Chosen of the Valkyries

Chapter Twenty-Three

Berlin, Germany Prime

22 September 1985

“I cannot believe they’d do this,” Gudrun protested, honestly shocked.

“Don’t be naive,” Horst said. He sounded irritated – and exhausted. She would have been annoyed at his tone if she hadn’t known he’d been up for most of the night, working with her father and his handpicked team to try to track down the SS spy. “They wouldn’t hesitate to kill whoever got in their way, if it suited them.”

Gudrun shook her head, slowly. She’d known – intellectually – that the SS had carried out thousands, perhaps millions, of atrocities. Grandpa Frank had even admitted to having served in the Einsatzgruppen. But to casually burn over a hundred men, women and children, all of good German blood, to death, just because a sniper had used a house in the town… it was appalling.

She looked at the photographs, cursing under her breath. She’d never been particularly religious – religion was officially discouraged at school, although the Reich had never tried to stamp it out completely – but even she knew a church was supposed to be holy. And yet, the SS had herded up the townsfolk, crammed them into the building and set it on fire. Over a hundred people were dead… and it was all her fault.

The guilt struck her like a physical blow. She’d started the ball rolling, but she hadn’t realised – not really – just how high a price the Reich would pay for what she’d done. Overthrowing the Reich Council couldn’t have brought matters to a conclusion, could it? This wasn’t a neat little story where every single plot thread was tied up in the final chapter. The villain had escaped to the east and started a counterattack. God alone knew how many people had died in the fighting, the fighting she’d started…

“My fault,” she muttered, bitterly.

She closed her eyes in pain. She’d thought she’d known the risks when she started, she thought she’d known – and accepted – what would happen to her if she was caught. And she’d done her best to make sure that her friends knew too, even though they’d been compromised just by listening to her. They’d all known the risks…

…But the townsfolk hadn’t. They hadn’t been involved in the protest movement, as it grew and diversified; she would have been surprised if they’d even heard of the protest movement before the Reich Council crumbled into dust. And yet, they’d paid a steep price for her decisions. The town was dead, save perhaps for a handful of young men who’d joined the military and left before the advancing SS stormtroopers captured the town. She knew, deep inside, that they would never forgive her for what she’d brought upon their families.

Horst wrapped an arm around her, gently. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Gudrun pushed him away. She didn’t feel like being cuddled, not now.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Horst repeated. “You heard Kruger, didn’t you? The Reich was heading for a fall long before you were born. You may have started the protest movement, Gudrun, but it would have happened with or without you.”

Gudrun snorted. Even in the university, political debate had been almost non-existent. She knew – now – that thousands of people had seen the cracks in the state, the hundreds of tiny problems that spelt looming disaster, but very few had dared to speak out and prove to the others that they were not alone. It had been her who had worked up the nerve, her who had made those people see that there were hundreds of thousands of others who felt the same way too. And if it hadn’t been her, who would it have been? She still found it hard to believe that she had had the nerve to do it.

She sighed, bitterly. If Konrad had been unharmed – or even if she and his family had known what had happened to him – she would never have dared to start the protest movement. She would have married Konrad, after graduating from the university, and done her best to balance her career with life as a married woman. If, of course, he allowed her to have a career. Her husband could have forbidden her from working, if he’d wished. It had been one thing she’d sought to change at once, as soon as she’d taken her seat on the council, but the demands of war had pushed social reform aside.

And if I hadn’t started the movement, she thought, what would have become of me?

Horst tapped her shoulder, firmly. “Gudrun, you can’t blame yourself for this,” he said. “The war is bringing out all the old nightmares.”

“I can blame myself,” Gudrun said, tartly. “I do blame myself.”

“Blame Holliston,” Horst said. He scowled. “If the so-called Fuhrer was angry about what happened to the poor bastards, he would have made his feelings clear by now. Or blame Voss and Gath for failing to evacuate the town, even though it would have clogged up the roads with even more refugees. Or blame the swinehund who ordered the people killed. You cannot be blamed for what they chose to do, of their own free will.”

He paused. “And Holliston was willing to kill hundreds of his fellow Germans before the Reich Council fell,” he added. “You didn’t make him do that, did you?”

Gudrun shook her head, then looked up at him. “Did you do anything like that? In the east, I mean?”

Horst met her eyes, evenly. “No,” he said. “But the war out there is merciless. We all knew it happened and we all applauded it.”

“Monsters,” Gudrun said.

“What would you have them do?” Horst asked. “You can’t live and let live with Untermenschen who want to kill you. And you can’t move millions of people out of their homes in the hopes of keeping them safe. What would you have them do?”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have turned Russia into Germany East,” Gudrun snapped.

Horst cocked his head. “Maybe not. So what?”

Gudrun blinked. “So what?”

“So what?” Horst repeated. “You cannot change the past. There is no way you can go back in time and convince Adolf Hitler not to invade Russia, or force the Reich Council not to hand it over to the SS. You have to deal with the situation you have, not the situation you want. And, right now, what you have is an endless insurgency that demands the harshest possible measures to bring it to an end.”

“Which have now been exported westwards,” Gudrun said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she added. “Can you leave me alone for a while.”

Horst frowned. “You do have an appointment at the transit barracks…”

“Cancel it,” Gudrun snapped, sharply. She knew she was hurting him, but she found it hard to care. “Just leave me alone.”

She wondered, just for a long moment, what Horst would do. Shout back at her? Part of her would have welcomed a shouting match, even if they’d probably be overheard by everyone in the bunker. Or hit her? It wasn’t uncommon, but she would have hit him back… and who knew what would happen then? And yet, the pain would have dulled her fears…

“I’ll get some rest,” Horst said, rising. “And I would suggest you get some rest too.”

Gudrun snorted. It wasn’t easy to sleep alone, now. She’d grown far too used to having a warm body in her bed, even though her father would definitely notice something – if he hadn’t noticed already. There had been the odd tension between him and Horst, after all. She watched Horst leave, his back stiff and felt a flicker of a very different guilt. She’d practically chucked him out of the room they shared. But she needed to be alone for a while, alone with her guilt.

She looked at the final photograph – the remains of the church, surrounded by armed guards – and then picked up the list of known townsfolk. Records were a mess now, she knew; it was unlikely that everyone on the list was dead. It was quite possible that some of the smarter townsfolk had seen what was coming in their direction and driven westwards, trying to stay with relatives in Hamburg or Kiel. And yet, she knew that most of the people on the list were dead. Older civilians with nowhere to go, children too young to get married or join the military… and women, married to men who were currently serving in South Africa. It would be months, perhaps, or years before their husbands learned they’d been widowed.

Something has to be done, she thought, numbly. But what?

She sighed. Perhaps it was time to learn how to pray.

The unmarked aeroplane looked, to the civilian eye, to be identical to the other aircraft on the tarmac. It was large, easily forty metres from nose to tail; indeed, the only obvious difference was the complete lack of markings. And yet, to Andrew, it was easy to tell that the aircraft was American. There was a smoothness to the aircraft that was lacking in the Reich’s designs. It touched down neatly, the pair of escorting fighters flashing over the airfield and heading into the distance. Andrew couldn’t help hoping that they found a pair of prowling easterner aircraft on their way home. The bombing of Berlin was growing more intensive as the front lines moved closer.

“That’s the fifth shipment,” General William Knox said. “You think they’re not going to try and take them apart?”

Andrew shrugged as the aircraft came to a halt, the ground crew already running forward to open the hatches and start unloading before the airfield came under attack again. The Reich might consider the airfield to be a state secret – despite being close to Berlin, it wasn’t shown on any official map – but the SS knew about it. They’d even tried to bomb it twice before, although it had cost them a pair of long-range bombers. He’d seen the wreckage as they’d driven towards the airfield.

“I think they’ve already captured a few,” he said. It had been a concern – a very valid concern – back when the US had started shipping Stingers to South Africa. If the Germans captured a missile launcher, the doubters had said, they might be able to reverse-engineer the technology and start supplying it to their clients. “And in any case, the risk is acceptable.”

Knox smiled. “Is that your choice to make?”

Andrew grinned. “It was the President who made the final call,” he said. “If the provisional government wins the war, we find ourselves talking to a government that owes us a favour – and, just incidentally, might be better for Germany than their old government. But if the SS wins the war, we go straight back to the days when nuclear war seemed a very real possibility.”

“I am aware of the reasoning,” Knox said, a little tartly. “But the Reich’s long-term health isn’t our concern.”

“It is,” Andrew said. “If they get desperate, they might do something stupid in hopes of getting out of the trap.”

He shook his head, then watched as the first set of pallets were unloaded and transported towards the warehouse. The Stingers were designed to be idiot-proof, even though he knew that some idiots could be very clever indeed when it came to breaking things. If they could be used by illiterate tribesmen from somewhere with an unpronounceable name, they could be used by German soldiers who were both literate and aware of the importance of following instructions. The handful of printed instructions attached to each of the missiles – in German – would be more than enough for them.

And it might just convince most of the soldiers that the weapons were produced in the Reich, Andrew thought. The days when German weapons had dominated the world were long gone, but he had to admit that some of their designers were quite ingenious. Their general technological base had been falling behind America’s for quite some time, yet they sometimes came up with ideas the US had missed. Hopefully, that will make it harder for them to believe that the provisional government is talking to us.

“I’m due to go to the front tomorrow,” Knox added. “They were quite keen on warning me about the dangers.”

Andrew nodded. “You could be killed,” he pointed out. “Or captured.”

Knox made a rude gesture with his hand. “I didn’t join the marines to sniff flowers,” he said, sarcastically. “Or to count trees in Siberia.”

“If you get killed, there won’t be any official protests,” Andrew reminded him. “And if you get captured…”

He scowled, allowing his words to trail away. A handful of covert intelligence operatives – and observers – had been captured by the Reich, only to vanish without trace. God knew the United States had done the same, with German agents captured in Latin America, but it still pained him. The US promised its defenders that none of them would be left behind, even to the point of threatening a major conflict with Mexico, yet pushing the Reich around was far more risky. If Knox were captured, there would be no demands for his return. His widow would be given a sealed coffin and told her husband had died in the line of duty.

This is a shitty world, he thought, grimly. Poor Marian doesn’t deserve to lose her husband like that.

“I know the risks,” Knox said. “But when are we ever going to get a better chance to see our foes in action?”

Andrew nodded, curtly. Orbital and high-altitude reconnaissance had told the United States a great deal about the Reich, ranging from flaws in the latest panzers to the limitations of German antiaircraft weapons, but they needed more. Knox was right. A US observer, embedded with the provisional government’s defenders, would be able to learn a great deal about how the Reich actually worked. And such data would come in handy, Andrew knew, if the US ever had to go to war. Just knowing that the armour on the panzers was weaker than they’d supposed was a titbit of information that was worth its weight in gold.

“Be careful,” he said.

He would have gone himself, if he hadn’t been ordered to stay in Berlin. Given how much he knew about ongoing covert operations, his bosses didn’t want to take the slightest chance of him falling into enemy hands. Knox would probably get a noodle in the back of the head – SS slang for a bullet through the brain – but they’d take their time with Andrew, if they knew who he was. They’d drain everything he knew, then dump whatever was left in a mass grave…

The alarms began to howl. Andrew glanced up sharply, then swore as he realised the aircraft was far from completely unloaded. Knox grabbed his hand and dragged him towards the nearest shelter, the ground crews dropping whatever they were carrying and following the Americans as they ran. Three tiny dots appeared, low in the sky; they hugged the ground as they raced towards the airfield. A missile launcher swung around and opened fire, blasting one of the aircraft out of the sky, but the remaining two kept coming, their cannons spraying explosive shells into the grounded aircraft. Andrew had barely a second to turn and watch helplessly as the American aircraft exploded into a colossal fireball, a wave of heat scorching his face as he dropped to the ground. The easterner aircraft swooped around, dropping a pair of dumb bombs on the runways, then fled back towards the east.

Should have ringed the airfield with defences, Andrew thought bitterly, as he picked himself up. Four American aircrew were now dead, along with at least a dozen Germans. But they didn’t want to draw attention to the airfield.

“Damn,” Knox said. “Now what?”

“They’ll just have to send more aircraft,” Andrew said. “And we’ll have to lie about the pilots.”

He contemplated the problem, briefly. Shipping the Stingers into the Reich would be far harder than flying them in. The Reich rarely allowed British or American ships to dock, particularly in naval bases. Someone would certainly start asking questions if that changed in a hurry. But there might be no choice. His superiors were unlikely to authorise more flights to Berlin…

He ignored Knox’s angry stare as he looked at the flaming wreckage. There was no help for it, not if they wanted the operation to remain covert. The pilots would be recorded as having died in training accidents, with a carefully-manufactured paper trail to back it up – if anyone checked. OSS would make sure the families received a hefty payout in exchange for their silence, even though they might never know what had happened to their husbands and sons.

It galled him, more than he cared to admit. Intelligence – and covert operations – work called for secrecy, demanded secrecy. He’d had to lie to girlfriends, in the past; he’d have to lie to his wife, if he ever married. Knox’s scorn was quite understandable. There was something inherently honest about the Marine Corps, while far too much intelligence work was dishonest by nature. Manipulating someone into betraying his country was far too much like trying to seduce a married woman. And the pilots, men who had only been in the fringes of the operation, would never be applauded for their work. Their deaths would pass unremarked. There would certainly be no threats of retaliation.

Perhaps the whole story will be declassified, one day, he thought. He knew too much of his own work would never see the light of day – he’d seduced too many foreigners into working for the United States – but the pilots weren’t true intelligence operatives. And then their families can be truly proud of them.