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halt. While the senior British officer issued his dismissal orders, a pale yellow Berlin city bus rumbled up to the prison, headlights cutting through the lightly falling snow. The moment it stopped, twenty-four soldiers dressed in a potpourri of uniforms spilled into the darkening prison yard and broke into four groups of six. These soldiers represented a compromise typical of the farcical Four Power administration of Spandau. The normal month-long guard tours were handled by rota, and went off with a minimum of friction. But the destruction of the prison, like every previous disruption of routine, had brought chaos. First the Russians had refused to accept German police security at the prison. Then—because no Allied nation trusted any of its “allies” to guard Spandau’s ruins alone—they decided they would
all
do it, with a token detachment of West Berlin police along to keep up appearances. While the Royal Engineers boarded the idling bus, the NCO’s of the four guard details deployed their men throughout the compound.
    Near the shattered prison gate, a black American master sergeant gave his squad a final brief: “Okay, ladies. Everybody’s got his sector map, right?”
    “Sir!” barked his troops in unison.
    “Then listen up. This ain’t gate duty at the base, got it? The Germs have the perimeter—we got the interior. Our orders are to guard this wreckage. That’s
os
tensibly, as the captain says. We are
here
to watch the Russians. They watch us; we watch them. Same old same old, right? Only these Ivans probably ain’t grunts, dig? Probably GRU—maybe even KGB. So keep your pots on and your slits open. Questions?”
    “How long’s the gig, Sarge?”
    “This pa
trol
lasts twelve hours, Chapman, six to six. If you’re still awake then—and you’d better be—then you can get back to your hot little pastry on the Bendlerstrasse.”When the laughter died, the sergeant grinned and barked, “Spread out, gentlemen! The enemy is already in place.”
    As the six Americans fanned out into the yard, a green-and-white Volkswagen van marked POLIZEI stopped in the street before the prison. It waited for a break in traffic, then jounced over the curb and came to rest before the command trailer steps. Instantly, six men wearing the dusty green uniform of the West Berlin police trundled out of its cargo door and lined up between the van and the trailer.
    Dieter Hauer, the captain in charge of the police contingent, climbed down from the driver’s seat and stepped around the van. He had an arresting face, with a strong jaw and a full military mustache. His clear gray eyes swept once across the wrecked prison lot. In the dusk he noticed that the foul-weather ponchos of the Allied soldiers gave the impression that they all served the same army. Hauer knew better. Those young men were a fragmented muster of jangling nerves and suspicion—two dozen accidents waiting to happen.
    The Germans call their police
bullen
—“bulls”—and Hauer personified the nickname. Even at fifty-five, his powerful, barrel-chested body radiated enough authority to intimidate men thirty years his junior. He wore neither gloves, helmet, nor cap against me cold, and contrary to what the recruits in his unit suspected, this was no affectation meant to impress them. Rather, as people who knew him were aware, he possessed an almost inhuman resilience against external annoyances, whether natural or man-made. Hauer called, “Attention!” as he stepped back around the van. His officers formed a tight unit beneath the command trailer’s harsh floodlamp.
    “I’ve told anyone who’d listen that we didn’t want this assignment,” he said. “Naturally no one gives a shit.”
    There were a few nervous chuckles. Hauer spat onto the snow. A hostage-recovery specialist, he plainly considered this token guard detail an affront to his dignity. “You should feel very safe tonight, gentlemen,” he continued with heavy sarcasm. “We have the