Eva Read Online Free PDF

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

H EY, 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