For over two months Leonhard Meir and the two elderly couples he had tried to take out with him had lived in a roller coaster of uncertainty as the normally well-ordered Stasi police did not seem to know what to do with them. At first they were told they must stay inside, a twenty-four-hour curfew in effect, but then they had been issued brown passbooks allowing them to go outside but no farther man two kilometers.
At Allied headquarters in Brussels, the punishing cost in pilots trying to keep the Soviet-supply lines through eastern Germany closed could no longer be justified. It was clear that if NATO kept losing pilots at this rate, the equation would turn, especially with the enormous stockpiling of arms and materiel SATINT showed was going on in Berlin, the Russians in effect holding the Berliners as hostages in as coldblooded a calculation as the NKA’s General Kim had made in his advance down the beleaguered Korean peninsula.
From southern Germany Second German Corps, consisting of a badly mauled armored division and mountain brigade, fighting next to Seventh and Fifth American Corps, were requesting WFS — weapons-free status — for the mobile, nuclear-tipped Lance missile batteries, which, other than chemical weapons, were considered NATO’s land weapon of last resort. Permission was denied, though the Lances were authorized to fire as many conventional warheads as “deemed necessary,” NATO’s way of signaling its commanders that stockpiles were rapidly diminishing.
Ironically, 130 miles behind the western front, Berlin had been one of the safest places in the opening stages of the war. The Soviet divisions and fighter squadrons situated between the city and western Germany protected the inhabitants from NATO bombing — the area so heavily armed that as well as the central front being festooned with SAM sites, some farmers, members of Stasi reserves, had been issued with the deadly hand-held Soviet SAM-7Ds, so that low-level attacks had become increasingly dangerous. And yet NATO HQ knew the buildup of supplies in Berlin must somehow be checked.
Battling his boredom, Leonhard Meir had started to take much more notice of his surroundings and discovered that the northern suburb of Lübars, where he was being kept along with his elderly acquaintances, could actually take on the air of a rural village, its crossed wooden gateposts and ornamental fences reminding Meir of his country childhood.
Perhaps it was the air, the pervasive smell of stored hay in the farms all about the city, with the soft tones of autumn, that reminded him of another age. If you ignored the jets— the two elderly couples seemed to have no trouble doing this — you could even delude yourself at times that you were on a farm.
At first Leonhard felt ashamed because the older people seemed more able to stand the strain of not knowing what was going to happen. Even the old man who had panicked in the car and had not wanted to return to the city now seemed calmer than he. But what Leonhard Meir didn’t realize was that the old peoples’ hearing had deteriorated to the point that they simply didn’t hear many of the jets. Even so, Meir saw things were changing; morale began slipping rapidly in proportion to the depletion of their canned food stocks and the introduction of severe rationing, all farms’ produce being claimed by the Russian authorities. For a while, supplies of canned goods had held out, and the fall having been reasonably mild to this point meant that some of the late vegetables were also available, though these, too, very quickly ran out. Still, for a time, the Berliners’ renowned sense of humor, never entirely understood by most other Germans, who had never lived surrounded in a Communist sea, had held. Then, when all reserves were gone, shops looted, the sense of humor began to wane — even around the outer suburbs such as Lübars, closer to farms than the inner suburbs. It became evident that “old” Berliners, especially those who had lived in what had once been the old, Western sector, were expendable.
It was on a Friday morning, one of the old men complaining again about how they had become prisoners in their own apartment, that Leonhard first sensed a resentment of his presence. Once grateful to him for trying to get them out of Berlin, the two couples now saw him as merely another mouth to feed.
Going for a walk to let things cool off a little, Meir pondered how long it would be, if ever, before he’d have any knowledge of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, let alone his son, who had been stationed at Fulda. But he was determined not to let the depression overwhelm him, always telling himself that tomorrow would see some small improvement. Surely the war couldn’t last much longer. All the experts had said that another war couldn’t last very long. Just as they had told the world Adolf Schicklgruber wouldn’t last long.
Meir heard the village clock strike noon and set his watch ten minutes ahead, an old habit he’d developed on his shoe salesman’s route to make sure he was never late for appointments.
At that moment a squadron of twenty-four British Canberra Mk-8 bombers were taking off from Greenham Common in southern England, their yellow lightning flash insignias either side of the RAF’s blue-circled red bull’s-eye streaked with water from a passing shower. Their target was Berlin.
MiG fighters scrambled in northern Holland, flying out over the hook high above the North Sea.
Seeing the blips of ten MiGs fifty miles east of him, the squadron leader of the twenty-six Canberra bombers crossing the North Sea called for interceptor assist. This wasn’t necessary, however, as RAF ground radar on England’s south coast had already dispatched six aquamarine, bullet-nosed “Tigers” out over East Anglia into a fish-scaled sky to do battle with the MiGs. The Canberras’ commander looked out across his bomber’s wide, stubby-looking wings and, seeing heavy cloud cover over Holland, instructed his pilots that the squadron would detour farther south, below the hook of Holland, which arced like a left-handed scythe toward Germany, then go in for the attack south of Hannover. The Canberras’ navigators recalculated, under instructions from the wing commander to use Magdeburg, twenty-three miles east of the old West/East German line, as the IAP, initial aiming point, for the bombing run on Berlin.
Of the nine remaining Canberra bombers that had survived the German Roland missiles, three were hit by SAM-16s, the advance hand-held Soviet surface-to-air missiles in plentiful supply along the Berlin Corridor. One Canberra crew managed to bail out over the Havel River in Grunewald Forest in what used to be the American sector of West Berlin. He pulled the cord for his inflatable vest well before he hit the water, but the carbon dioxide cartridge was a dud. One of the coolest of the cool in aerial combat, the pilot, Kevin Murphy, an Australian born and raised in the outback, had a dread of water, and was now desperately telling himself to calm down, which he did after a few anxious moments, unhitching the chute harness and breaking free before beginning to blow into the mouthpiece of the Mae West. Now his uniform, particularly the elastic G suit, was beginning to soak up water at an alarming rate. His finger slipped from where he was holding the mouthpiece. He grabbed for it and resumed blowing as he heard a power boat start out from the shore. He was going under.
The Stasi people’s patrol boat dragged the river for two hours: slow, monotonous work, a crowd gathering on the eastern shore by the picnic tables to see whether they would find the “terror bomber.”
“Why bother?” said one of the three men aboard the patrol boat.
“Because, you Dummkopf” said the oldest comrade in charge of the boat, “it is important.”
“Why?”
“Because, you Dummkopf, headquarters wishes to know what squadron he is from. This is vital intelligence.”
The crew member, a youth in his midtwenties, made a rude noise at the acne-faced teenage boy who was the third member of the crew. “Intelligence, nonsense,” said the crewman. “We know what squadron they came from. Three of them crashed out near Lübars. Can’t you see?” He was pointing north.
The older man in charge knew he was correct, but the thick, coal-brown smoke that was rising and flattening over Berlin was coming not from the Allied bombers that had crashed but from farther in than Lübars, from Tegel Airport and from around Schönefeld Airport to the east, where storage sheds, hit during the raid, were burning out of control.
“So,” pressed the crewman, “why do we waste our time dragging the river? Let the fishes have him, ja?”
The people’s captain, a thickset man with a game leg, was kneeling awkwardly on the deck, face showing the strain, untwisting one of the lines on the chain-weighted drag. When he looked up, his face was beet red from the effort. “If you don’t wish to be sent to the Fulda Gap, my young friend, you’ll help me and stop your complaining, ja?”
“They cannot send me,” answered the crewman insolently. “I have medical exemption.”
“Ah,” said the people’s captain, pushing himself up from the gunwale. “And if the Americans counterattack? If then-ships do come? What then, eh?” Before the crewman could answer, the people’s captain spat into the lake. “That is what your exemption will be worth, Comrade. Nothing.”
“Their ships will not come,” answered the other boy sharply. “And even if they do — where will they land them? We have all the ports. Bremen will fall in a few days. You’ll see.”
“They will use La Rochelle and Saint Nazaire,” said the captain. “They will not need Bremen or Hamburg if they land there. It will also save them two hundred kilometers.”
This gave the two boys food for thought, but the one who had started the argument was not deterred. “Paris will not permit them to use the French ports.”
The captain had straightened out the drag line. “If one of our bombs lands on French soil, France could be at war with us overnight,” he said, turning, suddenly hearing the drag tackle go taut. But it was only one line, the others still loose. He sat back on the seat behind the steering wheel of the plywood boat and put it on “idle,” letting the current push them — the way it would push anything else.
“You think the French capitalists are that stupid?” challenged the youth. “To let a stray bomb bring them to war? No, Comrade. The French are not idiots. If you bombed a whole French city, they would not come in — they would say it was a mistake. They are waiting like the giraffes, the French.”
“Giraffes?”
“Yes… scavengers… you know.”
“You mean hyenas!” laughed the old man. “Giraffes!”
“Whatever you call them,” the youth replied angrily.
“And what if we bombed Paris?” asked the old man. He saw the lines go taut. “Hey then, Comrade? What if Paris was bombed?”
“Paris is different,” conceded the younger man. “That’s quite another matter.”
When they finally found the dead pilot and pulled him aboard, they discovered the air bag, what the “terrorist fliers” called a “Mae West,” had a small tear in it. They delivered the Australian’s body to headquarters in the old Karl Marx Allee and were cheered by some former East Berliners, including several of the Turkish migrant workers unable to go back home but enraged nevertheless by the NATO bombing. The military commander, flanked by Volkspolizei, personally came out to congratulate the people’s patrol.
As they were leaving, the crewman who had been arguing with the people’s captain noticed a police corporal handing the older man what looked like a voucher of some kind. Now he understood why the people’s captain had been so determined to find the flier. Marx was right, he said to the boy. Money is a corrupting force. Nevertheless, if the party had offered a reward—
He went up to the captain and demanded his share, right there and then. And got it.
In Lübars, on the city’s northern outskirts, a gaping bomb crater thirty yards wide was still steaming with burning debris near the remains of the two four-story apartment blocks. The two elderly couples befriended by Leonhard Meir, who was out at the time, had been in one of the apartments when the six Canberra bombers struck.
With an efficiency they were famous for, the Berliners immediately began to clear the rubble, looking for survivors, moving as quickly as caution would allow around the debris, especially a staircase teetering near the edge of the crater, though it was quite clear they did not expect to find anyone who would be easily identifiable. The strangled horn siren of the Volkspolizei put an end to the clearance, however, as police arrived, quickly cordoned off the area for “investigation.”
“Investigation of what?” asked an elderly Berliner, his wife still shaking but with presence of mind enough to pull him away.
“Investigation of crimes against the state!” answered the policeman.
The old man Berliner threw his hands up in disgust. “Crimes against the state? Against those Russian pigs, you mean. Don’t forget Moscow in your investigations, Kamerad!”
“Silence!” shouted the policeman, and despite the death and destruction that had come upon them like a cyclone, several people began laughing, others joining in, mocking the official’s officiousness. Several small boys were playing war, running around the crater and the cordoned-off debris, one with a plane in his hand. It was an American F-15, ghost gray with U.S. Air Force insignia.
“Whose child is that?” demanded the policeman.
“Mine,” said a woman rather timidly.
“Stop him. It is not permitted.”
“What isn’t?” cut in the old man again.
“Antisocial behavior,” answered the Volkspolizei.
The old man spread his hands again, staring at the sky, his faded coat ballooning about him like a clown. “You talk of antisocial behavior!” He pointed angrily at the crater. “You are the cause of this! You — you fascist!”
The Volkspolizei took him away, his wife screaming as he was hustled inside the small Volga sedan.
In the second apartment that had been split open as if struck by an enormous ax, several suites were open to the air like a doll’s house, a body visible and still near the lip of the third floor. And, astonishingly to most of the onlookers, a radio was blaring with news reports of the “brüderlicher Hilfskrieg”—the “fraternal war of assistance”—the boys around the crater fighting now over who would be Bomber-mannschaft, “bomber crew,” and who AA-Flak, “AA battery commander.”
After a while another Volkspolizei returned and checked off names against those on record as having lived in the two apartment blocks. They managed to identify some by wedding rings, medical bands, odd podiatric shoes, and so forth. There were still eleven people unaccounted for, among them the temporary permit holder, Leonhard Meir.
By nightfall Meir had decided to try again to escape from Berlin. At first he felt somehow responsible for the old couples’ death, for not having been there with them, for having left, all of them in a bad temper. But soon guilt gave way to his determination to reach the west. He had hatched the plan on the way back from his work after having seen several dead Stasi-led AA battery crews near Tegel Forest. All that remained of one battery after a direct hit from one of the Canberras’ iron bombs was strips of flesh dangling from tree branches like sodden toilet paper. But nearby, the headless corpse of one man was still sitting upright in the sidecar of an army motorcycle, the dark blue boiler suit and AA armband the man had been wearing bloodied and lacerated by shrapnel. Meir also noticed that several other corpses nearby which were not burned and were dressed in the boiler suits looked as if they were in their fifties — about his age.
Racing against what he knew would be the imminent arrival of the ambulances, their Klaxons wailing in the distance, Meir quickly stripped a boiler suit from one of the corpses, snatched up one of the helmets strewn about the edge of the wood, and made his way over to the motorcycle. He kicked the starter pedal. Nothing. He kicked again and again until he was exhausted, then gave it what he told himself would be his last try. The bike coughed and promptly died. “Shit!”
Now he could hear a car, perhaps a hundred yards or so away down by the lake, and voices coming toward him. He ran back to the gutted battery and into the wood. The voices receded, going farther down the lake. Back at the bike, Meir kicked the starter again. It spluttered, coughed, and rattled to life. He unscrewed the petrol cap and stuck his finger in it. It felt ice-cold. Full tank. He had no excuse — it was either now or never. A dash for freedom down the Corridor or wait. Would the Allies come? Or would it be slow starvation in the occupied sector? No one knew. He let the engine die. If stopped by the GDR Polizei or the Stasi—with nothing but his “enemy alien” card, it would mean torture and interrogation.
He hesitated, got off the bike, moved around, looking for a piece of ID, finding an identification card on one of the dead. The card’s photo, even in the pale, shimmering moonlight over the lake, looked nothing like him. Entscheide doch, Meir! — ”Make up your mind, Meir!”—he told himself. Brio! Do it with brio! He kicked the starter pedal again and, as it gained power with a throaty roar, switched on the slit-eye headlamp and tightened the chin strap of the AA helmet. Slipping the bike into gear, easing out the clutch, he sped over the grass down toward the lakeside road and from there headed out for the autobahn, singing, his voice rising, though drowned by the noise of the bike and sidecar, “La Donna e Mobile” louder and louder, trying to drown the fear that kept telling him to turn back, a heavy drone of Russian bombers overhead. He had strapped on a holstered gun but had absolutely no idea how to use it, wondering if it had a safety catch or not.