A Tissue of Deception.

Part Two.

The Red Horseman.

A Novel by

David Mace.

Chapter One.

The deep rumble of the big V8 engine of the U.S. Army, Olive-drab painted Cadillac staff car echoed back from the buildings on Karwendelstrasse as it cruised across its junction with Drakestrasse, Berlin-Lichterfeld, and turned into Finkensteinallee. The road was still cobbled, although many of the stones were chipped and scarred. It was still lined with the old lilac trees; bearing the scars of bullets and shell fragments in their thick trunks and lower branches. Many of the old buildings had survived the Russians' onslaught as they blasted their way into Berlin; but many new structures had appeared on the sites of their ruined predecessors.

A pretty blonde girl wearing a Claire McCardell moss green wool, fitted two-piece, long-skirted suit, and a jaunty little matching Fedora, sat in the rear seat of the staff car, glancing out of the window. Finckensteinallee was much the same as she remembered from when she had been driven down to the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Lichterfelde Kaserne in 1937, in company with SS-Gruppenführer Wolff; the Head of ReichsFührer-SS Himmler's personal staff and his Personal Adjutant and Liaison officer. Ten years had passed since she was last here; as she was about to embark on Himmler's preposterous "Aktion Donnerwaffe" expedition to Siberia. It was also almost two years since she had last been in Berlin. Back then; she had a totally different identity. Her name had been Fräulein Doktor Karyn Helle von Seringen; Deputy Researcher for the Deutsches Ahnenerbe Institute for Linguistic study, at Berlin-Dahlem.

The Cadillac turned into the main entrance of the old Lichterfelde Kaserne at Finckensteinallee 63, and was waved down by an American Military Policeman. Nothing much had changed at the Kaserne. The long guardhouses either side of the gate were still there; but the pair of four-metre high, Stone sentinel statues of "Der Ewigen Reichsrottenführer"… "The Imperishable Corporals," that had flanked the gate, were now encased in anonymous, rectanglar concrete pillars.

The old Headquarters building across the checkerboard parade ground still stood; but was now minus the massive Reichsadler Eagle perched above the false portico, which no longer bore the legend:

"LEIBSTANDARTE SS ADOLF HITLER"

emblazoned boldly across its cornice.

The staff car driver handed his orders to the MP, who scanned them and glanced at the blonde in the rear seat. The subtle fragrance of her perfume created a deliciously feminine counterpoint to the masculine smell of the leather upholstery. Surreptitiously, the MP inhaled. God! Why didn't all women in Berlin smell like this? Quickly, he composed himself and was once again the stern MP guardian.

'Captain Charlotte Mckenna? Welcome to Andrews Barracks, Ma'am.'

Two years earlier to the day; on Thursday morning, April 19th, 1945; SS-Panzerobergrenadier Jürgen Seifert was standing guard on the one-metre-square concrete plinth in front of the corner pillar supporting the open rear arcade of the guardhouse to the right of the wide main entrance gates of the Berlin-Lichterfelde Kaserne der Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler. He glanced furtively up towards the sky from beneath the rim of his glossy black Stahlhelm. When mounting guard duty at the Kaserne, you were expected to stand like a statue; rigid and unmoving at attention; no matter what was happening. It was always likely that someone would be watching from the administration building across the wide parade platz stretching back from the main gates.

Nazi Germany was on the brink of defeat. After being turned back at Stalingrad, Hitler's forces had been steadily pushed back by a relentless Soviet Red Army hungry for revenge against the atrocities committed by the marauding Nazis in the East. With each successive victory, the Russians were pushing ever closer to the heart of the Third Reich, and the German situation was becoming ever more desperate. Allied bombers had been conducting continuous, twenty-four-hour bombing of Germany for weeks now; aiming to crush its industrial heartlands and destroy any remaining German morale.

Twenty-one-year-old Seifert became aware of a muffled hum coming from the west. He heard the distant howl of the first of the alarm sirens, very faintly... a swelling and ebbing away out towards Potsdam. As the sirens began braying their warning at Spandau, the faint sounds of approaching aircraft grew louder and gradually rose in crescendo to become a droning roar. The Yankee Terrorfliegers were high today. He could just make out the countless little shining silver dots etching their condensation trails across the cornflower-blue sky; and watched the first black puffs of smoke appearing amongst them as the anti-aircraft shells began exploding. The sound of the flak batteries firing was almost drowned by the continuous rumble of heavy artillery away to the east, up on the Seelow Heights, a mere ninety kilometres east of Berlin, as the defenders struggled to hold back the remorselessly advancing steamroller of the Red Army that was hammering at the very Gates of Berlin. Ominously, there was also the distant sound of gunfire from the forests south of Berlin, like the sullen thunder of a distant summer storm.

The dead-straight, pure-white streamers, many kilometres long in the bright blue sky, clearly indicated the track of the bombers. It looked as though the massed bomber formations were lining up to plaster the city's Government quarter again. This also meant that the big 128mm twin guns mounted on the vast, ferro-concrete, fortress-like flak towers would soon begin blasting away. These huge weapons were capable of hurling their twenty-eight- kilogramme shells up to an altitude of almost fifteen-thousand-metres. There were three of these formidable, bomb-proof flak towers sited in a triangular defensive ring around the Berlin city centre area which encompassed the Government district; each tower being roughly the height of a thirteen-storey building, measuring approximately seventy-metres-square, and topped with four gun platforms, each of which was armed with a twin mount of the huge Rheinmetall-Borsig Flak 40 128mm guns; one pair to each corner of the tower, with each twin mounted battery being rated to fire a maximum of twenty-four-rounds-a-minute. When the eight shells exploded in the planned pattern, they projected a kill zone of two hundred-and-forty-metres across; at a firing rate of a salvo every ninety seconds. So; twenty-four of these massive weapons would be opening up at any moment. That was an awful lot of metal to be exploding in the skies above Berlin, and what goes up, must come down in the form of shrapnel and metal splinters.

The main function of the towers was not so much to shoot down the Allied bombers, although that was important; but more, to put up such a mass of anti-aircraft fire as to hinder the bombing attack on the area in the immediate vicinity of the towers themselves. Each tower comprised a cellar, the ground floor; and five upper floors. The cellar and ground floors were used as shelters lit with blue lights, into which crowds of Berliners would seek refuge from the bombs when the sirens sounded. Each tower had reinforced ferro-concrete walls up to three-and-a-half-metres thick, steel window shutters; air-conditioning, and an independent, diesel-powered Daimler-Benz generating plant six metres below ground. All three had a hospital floor, and the Zoo tower's second level was used to house the most priceless, and irreplaceable art treasures of the fourteen museums in the Berlin area. The Humboldthain tower to the north also had passages leading down to the nearby Gesundbrunnen Station... one of the deepest in the Berlin U-Bahn system. More than twenty-thousand people could take shelter in this tower and the U-Bahn tunnels.

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Jürgen Seifert glanced up nervously at the bright, wide, feathery-white ribbon streaming back from the Terrorfliegers' engines, which was creeping across the sky slightly to the north of his guard duty position. The shrapnel from the exploding shells would soon be showering down on the city; and a decent-sized lump could easily kill someone if they were unfortunate enough to be hit by it. The biggest danger by far, in these raids was being hit by falling lumps of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells. These spent pieces of shrapnel would obviously fall at the optimum speed of gravity. At the height the bombers were today; they would take something like two, to three minutes from the initial detonation explosion to hitting the ground.

When the flak towers opened up; standing rigidly to attention out here would not be a healthy place to be. The Zoo flak tower... Flakturm I, which was the nearer... on the southern side of the Tiergarten fifteen kilometres to the north-east, and the primary protection for the Government quarter of the City, was not really a problem. The falling shrapnel from these guns normally showered down over Schöneberg and the northern parts of Steglitz. The main risk came from the guns of the flak tower sited in Humboldthain Park... Flakturm III; a couple of kilometres further north from the Zoo tower. Humboldthain would be firing with its guns depressed at a shallower angle, and its shell shrapnel would carry further to the south.

The remaining flak tower... Flakturm II, was sited in Friedrichshain Park; some fourteen kilometres to the north-east from where he was standing. The shrapnel from its exploding shells would fall across Kreuzberg and Alt-Treptow, well away from his location; but if Humboldthain opened fire ahead of the bomber stream in the hope that they would fly into the barrage; the shrapnel would certainly come down over Lichterfelde.

He barely had time to finish forming this thought, when the great, rolling crashes of the 128mm guns began to echo across the city. The bomber stream appeared totally unaffected by the thick black flak bursts that seemed to engulf them from the constantly thundering guns of all three flak towers, and flew majestically on towards their target. Jürgen Seifert nervously braced himself and silently began to count; waiting for the patter of the rain of thousands of sharp-edged pieces of flak shrapnel to begin buzzing and whistling down. They made a soft, ominous sound; like hail falling onto a tin roof.

Seiferit instinctively stiffened. Here they come. At first, he could hear them dropping through the big lilac trees out on Finckensteinallee; clinking and thudding onto the cobblestones. Then they began falling onto the parade platz of the Kaserne. Occasionally, there was the wicked swish of a falling shell nose-cap that hadn't disintegrated. These clanged and bounced up into the air as they struck the ground.

As he silently cringed under the approaching steel rain; he glanced out to the north east. A glittering cascade of sticks of incendiaries was falling along with thick black strings of high explosive bombs; and above Berlin, a colossal mushroom cloud of smoke and flames was burgeoning up into the sky as the sun began to disappear behind the thick, reeking veil of smoke gathering over the city.

The first small shards of shrapnel were beginning to tinkle off the top of his Stahlhelm. Any minute now, and a big lump was bound to find him. Suddenly, he heard the sharp blast of a whistle from the direction of the Kaserne Headquarters building. He glanced across the parade platz, and saw the duty SS-Oberscharführer; who yelled for him to get under cover. Jürgen Seifert ordered arms and stepped back smartly under the covered rear arcade of the guardhouse. As he did so, he heard a sharp whine; and a lump of shrapnel which must have weighed at least a couple of kilogrammes, struck the concrete plinth where he had been standing only a few seconds previously; chipping a deep gouge, and bouncing and clattering several metres out into the parade platz.

Nineteen-year-old "Rotkreuzschwester"... Red Cross nurse; Luise Gärtner peered nervously through the windscreen of her canvas-hooded Krupp-Protze six-wheeled truck towards the sky. She watched the oncoming bomber stream with increasing apprehension. The truck was one of the many civilian vehicles impressed for military use. The driving cab had no doors to protect her from flying shrapnel. On the orders of her Colonel, Oberstarzt Brenner, she had driven from the Feldlazarett... the field hospital in Tempelhof, hoping to pick up medical supplies from the Lichterfelde Kaserne for delivery to the Feldlazarett that had been set up in offices on the far side of the Chancellery building in central Berlin.

The journey had been perilous. The streets in Steglitz were rubble-strewn from the recent bombing, and she had to turn back twice to find a passable route. More frightening was the sound of heavy gunfire less than sixty kilometres to the south. The Ninth Army was fighting a rearguard action in the heavily-wooded Spreewald region south-east of Berlin, attempting to break out of the pocket westwards through the village of Halbe and the pine forests in the south, to link up with the German Twelfth Army. According to the latest report, they were being cut to pieces; and the Soviet forces were advancing swiftly towards Berlin. She knew what they would do if the Russians caught up with her. Being gang-raped by ten or twelve drunken Russian soldiers was really not something she wanted to experience.

Gritting her teeth, she viciously floored the accelerator pedal and sent the truck careening and bouncing over the rubble-strewn streets towards Lichterfelde.

Fräulein Doktor Karyn Helle von Seringen; the Deputy researcher for the Deutsches Ahnenerbe Institute for Linguistic study sat apprehensively in the front passenger seat of the powerful Mercedes-Benz 540K Limousine next to the Deputy Kurator of her Institute, as he drove her down through Dahlem to the Lichterfelde Kaserne where he had arranged for her to be taken into central Berlin. Since 1939, the Ahnenerbe had been fully incorporated into the SS as one of its branches, and its leaders absorbed into Himmler's personal staff. Therefore, his request to have this young Fräulein Doktor driven into Berlin had not been questioned.

She had remained at the old headquarters at Berlin-Dahlem, Pücklerstrasse 16, on the specific instructions of ReichsFührer-SS Himmler, in order for her to recover several valuable Ahnenerbe artefacts from various locations in the Berlin Government Quarter, which had been "borrowed" by certain high-ranking Officials to adorn their offices. Most of the Government Quarter which comprised the area of Parisier Platz - Wilhelmstrasse - Friedrichstrasse - Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse had been virtually flattened by bombing. Karyn von Seringen didn't hold out much hope of recovering anything... except, hopefully, one particular item.

This item was a large, Garnet gemstone that had been discovered inside an ancient artefact that she had recovered from the Tunguska region of Central Siberia during Himmler's futile "Aktion Donnerwaffe" initiative of 1937-38. This artefact was said to be the very embodiment of evil... a Destroyer of Worlds; and it had been released into this world in 1939 in an Essen machine shop on the unwitting instructions of Himmler, as the artefact was being sectioned for analysis.

Word had it that this malignant gemstone had been presented to Reichsmarschall Göring as yet one more trinket for his extensive collection. Allegedly, it was last seen at Die Dienstvilla Goebbels; the private residence at Number 20, Hermann-Göring Strasse; a little to the south of the Brandenburg Gate, and adjacent to the American Embassy, when Göring had occupied the building. Karyn thought that the likelihood of it still being there was at the least... tenuous. Göring had only spent a few weeks there before Goebbels took over the premises. It was more likely that if the gem still existed, and was no longer in the possession of the Reichsmarschall; then the place to look would surely be his ostentatious villa residence off Leipziger Platz… if it still stood. The whole area was a prime target for the bombing raids because of its close proximity to the Reichs Chancellery.

As the Mercedes turned into the main entrance of the Kaserne, SS-Panzerobergrenadier Jürgen Seifert, now back on his chipped pedestal; smartly presented arms as the Mercedes swept onto the parade ground, where a fatigues party were busily sweeping up the scattering of scrap metal. The car stopped outside the Headquarters building, as Hauptsturmführer Weiser; the Korps Adjutant came to meet the Fräulein Doktor. As he escorted her into the Headquarters building, the Deputy Kurator drove smoothly away through the main gates; turned left onto Finckenstein Allee, and disappeared towards the Allied lines to surrender.