The wall did not yield easily. It was a stubborn adversary, composed of limestone blocks hewn in the sixteenth century and mortar that had calcified into a substance harder than the rock itself. It fought back against the entrenching tool, sending jarring shocks up Peter's arms that rattled his teeth and threatened to dislocate his shoulders.
Clang. Clang. Crunch.
The sound was maddeningly loud in the confined space of the tomb. Every strike seemed to echo like a gunshot, a beacon calling out to the Russians on the other side of the oak door.
"Faster," Hanke urged. He was holding the flashlight, the beam trembling in his blistered hands. The light cast wild, swinging shadows against the curved ceiling, making the skulls in the niches seem to nod in approval. "The door is smoking, Peter. The wood is charring."
Peter didn't look back. He couldn't afford to look at the door. He focused entirely on the fissure near the floor where the draft was whistling through. He swung the shovel with a manic, rhythmic violence, channeling all his fear, all his rage, and all his guilt into the steel blade.
He wasn't digging for himself anymore. He was digging for Klein, whose body lay cooling on the flagstones behind him. He was digging for the names he had spoken aloud in the dark: Marco. Elena. The fiction he had written on the back of a logistical manifest had somehow, in the reading, become a prophecy. His men had heard it. They had bought into it.
"Here!" Muller gasped. He had been clawing at the mortar with his bayonet. "It's loose!"
Peter dropped the shovel and jammed his fingers into the crack. He felt the rough grit of the stone. He pulled. His nails bent backward, screaming with pain, but the block shifted. It ground against its neighbors, a deep, geological groan, and then slid outward.
A rush of air hit Peter's face. It was not fresh air—it smelled of wet rot, sewage, and the ancient, earthy damp of the grave—but it was cool. It was oxygen.
"Push it through," Peter ordered.
Together, he and Muller kicked at the loose stone. It tumbled away into the darkness beyond, landing with a wet splash that echoed hollowly.
"A drain," Peter whispered, shining the light through the hole. "It's the old storm drain for the crypts."
The hole was small, barely wide enough for a man's shoulders. Beyond lay a cylindrical tunnel of slimy brick, glistening with moisture and draped in cobwebs that looked like heavy gray curtains.
"Schultz first," Peter commanded. "Go."
The boy hesitated, looking at the black maw of the drain. "It looks... narrow."
"It is better than the fire," Peter said, shoving him gently. "Go. Crawl. Don't stop until you see the sky."
Schultz wriggled through the opening, disappearing into the muck. Muller followed. Then Hanke, gritting his teeth as his burned hands touched the rough stone.
Peter paused. He looked back at the tomb one last time. He looked at Klein. The boy looked peaceful now, his face unmarred by the fire that had taken his back. Peter felt a sudden, crushing urge to take the body with them, but he knew it was impossible. The dead were heavy, and the living were barely lighter.
"I'm sorry," Peter whispered to the corpse. "Hold the door for us."
He squeezed through the hole, dragging his MP40 behind him.
The drain was a nightmare of claustrophobia.
It was a tube of brick perhaps three feet in diameter, forcing them to crawl on their hands and knees in a slurry of mud and stagnant water that smelled of centuries of decay. The ceiling pressed down on the back of Peter's helmet, scraping against the steel. The air was thick and foul, tasting of copper and excrement.
There was no light except for the erratic beam of Hanke's flashlight ahead. Peter crawled in the dark, guided by the splashing sounds of Muller's boots in front of him.
His knees were raw within minutes. The slime soaked through his trousers, freezing his skin. Rats, disturbed by the intrusion, skittered along the ledges of the brickwork, their eyes reflecting red in the gloom, their wet bodies brushing against Peter's hands.
He suppressed the urge to scream. He suppressed the urge to stop. He focused on the rhythm of movement. Right hand, left knee. Left hand, right knee.
He thought of the letter in his pocket. It was damp now, protected only by the oilcloth and the wool of his tunic. Was the ink running? Was the apology dissolving into a blue smear against his chest?
"Halt!" Hanke's voice echoed back, distorted and hollow.
"What is it?" Peter hissed.
"Junction."
Peter crawled forward until he was beside Muller and Hanke. The drain had widened into a small, vaulted chamber where two tunnels intersected. A rusted iron ladder led up to a manhole cover far above.
"Where are we?" Muller asked, wiping slime from his face.
"Under the cloister, I think," Peter said, orienting himself by the internal compass of a soldier who had studied the maps until they were burned into his brain. "The drain runs downhill toward the river. If we keep going straight, we come out on the banks of the Spree."
"The Russians are on the banks," Muller pointed out. "They crossed the river two days ago."
"They are everywhere," Peter said. "But the riverbank is chaos. Reeds. Mud. Wreckage. We can lose ourselves there."
Suddenly, a sound drifted down from the manhole shaft above. Voices. Boots on cobblestones.
And then, unmistakably, the sound of a dog barking.
"They are sweeping the ruins," Peter whispered. "They have dogs."
"If they open that cover..." Hanke looked up at the circle of iron. A thin rim of moonlight showed around the edge.
"They will smell us," Muller said grimly. He looked at Peter. "You have the letters?"
Peter blinked. "What?"
"The letters," Muller repeated. "To the girl. The one with the peaches."
"Yes. I have them."
"Good." Muller nodded, a strange look of resolve settling over his dirt-streaked face. He unclipped the last grenade from his belt. It was a stick grenade, the handle battered and worn. "You need to keep moving, Sergeant. You and Hanke and the kid."
"We move together," Peter said.
"No," Muller said. He stood up—the chamber was just high enough to stand in if you hunched. He looked older than his seventeen years. His eyes were hard, flat, and undeniably clear. "The tunnel narrows up ahead. I saw it on the maintenance plans in the sacristy before the attack. Single file. Slow."
"So?"
"So if the dog finds this shaft, they will send the animal down. Or they will drop a satchel charge. Someone has to make sure they don't follow the tunnel."
"Muller, no."
"Listen to me, Peter," Muller said, using the first name. It was a breach of protocol, but protocol had died in the crypt. "I have nobody. My parents were in Hamburg. The firestorm took them. I have no girl. No house with a red roof. No Marco."
Peter felt a chill that had nothing to do with the freezing water. "Muller..."
"You have a reason to breathe," Muller said, pointing a dirty finger at Peter's chest. "You have an apology to deliver. Or a life to live. I don't know which, but it's more than I have. I am just carrying a rifle. You are carrying a future."
"I am not leaving you."
"You are," Muller said. He stepped toward the iron ladder. "Because if you don't, then Klein died for nothing. And I will die for nothing. And your Italian girl will wait forever."
He looked at Hanke. "Take him. Get them to the river."
Hanke hesitated, then nodded slowly. He understood the currency of the moment. Breath was finite. To buy it for one man, another had to pay.
"Come, Peter," Hanke said, grabbing Peter's arm with his bandaged hand. The grip was weak, but the intent was iron.
"Muller..." Peter started.
"Go!" Muller hissed, starting to climb the ladder. "The dog is right there! I can hear the claws on the stone!"
Muller climbed halfway up the shaft. He wedged himself against the rungs. He unscrewed the cap of the grenade. The porcelain bead on the pull-cord dangled white in the gloom.
He looked down at them. He grinned—a rictus of teeth in a black mask of soot.
"Tell her," Muller whispered. "Tell her the peaches were worth it."
Peter stared at him. He wanted to argue. He wanted to order him down. But he saw the peace in Muller's eyes. It was the peace of a man who had finally found a purpose for his death. He wasn't dying for the Reich. He wasn't dying for the Fuhrer. He was dying for a love story he would never see.
"I will tell her," Peter choked out.
"Go."
Hanke pulled him. Schultz was already crawling into the downstream tunnel, sobbing quietly. Peter turned and followed.
They scrambled through the muck, moving as fast as their exhausted limbs could carry them. The tunnel sloped downward, the water getting deeper, rising to their chests. It was freezing, numbing the body, stealing the heat.
They had gone perhaps fifty meters when it happened.
Above them, through the earth, they heard the heavy clank of the manhole cover being lifted. Then a bark, loud and echoing. A shout in Russian.
Then, the pop of the friction igniter.
Peter stopped. He braced himself against the wet bricks.
One. Two. Three.
BOOM.
The sound was dull, muffled by the earth and the distance, but the shockwave slapped the water around them, sending ripples washing over Peter's chin. The tunnel shook. Dust rained down from the ceiling.
Then came the secondary sound—the collapse of the shaft, the rumble of tons of earth and cobblestones falling in to seal the junction.
Muller had pulled the ceiling down on top of himself. He had turned the junction into a grave and a wall.
"He did it," Schultz whispered, his voice echoing in the darkness. "He buried them."
Peter didn't speak. He couldn't. He felt a physical weight added to the letters in his pocket. It wasn't just paper anymore. It was heavy with blood. Muller was in there now. Muller was part of the ink.
"Move," Peter said, his voice a stranger's rasp. "Don't let him wait in vain."
They pushed on. The water rose higher. The air grew colder. They were moving under the city, under the war, traversing the intestines of a dying beast.
Time lost its meaning. It could have been minutes or hours. They were just machines of motion—drag, kick, breathe. Drag, kick, breathe.
Finally, the darkness began to thin. Ahead, a grey, diffuse light filtered into the tunnel. The air changed. The smell of sewage was replaced by the smell of wet reeds, river mud, and smoke.
"The outlet," Hanke croaked.
They reached the end of the drain. It opened out into a culvert, half-submerged in the Spree River. An iron grate barred the exit, but the bottom bars had rusted away, leaving a gap just wide enough to squeeze through underwater.
"We have to swim," Peter said.
He took a breath, submerged, and pulled himself under the rusted iron. The water was icy, a shock that stopped the heart. He kicked, scraping his back on the metal, and surfaced on the other side.
He was outside.
It was dawn.
The sky was the color of a bruise—purple and grey, streaked with the black smoke of burning oil. They were on the riverbank, hidden amidst a thicket of tall reeds. To their left, the ruins of the bridge they had tried to protect lay broken in the water, twisted girders sticking up like the ribs of a skeleton.
To their right, on the high ground, the chapel of St. Matthias was a smoking volcano. The roof was gone. The walls were jagged stumps.
Peter dragged himself up the mud bank, collapsing into the reeds. Hanke and Schultz followed, looking like creatures emerging from the primordial ooze. They were coated in black slime, shivering uncontrollably.
"We made it," Schultz chattered, his teeth clicking together like castanets. "We're alive."
Peter rolled onto his back. He looked at the sky. Snow was beginning to fall—light, incongruous flakes drifting down to land on the mud and the dead.
He reached for his chest. The button was still done. The packet was still there.
But as he lay there, gasping for air, he saw movement on the ridgeline above the river.
Russian trucks. A convoy. They were moving along the river road, headlights cutting through the dawn gloom.
And walking alongside them, a column of prisoners. German soldiers, hands on their heads, shuffling in a long, grey line.
"Look," Hanke whispered, pointing.
Peter raised his head. He watched the column. He saw the defeat in their posture. He saw the end of the war marching west.
"We can't stay here," Peter said. "They will sweep the riverbank when the sun comes up."
"Where do we go?" Schultz asked. "The bridge is gone. The town is taken."
"We go into the crypts of the city," Peter said. "The cellars. The Bautzen labyrinth. We wait for the counter-attack."
"Counter-attack?" Hanke laughed, a harsh, barking sound. "Peter, look around. There is no counter-attack. The Wehrmacht is dead."
"No," Peter said. He sat up. He wrung the water from his tunic. "They are not dead. I heard it on the radio before the jammer started. The Grossdeutschland division. They are moving from the south. They are coming."
It was another lie. Or perhaps a half-remembered rumor. But he couldn't let them stop now. If they stopped, the cold would kill them. Or the Russians. Or the despair.
"We have to move," Peter said. "For Muller."
He stood up. He swayed, dizzy with hunger and exhaustion. He looked at Hanke. The corporal's hands were raw meat, the bandages soaked in sewage.
"Hanke," Peter said softly. "Can you hold a rifle?"
Hanke looked at his hands. He tried to close his fingers. He winced, tears springing to his eyes.
"No," Hanke said. "I can't."
"Then you carry the hope," Peter said.
He reached into his pocket. He took out the packet of letters. He hesitated.
If he died, the letters died. If he fell, the apology was silenced.
"No," Peter corrected himself. He put the letters back. "No. I carry the letters. You carry the map."
He pulled the soggy map case from his belt and handed it to Hanke. "Find us a basement. Find us a hole that isn't a grave."
They began to walk, three specters in the reeds, moving parallel to the river of death, heading toward the burning skyline of Bautzen.
They were alive. But the ledger was unbalanced. Klein was dead. Muller was dead. And Peter Polemos was still breathing, his heart beating a rhythm of guilt against his ribs.
One for you. One for me. One for the ghost.
He trudged on, the mud sucking at his boots, the weight of the survivors pressing down on his shoulders. He was the captain of a ghost ship, and he knew, with a terrible certainty, that the toll was not yet paid in full.