Eva Read online

  There were few people abroad. He saw a couple of men rummaging through the mountainous piles of foul-smelling garbage heaped against the ruins. One boarded-up store had been broken into and a dozen or so ragged people were busily looting its stock. Several women brandishing knives were carving chunks of meat from the haunches and flanks of a dead horse, still harnessed to a demolished wagon. Lying between the wagon poles the head of the animal was wrenched around, its dead eyes open, sadly watching the women at their grisly task.

  Willi felt sick. The city was disintegrating. And its people. It tore at him even more than the sights of villages he’d passed through, every window hung with the white sheets of surrender—waiting for the enemy.

  He turned a corner, skidding in the mud cover left by the shattered masonry and mortar and the broken water mains. The street before him was empty. About a hundred meters ahead a barricade of rubble and sandbags built around an overturned streetcar blocked the entire thoroughfare. He began to work his bike through the debris.

  Wolfgang Schiller was two days shy of his thirteenth birthday. He was already a Fähnleinsführer in the Hitler Youth. And he was proud of his responsibilities. He poked his friend Helmuth, almost six months his senior.

  “Look,” he whispered. “Someone is coming. On a motorcycle.”

  The two boys peered fearfully down the stretch of darkened, deserted street in front of the barricade. Automatically they moved closer together. They were alone at their post.

  “Should—should we get Herr Brauner?” Helmuth whispered, clutching his MP40 submachine gun. “And the others?”

  Wolfgang shook his head. “He said not to disturb them unless it was important,” he whispered back. “He said they hadn’t slept for two days—and better they sleep now than when Ivan comes.”

  He bit his lip. He knew it was up to him. He had the rank. He had to decide if it was important. Or not. Was it? One lone soldier? He wished he could decide. If it wasn’t important and he alerted the men from the Volkssturm unnecessarily, he would surely be ridiculed. But what if it was? And he handled it himself? He would show himself to be a real soldier then, wouldn’t he? If he could only make up his mind . . .

  Helmuth peered out through the barricade. He looked frightened. The strange man on the motorcycle was slowly coming closer. He turned to Wolfgang. “Who do you think it is?” he whispered, hoarsely.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A . . . Russian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he is one of ours?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t look like it. His uniform looks funny.”

  “What—what’ll we do?” Helmuth’s voice quavered.

  Fähnleinsführer Wolfgang Schiller said nothing. He did not know what to say. He took a firmer grip on the Panzerfaust poking out through an opening in the barricade. He knew it could knock out a tank, if it hit just right. He had seen it done. It would certainly destroy a motorcycle. And the man on it. He had fired a Panzerfaust once before. In training. You just aim it. Be sure no one stands behind you. And pull the trigger. It was like a rocket.

  The man on the motorcycle was steadily coming closer. Wolfgang could see him clearly now. He did not recognize the uniform. And the helmet did not look like the ones he knew. He began to tremble.

  “Oh, God,” he prayed. “Let me be brave. Not—not like the last time.” And softly, full of fear, he whispered the Hitler Youth oath to himself, his dry lips moving with the words: “I promise in the Hitler Youth to do my duty at all times, in love and faithfulness to the Führer, so help me God . . .”

  The motorcycle was halfway to the barricade. What should he do? Was it a Russian? A Russian scout? Would they come in force? Or—was it a German soldier? He had to make up his mind. The tears began to run down his cheeks. What should he do? Shout to the man? And what if it was a Russian, he would be warned. And start shooting. Oh, dear God, what should he do? What? . . .

  His finger was on the trigger of the weapon. He began to tremble. His hands shook. And suddenly . . .

  Willi more sensed than saw the flash. Instantly he knew what it was. And even as the realization streaked through his mind to reach his conscious thought he reacted instinctively. He catapulted himself from the moving bike. The violent shockwave from the blast when the Panzerfaust warhead hit the bike, disintegrating it in a ball of fire, slammed into him, hurling him into the rubble. He felt a piece of shrapnel rip through his crash helmet savagely tearing it from his head. He let himself go loose as he hit the rubble of broken masonry and chunks of shattered concrete. With detached wonder he realized he was unhurt except for a numbness of his limbs and a ringing in his ears from the explosion. He pressed himself down among the broken bits of stonework. Cautiously he raised his head.

  “Idioten!” he screamed. “Hold your fire!” His shout was at once drowned out by the staccato rattle of submachine-gun fire from the barricade.

  Willi was mad. What the hell did the verschissene bastards think they were doing? He kept down. Snaking his way between chunks of masonry and shattered brickwork he reached the ruined wall of a demolished building. Using all his skill of infiltration and concealment he made his way through the wreckage until he flanked the makeshift barricade. All was quiet. He drew his Walther P-38. Slowly he raised his head and peered out over the barricade position.

  Behind the roadblock, at a small opening, a lone soldier was crouched. One lone soldier. Willi was surprised. The man below seemed to be watching tensely, a Mauser rifle aimed down the street toward the burning motorbike.

  Quietly Willi stood up.

  “You idiot!” he called sharply. “You could have . . .”

  The soldier at the barricade whirled toward him. He raised his rifle—and fired.

  Willi felt the bullet whizz by his right cheek. He hit the ground. He had a flash view of a white face under a large helmet. His P-38 flew into position in front of him. And he fired. Two rounds. A trained reflex action.

  At the barricade the soldier fell. Backwards. As if pushed by an invisible fist.

  Warily Willi got up. He ran down to the fallen soldier. He looked at him, the bile rising in his throat, burning it.

  A tiny figure in a uniform two sizes too large for him. A boy. His downy, grimy cheeks still wet with the streaks of tears. His dead eyes looking at his killer with a child’s surprise. And around his neck an Iron Cross. Second Class.

  There was a sound behind him. Footsteps. Hurrying. He whirled on them, automatically falling to one knee, his P-38 locked before him.

  There were six or seven of them. All elderly men clad in a mixture of uniforms and civilian clothes. But the red armbands with the black stripe and white letters—DEUTSCHER VOLKSSTURM WEHRMACHT—and the two Hoheitsabzeichen—the German eagle with the swastika—worn on their sleeves proclaimed who they were. The people’s army. The defenders of Berlin. Along with the boys.

  Willi rose as they walked up to him. “I am Obersturmführer Lüttjohann,” he snapped. “Report!”

  One of the men stepped forward. “I am Brauner,” he said, “Alois Brauner.” He stared at the dead boy. “You—you killed him,” he said tonelessly. “Little Wolfgang. You—killed him . . .’’

  “He fired on me,” Willi said curtly. He was surprised how harsh his voice sounded. “He blew up my motorcycle with a Panzerfaust. Damn near killed me!”

  Brauner did not hear him. He knelt down beside the dead boy. With infinite sadness he closed the questioning eyes. Gently he touched the Iron Cross.

  “Only a week ago,” he said quietly. “On the Führer’s birthday, it was. The Führer himself gave him this. In the garden of the Reichschancellery.” He looked up at Willi, accusingly. “For destroying a Russian tank.”

  “I did not know he was just a boy,” Willi said defensively. “He fired at me. I called to him—but he fired at me. I had no choice. His bullets would have killed me just as damned dead as if he’d been your age!”

  The men all stared at h
im. Brauner stood up.

  “He was frightened,” he said wearily. “Just as he was when that Russian tank suddenly came around the corner and bore down on him. Up near Moabit, it was. The boy froze. He could not run. He just stood there. Watching the tank. Coming closer and closer. I was there. I saw it. Then suddenly he threw away the Panzerfaust he had been holding and ran. The Russian tank kept coming. It ran over the charge—and it exploded. It blew off a track.” He looked down at the boy. “Wolfgang got the Iron Cross. Second Class. I—I guess he was trying to live up to it.”

  Willi was suddenly angry. “And what the hell was he doing here? Alone? On a military roadblock. A child! Where the devil were you?”

  Brauner peered nearsightedly at him. “The Russians are still many blocks from here,” he said tiredly. “We haven’t slept for days.” He sighed. “They—they sent us a couple of boys from the Hitler Youth to—to . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

  “He was alone,” Willi said.

  Brauner nodded. “There were two of them,” he said, not really caring whether the SS officer believed him or not. “The other one, Helmuth, must have run off. Home, I guess . . .”

  He looked at the tiny, still form of Wolfgang Schiller, Fähnleinsführer in the Hitler Youth. “Wolfgang,” he said. “He stood his ground. This time.” He looked at Willi. “And you—killed him . . .”

  Willi glared contemptuously at the Volksstürmer. “His blood is on your hands, old man,” he growled. “You live with it!”

  Angrily he turned on his heel and stalked off. He had to make it on foot to the Reichschancellery. It would take time. Children, he thought bleakly. Children and old men. Frightened children and foolish old men, neither of whom should be concerned with the harsh realities of war.

  He disappeared into the blackened ruins.

  Behind him, sprawled in death, lay Wolfgang Schiller, Hitler Youth, son of Fritz, who had been killed on the Russian front, and of Hilde, who was waiting for him at home with a wonderful birthday gift. A briefcase. For his studies at the Hochschule. Real leather. So very hard to get.

  She would never see him again.

  From Kaiserdamm Willi cut through the Tiergarten. There would be less chance of running into another barricade, he thought. And the Reichschancellery was located just east of the park.

  He quickly regretted his choice. He had not been prepared for the harrowing sights that met him.

  The Tiergarten had been mercilessly bombed. The cages and runs were all damaged, the ones holding the dangerous animals shored up with timbers from the ruins and reinforced with wire fencing. Some were burned and gutted hulks—the charred carcasses of the wild inhabitants lying like discarded toys on a smoldering city dump.

  The pitiful howls and bellows of the maimed and dying animals pierced his ears and he found himself welcoming the occasional shot that abruptly stilled a piteous scream.

  He was startled when a large crane, most of its feathers scorched off, flapped across his path, the remains of one leg flopping awkwardly beneath it.

  At the tumbled-down wall of a brick building he passed a man, obviously an attendant, sitting on the ground, staring at a badly mangled, big red kangaroo, a dead baby dangling from its pouch. The tears were streaming down the man’s face.

  He passed by the Aquarium—totally destroyed. And the reptile house. At the broken fence of the deer run a doe stood motionless, watching his approach, her glistening guts hanging from a gaping wound in her abdomen. Suddenly she took alarm and leaped to get away. Her thrashing hoofs got tangled up in her entrails and she fell heavily to the ground, unable to get up. Looking at him with huge brown eyes filled with pain and dread, she waited.

  He shot her.

  And he was sick.

  If there was a hell for animals, he thought, it would be like this.

  Finally he stood before the sandbagged, guarded entrance to the New Reichschancellery. The officer in charge of the guard detail examined the sealed envelope Willi held out to him.

  “From Sonderkampfgruppe Skorzeny,” Willi said. “Urgent. For the Führer’s eyes only.”

  The officer glared at him. He motioned to a non-com. “Take this man to Reichsleiter Bormann,” he ordered.

  Obersturmführer Willibald Lüttjohann had arrived at the Bunker.

  Unternehmen Zukunft—Operation Future—was ready to be launched.

  3

  HEY, MORT! Heard the latest scoop? They got that bastard Himmler!”

  CIC agent Woodrow Wilson Ward came barging into the office of Major Mortimer L.—for Lucius—Hall, Commanding Officer of Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment 212 at Iceberg Forward in Schwarzenfeld, where XII Corps Headquarters Forward had moved into a nondescript housing development at the edge of town on April 26, two days before.

  “What the hell are you doing back here, Woody?” Hall scowled at the young man. “I thought you were with Jim on the Kratzer case. In Steinach.”

  “I was,” Woody said airily. “We got Kratzer. He’s on his way to AIC. Case closed.”

  Hall eyed the young CIC agent who nonchalantly had draped himself over a chair. Woody was one of his best operatives. Intelligent. Imaginative. Resourceful. And stubborn as hell. But he got results. Many a time Hall had had to pull his service record to add an accomplishment, a recommendation, or a decoration. Purple Heart. Bronze Star. By now he knew that record by heart.

  Woody was born in San Francisco on September 17, 1920. A Virgo, with all the supposed traits of that sign. His father, Peter Ward, had met his mother during World War I when he served in the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Europe, and she was a Red Cross volunteer. A Swiss, Lucinda something-or-other. They had married as soon as possible after the war was over and named their boy after Peter’s hero, President Woodrow Wilson. After graduating from Berkeley, Woody had studied International Law at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland with the idea of joining his father’s law firm, Wenton, Ward & Zimmemann, in San Francisco as an expert in that field. Woody was in Switzerland in 1939 when the war broke out, and he returned at once to the States. Since he had traveled extensively in Europe, skied and climbed in the Swiss and Bavarian Alps, and spoke fluent German and some Italian, he had been a natural for the U.S. Military Intelligence Service when he volunteered just after Pearl Harbor, and he’d ended up in the Counter Intelligence Corps. A Staff Sergeant, he had more than once turned down a field commission. “Too damned busy to take time off for that crap,” he’d said. Hall thought he knew the real reason: the three-year extra hitch that automatically went with the commission. And Woody— however bang-up a job he was doing—just wanted to get the war over with and go home.

  “You came all the way back to Corps to tell me something I can read in tomorrow’s Stars and Stripes?” Hall asked sourly.

  “Not—exactly,” Woody admitted disarmingly. “Actually, I want to talk to you about the latest latrine rumor. About the point system for going home.”

  Hall raised an eyebrow. “How the hell do you know about that?” he asked archly. “The War Department hasn’t issued any directives yet.”

  “Ran into a guy from G-1,” Woody explained. “Pumped him a little. He said they got the advance poop.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s a four-point system, Mort,” Woody said eagerly. “You get credits for length of service, service overseas, combat service—and for having kids.” He leaned forward. “Here’s how it’s supposed to work. You get one point for each month of service plus one point for each month overseas. You get five points for each combat decoration and for each battle star, and you get twelve points for each kid you’ve got!”

  “Got any?” Hall asked drily.

  “Who the hell knows,” Woody said, shrugging mischievously. “Nothing that’ll give me twelve points, that’s for sure.” He grinned. “But get me home and I guarantee I’ll start on it right away!”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Anyway, a guy’s got to have eighty-five points to be
eligible to go home.” He glanced sideways at his C.O. “An enlisted man, that is. Officers have to have more. Sorry.” There was a hint of self-satisfaction in his voice. “They call it the Adjusted Service Rating Score.” He looked earnestly at Hall. “Listen, Mort. This waltz is pretty near over. I don’t want to get stuck doing lousy occupation duty in Kraut country. I want to go home. I counted up my points. I’ve got an ASR score of seventy-six. Seventy-six points. Including my five battle stars and that Purple Heart I got at the Bulge. And the Bronze Star for that Reichsamtsleiter case in Meiningen.” He looked disgusted. “I’m a lousy nine points short.”

  “T.S.,” Hall commented drily.

  “Yeah. But it doesn’t have to be tough shit, Mort.” Woody looked earnestly at his C.O. “All I need is two more months and a cluster to my Bronze Star. And I’m home free.”

  “And you want me to write you up for one? On what grounds? Being the first to figure out how to beat the point system?”

  “Shit, no, Mort.” Woody sounded offended. “I’ll earn the damned points. All I need is a case that’ll give me a chance to do it. You know—a ‘glamour’ case. Some big-shot deal. Something that’ll be noticed. You know.”

  “You usually pick your own damned cases,” Hall commented acidly.

  “Sure. I know. But I thought you might know of something. Throw it my way.” He looked guilelessly at Hall. “How about it? A lousy five points.”

  Hall leaned back in his chair. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin and contemplated the young man sitting across from him.

  A “glamour” case. He didn’t know of any. And if he did, would he assign it to Woody Ward? Probably. Nobody would be better qualified. A pain in the ass sometimes. Too damned much of an individualist. The kind of guy who never bowed to authority, just touched his fingers to his cap. Anywhere but in the informal atmosphere of the CIC where everybody was pretty much on his own, he’d have spent the greater part of his army career in the stockade. But as a CIC agent he was top drawer. He shook his head.