An aide of Field Marshal Walter Model came through the blackout curtains and instructed groups of general officers to stand by to have their personal effects checked by security troops.
“There is no way to guess how long this will take,” General Kroll said to Jaeger. “As far as I know, there is not yet a final commitment to Christrose.” The general adjusted his Iron Cross so it hung neatly between the lapels of his field-gray greatcoat. “I can only suggest you make yourself as comfortable as possible.”
The general returned Jaeger’s salute and walked across the crowded courtyard to join the other officers who were opening briefcases and emptying their pockets under the surveillance of SS guards.
Lieutenant Colonel Jaeger walked to the far side of the enclosure where he found a wooden bench under a windbreak of linden trees. Seating himself, he stared at the great face of the bunker and the soldiers of Hitler’s personal bodyguard.
Snow and sleet fell through the blue headlights of the trucks. The illumination coated the packed white snow and spread across the courtyard to the flags and emblems of the Third Reich, gleaming on the red piping running down the trousers of the general officers standing in fine to be searched.
Karl Jaeger removed his gloves and opened the lapels of his greatcoat to feel the winds on his muscular throat. The blue lights touched the Iron Cross on his tunic, the silver runes of the SS and the three emblems of his rank on the collar tabs of his jacket. On the sleeve of his tunic was the shoulder patch of Das Reich, a crusader’s shield with three horizontal bars within its borders.
Jaeger was tall and slender with coarse, fair hair and luminous gray eyes in an angular face that was scored with tensions. He would be thirty within a month and had not smoked a cigarette for three hundred and twenty days. This wasn’t simply a matter of personal health or fastidiousness, he was certain. But on the other hand he wasn’t quite sure why he had quit smoking. Whatever was wrong with him (why else quit smoking?) Jaeger figured it wasn’t physical. He had been a soldier almost a third of his life and he had fought for thirty-one months on the Russian fronts in the campaigns code-named Barbarossa and Citadel, the first attack in ’41, the second in the massive clash of armor at Kursk in ’43. And in the invasion summer of ’44, he had been at Normandy and Avranches, when all their divisions were at half strength, not like Barbarossa where Goebbels had been able to proclaim: “The eastern continent of Europe lies like a limp virgin in the arms of a mighty German Mars.” Gross Deutschland had been on the line then. With SS Totenkopf and SS Leibstandarte, and to the south, Spain’s Blue Division.
No, he still had the strength and stamina for war, but in some fashion he had lost his ability to concentrate. Or more accurately, he couldn’t stop concentrating, couldn’t stop feeling and remembering things in the past. It was the pressure of memory that created the anxieties in him, that forced him to study the world with what had become a bewildering and frustrating intensity...
Karl Jaeger still did have an occasional insidious need for nicotine, and to distract himself had taken to smoking a dry pipe. Feeling restless now, he took an old black briar from his pocket and dug the stem into the back of his hand until the pressure sent a searing pain down into his numb fingers.
He just could not watch at ease and at peace, like a dumb beast in a field, while the Gestapo searched officers whose names rang with honor down hundreds of years of Prussian and German history. Kroll, von Seeckt, Krueger, Lutz, von Manteuffel, Beck and Brandenberger and Guderian and Scheer and Jodl and von Rundstedt... Yet if such security was necessary, his thoughts were disloyal. Since von Stauffenberg had placed a bomb under the Führer’s desk in East Prussia, everyone in Germany had become a potential traitor and enemy. Von Stauffenberg was dead, shot without a trial along with hundreds implicated in the plot, with even Field Marshal Rommel, the hero of the African desert campaigns, accepting a pellet of cyanide in return for a hero’s funeral and a pension for his widow.
Hitler was damned by the world because he was absolute, because his character reduced principle to action. If that were cause for damnation, then what of Eamon de Valera and Simon Bolivar and Oliver Cromwell? Sanctified “heroes” now, Jaeger thought, like the American patriot, Abraham Lincoln, because they had all reduced their principles to ruthless action to preserve the strength and union of their countries...
When the search of the generals was completed, they filed through the blackout drapes into the bunker, which was known as Adlerhorst. Eagle’s Aerie. A command car entered the courtyard and stopped with a whine of brakes in front of the Führer’s personal guard.
Jaeger recognized the giant figure stepping from the car, Colonel Otto Skorzeny, presently the Führer’s favorite among the junior officers in the Waffen SS. Skorzeny wore a black leather overcoat that fell in clean lines to his booted calves and against whose rich, dark lapels his Knight’s Cross with diamonds glittered like a star. Accompanying the colonel was one of his senior aides. Captain Walter Brecht, a former Bavarian schoolteacher who savored the nickname he had acquired in Skorzeny’s service — “Der Henker,” “The Hangman.”
There was no nonsense about a body search of Colonel Skorzeny. With Brecht at his side, the colonel greeted Hitler’s personal bodyguard with a broad smile and swept past them into the Führer’s bunker.
From the depths of Adlerhorst, the soldiers in the courtyard could hear the voice of the Führer, not as strong as it once had been, breaking now when he gasped for breath, but still dynamic and compelling when it rose high in the familiar, exalting cadences.
The meeting had gone on for hours; some of the drivers and junior officers were sleeping in the trucks. Others laughed and talked softly in groups, smoking and making late suppers of hot tea and spiced potato sandwiches.
Jaeger sat alone on the cold wooden bench thinking of Operation Greif, which logic dictated would be linked to Christrose if the latter became functional, and examining his dislike of Captain Brecht. He had met Skorzeny briefly on several occasions, but had spent almost three months with Brecht at the Military Academy in Berlin. Brecht was vain and supercilious, but that was hardly reason to be especially critical of him. Jaeger’s thoughts troubled him; he had no right to sit in judgment of his country’s soldiers, or Operation Greif.
He pressed the bit of his pipe into the back of his hand; on occasion physical pain was the only antidote for such disturbing concerns. Lately his mind had been driven constantly to embrace — or attempt to embrace — a variety of opposed concepts. He thought of the sacred and profane, tried to hold in mind at once the concepts of building and destroying, of flourishing and declining, belief and doubt, pleasure and pain... He abruptly realized with alarm that he had begun to breathe rapidly, the moisture on his forehead a mixture of sleeting snow and his own perspiration. His thoughts had involuntarily turned to Rudi Geldman and that had created other contradictions, Rudi in their home at Christmas, amused but envious in the presence of fir trees sparkling with candles and marzipan animals, or studying under the eye of Jaeger’s father, but then later had come the persistent irreverence... “the sleep of reason in Germany, in which the beast in the blood stirs and wakens.” The mocking of the Cornet Rilke... “The pale, romantic men of Germany seeking honor in death? No. The bayonets they sought were the cocks of their fathers and what they yearned for were emasculating wounds to make them one with their mothers...”