The Berkut (45 page)

By Petrov's design, Bailov's insertion was far less precise. His papers showed him to be a Wehrmacht corporal who had been processed by the Americans and released. He was one of thousands of veterans and refugees afoot in the countryside, so it was difficult to get established in a village where they wanted no more people unless they brought some special skills with them. Where Gnedin was accepted almost immediately, Bailov was not. No matter where he tried, or how often, there was no work to be had, at least nothing steady with regular pay, either in cash or food. While he sought a base from which to work he lived in the forests near the village, taking small game for sustenance. Having no luck in the town, he foraged from farm to farm, finally finding a hovel with a woman and her two young girls. She was older than he, perhaps thirty-five, and tired. She told him he could have shelter, but there was no food to share; they had been reduced to eating pine needles. With typical optimism and hard work, Bailov soon changed their fortunes. He produced wild meat, which he'd
trapped in the forest. In a matter of days he gave their lives back to them and his presence at the homestead was accepted, with no questions asked about how long he might remain.

The woman was plain, but not unattractive. Underneath her simple veneer Bailov thought he detected an inner toughness, even a hint of danger, to which he was attracted. After the first week she came to his room during the night; she stood at the foot of his bed and stared at him. "My name is Janna," she said, dropping her robe and crawling under the covers with him. Every night thereafter they slept together. The two girls, with encouragement from the woman, began to address Bailov as "Father," and while he was sure it was a trick of his imagination, they seemed to be drawn more to him than to their mother. It was a feeling that made him uneasy.

Gnedin was patient in gathering information. To his surprise, he found both pleasure and challenge in fulfilling the medical needs of the villagers, and in a short time his gentle ways earned him their acceptance.

There was no American occupation force in Bad Harzburg; this honor was saved for the larger communities nearby. But the Harzburgers knew that eventually the Americans would arrive, and a town meeting was called to discuss their p
olitical situation. The Bü
rgermeister, a short man with thick silver hair and a congenital harelip, was nervous as the meeting convened. "Hitler is dead," he stammered. "The war is lost. We no longer control our own destiny."

"We will be occupied?" an elderly man asked from an ancient wheelchair.

"In time."

"Russians or Americans?"

"I think it will be the Americans. The Russians are in all the villages on the other side of the upper Harz. If they were coming, they'd already be here. But if you're afraid, you should leave now and go west. If the Russians come, there'll be no leaving."

"How far west?" the old man asked.

The mayor's anguish was apparent; he did not like the responsibility for such grave decisions. He was a simple man, happy to have the job when it was ceremonial, perplexed when true leadership was demanded.

Gnedin intervened, and the villagers listened attentively. "Perhaps I can help," he said. "I've been out there."

"Herr Doktor," the mayor said, relieved to have somebody else on the spot

"Go west past Hanover and it should be all right."
"How do you know?" an old woman demanded.

"I don't," Gnedin said quietly. "Not with certainty. But I've seen where the Americans are massed, and I believe there are too many of them west of Hanover for the Ivans to displace them." He knew for certain that Bad Harzburg would be safe, but it helped to have the villagers uneasy; their collective sense of guilt and the fear that stemmed from it could work to his advantage.

"What we need to do," Gnedin went on, "is to prepare by purging the Nazis."

"I'm not a pa
rty member," the Bü
rgermeister said defensively. "You didn't do anything about them, either," someone shouted from the back of the narrow and drafty hall.

The mayor turned bright red. "Go ahead, blame me. What did
you
do? What would you have done differently if you were in my shoes?" He shook his finger angrily and mopped the sweat from his face. The villagers were silent, and the mayor calmed himself with a gulp of beer from a brown ceramic stein. "You know who they were. The Blockleiters are gone, along with the Zellenleiter and his family. I say look into ourselves for truth. Things happened here. Search your own soul now, before the Russians help you do it."

"His Honor makes good sense," Gnedin added. "I've seen the Ivans close up. They are not monsters-" Several people gasped. "-but they do not share our culture or our ideals. If there is anything to link you to the Nazis, I'd advise you to go west and to do so quickly. The Americans will be more forgiving." He liked seeing the fear in their eyes.

The next day more than half a dozen families and several individuals headed west from Bad Harzburg
.

56 – July 24, 1945, 7:20 P.M.

Surely the Russians had access to duplicate records from the FriedenthaI, Valentine thought. If there were no other certainty in life, there was the guarantee that German bureaucracy was committed to redundancy. If the Germans could have reproduced the Rhine so as to have one in reserve for the day when the first dried up, they would have done so. If one was good, two was better; twice two or more was best. It was their way.

The evening air was cool as Valentine drove southeast toward Würzburg and Nuremberg. A sergeant he'd befriended in the Frankfurt noncommissioned officers club, an open-air affair under a circus tent, had stuffed a large satchel with salami sandwiches, cans of Spam, chocolate bars, three cartons of Lucky Strikes, apples, a small bag of walnuts, radishes in waxed paper, a tin of crackers, disposable containers of salt, sugar and pepper, a wheel of white cheese, four bottles of dark red Hungarian wine, several packages of nylon stockings and a large unlabeled bottle of brandy. On the black market Valentine knew that all this represented a small fortune. Carefully bargained with the right people, these items could produce a great deal of information. He would use his hoard wisely; it was in his blood to trade well. The satchel sat on the seat beside him in the jeep.

As he drove, Valentine took measured swigs of brandy to warm himself. By autobahn the trip to Nuremberg was two hundred and forty kilometers; at the jeep's top speed it would take more than three hours. It would be a moonless night and there were no other vehicles on the road. In the back of his mind a voice was urging him to hurry, but he disregarded it and kept a less risky pace.

At a place where the highway crossed over the Main River east of Würzburg, Valentine jumped up onto the retaining wall and urinated into the river below. While he knew Germany well, he still felt chilled by it. He had sensed what was happening in the thirties and his feelings had been borne out. Perhaps it was always there, he thought; something old and evil resided in the land, and the Germans seemed to take nourishment from it. His reason told him that it was wrong to condemn an entire people, but history showed the Germans to be willing followers of every two-bit rabble-rouser who came along each generation. Like their countryside, they seemed to be marked by extremes; there was no center of gravity, no natural social equilibrium. Such thoughts bothered him because, despite their history, Beau Valentine liked Germans.

The meeting between Skorzeny and the Russians was a tough one to figure. If they had Skorzeny's records, why would they have gone to the trouble of flying to Austria to question him? To be sure, Skorzeny had operated on the Russian front, but his missions there had been unsuccessful in comparison with his exploits in the west. Skor zeny's headquarters had been in Friedenthal, only twenty miles north of Berlin. If there were no records there, certainly there would be copies somewhere in the Nazi paper labyrinth. It was only a matter of time until somebody stumbled across them. The officials at Oberursel had been agog with stories of Russian activities. Suddenly the Reds had replaced the Nazis as America's bogeymen; by the hour, new horror stories were traded. From the reports of various intelligence units Valentine had learned that caches of Nazi records were being discovered regularly throughout the country, and that a race was on between the Russians and Americans to see who could find the most. Of course, neither side was telling the other what it had. He could have predicted both the finds and the competition.

After his discussion with Skorzeny, Valentine had used his army contacts to initiate some fast inquiries into the whereabouts of Skorzeny's records. He had the name Gunter Brumm, but needed more. He'd spent weeks talking to G-2 types and gleaning the transcripts of the German commando's many interrogations, sifting for information. Precisely what he was interested in he couldn't say. It wasn't something he could verbalize yet. The urge to investigate was more in his guts than in his brains, but he knew that invariably the one was linked with the other. In a sheaf of German notes he found several references to the satellite training center run by Skorzeny's group near Munich. Based on this he'd asked the OSS office in Switzerland to trace the records, and finally they'd reported that the records of Skorzeny's Friedenthal training facility had been shipped to Nuremberg. They also wanted to know what he was doing. Valentine hung up without giving them an answer. In part he didn't know how to answer his superiors, but more important, it was none of their business. They'd sent him into Germany to snoop, and that's what he was going to do, without their interference. Maybe the unit's records wouldn't reveal anything, but he had to see for himself.

He reached Nuremberg at dawn. The city had been flattened by bombs, and in the final assault by the Seventh Army in the middle of April it had taken several days of house-to-house fighting to dislodge the fanatics. In the process the city was almost completely demolished. Valentine knew all this from written reports, but as he drove through the destruction he decided that words didn't adequately relate the reality of what had happened. Some clean-up efforts had begun; even so, few buildings were still standing. Entire blocks had been razed and reconstituted as piles that from afar looked like pointed breasts. Some civilians were already lined up at American food-distribution centers, while others were gathering to begin the day's attack on the rubble.

The Swiss office had directed Valentine to search out a G-2 section charged with beginning the long process of cataloging and reading German documents, a process that he guessed might take decades to complete. The group was barracked in an estate east of the city, and he was not surprised to find them waiting for him. The records he sought were in cartons and had been fetched from a storage area to a room for his own use. As he perused the papers a thin WAC lieutenant with acne scars on her neck and chin brought him a breakfast of dark toast and powdered eggs. He picked at the food while examining the boxes and their contents.

The WAC sat on a nearby table, watching him, working on her nails with a small file as he ate. "None of this has been cataloged, though we've been through the whole batch once already to get a rough feel for what we've got," she said. Her perfume smelled of lilacs, and the scent caused him to look up. "You ever feel an urge to get a rough feel for what you've got?" she asked. Her head was tilted at an angle, and her lips were slightly open. She had stopped filing, anticipating some kind of response to her overture.

"Personnel records or operational stuff?" he asked as he crunched on a mouthful of toast.

She looked disappointed. "Mostly personnel folders, office memos. Nothing terribly exciting." She paused. "This whole place lacks excitement, if you know what I mean. The guys here are all creeps."

She was persistent; he'd give her that. "How much?" he asked. "Free," she said, sliding down from the table and taking a step toward him.

"I mean how many records?"

Her eyes narrowed. What did she have to do to get through to this guy, stick an asset in his face? "We're not certain. Our notes vary; probably somewhere between two and three thousand folders."

He whistled. "Is there an index?"

"A start on one. Big categories only, but it might help. You're not going to try to go through the whole mess in one sitting?"

"Depends on how long I can last."

She giggled. "I've been wondering the same thing. My name's Angie."

He looked at her. "Sorry, Angie, but this is one of those duty-calls situations. "

"Sure," she said. "I've heard that before." She turned to leave the room, her face beginning to turn red, but he stopped her. "I'm going to have to take a break sometime. Where you going to be?" A guy had to cut himself some slack once in a while.

"Third floor. Fourth door on the right. Don't worry about anything. We're real informal around here. See you later," she said happily as she closed the door.

It was odd how women were attracted to him, Valentine thought. Homely ones, beautiful ones. The homely ones were so desperate for affection that they'd do anything for it but didn't often get the opportunity. The beautiful ones put men off and were just as lonely as those at the other end of the scale. It made him sad.