Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [157]
Kahr brought out his box of matches and scratched a match against the score.
23
FOREIGN MINISTER RIBBENTROP struggled with his gas mask. A strap was caught on his ear. He wrestled with it, swearing and coughing. Finally the goggles were squarely over his eyes. He lit a cigarette, perhaps figuring no one would notice, and he lifted his mask momentarily to draw on it.
Keitel had found the captain of the guard, an SS-Hauptsturm- führer who was overseeing three men working a pry bar at the generator-ventilator room door. Keitel yelled at them to hurry, then tugged at his high collar and gulped the blackened air. He jammed his thumb against the door buzzer again and again.
The bombing raid had just ended, and the bunker had stopped its trembling. But it was filling with acrid black smoke that obscured the walls and ceiling. Fumes gushed from the grates along the hallway.
"Keep at that door." The guard captain began walking the hallway, demanding at each door, his voice muffled by a gas mask, "Report any fire."
Martin Bormann emerged from the conference room and held a handkerchief to his mouth. Bormann was called the Brown Eminence because of his cunning and his brown uniform, one of the last of the Old Fighters to wear brown. An SS orderly rushed up to Bormann to give him a mask. Bormann pulled it over his face.
On the guard captain's orders, guards had assumed their emergency stations. At each end of the center hallway an SS guard wearing a gas mask stood near the door, a submachine gun in his hands. Another guard stood precisely in the middle of the hallway holding a pistol, and yet another posted himself outside the door that entered Hitler's conference room and bedroom, the guard's Walther ready and his head— hidden under a gas mask—moving left and right like a metronome.
Smoke was thickest near the ceiling, and the throng appeared headless to Minister Goebbels, who was shorter than everyone else in the hallway. General Speidel helped one of the Führer's secretaries into a mask, then gestured that she should kneel to get below the densest smoke. Gasping, another secretary stumbled into a folding table, spilling three bottles and a deck of cards onto the concrete floor. One bottle shattered, and wine sped along the floor. The pilot, Baur, lifted his mask to wipe his eyes with his fingers.
Noise in the bunker was ear-rending. The ventilators had again started their dentist-drill whine, pushing smoke into the area. The Führer's dog, Blondi, howled and barked at the smoke as it paced in front of the conference room door. The SS crew frantically worked on the ventilator room door — metal on metal — and the door squealed in protest. Goebbels had found someone to yell at — a hapless Propaganda Ministry aide — whom Goebbels, it was suspected, employed for that very purpose because he had no luck shouting at his wife. The gramophone played a piano solo, one of the Führer's favorites, Schumann's Kindenzenen, too loudly. And all the coughing and swearing and arguing — all of it echoing in the long concrete tunnel.
Alfred Jodl stepped into the hallway, breathing stertorously, tears running down his rounded cheeks. He called, "We must evacuate. Give the order."
"No, sir," replied the guard captain. "Our orders are to remain belowground if at all possible, and it is still possible."
Jodl was six ranks above the captain, but the captain was in charge of bunker security. Jodl abruptly turned away, bumping into Minister Speer, who was standing in the middle of the hallway staring through his mask