Winner Lose All Page 24

“You only did what comes naturally, Otto.”

  “Actually, I gave the man what he expected,” Dietrich corrected him. “Welcome to the German psyche, Herr Scanlon. After all, I am a full Colonel. That idiot Weiter will never be more than a simpering Lieutenant Colonel, so the gate will open. You shall see.”

  Dietrich was right. The wrought-iron gate immediately swung open, and the guard snapped to attention rendering a rigid Nazi salute. “The first building on your right, Sir,” he said. “The Commandant will join you shortly.”

  As they drove through the archway, Scanlon saw ornate wrought iron lettering across the top of the gate. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” it said. Work makes one free.

  “It is an old SS joke,” Dietrich smiled. “You know what a marvelous sense of humor Reichsführer Himmler has — free as the clouds in the sky, as they say.”

  The Chief Inspector drove into the compound and steered the car toward the infirmary along a narrow white gravel drive. In the far corner of the camp, they saw a small brick building with a very tall chimney. That was where the thin plume of smoke was coming from that Scanlon had seen from the road. A power plant or incinerator, he assumed. Today, the smoke rose slowly before the light breeze pushed it west. Slowly, it dissipated until it became a dull, gray smudge.

  “What is that smell?” Christina Raeder asked from the back seat as she sniffed the air and turned up her nose.

  “That is the crematorium,” Dietrich gave a curt answer. “This camp began as a reeducation center for political prisoners, or anyone else stupid enough to defy the Reich. When the education doesn’t take — well, people have been known to die here.”

  “Then they got what they deserve,” her father declared.

  Christina looked at him, and then stared wide-eyed out the car window, trying to understand it all. “How… how many, Herr Dietrich?” she asked, looking at the tall smokestack.

  “Here? Oh, perhaps 25,000 now, maybe more.”

  “No, Otto, she wants to know about the crematorium,” Scanlon prodded him.

  Clearly, this was not a conversation that the Chief Inspector wanted to have outside a limited circle of Nazi Party friends. “I once heard Weiter tell Himmler that the only way to escape Dachau is up that chimney. On a good day, he says they can eliminate 300 corpses, but even that is not nearly enough now. They are dying too fast for the ovens to handle.”

  Christina Raeder suddenly grabbed the handle and opened her door. Dietrich stopped the car as she leaned out the door and threw up. “Pardone, pardone,” she mumbled.

  “My sincere apologies, Fraulein,” Dietrich said as he handed her a handkerchief from his pants pocket. “Just remember, it was not my idea to bring you here.”

  “No, she needed to see it, Otto. Everyone in Germany needs to see it,” Scanlon said.

  As they drove into the compound, they saw dozens of gray, emaciated men with shaved heads, pale skin, and gaunt expressions, milling about in small groups or sitting on the ground near the barracks buildings. The black limousine drew every eye, as if Flash Gordon’s spaceship had just landed in their midst. Sensing danger, however, they all kept their distance. The prisoners wore tattered gray and white striped prison garb that hung on their bony frames like rags. Each man had a triangular cloth patch sewn on the sleeve. They might be faded and torn, but the remaining colors ranged from yellow to red, green, or black. Scanlon would never forget the sight. They looked like skeletons.

  Even Wolfe Raeder appeared moved by the sight. “This business with the Jews is most unfortunate,” he said as his nervous eyes darted about the milling crowd. “There won’t be a decent doctor or violinist left in all of Europe by the time that fool Himmler is finished.”

  “Papa, my God!” Christina shrank back, appalled by her father’s callous comment. “What could any of these people have possibly done to deserve this?” she demanded to know.

  “Done?” Wolfe Raeder answered, not comprehending. “They are enemies of the Reich, Christina. You read Mein Kampf. You heard Herr Hitler and Herr Goebbels on the radio. We are building a new society, a new German people. It is our historic imperative.”

  Christina’s angry eyes bored into the back of Otto Dietrich’s head. “Enemies of the Reich? Tell me what that means, Herr Dietrich. I don’t understand.”

  Dietrich frowned. “It began with the Communists, the Socialists, the criminal element, and political enemies of the party — the low-hanging fruit, if you will. After that, it meant anything they wanted it to mean: black marketers, trade unionists, priests and ministers who refused to shut up, uncooperative journalists, university professors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally retarded, the physically deformed, Jews, homosexuals…”

  “Like Rudy? Is this what you would have done to him too?”

  “Christina!” Wolfe Raeder exploded. “What could you know of such things?”

  “I know, Papa. I am not a child.”

  “Lies,” Raeder puffed indignantly. “Everyone knows the Jews were shipped east for resettlement, where they have been well taken care of. It has been in all the newsreels, so all that is nothing but British propaganda. We know better.”

  “For a very smart man, it amazes me to see what a gullible fool you can be, Herr Raeder,” Dietrich replied, smiling benignly. He pointed through the windshield into the bleak compound beyond. “Newsreel? I am a policeman and as thorough a bastard as you’ll find, as Captain Scanlon here can attest, but I do my work up close and personal, not on a scale like this. There is your newsreel, Herr Doktor, and there is your resettlement,” he said, pointing at the column of smoke rising above the chimney. “German industrial engineering at its finest. It can all be reduced to formulas and numbers: the number of bodies, the number of ovens, and the number of hours. It is simple mathematics, the mother’s milk of science, as any good engineer should know.”

  “You know nothing,” Raeder glowered.

  “Is this business finally beginning to bother you, Otto?” Scanlon asked. “I don’t recall much of anything bothering you back in the basement in Leipzig.”

  “That was entirely different, Edward,” Dietrich insisted. “You were a spy, you are a spy, and you deserve everything you got. It was The Game. No quarter is asked and none given. The Steiner woman knew it, your friend Kenyon knew it, and you knew it, too; so do not get all self-righteous with me. But this…” His voice failed him as his eyes scanned the sprawling compound. “This… I am a policeman, not a butcher or a mortician.”

  “No, you’re the mortician’s assistant. Oh, you may not be stoking the ovens, but none of this would be here if it weren’t for men like you, Otto — good Germans, one and all, and a whole lot more like you. None of it!”

  “You are wrong, my fine American friend,” Dietrich answered nervously, refusing to accept the indictment. “I did not make the definitions and I didn’t write the laws. Blame the lawyers, the judges, the politicians, and the people who voted them into office. You may not appreciate what I did back in Leipzig, but do not blame this camp on me.”

  “Tell you what, Otto,” the American replied. “When they march you to the gallows and put that rope around your neck, I’ll have them sew a piece of cloth on your sleeve. That way, we can tell you apart from the psychopaths, the mass murderers, and the rest of the Nazi big shots who will be standing up there next to you. But you’ve got to help me out, Otto; what’s the color of indifference and lame excuses?”

  “Very funny, but I will not find myself on any gallows, Edward,” Dietrich answered. “You still have a hundred miles of my Germany to negotiate; and in the end you will have to deal with the lovely Fraulein Steiner. Personally, I do not think you are a match for either.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  By the time Hanni saw the roadblock, it was only a quarter mile away and there was no way to avoid it. The road was too open and turning around would draw too much attention. Those bastards in the black death’s-head uniforms were clever, she thought; they picked their spots well. Like a cork i
n the neck of a bottle, they had blocked the only bridge across the river for thirty miles. Worse, instead of the militia and a few police, it was the Waffen SS. They were combat troops in full battle gear with an armored car. It was not that Hanni was afraid of them, not after all these years, but she was tired and gut-sick of it all. She had been killing SS and Gestapo for four years now, here and in Russia, and she had had enough. This hideous excuse for a war had to end.

  She looked at her hands as they gripped the steering wheel. They were small and delicate. Once they had been a young girl’s hands, but since then, they had been badly abused. One was bandaged and blood-stained. Both were scarred, bruised, and callused now, witnesses to the many guns and knives they had held over the years. How could they possibly be trusted to hold something as small and innocent as a newborn child? Perhaps that was the answer as to whether or not she really wanted this new life growing inside her. She wanted to see that child born into a world where things like this did not happen. She wanted to see her father, she wanted to see her baby, and she wanted to see Edward, too. She wanted to see them all — all three of them — and settle down in a small house somewhere where she could forget that any of this had ever happened.

  Georg Horstmann also stared nervously at the roadblock and the crowded bridge. “Are you certain you want to risk it?” he asked.

  “Are you losing your nerve, old man?”

  “I never had any, Hannelore,” he answered with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Cowardice is what kept me alive all these years. You should try it yourself sometime.”

  “Life never gave me that choice. My darling Edward made certain of that, and there is nothing I can do about it now,” she said glumly as she stared at the roadblock. “If we do not try to push through, I will never catch him.”

  She knew there was only one good road between Nuremberg and Munich. Edward knew it too, so this was the way he would have come. He had a good set of forged papers, better than hers, and he had Otto Dietrich and his flashy Maybach for cover. Knowing him, he would have driven right down the middle of the road, honked, and shouted at them to get out of his way. Why not? She taught him everything he knew, both in and out of bed, and in the process provided him with all the motivation he would ever need. Damn you, Liebchen; and damn me, too, if I let you win.

  Ahead at the foot of the bridge, dozens of cars and trucks sat in a long queue, waiting impatiently to pass through the narrow SS checkpoint, and very little of it looked official. Most were fat cats and party big shots from Dresden, Meissen, and Torgau, fleeing south and west ahead of the Russians. They carried everything they owned of value, like rats leaving a sinking ship. In the crush of vehicles, perhaps a young woman and an old man in a small, beat-up coupe might slip through. If not, she had her pistol hidden under her coat and Georg had a submachine gun under a blanket in his lap. Interspersed with the long line of civilian vehicles, she saw Army trucks stacked high with wooden crates. What was in them, she wondered. Weapons and ammunition for the troops? Or stolen art, gold, and secret records? Perhaps it was more blueprints, research, and industrial secrets? Those would be the currency of the next Reich and keep Krupp, Thyssen, I.G. Farben, Agfa, BASF, Hoechst, and their ilk alive. The Nazis were clever, but the big corporations were even more so. Long before the shooting started, they opened subsidiaries in a dozen foreign countries under new, benign names. They incorporated in Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, Paraguay, South Africa, and a dozen other countries, where they had already moved money, patents, and proprietary machinery. No doubt, crates like these were destined for a deep basement, an old mineshaft, or the bottom of an alpine lake. In a few years, when the time was right, the crates would slowly resurface; and they could buy anything they wanted — wealth, power, men, and whole nations if they wished. No, she realized sadly. The rats were not leaving the sinking ship, they were merely moving the cheese.

  Hanni cut around two trucks and an old farm wagon. Those were not what the SS were looking for and should be allowed through without much delay. It was the big civilian cars loaded to the axles with loot that were being pulled over and searched. It was one thing to be an official looter with all the proper documents and quite another to be free-lancing, as some of them soon discovered at gunpoint. She saw one fat, red-faced party hack waving his papers high in the air as he was marched to a stone wall. A hard-eyed SS officer in well-worn battle fatigues knocked him to his knees on top of a large pile of bodies and summarily shot him in the head as his pretty papers flew away on the wind.

  “Be ready, Georg,” she warned as they drew closer. “I have too many things left to do to see it all end here.” Carefully, she steered the small coupe onto the road shoulder and around the obstacle course of cars and trucks, slowly inching her way closer to the bridge.

  “You there!” a harsh voice called out to her.

  “Me?” she answered meekly as she looked out the window, letting the coupe roll to a halt between a large Mercedes and a horse-drawn wagon with a tall load of hay. Damn! She cursed her bad luck. They were not fifty feet from the bridge. They almost made it.

  It was the same SS Lieutenant, an Untersturmführer, she saw at the stone wall. “Where do you think you are going?” he demanded to know as he strode over to the coupe.

  Hanni tried to look her most haggard, exhausted, and innocent, as she held up her bandaged hand. “Lieutenant, I am pregnant, tired, and hungry. I gashed my hand trying to change a flat tire. We are carrying nothing, so it did not seem right to waste your valuable time with all the very important things you have to do.” Hanni pulled her bulky old greatcoat around her as the man quickly looked inside the car, keeping her hand near the butt of the Luger lying in her lap.

  “I shall be the judge of that,” he scowled. “What are you doing with a Luftwaffe staff car?” he asked suspiciously, as he held out his hand for her papers.

  “It belongs to my husband. He is a pilot, and I am trying to reach his base near Munich. I know I’m fat, but I did not think I looked like Hermann Göring yet.”

  For the first time that day, the Lieutenant smiled as he thumbed through her papers.

  Hanni glanced around at the crush of vehicles. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Spies and traitors. They are driving an old black limousine and some trucks,” the Lieutenant answered, watching her eyes for any reaction. “You did not see a car like that along the road, did you?”

  “A black limousine? No, I do not believe so.”

  The Lieutenant nodded as he folded her papers and tossed them back through the window into her lap. The papers slid off onto the floor. Without thinking, she leaned forward to pick them up and her coat fell open, revealing the Luger lying in her lap.

  “What is that!” the young officer flared angrily as he pointed in through the window.

  “Oh, this?” she answered matter-of-factly as she picked up the pistol and pointed the barrel at him. “It is a Luger,” she said as she jammed the muzzle into his chest and pulled the trigger before the wide-eyed Lieutenant realized what was happening. The din of the nearby automobile engines muffled the gunshot, but the impact of the heavy slug blew him backward. He fell into the legs of an old dray horse hitched to a hay wagon parked at the side of the road, making the horse rear up and bolt.

  Horstmann needed no instructions. He raised the Schmeisser submachine gun from his lap, pointed it out the window, and began firing short, well-aimed bursts into the cars and trucks parked around them, going for the gasoline tanks, the tires, and the engines, before he put a burst into the rear of the Mercedes, setting it on fire. At the same time, Hanni took careful aim at the armored car with her Luger. The vehicle was protected by half-inch steel plate, but its crew was not. Her first shot went through the open front windscreen and killed the driver as he sat watching her. Her second and third shots caught the machine gunner in the top hatch. He toppled over and dropped onto the ground. That should slow them down for a while, she thought, as she dropped the small coupe into ge
ar and pressed the accelerator to the floor. As it did, she pulled out the “potato masher” hand grenade she grabbed in Dietrich’s office, pulled the pin, and tossed it under the armored car. The small coupe raced across the crowded bridge as if it knew how much trouble it had just stirred up, fishtailing madly as Hanni fought to keep it under control. Behind them, the grenade exploded, followed by the armored car’s gas tank, spooking the horse even more. It bolted and its load of hay bales toppled over, blocking the entrance to the bridge as the fire spread. By the time they reached the other side of the bridge, smoke and flames filled her rear-view mirror.

  “Ha, Ha!” Georg turned and looked back through the window, jamming a fresh magazine in his submachine gun. “Look at those dogs scatter back there, Hannelore! My God, I have not had this much fun in months.” However, before they reached the raised center of the bridge, they heard the first angry gunshots behind them and felt heavy slugs strike the small car. One bullet blew the rear view mirror off the driver’s side door and two more well-aimed slugs punched through the rear window, shattering the glass.

  Suddenly, Hanni heard Horstmann make a loud grunt and twist sideways in the seat. “Georg!” she screamed. “Are you all right?”

  The old man slumped against the passenger door with a soft moan. “Go, go. Keep going,” he gasped. “I will be fine. Keep going.”

  The car bounced hard when it reached the road pavement. It skidded sideways onto the shoulder and kicked up a cloud of dust as she began twisting and turning the steering wheel to avoid the hail of gunfire now trying to reach them. The fusillade missed wide of the mark, as she swung hard around the next bend and out of sight. As the road entered the forest, Horstmann managed to push himself upright, although his face was now deathly pale. He pulled his hand out of his coat, and Hanni saw it was covered with blood.

  “Georg! My God, you are shot.”

  “Find a good spot and pull over,” he said, his voice barely audible over the car’s roar.