I

Berlin was falling, falling in ruin, falling in fire, falling in blood. Back when the war was new, Goring said you could call him Meyer if a single bomb ever fell on the capital of the Reich. Had anyone held the Reichsmarschall to his promise, he would have changed his name a million times by now.

Goring never said a word about shells or machine – gun bullets. Back in those triumphant days, who could have imagined Germany would go to war with Russia? Not needing to worry about Russia helped make the destruction of France as easy as it was.

And who could have imagined that, if Germany did go to war with Russia, she wouldn’t knock down the Slavic Untermenschen in six weeks or so? Who could have imagined that those Red subhumans would fight their way back from the gates of Moscow, back across their own country, across Poland, across eastern Germany, and into Berlin? Who could have imagined the war was over except for the last orgy of killing, and all the Fuhrer’s promised secret weapons hadn’t done a thing to hold off Germany’s inevitable and total defeat?

Captain Hasso Pemsel and what was left of his company crouched in the ruins of the Old Museum. The space between the Spree and the Kupfergraben was Berlin’s museum district. These days, the finest antiquities were in G Tower, next to the Tiergarten. People said the massive reinforced – concrete antiaircraft tower could hold out for a year after the rest of Berlin was lost. Maybe soon they would get the chance to find out if they were right.

A Russian submachine gun burped bullets. Behind Hasso, something shattered with a crash. It might have come through two or three thousand years, but a curator had decided it wasn’t worth taking to G Tower. Nobody would study it any more – that was for sure.