The Wolf's Hour (7 page)

6

“Martin? Come here and look at this!”

The man whose name had been called stood up from his desk immediately and walked into the inner office, his shoes clacking on the concrete floor. He was heavyset and broad-shouldered, and he wore an expensive brown suit, a spotless white shirt, and black necktie. His graying hair was combed back from his forehead. He had the soft, fleshy features of a child’s favorite uncle, a man who liked to tell bedtime stories.

The walls of the inner office were covered with maps, marked with red arrows and circles. Some of the arrows had been scratched out, drawn and redrawn, and many of the circles had been crossed out with angry lines. More maps lay on the office’s large desk, along with piles of papers that needed signatures. A small metal box had been opened, and in it were carefully organized vials of watercolors and horsehair brushes of various sizes. The man behind the desk had pulled his stiff-backed chair to an easel in the corner of the windowless room, and on that easel was a painting in progress: a watercolor of a white farmhouse and behind it the purple rise of jagged mountain peaks. On the floor around the artist’s feet were other paintings of houses and the countryside, all of them put aside before they were finished.

“Here. Right here. Do you see it?” The artist wore glasses, and he tapped his paintbrush against a smeared shadow at the farmhouse’s edge.

“I see… a shadow,” Martin answered.

“In the shadow. Right there!” He tapped it again, harder. “Look close!” He picked up the painting, getting water-colors on his fingers, and thrust it in Martin’s face.

Martin swallowed thickly. He saw a shadow, and only that. This seemed to be important, and should be handled carefully. “Yes,” he answered. “I think… I do see it.”

“Ah!” the other man said, smiling. “Ah! So there it is!” He spoke German with a heavy-some might think clumsy-Austrian accent. “The wolf, right there in the shadow!” He pointed the brush’s wooden end at a dark scrawl that Martin couldn’t make heads or tails of. “The wolf on the prowl. And look here!” He picked up another painting, badly done, of a winding mountain stream. “See it? Behind that rock?”

“Yes, mein Führer,” Martin Bormann said, staring at a rock and a misshapen line or two.

“And here, in this one!” Hitler offered a third painting, of a field of white edelweiss. He pointed his crimson-smeared finger at two dark dots amid the sunny flowers. “The eyes of the wolf! You see, he’s creeping closer! You know what that means, don’t you?”

Martin hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

“The wolf is my lucky symbol!” Hitler said, with a hint of agitation. “Everyone knows that! And here’s the wolf, appearing in my paintings with a will of its own! Do you need a clearer portent than that?”

Here we go, Hitler’s secretary thought. Now we descend into the maelstrom of signs and symbols.

“I’m the wolf, don’t you understand?” Hitler took off his glasses, which few but the inner circle ever saw him wearing, snapped them shut, and slid them into their leather case. “This is a portent of the future. My future.” His intense blue eyes blinked. “The future of the Reich, I should say of course. This only tells me again what I already know to be true.”

Martin waited without speaking, staring at the farmhouse picture with its unintelligible scribble in the shadows.

“We’re going to smash the Slavs and drive them back into their rat holes,” Hitler went on. “Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk… names on a map.” He grasped a map, leaving red fingerprints on it, and pushed it disdainfully off the desk. “Frederick the Great never considered defeat. Never considered it! He had loyal generals, yes. He had a staff who obeyed orders. Never in my life have I seen such willful disobedience! If they want to hurt me, why don’t they just put a gun to my head?”

Martin said nothing. Hitler’s cheeks were growing red and his eyes looked yellow and moist, a bad sign. “I said we need larger tanks,” the Führer continued, “and you know what I heard in return? Larger tanks use more fuel. That’s their excuse. They think of every possible way to hobble me. Larger tanks use more fuel. Well, what is the whole of Russia but a vast pit of petroleum? And my officers tumble back from the Slavs in terror and refuse to fight for the lifeblood of Germany! How can we hope to hold the Slavs back without fuel? Not to speak of the air raids destroying the ball-bearing plants! You know what they say to that? Mein Führer-they always say mein Führer in those voices that make you sick as if you’d eaten too much sugar-our anti-aircraft guns need more shells. Our trucks that haul the anti-aircraft guns need more fuel. You see how their minds work?” He blinked again, and the other man saw the understanding settle back in like cold light. “Oh, yes. You were with us at the meeting this afternoon, weren’t you?”

“Yes, mein… Yes,” he answered. “Yesterday afternoon.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “It’s almost one-thirty.”

Hitler nodded absently. He wore his brocaded cashmere robe, a gift from Mussolini, and leather slippers, and he and Bormann were alone in the administrative wing of his Berlin headquarters. He stared at his handiwork, at the houses built of unsteady lines and the landscapes with false perspectives, and he dipped his brush into a cupful of water and let the colors bleed out. “It’s a portent,” he said, “that I’m drawing a wolf without even knowing it. That means victory, Martin. The utter and total destruction of the Reich’s enemies. From without and within,” he said, with a meaningful glance at his secretary.

“You should know by now, mein Führer, that no one can defy your will.”

Hitler didn’t seem to hear. He was busy returning all his paints and brushes to the metal box, which he kept locked in his safe. “What’s my schedule for today, Martin?”

“At eight o’clock, a breakfast meeting with Colonel Blok and Dr. Hildebrand. Then a staff meeting from nine o’clock to ten-thirty. Field Marshal Rommel is due in at one o’clock for a briefing on the Atlantic Wall fortifications.”

“Ah.” Hitler’s eyes lit up again. “Rommel. Now there’s a man with a good mind. I forgave him for North Africa. Everything’s fine now.”

“Yes, sir. At seven-forty this evening, we’ll be accompanying the field marshal by plane to the coast of Normandy,” Bormann continued. “Then on to Rotterdam.”

“Rotterdam.” Hitler nodded, putting his box of paints into the safe. “I trust that work is going on schedule? That’s vital.”

“Yes sir. After a day in Rotterdam, we’ll be flying back to the Berghof for a week.”

“The Berghof! Yes, I’d forgotten!” Hitler smiled, dark circles under his eyes. The Berghof, Hitler’s mansion in the Bavarian Alps above the village of Berchtesgaden, had been his only true home since the summer of 1928. It was a place of bracing wind, vistas that would have stunned the sight of Odin, and memories that lay easy on the mind. Except for Geli, of course. He’d met Geli Raubal there, his one true love. Geli, dear Geli with blond hair and laughing eyes. Why did dear Geli burst her heart with a single shot? I loved you, Geli, he thought. Wasn’t that enough? Eva would be waiting for him at the Berghof, and sometimes when the light was just so and Eva’s hair was brushed back, Hitler could squint his eyes and see the face of Geli, his lost love and niece, twenty-three years old when she committed suicide in 1931.

His head hurt. He looked at the calendar, the days of March, on his desk amid the clutter.

“It’s springtime,” Hitler realized.

From beyond the walls, out over the blacked-out city of Berlin, came a howling. The wolf! Hitler thought, his mouth opening in a gasp. No, no… an air-raid siren.

The noise built and moaned, felt more than heard behind the walls of the Reich Chancellery. In the distance there was the sound of a bomb exploding, a crunching noise like the smashing of a heavy ax against a tree trunk. Then another bomb, two more, a fifth and sixth in rapid succession. “Call someone!” Hitler commanded, cold sweat sparkling on his cheeks.

Martin picked up the desk telephone and dialed a number.

More bombs fell, the noise of destruction swelling and waning. Hitler’s fingers gripped the desk’s edge. The bombs were falling to the south, he believed. Down near Tempelhof airport. Not close enough to fear, but still…

The crack and boom of distant explosions ceased. Now there was only the wolf howl of the air-raid siren and more answering around the city.

“A nuisance raid,” Martin said after he’d spoken with the chief of Berlin security. “A few craters on the airfield and some row houses on fire. The bombers have gone.”

“Damn the swine!” Hitler stood up, trembling. “Damn them to hell! Where are the Luftwaffe night fighters when we need them? Isn’t anyone awake?” He strode to one of the maps that showed the defensive fortifications, the mine fields and concrete bunkers, on the Normandy coast. “Thank the fates that Rommel is. Churchill and that Jew Roosevelt are going to come to France, sooner or later. They’ll find a warm reception, won’t they?”

Martin agreed that they would.

“And when they send their cannon fodder, they’ll be sitting in London at their polished desks drinking English tea and eating those… what do they call those biscuit things?”

“Crumpets,” Martin said.

“Drinking tea and eating crumpets!” Hitler steamrolled on. “But we’ll give them something special to chew on, won’t we, Martin?”

“Yes, mein Führer,” Martin said.

Hitler grunted and moved to another map. This one was of more immediate concern; it showed the route of the Slavic wave threatening to burst the banks of Russia and flood their filth into German-occupied Poland and Romania. Small red circles showed pockets of trapped German divisions, each fifteen thousand men, slowly dwindling away.

“I want two more armored divisions right here.” Hitler touched one of the pressure points, where at this moment, hundreds of miles away, German soldiers fought for their lives against the Russian onslaught. “I want them ready to fight within twenty-four hours.”

“Yes, mein Führer.” Thirty thousand men and almost three hundred tanks, Martin thought. Where would they come from? The generals in the west would bellow if they lost any more of their troops, and those in the east were too busy for additional paperwork. Well, the men and tanks would be found. It was the Führer’s will. Period.

“I’m tired,” Hitler said. “I think I can sleep now. Lock up, will you?” He trudged out of the office and down the long hallway outside, a small man in a bathrobe.

Martin was tired, too; it had been a long day. All of them were. Before he turned out the desk lamp, he went around and picked up the farmhouse painting with its dark smear of shadow. He looked long and hard into that darkness. Maybe… just maybe… that was a wolf, creeping around the farmhouse’s corner. Yes, Martin could see it now. It was right there, where the Führer had said it was. A portent. Martin put the painting back on its easel. Hitler would probably never touch it again, and who knew where all these pictures would end up?

The wolf was there. The more Martin looked, the clearer it became.

The Führer always saw these portents first, and that of course was part of his magic.

Martin Bormann switched off the lamp, locked the office door, and walked down the long corridor to his apartment. In the bedroom, his wife Gerda slept soundly, a picture of Hitler on the wall above her head.

7

“Major Gallatin?” the dark-haired copilot said over the muffled roar of the propellers. “Six minutes to the drop zone!”

Michael nodded and stood up, grim-lipped. He hooked his ripcord’s clamp around the brace that ran overhead the length of the transport aircraft’s spine and walked to the closed door. Above it was a dim red warning light, suffusing the plane’s interior with crimson.

It was the twenty-sixth of March, and the time on Michael’s wristwatch was nineteen minutes after two. He closed his mind to the lurch and sway of the C-47 and began to inspect the parachute pack’s straps, making sure they were hooked with equal pressure on either side of his groin. A strap tightening across the testicles almost a thousand feet in the air would not be his idea of a pleasant experience.

He checked the buckles of the chest straps and then the top fold of the pack itself, making sure nothing would foul the lines as the chute billowed out. It was supposed to be a black chute, because there was a half-moon.

“Three minutes, Major,” the polite copilot, a kid from New Jersey, said.

“Thank you.” Michael felt the airplane veer slightly to starboard, the pilot correcting course either to avoid searchlights or an anti-aircraft emplacement. Michael breathed slowly and deeply, watching the red bulb above the doorway. His heart was beating hard, and sweat had dampened the inside of his dark green jumpsuit. He wore a black knit cap and his face was daubed with black and green camouflage paint. He hoped it would wash off easily, because it might draw a bit of unwanted attention on the Avenue des Champs Élysées.

Strapped to his body was a short shovel with a folding blade, a knife with a serrated edge, a.45 automatic, and a pack of bullets. Also a little box, zipped into his jacket, that contained two chocolate bars and some salted beef jerky. He figured the heat of his body would have melted the chocolate bars by now.

“One minute.” The red light went out. The New Jersey kid pulled a latch and the C-47’s doorway slid open, letting in a scream of wind. Michael immediately stepped into position, his boot tips on the edge and his arms braced against the doorway’s sides. Below him was a black plain that just as well could have been dense forest or fathomless ocean. “Thirty seconds!” the copilot shouted against the wind and props noise.

Something glinted, far below. Michael’s breath snagged. Another glint: a finger of light, rising from the earth, searching the sky.

“Oh Jeez,” the other man said.

The searchlight angled upward. They’ve heard our engines, Michael realized. Now they’re hunting. The light swung around, and its beam knifed through the dark less than a hundred feet below Michael’s boots. He stood steady, but his gut twisted. There was a burst of red off to the left of the searchlight, followed by a thunderous boom and a white flash about five or six hundred feet over the C-47. The plane trembled from the shock wave, but stayed on course. A second anti-aircraft shell exploded higher up and more to the right, but the searchlight was coming around again for another sweep. The New Jersey kid, his face pallid, grasped Michael’s shoulder. “Major, we’re screwed!” he shouted. “You want to scrub the drop?”

The aircraft was picking up speed, about to make a violent turn away from the drop zone. Michael knew there was no time for deliberation. “I’m going,” he answered, and he jumped through the doorway with sweat on his face.

He fell into darkness, his heart swelling and his stomach rising up in his abdomen. He clenched his teeth, his arms crossed and gripping his elbows. He heard the high whine of the plane passing on and then there was a bone-wrenching shock as the rip cord pulled and the chute trailed out of its pack with a soft, almost gentle pop.

As the parachute bloomed, Michael Gallatin’s hurtling descent was braked. He felt as if his internal organs, muscles, and bones were in brutal collision, his kneecaps jerking up so high they almost smashed into his chin. Then he got his legs straightened out and he grasped the chute’s guidelines, his heart still racing from the impact with air. He heard another blast from the anti-aircraft cannon, but it was high and to the right and he was in no danger of being shredded by shrapnel. The searchlight veered toward him, stopped, and began to rotate in the other direction again, hunting the intruder. Michael gazed around at the dark earth below, looking for the sign he’d been told to expect. It should be from the east, he remembered. The half-moon was over his left shoulder. He turned slowly under the expanded silk and searched the ground.

There! A green light. A blinker, flashing out a quick tattoo.

Then darkness again.

He guided the chute toward the light and looked up to make sure the lines were all clear.

The parachute was white.

Damn it! he thought. Trust the supply service to screw things up! If a German soldier on the ground saw the white chute, there was going to be hell to pay. The searchlight crew had probably already radioed for a scout car or motorcycle team. Now not only was he in danger, but so was the person with the green blinker. Whoever that might be.

The anti-aircraft cannon spoke again, a knell of distant thunder. But the C-47 was long gone, heading back across the Channel to England. Michael wished the two Americans good luck, and turned his attention to his own difficulties. There was nothing to do at the moment but fall. When he touched ground, he’d be ready for action, but right now he was dangling at the mercy of a white parachute.

Michael looked up, listening to the wind hiss in the silk folds. It stirred a memory. So long ago… a world and a lifetime… so long ago, when he knew innocence.

And suddenly, in a flash of memory, the sky was bright blue and there was not a white parachute over his head, but instead a white silk kite, unreeling from his hand to catch the breeze of Russia.

“Mikhail! Mikhail!” a woman’s voice called, over a field full of yellow flowers.

And Mikhail Gallatinov, all of eight years old and still fully human, smiled with the May sun on his face.