If the conditions are just right—on a clear, cold day, in a flat, treeless terrain—the sound of an average gunshot can travel several kilometers. The sound wave from Yael’s cartridge went much farther. Ripping through cables and airwaves, from Tokyo to Germania/London/Rome/Cairo/anywhere with a working television set, in the span of seconds.
The world heard it. People of all stations, colors, creeds… Aryan mothers and fathers with broods of blond children, a balding shisha merchant in Cairo, an oily-faced adolescent in Rome. Many stared at the screen—mouths slack, stunned eyes—trying to process what had happened. Others who watched understood. This was the signal they’d been waiting for.
One—a frizzy-haired Polish woman by the name of Henryka—even smiled at her television, whispering, “That’s my girl,” before she stood and got to work.
For years Henryka’s beer hall basement had been the nerve center of the resistance—relaying messages between the cells, gauging the readiness of every territory, housing operatives, providing a safe place for General Erwin Reiniger and other mutinous National Socialist officers to brainstorm military operations.
A pair of radios sat between stacks of cracked-spine encyclopedias, waiting to receive messages from all corners of the crumbling Reich. Each set was accompanied by an Enigma machine, meant to protect the resistance’s airwave conversations from prying ears by encrypting outgoing messages and decrypting replies. For years these machines had been silent, gathering dust. Now they were brushed off, switched on. Four resistance operatives sat close by, their eagerness palpable. Brigitte, the only other woman in the room, had laid out not one but two sharpened pencils by her notebook, ready to encode messages. There was a third tucked through her honey-blond bun. Johann was already wearing his radio headset. Reinhard and Kasper stared at the map of the Axis-controlled world on the far wall, making bets on which territory would be first to secede.
There were plenty to choose from. The continents were littered with coded pins of operatives and Wehrmacht regiments, detailing the borders of the Third Reich’s reach in wretched red. The color swallowed Europe, crept into Asia, stained the sands of northern Africa.
The resistance had twenty-four hours to change it.
The putsch—a full-fledged militarized occupation of Germania, including arrests of the Reich’s highest officials and new leadership put into place—had to be quick. The old National Socialist government felled and Reiniger’s new government raised within a single day. Otherwise, the leading minds of the National Socialist Party—Göring, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels—would get over the shock of Hitler’s assassination, declare a new Führer, and crush Reiniger’s attempt to establish martial law.
Such an event would not mean defeat. But it would mean war. War in a way the world had rarely seen before—battles without borders, soldiers without uniforms. War that would ravage the bones of the Reich from within, with chaos like cancer.
Henryka stared at the red map, wrapped in a maelstrom thought pattern of what might/could/would happen when—
“What’s going on?” The girl’s voice would’ve been imperious had it not been muffled by several centimeters of steel. “Did I hear a gunshot?”
Henryka looked over at the doorway. Once, it had led to a supply closet full of filing cabinets, a broom, a lightbulb operated by a pull chain, and a spider or two. Now—with the help of a newly installed, reinforced door—it contained one very real Adele Wolfe (and, perhaps, still a spider or two).
At the beginning of the girl’s captivity, Henryka’s maternal side fought against the idea of keeping her locked up in a windowless room. These sympathies vanished after Adele’s first three escape attempts. Her initial “cell” had been Yael’s old sleeping quarters, but that door was made of mere wood, which took Adele only twenty-four hours to kick down. Henryka caught the girl before she reached the beer hall and relocated her to the closet. The girl’s second break for freedom happened when Henryka tried to slip her some crullers for breakfast and Adele shoved the reinforced steel wide open. The third involved an unscrewed lightbulb smashed into Henryka’s face and a dropped plate of schnitzel. Both attacks had come to nothing. Henryka still had cuts on her cheeks. Adele Wolfe now sat in the dark. Mealtimes were tenuous.
“I demand to know what’s happening!” The next yell was followed by a blunt THUD. And another. And another.
Kasper, who’d been involved in the operation to bring Adele Wolfe in, eyed the shuddering door. “Want me to slip her a sedative?”
Henryka shook her head. “Let her kick. She’ll break her toes before she gets through that door.”
And it sounded like she might. THUD after THUD, Adele was giving the steel a noble fight. “What’s going on out there?”
Henryka’s gaze shifted to the static-filled screen and then back to the map. She wished she knew the answer to that question, but it would be some time before any real news started pouring in through Johann’s headset and Brigitte’s pencils. Right now all Henryka could do was record the facts she knew. (One day this would all be history. Someone had to keep documents for the books.)
So she walked over to her Olympia Robust typewriter, placed her fingers on its well-worn keys, and started to write.
Valkyrie the Second Operation Notes
April 2, 1956
1315 hours--The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead.