The Execution Read online

  There was nothing poetic about a bomb. A bomb was fire and destruction.

  The poetry would come afterward, when they rebuilt a Germany free of Nazi rule. The poetry of rebirth, peace, and prosperity.

  Today, he must transform himself into a blunt instrument, and it was helpful to think in equally blunt terms.

  “No appetite, Colonel?”

  For a brief moment, Stauffenberg feared he might lose his breakfast at the sound of Field Marshal Keitel’s voice. There was a slightly mocking edge to it, as if Keitel viewed Stauffenberg’s inability to finish his food as something he could use against him at a later date.

  Stauffenberg forced himself to meet the man’s eyes with cordial indifference. “The flight from Berlin was especially turbulent. I’m afraid my stomach isn’t what it once was, ever since North Africa.”

  He held up his right arm, giving Keitel a good look at the empty sleeve where his hand had been.

  Keitel eyed Stauffenberg’s injury with poorly disguised longing, as if he wished to be the one who had heroically recovered from grievous wounds sustained in battle.

  “They use too much salt here, anyway,” Keitel said, with a wink. Stauffenberg had to hand it to the man—his schemes evolved so fast that he couldn’t even make small talk without cycling through several different personalities at once.

  The field marshal’s presence was like a foul smell in a musty attic. Even outside among the pines, Stauffenberg felt stifled.

  The Führer’s previous base of operations, the Berghof, had at least been perched on the edge of a cliff, and the Bavarian air had been fresh and sweet—an antidote to the rot that corrupted the halls of the building itself. But here at Hitler’s eastern headquarters, there was no such relief.

  A harried-looking sergeant-major came rushing over to the table.

  “My apologies, gentlemen—the Führer wishes to greet you outside, and then you will make your way to the briefing room together.”

  He gestured toward a wide pathway of packed earth. Stauffenberg’s gaze swept along the attendees already gathered in front of the guest bunker—generals and admirals, mostly. Stauffenberg recognized Karl Bodenschatz from the army and Jesko von Puttkamer from the navy. High-ranking military members whose deaths would have little impact on the Valkyrie coup one way or another. Still, they were all Nazi supporters who loved their Führer. Stauffenberg put their deaths out of his mind. Anyone here at the Wolf’s Lair was an acceptable casualty, as long as the Führer was killed. Including Stauffenberg himself, if it came to that.

  Stauffenberg and Keitel followed the sergeant-major along the pathway. Mentally, he rehearsed the plan. The day’s agenda called for a presentation on the Allied progress in France, followed by a second presentation on the Russian advance along the Eastern Front. There would be a short break between the sessions, which gave Stauffenberg the perfect opportunity to arm the bomb in his briefcase without arousing suspicion. He would set the case down as close to Hitler as possible, then excuse himself to make an urgent phone call to Berlin.

  He would then leave the visitors’ bunker and hurry across the grounds of the Wolf’s Lair to the signal shelter. There, he would wait for the explosion alongside General Erich Fellgiebel, a coconspirator. After the bomb exploded, Fellgiebel would give the orders to activate Valkyrie and then cut off the Wolf’s Lair from any further outside communications.

  Finally, Stauffenberg’s aide-de-camp, Werner von Haeften, would drive Stauffenberg through the checkpoints and out of the Wolf’s Lair as quickly as possible. Then it was back to the airfield and off to Berlin, where the difficult work of coordinating Operation Valkyrie would begin.

  “I said, he is looking well today,” Keitel said, apparently for the second time. Stauffenberg had been too distracted by his plan to notice that the field marshal was speaking to him.

  “Who?” Stauffenberg said.

  Keitel paused and gave Stauffenberg a curious sidelong glance. “The Führer, of course. Did that turbulent plane ride knock something loose in your brain, Claus?”

  Keitel’s false camaraderie raised a faint alarm in Stauffenberg’s mind. And was it just Stauffenberg’s imagination, or was Keitel giving his briefcase a long appraisal?

  They took their places among the guests while Hitler worked his way down the row, clasping hands. Stauffenberg noted the way Hitler’s leg still dragged. Contrary to Keitel’s opinion, he was not looking well at all. His face was puffy and his posture hunched. To stop himself from staring, Stauffenberg shifted his gaze to the visitors’ bunker. It was an ugly concrete block of a building with vegetation planted on its roof as camouflage against bombers. It brought to mind some impossibly huge mushroom that had sprouted from the forest floor, topped with flak guns instead of a squishy cap.

  Stauffenberg stood at attention, then offered the three remaining fingers on his left hand for the Führer to shake. He met Hitler’s watery eyes for a moment, and something passed between the two men—an odd sensation that reminded Stauffenberg of the way his wife, Nina, described her migraine headaches beginning with a sort of aura, a vague sense that the atmosphere had shifted slightly.

  How strange, Stauffenberg thought, that Hitler is an arm’s length away from the instrument of his destruction. If he were to demand to see the contents of the briefcase right now, Stauffenberg would be tortured and shot before the afternoon was out.

  While the Führer’s fingers still gripped his own, all that could go wrong with the plan nearly brought Stauffenberg to his knees. What were the chances that Haeften could get them safely through the SS checkpoints after the bomb went off?

  Everything depended on swiftness of action.

  With the same willpower he had called upon to recover from his injuries, Stauffenberg blanked his mind. He gave Hitler a short respectful bow, and the Führer dropped his hand and moved on to Keitel.

  Stauffenberg maintained his focus for the next hour, taking in relevant information and ignoring everything else. The briefing room was in the basement of the visitors’ bunker—a hollow cube with concrete walls and a single long table cluttered with maps. With no windows for the shock wave to escape, the blast would be contained, its explosive power magnified. The briefing room was the perfect death trap. Stauffenberg couldn’t have designed it any better.

  Finally, after so many false starts, things were beginning to fall into place.

  When the first session ended and refreshments were being served, Stauffenberg excused himself and walked calmly down the hall to the washroom. Inside, he set the briefcase down on a small table and retrieved his special pliers from their pocket, using the stump at the end of his right arm for leverage as he undid the buckles. Then he opened the case and removed a small parcel wrapped in white cloth. Inside the parcel, explosives the size of two large chocolate bars awaited the fuse that would ignite them.

  Stauffenberg picked up the fuse—a metal rod encasing a vial of sulfuric acid—and willed his hand to stop trembling. If he mishandled the fuse, the bomb would be useless. Slowly, he slid the fuse into a slot at the top of the bomb’s thin casing. Then he took his special pliers and paused with their teeth gripping the fuse. Once he squeezed the pliers and clipped the vial inside the rod, there would be no going back. The bomb would be armed and the countdown would begin.

  For Germany, he thought. For the world.

  He squeezed the pliers, putting a deep crimp in the fuse and breaking the vial inside. He wrapped up the bomb and placed it back in his briefcase. He couldn’t help but wonder about the supposed ten-minute fuse. Would the summer heat affect the timing? What if he only had seven minutes? Or five?

  He used a hand towel to dab sweat from his face, smoothed the front of his uniform, and exited the washroom. The corridor was empty. That was good. That meant that the second briefing session was just beginning.

  He nodded to the SS guard beside the door, tucked the briefcase under his arm, and reached for the handle. With a start, the guard moved quickly to pull open the doo
r for Stauffenberg.

  He stepped into the briefing room and scanned the fifteen or twenty men gathered around the table, chatting among themselves. Hitler had not yet returned. That gave Stauffenberg a moment to situate himself and find the ideal place to set the briefcase down.

  “Better than the breakfast, eh?” Keitel said, stuffing a big piece of apple strudel into his mouth as Stauffenberg passed by.

  He returned the greetings of the military men of his acquaintance and walked to the center of the table, slightly to the left of where Hitler had stood to preside over the earlier briefing. He set the case down and gave it a slight nudge with the toe of his boot. He wanted it out of sight, but he didn’t want its explosive charge dampened by the table—although it probably wouldn’t matter. The windowless room would amplify the bomb’s power. Everyone in here would be killed instantly.

  By that time, God willing, Stauffenberg would be in Haeften’s car, making for the airfield.

  Suddenly, the door swung open and the chatter ceased. Hitler’s personal secretary, Martin Bormann, filled the door frame with his bulk.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “With regret, I must inform you that the Führer has been called away on a most urgent matter. He has requested that the briefing session continue in his absence. Good day to you.”

  Bormann backed out into the hallway, pulling the door shut.

  Stauffenberg stared after Bormann in disbelief. While his mind reeled, his body felt impossibly heavy, his feet rooted to the floor. The words of his mantra came and went.

  Freedom

  Action

  He had to make a decision. Leave the bomb where it was and let it explode, killing a few Nazis, yes—but not Himmler, Göring, or Hitler himself—or take the bomb back to the washroom and attempt to disarm it himself.

  Keitel turned to him. “Well, then, Colonel, why don’t we bump your update to the top of the agenda.”

  He felt twenty pairs of eyes settle on his face.

  Say something, Claus!

  He opened his mouth. He was so thirsty, his words were going to crumble in his throat and come out as dust. How long had it been since he’d armed the bomb? Three minutes? Four?

  He had no idea.

  “My apologies,” he said, trying to keep his voice strong and clear, his tone casual and light. “But I need a moment to prepare my notes.” He bent to pick up his briefcase. This would strike some of the men in the room as unprofessional and out of character for Stauffenberg, but he had to make the bluff work.

  Keitel frowned. “Your reports are always exemplary, Colonel. I’m sure we won’t mind a more cursory update, in the interest of keeping the briefing moving.”

  Stauffenberg couldn’t wait for Keitel’s permission. He strode toward the door. “Excuse me,” he said, sounding every inch the aristocrat, “I’ll just be a moment.”

  He felt Keitel’s eyes boring into him. The man seemed about to say something else, and Stauffenberg knew he was weighing the prospect of giving Stauffenberg a command to save face.

  “We’ll begin with the Eastern Front, then,” he said, turning back to the men at the table.

  Stauffenberg opened the door, stepped out into the hall, and let the SS guard shut the door behind him. His heart was fluttering and he felt his pulse in his throat. Briefly, the absurd thought entered his mind that the briefcase had suddenly become transparent, and the SS man could see the bomb.

  Inside the washroom he locked the door, placed the briefcase on the table, and removed the wrapped parcel. The stale air seemed to lack oxygen. He held the bomb steady against the table with his stump, clamped the fuse between the knuckles of his first and second fingers—and pulled. The fuse did not budge. With a second hand, it would be no trouble to pry the metal rod loose, but his stump did not provide enough leverage.

  Stauffenberg removed the pliers from the briefcase and affixed them to his fingers. Holding his breath, he clamped the teeth of the pliers down on the fuse, careful not to put another crimp in the metal. He didn’t want to accelerate the work of the acid. Slowly, he slid the fuse out of its slot in the bomb’s casing. At the last second, he paused. Would manually separating the fuse from the explosives trigger the bomb? He had no idea if he was doing this properly. He had not planned on ever having to disarm it.

  He closed his eyes and thought of Nina and the children, fixing their faces in his mind. Then he tore the fuse away from the casing.

  For a moment, he stood perfectly still. Then he opened his eyes.

  The explosives lay on the table. The fuse was wedged between the pliers’ teeth.

  Relief surged through him. He let out a long breath and stared at his trembling hand as if it were an alien appendage. Hitler and I and our shaky hands! he thought wildly. Water. He needed a drink of water. He had never been so thirsty.

  There was water in the briefing room, sweating metal pitchers of ice-cold water.

  Still trembling, he shoved the bomb and the pliers into his briefcase. He placed the dead fuse in the side pocket, counted backward from ten, and left the washroom, mentally rehearsing his presentation on the state of the Reserve Army.

  The moonlight tastes like salt.

  Kat Vogel remembered the night her mother told her that she could taste the moonlight as a little girl, but as she got older and became a grown woman, she lost the ability.

  It’s because the moonlight controls the tides, and the ocean is very salty.

  Kat crossed the street, moving in and out of the camouflage netting strung from sidewalk to sidewalk. Tonight, the skies were clear and moonlight bathed Prenzlauer Berg in a pale glow. She thought of the dreamy look in her mother’s eyes when she recalled her own childhood in the Bavarian countryside. Kat used to think of her mother as a wood sprite, a free spirit connected to the natural world in ways that Kat, as a child of the city, would never understand.

  Everyone thought of her parents as an odd couple: the ethereal woman who could calm a frightened horse with a whispered word, and the blustery Wehrmacht general who spent his days playing politics in smoky government briefing rooms.

  But Kat saw what the others didn’t see. At home in their spacious flat, her parents’ personalities fit together like puzzle pieces, forming an unlikely whole that made perfect sense in the end.

  And now that puzzle was forever undone.

  She moved swiftly, averting her eyes as she passed a drunken couple swaying and giggling as they walked. It was very late, but the full moon and the mild weather had brought a few sleepless citizens out into the streets.

  It was too painful to think of her father’s half of the puzzle. Words like torture and execution—words Karl and Ingrid Hoffmann whispered when they thought she couldn’t hear—were almost beyond what she was able to imagine. When she lay awake in her bed at night ambushed by thoughts of her father’s fate, she tapped out a two-fingered rhythm on her palm. Eventually, the swells and crests of some imaginary jazz band—American jazz, not the watered-down, Nazi-approved German jazz they played on the radio now—chased the dark thoughts away.

  Her mother was another matter entirely. She was alive, and her spirit, which had never seemed tethered to her body anyway, was present in everything Kat saw, heard, and touched. She hoped that wherever her mother was, there were trees.

  As she took a sharp right at the end of the street, she felt her pulse begin to pound with the most familiar rhythm of all.

  Rage.

  The pure, undistilled anger that had driven her to throw rocks at the Hitler Youth and a brick through the window of their headquarters.

  Max thought she was too reckless. Gerta did, too, although she hid her feelings better than her brother. But the Becker Circle had been careful, hadn’t they? And in the end, despite their caution, they had been taken down—captured, killed, or forced into hiding.

  Her father dead. Her mother a captive.

  Kat accepted that it wasn’t fair to put the Hoffmanns in danger with her actions. That’s why tonight’s mission wa
s for Kat alone. She would tell Max and Gerta about it in the morning, after the item had been secured. Then they could decide if they were in or out for the next phase of attack against the Hitler Youth.

  Now, where was the house? She paused beneath the awning of a boarded-up hat shop. It should be just up ahead, at the bend in the road. Yes! There it was. The building with the most ornate facade on the street gave way to the wealthiest section of the whole district—carriage houses set comfortably back from the traffic, complete with their own garages. There was a house at the very end of the block with a gabled roof and well-kept shrubbery. On one of the Red Dragons’ trips to the community garden she had seen an automobile pull out of its garage. It was a Mercedes-Benz, the car of a wealthy citizen, like a Nazi functionary or an industrialist.

  The Red Dragons needed something better than absinthe to burn.

  Cars needed fuel to run.

  The math was simple.

  Kat waited beneath the awning, flattening herself against the boarded-up window as a pair of older gentlemen passed by, whispering intently about the fighting in France. When they were out of sight, she stepped out into the moonlight, dashed across the street and down the block.

  She slowed as she reached the house. Attached to one side was the low-slung brick hut of the garage. She ducked behind a hedgerow and moved around the side of the house until she found what she was looking for: a single square window in the garage.

  She kept going until she found a gap in the hedgerow she could slip through, then doubled back to the window. She had a small electric torch in her pocket, but didn’t dare use it until she was inside the garage. She felt along the windowsill, pressed her hands against the base of the window, and pushed upward. To her great relief, it wasn’t locked. It was a small window, too small for an adult burglar to slip through.

  They hadn’t counted on someone as slight as Kat Vogel.