Read Red Inferno: 1945 for Free Online

It’s like them being from another unit makes it easier to deal with.”
    Singer understood. “Yeah, like they’re not even in our army and this really didn’t happen.”
    They returned to their own truck and the men gathered about it. “Like I said, Lieutenant, now what do you think of combat?”
    “It’s shit, Sergeant Logan, really, truly shit.”
    Logan nodded. “Now will someone tell me just what the hell we’re doing here? Everybody says we’re going to fall back to the Elbe when the krauts surrender, so why did our guys have to get killed and wounded when they should have been safe and happy on the other side of that damn river? Whose idea was this?” he said angrily. “Who the hell is trying to prove a point with Stalin?”
    Singer nodded. Captain Dimitri had read a letter from a general named Miller in which he spelled out the goals and objectives of what he referred to as Miller Force. It didn’t make anybody happier. The war was almost over and they were sticking their necks out. It wasn’t fair.
    E LISABETH W OLF LURCHED, seemingly drunkenly, as she forced her aching and weary legs to move. Walking more than a couple of hundred feet was something she’d been unable to do for several weeks, and the inactivity had made her soft. The lack of proper food—or any food at all, for that matter—had made her weak, and her young and once nimble joints were racked with pain. Her head pounded from pain as she and her young nephew Pauli followed the bearded and one-legged man who was going to save them. Save them from what? she wondered as her eyes tried to focus. From the Russians, she remembered. From death.
    If only she knew his name, Elisabeth thought dizzily. She had been brought up to believe in God, and she wondered if the one-legged man was a saint or an angel. Maybe he was the Archangel Michael? A few feet away, the man hobbled along on his crutch, crippled in body but leading them through strength and force of will.
    Behind her, she heard the rumble and thunder of the battle for the city of Berlin, the center of Nazi Germany. For several days, the artillery had been incessant and the bombing had been a nonstop drumming that shook the earth and caused buildings to disintegrate on top of their occupants, burying and crushing the people inside. It would seem a miracle if anyone was alive. Yet there were many people still hiding in their basements and shelters while others, like Pauli and herself, attempted to flee westward from the burning city.
    A sharper noise intruded as something large exploded in the distance. She resisted the urge to turn around and gaze at the billowing black clouds that sometimes blotted out the sun. In her confusion, she thought she would be like Lot’s wife and be turned into a pillar of salt for her sin of inquisitiveness.
    There were about fifty refugees. They stopped and she looked up ahead to see what the cause was. It was another roadblock, and the jackals from Himmler’s SS were searching for deserters. The slack body of a young man hung from a telephone pole, and she tried in vain to keep a wide-eyed Pauli from seeing it. The corpse’s eyes were open and his purple tongue stuck out.
    A golden-haired and well-fed SS officer in his late twenties, clad in a shockingly clean black uniform, walked through the little crowd and sniffed at them in dissatisfaction. There were no deserters here. Only the old, the lame, a few women, and a couple of children. He stood in front of Elisabeth and stared, and she looked back at him although her eyes continued to have a hard time focusing. In her condition she was physically thin and shapeless and was wearing the clothing of a small man. She also probably looked quite mad.
    “And what is this,” the officer sneered. “Male or female?”
    A couple of soldiers snickered, and the officer ran his hand down the outside of her shirt, searching for breasts. Once she had had a nice petite figure. Now she was a shapeless stick.
    “I