Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

depot itself, but barriers had been erected, blocking the way in.

Several civil police officers were directing the people.

“Around this way, sir,” one of them said to Deland as he approached.

“What happened?”

“Go around! There are a lot of wounded inside!”

“The bombing raid?”

“Yes. The bastards hit the station when it was full,” the policeman said, full of disgust.

Deland shook his head, and followed the crowd along the trackside boarding area to the far side of the building and finally out onto Invalidenstrasse.

The entire front of the railway station had collapsed inward.

There was no roof left. A lot of ambulances and Army trucks were blocking the streets, and fire units were spraying water somewhere inside the far end of the building.

Deland could hear people crying and screaming, men shouting.

Rubble was everywhere. Big craters pockmarked the street. Glass littering the streets sparkled like a million blood-red rubies in the fires.

He turned away and headed slowly up toward the Museum of Natural History, parts of which were also on fire, conflicting emotions raging in his head.

When he was studying mathematics at Gottingen, he and his friends had come to Berlin as often as they could. Several of his classmates had families or girlfriends here, and he’d got to know the city pretty well.

It was all different now. Horribly different. It made him sick to his stomach. And yet the Germans had brought this on themselves.

God, what a waste, he thought. What a terrible waste.

Two Army trucks filled with troops rumbled up Friedrich Strasse, and Deland ducked into the doorway of a mostly bombed out building until they passed. Then he continued across to the Museum, and twenty minutes later he found a telephone booth near the Lehrter S-Bahn Station.

The phone lines were all underground, and if the telephone and postal building hadn’t been hit too hard, there was a very good chance he’d get through.

He dialed the number he had memorized in Switzerland during his final training before he had been sent over.

It took a long time to get through, and Deland almost hung up before the connection was finally made. It rang, and a man’s voice answered cautiously.

“Yes?”

“It’s David.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Perhaps you know my cousin. Edmund Dorfman.”

“He is a first cousin, or what?”

“My third, actually.”

“You’re lucky there was a raid tonight. I’ll come get you.

Where are you?”

There were only a couple of times in his life when Canaris had actually admitted to himself that he was frightened. The first was in 1915 in the harbor at Valparaiso, Chile, when he managed to escape from the light cruiser Dresden despite the blockade by the British. The second was January 2, 1935, the day he took over the Abwehr. And the third was at this moment.

A warm late-afternoon breeze off the Atlantic ruffled the long grasses in the rough along the golf course fairway. A foursome of German officers were finishing play just ahead as Canaris walked his dogs, Kasper and Sabine. He paused and looked back toward the villa outside Biarritz where he had stayed the last couple of days.

He had tried everything within his power to get back into Spain. But the German ambassador, Hans Dieckhoff, had blocked his move with a flurry of cables to Berlin. KO Spain was having a lot of trouble. The Spanish government was upset. All hell would soon break loose.

“Not a propitious time for the head of the Abwehr to be visiting Spain,” the ambassador had wired the Reichs Foreign Ministry.

Not a propitious time indeed! Spain was and always would be open to him.

The dogs whined and barked, bringing Canaris out of his daydreams. He bent down and the dogs came to him, their entire bodies wagging as he scratched behind their ears and looked into their eyes.

“Yes,” he said puckering his lips. “If they all were like you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

The dogs loved the attention, and when Canaris stood, they were filled with energy and enthusiasm. They tried to bound off, straining against their leashes.

Canaris was following the golf course. It had been a lovely day. He could appreciate that, even though the meeting with Dieckhoff’s deputy, Minister Baron Sigismund von Bibra, and the others from the KO’s in Spain and Portugal had gone badly.

They had ostensibly gathered to review intelligence problems, but Canaris had merely probed for a way to reenter Spain. Once there he had planned on going immediately down to Algeciras, where he would remain.

Even as he had planned out his moves, he had known deep inside that such a maneuver was outside the realm of possibility for him. As much as he might want to, he could not simply sit idly by while Germany was brought to total ruin by a madman.

Yet the alternatives to sitting out the rest of the war with the only person on this earth who really meant anything to him were deeply frightening.

He had brought everything with him that he would need for his alternative plan. It was all back in his room at the villa under lock and key. No one would have disturbed it. There were no Reitlingers here.

“Admiral Canaris … Oh, Admiral Canaris, sir,” someone called from behind him.

Canaris stopped and turned back as Major Kremer von Auenrode, the chief of the Kriegsorganisation for Portugal, came hurrying up from the lake.

The dogs came to Canaris’ side and sat.

Von Auenrode, a tall, thin, good-looking man, was out of breath. He seemed very troubled. One of the dogs growled.

“It’s Cartagena,” von Auenrode said heavily. He was trying to catch his breath.

Something cold clutched at Canaris’ heart. Cartagena was a principal port in Mediterranean Spain—supposedly neutral. British ships called there for fresh fruit. So long as the Germans in Spain did not interfere with the British, the Spanish government turned a nearly blind eye to German intelligence operations. On more than one occasion, however, the local Abwehr operatives had struck against the British in their enthusiasm for the war. It had become a pet peeve of Hitler’s. If Canaris could not