Finally Himmler had been unable to stand it any longer, calling for an SS medic to attend. The man had arrived ten minutes later, and unlike the sniveling civilian doctors he had acted, getting the fьhrer transferred to a cot in his private chambers and administering a sedative that noticeably calmed the tremors. He had re-dressed the ugly, swollen gash over Hitler’s left eye and sternly warned everyone not to disturb him. He had then taken Himmler aside and, in a low worried tone, had explained that it was possible the fьhrer had suffered a stroke and might well be impaired for some time. One arm was lifeless, and the whole right side of his face looked like that of a wax dummy exposed to an excess of heat. It…drooped was about the best word Himmler could come up with.
At that moment a terrifying loneliness had seized the Reichsfьhrer. He felt like a child who loses sight of its parents in a crowd. What if the fьhrer was gone? What if he had been poisoned, or succumbed to the enormous strain of the past month? No one else in the world had to deal with the sort of pressure to which he had been subjected. Nobody else could possibly have withstood the physical and psychic torment like Adolf Hitler.
But what if he was gone?
Himmler had returned to the map room, where a heavy pall still hung, and explained that long hours had caught up with the fьhrer and he had simply passed out, in need of some rest. Yet his endurance was a beacon to all. The SS chief explained then that he would assume administrative responsibilities for the next few hours, until the fьhrer awoke, and told the assembled staff officers that he wasn’t going to meddle with their deliberations; they were to dispose of their forces as they saw fit to meet the challenges on both the Eastern and Western fronts.
Then he had excused himself.
Flanked by his bodyguards now, Himmler hastened up the narrow steps into the rear of the building for his meeting with Oshima. The Japanese envoy wasn’t due for another half an hour, and it was more than likely that he would be delayed anyway. Once inside, he was confronted with a narrow hallway that ended in a steel door, which was blocked by two more SS guards who came rigidly to attention when they saw him. As Himmler acknowledged their salutes, one of the guards spoke into a telephone. The door, which resembled a watertight hatch on a warship, clanked open and Himmler passed through. Bare concrete stairs led downward on the other side. He descended, holding tight to the steel handrail. The staircase was steep and the steps were quite narrow. It would be easy to slip and break his neck.
Behind him the three-story block presented the faзade of a well-maintained baroque apartment building. Formerly owned by Jews, it had been converted to office space for use by the SS after the Kristallnacht pogrom. The uniformed Allgemeine-SS staffers in the aboveground offices were part of a unit charged with disposing of the worldly goods of Jews such as the former owners of this building, all of whom had gone into the ovens or died in forced labor camps.
Deep below street level, however, a series of linked, reinforced-steel chambers provided safe working space for Himmler when he needed to be away from the bunkers where most of the activity took place. While the Waffen-SS played a pivotal role in the war effort, the greater SS was responsible for much, much more, and regardless of the demands the armed conflict made upon him the Reichsfьhrer could not afford to ignore his other duties. He was still the man responsible for attending to the Final Solution. The foreign and domestic security and intelligence services reported directly to him. And along with Albert Speer, the armaments minister, he was charged with delivering to the Reich the ultimate weapon-an atomic bomb.
Unfortunately, he was beginning to doubt that he could.
After an initial period of euphoria and accelerated progress following the capture of the Dessaix and her informational systems, further successes had proved elusive. The Allies were largely to blame. At times it seemed as if they had devoted entire armies to destroying every facility even remotely connected with the project. And he had begun to acknowledge, with intense frustration, that he hadn’t understood two years ago just what a Herculean task he had taken on. This project consumed resources on a scale he hadn’t imagined possible.
For once the shelter did not reek of kerosene. They were plugged into the city’s power grid and it was running, despite the RAF’s best efforts. In contrast with the bunker he had just left, this one was clean, well lit, un-crowded, and calm. Blond secretaries and square-faced SS men saluted him as he passed through the antechamber into the first of the buried steel tanks. It was at least sixty meters long and twenty across, an open space with dozens of small work pens separated by particleboard dividers. The pens grew larger as they progressed down the body of the tubular structure, until they terminated in two relatively spacious work areas in front of another watertight door. He marched down the room, nodding and smiling to his personal staff, calling a few favored individuals by their first names, stopping to chat briefly with a secretary called Helga who was beginning to show her pregnancy. Her husband had been involved in the doom-struck assault on Calais, and nothing had been heard from him since. Helga was a good German, and she was holding up bravely. Himmler told her he was proud of her forbearance, and said that she must soon rest up and save her strength for the birth. After that, if she wished, he could suggest a number of fine young SS men who were looking for wives.
He dismissed her tears of gratitude and carried on to his private rooms. He feared what would become of women like that if the Bolsheviks ever set foot inside Berlin. He was one of the few people in Germany who’d read anything of the city’s fate in the other world. Some extracts from a book called Armageddon had been found on the Dessaix and translated from French. It made for harrowing reading.
Himmler asked one of the guards to see to a pot of herbal tea as his personal assistant, Hauptsturmfьhrer Buhle, presented him with two sets of papers.
“The files have also been loaded onto your computer, Reichsfьhrer,” Buhle said. “They are the only files on the desktop.”
“Thank you,” said Himmler, who found the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment. And they accuse me of crimes against humanity, he thought as he settled himself in at his desk. Wilhelm Gates, you are a beast, and your family will pay.
His tea arrived and he sipped the infusion as he read the latest report by Professor Bothe. The work of the Army Weapons Office was not going well. Bothe complained of shortages and disruptions caused by Allied attacks, and staffing problems that he rather boldly laid at the feet of the Gestapo, which had arrested so many of his best scientists, including Heisenberg, Hahn, and Diebner. The last of his gaseous uranium centrifuges had been destroyed by a British commando raid on the Tirana complex, and at any rate he was running short of the yellow cake supplied by Japan. He did not think it possible that a weapon would be ready within twelve months, let alone a week.
Under other circumstances, Himmler would have punished such insolence with a cold fury. But Professor Bothe was beyond his reach now. A few hours after he had dispatched his report, Bothe had been killed in a Soviet air attack.
There was little point in reading through the rest of the message. Much of it was couched in opaque jargon, and the crucial point was in the first paragraph anyway. There would be no bomb.
Himmler bit down on the sense of despair that was threatening to engulf him. He put the Bothe paper aside and picked up a briefing note from Gruppenfьhrer Stangl on the renewed effort to root out fifth columnists, saboteurs, and traitors within the highest offices of the Reich. Normally he skimmed Stangl’s briefings. There was rarely anything of note; an admiral here, a general there. But today his eyes bulged as he read the first name on the list.