The Berkut by Joseph Heywood

to the Alpha's mouth and fired. The bullet completely obliterated his front teeth, tore away the back of his head, and splattered the top of the couch and the wall behind with sticky clusters of brain tissue and blood. The body lurched heavily to the right, and the colonel dropped the pistol to the floor, just under the body's right hand. Brumm noticed that a piece of bullet or bone, he wasn't sure which, had exited at the right temple, leaving a small wound that trickled dark blood. Less than four minutes had passed since Magda Goebbels had been removed from the anteroom.
    Quickly, Brumm ran back into the bedroom, moved the chair back to its place against the wall and leaped to catch the grille frame above. Stabilizing himself like a gymnast, he swung his legs back and forth to gain momentum, then thrust himself upward, driving himself higher as he gained purchase, finally pulling himself up into the narrow metal ventilation shaft with a single fluid motion. He backed up, reached forward and lowered the light unit into place. Satisfied that it was secure, he put his cheek on the metal and consciously began an effort to slow his breathing, to calm his racing heart and prevent hyperventilation.
    For a few minutes it was quiet below; then Brumm could hear the
    steel door opening. People entered the death room.
    He heard Bormann grunt. "Get the doctor."
    Moments later: "They are both dead. Get the certificates." Bormann again: "Get blankets. We need something to cover him." "Everything's ready in the garden," another voice reported. It
    sounded like Gu nsche.
    There was no further conversation. In relative quiet the bodies were removed to the Chancellery garden above, to be bu rned in accordance with the Fü hrer's final instructions.
    After there was silence for a while, Brumm looked across at Hitler for the first time. "It is done. Now we wait," he told his leader.
    Suddenly Hitler's eyes widened and he began to thrash around, kicking gently at first, but progressively more wildly, making the metal walls of the shaft ring like a huge kettledrum. Brumm reached over and grabbed the Fiihrer by the arm, squeezing with such strength that the pain overrode the cause of the panic.
    "Rats," Hitler whispered excitedly, looking behind him.
    The col onel tightened his grip. "My Fü hrer," he said coldly, "we have lived the free life of the wolf, but for the moment our brother in arms ;s the rat."
    Hitler glared at the colonel, hatred filling his eyes. A pool of clear spittle formed at the corner of his mouth and fell slowly to the sheetmetal floor of the tunnel that hid them from the world.

    10 - APRIL 30, 1945, 3: 3 0 P.M
    There was a single shot, a muted pop that was barely audible through the thick steel doors that separated the cramped private quarters of Adolf Hitler and his new wife from the rest of the subterranean Führerbunker. The good-byes had been said; it was over. Hitler had given his Anton Graff portrait of Frederick the Great to his personal pilot, Gruppenfhrer Hans Baur, with the directive that the flier carry it to safety. Despite many pleas-the final one coming from the overwrought Magda Goebbels, wife of the minister of propaganda-the Führer had refused to attempt to escape. If Berlin could not hold against the invading Russians, he preferred death to life. He feared capture more than death, though he shared this fear with few. The Russians, he was certain, would display him in a cage, like a common animal. He would not risk it. Berlin was falling. He would go down with it. His decision was irrevocable.
    Fifteen meters underground, the bunker's five-meter-thick concrete walls shuddered from the rain of artillery shells above. Less than sixteen square meters of Berlin remained under German control, and even in this final German pocket, Russian snipers were on the rooftops while larger bodies of Soviet infantry smashed relentlessly toward the Chancellery, fighting the battle one building at a time.
    Outside the steel