'He is just leaving! He is about to board the plane!' 'What did I tell you?'
The General stood up and pressed his palm against the ice-cold glass of the window. His own room was also filled with the stench of fumes from the oil-heater. He was not sure which he hated most: that ghastly stink which kept you alive or the dreaded cold which made it hard to think, an effort to move. Resolutely he held his hand against the numbing glass until they could just see through the outline of his palm-print the blurred figure of the Fuhrer.
'You understand, von Kluge,' Hitler repeated, 'one giant hammer-blow with massed tanks and men. With the huge force under your command – larger than any general has directed in this war – you will drive on and on! Non-stop until you reach Moscow! Not one chance for the enemy to recover from the initial shock! Ignore taking prisoners…' His hypnotic eyes fixed von Kluge. 'As in France in 1940 you keep up the momentum – roll over the swine! On and on until you have the domes of St Basil in your artillery sights!'
'I understand, mein Fuhrer! With the new forces you are sending it shall be done..
Deliberately lingering in the terrible cold as an example, Hitler gripped von Kluge's arm and softened his voice. 'You are about to make history, my friend. A hundred years from now the historians will still be writing about the Second Battle of Moscow which finally destroyed Stalin and burned the Communist plague from the face of the globe!'
He turned away and behind him von Kluge, one of the shrewdest and most experienced of Hitler's commanders, felt a sensation of excitement rising inside him. The unique power of Hitler to inspire men was working again. He saluted as the Fuhrer walked slowly towards the waiting Condor.
Reiter's heavily armed SS guard was ready for his departure, drawn up in two lines as Hitler walked very slowly between them, staring into each face. The cold seemed not to affect him at all; long ago as a pauper during his youth in Vienna he had learned to ignore the elements, to summon up his unique willpower to withstand all discomfort. Then, at the foot of the staircase leading up to the aircraft he paused. Something was wrong.
His intuitive Sixth sense told him something was wrong. What could it be? As the snow fell softly he looked round for a clue. Von Kluge's GS01, General von Tresckow, had been absent from the war council. Something to do with suffering a bout of influenza. Why had that thought come into his mind? He remained motionless, indifferent to the insidious wind from the East freezing his face. The double column of SS guards stood equally motionless, their right arms raised in the Hitler salute. In the far distance the Fuhrer could hear a sound like muted thunder, the rumble of gunfire at the front carried all the way to Smolensk by the wind.
Inside his quarters General von Tresckow watched the scene through the de-frosted shape of his palm- print which was rapidly misting up. He dared not apply his frozen hand again; the movement might be seen – even by the Fuhrer who seemed to miss nothing.
'He's hesitating – he's suspicious…'
In the tension of the moment Schlabrendorff found himself whispering with fear. His legs felt like jelly and he was cursing inwardly. How could they have performed such an insane act?
'Yes,' von Tresckow agreed sombrely, 'that blasted sixth sense is at work. It's uncanny.'
Already he could picture himself standing in front of a firing squad; erect, stripped of all his medals; the order given; the line of rifle barrels levelled at him; the brief command. 'Fire!' Then oblivion. With an effort of will, worthy of the Fuhrer himself, he maintained an outward air of composure and waited.
Hitler had still not boarded the plane. The raised arms of the SS guard were almost frozen rigid in their posture. Field Marshal von Kluge and his staff stood a few yards away at attention. Von Kluge was still experiencing a sensation of exhilaration. Before Hitler's arrival he had been despondent; the more Russians you killed the more of them appeared. It had been a nightmare.
Now he was turning over in his mind the new plan. The more he thought about it the more sure he was it would work. It had done so in Poland and in Russia it would succeed. But this time the victory would be colossal, earth-shaking. The whole Red Army would be annihilated in one shattering onslaught. Only a man with Hitler's mesmeric powers could have changed the mind of so calculating a commander as von Kluge in one short conference.
Suddenly Hitler raised his own arm and the cry ' Heil Hitler ' echoed round the bleak, snowbound encampment of broken buildings. Without a word the Fuhrer turned, mounted the steps to the plane, disappeared inside. The door was closed as the pilot fired his engines, the steps were hauled away and the machine began to move bumpily over the freshly cleared airstrip.
Inside the plane Hitler took off his cap and coat, handed them to an aide who shook them free from snow, and walked rapidly along the corridor. He chose the seat in front of the one under which von Tresckow had placed the time-bomb and called for his briefcase. He needed something to occupy his mind: he detested flying as much as he loved being driven at high speed in a car.
The stern expression he had adopted when facing the SS guard disappeared. Despite his dislike of planes his face relaxed into a smile, the smile which had charmed – and disarmed – so many Western leaders. As he extracted a folded map of France and the Low Countries showing the locations of the dummy encampments, the plane left the ground.
Von Kluge and his staff still stood in the cold, watching the machine disappear into the murky overcast, the machine carrying the greatest political and military genius since Napoleon and Julius Caesar. Evil he might be in many of his methods, but his predecessors had not been saints. And he had not had any of their advantages in upbringing and professional training.
He had risen from the gutter, his only weapons his extraordinary powers of speech and supreme willpower and belief in his own destiny. Alone he had done it: had dragged a nation of eighty million from the depths of degradation and despair to become the most feared and mighty power in the world.
But two other hidden men also watched the tiny blur of the plane disappear into the sky. Von Tresckow and Schlabrendorff turned away from the window and the latter wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. Even the strong-willed von Tresckow sank on to a chair.
'We've done it!' Schlabrendorff said jubilantly.
'The bomb still has to detonate,' his superior reminded him. He roused himself from the feeling of torpor which was a reaction to the strain they had undergone. 'And I must send the signal to Berlin to warn Olbricht…'
Leaving his quarters, he strode briskly through the snow to the signals building which housed the direct line to Berlin. Inside he told the operator to leave him alone. 'I am sending a highly confidential message,' he remarked curtly. Waiting until the door was closed, he rang Berlin and asked to be put through at once to General Olbricht, Chief of the Home Army who commanded the troops in the capital.
'Von Tresckow here,' he informed Olbricht when the General came on the line. 'The present I promised you has been delivered…'
He cut the connection the moment he had spoken the key words; these days no one knew when the bloody Gestapo was monitoring calls Now everything was ready: as soon as the news of Hitler's death reached Berlin, Olbricht would move, using his garrison troops to seize all major control points in Berlin – the War Ministry, the radio stations, the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment and so on.
He walked out of the signals building and stared briefly in the direction where Hitler's plane had disappeared on its long flight to the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia. Everything now hung on one thing. The explosion of the bomb.