8
Hans had a restless sleep that night. He woke before dawn, packed a small suitcase, and drove three hours north to Stralsund, a city on the Baltic coast. As Hans approached the city, he caught sight of the dramatic spires of Stralsund’s three Brick Gothic churches. The towering medieval structures were built when Stralsund was a member of the wealthy Hanseatic League of merchants. Hans drove through the cobblestone streets of the old city and across the Rügendamm bridge to the small island of Dänholm. The island lay between Stralsund and the much larger island of Rügen. Dänholm had housed a naval garrison since the Prussian empire, and in the 1950s, the GDR established its naval college on the base. Hans reported to the small port where a Coastal Border Brigade patrol boat was docked. He boarded the vessel and was greeted by Lieutenant Strelitz, the officer in charge of that section of coastline. The cruiser motored out of Dänholm into the Strela Sound.
Hans stood on the port side gunwale and looked out at the grand seaside view of Stralsund. A heavy wind chopped up the waves across the sound, making the patrol boat bounce across the water as if it were on springs. After a few minutes, he returned to the bridge with Lieutenant Strelitz.
“So you’re here to evaluate border defenses, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel Brandt? We’re doing the best we can along the coast,” Strelitz said. He brought Hans over to a table and spread out charts detailing the entire GDR coast. “Despite hundreds of kilometers of coastline, our defenses are quite adequate. Between us and the regular navy, the coast is thoroughly patrolled. We’ve been quite effective. In the last year alone, we stopped twenty-nine incursions of the border. Eighteen of those were small boats from non-Warsaw Pact nations assisting the escape of GDR citizens. Altogether one-hundred-and-five persons were taken into custody, seventeen boats were seized, and the rest scuttled.”
“Excellent,” Hans replied.
Strelitz smiled.
“And what recommendations do you have for improving the border, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel Brandt?”
“We are considering a high-tech system to be implemented in several phases. Buoys with sonar and motion detection lining the entire coast.”
Strelitz looked at his crew. “I don’t see how that would be worth the investment, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel. It sounds like a lot of money for automating a system we do just fine manning by ourselves. What does Admiral Wurtz say about it?”
“We haven’t discussed it, as yet.”
Strelitz smiled again. “We’re doing fine, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.”
Strelitz left the cabin and headed toward the bow. Hans followed him, feeling the cold sea breeze in his face as the patrol boat cut through the waves.
Hans stayed the night in the Dänholm officer’s barracks. The next morning he drove across the bridge onto Rügen. He headed toward the military base at Prora on the eastern side of the island. Hans’ thoughts weighed on him as he drove along a narrow road through heavily wooded forest. He began to feel numbed by his new assignment. Never before had he spent so much time analyzing the border defenses, and despite his years of training and patience, this duty wore on him. He was on edge—largely because of Scharf’s mole hunt—but also because every inspection felt like another brick being laid to seal him in. He and his fellow soldiers were suffocating the people, making the noose around the GDR tighter and tighter.
As Hans’ thoughts began to wander, he remembered the last time he had spoken with his father, over fifteen years ago. Dwelling on that conversation, he felt a strange detachment from those events—he remembered the details vividly, but it was if they had happened to someone else. They had been in a cabin, not far from the inner-German border, and spoken by the warm light of a fireplace. Still, in Hans’ memory, he felt cold. He remembered his father’s angular face lit by the dancing flames of the fire, a strange effect that gave him a mystical visage.
“Until now, we’ve never been able to successfully plant a deep cover agent behind the Iron Curtain. But you’ll succeed. I’ve prepared you your whole life for this,” his father said. “When you’re over there, never forget: you have a rare opportunity to make a major impact in the greatest struggle of our age. Communism must be defeated because it runs an inverted society. It proclaims the progress of society while it crushes the rights of individuals. They proclaim there is no rich, no poor, that everyone is provided for and happy. But there can be no happiness without individual freedoms. The only way anyone is happy in a communist society is if he or she becomes a functionary, and exercises his little authority to its maximum, so one can feel the selfish pleasures of being drunk on power. It’s a society that’s rotten to the core.”
“I know all of this already,” Hans protested.
“But now you’re going to see it,” his father said. “You’re going to know it, from the inside out. You’ll know the very soul of their rotten society, and you’ll know why they have to be defeated. No one should have to live like that, let alone half the world.”
For a moment, they were both silent. Hans watched the flames leap and crackle in the fireplace.
“You must always remember,” Hans’ father said, “that this is a war. It may be a cold one, but you’re going to be fighting in enemy territory. Back when I was there, I met a man who was the best soldier I’d ever seen. He was there from the beginning, when the Nazis fell. He told me something I’ll never forget. He compared war to an inferno, and he said, ‘the fire is out, but it’s still smoldering. It can easily ignite again, and if it does, we’ll all be burned.” Hans’ father leaned forward to his son, trying to ingrain the lesson. “Our job is to prevent that from happening, but remember—when tending to the smoking coals—that smoke is insidious. Most people die from smoke inhalation long before the flames reach them.” Hans now understood those words more clearly than ever before.
It was clear Scharf would have to be stopped. Scharf’s closeness with the Minister of State Security was troubling, considering his power grab had begun to clear out anyone who opposed him. Dietrich’s death and the whole mole hunt reeked. Hans suspected his conversation with Dietrich had likely convinced the general to break off the invasion plans, and Scharf had probably killed him for it. Events were unraveling too conveniently in Scharf’s favor. The mole hunt now posed a very real danger to Hans, and more importantly, Anna. Scharf would bulldoze his way through the government ranks to find his way to the top, but he was smart enough that if he uncovered any trace of a real breach, he’d sniff out the source.
The Prora base was a complex of old Nazi buildings along the wooded coastline. The entire complex stretched for almost seven miles, set just a hundred meters back from a golden sand beach. Hitler had commissioned the five-story structures in 1936 as a vacation resort where the Aryan nation could play. Despite the charming natural surroundings, the complex was dour and gray; it seemed as if it was always destined to be barracks.
Hans reported to the base headquarters, where he was escorted to the office of the base commander, General Thorwald. The general and his chief of staff, Colonel Grossmann, sat Hans down. The men had little interest in his official duties, though they were eager to hear of news from Berlin.
“What is the status on the Dietrich case?” Thorwald probed.
“The Minister of State Security has assigned a special unit to find the murderer,” Hans replied, his throat dry.
“Do they have a suspect?” Grossmann chimed in.
“Not that I know of, though they are building a profile.”