Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [70]
"I don't go through a door unless I know I can get back out." The American lifted the message and reread it.
Katrin thought he was deliberately making light of the message. She said quietly, "And I'm telling you, you are being sent to your death."
10
A DEAD DOG in a wheelbarrow was Cray's ruse, and it was working. Stooped and limping, he walked southwest from the park and onto Hermann Goring Strasse. The Reich Chancellery garages and guard quarters were on his left. SS guards stood at the doors to the barracks. Others manned machine guns behind sandbags. Rolls of razor wire had been spread along the curb to keep passersby from nearing the barracks. Two antiaircraft guns—Flakvierling 38s with quadruple barrels—were at the corners of the barracks. Their regular-army crews stayed near their weapons, away from the SS guards.
Cray walked among a slow stream of refugees, pushing his wheelbarrow. They were a sullen, dispirited lot, shuffling ahead, slowed by despair and grief and hunger. Many glanced covetously at the dead dog, knowing its owner would eat well that night. One man wore rags wrapped around his legs like puttees. A woman with an empty sleeve pinned to her coat led a ten-year-old girl with a bandage over her eyes. Some refugees wore pieces of cast-off uniforms, some little more than rags, more than likely picked off bodies, including a Soviet flyer's thigh-length fur-lined boots and a Danish army officer's black greatcoat. Many carried their possessions in blankets over their shoulders, some wore rucksacks, and others carried dilapidated suitcases. Two dead chickens hung from a pole over one man's shoulders, and another used a birch switch to herd a goat. Crutches and canes were common on this street. Cray's was not the only wheelbarrow. Others pulled small hay carts loaded with possessions, and one family nudged along a railroad porter's cart.
Walking among the refugees, but with brisk steps in an effort to appear to be on business, were many servicemen in Wehrmacht gray and Luftwaffe blue and even a few Kriegsmarine sailors in navy-blue pea jackets. Were any of the soldiers or sailors to mill about, they would be pounced upon by roving SS squads demanding identification and orders. Cray guessed that many of these servicemen were from destroyed units and were seeking—with various degrees of diligence—to hook up with new companies.
Berliners had become expert at judging shell trajectory from the sound, and when a Red Army shell sailed overhead, sounding like a dog's growl, few looked up. They knew the shell was destined elsewhere, and an instant later it detonated three blocks away, a muffled and dull sound indicating it had found rubble rather than a standing structure.
Up ahead, a horn bleated, and the refugees were shunted toward the curb as six Wehrmacht Phanomen and Auto-Union trucks carrying troops rolled down the street, the last one pulling a 15-cm infantry- support gun. They were followed by three enormous Famo half-tracks whose steel treads ground stray bricks and plaster to powder. When the convoy had passed, the refugees refilled the street.
Cray was wearing two wool jackets, one over the other, a grease- stained felt hat, and pants so short they showed his ankles. His eyebrows and hair were blackened with fireplace soot, and a bandage was over his left cheek and ear. He shuffled along, bent and slow, indistinguishable from hundreds of others on the street.
He turned his wrist to look at his watch. Only he among the crowd knew that an American air strike was due in twelve minutes.
The dead dog stared up at the American with unseeing eyes. Its back was bent unnaturally, probably the result of falling bomb debris. Cray pushed the wheelbarrow nearer a row of five-story apartment buildings, once the elegant homes of Reich officials, now vacant, many with facades pushed in, others sagging out onto the street. Rubble rose in front of the ruined buildings like foothills. Pipes and support posts jutted uselessly into the sky. Mounds of rubble