The Metal Man: An Account of a WW2 Nazi Cyborg Read Online Free PDF

very department’s – Germany must get this… this…’
     
    Suddenly, Reinhardt remembered Adolf Hitler’s words.
     
    ‘This ‘super-soldier’.’
     
    With a small, mysterious smile that Reinhardt for some reason found slightly uncomfortable, Schroder said quietly –
     
    ‘Oh, the Nazis will get their super-soldier, Captain Reinhardt – that I promise.’
     
    Reinhardt gave an uncertain nod and opened the door out into the cavernous room filled with machinery and scientists.
     
    So it begins he told himself.
     
    All they need now is the…
     
    He could barely even think the last word –
     
    All they need now is the cadaver.
     
     
    5
     
     
    Karl Brucker’s body was laid out in a shady area close to the collapsed but still-burning house. Mayer, the second-in-command, had found an old blanket to cover the corpse. Now Mayer was crouched beside his deceased commander, the expression on the broad face drawn.
     
    He looked over at a short, powerfully-built man, who was sat doing something with the bulky radio-set he usually carried on his back, but which was now placed between his legs.  
     
    ‘Still nothing, Amsel?’ questioned Mayer.
     
    The radioman shook his head.
     
    ‘Zilch,’ he said curtly.
     
    ‘Keep trying,’ said Mayer.
     
    ‘Aim to,’ returned Amsel.
     
    The two men exchanged a brief, defiant grin… Then their faces again became set and hard.
     
    Brucker gone – it hardly seemed real. There was the same aching sense of disbelief in all the four men. Almost the belief that even now, Brucker might rise Christ-like, shaking off that blanket and saying, as he so often had –
     
    ‘Move your ass.’
     
    A veteran of the Eastern Front, and a survivor of numerous, bloody hand-to-hand battles, finally stabbed to death by a peasant woman he’d been attempting to save from a burning building…?
     
    Mayer and the others failed to see how such a thing could even have happened …
     
    There was the crack of a gunshot from nearby, and one of the two other men who were sat sharing a cigarette muttered a curse.
     
    Two more gunshots quickly followed.
     
    Then a woman screamed.
     
    ‘The man who apparently had this dagger found on him had two sons,’ muttered one of the men who were smoking. ‘So that bastard Ackermann has them executed too, saying they’re also partisans ‘by association’ – and one of them still a lad of fourteen. Guess that was the mother we just heard.’
     
    ‘We may be forced to follow Ackermann, now,’ said the other man, as he passed the cigarette to the soldier who’d just spoken. ‘But there’s no bloody way I was going to go and watch as they shot those three villagers in the square.’
     
    ‘Goes for all of us, Bach,’ grunted Mayer. ‘We shouldn’t even be in this village, full-stop. Best chance for us all now is to get back to Germany quick as possible and start building defenses against the Ruskies. Ackermann can tell the standard bullshit about how we’re ‘staging a tactical withdrawal’ and ‘preparing for a regroup’. Anyone else who hasn’t got crap for brains, or isn’t a full-blown Nazi, knows we’re in a full-on state of retreat.’ 
     
    ‘We have to stick with this unit?’ murmured the man sat next to Bach.
     
    Mayer glanced over at him, and sighed.
     
    ‘What are you suggesting, Weber – that we desert?’ he said. ‘As extremely tempting as that option is, you can still get shot for desertion, you know. We may not like being stuck with Ackermann and his animals – to put it mildly – but we’ve got no bloody choice in the matter.’
     
    ‘Getting something,’ said Amsel suddenly, as the radio crackled into life.
     
    ‘You want to say a few words?’ he then asked Mayer.
     
    ‘Yeah,’ returned Mayer, getting to his feet and walking over to the radioman. ‘As it happens, I do…’
     
    *
     
    When Ackermann returned a short while later, accompanied by several of his troops (including Rudolf