Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [75]
Cray let himself be led into a conference room with a thirty-foot- high marble ceiling. The room was dominated by a table around which were two dozen Empire chairs. The seat back of each chair was decorated with an eagle and a swastika. A green doth covered the table, with gold tassels hanging at the ends of the cloth. In front of each chair was a blue leather folder and a writing pad with a minister's name embossed in gold. Landscapes in gilded frames were on the walls, and a red and blue Kermanshah carpet covered the floor. This was the Chancellery's cabinet room. Hitler had never convened a meeting here. Cray's blood dripped onto the carpet.
The woman led him into an anteroom, where a surgery had been set up to treat Chancellery personnel. An examining table, three beds, a medicine cabinet, and an X-ray machine filled the room. Two of the beds were occupied by guards who had remained at their stations during the raid rather than seek shelter. One moaned and turned his head back and forth. A physician tended to a third guard, probing a wound on his arm.
The woman lowered Cray into a chair by a window and patted him on the arm. "He'll be with you as soon as he can." She continued to stand near him, waiting to catch the doctor's eye.
Prompted by the sudden good fortune of an SS uniform and documents allowing him entry into the Chancellery, Cray's makeshift plan had been to see as much of the building as he could, open a few doors and walk into a few rooms, and if he found the target, take advantage of the opportunity. At the very least, he would discover the layout of the seat of German government. At best, he would accomplish his mission.
The American wiped blood from his eyes, wondering when this good-hearted woman would leave him so he could continue his reconnaissance. He turned in his seat to peer out the window.
Behind the Chancellery was a garden. The smoke was lifting, and Cray saw that it must have been an elegant park at one time, with pergolas and fountains and symmetrical planters and walkways. But the fountains were dry, and air-raid ditches had been dug in irregular patterns. A tower was occupied by an SS guard.
Cray again brushed blood from his eyes. At the west end of the garden was a massive concrete block with a steel door in it. The block stood by itself, not connected to the Old or New Chancelleries, and its door surely led belowground to a bunker. Two SS guards stood at the door. And to one side of the block Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl were bent in conversation, smoking cigarettes.
Cray recognized both generals from photographs. Wilhelm Keitel was known as Lakaitel (lakai means "lackey") and carried out Hitler's orders without question. Alfried Jodl attended Hitler's twice-daily strategy sessions and turned the Führer's strategy into tactical operations. Cray knew that neither Keitel or Jodl ever allowed himself to be far from Hitler. And when Keitel and Jodl threw aside their cigarette butts and reentered the blockhouse, Cray knew that Hitler was no longer ruling the Reich from the Chancellery but instead was in a fortified bunker below the Chancellery's garden.
When the helpful woman walked to the physician to alert him that a badly wounded SS colonel needed his attention, Cray rose quickly and left the room, then crossed the conference room, still carrying the briefcase. The Chancellery was filling quickly as personnel returned from bomb shelters. Many stared at the mask of blood on Cray's face, but the wounded were as common as stray bricks in Berlin, and no one paused to ask after him. Cray walked out the same door he had entered the Chancellery.
He walked toward Hermann Goring Strasse and grinned to himself, the drying blood around his mouth cracking. He had located the Führer. In a bunker below the Chancellery garden. Adolf Hitler had gone to ground.
11
OTTO DIETRICH walked through a canyon of flesh. Corpses were on both sides of him, stacked