The Ten Thousand (69 page)

With that, the assembled rangers saluted and filed out of the room without another word, leaving Ilvanich alone to continue his study of the maps, photos, and graphics.

Unable to sleep or sit, Abigail Wilson wandered about the room that served as her private study.

Though she could have gone down and joined the others in the War Room buried beneath the house that had been home to some of the most important men in American history, Wilson knew that her presence there would only serve to heighten the nervous apprehension that always seemed to hang in that room like a cloud. Through years of practice Wilson had learned the fine art of hiding one’s emotions and acting as those about you expected. Yet there were times when she simply could not stuff her emotions away like so much dirty laundry. She never made excuses for this, a trait that some of her male opponents in private referred to as a flaw. Instead she trusted her own instincts, for she knew there were times when it was wise to remove herself from public view and in private give free rein to whatever emotions swept over her.

Tonight her fears and doubts came forth like a spring storm. At first there was only a slight darkening on the distant horizon, so subtle that one hardly noticed it. Then came a gentle stirring of the wind, first that way, then this, as if Mother Nature herself was vacillating, unsure if she wanted to unleash her fury.

But this lasted only a few minutes. With the measured pace of a great musical composition, the various elements began to make their presence felt. The clouds rolled in, casting their shadows across everything beneath them. The wind gave up its hesitancy and began to move across the face of the earth with purpose and force. Finally in the distance, like great kettledrums announcing a storm of war-horses, thunder warned all who heard that a great storm was coming. Finally, when all the elements were ready, wind, rain, darkness, and thunder, the storm unleashed its full fury and came crashing down.

In the beginning, during her first few years of public life, Wilson had discounted her feelings, telling close friends that they were nothing more than silly emotions that she needed to master. But as her political career blossomed and she grew in both importance and ability, Wilson also matured and found that she didn’t need to deny herself or her emotions. For she found that, like the spring storm, an occasional venting of her fears or anger in private served to release her tensions and cleanse her soul in the same way that a spring storm unleashes the pent-up fury of the heavens and makes way for the cool, fresh calmness that inevitably follows.

So Wilson chose not to sit in the War Room with key members of her staff like mourners attending a wake. Instead she stayed in her private apartments and allowed her emotions and thoughts free rein for a while. In a few hours she would need to be in complete control of herself, for it would be in the aftermath of the operation to take back the nuclear weapons from the Germans, an operation that was about to commence several thousand miles away, while the wounded were still being tended to and the dead counted, that her struggle would begin.

In her wanderings, Wilson came to the window and stopped. Looking out, she could see the lights of the city that lit the streets and the many imposing statues and monuments that made the city of Washington an open-air museum. Even at this hour there was a fair amount of traffic, something that never ceased to amaze her. She still didn’t understand cities, even after living in Denver for years and now Washington. They were alien places with their own rules, their own codes of ethics, their own ways of life.

In many ways, Wilson thought, her inability to understand the city was like her ignorance of the innermost psychology that drove the military machine that she now commanded. While the organizational charts and mission statements of each of the services and units were simple to understand and their use easily explained, she lacked a real appreciation of what it meant to be a soldier or an airman or a sailor.

Nothing in all her years of college, life as a mother, member of Colorado’s leading law firm, and governor of that state gave her any idea of what motivated young men and women to place themselves with such casualness into harm’s way in defense of a vague idea, a principle. How shallow such words as duty, honor, country, must seem when facing death. Or were they shallow? Was there real meaning in those words that only a person faced with his or her own mortality could really understand and appreciate?

Leaning her head against the window, Wilson felt the coldness of the glass against her warm forehead.

When she had been a young girl in Colorado and her head seemed so full of troubled thoughts that it appeared that it must burst, she would go over to the window and place her head against the pane of glass. Somehow, in the mysterious ways that elude explanation or logic, the image of the soft, quiet landscape and the feeling of the cold glass against her brow served to calm her.

There was nothing more to do. She had done what she had felt was right. Now it was up to others to do what was necessary, leaving her to deal with her emotions alone and prepare for the consequences of her decisions.

With every turn of his staff car’s tires, he rolled closer to the front gate of the storage site. Seated in the front passenger seat clutching the assault rifle that lay across his lap, Ilvanich could feel his heart beat louder, more violently. Though he tried not to, his eyes remained fixed on the muzzle of a machine gun that protruded from the aperture of a concrete bunker that sat next to the front gate. Ilvanich knew that behind that gun there was a young German soldier, a paratrooper, with his finger wrapped around the trigger and his gaze fixed along the sights of the machine gun that was locked on his vehicle. In silence, while Sergeant George Couvelha seated to his left drove them forward at a steady, unrelenting pace, Ilvanich waited for the machine gun to fire. At this range there was little doubt that both he and Couvelha would perish in the first volley. Yet there was nothing he could do. It had to be this way. It was expected of him. He had known all of his life that nothing less would be acceptable.

Still, sheer terror that tried to wrestle away Ilvanich’s sanity couldn’t be denied. It was like the feeling of helplessness he got when he sat in the front seat of a roller coaster. Slowly, with mechanical precision, the roller coaster was cranked up the first incline. Ilvanich hated roller coasters, hated them with a passion. To please a girl he was with or a little nephew he was entertaining, however, he would always go, as was expected of him. There would be when the lead car reached the top nothing but sheer terror, panic that Ilvanich was expected to master because he was, in the eyes of those with him, the strong one.

Today, as on those occasions, there was no other place he could be. He was where he was expected to be and nothing and no one could change that. It was his fate, and he accepted it in silence.

At the command post that served as the headquarters for the 2nd Battalion, 26th Parachute Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Jakob Radek greeted the news that there was a convoy of trucks carrying troops approaching the front gate with a great sigh of relief. His pleas to Colonel Haas, his brigade commander, had been heard. It had been a stupid decision to strip away one of his companies and send it to Berlin for riot control just when the Americans were growing closer and the danger of a strike against the storage sites was at its greatest. Radek knew it. And Haas knew it.

In stormy conversations, both when he had received the order early the night before and again not more than three hours ago, Radek had told Haas exactly what he thought of the decision, not to mention the fools in Berlin who had placed such a demand on him. Though he knew he had been wrong to do so, it was, he felt, necessary to make his protest in the strongest possible terms. That Haas, or one of the idiots in Berlin, had finally come to his senses and realized what he had done didn’t surprise Radek.

Without further thought, he ordered the sergeant of the guard at the gate to have the company commander of the returning company report immediately to his office. Radek was anxious to get his third company back into the defensive positions inside the inner secure area where the nuclear weapons were stored. Hanging up the phone, he finally felt that he could breathe easy. Given the choice of having a strong force in the inner secure area at the expense of weakening his outer perimeter, Radek had opted for the strong outer perimeter. Since it was his mission, after all, to keep the Americans away from the nuclear weapons, it made perfect sense to Radek that the further away from the inner secure area he could keep the Americans the better. Besides, he reasoned, if the outer perimeter broke at some point, he could always withdraw units on the outer perimeter that were not under pressure into the inner secure area. That this gamble in deployment of his forces would never be put to the test was for Radek a great relief.

At the gate the sergeant of the guard looked at the receiver of the telephone, then at the corporal who stood across from him. Radek’s last instructions, in light of the standing orders that no one under any circumstances was to be allowed in, did not make any sense at all. Of course, pulling one of the companies away from the battalion and sending it to Berlin for riot duty didn’t make sense either.

Carefully replacing the receiver, the sergeant looked at the convoy, now less than fifty meters away, and then back to the corporal. He shook his head before he gave an upward motion of his arm, the signal to his men to remove the barriers at the gate and let the convoy through.

At this range, Ilvanich knew that the machine gunner couldn’t miss. There would be no chance to duck, no opportunity to strike back. He would fall with the first burst. It came as a shock when Couvelha shouted, “They’re opening the gate for us, Major. The fools are going to let us in!”

Tearing his eyes away from the sinister black muzzle of the machine gun, Ilvanich looked over to the gate and saw a German corporal waving them through a now opened gate. For the briefest of moments Ilvanich was flabbergasted. What, he wondered, was going on? But quickly he recovered from his surprise and ordered Couvelha to continue forward. “They must be expecting someone and they think we are them. Go, go. Keep going but do not speed up.”

Just as Ilvanich’s vehicle pulled even with the front gate, Colonel Johann Haas’s staff car came out of the wood line and into the open stretch of road that led to the storage site. He saw the convoy of trucks entering the storage site and wondered what was going on. Already angered by the tone of his last conversation with Radek, Haas began to slip into an absolute rage.

Under ordinary circumstances, Haas was a reasonable man. But these, as people kept reminding him, were not ordinary circumstances. Besides, he was not used to having his subordinates argue with him over such important issues. While Haas was always willing to listen to the thoughts and ideas of his subordinates, when he gave a final order he expected discussion to stop and for the order to be carried out. Radek’s continued badgering and the tone of his conversations had infuriated Haas, who was already angered over his dealings with his own superiors. After Radek’s second phone call of the morning, Haas wanted to run from his office, jump into his vehicle, and drive immediately to the weapons storage site and relieve Radek on the spot. But there were other, more pressing matters that needed to be tended to.

The battalion he had sent to Berlin for riot duty had turned out to be woefully inadequate for the task.

Though he didn’t like the idea, he had ordered each of his other two battalions guarding the two nuclear weapons sites near Potsdam to send one of their companies to Berlin to augment the battalion already there.

This problem was only one that the parachute colonel had to deal with. Besides his own units, he discovered two battalions from the 3rd Panzer Division in Berlin. They had come into the city in the middle of the night after the President of the Parliament had made a personal appeal to the commander of the 3rd Panzer. By dawn Haas had learned that the President of the Parliament, fearing that Ruff had brought Haas’s battalion into Berlin to intimidate them, felt the need to counter Haas’s battalion with units loyal to the Parliament. So, although he had wanted to deal with Radek, Haas had felt that it was more important to meet with the commander of the 3rd Panzer’s units in Berlin and ensure that they established a clear understanding of where each stood on the matter of loyalty to the government. The last thing Haas wanted to do was to have various units of the Bundeswehr start tearing away at each other because of misunderstandings.

Yet now, seeing the lead vehicle of the convoy start to roll through the front gate of the storage site, Haas regretted his earlier decision. Something was happening here, and he didn’t like the looks of it.

Haas began shouting to his driver and making gestures. “Go around. Go around this convoy and head for the front gate, now!”

Caught off guard by his commander’s sudden shouts, the driver did exactly as he was told. Jerking the wheel to the left, he stepped on the accelerator and began to race down the road in the left lane so that he could pass the trucks as the lead vehicles of the convoy began to roll into the storage site.

At the gate the guard corporal turned his attention away from the trucks passing him as he heard the gunning of an engine. Looking down the flat, straight road, he saw a staff car headed right toward him and gaining speed. Throwing up his right arm and waving violently, he yelled halt three times in quick succession. The driver of the staff car only drove faster. Realizing that he was in danger, the corporal began to run for the cover of the bunker, yelling to the paratroopers inside to open fire as he ran by.

The sudden order to halt, followed by the rattle of the machine gun behind them, caused Ilvanich to snap, “NOW!
STEP
ON IT.”

Like Haas’s driver, Couvelha complied without hesitation. The inner secure area was straight ahead, less than three hundred meters away. With luck they could cover that distance in a matter of seconds and have a real chance to grab the weapons. Couvelha ignored Ilvanich as Ilvanich kicked his door open, leveled his automatic rifle, and began to spray the bewildered Germans along the side of the road as they emerged from buildings.