Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
bullet, which had drilled a hole in the tank.
Chapter 4 The two VOPOs were so stunned by what had happened that they reacted slowly. Nothing in their training or previous experience as People’s Police had accustomed them to this kind of civil disobedience. They had been publicly assaulted and humiliated in front of a crowd of people, and they were beside themselves with rage. A fair amount of shouting took place before they worked out what to do. The uninjured officer left his broken-nosed colleague on the scene while he headed back to the police station. They had no personal communicators because they were accustomed to using the car radio to report to HQ. Appeals to the crowd for a telephone had met with shrugs. Working-class people did not have telephones in the GDR. The Party member with the battered Trabant asked if he could leave and was promptly arrested at gunpoint by Broken Nose, who was prepared to believe that anyone could have been part of the conspiracy. His colleague, marching up the road toward Jena, saw a Wartburg coming toward him, flagged it down (also at gun-point), and ordered the driver to take him straight to the police station in central Jena. A mile farther on, they saw a police patrol car coming toward them. The VOPO in the civilian Wartburg frantically waved his colleagues to a stop and explained what had happened. Using the patrol car’s radio, they checked in, explained the nature of the several crimes that had been committed, and were told to report immediately to police HQ. Meanwhile, backup prowl cars were sent to the crash scene. The call to Jena Central was logged at 12:35. It was also logged many miles away, high in the Harz Mountains on the other side of the border by a British listening post code-named Archimedes.
At oneP.M. Dr. Lothar Herrmann, back at his desk in Pullach, lifted his phone and took the awaited call from the BND ballistics laboratory in a neighboring building. The lab was situated adjacent to the armory and firing range. It had the shrewd practice, when issuing a sidearm to an operative, not simply to note the serial number of the gun and get it signed for, but to fire two rounds into a sealed chamber, then to retrieve and keep the slugs. In a perfect world, the technician would have preferred the actual bullets from the cadavers in Cologne, but he made do with the photographs. All rifle barrels are different from one another in minute respects, and when firing a bullet, each barrel leaves miniscule scratches, called lands, on the dis-charged slug. They are like fingerprints. The technician had compared the lands on the two sample slugs he still retained from a Walther PPK issued ten years ago with the photo-graphs he had been given and about whose origin he had no idea at all. “A perfect match? I see. Thank you,” said Dr. Herrmann. He called the fingerprint section—the BND keeps a full set of prints of its own staffers, apart from others who come to its attention—and received the same reply. He exhaled deeply and reached for the phone again. There was nothing for it; this had to go to the Director General himself. What followed was one of the most difficult interviews of Dr. Herrmann’s career. The DG was
Page 54