moved out. Wilkins snatched up his jungle carbine, a lighter, more compact version of the Enfield rifle, and followed. West, into Tiergarten.

They were nine shooters, all veterans and very capable men. The colonel had told Wilkins he could pick his men, but he couldn’t choose men for this type of operation. They had to come to him.

He’d quietly sent around a call for volunteers. To his surprise, he’d received far more volunteers than he had seats on the plane, and had chosen carefully until he’d sorted a crack squad for Chappie’s approval.

They were the best of the best.

With its woodland scenes, monuments, lakes, and pathways, Tiergarten must have been a beautiful sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of Berlin. Now windswept garbage rustled along the ground, the trees bare, the monuments broken by bombs, massive impact craters scarring the once pristine landscape.

Aside from nationalist tinkering by the Prussians and then the Nazis, Tiergarten stood pretty much as it was originally designed in the 1800s, and modeled after English gardens at that.

They found numerous tracks in the snow, both animal and human. Still no sign of the American Pathfinders, however. No ghouls, either. Smoke rose in the distance from a downed plane. The eastward wind brought a smattering of gunfire from the German drop zones. Booms resonated from the east; the British paras were assaulting Tempelhof Airport.

Phase one of the operation, it seemed, was proceeding apace. Wilkins considered it a bloody miracle they’d all made it this far.

They passed a broken statue of Adolf Hitler, hand raised in classical oration like a Roman senator, headed tilted toward the heavens. Now the Leader lay on his side facing the mud, his marble feet turned into rubble. Ahead, a pillar soared into the air, still proud and intact. The Victory Column, topped by the goddess Victoria, built to commemorate the nation’s victory in the Danish-Prussian War. To the south, damaged statues of Prussian kings framed Victory Avenue cutting into the park.

So much history here, Wilkins thought. And yes, greatness. A great nation and a proud people. All hijacked by Hitler and his thugs and harnessed to totalitarianism and war. The waste of it all sickened him.

After they’d marched two kilometers across the park, Corporal Wright spotted the army research center through the trees. The building had been constructed on a little island on the Neuer Lake, now frozen by winter’s cold.

Chapman raised his binoculars to investigate. The facility appeared to be unguarded. He waved at Wilkins and communicated using hand signals.

The sergeant patted Wright’s back and gestured at him to follow. Together, the two men scurried to the barbed-wire fencing. Wilkins held the wire while Wright cut it. After folding it aside to make an entrance point, Wilkins dashed to the pillbox by the entrance while Wright covered with his Sten submachine-gun.

The pillbox was empty, the heavy steel door to the dome-shaped facility unlocked and kept ajar by snowdrift. Wilkins gave the all-clear signal.

Chapman led the team forward.

The research center’s top level appeared to be drab and utilitarian administrative space, complete with offices, filing room, and radio shack. Papers littered the floor, some of them burned; the people here had left in a hurry and tried to destroy the evidence as they did. The lieutenant casually tore a massive swastika-emblazoned banner from the wall and let it crumple at his feet.

The next level underground was research space, derelict machines and long tabletops splattered with broken class and chemicals letting up an acrid stench. The squad donned gas masks just in case and kept moving, observing everything but caring about nothing. Their objective, they knew, would be on the lowest level.

The team piled out onto the third level. There, they found bodies near a long table stacked with champagne flutes under a sign. The paras kept going, securing the level before returning to the room of the dead.

They were scientists, around twenty men and women in pristine white lab coats. They lay strewn on the floor as if dropped from a great height. Wilkins inspected one without touching her and found no visible cause of death.

Suicide, most likely. Or, he thought with alarm, maybe something else.

He glanced up at the sign, which read: “Die ganze Natur ist ein gewaltiges Ringen zwischen Kraft und Schwache, ein ewiger Sieg des Starken über den Schwachen.”

The whole of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.

“Poor buggers just dropped dead,” Davies said.

Wilkins jumped to his feet waving his gloved hand. He held a finger in front of his gas mask. Quiet!

The woman Wilkins had just inspected sat up, eyes closed and face contorted as if struggling to awake from a deep slumber. Her blond hair had frayed around its austere bun, giving her a helpless quality.

Chapman crouched in front of her. “Are you all right, miss?” he said in German.

“No pain, no progress,” she said sleepily.

“Get away from her, sir,” Wilkins warned.

Her eyes flashed open as she turned toward him. They were completely white.

“No pain,” the other scientists murmured. “No progress.”

They stirred, some straining to rise to all fours, continuing their lethargic chant.

“They’re infected, sir,” Wilkins said.

The lieutenant frowned. “Are you sure? They’re blind, not dead.”

“Sir!”

“We have to confirm. If they’re alive, they can give us information.”

A grizzled scientist wrapped his hands around Chapman’s ankle and bit into it.

“Christ!” The lieutenant kicked to free himself and inspected the bite, which had failed to penetrate the leather of his boot. Another close shave.

A scientist rose unsteadily to her feet and lurched grinning at Wilkins.

He didn’t wait for orders. He raised his rifle and fired.

The rest of the squad joined in, shooting the scientists in the head as they struggled to rise or crawled toward the soldiers.

The slaughter finished, the paras stood in a cloud of smoke. The gunfire still rang in their ears. Nobody spoke, too stunned by what just happened.

A speaker on the ceiling startled them with a loud screech. “Achtung, achtung.” The man’s calm, deep voice resonated throughout the level. “What is the disturbance?”

Chapman and Wilkins looked at each other.

“We heard shooting. Respond now.”

The lieutenant pulled off his gas mask and picked up the phone. “We’re on level three. Please send help.”

At his signal, the team took up firing positions near the stairwell.

Nothing.

Then: “We have orders not to leave our post. The door must remain secured.”

“Please, comrade!” Chapman said, doing an admirable job with his acting. “If you don’t come, we’ll all be killed and our research destroyed!”

“Nein,” the speaker blared.

“I order you to come!”

Nothing.

“In the name of the Führer!”

Nothing.

The lieutenant hung up the phone. “So here’s the situation. There’s still a military presence in the facility, possibly SS types. Likely, they’re at the bottom level and have barricaded themselves in with the serum. Wilkie?”

“I agree, sir.”

“If you’ve got a brilliant idea, I’d be all ears.”

“We may not be able to get inside to have a go at them. We don’t have time to starve them out. That leaves talking, sir.”

“Talking?”

“As in convince them to surrender.”

Chapman sighed. “A nice little chin wag with the SS. Right.” He picked up the phone, chewed his mustache a bit, and set it back down. “Any more brilliant ideas on how I should do that?”

Wilkins shrugged. “Tell them Germany surrendered?”

“Smashing,” the lieutenant said. “Attention any German military who can hear my voice: We are the 2nd Para Brigade with Her Majesty’s 1st Airborne Division and have arrived to secure this site. Your Führer unleashed a plague from this facility, which we believe originated here. Germany has since surrendered. The plague, however, is out of control. We ask you to surrender so that we can reduce unnecessary loss of life not only in Europe but in Germany itself.”

Good going, Wilkins thought. The lieutenant had told the truth and kept it short and simple, ending with an appeal the man’s humanity.

After a long silence, the speaker came to life again. “What is the Führer’s status?”

“Who am I speaking to?”

“Waffen-Schutzstaffel.”

SS. Scratch that appeal to the man’s humanity. He was a fanatic likely to follow his last orders to the death, no matter how ridiculous.

“What is the Führer’s status?”

Chapman winged it. “The Führer became infected himself. Surely, you’ve seen what happens to men when they’re infected. They go insane, they kill, they die, and then they go on killing. If you let us in, we’ll be able to cure him.”

The SS didn’t answer.

“Come on, man. You can save the Führer.”

“Hang up,” Wilkins said.

Chapman did. “What’s the ruckus, Wilkie? I’ve got this well in hand.”

The SS had sworn to follow Hitler to the grave.

The speaker blared again. “Remain in your present location, British. We are coming to you.”