“Let me give you a little advice. Don’t think about time anymore. It has lost all meaning for you. You see, as far as the world is concerned, you died weeks ago.”
322
Standing outside the cell, Fokin speculated whether Kingston would kill himself. He hoped not. One day it might still be useful to have him available.
Sunday, August 13,1961
Bikini Alert
IT became known as Das Ding, “the Thing.”
At 2 A.~. they appeared along the sector boundary from inside the East zone. The Volksarmee armored cars took up position. The machine guns were set up, pointing at the West.
Then the trucks arrived and out jumped steep-helmeted soldiers. They lugged the barbed-wire-garlanded Spanish steeds into place the wooden barriers that had, for weeks, been prepared and wound with wire supplied by the West.
The Vopos stood by with their antiriot water cannon.
The Grepos had been summoned to action stations two hours earlier, and now they were at their posts, all along the boundary, stacking sandbags, erecting obstacles, cutting off access to and from the other side.
The line was ruthlessly drawn. The troopers entered houses ordering families to pack and get out, because the zonal boundary cut through their dining room, or bedroom, or garden. Apartments, houses, a graveyard were cut in two. They bricked up the windows of the houses overlooking the Thing and no-man’s land was established.
The Vopos, fingers on the triggers of their machine guns, had 600 specially coached guard dogs, prowling in 270 “dog alleys,” angry, vicious animals, trained to attack at the sound of a whistle.
The few late-night drivers trying to enter East Berlin were waved back. Red lanterns spelled out the message. The frontier was closed.
The last S-bahn train of the night came to a stop. It would not be running again that Sunday. The black-clad East German railroad police stood with fixed bayonets on the East, guarding the lines and stations.
And there was not a single Russian to be seen. The troops, the police, the militia who scurried about setting
323
up barricades, manning the observation points, the machine guns, were all East German.
That night a new order came into effect in East Berlin. It was called the Shooting of Line Jumpers Order and decreed:
If suspicious persons are in the vicinity of the zonal
border, order them first to stop. If they continue in the direction of the border, fire two warning shots in the air. If this measure fails, shoot low to wound. If this fails, shoot to kill.
Marshal Koniev sat in his operation headquarters, the large-scale map of Berlin spread out before him, other sectional maps of the boundary on the walls. Every few minutes the messages came in. Stetlitzer Strasse. Ebert Strasse. Heidelberger Strasse. The barriers had gone up. All according to schedule. Without interference. Without incident. Without anybody on the other side raising a finger.
Koniev sipped his hot lemon tea and felt satisfied. His information had been correct, absolutely correct. As he had been promised, there would be no problem.
‘They’ve got a Bikini Alert on,” joked his intelligence officer, a Ukrainian colonel.
Koniev nodded.
Suddenly the quiet Berlin night was disturbed by harsh automatic chatter. But it wasn’t from machine guns. Pneumatic drills were in action, making the holes into which the concrete foundations of the permanent wall were to be sunk.
It was a thorough job, and it had been well planned. There were 165 7 kilometers of death line, designed to frustrate all attempts to get across. Soon there would be 258 watchtowers, manned by more than 500 sentries with held glasses and guns and 136 bunkers with machine guns loaded day and night. These men, ready to shoot on sight, became “Grenzers.” Bordermen. It wasn’t what the word meant that made it so nasty. It was the way people started saying it.
“People are beginning to gather on the western side,” reported one of Koniev’s aides. “Quite big crowds. There may be trouble.”
“There won’t be,” replied the marshal confidently.
And he was right.
324
Not a single shot was fired the night the longest wall in Europe made one million people prisoners in East Berlin.
Sonning
They sat by the Thames, on the terrace of the French Horn at Sonning, and for a long time they were silent.
Laurie had suggested they have dinner at the little Oxfordshire village where the swans cruised along the river, and the world seemed far away.
“You know,” said Laurie lazily, “you still haven’t told me everything.”
“Nor have you.”
“Oh?”
“You work for them, don’t you?” he said, but it came out more as a statement than a question.
“Who’s them?”
Verago smiled rather wearily. “I don’t know anymore, but I can guess. The spooks.”
“Well,” said Laurie, “it doesn’t matter, does it? Not really?”
“No. Not really. Not anymore.”
He stirred the coffee in the little demitasse. “I’ve got thirty days’ leave,” he told her, studiously casual
“Isn’t that nice,” she said. “So have I.”
Her violet eyes were dancing.
“And after that?” she inquired softly.
“I guess the army’s had enough of me in Europe. They’re reassigning me to Southeast Asia.” One of the swans had emerged from the river and was strutting across the lawn in front of them. “Colonel Ochs says Saigon will be a rest cure for me.” He glanced across at her. “What about you?”
“I go where I’m sent,” she said. “But I can ask.”
“For what?”
“To be assigned to Saigon.”
“Do you want to?’ Her answer was very important to him.
“I rather think I do, Tony,” she said slowly.
“I want to kiss you,” he said in a low voice.
“The night’s young,” murmured Laurie. “There’s plenty of time. I won’t run away.”
And they smiled at each other.
On the way back to London, they had the car radio on. The news bulletin was full of Berlin and its fate.
“The bastards,” said Verago.
325
“Who?” she asked. “Us or them?”
“Is there any difference? Ask a Berliner.”
She kept her eye on the dark road ahead. Then she said, “What would you have done? Pressed the button?”
And the question wasn’t answered.
On August 26, 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan remarked about the public outcry following the erection of the Berlin wall: “I think it’s all been got up by the Press.”
And on June 26, 1963, President John P. Kennedy stood in West Berlin and declared: “As a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.”’
326
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