Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

times he stopped to take photographs of interesting looking buildings. One of them had all of its windows boarded over, yet he could hear the sounds of some kind of machinery running from within—a high-pitched sound, not like a generator, but more like a centrifuge, Schey thought.

Another five hundred yards farther on, the ditch ended at a narrow culvert that he could not follow, forcing him to either return the way he had come or to climb up.

He chose the latter, scrambling silently up on the bank, then across it between a row of long, low barrackslike buildings.

Schey could hear music coming from one of the barracks, and soft yellow light spilled from the windows, although most had curtains covering them.

He approached one window that was open a crack. The slight breeze ruffled the curtains, and he was able to catch a glimpse of the inside’.

It was a barracks. It was filled with at least fifty men, some of them in bed, some of them lounging, drinking, or reading. Five men in skivvies were playing cards around a foot locker at one end of the barracks. At the other end, a tall, thin red-skinned man, a portable radio perched on his shoulder, the speaker directly against his ear, was doing some kind of loose-limbed shuffling dance.

All the clothing he could see hanging on rods behind the bunks and lying around were civilian. These were not soldiers. They were civilians. Probably engineers and perhaps even scientists.

Bachelors, or men whose wives had decided not to come along.

Schey stepped away from the building and looked down the row of similar buildings, all the windows lit. If each was a bachelor barracks and the housing across the base, which he had seen earlier from above, was presumably for married couples, and if all were filled, then there were at least five thousand people here. Perhaps more.

The effort of the Americans to produce this bomb was at once staggering and frightening. Germany was under a siege at the moment, and that seriously hampered her war efforts. Even at peace, however, her factories and laboratories working at full capacity, her people as dedicated to this as they were to their Fiihrer, Schey did not think they could match the Americans.

There were too many people in this country, too much industry, too vast a pool of natural resources for Germany to possibly match it.

And yet the war was not over. Not yet. Not by a large measure.

Schey continued taking photographs of the buildings across the wide dirt street that ran in front of the barracks. Many of them looked like laboratories. Some of the individual buildings were isolated within their own separate enclosures, with signs warning passersby that special permits were required for entry.

He made his way back to the ditch that paralleled the fence, then back away from the well lit buildings toward the area of relative darkness where he had come over.

Even before he got back to his starting position, he could hear a jeep’s engine, and he could hear someone talking.

He crouched down and went the last dozen yards, finally flattening himself against the bank and peering over the side.

The two foot soldiers who patrolled inside the fence were speaking with the soldiers in the jeep on the other side of the fence.

At first Schey could not tell what they were talking about. Had they discovered that someone had breached the security of the base? Perhaps someone had found his horse up above the ridge.

Or perhaps they had spotted his trail down the hill. Maybe he had ripped his jacket and a patch of material was stuck on the barbed wire.

But then one of the men laughed. Another stepped away from the fence and urinated not ten feet from where Schey lay.

A few minutes later, with a parting word or two, the jeep headed west and the foot soldiers went east. Soon they were out of sight, and Schey quickly made his way over the fence and up the hill, his horse whinnying softly in the suddenly very cool evening.

Deland and Bernard Dannsiger walked together along Wilhelmstrasse, the Reich Chancellery and Foreign Office in the park across the broad avenue from them. They were both large men, Deland somewhat fairer of skin and more Nordic-looking, if anything, but Dannsiger much older and obviously wiser.

The late afternoon was warm, and although there wasn’t much vehicular traffic, other than the occasional Army troop truck or open Mercedes staff car, there were a lot of pedestrians out and about.

Allied raids had come every night and morning for seven days in a row. Last night there had been peace as there had been this morning because of a low, humid overcast that was supposed to last for several more days.

“It’s a rare pleasure to be outside without having to maintain an awareness of just where the nearest air raid shelter is located,” Dannsiger was saying. He had been a lecturer in Latin and South American history at the University of Berlin until three years ago when his post was declared “superfluous.” He ran the underground now.

“At least it’s not cold. We don’t have to worry about overcoats,” Deland said.

Dannsiger, along with a dozen others in the underground, provided identification, clothing, and some limited transportation for downed Allied fliers. In some respects their job was much easier now that it was summer. At least they didn’t have to worry about a man freezing to death.

But Deland was chafing at the bit.

“This winter will probably be the last,” Dannsiger said firmly.

“You think so?”

“He can’t hold out much longer.”

They both glanced instinctively over at the Reich Chancellery building. Dannsiger had learned that Hitler was spending a lot of time in his specially constructed bunker beneath the building. He had his staff with him. Practice, they all supposed, for when the siege came, although it was likely that when the end did come, the Fiihrer would head south into Salzburg where he could more easily be defended.

“He’ll probably hold out a lot