On Desperate Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

useful someday.
    This was the day Faust marked as his turning point. He was no longer afraid of going insane. He understood too much now. The demons would extract their price from him, he knew, but they had shown him the way, the way for all of them.
    From that day on, Johann Faust never wanted the war to end. He never wanted to stop killing. He wanted rivers of blood.
     
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    5 January 1945
    Saint Alban’s Military Hospital
    Darbyshire, England
     
    White. Everything was white. This morning, like every morning since he first opened his eyes here, he saw white. White walls, white sheets, white uniforms of the nurses as they hurried by, and the white coats of the doctors as they gathered at the foot of his bed murmuring among themselves. His bandages were white. The charts on the clipboards were white. His entire life was swathed in freshly laundered whiteness.
    As he did every morning, he closed his eyes against the sterile glare. Across his eyelids, visions of dirty white snow, gray-blue under the clouded sky, drifted gracelessly. Tank treads churned up mud, splattering it against snow banks as they accelerated and turned in the forests of the Ardennes, the snow turned shades of brown from the dirt and black from explosions, leaking oil, smoke and struggle. Then the redness, blood seeping out from the wounded and dead until the white snow absorbed it all and the landscape was all reds and blacks and explosions and dead bodies falling on top of him…
    “Jesus!” Matthew “Mack” Mackenzie gasped and woke up gulping for breath. “Goddamn sonuvabitch! Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!”
    “Captain Mackenzie!”
    Mack looked up, eyes frantically searching for something real, anything not of his dreams. His mouth gaped open, eyes wide at the strange world he found himself in. Closing them again he flopped back onto his pillow. Oohh noooo, no, no. I can’t take anymore of this!
    He opened one eye, hoping that the owner of the voice calling his name would be gone. Focusing on the figure in the doorway to his private room, he saw the face of Doctor Reginald Cuthbert-Hewes, a full colonel in His Majesty’s Medical Service, a distinguished pre-war psychiatrist, and his keeper in the whitewashed prison that was St. Alban’s.
    St. Alban’s had opened in 1921 as a private hospital for the upper classes. For those with nervous disorders and other aliments which required they spend their stay secure from public view. The location outside Darbyshire was perfect. The small town did not even have a train station and the road leading to the hospital was unmarked. Gently rolling wooded hills provided both serenity and seclusion. The hospital building was designed in the art deco style popular at the time, and each private room had been decorated with polished teakwood furniture, paintings and hand-woven Persian carpets, all of which was now in storage, having been replaced by military beds and desks since the British Defence Ministry had taken over in 1940. The hidden and little-known facility was perfect for the recovery and recuperation of personnel engaged in top security operations. Spies, commandos, generals and secretive foreigners from occupied nations had all recovered from their physical and emotional wounds within these walls. Or least on paper they did. Battle fatigue, neurosis, and loss of nerve were on occasion cured ahead of schedule when it was necessary to return a patient whose file was marked “Priority Personnel” to active duty.  
    Mack knew that Doctor Cuthbert-Hewes prided himself on his rate of return. He felt it his duty to get those who came into his care back into the fight against Nazism as soon as possible. Cuthbert-Hewes had been in France with the British Expeditionary Force, and had made it out at Dunkirk. He wanted the Germans defeated, and looked forward to the day British troops marched into Berlin. He believed that since Mack had volunteered for hazardous duty, it