Potsdam Station

Plunging into darkness

April 14 – 18

Russell had only just finished his breakfast when the usual escorts arrived. Three men were waiting in the interrogation room. The golden-toothed questioner from last time occupied Ramanichev’s place; an NKVD officer with a shiny bald head and sharp-eyed Tatar face sat to his left. The third man was Yevgeny Shchepkin, Russell’s old partner in espionage.

‘I am Colonel Nikoladze,’ Gold Teeth admitted, with the air of someone revealing a state secret, ‘and this is Major Kazankin. Comrade Shchepkin I believe you know.’

Shchepkin’s hair had turned white since Russell last saw him, and his body seemed strangely stiff in the chair, but the eyes were alert as ever.

‘We have sad news for you,’ Nikoladze began briskly, conjuring instant images of dead Effis and Pauls. ‘Your president died yesterday.’

The relief was intense. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Russell heard himself say. He supposed he was. He had never much liked Roosevelt, but he had admired him, particularly in the early years.

‘To business, then,’ Nikoladze said, laying both palms on the table. ‘We have a proposition for you,’ he told Russell. ‘As I understand it, you have family in Berlin, and concerns that they might come to harm when our forces reach the city.’

‘That is correct,’ Russell told him. Surely they couldn’t have changed their minds?

‘I believe you offered assistance. “Whatever your generals need to know”,’ Nikoladze read from the paper in front of him. ‘“Where everything is, the best roads, the best vantage points”.’

‘That’s what I said.’ He could hardly believe it.

‘So how would you like to arrive in Berlin several days ahead of the Red Army?’ Nikoladze asked, with a singularly unconvincing smile.

Russell looked up. ‘Ahead of?’

‘We are sending a small team into Berlin. Major Kazankin will be in command. A second soldier, a scientist and, we hope, yourself. You will all be dropped at night in the surrounding countryside, and will work your way into the city. You, Mr Russell, will act as the guide. And you will handle any accidental contacts with the local population – Kazankin here speaks a little German, but not enough to pass himself off as a native.’

‘Where exactly are we going?’ Russell asked, suspecting he already knew the answer. ‘Scientist’ was a bit of a clue.

‘You’ve heard of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute?’ Nikoladze asked, confirming his guess.

‘Any one in particular? There are several of them.’

‘The Institute for Physics,’ Nikoladze said, with some irritation.

This was not a man, Russell thought, who took life as it came. ‘It’s in Dahlem,’ he said. ‘Or was. It may have been bombed.’

‘As of last week, it was still intact. You know exactly where it is?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg?’

‘Yes.’

‘According to our information, these are the most important atomic research establishments in Berlin. We want to secure all the available documentation from these facilities, and get an accurate assessment of what materials and equipment they contain.’

‘Why not go in with the Red Army?’ Russell asked. ‘Are a few days going to make any difference?’ He knew he was arguing against his own interests, but the more he understood of the Soviets’ reasoning the safer he would probably be.

‘They might,’ Shchepkin answered him, speaking for the first time. Even his voice seemed weaker than it had. ‘The Germans may well decide to destroy everything, and if they do not, the Americans probably will. Three weeks ago they tried their best to destroy the uranium production facility at Oranienburg from the air, and they may well decide to send in a ground team.’

‘I doubt there’s anything they need,’ Russell protested.

‘There isn’t,’ Shchepkin agreed. ‘But they don’t want us to get it.’

That sounded right to Russell. Hitler might still be breathing fire, but his two principal enemies were already getting ready for the next war.

‘You will guide the team from the drop zone to the Institute, and then on to Charlottenburg,’ Nikoladze continued. ‘You know the city. And you speak Russian – so you can help our scientist translate from the German.’

Russell idly wondered what the cost of refusal would be. Siberia, in all likelihood. Which was neither here nor there, because he didn’t intend to refuse. He could see several drawbacks to acceptance – in fact, the more he thought about it the more occurred to him. Berlin was probably going to be the most dangerous place on earth over the next few weeks, and the Americans would be seriously displeased with anyone who helped the Soviets to an atomic bomb. To top it all, the idea of jumping from a plane with only a sheet of silk to combat gravity was truly petrifying.

But what did all that matter if it gave him the chance to find Effi and Paul? ‘I assume we won’t be wearing uniforms,’ he said.

‘You will wear the uniforms the Nazis give their foreign labourers. Many were captured in East Prussia.’

That made sense. ‘And once I’ve guided the team to these two locations… where do we go then?’

‘The team will go to ground and wait for the Red Army.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘We are investigating several possibilities.’

‘Okay. But once the team is safely in hiding I assume I’ll be free to look for my family?’

‘Yes, but only then. I understand your concern for your family, but you can only leave the team when Major Kazankin agrees to your release. This is a military operation, and the usual rules apply. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the penalty for desertion.’

‘You don’t,’ Russell agreed. Nor did he doubt their ability to enforce it. The NKVD had a global reach, and peace or no peace, they would eventually hunt him down. And he could see how important this must be to them. If, as some experts claimed, the Soviets had sacrificed an eighth of their population to win this war, they hardly wanted to end it at the mercy of an American atomic monopoly. The stakes could hardly be higher.

‘So you accept,’ Nikoladze said, looking slightly more relaxed.

‘I do,’ Russell replied, glancing at Shchepkin. He seemed almost grateful.

‘Have you ever jumped from a plane?’ Kazankin asked. He had a deep voice, which somehow suited him down to the ground.

‘No,’ Russell admitted.

‘Your training will begin this afternoon,’ Nikoladze said.

‘But first a bath,’ Russell insisted.

Half an hour later, he was standing under a near-scalding downpour in the warders’ shower-room when a further drawback suggested itself. Regardless of success or failure, by the end of the operation he would know far too much about Soviet atomic progress – or the lack thereof – for them to ever consider letting him loose. The most likely culmination to his involvement was a quick bullet in the head from Kazankin. One more body on the streets of Berlin was unlikely to attract attention.

For the moment they needed him – Nikoladze had been visibly relieved when he’d agreed to join the team. Even knowing he wanted to reach Berlin, they had feared a refusal. Why? Because they still believed he was working for American intelligence, and a real American agent would hardly agree to help the Soviets gather atomic secrets. And on the off-chance that he was telling the truth, and no longer working for the Americans, they had brought along the only man whom he might conceivably trust. Yevgeny Shchepkin. Resurrected, dusted off, and asked to help them bring Russell on board.

They must want the German secrets very badly.

Dried and dressed in clothes collected from his hotel, he found the major waiting for him. ‘The car’s outside,’ the Russian said.

A thin young man with dark wavy hair and spectacles was waiting in the back. ‘Ilya Varennikov,’ he introduced himself.

‘The scientist,’ Kazankin growled.

For Effi and Rosa, Saturday was a day spent learning the ropes. The morning meal of wassersuppe and a few potato peelings served notice that yesterday’s dinner had not been a fluke, but, as Johanna wryly remarked, starvation seemed unlikely in the short time remaining. They were allowed exactly forty-five minutes of exercise, circling a small courtyard under a square of smoke-streaked sky, and were then left with nothing to do but wait another twelve hours for another bowl of wassersuppe.

Once one of the guards had been cajoled into sharpening Rosa’s only pencil, the girl seemed happy to draw, and Effi embarked on the task of learning as much as she could about their place of imprisonment. Johanna knew quite a lot, but residents of longer standing were more aware of how different the place had been only a few months earlier, and how it had changed in the meantime.

There were, it seemed, about a thousand Jews still resident in the hospital complex. As the nurse had told Effi, those living in the hospital proper – the half-Jews and quarter-Jews, the dreaded greifer – were the privileged ones. The atmosphere on that side of the barbed wire was said to be increasingly febrile, with much drinking, dancing and promiscuous coupling. The non-Jewish authorities, far from forbidding such activities, were avidly joining in. Everyone was fiddling while Berlin burned.

Still expecting a summons to interrogation, Effi sought information about her likely interrogator. SS Hauptscharführer Dobberke, as everyone seemed to agree, was a thug of the first order, but many of the same people seemed, almost despite themselves, to have a sneaking respect for the man. Yes, he did punish any serious rule-breaking with twenty-five lashes of his favourite whip, and yes, he would stick anyone lacking funds on a transport east with hardly a second thought, but he never exceeded the twenty-five, and once he had taken a bribe he always delivered his side of the bargain.

And not all the bribes were monetary. Dobberke loved the ladies, and was more than ready to stretch the rules in a woman prisoner’s favour if he received a favourable response to his overtures. Effi forced herself to consider the possibility – would she let the bastard fuck her if it improved her and Rosa’s chances of survival? She probably would, but doubted she’d be given the chance. Dobberke was said to like his flesh tender, and though she had become many things over the last four years, young wasn’t one of them.

The church bells were ringing as Paul, Neumaier, Hannes and Haaf walked into Diedersdorf that evening. A gesture of defiance, Paul guessed, in that no one was left to attend any services. The only show in town was at the village hall – a screening of the movie Kolberg, which rumour claimed had cost as much as a thousand new tanks. According to battalion some idiot from Personnel had delivered the tickets in his staff car, engine still running, eyes nervously scanning the eastern horizon and sky.

Reaching the village hall the foursome discovered that their tickets, far from being free, simply entitled them to come up with a four Reichsmark entrance fee. After some grumbling – Hannes was all for telling the doorman to stuff his wretched movie – they came up with the cash and filtered inside. The hall lacked sufficient chairs for the likely audience, and those available, arranged in rows at the back, were already occupied. But the large area of floor space at the front was still only sparsely populated, and they managed to secure a stretch of wall on the far side to sit against. Looking round, Paul could see that most of the men were from artillery units like their own. The few tank men present had managed, with characteristic arrogance, to seize the front row of chairs.

The hall gradually filled, the babble of conversation growing steadily louder, until the ceiling lights abruptly went out, and the film began flickering on the large white sheet which covered half of the end wall. The first scenes drew deep sighs of appreciation, less for their content than for the fact that the film was in colour.

Paul, like almost everyone else in the hall, already knew the story – the Pomeranian town’s defiance of the French in 1807 had been a staple of school history lessons and Hitlerjugend meetings for as long as he could remember. It had, however, ended in failure when the overall war was lost, and Paul was intrigued to discover how Goebbels and his film producers – Effi’s ‘nightmare machine’ – had finessed this unfortunate fact. He soon found out. Kolberg opened in 1913, after the eventual defeat of the French, with one of the characters reflecting on the importance of civilian militia, and the crucial role the men of the town had played in pointing the way towards victory.

Most of the rest was flashback. The indomitable mayor first overcame the doubters in his own camp – some seduced by foreign liberalism, others weakened by cowardice or too much self-importance – and then held the French at bay with the usual heady mixture of ingenuity, courage and extraordinary will-power.

It was impressively done, and almost insultingly lavish. He remembered Effi explaining how salt was always used for snow, and that hundreds of railway wagons would be used to transport it to a set. And then there were the soldiers – thousands of them. Where had they come from? They looked too much like Germans to be prisoners. They could only be real soldiers, taken out of the front line at some point in the last eighteen months. It beggared belief. Paul felt anger rising inside him. How many men had died for lack of support while Goebbels was making epics?

Let it go, he told himself. This might well be the last movie he would ever see. He should enjoy the spectacle, enjoy imagining a night in Kristina Söderbaum’s arms. Forget everything else.

And, for most of the film, he did. It had to end though, and when the lights came on it felt like a slap in the face from reality. Most of the faces around him reflected similar feelings – the sense of angry hopelessness as the hall emptied out was impossible to ignore. Haaf had enjoyed it of course, but even he seemed aware that overt enthusiasm was inappropriate, and the four of them walked back to their woods in almost complete silence. If the film-makers’ intention had been to stiffen resolve, and to foster the belief that eventual victory was still possible, they had made it several years too late, and shown it to the wrong audience.

Of course, Paul thought later, as he clambered up into his bunk, it didn’t help that the real Kolberg had surrendered to the Soviets more than a month ago.

The level of noise suggested to Russell that the transport plane was slowly shaking itself to pieces, but Varennikov was all smiles, as if he had trouble believing how much fun it was. The dispatcher nonchalantly propped beside the open doorway was taking periodic drags on his hand-cupped cigarette, apparently oblivious to the strong smell of aviation fuel suffusing the cabin. If the inevitable explosion didn’t kill him, Russell thought, then the fall was bound to. He checked his harness for the umpteenth time and reminded himself why he had agreed to this madness. ‘The things we do for love,’ he muttered under his breath.

He and the young physicist had spent the previous twenty-four hours rushing through lessons that usually lasted a fortnight. They had mastered exit technique, flight technique, landing technique. They had jumped off steps, off the end of a ramp, from the dry equivalent of a high-diving platform, and, finally, off a hundred foot tower. And now, against every inclination his mind and body could muster, they were about to leap from a thoroughly airborne plane.

The dispatcher was beckoning. Russell fought his way forward against the wind and looked down. The patchwork of forests and fields seemed both alarmingly close and alarmingly distant. He turned to the dispatcher expecting some final message of comfort, just as a hand in the back pushed him firmly into space.

The shock took his breath away. The transport plane, so solid and loud and all-encompassing, had vanished in an instant, leaving him plummeting through an eerie silence. He frantically tugged at the ripcord, thinking as he did so that he was pulling too hard, and that he’d be left with only a piece of broken rope and a perplexed Buster Keaton expression on his face as he dropped like a stone. But the chute snapped open, the heavens tugged him back, and he was floating down exactly the way he was supposed to. He dropped his head on his chest, held his elbows in, tried to keep his lower limbs behind the line of his trunk – all the things their instructors had been pummelling into them for the last twenty-four hours.

It was extraordinarily peaceful. He could hear the plane again now, a low drone in the distance. He could see the aerodrome below, the huts and training tower on the eastern rim, the wide expanse of grass at which he’d been aimed. Away in the distance sunlight was glinting on a clutch of golden domes.

Looking up, he could see Varennikov dangling beneath his red chute. The Russian’s smile would be broader than ever.

After seeming no nearer for most of his fall, the ground rose to meet him at breakneck speed. He told himself to concentrate, not to let his legs out in front of his body. This was the moment his rational self feared most, when his forty-five-year-old bones were put to the ultimate test. A broken ankle now, and that would probably be that, though he wouldn’t put it past the Soviets to drop him in a cast.

At least he was falling onto flat grass – the dispatcher’s shove had been well-timed. He took a deep breath, mentally rehearsed his technique, and rolled away as he hit the ground, ending up in a relieved heap. He looked up to see Varennikov hit the grass running some twenty metres away. He hardly needed to roll, but did so with all the graceful agility of youth. ‘Show-off,’ Russell murmured to himself. He lay on his back, staring up at the blue sky and wondering whether kissing the ground was in order, only clambering to his feet when he heard Varennikov anxiously ask if he was all right.

A jeep was on its way to collect them, their plane coming in to land.

‘Again,’ their chief instructor barked from the front seat of the jeep.

‘Why?’ Russell wanted to know. ‘We know how to do it now. Why risk an injury?’

‘Five by day, two by night,’ the instructor told him. ‘The minimum,’ he added for emphasis. A bomb fell through the roof of the Pathology block extension on the Sunday morning, burying one male prisoner alive in the cells which lay below. It took them most of the morning to dig him out, but the young man managed a smile as they carried him through the basement rooms en route to the hospital. Rosa had been crying on and off since the news of his entombment, and Effi guessed that the incident had triggered some family memory.

When an orderly came for Effi early that afternoon, she was glad that Johanna was on hand to look after the girl. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she shouted over her shoulder, hoping it was true.

Dobberke’s office was at the end of a book-lined corridor on the top floor. He gestured Effi into a chair and stared at her for several seconds before picking up what looked like her papers. The famous whip was in view, hanging from a nail in the wall. The black German shepherd was asleep in a corner.

‘You are from Fürstenwalde?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I know it well,’ he said with a smile. ‘What was your address?’

The smile told her he was bluffing. ‘Nordstrasse 53,’ she said. ‘It’s a few streets north of the town centre.’

He grunted. ‘How long have you lived there?’

‘Eight years,’ Effi said, picking a figure out of the air.

Dobberke laughed. ‘You expect me to believe that a Jew could survive detection in a small town like Fürstenwalde for eight years?’

‘I am not a Jew.’

‘You look like one.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘And the girl you have in tow – is she not a Jew?’

This was a question that Effi had expected, and she had considered saying no. But the only explanation of the faded star that she could think of – that Rosa had somehow ended up with the blouse of a young Jewish girl of similar size – sounded almost ludicrously unconvincing. ‘She is a half-Jew, a mischling,’ she told Dobberke. She explained about her sister’s marriage to a Jew, and how she herself had come to be Rosa’s guardian. ‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ Effi concluded. ‘We should be in the hospital, not the collection centre.’

Dobberke stared at her for a few more seconds, almost admiringly, she thought. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ he said at last. ‘You arrive here with papers that are less than a day old, a girl with a star on her dress, and a very practised story. I think there’s more to you than meets the eye…’ He cocked his head, and she heard the rising whine of the siren. ‘If you had arrived a week ago,’ he continued, rising to his feet, ‘you would be on your way to Französische Strasse for a real interrogation. That may no longer be possible, but the war isn’t over yet. In the meantime, you will stay exactly where you are.’

They were ripped from sleep by unearthly thunder – even deep inside the dugout the onset of the Soviet bombardment seemed loud enough to awaken comrades long since dead. This is it, Paul thought, leaping down from his bunk. The beginning of the end.

Haaf stared at him wide-eyed, apparently paralysed. ‘Move,’ Paul told him. ‘We have guns to man.’

Outside it was light enough to check his watch by, and dawn was still three hours away. Vehicles were hurrying west on the road – supply trucks probably, caught too close to the front. They had to be German at any rate – the Soviets would not be moving until the bombardment ended. Paul watched as stretches of earth heaved up around them, wondering which would be hit.

Exploding shells flashed a few hundred metres away to the south, the noise of their detonations engulfed in the wider cacophony. Shaken out of his trance, Paul raced across to the deep trenches that connected their gun emplacements and leapt in, almost landing on Hannes. Haaf was right behind him, barefoot and clutching a boot in either hand.

The shells were drawing closer, ripping a corridor of destruction through the wood with mathematical precision. They waited, grim faces lit by the flaring sky above the trees, for death to descend, but this time the maths were on their side, and the line of fire passed harmlessly in front of their position.

‘I can’t stand this,’ Paul thought. But he could. He had in the past.

The level of noise grew no easier to endure – as he knew from experience it rose until increasing deafness provided its own defence. He looked at his watch. It was three-twenty, which probably meant another ten minutes. He stared up at the long rectangle of sky, trying to lose himself in the swirling patterns of light and smoke.

At exactly three-thirty the sound quality shifted, and the decibel level dropped a merciful fraction. The full-on bombardment of the front areas had shifted to a rolling barrage, as the Soviet artillery concentrated on clearing a route across the Oderbruch for their tanks and infantry, and on obliterating the first line of defence on the lip of the escarpment. The latter, Paul knew, would be more or less devoid of troops, the German commanders having finally learned that it paid to pull them out before the bombardment started, and quickly return them once it was over.

Soon they could hear the Soviet tank guns, and the answering 88s. machine-gun fire began filling the spaces in between. Like a fucking orchestra, Paul thought.

No shells were falling around them now, but all knew the reprieve was temporary. They ate their breakfasts mostly in silence, thinking ahead to the moment when the tanks would appear in their sights. Not for the first time, Paul felt an intense need to be moving. He could understand why people in the rear lines sometimes ran screaming towards the front, eager to settle things once and for all.

Soon after five-thirty, nature’s light began seeping into the sky, and by six the sun was rising above the eastern horizon, illuminating a world of drifting black smoke. Low-flying Soviet fighters were soon whizzing in and out of the man-made clouds, but clearly found it hard to pick out targets on the ground. A horse-drawn ambulance cart hurried by on the Seelow-Diedersdorf road, headed for the aid stations farther back. The first of many, Paul thought.

There were too many ways to be killed, and too many hours in the day. Soon after two o’clock a shell suddenly struck the upper trunk of a tree nearby, setting it ablaze. As they all scrambled for the shelter of the front walls, other shells followed, straddling and surrounding their emplacements without ever hitting them, like some malign god intent on scaring them half to death before finishing them off. The noise and heat were so intense that Neumaier started screaming abuse at the Soviet gunners. Haaf, he noticed, had tears streaming down his adolescent face.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shelling stopped, and the war was once again several kilometres distant.

‘Why don’t you send Haaf back to the command post for our welfare stores?’ Paul suggested to Sergeant Utermann.

‘Does he know the way?’

‘I’ll go with him,’ Hannes volunteered.

Darkness had almost fallen when the pair finally returned, loaded up with cigarettes and other necessities.

‘They’re still handing out razors?’ Neumaier expostulated. ‘Who are we supposed to be impressing – fucking Ivan?’ He seemed much better pleased with the chocolate and biscuits in the front line packets.

‘Don’t forget your buttons’ Hannes told him. ‘You wouldn’t want your dick to fall out in Red Square.’

Paul smiled, and stared at his allotment of writing paper. There was no post anymore. Maybe he should start writing war poetry. The other day someone had shown him a poem by Bertolt Brecht, one of his father’s old favourites, a communist writer who’d left Germany when the Nazis came to power. He’d been living in America ever since, but he hadn’t forgotten Hitler or the Wehrmacht. ‘To the German Soldiers in the East’ was the name of the poem Paul had read, and one line had stayed with him: ‘there is no longer a road leading home.’ Perhaps Brecht had meant that they would never see Germany again, in which case he’d been wrong – here they were, defending German soil. But that didn’t matter – there was a bigger truth there, for Paul himself and so many others. They might die in front of Berlin, but even if they survived, the home they had known was gone.

Hannes and Haaf had also brought news. The Russians had lost hundreds of tanks and thousands of men trying to cross the Oderbruch, and the line was still holding. They wouldn’t be coming up the road today.

There was also a Führer Order, which Sergeant Utermann insisted on reading aloud. ‘Berlin remains German,’ it began. ‘Vienna will be German again, and Europe never Russian. Form yourselves into brotherhoods. At this hour the whole German people are looking at you, my East Front warriors, and only hope that through your resolve, your fanaticism, your weapons and your leaders, the Bolshevik onslaught will drown in a sea of blood. The turning point of the war depends upon you.’

Utermann carefully folded the sheet and put it in his breast pocket. ‘East Front warriors,’ he repeated, looking round at the others. ‘He has a way with words.’

‘We mustn’t give up,’ Haaf said earnestly. ‘There’s always hope.’

No there isn’t, Paul thought but refrained from saying.

It was still dark when Effi was woken by Rosa shaking her shoulder and urgently asking: ‘What’s that noise?’

Effi levered herself onto one elbow and listened. There was a dull booming in the distance, a sound neither continuous nor broken, but something between the two. All around the room others were stirring, heads raised in query. ‘It’s the Russians,’ someone said breathlessly.

The news raced around the room, the initial excitement swiftly turning to anxiety. Everyone knew what this meant, that the decision about their own fate had just been brought a whole lot closer. Suddenly the horrors of the present – the hunger, the fear, the living in perpetual limbo – all seemed much more bearable.

About fifteen hours had passed since Effi’s interview with Dobberke, and she hadn’t been summoned to another. She had met a new friend though, a young Jewish woman in her twenties named Nina. Effi had noticed her on the Saturday, a pale, thin, almost catatonic figure sitting in a corner with knees held tight against her chest. But on Sunday a package from the outside world had worked a miracle, turning her into the vivacious and talkative young woman who, that evening, introduced herself to Effi and Rosa. Nina, they learned, had been in hiding since the big round-up of March 1943. She had lived with a gentile friend – the way she talked about the other woman made Effi think they’d been rather more than ‘friends’ – and only been caught when a female greifer recognised her from their old school days together. That had been four weeks ago.

That morning, the mood engendered by her friend’s visit was still in evidence. When she, Effi and Johanna discussed the one question occupying every mind in the camp – what would the SS do when the Russians drew near? – Nina was the most optimistic. They would release their prisoners, she thought – what else could they do? The answer to that was depressingly obvious, but neither Effi nor Johanna put it into words. Were there enough of them to kill a thousand Jews, Effi wondered. Or would they just settle for murdering the hundred or so pure Jews in the collection camp? Making those sorts of distinctions with the world crashing down around them seemed utterly absurd, but when had they ever been anything else?

Later that morning, when the latest raid forced everyone down to the basement, she studied Dobberke’s face, hoping for a clue to his intentions. There was none, and when he suddenly glanced in her direction she quickly looked away; she had no desire to provoke another interrogation.

She tried to imagine herself in his situation. He had committed crimes which she hoped the Allies and Russians would consider serious enough to warrant the death penalty. It was often hard to believe that the people bombing Berlin had any sort of moral sense, but surely sending civilians to their death for being members of a particular race would be considered worthy of the ultimate punishment. So Dobberke had to be fearing the worst. Of course, it was possible that he had already decided on suicide – Hitler, she was sure, would take that way out – and, if so, he might well want to take them all with him. But Dobberke hadn’t struck Effi as the suicidal type. And if he wanted to survive he needed to provide his future captors with an ameliorating circumstance or two. Like letting his current charges go.

So maybe Nina was right. As the day wore on Effi felt more optimistic, right up to the moment when two of the Jews from the Lübeck train were escorted through the basement rooms, en route to the cells. The third Jew, the young man who had stayed in Bismarck Strasse, was nowhere to be seen, but one of these recognised her from the night in the forest, the eyes widening in his badly bruised face.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. It was too late in the day for Dobberke and his goons to start investigating individual stories. Whatever the fate awaiting those in their care, it seemed increasingly certain that everyone would share it.

It was long past dark when the chauffeur-driven Ford dropped Russell and Ilya Varennikov outside the NKVD barracks that served as their temporary home. They had done five drops that day, one in the pre-dawn twilight, three in daylight, and one as dusk shaded into night. The first had been the scariest, a long fall through gloom in which distances had been hard to measure, and only a serendipitous patch of bog had saved Russell’s legs from the clumsiness of his landing. The last, darker drop had been easier, the various lights on the ground providing more of a yardstick for judgement, but there was no guarantee of similar assistance in the countryside west of Berlin. A moon might make things easier, but it would also render them more visible. Russell found himself hanging on to the thought that the Soviets really wanted this operation to succeed, and would not be dropping him to a likely death just for the fun of it.

Although he and Varennikov were physically shattered, a day spent falling from the heavens had left them both with an undeniable sense of exhilaration. It had also brought them together, as risk-sharing tended to do. Russell had expected the usual Soviet caution when it came to dealing with foreigners, but Varennikov had been friendly from the start, and now, tucking into a large pile of cabbage and potatoes in the otherwise empty canteen, he was eager to satisfy his curiosity about Russell. How had an American comrade ended up on this mission?

It occurred to Russell that the young scientist might had been primed to ask him questions, but somehow he didn’t think so. And if he had, what did it matter? He gave Varennikov an edited version of the true story – his long career as a foreign correspondent in Germany before and during the war, his eventual escape with Soviet help, his time in America and Britain, his determination to rescue his wife and son in Berlin and his consequent arrival in Moscow. If only it had been that straightforward, he thought to himself in passing.

He expected questions about America and Britain, but Varennikov, like many Soviet citizens, seemed oblivious to the outside world. He also had a wife and son, and pulled two photographs from an inside pocket to prove it. ‘This is Irina,’ he said of the smiling chubby-faced blonde in one snapshot. ‘And this is Yakov,’ he added, offering another of a young boy gripping a large stuffed bear.

‘Where are they?’ Russell asked.

‘In Gorki. That is where I work. My mother is there also. My father and brother were killed by the Nazis in 1941. In the Donbass, where my family comes from. My father and brother were both miners, and my father was a Party official. When the Germans came in 1941 anti-Party elements handed over the list of local Party members, and they were all shot.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Varennikov shrugged. ‘Most Soviet families have such stories to tell.’

‘I know. Yours must have been proud of you. Doing the work you do.’

‘My father was. He used to say that before the Revolution, the sons of miners had no chance of going to university, or of becoming scientists. All such jobs were taken by the sons of the bourgeoisie.’ He gave Russell a smile. ‘I was born the day after the Party seized power in 1917. So my father decided that my life should be like a chronicle of the better world that the Party was creating.’

It was Russell’s turn to smile. ‘And has your life gone well?’

Varennikov missed the hint of irony. ‘Yes, I think so. There have been troubles, setbacks, but we are still going forward.’

‘And were you always interested in atomic physics?’

‘It’s been the most interesting area of research since the mid-thirties, and I… well, I never really considered any other field. The possibilities are so enormous.’

‘And what are you hoping to discover in Berlin?’

‘More pieces of the puzzle. I don’t know – there were so many brilliant German physicists before the war, and if they received enough government backing they should be ahead of us. But they probably didn’t – the Nazis used to describe this whole field as ‘Jewish physics’. Or the German scientists might have refused to work on a bomb, or worked on it without really trying. We don’t know.’

‘How powerful will these bombs be?’ Russell asked, curious as to current Soviet thinking.

‘There’s no obvious limit, but large enough to destroy whole cities.’

‘Dropping them sounds a dangerous business.’

Varennikov smiled. ‘They’ll be dropped from a great height, or attached to rockets. In theory, that is.’

‘And in practice?’

‘Oh, they won’t actually be used. They’ll act as a deterrent, a threat to possible invaders. If we had owned such a bomb in 1941 the Germans would never have dared to invade us. If every country has one, then no one will be able to invade anyone else. The atomic bomb is a weapon for peace, not war.’

‘But…’ Russell began, just as footsteps sounded behind him. The openness of their discussion might, he realised, be somewhat frowned upon in certain quarters.

Varennikov seemed unconcerned by such considerations.. ‘And harnessing atomic power for peaceful purposes will transform the world,’ he continued. ‘Imagine unlimited, virtually free energy. Poverty will become a thing of the past.’

Colonel Nikoladze sat down beside the physicist.

‘We’re imagining a better world,’ Russell told him.

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Nikoladze replied. He didn’t care what they were talking about, Russell realised with a sinking heart. Varennikov could tell him that Stalin was partial to goats, and no one would protest. They hadn’t even forbidden him from writing about the mission once the war was over. Why bother when he wouldn’t be around?

‘I hear it went well today,’ Nikoladze said.

‘We’re still in one piece,’ Russell agreed. ‘When do we go?’

‘We leave for Poland early tomorrow. And if all goes well, you’ll be dropped over Germany early on Thursday.’

‘Four of us?’

‘Yes,’ Nikoladze answered. ‘The two of you, Major Kazankin who you’ve already met, and Lieutenant Gusakovsky.’

It seemed small for an invading army, but that was probably the point. If the Germans noticed them, it wouldn’t matter if they were a thousand-strong – they still wouldn’t get away with a single sheet of paper. But four men had a reasonable chance of passing unobserved. They could all get under one big bed if the situation demanded it. And the smaller the group, the better his own chances were of eventually cutting himself loose.

‘The final offensive began this morning,’ Nikoladze was saying. ‘More than a million men are involved. Assuming all goes well Stavka hopes to announce the capture of Berlin on this coming Sunday – Lenin’s birthday. So you’ll have three days to complete your mission and remain undetected. An achievable target, I think.’

Later, back in the small two-bunk room they shared, Russell asked Varennikov where Nikoladze was from.

‘He’s from Georgia. Tiflis, I think.’

Georgians seemed to be running the Soviet Union, Russell thought. Stalin, Beria – Nikoladze would have powerful friends.

‘He seems competent enough,’ Varennikov said with a shrug.

‘I’m sure he is. What made them select you from all the other scientists working on the project?’

‘Several reasons, I think. I speak English well enough to talk with you, I speak and read a little German, and I know enough about the matter in hand to recognise anything new. There are other scientists with a much better grasp of German,’ he added modestly, ‘but their minds were too valuable to risk.’

There was no obvious let-up in the Soviet bombing of the German defences during the night, and the members of Paul’s anti-tank unit saw little in the way of sleep. Roused bleary-eyed from the dugout shortly before dawn, and fully expecting a re-run of the previous day’s all-out artillery bombardment, they were pleasantly surprised to find nothing more immediately threatening than a cold but beautiful sunrise. A steaming mug of ersatz coffee had rarely seemed so welcome.

The respite lasted several hours, the Soviet guns finally opening up, in deafening unison, on the stroke of 10 a.m. Low-flying aircraft were soon screaming overhead, shells and bombs exploding in the wood around them. For thirty long minutes they huddled in their trenches, knees drawn up against their tightened chests, praying that they didn’t receive a direct hit. When a shell landed close enough to shake their ramparts, Paul fought off the temptation to risk climbing out in search of the new crater. Everyone knew that no two shells ever landed in the same spot.

As on the previous day, the gunners shifted their focus after half an hour, and began pummelling the German forward defences some two kilometres to the east. A look through the unit’s periscope revealed the familiar curtain of smoke above the invisible Oderbruch. Tank guns boomed in the distance.

An occasional plane still flew over their position, but the rain of shells had stopped, making movement beyond the trenches a relatively safe affair. The gun emplacements had survived several near misses, and the outer door to the dugout had been blown in, but the only real casualty was their football pitch, which now featured a large crater where the centre circle should be. Neumaier looked ready to kill, and Paul’s consoling remark that further fixtures were unlikely elicited a bleak stare.

Hours of nervous waiting followed. They could hear the battle, see it reaching for the sky in smoke and flame, but had no way of knowing how it was going. Were the Russians on the point of breaking through, or simply piling up corpses in the meadows? No one, with the possible exception of Haaf, actually expected the ‘turning of the tide’ their Führer was demanding, but stranger things had happened. Maybe Ivan had finally run out of cannon fodder. It had taken him long enough.

More likely, he was just taking his time, grinding down his opponent with the same remorseless disregard for life he’d demonstrated from day one. And any moment now his tanks would rumble into view.

But when? The unit radio just crackled, and no runners arrived with orders. Utermann sent two men off to battalion, in search of news and additional shells. Paul, on observation duty, watched a steady stream of laden ambulance carts lumber west towards Diedersdorf, and found himself remembering a long-ago birthday party, and the seemingly endless string of coloured flags which the hired magician had drawn from his sleeve.

The emissaries returned with neither news nor shells, but bearing two dead rabbits. The smell of cooking soon wafted along the trenches, and by three in the afternoon they were all licking grease from their fingers. As they dined a Soviet plane passed high overhead, and several leaflets drifted down amongst them. ‘Your war is lost – surrender while you still can’ was the basic message – one that could hardly be argued with. But here they were.

‘I bet they’re not having meat for lunch,’ Hannes muttered.

An hour or so later German troops, most of them Waffen-SS, appeared in the distance, falling back across the fields. The trickle soon turned into a flood, soldiers with smoke-scarred faces and dark-rimmed eyes, half walking, half running, passing them by with barely a glance. There were vehicles too, self-propelled guns and the occasional tank, with lines of soldiers clinging to whatever purchase they could find, bumping up and down like amateur horsemen as their mounts rumbled across the uneven ground and blundered their way through the trees.

A grey-haired Hauptsturmführer told them that Soviet tanks had broken through on either side of Seelow, and were close to surrounding the town. He looked as tired as any man Paul had ever seen. ‘They’re not far behind us,’ the SS officer said, looking back across the fields as if expecting to find the Russians already in view. ‘We’re moving back to the Diedersdorf line,’ he added, then managed the ghost of a smile. ‘But I doubt we’ll be there for long.’

He raised a weary hand in farewell and walked off towards the west. So this is it, Paul thought.

But it was another couple of hours before the enemy appeared, and by that time the fields ahead were bathed in the golden light of the setting sun. The first Soviet tank, a T-34, appeared as a flash of light, then coalesced into the familiar profile. As Hannes manned the sighter, Paul and Neumaier spun the direction and elevation wheels to his bidding, and Haaf stood waiting with the second shell.

‘Wait for it,’ Utermann warned. He might be an idiot, Paul thought, but he knew how to run a battery. ‘On the left,’ the sergeant reminded them. The other 88 would take out the tanks on the right.

A second T-34 slid into view, and a third. Soon there were ten of them, fanning out on either side of the road. They were advancing slowly, with all due caution. A big mistake.

‘Fire,’ Utermann said, almost too quietly to hear.

Paul’s left hand tugged on the trigger, and the gun shook with the force of the discharge. A split second later the other 88 followed suit. As the smoke cleared Paul could see two of the T-34s in flames. He thought he heard a distant scream, but was probably imagining it.

One of the other Soviet tanks opened fire, but it was still out of range. Haaf rammed another shell into the breech as Hannes barked instructions, and the other two adjusted their wheels. ‘Now,’ Hannes shouted, and Paul pulled the trigger again.

The target slumped to a halt, but no flames erupted. The crew were already tumbling out.

Three further tanks were destroyed, but more were moving into view, and the 88s were running out of shells. Another two burst into flame, and another two. It was like shooting ducks in the fairground on Potsdamer Strasse, Paul thought, only these ducks would outlast the supply of shot. And those that survived would be angry.

They were down to five shells when the first tank turned away, and the others soon followed suit. Their commander had probably just been told there was no chance of air support that evening, and had preferred a ten-hour wait to losing his entire brigade. He had no way of knowing his opponent was down to his last few shells.

It was time to get out. With two shells needed to render the 88s useless, there was no point waiting for morning to fire the other three. They might as well charge the Russians on foot.

‘Prepare the guns for demolition,’ Utermann told the two crews fifteen minutes later, apparently satisfied that the Russians weren’t about to reappear. ‘And get all the fuel into one of the half-tracks,’ he told Hannes.

They set to work. Ten minutes later Hannes returned with the bad news. ‘There’s no fuel in either tank,’ he said. ‘Those SS bastards must have siphoned it off.’

Utermann closed his eyes for a second and breathed out heavily. He was still opening his mouth to speak when they all became aware of the roar in the distance which heralded a katyusha attack. ‘Stalin’s organs!’ Utermann shouted unnecessarily, as everyone bolted for the nearest trench. Most were still running as the roar transmuted into a hissing howl, and an area of the wood some hundred metres to the west exploded in flames. By some merciful chance, Ivan had got the range wrong.

Over the next ten minutes he did his best to make amends. As Paul and his comrades hunkered down helplessly in the emplacement trenches, the rocket-launcher crews systematically worked their way across the wood, drawing ever nearer to the German guns. Looking up, Paul saw that the stars were lost in smoke, the branches above bathed in orange light. This is it, he thought, the moment of my death. It felt almost peaceful.

And then the salvo fell, straddling their position with a flash and crash that threatened to obliterate the senses. Paul had his eyes closed at the vital moment, but still had trouble focusing when he opened them again. Haaf, he realised, was screaming his head off, though he couldn’t hear him. Something had landed in the boy’s lap – a head, Paul realised – and he had leapt to his feet to shake it off. Before anyone could stop him, the boy had clambered out of the trench and disappeared from sight.

Someone shone a torch on the head. It was Bernauer, the other gun’s loader. His emplacement must have taken a direct hit.

Another salvo landed, sounding much further away but still turning nearby trees into torches. They had all been deafened, Paul realised. It would pass in a few hours. Or at least it always had.

The rockets kept firing for another ten minutes, the hiss of their incoming flights barely discernible above the hissing in their ears. Once they had stopped, Utermann gestured them out of the trench – the Soviets might be playing games, creating a false sense of security before launching more salvos, but an immediate infantry assault was much more likely.

There were no obvious human forms in the other emplacement, which was itself barely recognisable. Paul had seen such sights in daylight, and felt grateful to the darkness for cloaking this particular jigsaw of blood, flesh and bone.

Hannes cursed as he tripped over something in the dark. It was Haaf’s life-less body – a large chunk of the boy’s head had been sliced off.

A red flare suddenly blossomed above what was left of the wood – Ivan was on his way.

Utermann was waving his arms around like a demented windmill, trying to get their attention. ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted, if Paul’s lip-reading was any good. The sergeant must have been feeling pretty lucky, Paul thought. Up until this evening, he and Corporal Commen had always taken shelter in the other emplacement.

The five of them moved off through the battered wood, clambering over fallen trees and sheared limbs, working their way through the mosaic of fires still raging. Fifteen minutes went by with no sign of pursuit, and Paul began to wonder whether the Russians had decided to call it a night. The hissing in his ears had almost gone, and he found he could hear his own voice, albeit from some distance away. As he walked on, the sounds of his and his companions’ progress grew steadily clearer, as if someone in his skull was cranking up the volume.

‘How’s your hearing?’ he asked the man walking behind him.

‘I can hear you,’ Neumaier said.

Another fifteen minutes found them staring out across depressingly open fields. The moon had just climbed over the horizon, and the landscape was visibly brightening with each passing minute.

‘The next line runs through Görlsdorf,’ Utermann said, gesturing to the right, ‘and along there,’ he added, sweeping a finger from north to south, ‘across the Seelow road to Neuentempel. It’s about a kilometre away.’

‘When does the moon go down?’ Hannes asked.

‘About two o’clock,’ Neumaier told him. He’d been on watch the previous night.

‘So we wait?’ Hannes suggested.

‘Yes,’ Utermann decided. ‘Unless Ivan turns up in the meantime.’

Russell had a night of anxious dreams, and was relieved when a hand shook him roughly awake. It was still dark and cold outside, but by the time they had downed mugs of tea and chewed their way through hunks of bread and jam, light was seeping over the eastern horizon. A long walk across the tarmac brought them to their transport – a Soviet-built version of the American DC-3 which Varennikov told him was designated a Lisunov LI-2. It had space for thirty men, but the two pilots were their only fellow-travellers. Five minutes after clambering aboard they were airborne.

It was Russell’s first meeting with the fourth member of the insertion team. His first impression of Lieutenant Gusakovsky was favourable – the youngish Ukrainian accompanied his handshake with a pleasant smile and seemed less full of himself than Kazankin. He was tall, good-looking and seemed extremely fit. He had, Varennikov revealed, played centre-half for Dynamo Kiev before the war.

The Lisunov had rows of rectangular windows, and one of these offered Russell a panoramic view of Warsaw as they came into land just before noon. He had expected damage – the city had been bombed for a couple of weeks in 1939 – but nothing like this. As far as he knew, there had been no fighting inside the city, but the centre looked like a giant had danced all over it. A farewell gift from the Nazis, Russell could only assume. It didn’t bode well for Berlin.

The airfield, which lay several kilometres to the south, was awash with Soviet planes, personnel and flags. The one lone Polish emblem tagged to a long row of hammers and sickles might have been an accident, but looked more like an insult. A glimpse of the future, Russell thought.

Rain began falling as they walked across the grass, and was soon beating a heavy tattoo on the corrugated roof of the canteen. Nikoladze and the two soldiers disappeared in search of something or other, leaving Varennikov and Russell to pick at the dreadful food. Working on the assumption that Berlin’s current cuisine would be even less rewarding, Russell consumed as much as he could, sealing his achievement with a stinging glass of vodka. Varennikov had brought a book of mathematical puzzles to amuse himself, but Russell was reduced to reading the army newspaper Red Star. There were several stories of tragic heroism, a few slices of that cloying sentimentality which Russians seemed to share with Americans, and a bloodthirsty piece by Konstantin Simonov encouraging Red Army soldiers to take their revenge on the German people. Russell checked the newspaper’s date, thinking that it must have been printed before Stalin’s recent edict emphasising the need to distinguish between Nazis and Germans, but it was only a few days old. Simple inertia, he wondered, or something more sinister? Whichever it was, Berlin would pay the price.

They took off again in mid-afternoon, this time aboard a smaller two-engined plane which only had room for the four of them. It was a rough ride through clouds, with Poland’s mosaic of fields and woods only occasionally visible a few thousand feet below. Kazankin seemed worst-affected by the bumpy flight: he sat rigid in his seat, carefully controlling each breath, a study in mind over stomach.

It was getting dark when they bounced back to land on another makeshift airstrip. ‘Where are we?’ Russell asked Nikoladze, as they walked towards a single small building surrounded by large canvas tents.

‘Leszno,’ the Georgian told him. ‘You know where that is?’

‘Uh-huh.’ It had been the German town of Lissa until 1918, when it found itself a few kilometres inside the new Poland. They were about two hundred kilometres – an hour’s flight – from Berlin.

Nikoladze disappeared inside the building, leaving the rest of them outside. The clouds further west were breaking up, offering glimpses of a red setting sun, and a series of Soviet bombers were dropping down onto the distant runway. ‘Where have they been?’ Russell asked a passing airman.

The man’s initial reaction was dismissive, but then he noticed the NKVD uniforms. ‘Breslau, comrade’ he said curtly, and hurried off.

So ‘Fortress Breslau’ was still standing. It had been surrounded for two months now – a mini-Stalingrad on the Oder. A beautiful city, once upon a time.

Nikoladze emerged with the news that a tent had been reserved for the team. As they walked towards it, the landing lights on the distant runway winked out. The Luftwaffe was still out there, Russell deduced. He wasn’t looking forward to the next night’s flight.

In the tent they found a sackful of foreign worker uniforms, rough dark trousers and jackets with the blue and white Ost patch. ‘Find one that fits,’ Kazankin told him and Varennikov.

The uniforms obviously hadn’t been washed in living memory, but Russell supposed that a band of sweet-smelling foreign workers might be deemed suspicious. He found an outfit that seemed a reasonable fit, and didn’t actually stink. There was a torn square of paper in one pocket with a couple of strange-looking words scribbled across it. Finnish perhaps, or possibly Estonian. A fragment of a life.

‘Will we be carrying guns?’ he asked Kazankin.

‘You won’t,’ was the instant answer.

A few minutes later Nikoladze arrived with two pieces of bad news. The Germans on the Oder was putting up a stiffer resistance than expected, and Berlin by Lenin’s birthday was beginning to look a trifle optimistic. More germane to their own operation, there was no sign of the inflatable dinghy which Nikoladze had been promised. The plan, as Russell now discovered, involved a dropping zone a few kilometres west of Berlin, a long walk to the Havelsee, and a short voyage across that body of water. A further hike along the paths of the Grunewald would then bring them to the edge of the city’s south-western suburbs.

It seemed an ambitious programme for a single night.

Paul was woken by a tap on the head. He had fallen asleep with his back against a tree.

‘Ivan!’ Neumaier hissed in his ear.

Paul could hear the Soviet infantry crashing through the wood behind them. They couldn’t be more than a few hundred metres away. Scrambling to his feet, he followed Neumaier across the lane, swung himself over the gate and joined in the headlong flight. The moon was almost down now – another few hundred metres and the night might hide them.

The field was mercifully unploughed, its owner probably somewhere west of Berlin by now. Racing across the turf, Paul had a memory of one Jungvolk instructor urging him to run faster on a weekend exercise in the country. It must have been around the time of the Berlin Olympics, because the man had screamed: ‘this is not some fucking gold medal you’re running for – it’s your fucking life!’

He caught up with Utermann, who was always moaning that his right knee hadn’t been the same since Kursk. By this time they were over three hundred metres from the trees, and no bullets were flying past their ears. Glancing over his shoulder, Paul thought he caught a hint of movement in the wall of trees behind them.

They caught up with the others, who had gone to ground in a ditch between fields. Paul had no sooner sunk gratefully onto his front than two ‘Christmas trees’ rippled into life above them, the Soviet parachute flares scattering what looked like blazing stars across the night sky. The five men kept their heads down, pressed into the wet earth of the bank. All that talk about German soil, Paul thought. And here it is, stinking in my nostrils.

As the flares dimmed they cautiously raised their heads. A host of shadows was advancing towards them.

Once the lights had flickered out, they made their way across the stream and up into the adjoining field. As they began running an excited shout rose up – one of the Russians had seen them. A single rifle cracked, and Paul thought he heard the bullet pass by. A volley of shots followed, with no more effect. They were firing blind.

But someone would be asking for another flare, Paul thought.

There was an explosion behind him. He was looking back when another went off – mortar rounds were landing amongst the Russians.

And then the machine-guns opened up, and Neumaier, twenty metres ahead of him, suddenly stopped in his tracks and toppled to the ground. Paul came up as Hannes turned his friend over – one eye was staring, the other gone. Utermann and Commen were still running, screaming out that they were Germans, when both went down together, as if tripped by the same wire.

Paul crouched there with Hannes for what seemed an age, waiting his turn, almost revelling in the breathtaking absurdity of it all. But the machine-gun had fallen silent – Utermann had obviously been heard, albeit too late to save himself – and voices were calling them forward.

They did as they were told, almost falling into the foremost German trench, but there was no time to rest. Someone gave them each a rifle, shouted something vaguely encouraging, and moved on. Paul stared at the gun for several seconds as if unsure what it was for, shook his head to clear it, and took a position at the parapet. Many Russians were down, but hundreds of others were still charging towards them, screaming at the top of their lungs, the leading echelons no more than fifty metres away. Paul took aim at one, and saw another go down. He took aim again, and his first target went down bellowing.

A few seconds more, and the first Russians were amongst them, some leaping across the trenches, other straight in, rifles firing then swinging, blades glinting and falling. One swung wildly at Paul, and he swung equally wildly back, catching the man across the neck with a sickening crack.

He scrabbled in desperation at the wall of the trench, and managed to haul himself over the edge. All around him, men were heaving, grunting and rasping, like warriors from some ancient battle between Teutons and Romans. In the dark it was hard to distinguish friend from foe, and Paul saw no reason to try. Weaving his way between personal battles, he ran for the next line of trees.

Since the weekend bombing of the ground-level extension above the cells, the latter’s capacity had been severely diminished, and the two Jews from the Lübeck train had been allowed to share in the relative freedom of the fourth basement room. Effi had initially thought it prudent to stay away from them, but she badly wanted to know what had happened to their friend, the young man she had once sheltered in the Bismarck Strasse flat. After two days had passed she decided it was safe to make contact.

From the doorway of the furthest room, she could see them sitting against a wall. Their faces still bore the marks of the last interrogation, but they still seemed more animated than most of their fellow-prisoners. Both got warily to their feet as she approached.

The thought crossed Effi’s mind that they might suspect her of betraying them. ‘Do you remember me?’ she asked unnecessarily.

‘Yes,’ the younger of the two replied. He was about twenty-five, and looked intelligent.

‘What happened in Lübeck?’ she asked them quietly.

‘We don’t know,’ the young man said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘We were already on board the ship. We’d been hiding in the hold for a few hours when the roof slid open and there were the Gestapo, shining their torches down at us and killing themselves laughing.’

‘They never let slip how they tracked you down?’

‘No.’

‘What happened to your friend?’

‘Willy? He’s dead. He made a break for it as they led us off the ship, jumped off the gangplank. There was some sort of stanchion sticking out of the wall, and he landed right on it. He looked dead, but they shot him a few times just to make sure.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘He told us he’d met you before, that you’d helped a lot of Jews.’

‘Some,’ she admitted.

The obvious question must have showed in her face. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘He didn’t tell us your name or anything else about you.’ Or we would have told them, went the unspoken coda.

It didn’t seem to matter now. ‘It’s Dagmar. Dagmar Fahrian,’ Effi said. There was a hint of guilt in the older man’s eyes, she thought. He had probably given the Gestapo her description. She couldn’t blame him.

‘I’m Hans Heilborn,’ the younger one said. ‘And this oaf is Bruno Lewinsky.’

‘May we meet again in better times,’ Effi said simply. ‘Have you heard any news of the fighting?’

‘Yes,’ Lewinsky said, speaking for the first time, ‘I heard two of the guards talking.’ He had a surprisingly cultured voice.

He’d probably been a university professor, Effi thought. So many academics, scientists and writers had been Jews. How much knowledge and wisdom had the Nazis destroyed?

‘The Russians have broken through on the Oder,’ Lewinsky was saying. ‘They should be in the outskirts by the weekend. And the army defending the Ruhr is surrounded by the British and Americans. It’s bigger than the army we lost at Stalingrad.’

Effi noticed the ‘we’ – after everything that had happened, these two Jews still thought of themselves as Germans – but mostly she was thinking about Paul, and hoping that he’d been taken prisoner. She wasn’t sure John would ever forgive himself if his son was killed.

As dawn broke Paul was sitting on a wall in Worin. He was one of around fifty men who had reached the deserted village through the darkened woods. Most of the others were from the misleadingly named 9th Parachute Division – their airborne status had long been merely honorary – along with some stray panzergrenadiers. All were remnants of remnants, of those units once entrusted with the defence of the Seelow Heights.

Paul had not seen Hannes since the hand-to-hand battle with the Russians, and rather doubted he would again – if his friend was still alive, he’d probably been taken prisoner. And if he, Paul, was the unit’s only survivor, then God had to be smiling down on him for some strange reason.

Or perhaps not. If all of them were going to die, then someone had to be last.

He bit another chunk off the sausage he had found in one of the abandoned houses, and eyed the growing light with some alarm. Soviet planes would soon be overhead, and a further withdrawal seemed advisable. He assumed that his battalion had been pulled back en masse, probably in the direction of Müncheberg, but heading that way without orders might prove a risky business. The two military policemen on the far side of the village square had already given him – and just about everyone else – suspicious looks, and Paul suspected that their current passivity was well calculated. They would have loved to order everyone back in the Russians’ direction, but feared, with ample justification, that they might be shot if they tried. If Paul tried to strike out on his own, they would have no such worries. For him, for the moment, safety lay in numbers.

A panzergrenadier lieutenant seemed to be working his way round the square, talking to men and probably canvassing opinions. He looked like an officer who knew what he was doing, and Paul hoped he was planning a further withdrawal.

More men were trickling in all the time, but Hannes was not among them. Most of the arrivals looked as if they hadn’t slept for days, and when a Soviet plane roared across the rooftops only a few bothered to take evasive action. One man raised a weary fist at the sky, but his heart wasn’t it. This plane dropped nothing, but more would be back. It was time to move.

A few minutes later the roar of approaching tanks did get men reaching for their rifles. And then, to general amazement, two Tigers rumbled into view. This was good news and bad news, Paul thought. Good because it made the village slightly more defensible, bad because it would encourage the idiots to defend it.

The latter forecast proved distressingly accurate. While village beds were stripped of mattresses to bolster the tanks – a trick learned from Ivan – trenches were started at either end of the single street. But the earth had barely been broken when the familiar roar sent everyone rushing for cover. Paul made a run for the nearest building and threw himself down behind a large wooden horse trough. With hands over head and knees almost up to his chest, he shook with the earth and tried to think of something beautiful. Madeleine came to mind, but she was dead. Another shower of human flesh.

When it became clear that the barrage was over, he stayed where he was, shaking gently to and fro, feeling the burn of uncried tears.

A few minutes later, walking aimlessly up the street, he came upon a young officer he hadn’t seen before. The man was foaming at the mouth, talking gibberish, and several of his subordinates were standing there looking at him, not unkindly, but with a sort of grim impatience.

Both military policemen had been seriously injured. ‘That’ll teach ’em to get this close to the front,’ one grenadier joked in Paul’s hearing.

The Tigers were unscathed, their crews sufficiently humbled by their irrelevance to be moving out. The village would be abandoned, which seemed just as well, as there wasn’t much left of it to defend.

The panzergrenadier lieutenant had also been slightly wounded, and the shock had apparently removed any inhibitions he had about taking charge. When darkness fell they would withdraw into the woods that lay west of the village, and try to shake off the Russians with a night march into the west.