The Gods of Atlantis by David Gibbons

Author:David Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780755374328
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2011-08-17T23:00:00+00:00

13

A few minutes after 10 a.m., Hoffman emerged on the roof inside the flak-battery command post, a circular concrete shelter like a truncated cone with walls that rose a metre or so above his height. He looked up, squinting at the overcast sky, and saw the dark pall of dust and soot that hung over the city. The sky seemed to reflect a red glow from the flames, and from the dust of millions of pulverized bricks that hung in the air like a mist of blood. Climbing up the stairs from the squalor and seething humanity below, Hoffman had thought of the medieval axis mundi, the ascent to heaven that seemed to be promised by the smudge of daylight he had seen at the top of the stairs; yet when he reached there, all he found was another vantage point over hell, as if he himself were fated to be among the orchestrators of this horror. He remembered swimming in the lakes of Bavaria as a boy, looking down and seeing the lens of sulphur that divided the living lake from the dead lake below, and never having the courage to dive through it. Here it was as if he were trapped beneath that opaque layer, cut off forever from the light of the sun. Beyond the sight of God.

He felt his nostrils burn, and the grit of brick dust on his teeth. After the atrocious stench of the stairwell, he had yearned to take a breath of fresh air, but out here it was acrid, fume-laden, and caught in his throat. Yet the pall of dust had lessened with the ceasefire of the last few hours, and he could discern other smells too: a waft of cordite from the flak guns; wisps of black markhorka tobacco, brought for the flak gunners by the boys who stole out at night from the tower to loot Russian corpses, some never to return; and the honey-sweet smell of decomposing flesh, rising up everywhere from the rubble of the city. And there was another smell, not a Berlin smell but the farmyard smell of Russia, of thousands of horses dragging supply wagons for the Red Army that snaked into the city behind the advancing soldiers and tanks, coming from nearly every direction now. Two days ago, the remaining German perimeter had been a rough rectangle five by fifteen kilometres. Now it was little more than the Tiergarten and the strongholds on either side. He felt as if he were standing on a precarious mound of solid ground in a lake of lava. Soon they too would be swamped, islands in a sea of blood, and then submerged in the red tide like some ghastly modern-day parable of Atlantis.

He pushed past crouched helmeted figures to the only officer present, a Luftwaffe Hauptmann with aviator wings on his tunic like his own, another pilot in an air force that no longer had aircraft. The man wore a battered forage cap and radio headphones that were hooked into the fire control panel.

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