Their own FW 189 had to be the last SIGINT variant left to the Luftwaffe’s Tactical Reconnaissance Command, which was particularly bad luck for them, since orders had come down from the Aufklärungsgruppe HQ in the early hours of the morning for a Uhu to be sent over Ivan’s 1st Ukrainian Front on a signal intelligence mission of the utmost importance. Ivan’s radio traffic was building up, a sure sign that a new offensive was imminent.
Menzel had also been told to get pictures since on his previous mission to the target none of the photographs had come out. Some stupid technician in the photography lab had over-exposed the film. Menzel had been tempted to draft the idiot as one of his crew members for the return flight to teach him a lesson he would never forget.
Their gunner, a Gefreiter recruited from the almost redundant flight maintenance shop on the airfield, uttered bullish oaths every few minutes about how many Yaks he would cut down under his twin-MG 81 machine guns and Menzel had not moved to silence him even though he knew the teenager would be lucky to spot a Russian fighter, let alone hit one, before the Uhu went down in flames.
Because Menzel knew where they were going. Worse than that, he had been there only six days before.
He flicked the powerful eavesdropping radio to test, thumped it once, and marvelled as his headset burst into life.
Then he looked back up to the pilot’s and gunner’s positions. Chrudim was a rotten mission for their first — and very probably, last — flight, but then perhaps they were the lucky ones. At least they didn’t know they were heading for one of the biggest concentrations of Soviet armour, troops and flak on the Eastern Front.
“Turn left,” Herries said, “onto Martin Luther.”
The driver nodded and swung the truck off the wide and straight Grunwalder Strasse that had brought them into Munich. The journey had been much shorter than Kruze anticipated, but that was only because the road into Munich was almost devoid of traffic. The same could not be said of the highway leading south, towards the mountains. It was an unrelenting, slow moving stream of military vehicles, horse-drawn refugee carts and stumbling humanity trying to escape the American advance pressing towards the city from the other side.
The few checkpoints they had encountered before the city approaches had not been concerned with a single KG squad heading back into the teeth of the fighting in defence of the Reich. They were looking for deserters heading the other way. Kruze had caught the meaningful glances between the Wehrmacht guards and the driver as papers were exchanged: thanks to the pig of an Obersturmführer sitting in the cabin they were now going back to almost certain death.
Yet no one in the truck had dared oppose Herries, mainly because the average age of the dozen or so troops in the back was much the same as their teenage driver.
They drove slowly northwards along Eduard Schmid Strasse, Herries throwing quick glances past the driver at the River Isar. Kruze knew exactly what was going through the traitor’s mind. They had to get across to reach the old town, yet so far, one bridge was down, a massive centre section lying broken and twisted in the swirling brown waters, and the next was manned by a particularly officious-looking SS detachment, whose soldiers he could see examining the papers of all and sundry on both ends of its span.
The driver was too busy avoiding bomb holes, negotiating a path around makeshift street barricades and hustling civilians out of the way to notice their agitation.
Kruze was horrified by the devastation. Houses burned from a raid the night before, civilians wandered shocked and aimlessly around them, clutching their last few possessions. Others darted to and from the shadows of shelllike buildings, teetering over the rubble as they tried not to spill pans filled to the brim with precious water, collected from broken mains in the street.
Only once was their way blocked. A dead work-horse, killed from a nearby bomb-blast during the raid, was having strips of flesh torn from its carcass by a mob of hungry citizens, their eyes gleaming in blackened sockets at the sight of meat, whose taste was a far-off memory. They ignored the driver’s frustrated attempts to dispel them with bursts on the horn, so he simply slipped the truck into gear and drove over the horse, ignoring the angry shrieks of the women who witnessed their next week’s meal ground into the mud of the street.
The Gefreiter, clearly upset at what he had had to do and with no indication from Herries as to their final destination, could no longer contain himself.
“Where are we going, exactly, Herr Obersturmführer?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Gestapo Headquarters, Thiersch Platz,” Herries said, as nonchalantly as he could.
Kruze’s muscles tensed. What was he playing at now? His fingers inched around the solid butt of his Luger, deep inside his raincoat pocket, just as Herries gave him an almost imperceptible nudge and held his hand out flat, as if to say he had things under control. Like the driver, however, Kruze was sweating profusely, beads of perspiration running down his face and under his collar. Whatever Herries was up to, he did not like it one little bit.
“We need to cross the river soon, Herr Obersturmführer,” the Gefreiter mumbled nervously.
“I know the way,” Herries snapped. “We’re going over the Cornelius Bridge, if it’s still standing.” He only hoped that it was and, deeper still, that it was not guarded by the SS.
Through the smoke of the smouldering city and the early morning mist that rose from the Isar, the dim outline of the Cornelius Bridge hove into view. On the far bank, Kruze could just make out the silhouette of the ancient, rickety Bavarian houses of the old town, within which they would find the watchmaker, if Herries was not aiming to turn him over to the Gestapo first.
The driver joined a small queue of vehicles that had lined up to cross the bridge. Kruze looked at his watch, hesitantly, as if even this innocent action was likely to give him away. It was coming up to seven o’clock, the hour of their rendezvous with Schell on Piloty Strasse. It was not worth fretting about whether the man was there or not; first, they had to get over the Cornelius Bridge.
The high-sided lorries in front still occluded their view of the guards. It was not until they pulled up onto the bridge itself, that Kruze caught a glimpse of one, a stooped man of about sixty, wearing a uniform that looked at least two sizes too big. He almost let out a sigh of relief, for this had to be a Volkssturm, a member of the Reich’s home guard, about which he had been briefed prior to his departure from Stabitz.
It was not until the guard moved towards the cabin of their truck that he saw the SS flashes on the collar and realized that the sentry was a young man in an old man’s body.
The man slammed his fist on the driver’s cabin door and asked for papers. The Gefreiter stabbed his finger towards the passenger seat and the Untersturmführer shuffled round to the other side, where he stared straight into the unforgiving face of Herries.
The officer did his best to straighten in front of his superior.
“Do you call that a salute?” Herries shouted.
The man thrust his right arm out, his gloved hand pointing to the sky. “Heil Hitler, Herr Obersturmführer,” he croaked.
Herries flashed his ID quickly, looking over the man’s head to the old town. “Is the road still open to Thiersch Platz?” He asked, before the officer could ask him where he was going. There was no need to spell out his precise destination; the Untersturmführer would know there was only one place an officer of Herries’ calibre would head for in the square.