The telephone sounded. An SS lieutenant lifted the handset, said, "Yes, sir," and replaced it on the cradle. He told Dietrich, "The Rescue Squad has been summoned."
"Has an evacuation been ordered?"
"Not yet. They can hold out a while longer, General Eberhardt thinks."
Dietrich nodded. He suspected Eberhardt would rather allow everyone to be parboiled than expose the Führer to Jack Cray out in the open.
And Jack Cray was out in the open. Cray was within one hundred meters of him, Dietrich was certain. Somewhere in the Reich Chancellery, in the ruined wing, maybe even in the garden, hidden somewhere, waiting for Hitler to emerge. Cray's sniper rifle had been found, along with the note, and so Dietrich's deductions regarding Cray's plans had been entirely wrong. Now Dietrich simply had no notion how and where Cray would strike. Dietrich had failed.
Guards at the motor entrance pulled open the iron gates. The guards were made spectral by layers of smoke that dipped from the sky, hiding their heads and shoulders, then lifting to reveal them again. TeNo men ran through the gate, followed by a TeNo pumper truck with yellow flashing lights on top of the cab. A generator truck followed. The TeNo uniforms were the precise color of the smoke. Some of the Rescue Squad carried axes and pry bars. Many wore gas masks, and others were just now putting them on.
When the first truck arrived at the blockhouse, a TeNo officer jumped from the running board and held his identification card up to the guard at the door and said, "Captain Dreesen."
The TeNo captain's gas mask was hanging around his neck. The SS guard had worked with Dreesen before during rescue drills, but he still studied Dreesen's face, comparing it with the photo on the ID.
Finally Dreesen barked, "Get out of my way, asshole."
The SS guard waved Dreesen and his men through. A line from the generator truck was clamped to an electrical box. If needed, the truck would provide electricity for emergency lights. Another TeNo man placed a pack radio on the walkway near the bunker. Two TeNo radiomen entered the bunker, one carrying a second radio, and another unwinding wire from a reel. Should the bunker's telephones fail, the TeNo crews above- and belowground would still be able to communicate.
More Rescue Squad members trailed in from the haze. Several wore fire-resistant canvas vests with "TeNo" stamped on them in white. Some carried coiled ropes, others hauled oxygen bottles, pry bars, and sledgehammers. The SS guards stood aside as they passed through the door into the blockhouse.
And then it came to Otto Dietrich, came with a force like a blow to his chest, crushing the wind out of him.
The SS guards had checked the TeNo captain's identification, but were allowing his men into the bunker without being screened.
TeNo men had come into the ruined garden as a group, and were entering the bunker as a group, all in their white herringbone uniforms, some wearing gas masks, all hauling equipment, rushing underground as they had rehearsed time and again. And as the SS guards had witnessed time and again.
No one was examining each TeNo face.
"Arrest them," Dietrich yelled, waving his hand wildly. "All of them. All the TeNo men." He dug into his coat for his pistol.
The SS guards glanced at Dietrich with indecision, but only for an instant. They brought their weapons up, and stepped across to bar the blockhouse door.
Outraged, the TeNo radioman began to loudly protest but was choked off when the bore of a Schmeisser found his nose. The guards quickly surrounded the Rescue Squad members still aboveground.
His pistol in front of him, Dietrich tore off the nearest TeNo man's gas mask. A dark-haired man with black stubble across his cheeks and chin. Looked nothing like Jack Cray.
Guards shouted orders. The TeNo crew dropped their axes and bars and ropes, and lifted their hands above their heads.
Dietrich ran to the telephone at the blockhouse door. He lifted the handset and pressed the button. He yelled into the phone at the guard captain, "The American is in the bunker. Jack Cray is in a TeNo uniform."
Then the detective grabbed a gas mask from a guard and ran into blockhouse and down the stairs, into the smoke and gloom.
DIETRICH DESCENDED blindly, unable to see through the rising smoke, roughly pushing aside TeNo men slowed by their equipment, awkwardly trying to put on their masks. The detective knew any one of them might be Jack Cray working his way into the bunker, but Dietrich suspected the American would have been one of the first TeNo men down the stairs. Cray was already in the bunker, Dietrich was certain. Koder followed Dietrich down the stairs.
From below came cries of alarm, shouted orders, a dog's barking, and the crackling of fire. Heat rose in the stairwell. Dietrich held his pistol in front of him. His mask leaked and smoke stung his eyes. He reached the antechamber where two SS guards held their weapons on TeNo men, keeping them from entering the bunker. Smoke drifted among them, collecting in the antechamber before being pulled up the stairs. When the detective held up his ID, the S S guard glanced at his face, then nodded that he could enter.
"Arrest the TeNo men," came the harsh voice of a guard captain who had been yelling the order again and again since Dietrich's call sixty seconds before. The captain was hidden in the gray clouds somewhere down the corridor. "Block them from entering the Führer's quarters." His voice rose even more. "Block them."
"What the hell?" the TeNo captain yelled. "Who gave that order?"
"Arrest all TeNo men," the guard captain yelled again. "The American commando is one of them."
A shot came from somewhere in the bunker corridor, a sharp slap that echoed back and forth in the underground compound. Screams, then a curse, and orders for calm.
Dietrich stepped from the antechamber into the central corridor, Koder behind him. Fire worked along the floor in many places. The carpet burned, sending runners of smoke into the already thick air. Dietrich could see little beyond his hand. He heard the pumping of a fire extinguisher. He bumped into Gestapo Müller, who was coughing into his hand. Kaltenbrunner was doubled over, breathing in deep rasps and struggling with a mask.
The detective waded through the smoke. His foot caught on a leg. The body of a TeNo man. An SS guard with a pistol blocked the door to the Führer's map room and bedroom. He had just shot the Rescue Squad member.
The TeNo leader, Captain Dreesen, emerged from the smoke to kneel over the wounded man.
"What are you doing, goddamn it?" he yelled up at the SS guard.
And now the SS guard swiveled the pistol and fired at Captain Dreesen, whose face registered rage and shock as blood gushed from his chest. He slid sideways into a card table. Smoke closed over him.
Chaos. The commando's tool. General Keitel screamed order after order, slapping his field marshal's baton against his thigh. He was ignored. Sounds of metal prying metal came from deep in the smoke, where a team was frantically working to open the ventilation room door. A TeNo man dropped to the floor, felled from behind by an SS guard, who roughly kicked the TeNo man onto his back to rip of f the gas mask. It wasn't the American.
"Don't shoot the TeNo, for Christ sake," the guard captain called. "Arrest them. Round them up. ..."
His orders were drowned out by the scream of a woman, a secretary who swatted at the flame that had caught the fringe of her dress. A Luftwaffe general wrapped his uniform jacket around her legs, smothering the fire.
General Jodl stepped toward the SS guard blocking the door to Hitler's rooms, but the guard raised the pistol. No one was to enter. The Alsatian howled and tried to enter the Führer's room, but was kicked back by the SS guard. Not even the dog was going to get in.
A TeNo man carrying a pressure extinguisher emerged from the smoke directly in front of Dietrich, who held up his pistol and ripped off the man's mask. Not the American. Dietrich pushed him aside and stepped toward the pistol-wielding guard at the door, his shoes stepping in the TeNo man's blood. He yelled over the turmoil, "Where's General Eberhardt?"
Something clinked near Dietrich's feet. A skittering sound. Metal tumbling across the floor.
Dietrich glanced down. A stick grenade flashed by, visible one instant, then swallowed by the smoke. Then a second grenade slid along the floor and disappeared into the haze. It oddly registered with Dietrich that the head of the second grenade was a different color than that of the first.
Dietrich had long known he did not possess the instincts of the soldier. He should have shouted "Grenade." Given the warning. Told everyone to get down. But fear slowed him, and the warning caught in his throat. Others beat him to it, maybe the generals who were up from the trenches, shouting a warning.
"Grenade," came from Dietrich's right.
"Down, down," from somewhere near the door to the antechamber. A rush of movement. More yells.
The detective lunged away from the SS guard toward the opposite doorway, which was to a dressing room. Just before he entered the room, the smoke opened for an instant and he glimpsed a TeNo man in a gas mask with his back against the corridor wall, holding an SS guard in front of him, the TeNo man's thick arm around the guard's neck. The TeNo man was using the SS guard as a shield. Jack Cray must be in that TeNo uniform.
Dietrich tripped on an overturned chair and fell into the dressing room. A rug burned at the back of the room, and fire was spreading to a rack of uniforms.
The first explosion was muffled, nothing like Dietrich had feared. Maybe a dud, he thought, lying there at the feet of General Jodl, who had also dashed into the dressing room and dived to the floor. But the corridor instantly filled with spewing, acrid green-gray smoke, and clouds of it poured from the corridor into the rooms off the hall, pushing aside the gray smoke. Dietrich stared into the new smoke toward the corridor, seeing nothing.
General Jodl's face was the color of the new smoke. His cigarettes had fallen from his pocket and were scattered across the room. Dietrich pushed himself up to a sitting position.
The second grenade detonated.
The first had been a smoke grenade. The second contained TNT and shrapnel. The corridor filled with a brilliant white flash. The sound was of a sledgehammer hitting an anvil, a metallic peal so loud it seemed to stab Dietrich's head. Air in the bunker pulsed. Dietrich's ears rang. His pistol was still in his hand. He rose unsteadily and returned to the hall, walking into a wall of smoke.
Two seconds of silence. Then moans and screams. Shrapnel had swept the room like a scythe. The SS guard used as a shield was sprawled face-up on the floor, blood oozing from a dozen lacerations on his chest and belly and legs. Near him on the floor, blood pumped from punctures in the SS guard who had stood at Hitler's study door and shot the TeNo men. His mouth silently opened and closed. Smoke rolled over them. Dietrich looked up, across the narrow corridor to the entrance to Hitler's study and bedroom.
The smoke thinned for an instant. The TeNo man stood there. Jack Cray. Face hidden by a gas mask, but surely it was him. Pistol in one hand, knife in another. Just standing there, next to the door into Hitler's quarters.
But just for that second. Then the smoke throbbed and the air clapped and Dietrich felt metal cut into his thigh and leg. The detective spilled forward, onto the body of an SS guard. He tried to catch himself but slipped on the gore. Lacerations in his leg shot pain up into his body. He clamped his jaw and rose, grunting with pain. Cray had thrown another grenade into the study, maybe inside as far as the bedroom. And now the American spun from his place against the wall and charged into Hitler's study.
Dietrich staggered after the commando, across the hall and into the study, slipping on someone's entrails. The grenade had reduced the study's table and chairs to splinters. Another SS guard had been in the study. His legs were against one wall and the rest of him was against the opposite wall fifteen feet away. The barrel of his Schmeisser was bent in two like a jackknife. Bits of maps floated in the smoke.
The detective high-stepped over the fragmented furniture, his leg in agony. The American commando's back was dead ahead, framed in the doorway to Hitler's bedroom. Cray was raising his pistol.
Cray twisted violently, ducking, just as a shot sounded from the bedroom. Then the American's knife arm slashed forward, out of Dietrich's sight. Cray stepped ahead again into the bedroom, the weapon at the end of his arm coming up.
The sound was of a melon dropped onto the floor. Then another. The commando pitched forward into the bedroom, his gun and knife hitting the rug just as he did. Dietrich moved through the smoke toward the bedroom.
The commando was sprawled facedown on the rug.
General Eberhardt stood near the pedestal, the bust of Frederick the Great in his hand. The general's handgun was on the floor, and his right hand was bleeding from a slash on his forearm.
Eberhardt smiled grimly. "I hit him with Frederick."
The detective grimaced with pain as he bent to the downed man. He rolled the commando over and pulled off the gas mask. "It's him," Dietrich breathed. "Jack Cray. I'll be goddamned. You got him."
"We got him," Eberhardt corrected kindly.
Hitler appeared in the smoke. He was holding a small oxygen mask close to his mouth and nose. The tube was connected to a bottle on a roller. He asked dryly, "That was a little close, don't you think, General Eberhardt?"
Gestapo Müller rushed into the room, his face a mask of pain and rage. His uniform was dappled with blood. Shrapnel had creased his neck, and blood oozed over his shirt. He demanded, "Is he alive?"
As if in answer, Cray moaned. His arm moved a fraction.
Müller said, "I'm going to take care of this son of a bitch right now."
"I want to talk to him," General Eberhardt said, his voice muffled by the mask. "See how he got this far, and—"
"Your job is over, Eberhardt," Müller cut in. He yelled over his shoulder, "Koder, get in here."
The RSD general returned the bust of Frederick to the pedestal. "My Führer, an interrogation . . ."