Return to the Reich by Eric Lichtblau

Author:Eric Lichtblau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Hans, meanwhile, whiled away the late-winter days in an attic in Oberperfuss, waiting for news from Freddy to relay to OSS, now that his transmitter was finally working. Alois had arranged for Hans to move from his original hideout to the attic of another helpful ally, Herr Kirchebner—not because of any romantic entanglements this time, but for safety concerns. The longer the Americans stayed in one place, the greater the risk that a nosy neighbor might notice something peculiar and alert the Gestapo.

With Alois’s help, Hans once again rigged a hidden radio antenna to a clothesline outside his hideout. A few written messages had begun to trickle in from Freddy, with Hans dutifully encoding them and radioing them on to Italy. Still, days and weeks would go by with nothing but silence from his fellow agent. He and Freddy had been side by side for nearly a year, brothers in arms wandering together in exile from Maryland, to Africa, to Italy, and now Austria, but lately his only contact with him was limited to cryptic messages on scraps of carefully folded paper.

Boredom was Hans’s main adversary between transmissions—that and the physical demands of waiting until the middle of the night to tiptoe downstairs to use the bathroom; daylight trips were too risky. Impatient by nature, Hans was going a bit stir-crazy in the house. At least he had his chemistry books to distract him; he spent hours at a time copying and rewriting complicated chemical structures that mapped out the composition of molecules. Like the OSS coding he had learned, this was his own secret language that almost no one he knew was able to understand. He thought he might have the makings of a college thesis in mind.

Eventually even his chemistry studies became monotonous, though. Looking for a new diversion, Hans began carving a chess set out of some old wood scraps in the attic. Waiting for news from Freddy on the real war, Hans gamed out the battle in miniature in a stranger’s attic, with the white knight he had carved trying to pierce the defenses of the dark king. Kirchebner’s teenage daughter, Frannie, felt sorry for the foreigner hiding upstairs, so under a vow of silence to her father, she tried to find amusements to occupy Hans. She taught him how to play Mühle, a popular board game exported from Germany; it became one of Hans’s favorites.

Then, in late March, came the handwritten note marked “Führer HQ,” passed from courier to courier, one hand to the next, from Maria back to the Krone hotel, until it ultimately reached Hans in the Kirchebners’ attic. Hans had already relayed some intriguing tidbits from Freddy to OSS in Bari, but nothing like this. He realized the significance of the message as soon as he began reading it. The length of the note alone—a weighty 146 words—was unusual: compared to the terse messages of a line or two that he had received before now from Freddy, this was a virtual War and Peace.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.