Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [253]
Scott shook his head. “Your show, sir.”
Scott made a short flight to the outskirts of Offenbach to where an open field was marked out for the experiment. He flew low over it and flapped his wings to tell the ground observers he had spotted the target area.
On the edge of the white circle stood Hiram Stonebraker, Clinton Loveless, Perry Sindlinger, and a half-dozen other eager members of the staff.
Scott circled the craft to come in downwind, dropped to three-hundred-foot altitude, reduced air speed, and as he hit the edge of the circle a signal was sent back to a crew who released duffel bags filled with coal. They zoomed earthward. He made two more passes flying slower and lower, enabling many more sacks of coal to be thrown out of the door.
The duffel bags burst into shreds as they hit the ground and the coal was splintered into fractions. An angry black column of dust arose, raining down a storm of coal, and the winds sprayed and spewed it for miles beyond the target area.
The observers on the ground were gagged and blanketed with dust and in a moment resembled characters in a high school play using burnt cork on their faces.
Clint saw Perry Sindlinger, whose eyes resembled two burned holes in a blanket. He started to laugh, tried to control himself, because somebody there didn’t think it was very funny. They bit their lips to contain themselves as a pitch-black Hiram Stonebraker faced them.
“Doesn’t work,” Stonebraker said.
Chapter Fourteen
MARSHAL ALEXEI POPOV HAD made an error. He decided to allow a Western journalist to tour the Soviet Zone of Germany to “prove” freedom of the press. Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury was chosen.
His articles became increasingly more terse and when faced with censorship he began smuggling out stories through those mysterious channels known only to the society of newspapermen.
The last article had deep repercussions:
POPOV’S FOLLY. A FARCE IN THREE ACTS by Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury.
Until recently the Communists continued to go to elaborate lengths in East Germany to parade in public members of opposition parties to “prove” political freedom existed in the worker’s paradise. Berthold Hollweg is their most famous relic.
This farce of showcasing a few inept democratic politicians is over. Also over is freedom of speech, assembly, justice, worship, and all those other petit bourgeois annoyances tolerated by the decadent capitalist society.
The consolidation of the Soviet Zone of Germany is complete. The last voice of freedom is still. Any hope for democracy is dead.
V. V. Azov, a mysterious puppet master, calls the plays from a shuttered mansion in Potsdam.
The life and times of Comrade Rudi Wöhlman show him to be perfect in the role of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Wöhlman is about ready to call together a “people’s” congress. At the end of the congress plans will be announced for a “People’s Republic” with Leipzig as the provisional capital.
Later, when the West is hopefully squeezed out of Berlin, this city will be named capital of the newest police state.
A four-hundred-thousand-man para-military “People’s Police,” which is the nucleus of an East German Army, are in existence to persuade the people that this is the right thing. The existence of this organization is in violation of all agreements to cleanse militarism from German life.
A back-up force of twenty divisions of infantry and armor under the command of Marshal Popov ensures full acceptance of the new way of life.
Why is there such a panic to form a People’s Republic while the Communists continue to talk out of the other side of their mouths for unification?
The call for unification is the most hideous libel in all of the postwar Soviet profanities. The fact is the Soviet Union lives in terror of a reunited Germany which they cannot control.
They cannot control Germany so long as the West remains. They cannot win Germany through free elections.
The West is beginning to hammer out its own plans for the political and economic merger of their zones and, therefore, the Soviet Union must make unification