Free The Berkut by Joseph Heywood Page B

held out his right hand in a gracious gesture. The girls moved to him and held themselves against him. Brumm could see the power exerting itself and was amazed by it.
    "Waller." She snapped to attention. "Help Herr Wolf." He let the name sink in. "You," he said to three of the girls, touching them on their heads, "resume your watches and tell Beard to come in."
    As the girls gathered their weapons and moved out, Hitler found a place by the wall and was helped to sit down by Waller. Immediately he curled into a ball and went to sleep. Waller covered him with a curtain from the flat.
    When Beard entered, Brumm sat him down beside Waller. "We have a lot to talk about."
    The flames of a large fire snapped loudly as they burned unchecked in a nearby building. A lone rifle cracked somewhere in the streets outside.
     
     
    14 – May 2, 1945, 11:50 P.M.

    Vasily Petrov always began at the beginning. While his patterns of thought were fast, his methods of investigation were not. He took his time and paid attention to details-all the details. It was not that he tried to do everything by himself. He knew how to delegate, but he always made sure that his subordinates knew exactly what they were supposed to do and the results he expected. Then he checked periodically to be sure that his orders were being followed. It was a matter of control. Over time he had built his staff to four, all of them different in personality but similar in motivation. Each man was fanatically dedicated to the unit's mission, and each of them was physically robust, with great reserves of stamina and the persistence of a well-trained hunting dog.
    The four men felt a distant fondness for their leader. He was hard to know, cold and logical in approach and secretive in nature. But whereas their admiration for Petrov the man was somewhat subdued, their respect for Petrov the leader was strong and genuine. Comrade Petrov was not a demonstrative man, but all of them knew when he was satisfied with their work. They trusted him and learned from him. Yet with all this, t hey feared him, too, for Petrov, code name: The Berkut, gave no quarter and countenanced no incompetence. To fail meant death; this was the rule of the Special Operations Group.
    It was just before midnight on May 2. Petrov and his men moved slowly through what remained of the darkened halls of the Reich Chancellery. Petrov had intended to reach this destination earlier, but after nearly being caught in the mine ambush, they had been pinned down by stubborn German civilians-old men and adolescents with automatic weapons and stick grenades-and had been forced to wait until an infantry unit arrived to help them eliminate the opposition. Petrov loathed the delay, but he accepted it. His men were fully capable of doing the job, but to have committed them to it might have cost lives, and these were reserved for a higher need.
    They entered the Chancellery rubble from the north end, through a shattered window frame. They climbed a pile of stones and jumped into what had once been the lavish interior of the building. They had been told by Soviet intelligence that Berlin was entirely under Russian control, but they had seen for themselves that there remained pockets of resistance, and in making their way into the Chancellery, they were cautious. The Chancellery, they had been told, had been taken by their military comrades during the early hours of May 2. Now Petrov was intent on finding some kind of Soviet military command post. The Special Operations Group was eager to begin its work. Officially they would have no role in the investigation to come-at least not in the work that the Russian SMERSH units would perform. Their mandate was quite different.
    On the second floor of the Chancellery, in a large hall the Nazis had called the Blue Room, they found a temporary army control center. Nearly a hundred soldiers were in the room, most of them asleep. A few stood in small groups talking quietly; others were