Blue Flame. Robert A. Webster

trembled and glanced at the cellar door.

      “Yes, he is fine,” said Erik smirking, eager to get on with the next phase.

      A truck pulled up outside and a dozen infantry soldiers jumped out and formed up into a line. The Gestapo officers gave the soldiers their orders and they unloaded their cargo of furniture. Hans’s commandos offered to lend a hand until they found out the items were going to the cellar.

      Another truck pulled up. This one’s rear compartment was armoured and its cargo differed from the first having various sized, heavy narrow crates and a rectangular red strongbox.

      Hans, Benno, and Erik were organising and planning. Erik stopped when his furniture came through the cottage. He went with the soldiers down to the cellar to oversee the delivery.

      It didn’t take long to complete the task. The soldiers went outside to wait for the slow, heavy excavation equipment and to speak with the commandos who told them about the creepy cellar.

      Hans, Erik, and Benno came outside. Benno pointed out the area for the excavation and building of an underground bunker.

      Erik gave an order to a Gestapo officer, who marched to the back of the armoured truck.

      Benno looked at his watch and told Hans, “Your job is finished here SS-Oberfüehrer. You need to carry out your next assignment. There is a camouflaged Junkers Ju252 cargo plane waiting at a makeshift airstrip, 40k North West, at the rim of the Black Forest. The plane will take you and your team to a transitory airstrip near Farge port. A truck will pick you up from there.”

      Hans smiled and breathed a sigh of relief as Benno clicked his heels together… “Heil Hitler!”

      The commandos returned the salute and Hans ordered his men into the Kubelwagon.

      “Wait!” shouted Erik stood behind the BUCH MOSE strongbox,beckoning Hans to return.

      Hans glared at Erik as he got out of the Kubelwagon and went over to Erik, who said, “You know how important this is, and the Füehrer insisted that you and I place this into its new home.” He smirked.

      The Kubelwagon drove around the slow oncoming convoy of heavy machinery and along tracks and small roads around the Black Forrest region. The commandos, relieved to be away from the cottage, remained deep in thought and confused as they made the slow journey to the airstrip. Milky orange dusk enveloped the sky as they reached the Junkers, covered in camouflage netting. The pilot ordered them to hurry with the plane not being equipped to fly at night.

      Hans’s men removed the netting, and the pilot started the Jumo 211F engines. Hans and his commandos climbed aboard and the plane took off. The commandos, still unnerved by their experience, stared ahead in silence throughout the short flight.

      Hans looked at his watch in the moonlight, “2:00 am. We could have walked there quicker,” he grumbled. He and his men had now been waiting on a small roadside at the now deserted airstrip for several hours. They then heard engines and saw headlights coming toward them.

      Four ‘Moles,’ Opel Maultier trucks loaded with cargo and troops pulled up alongside them. Hans and his men climbed into the back of one vehicle for the short journey. The night sky was quiet, but everyone on the vehicles knew at any moment things could change. All the troops looked on edge as they listened for the sound of aircraft.

      They arrived at a jetty at the port of Farge, pulling up alongside a sleek U-boat, where two young SS officers met them. “Heil Hitler!” said the fresh-faced youngsters, snapping to attention and raising their arm in salute. Hans returned their salutes, marched past them, and boarded the U-boat, followed by his commandos.

      Previously, pity was not in Kruger’s nature, but after the unnerving events he’d witnessed at the cottage, he could not help but feel sorrow for the two young officers. He knew there was no room on the U-boat to accommodate them, so they would be a disposable loose end.

      The other troops got out of the trucks and started offloading the cargo into the U-boat. Several of the U-boat crew came from below decks and assisted. They loaded small heavy wooden crates, marked with a large black stencil:

      PRODUCTO DE ARGENTINA

      MAQUINARIA AGRICOLA

      Argentine agricultural machinery.

      Captain Viktor came on deck, while the rest of his officers stayed below supervising the storage of the heavy cargo. Several other trucks arrived during the night with storage containers that dockside cranes hoisted into watertight compartments. Other trucks arrived with smaller crates they loaded into the conning storage area within the vessel. Several hours into the offload they all ran for cover as allied bombers flew overhead, dropping their payloads onto the nearby town of Bremen and the Valentin submarine pens close by. The bombing was brief and once over they continued with the loading. By daybreak, the U-boat’s crew felt exhausted.

      The Captain stood on the conning bridge and watched his men load the last of the cargo into the U-boat. He felt angry, because not only was his crew’s complement less than half, just twenty-eight men but also they had to work tirelessly loading the boat. He, along with the rest of Germany knew they’d lost the war and knew they were transporting looted- treasure.

      Kruger and his men came out of the U-boat, now attired in black S.S. uniforms.

      The sailors just milled around on the jetty.

      The Captain thought that with the U-boat now loaded, they should soon be underway. He wanted to get back out onto the familiar ocean, maybe for the last time. Karl always hoped that he would die at sea, a maritime warrior.

      Hans issued an order to his men and they rounded up the U-boat crew at gunpoint and ushered them aboard. Hans then ordered the Captain to join his men. Captain Viktor clenched his fists, angry about getting orders from an S.S. murderer, but he had no choice; his orders had come from the top.

      The SS commandos locked the crew in the hot forward compartment of the vessel with the six remaining torpedoes.

      “What’s happening sir,” asked a submariner.

      “I don’t know but we’d better rest,” said the Captain who sat on the cramped steel floor, rested his head on his knees, and thought about his wife and kids.

      The jetty was now silent, except for screeching seagulls and the groan of twisted wrecks, buffeted by the waves.

      Hans Kruger and the two young SS officers stood on the jetty. Kruger looked at his watch, satisfied that everything had gone according to schedule. All he had to do now was wait for the Füehrer.

      * * *

      With the battle raging outside, a grisly sight greeted S.S. Officers Otto Guensche and Heinz Linge, as they entered Hitler’s quarters within the deserted Füehrer bunker. After hearing two shots and seeing an SS officer leaving Hitler’s drawing-room, they carried out their orders.

      Adolf Hitler, dressed in his beige uniform and Eva Braun in a blue floral skirt lay dead in what appeared to be a suicide tryst. Their faces contorted with blood staining their clothes, floor, and furniture. Wispy smoke drifted from the barrel of a Luger pistol lying on the floor beside Hitler’s body. Both he and Braun had white powder around their lips, with a bottle of cyanide capsules, and an empty carafe of water overturned on the table. Small gunshot wounds on their heads still smouldered as Otto and Heinz, glanced at each other, smiled, covered the bodies with plain woollen blankets, and lifted them onto trolleys. They wheeled them to the bunker’s elevator and took them to the surface. With no ceremony and little respect paid to the corpses as Heinz, Hitler’s former valet, and Otto, spat on the corpses before wheeling the bodies outside and dumping them into a bomb crater within the gardens of the chancellery. Artillery shells and gunfire exploded around the buildings as the two S.S. Officers’ removed the cap off a large tin drum and poured a pungent-smelling liquid over the corpses. They ignited the fuel, and with a whoosh, the two bodies erupted into flame.

      The two men watched as the corpses incinerated in the inferno. Otto noticed something strange as Hitler’s jacket dissolved in the flame.