Spandau Phoenix

BOOK ONE

West Berlin, 1987

A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.

PROVERBS 11.13

ONE

The wrecking ball arced slowly across the snow-carpeted courtyard and smashed into the last building left on the prison grounds, launching bricks through the air like moss-covered mortar rounds. Spandau Prison, the brooding red-brick fortress that had stood for over a century and housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals for the past forty years, was being leveled in a single day.

The last inmate of Spandau, Rudolf Hess, was dead. He had committed suicide just four weeks ago, relieving the West German government of the burden of one million pounds sterling it paid each year to maintain the aged Nazi’s isolated captivity. In a rare display of solidarity, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—the former Allies who guarded Spandau by monthly turns—had agreed that the prison should be destroyed as quickly as possible, to prevent its becoming a shrine to neo-Nazi fanatics.

Throughout the day, crowds had gathered in the cold to watch the demolition. Because Spandau stood in the British sector of Berlin, it fell to the Royal Engineers to carry out this formidable job. At first light an explosives team brought down the main structure like a collapsing house of cards. Then, after the dust settled into the snow, bulldozers and wrecking cranes moved in. They pulverized the prison’s masonry, dismembered its iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.

This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost, seemed ancient history. But now that Spandau’s forbidding battlements no longer darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.

By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck like a bomb. The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.

A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors. It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human expression of awe at the sight of large-scale destruction. Irritated by the spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went to work.

“Achtung!” they bellowed. “Go home! Haue ab! This area is clearly marked as dangerous! Move on! It’s too cold for gawking! Nothing here but brick and stone!”

These efforts convinced the casually curious, who continued home with a story of minor interest to tell over dinner. But others were not so easily diverted. Several old men lingered across the busy street, their breath steaming in the cold. Some feigned boredom, others stared openly at the wrecked prison or glanced furtively at the others who had stayed behind. A stubborn knot of young toughs—dubbed “skinheads” because of their ritually shaven scalps—swaggered up to the floodlit prison gate to shout Nazi slogans at the British troops.

They did not go unnoticed. Every passerby who had shown more than a casual interest in the wrecking operation had been photographed today. Inside the trailer being used to coordinate the demolition, a Russian corporal carefully clicked off two telephoto exposures of every person who remained on the block after the German police moved in. Within the hour these photographs would find their way into KGB caserooms in East Berlin, where they would be digitized, fed into a massive database, and run through a formidable electronic gauntlet. Intelligence agents, Jewish fanatics, radical journalists, surviving Nazis: each exotic species would be painstakingly identified and catalogued, and any unknowns handed over to the East German secret police—the notorious Stasi—to be manually compared against their files.

These steps would consume priceless computer time and many man-hours of work by the East Germans, but Moscow didn’t mind asking. The destruction of Spandau was anything but routine to the KGB. Lavrenti Beria himself, chief of the brutal NKVD under Stalin, had passed a special directive down through the successive heads of the cheka, defining the importance of Spandau’s inmates to unsolved cases. And on this evening—thirty-four years after Beria’s death by firing squad—only one of those cases remained open. Rudolf Hess. The current chief of the KGB did not intend to leave it that way.

A little way up the Wilhelmstrasse, perched motionless on a low brick wall, a sentinel even more vigilant than the Russians watched the Germans clear the street. Dressed as a laborer and almost seventy years old, the watcher had the chiseled face of a hawk, and he stared with bright, unblinking eyes. He needed no camera. His brain instantaneously recorded each face that appeared in the street, making associations and judgments no computer ever could.

His name was Jonas Stern. For twelve years Stern had not left the State of Israel; indeed, no one knew that he was in Germany now. But yesterday he had paid out of his own pocket to travel to this country he hated beyond all thought. He had known about Spandau’s destruction, of course, they all did. But something deeper had drawn him here. Three days ago—as he carried water from the kibbutz well to his small shack on the edge of the Negev desert—something bilious had risen from his core and driven him to this place. Stern had not resisted. Such premonitions came infrequently, and experience had taught him they were not to be ignored.

Watching the bulwarked prison being crushed into powder, he felt opposing waves of triumph and guilt roll through his chest. He had known—he knew—men and women who had passed through Spandau on their way to the death factories of Mauthausen and Birkenau. Part of him wished the prison could remain standing, as a monument to those souls, and to the punishment meted out to their murderers.

Punishment, he thought, but not justice. Never justice.

Stern reached into a worn leather bag at his side and withdrew an orange. He peeled it while he watched the demolition. The light was almost gone. In the distance a huge yellow crane backed too quickly across the prison courtyard. Stern tensed as the flagstones cracked like brittle bones.

Ten minutes later the mechanical monsters ground to a screeching halt. While the senior British officer issued his dismissal orders, a pale yellow Berlin city bus rumbled up to the prison, headlights cutting through the lightly falling snow. The moment it stopped, twenty-four soldiers dressed in a potpourri of uniforms spilled into the darkening prison yard and broke into four groups of six. These soldiers represented a compromise typical of the farcical Four Power administration of Spandau. The normal month-long guard tours were handled by rota, and went off with a minimum of friction. But the destruction of the prison, like every previous disruption of routine, had brought chaos. First the Russians had refused to accept German police security at the prison. Then—because no Allied nation trusted any of its “allies” to guard Spandau’s ruins alone—they decided they would all do it, with a token detachment of West Berlin police along to keep up appearances. While the Royal Engineers boarded the idling bus, the NCO’s of the four guard details deployed their men throughout the compound.

Near the shattered prison gate, a black American master sergeant gave his squad a final brief: “Okay, ladies. Everybody’s got his sector map, right?”

“Sir!” barked his troops in unison.

“Then listen up. This ain’t gate duty at the base, got it? The Germs have the perimeter—we got the interior. Our orders are to guard this wreckage. That’s ostensibly, as the captain says. We are here to watch the Russians. They watch us; we watch them. Same old same old, right? Only these Ivans probably ain’t grunts, dig? Probably GRU—maybe even KGB. So keep your pots on and your slits open. Questions?”

“How long’s the gig, Sarge?”

“This patrol lasts twelve hours, Chapman, six to six. If you’re still awake then—and you’d better be—then you can get back to your hot little pastry on the Bendlerstrasse.” When the laughter died, the sergeant grinned and barked, “Spread out, gentlemen! The enemy is already in place.”

As the six Americans fanned out into the yard, a green-and-white Volkswagen van marked POLIZEI stopped in the street before the prison. It waited for a break in traffic, then jounced over the curb and came to rest before the command trailer steps. Instantly, six men wearing the dusty green uniform of the West Berlin police trundled out of its cargo door and lined up between the van and the trailer.

Dieter Hauer, the captain in charge of the police contingent, climbed down from the driver’s seat and stepped around the van. He had an arresting face, with a strong jaw and a full military mustache. His clear gray eyes swept once across the wrecked prison lot. In the dusk he noticed that the foul-weather ponchos of the Allied soldiers gave the impression that they all served the same army. Hauer knew better. Those young men were a fragmented muster of jangling nerves and suspicion—two dozen accidents waiting to happen.

The Germans call their police bullen—“bulls”—and Hauer personified the nickname. Even at fifty-five, his powerful, barrel-chested body radiated enough authority to intimidate men thirty years his junior. He wore neither gloves, helmet, nor cap against the cold, and contrary to what the recruits in his unit suspected, this was no affectation meant to impress them. Rather, as people who knew him were aware, he possessed an almost inhuman resilience against external annoyances, whether natural or man-made. Hauer called, “Attention!” as he stepped back around the van. His officers formed a tight unit beneath the command trailer’s harsh floodlamp.

“I’ve told anyone who’d listen that we didn’t want this assignment,” he said. “Naturally no one gives a shit.”

There were a few nervous chuckles. Hauer spat onto the snow. A hostage-recovery specialist, he plainly considered this token guard detail an affront to his dignity. “You should feel very safe tonight, gentlemen,” he continued with heavy sarcasm. “We have the soldiers of France, England, the United States, and Mother Russia with us tonight. They are here to provide the security which we, the West Berlin police, are deemed unfit to provide.” Hauer clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m sure you men feel as I do about this, but nothing can be done.

“You know your assignments. Four of you will guard the perimeter. Apfel, Weiss—you’re designated rovers. You’ll patrol at random, watching for improper conduct among the regular troops. What constitutes ‘improper conduct’ here, I have not been told. I assume it means unsanctioned searches or provocation between forces. Everyone do your best to stay clear of the Russians. Whatever agencies those men out there serve, I doubt it’s the Red Army. If you have a problem, sound your whistle and wait. I’ll come to you. Everyone else hold your position until instructed otherwise.”

Hauer paused, staring into the young faces around him. His eyes lingered on a reddish-blond sergeant with gray eyes, then flicked away. “Be cautious,” he said evenly, “but don’t be timid. We are on German soil, regardless of what any political document may say. Any provocation, verbal or physical, will be reported to me immediately. Immediately.”

The venom in Hauer’s voice made it plain he would brook no insult from the Soviets or anyone else. He spoke as though he might even welcome it. “Check your sector maps carefully,” he added. “I want no mistakes tonight. You will show these soldier boys the meaning of professionalism and discipline. Go!”

Six policemen scattered.

Hans Apfel, the reddish-blond sergeant whom Hauer had designated one of the rovers, trotted about twenty meters, then stopped and looked back at his superior. Hauer was studying a map of the prison, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. Hans started to walk back, but the American sergeant suddenly appeared from behind the police van and engaged Hauer in quiet conversation.

Hans turned and struck out across the snow, following the line of the Wilhemstrasse to his left. Angrily, he crushed a loose window pane beneath his boot. With no warning at all this day had become one of the most uncomfortable of his life. One minute he had been on his way out of the Friedrichstrasse police station, headed home to his wife; the next a duty sergeant had tapped him on the shoulder, said he needed a good man for a secret detail, and practically thrust Hans into a van headed for Spandau Prison. That in itself was a pain in the ass. Double shifts were hell, especially those that had to be pulled on foot in the snow.

But that wasn’t the real source of Hans’s discomfort. The problem was that the commander of the guard detail, Captain Dieter Hauer, was Hans’s father. None of the other men on this detail knew that—for which Hans was grateful—but he had a strange feeling that might soon change. During the ride to Spandau, he had stared resolutely out of the van window, refusing to be drawn into conversation. He couldn’t understand how it had happened. He and his father had a long-standing arrangement—a simple agreement designed to deal with a complex family situation—and Hauer must have broken it. It was the only explanation. After a few minutes of bitter confusion, Hans resolved to deal with this situation the way he always did. By ignoring it.

He kicked a mound of snow out of his path. So far he had made only two cautious circuits of the perimeter. He felt more than a little tense about strolling into a security zone where soldiers carried loaded assault rifles as casually as their wallets. He panned his eyes across the dark lot, shielding them from the snow with a gloved hand. God, but the British did their job well, he thought. Ghostly mountains of jagged brick and iron rose up out of the swirling snow like the bombed-out remnants of Berlin buildings that had never been restored. Drawing a deep breath, he stepped forward into the shadows.

It was a strange journey. For fifteen or twenty steps he would see nothing but the glow of distant street lamps. Then a soldier would materialize, a black mirage against the falling snow. Some challenged him, most did not. When they did, Hans simply said, “Versailles”—the code word printed at the bottom of his sector map—and they let him pass.

He couldn’t shake a vague feeling of anxiety that had settled on his shoulders. As he passed the soldiers, he tried to focus on the weapon each carried. In the darkness all the uniforms looked alike, but the guns identified everyone. Each Russian stood statue-still, his sharklike Kalashnikov resting butt-first on the ground like an extension of his arm. The French also stood, though not at attention. They cradled their FAMAS rifles in crooked elbows and tried vainly to smoke in the frigid wind. The British carried no rifles, each having been issued a sidearm in the interest of discretion.

It was the Americans who disturbed Hans. Some leaned casually against broken slabs of concrete, their weapons nowhere in evidence. Others squatted on piles of brick, hunched over their M-16 Armalites as if they could barely stay awake. None of the U.S. soldiers had even bothered to challenge Hans’s passage. At first he felt angry that NATO soldiers would take such a casual approach to their duties. But after a while he began to wonder. Their indifference could simply be a ruse, couldn’t it? Certainly for an assignment such as this a high-caliber team would have been chosen?

After three hours’ patrol, Hans’s suspicions were proved correct, when he nearly stumbled over the black American sergeant surveying the prison grounds through a bulbous scope fitted to his M-16. Not wishing to startle him, Hans whispered, “Versailles, Sergeant.” When the American didn’t respond, he tried again. “What can you see?”

“Everything from the command trailer on the east to that Ivan pissing on a brick pile on the west,” the sergeant replied in German, never taking his eyes from the scope.

“I can’t see any of that!”

“Image-intensifier,” the American murmured. “Well, well … I didn’t know the Red Army let its sentries take a piss-break on guard du—What—” The noncom wrenched the rifle away from his face.

“What is it?” Hans asked, alarmed.

“Nothing … damn. This thing works by light magnification, not infrared. That smartass flashed a spotlight toward me and whited out my scope. What an asshole.”

Hans grunted in mutual distaste for the Russians. “Nice scope,” he said, hoping to get a look through it himself.

“Your outfit doesn’t have ’em?”

“Some units do. The drug units, mostly. I used one in training, but they aren’t issued for street duty.”

“Too bad.” The American scanned the ruins. “This is one weird place, isn’t it?”

Hans shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.

“Like a graveyard, man. A hundred and fifty cells in this place, and only one occupied—by Hess. Dude must’ve known some serious shit to keep him locked down that tight.” The sergeant cocked his head and squinted at Hans. “Man, you know you look familiar. Yeah … you look like that guy, that tennis player—”

“Becker,” Hans finished, looking at the ground.

“Becker, yeah. Boris Becker. I guess everybody tells you that, huh?”

Hans looked up. “Once a day, at least.”

“I’ll bet it doesn’t hurt you with the Fräuleins.”

“I’d rather have his income,” Hans said, smiling. It was his stock answer, but the American laughed. “Besides,” he added, “I’m married.”

“Yeah?” The sergeant grinned back. “Me too. Six years and two kids. You?”

Hans shook his head. “We’ve been trying, but we haven’t had any luck.”

“That’s a bitch,” said the American, shaking his head. “I got some buddies with that problem. Man, they gotta check the calendar and their old lady’s temperature and every other damn thing before they can even get it on. No thanks.”

When the sergeant saw Hans’s expression, he said, “Hey, sorry ’bout that, man. Guess you know more about it than you ever wanted to.” He raised his rifle again, sighting in on yet another invisible target. “Bang,” he said, and lowered the weapon. “We’d better keep moving, Boris.” He disappeared into the shadows, taking the scope with him.

For the next six hours, Hans moved through the darkness without speaking to anyone, except to answer the challenges of the Russians. They seemed to be taking the operation much more seriously than anyone else, he noticed. Almost personally.

About four A.M. he decided to have a second look at his map. He approached the command trailer obliquely, walking backward to read by the glow of the single floodlamp. Suddenly he heard voices. Peering around the trailer, he saw the French and British sergeants sitting together on the makeshift steps. The Frenchman was very young, like most of the twenty-seven hundred conscripts who comprised the French garrison in Berlin. The Brit was older, a veteran of England’s professional army. He did most of the talking; the Frenchman smoked and listened in silence. Now and then the wind carried distinct words to Hans. “Hess” was one—“lefenant” and “bloody Russians” were others. Suddenly the Frenchman stood, flicked his cigarette butt into the darkness, and strode out of the white pool of light. The Englishman followed close on his heels.

Hans turned to go, then froze. One meter behind him stood the imposing silhouette of Captain Dieter Hauer. The fiery eye of a cigar blazed orange in the darkness.

“Hello, Hans,” said the deep, burnished voice.

Hans said nothing.

“Damned cold for this time of year, eh?”

“Why am I here?” Hans asked. “You broke our agreement.”

“No, I didn’t. This was bound to happen sooner or later, even with a twenty-thousand-man police force.”

Hans considered this. “I suppose you’re right,” he said at length. “It doesn’t matter. Just another assignment, right?”

Hauer nodded. “You’ve been doing a hell of a job, I hear. Youngest sergeant in Berlin.”

Hans flushed a little, shrugged.

“I lied, Hans,” Hauer said suddenly. “I did break our agreement. I requested you for this detail.”

Hans’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because it was busy work. Killing time. I thought we might get a chance to talk.”

Hans studied the slushy ground. “So talk.”

Hauer seemed to search for words. “There’s a lot that needs saying.”

“Or nothing.”

Hauer sighed deeply. “I’d really like to know why you came to Berlin. Three years now. You must have wanted some kind of reconciliation … or answers, or something.”

Hans stiffened. “So why are you asking the questions?”

Hauer looked hard into Hans’s eyes. “All right,” he said softly. “We’ll wait until you’re ready.”

Before Hans could reply, Hauer vanished into the darkness. Even the glow of his cigar had disappeared. Hans stood still for some moments; then, shaking his head angrily, he hurried into the shadows and resumed his patrol.

Time passed quickly now, the silence broken only by an occasional siren or the roar of a jet from the British military airport at Gatow. With the snow soaking into his uniform, Hans walked faster to take his mind off the cold. He hoped he would be lucky enough to get home before his wife, Ilse, left for work. Sometimes after a particularly rough night shift, she would cook him a breakfast of Weisswurst and buns, even if she was in a hurry.

He checked his watch. Almost 6:00 A.M. It would be dawn soon. He felt better as the end of his shift neared. What he really wanted was to get out of the weather for a while and have a smoke. A mountain of shattered concrete near the rear of the lot looked as though it might afford good shelter, so he made for it. The nearest soldier was Russian, but he stood at least thirty meters from the pile. Hans slipped through a narrow opening when the sentry wasn’t looking.

He found himself in a comfortable little nook that shielded him completely from the wind. He wiped off a slab of concrete, sat down, and warmed his face by breathing into his cupped gloves. Nestled in this dark burrow, he was invisible to the patrolling soldiers, yet he still commanded a surprisingly wide view of the prison grounds. The snow had finally stopped, and even the wind had fallen off a bit. In the predawn silence, the demolished prison looked like pictures of bombed-out Dresden he had seen as a schoolboy: motionless sentries standing tall against bleak destruction, watching over nothing.

Hans took out his cigarettes. He was trying to quit, but he still carried a pack whenever he went into a potentially stressful situation. Just the knowledge that he could light up sometimes calmed his nerves. But not tonight. Removing one glove with his teeth, he fumbled in his jacket for matches. He leaned as far away as he could from the opening to his little cave, scraped a match across the striking pad, then cupped it in his palm to conceal the light. He held it to his cigarette, drawing deeply. His shivering hand made the job difficult, but he soon steadied it and was rewarded with a jagged rush of smoke.