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TWENTY-ONE

The door to the bunker was almost off its hinges, partially concealing a body; and from what Revell could see of its condition, a grenade had done the damage.

Just inside were three more dead and the mangled remains of a machine gun. Sections of splintered furniture were scattered about. Smoke from their smouldering edges bit into his throat and made his eyes water.

“No bodies outside.” Hyde stepped over a large puddle of blood. “How the hell could the Reds have got close enough to use grenades without getting casualties?”

Carrington entered behind them, paused, and ran his hand over the back of the door. “Major, that grenade went off right inside. All the gouge marks are in the back of the timber. If it had been thrown from the street, how did it do that?”

“Spetsnaz often use NATO uniforms.” Looking at the scorch marks on the walls and ceiling, Hyde knew the corporal was correct. The door must have been almost closed when the explosion occurred. “Maybe they tricked their way inside?”

“Not very likely.” Revell recalled his own reception by the guards. “The mood these men were in, it was definitely shoot first and ask questions later.

“The alternative is that they got in through the main building, and came out this way. That doesn’t look good.”

Submachine gun at the ready, Revell started down the stairs. The lights were still on, but the air-conditioning was not. Dust and smoke hung in the air. There was a strong smell of cordite, and other less easily identified odours.

In the corridor the sentry lay dead. He had been killed by a single shot through the head. The arrangement of his body and the position of the wound suggested he had been turning to see who was coming through the double doors behind him. They were half-open. As Revell stepped through, he knew what he was going to find. Each room contained its quota of dead. The Russians had worked systematically through the bunker.

“Must have used silencers.” Hyde pulled bodies aside to check if any of those at the bottom still lived. “Got in, killed the staff, opened the door, got the sentry before he could give the alarm and then bombed the door guard. By that time it didn’t matter what noise they made. There was no one left to hear.”

In the communication room Revell found every piece of equipment smashed. In confirmation of their reconstruction, they also found a dead Russian paratrooper. When they turned him over, they discovered his silenced pistol underneath.

A police officer had managed to unholster his own gun and use it to good effect. The weapon was still grasped in his hand.

All of the officers were dead. Among them was Col. Klee. Right at the end he had tried to redeem himself. His body shielded that of one of the women telephone operators. It had been a sadly futile gesture. Bullets had passed through his thin frame and killed her also.

Whirling around as he heard a noise behind him, Hyde’s finger tightened over his trigger. The sound came from a small side room. He went through. It was coming from within a storage cupboard, tucked away at the end of a row of lockers.

A body obstructed the door. He pulled it away and, covered by the major, snatched it open.

“We could hear you moving. You’d never be any good at hide and seek.” Hyde immediately regretted his flippancy.

Gebert collapsed into Revell’s arms. Sweat poured down his face, soaking his collar. His pants were wet to the knee from another source. “We thought they had come back. I had cramp, I could not help it.”

Aware for the first time that he had wet himself, Gebert tried to cover the large damp patches with a bloodstained folder.

From out of the cupboard behind him came Stadler. The chief of police looked grim, despite having to blink and shield his eyes against the unaccustomed glare. “Did they get everyone?”

“Looks as if they weren’t in a mood for taking prisoners. How did they get in?” Revell assisted the mayor to a chair.

“From upstairs.” Gebert fanned himself with the folder, then recalled what it had covered and put it on his lap. “They must have known the layout precisely. Those damned agents again. There can be nothing about this city that the enemy does not know.”

“They didn’t know about your cupboard.”

Despite what he had been through, Gebert smiled. It faded as swiftly as it appeared, when he noticed the body that had been pulled aside. “I suppose when they caught him in here, they assumed no one else was hiding.”

Stadler had brushed himself and straightened his tie. He pushed his hair back into place. “There is now absolutely no control over what is happening in the city, besides any that might have been established at a purely local level. We’ve got to regain overall control. Do your men still hold the police headquarters?”

“I presume so. With a couple of platoons and that armoury, it would take more than a plane load of Russians to retake it.”

“Then we must transfer there, Major. As quickly as possible.”

They left the way they had entered, slipping and sliding on the partially congealed mess on the door. The air outside tasted better, but carried the stench of smoke from burning vehicles.

“My poor city. Poor, Munich.” Gebert forgot his own discomfort as he saw several dark columns rising high over the rooftops. “The Russian barbarians are destroying it, piece by piece.”

Stadler noticed several dead civilians on the road. “And its people, but they are doing that at a much faster rate.”

It was only a few hundred meters to police headquarters. The journey took them forty-five minutes. Cutting the corner of Marienplatz, they came under fire from a sniper post on the top floor of a bank.

From the scattering of huddled forms, it was clear the gunman had been active for a while.

Some civilians, caught in the open, had been pinned down. They cowered behind flower tubs and benches, too terrified to move.

Revell saw a woman, driven by desperation, make a break from behind a pot of shrubs towards a side street. She had gone perhaps ten steps when the first shot caught her and she stumbled. Dragging her right leg, she tried to go on, but a second bullet passed through her body. Collapsing silently, she lay still.

Dooley looked to the major for permission, before unslinging the last of their rocket launchers. He sighted carefully before firing.

The missile soared the short distance to the target in a dead-straight trajectory. As Dooley had intended, the high-explosive warhead impacted immediately below the window from which the sniper was operating.

Intended to withstand the armour of main battle tanks, the fabric of the building presented no impediment to the jet of molten material projected into the room.

Every window was blasted out by the pressure generated, as blast and flame flattened thin partition walls and roared through the top floor of the bank.

When they moved on once more, they attracted no more sniper fire.

TWENTY-TWO

“Was Col. Klee among the dead in the bunker?” Stadler took off a headset and rubbed his ears with the palms of his hands.

“Yes, he was.” Revell had to think for a moment. “In the circumstances, it’s for the best. His life would have been very unpleasant when all this was over. Why do you want to know now?”

“Because if he wasn’t, I’d just made up my mind to kick him in the balls. Several times. Very hard.”

The commissioner looked at the handful of officers working in the communications room. Less than a third of the positions were filled, and those by inexperienced operators. “The men I detailed to accompany his column from the barracks tell me that they’re still there, and not likely to move in the foreseeable future. I’ve men being killed and others working themselves into nervous breakdowns, and they won’t move without an order in writing.”