V

April 1945

They sat in a small room on high stools in front of a huge slanted table covered with maps. The windows, which had been shuttered, were open wide this morning letting in the fresh, sweet spring breezes and bright sunlight. From the other rooms in the large schoolhouse the sounds of people talking, field telephones buzzing, and papers being shuffled was constant. Mahoney wore a rumpled U.S. Army uniform with captain’s bars on his epaulets. The young man seated next to him smoking a cigarette with a cardboard filter wore a Soviet lieutenant’s uniform.

“We will have to penetrate their lines without our uniforms,” the Russian was saying.

“Which is fine with me as long as we don’t get caught.”

Lt. Yuri Zamyatin looked up and smiled patiently, the gesture belying his youthful appearance. “It doesn’t matter, Captain, what we will be wearing. To be caught is to die. The matter of uniforms is nothing more than an expediency.”

“Against what?”

Zamyatin drew on his cigarette again and shrugged. “Civilians. Luftwaffe. Waffen SS.” He held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, the filter pointing inward toward his palm so that when he brought it to his lips his chin rested on the heel of his hand.

“Whatever,” Mahoney said. He was tired. He turned back to the maps of southern Germany spread out on the table in front of them, and stabbed a finger at an area on the Austrian border. “Obersalzburg. General Eisenhower is worried about it.”

Zamyatin turned to look, and he grinned. “The National Redoubt. We, too, have heard of it. But unlike your general staff, my commander takes little stock in rumors.”

“I know,” Mahoney said, looking into the man’s eyes. “It’s one of the reasons your forces will enter Berlin before ours.”

Zamyatin shrugged again. “Which brings us back to you and me, Captain.”

“Yes,” Mahoney said.

Field Marshal Walther Model’s German Army Group B, which was composed of twenty-one divisions from the Fifth and Fifteenth Panzer Armies, had been trapped in the Ruhr for eighteen days by the U.S. First and Ninth Armies which had joined forces at Lippstadt.

On the eighteenth day, when Model’s army surrendered its thirty generals and 325,000 troops, the German western front had been effectively torn in two, leaving a 200-mile-wide gap for the First and Ninth Armies to head into Berlin.

By April 11, the Ninth Army had reached the Elbe River near Magdeburg, barely sixty miles from Berlin, but instead of continuing on into the German capital city, General Eisenhower ordered his armies to continue up the Elbe to meet with the Russians between Magdeburg and Dresden thus allowing the Russians to have a first crack at Berlin.

Eisenhower and most of the general staff at SHAEF, including his chief of staff General Bedell Smith, believed in the so-called National Redoubt, where Hitler and his remaining forces would gather on the Obersalzburg above Berchtesgaden to make a last-ditch stand. The alpine region could easily make an impregnable fortress where, rumor had it, the Germans would unleash wonder weapons and guerrilla trained SS troops to prolong the war indefinitely from bombproof underground bunkers.

Patton’s army, which was closing on Berlin, had gotten word through its own G-2 that Hitler would be heading down to the Obersalzburg very soon. The questions were: When was the move going to be made, and more importantly, exactly where was the Führer going to set up his headquarters?

“A lot depends upon this,” Mahoney’s commanding officer had told him last night in Nuremberg where G-2 field headquarters for Eisenhower’s armies was located. “If that mad paperhanger makes it south and sets up before we can nail him, or before we can cut him off, we’re all of us fucked.”

“How many other American-Soviet teams will be in on this?” Mahoney asked.

“There will be others, but you won’t run into them,” his C.O. told him, and he handed across a thin file folder that contained a single sheet of paper and one small, faded photograph. “They sent this over to us. You’ll be working with Lieutenant Yuri Zamyatin. He’s GRU but he’s all right from what I’m told. Only twenty, but he’s managed to keep out of the flap his bunch is having back home. I suppose if he stays out in the field long enough he’ll be all right. Least I have him figuring it that way.” The G-2 chief, older than Mahoney, salt and pepper mustache, deep blue understanding eyes, a slight stoop, shrugged almost apologetically. “He was the best we could get for you.”

“Scraping the bottom of the barrel for me, are you?”

“No,” the C.O. snapped. “On the contrary. Zamyatin is with the GRU’s Western Fifth Division. The tops. Very good indeed. They’ve just moved into Vienna. You’ll be flying over tonight in a Gooney Bird.”

“Which means we’ll be using Russian equipment for this mission?”

The C.O. shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, looking into Mahoney’s eyes. “You’re the last of the bunch to leave. And you’ll only be at it for a few days. A week, maybe ten days tops, and then we’ll be calling you back.”

“To where?” Mahoney aid, rising. “Berlin?”

The C.O. looked up at him. “No, right here. We’re not moving. Ike said something about war trials or something like that.” The C.O. stabbed a finger at Mahoney. “Keep that under your hat, Captain.”

Mahoney smiled. “Nuremberg’s the place. Should be interesting.” And he left.

He had been flown across German lines the previous night, had been met at the airstrip outside of Vienna by the local Allied liaison, a British major, who showed him to a room in a small, undamaged hotel on the outskirts of town. In the morning he had been driven to Soviet Army General Staff Headquarters where he had been met by Zamyatin. They had had a cup of tea together, had exchanged views on when exactly the war would officially end, and then had gotten down to the mission’s brass tacks of when, where, and how.

“I would like to leave this evening,” Mahoney was saying. “We’ll have to drive the back roads.”

Zamyatin laughed. “I was told about that curious American expression—‘back roads,’—but as I understand the definition, all the roads in this country are ‘back roads.’”

Mahoney sighed deeply and stood down from the high stool he had been seated on in front of the map table. He looked at Zamyatin for a long moment and then glanced at the maps. They would have to cover a lot of territory in the next few days, and it was going to be a bunch of bullshit with a Russian comic in tow.

The thought of home crossed his mind. It seemed like fifty years since he had been to a baseball game. His dad and he had driven down to see the Cubs in a weekend doubleheader. They had driven back from Chicago, through Wisconsin, at a leisurely pace, seeing if they could somehow manage to hit one bar in every small town for one beer. They never even made it out of Illinois.

That was the last he had spent any amount of time with his father. The next year the war broke out and Mahoney had enlisted. Six months later his father was dead. A stroke, the doctors had said. But Mahoney knew it was a broken heart because the old man was too old to go back overseas. He had been a hot shot in France during the First World War. But now he was too old. And he could not handle it.

Zamyatin was staring at him, a sympathetic expression in his eyes. “I did not mean to make light of your orders, Captain,” the Russian said.

Mahoney smiled and shook his head. “No … it’s not that. I was thinking of something else.”

“Yes?”

Mahoney shook his head again. “Nothing.” He looked again at the maps. “I was told you would be supplying the equipment. Russian?”

“No,” Zamyatin said. “We have a German car and some German civilian clothes. We will be airlifted well behind their lines to a point southwest of Linz. From there we will make it on foot to Lambach, which is a small town on the Traun River, where we will be met and given travel permits, the current issue ration stamps, and the car.”

Mahoney had peered at the maps as Zamyatin talked, and he traced the route with his finger southwest from Lambach past the Atter See, over the Hollkogel Pass near St. Wolfgang, and from there south of Salzburg to Berchtesgaden itself.

“Beyond St. Wolfgang,” Zamyatin was saying, “our work will begin.”

Mahoney looked up. “The probable area extends that far east and north?”

Zamyatin shrugged. “I don’t know. But you talk of the Obersalzburg and Berchtesgaden. That is the fringe of the area. We cannot afford not to be thorough, can we?”

Mahoney felt as if he was being made fun of, but he dismissed the impression as too obvious an assessment of Zamyatin’s outward behavior. The Russian was much more complicated than that.

“No, we can’t,” Mahoney finally said.

*   *   *

They had spent four days together, working their way from Linz through the mountain passes to the Salzach River a few miles south of Salzburg. They drove only at night, hiding the car, a battered black Mercedes diesel, in the woods.

It was nearing dusk, and Mahoney stepped away from where the car was parked and walked back up the road on a narrow foot path that looked down on the city of Schellenberg on the Salzach. The Schellenberger Brücke, which crossed from Austria into Germany, looked new, or newly rebuilt, and obviously had carried much traffic.

Mahoney lit a cigarette, glanced back at the Mercedes where Zamyatin was asleep in the back seat and then stepped to the edge of the clearing in the trees. A few feet away from where he stood, the hillside plunged dramatically down and away, so that the town, the bridge, and the river were spread below.

In another time, he thought puffing on his cigarette, this panorama would be prime tourist stuff. The view was magnificent. Above him the sky was turning from a very dark blue to gray, and the clouds that had been incredibly white all day as they picked their way across the alpine sky, had turned pink. It all spoke of peace, but after nightfall, death would be waiting.

He turned that thought over in his mind. The last five nights were jumbled into a mass of data that seemed to form only two basic images.

The first image was of his wife. He could see her face in the face of each of the German girls he had bedded in the past five nights.

“The whores of a village are also the informants of the village. Look to them for information.” It was almost axiomatic, he told himself.

The other basic image, the strongest of the two and by far the most distasteful, was of Zamyatin, and his methods of interrogation.

“The idea is to kill them in such a fashion that they willingly make deathbed confessions of their sins,” Zamyatin had told him the first night out.

And although he was little more than twenty, Zamyatin was a master of the technique.

So far they had learned nothing about Hitler’s plans for the National Redoubt. Nor would they, according to the Russian, because the plan was nothing more than rumor. Seemingly everyone had heard of the National Redoubt, but no one knew anything about it. The whores they had bedded, to whom they had paid very good money, wanted desperately to be helpful, but they knew nothing. And the men Zamyatin had carefully interrogated wanted to tell him what he wanted to hear, but they could not. Like the girls, they knew nothing.

Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest was across the river and less than ten miles south. Bad Reichenhall was nearly the same distance to the west, and Salzburg was a little closer to the north.

The eighty or ninety square miles roughly bounded the area they were to search. Somewhere out there, Mahoney mused, finishing his cigarette, could be underground bunkers, ammunition factories, weapons and equipment dumps, and perhaps as many as a half a million troops. All of it was possible.

“But highly improbable,” a Russian voice from behind him spoke.

Mahoney flicked the hot ash from the end of his cigarette with a fingernail, stripped the paper off the butt, rolled it into a tiny ball and threw it away from the path into the woods and then scattered the tobacco on the wind before he turned to Zamyatin who was urinating at the edge of the path.

“You’re a mind reader now?”

Zamyatin zippered himself up then reached for a cigarette in his jacket pocket. “No, he said. “It is just that I was thinking along similar lines, my friend. We have been at this now four days—this will be the fifth night—and at last we have worked our way to the edge of what your orders call the ‘target area.’”

“We Americans are filled with ‘curious expressions,’ aren’t we,” Mahoney said lightly, and Zamyatin laughed.

“Now it is your turn to become the mind reader,” the Russian said, and he lit his cigarette with a flameless lighter. It was a cotton braid that ran through a brass tube attached to a flint and striking wheel. The cotton braid was pushed up near the flint, a couple of sparks ignited the cotton causing it to smolder, and the cigarette could be lit. The smoldering cotton caused no flash and when properly cupped with the hand could not be seen at any distance, even at night.

Zamyatin was a contradiction. For four days Mahoney had been trying to figure the man out, so far with little or no success. On the one hand he was a pleasant, gentle man with a fine sense of humor. He was a man who spoke of his homeland with great love and respect. He wanted very much for the war to end so that he could return home to rebuild his country; to find a girl and get married; to settle down with a few children; to have some kind of a future.

“We need more sanity in the world,” he told Mahoney on their second night out. “Construction, not destruction.”

And yet on the other hand Zamyatin was a ruthless man. Perhaps the most ruthless man Mahoney had ever known.

The two attributes seemed, to Mahoney, to be mutually exclusive, like a Jekyll and a Hyde.

Zamyatin had joined Mahoney and he looked down at the bridge and the town below through binoculars.

“Even this far south there are no border guards on the bridge,” he said after a time, and then he lowered the binoculars and glanced at Mahoney. “Perhaps we should become border guards?”

“Let’s see,” Mahoney said, reaching out for the glasses. Zamyatin handed them over and Mahoney looked through them. The bridge leaped up at him, and he followed the roadway halfway across until he came to the border guardhouse. The red and white striped border gate was raised and the guardhouse seemed deserted.

Mahoney followed the roadway across the bridge to the German side of the river, and shortly beyond the bridge the road curved sharply to the left. “There,” he said, and he handed the binoculars back to Zamyatin. “Just across the bridge. The road curves to the south. We will wait there to pick up stragglers.”

Zamyatin raised the binoculars to his eyes.

“If they are on that road,” Mahoney said, “they can only be going to Berchtesgaden. It’s perfect.”

*   *   *

They waited until well after ten o’clock before they pulled the car back out onto the road, and, driving with only the blackout headlights switched on, they made their way down the mountainside to the town and across the bridge unchallenged.

The few people they saw on the way through the small town turned the other way when they passed, assuming they were SS or Gestapo agents on some mission to Berchtesgaden. “The less one knows about such things, the better off one is,” the general populace had learned since the mid-thirties.

The lights on the bridge were out to avoid Allied air strikes, and not even the small red light that usually shined in border guardhouses was on. As they passed across the border, Mahoney had a strange sense of déjà vu, as if he had been here before; or perhaps he would be here soon under different circumstances. The fighting at this moment was concentrated mostly to the north, all eyes toward Berlin, so for the time being this area was deserted. Or at least it gave that appearance.

Mahoney was driving, and as they came off the bridge and started around the curve in the road, he glanced in the rearview mirror in time to see the flash of headlights some distance behind them.

He quickly shut off his lights, and a moment later they were around the curve and out of sight of the bridge.

“Someone coming?” Zamyatin snapped.

“Looked like a jeep,” Mahoney said. A hundred yards up the road, he pulled the car off to the side and set the parking brake but left the engine running.

They both got out of the car and Zamyatin, carrying a German submachine gun, quickly crossed the road and ducked down in the ditch out of sight as Mahoney, one hand in his pocket on the butt of a Luger, the other holding a flashlight with a red lens, waited by the car.

Within a couple of minutes a German army jeep came around the curve, its Volkswagen engine laboring under the strain of mountain driving, and Mahoney flipped on the flashlight and began waving it.

The jeep immediately showed down and Mahoney shouted, “Halt! Halten Sie!” as it got closer.

“Was ist?” someone shouted out the passenger window as the jeep pulled up at least twenty yards away. They were taking no chances.

Mahoney started toward the jeep, his shoes crunching on the loose gravel at the roadside. “Dies ist einer Gestapso Grenze Kontrollieren.”

“Warum nicht auf der Brücke?”

“Saboteure,” Mahoney said, coming to the side of the jeep. There were only two men in the little canvas-topped car. Both of them were very young, and both wore army uniforms with the insignia of second lieutenants. The one in the passenger seat was holding a machine pistol in Mahoney’s general direction, but when he saw it was only one man in civilian clothes and apparently unarmed, he lowered the gun.

Mahoney pulled the Luger from his pocket and pointed it directly at the young man’s head. “Raus!” he shouted.

The young second lieutenant started to raise the gun, but Mahoney shouted again. “Nein! Wollen Sie Sterben?”

The German lieutenant hesitated a moment, and Mahoney again shouted for him to get out of the jeep. He wanted them out of the car before anyone else came along.

Zamyatin was suddenly on the sloping hood of the car, his machine gun pointing through the windshield at the driver. “Raus!” he shouted, his Russian accent thick.

The two young soldiers, their eyes suddenly very wide, their attention jerking back and forth between Mahoney and Zamyatin, slowly climbed out of the car. Mahoney took away their weapons and then headed them toward the Mercedes as Zamyatin quickly pulled their jeep off the road and threw its keys away.

Within a couple of minutes, the young German soldiers, their hands tied behind their backs, were seated in the back of the Mercedes. Zamyatin was covering them with the machine gun from the front seat while Mahoney drove.

Less than a mile farther along the highway, they found a narrow dirt road that led into the woods. Mahoney turned down that path and within a few yards they were lost to view from the highway.

“This is far enough,” Zamyatin said, and Mahoney stopped the car.

One of the Germans struggled forward and tried to open the car door with his knee, but Zamyatin casually turned back from speaking to Mahoney and slashed the boy’s cheek viciously with the front sight of the gun.

Mahoney got out of the car and opened the back door on his side. “Kommen Sie,” he said gently to the young boy who looked up at him, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Der Russe … der Russe,” the young boy kept calling as Mahoney pulled him out of the car. He was frightened of Zamyatin. Already the stories had come from the front about how the Russians were treating captured Germans, both soldiers and civilians.

Mahoney had heard about it, but these two young soldiers had evidently heard the details. And unfortunately for them, he grimly thought, they were soon going to learn the brutal truth, the last thing they would ever know in their young lives.

He could feel the bile coming up his throat, bitter in the back of his mouth, and the young German boy evidently read the emotion from his eyes because he pulled away from Mahoney, and fell to his knees babbling incoherently.

Zamyatin had pulled the other young German out of the car, and he brought him around to the same side and threw him down on the ground next to his companion.

Mahoney gagged the young boy Zamyatin had just thrown down with a gray wool scarf from the trunk of the car, then tied both boys’ legs so neither of them could run.

There was no other way, he told himself, straightening up and stepping back. This method of Zamyatin’s was quick, efficient, and foolproof. If the boy he gagged knew anything—anything at all—he would be willing to tell it to them in a very few minutes.

Zamyatin handed the machine gun to Mahoney and got down on his knees between the two young Germans. He told the one Mahoney had just gagged that in a few minutes he was going to ask him some questions.

“And I will want answers,” Zamyatin said in German. “I will want no lies. None. Because if you lie to me, or even if I think you are telling lies to me, something very bad will happen to you.”

The young boy’s eyes were open very wide. Zamyatin turned to the other German who was still babbling, the drool running out from the corners of his mouth, and looked at him for several moments almost like a father might look at a naughty son. The next part happened so fast that Mahoney, who knew it was coming, was unprepared.

Zamyatin reached in his left coat pocket and withdrew a pair of pliers with which he grabbed the young German’s tongue and pulled it viciously out of his mouth. From his right coat pocket he pulled a knife and in an instant had cut the German’s tongue completely out of his head, the blood gushing and spurting everywhere.

A low animal growl escaped from deep in the boy’s throat and then was cut off as he began choking on his own blood, his chest heaving spasmodically as he tried to clear his throat.

Calmly Zamyatin cut the boy’s jacket and shirt exposing his chest and abdomen, and then he cut open the front of the boy’s trousers.

“The truth,” he said, glancing momentarily at the other German, and then he turned back and cut the boy’s penis and testicles off and threw them unceremoniously aside.

Again Zamyatin turned to the other young boy. “Remember,” he said calmly, “I will want the truth.”

Mahoney had turned away and was vomiting at the side of the dirt road as Zamyatin began cutting thin strips of flesh from the already mutilated body. From the abdomen all the way up to the neck, Zamyatin cut strip after strip of flesh from the wildly struggly boy, until finally there was nothing left except raw, bleeding meat.

Finally, mercifully, the boy’s struggles ceased. He was dead.

Zamyatin turned to the other young German, whose eyes were staring fixedly at him, and removed the gag from his mouth.

“And now the truth, my young Nazi,” Zamyatin said.

Mahoney, whose back was still to the grisly scene by the car, waited several moments for the questioning to begin. At this point the subject was usually very ready to answer any questions Zamyatin might ask. But this time there was silence, and Mahoney slowly turned.

Zamyatin was sitting back on his haunches next to the young German whose mouth and eyes were open wide.

“He’s dead,” Zamyatin said, shrugging his shoulders. “Heart attack, I think.”