Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [30]
Sean turned the convoy into the main boulevard, Friedrichstrasse, that led straight through Rombaden to the City Hall Square. It was a street of the dead. Tens of thousands of white flags of surrender welcomed the victors. The flags hung limply and the three-story buildings that lined the Friedrichstrasse were in wreckage. War had come cruelly to Friedrichstrasse. There were enormous piles of waste, charred and flaming skeletons of buildings whose walls stood by some unknown determination. All of the windows were gone and most of the roofs; the street-car line was snaked out of shape and useless; power poles snapped off; trees uprooted.
The convoy slowed to a whisper of speed.
At an intersection a dead horse lay in a pool of its own blood, swarmed over by hungry flies.
How strange, Sean thought: in every town and village a dead horse has lain open-eyed and puzzled by man’s folly.
The eyes of the men of the pilot team searched up at the broken windows knowing that tens of thousands of unseen eyes were on them. Only a fluttering of a curtain, a darting shadow, a muffled sound told of human life behind the ruins.
A single little boy stood in a doorway shading his eyes from the sun. He wore a pair of leather pants with such filth as only leather pants can gather. He was curious. A door opened behind him and the hand of a terrified mother jerked him from sight of the enemy.
The intersection where Friedrichstrasse met the City Hall Square was closed by a pile of brick and twisted steel ten feet high.
Sean halted the convoy. By hand signals they moved after him as he sprinted up the mound of bricks. Skittering and stumbling they came behind him to the City Hall Square on the Landau. The square was pocked by artillery-shell holes, the buildings cut up badly by the strafing. Sean looked first to the Marienkirche. The cathedral had been hit, but the tower with its magnificent onion dome stood by one of those miracles saved for the preservation of churches. The statue of Mary before the cathedral had been obliterated.
The half-mile-long row of buildings, the Medical College, the theater, the hospital, were all shakily intact. The statue of Hinterseer was headless on its pedestal.
All that broke the awesome silence was the shuffling of their trotting feet as they split up, began flinging doors open, moving in well-learned sequence toward those places they had seen on paper for so many months. Sean found himself running full head for the City Hall at the opposite end of the square, with Dante Arosa and O’Toole puffing behind him. Before the great building the statue of the gods Berwin and Helga, of the legend, remained intact. Damned irony! Hinterseer is headless, Mary is gone, but the pagan remains!
The door had been blown off its hinges, revealing the marble foyer filled with statues of the Von Romstein family and coat-of-arms shields of each district. Sean’s team moved in behind him up the spiral stairs, shoving open the office door. Everything was in perfect order, set for a day’s work.
The corner office on the second floor bore the name of the mayor, Baron Sigmund Von Romstein. Sean entered. It was a magnificent office. On one side the windows looked down on the City Hall Square, the other afforded a view of the Landau and the country beyond. He could see puffs of smoke and tracer-bullet streaks across the river in the district. Dundee’s battalion had engaged the enemy, perhaps the Waffen SS from the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp. The scene on the square changed by the moment. A tank plowed through ... now two ... three. Soldiers began swarming in. The engineers moved to the waterfront. Both bridges were useless. A pontoon bridge was started so that tanks and artillery could cross to join the battle in Romstein District.
Then there was an ominous grinding sound. It rumbled over the square. The gears of the ancient bell clock in the cathedral tower wound up to toll the hour. It bonged nine times with