Chosen of the Valkyries

Chapter Thirty-One

Berlin, Germany Prime

10 October 1985

Stay very quiet, Hauptsturmfuehrer Hennecke Schwerk told himself, as he inched forward though the house. Stay very quiet and listen carefully.

The sound of the constant bombardment was growing louder, making it harder for him to hear anything over the racket, save for his own heartbeat. Sweat trickled down his back as he listened, hoping to hear something – anything – that would tell him if the building was occupied. It was a simple house, built for a couple who might be expecting their first child; the possessions and kick-knacks surrounding him suggested that they’d had their first child and were probably expecting a second. There was a faint – a very faint – sound in the distance, but he couldn’t make out what it was…

There might be someone here, he thought. Or it might be empty…

He kept moving forward, peering into what had once been a neat kitchen. It looked to have been stripped of anything edible or useful, then abandoned. The gas cooker had been disconnected, the pipe closed; the water pipes to the entire suburb had been turned off after the population had been evacuated, further into the city. He wondered, absently, as he heard a faint tapping sound, if the owners had made it west or if they were trapped somewhere towards the heart of Berlin. There was no way to know.

His breath caught in his throat as he moved into the next room. His gaze swept the room, taking in the sofa, the comfortable chair, the portraits of Adolf Hitler and Adolf Bormann hanging from the walls… the owner would be a low-level party functionary, then. Too intimately involved with the party to avoid hanging portraits on the walls, too low on the pecking order to be able to afford better decorations or a home nearer the Reichstag. He kept his rifle at the ready as he crept towards the door, wondering if the home could be declared secure and then left empty. There was no love lost between the Waffen-SS and the millions of bureaucrats who kept the Reich running, but he had to admit they were necessary. Maybe the owners would return, with the wife looking after the kid while the husband went back to work…

He turned the corner and practically ran into the enemy soldier. For a second, they stared at each other in mutual shock, then tried to bring up their rifles. Hennecke realised, in a flash of insight, that his enemy had the advantage; he hurled himself forward, trying to draw his knife from his belt as he slammed into the enemy soldier. But the enemy knocked the knife from his hand as they crashed to the floor, both men desperately trying to kill the other before he was killed instead. Hennecke got on top, then was thrown back as the enemy pushed forward, grunting in pain. He was a good fighter, Hennecke had to admit; his training was different, but none the less thorough.

Hennecke glanced around for his knife, but it was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t have the time to draw his pistol without losing it too. His opponent knocked him backwards, drawing back a fist to slam Hennecke in the face; Hennecke punched him as hard as he could in the groin. His fist met something hard – the soldier was wearing protection – but it still hurt, distracting the enemy soldier long enough for Hennecke to punch him in the jaw, snapping his neck back. And then Hennecke slammed him again, as hard as he could. The enemy soldier tottered backwards, his neck broken, and hit the ground with a dull thud.

Hennecke could only stare at the body for a long moment, torn between relief and a peculiar kind of excitement as his enemy breathed his last. He’d had unarmed combat skills hammered into his head during training, his instructors drilling the recruits mercilessly until even the least of them was deadly with or without a weapon, but it was the first time Hennecke had ever killed a man with his bare hands. It had simply never been necessary, not for all of his career. And now he’d done it, he found himself unsure what to feel.

He sucked in his breath as he heard the sound of running footsteps, then hastily picked up his rifle. Losing it would be a good way to get in trouble. He checked the body as a Strumscharfuehrer entered the room, rifle at the ready. Hennecke didn’t recognise him, but that hardly mattered. Far too many units had been chewed to pieces as the fighting raged on, the enemy refusing to fall back to their next line of defence until they had taken out as many stormtroopers as they could. But it hardly mattered. The assignment – clear the suburb – had to be completed, whatever else happened.

Shaking his head, he checked the body for anything useful, but found nothing that might interest his superiors. Jokes aside, the enemy weren’t stupid enough to put copies of their battle plans on the corpses of ordinary soldiers. And if he had found something that claimed to be a battle plan, he would have been reluctant to pass it on to his superiors. It would almost certainly be a fake. He removed a half-empty packet of cigarettes and a lighter, then led the way back out of the house. The sound of shelling grew louder as he stepped into the open and peered towards Berlin. Great clouds of smoke were rising in the distance, obscuring the city.

But the aircraft will still be able to find their targets, he thought, nastily. And as long as they’re not dropping bombs on us, who cares?

He took a moment to study the squad as it slowly reformed. He’d lost too many men from his original company, but his superiors had supplied replacements – the survivors of other units that had lost too many men to remain viable. They’d have to be rebuilt from the ground up, if the war ever came to an end. Hennecke had been fighting for seven days, barely finding the time to get a few hours of sleep in between attacking, counterattacking and counter-counterattacking. He felt perpetually hungry and increasingly deaf.

And his men looked ragged. They were all experienced – even the least of them had spent months marching over Russia, chasing insurgents – but none of them had experienced a hellish nightmare like Berlin. Hennecke knew, as little as he wanted to admit it, that they needed to be pulled out of the line and given a few days to rest. But it wasn’t going to happen, not when their superiors were demanding results. The best they could hope for was good food and warm drinks and it didn’t look as though they were going to get either of them.

He sighed, feeling torn. There was a part of him that loved the fighting, that loved testing himself, that loved showing the westerners that treason had consequences. The dumb bastards had never really believed in the Reich, let alone committed themselves to doing whatever was necessary to ensure that the Reich’s dominance. They deserved, every so often, a reminder that the universe was cold and harsh, red in tooth and claw. And yet, he hated to think just how many stormtroopers had died. The battle to break into the suburbs had cost him over twenty men, suggesting that over five hundred men had been killed in a single bitter skirmish.

And that meant…

He shook his head. They were committed, now. The SS would either fight or die; the war would be won or lost. But there was no way to back off, to live together. West and east could not coexist. Only one could be supreme.

Bracing himself, he hefted his rifle. There were more buildings to clear before night fell.

Andrew kept his face impassive as he strolled through Berlin, even though he knew it was quite possible that he would be mistaken for an easterner, rather than an American. Quite a few pilots had been brutally torn apart by angry mobs, he’d been told. He was rather tempted to believe that, if anything, the stories were underrated. Berlin hadn’t been bombed since 1944, when the British had launched a handful of air raids before the end of the war. And the Berliners were angry.

“The SS are pushing hard,” his escort said. “But we are holding them.”

“You’re doing well,” Andrew said. “But how much of a city will you have left when time finally runs out?”

His escort – a young military officer – didn’t bother to answer. Andrew shrugged and turned his attention to the buildings as they walked past. Berlin was a huge city, but more and more buildings were badly damaged, even knocked down, by the fires of war. Broken windows were everywhere, despite advice from the provisional government warning homeowners to board up their windows or cover them with plastic. Makeshift tents were scattered everywhere, offering very limited comfort to the refugees and Berliners who had been driven out of their homes. Andrew had even heard that thousands of Berliners were even flocking into the city’s underground stations, just as the British had done during the Blitz. It provided more protection than they were likely to get elsewhere.

His lips thinned as they passed a soup kitchen. A dozen German women, all wearing trousers rather than the party-approved long skirts and blouses, were handing out soup, bread and something that smelt faintly unappealing. Andrew’s nose wrinkled as he took in the desperate refugees and, behind them, Berliners who were starting to look pale and wan as hunger took its toll. It was a sight he’d never seen in America or Britain; it was a sight that wouldn’t be out of place in the refugee camps in South Africa, the townships where black civilians were clustered as the military fought to exterminate the insurgents.

This is the beginning of the end, he thought. And the start of hell itself.

He looked past the refugees to the poster on the wall, feeling a flicker of concern that no one had bothered to take it down. A signal, perhaps, to anyone who might be watching that they weren’t totally opposed to the SS? Or a simple sign of apathy? There was no way to know, but it concerned him that none of the passing policemen or soldiers had cared enough to rip it from the walls. Perhaps, just perhaps, there were more rats within the provisional government’s walls than it wanted to admit.

“We could stop for soup,” he said, just to see what his escort would say. “I could pay, you know.”

“We’re expected at the front,” the escort said. He wasn’t quite experienced enough to hide the anger – and the shame. “They will be upset if we’re late.”

Andrew nodded, wondering just how he would have felt if Washington, D.C. had become a battlefield. There had been countless attempts by the Reich to resurrect the Confederate States, attempts so pitiful that the FBI had wondered if they’d been a joke, an attempt to distract the Americans while the Germans got on with the real plan. But Andrew, who had spent more time than he’d wanted to in the Reich, suspected that the Reich had genuinely believed that the Confederate States of America was just waiting to be reborn, just as they believed that a non-Nazi government would surrender Germany to chaos and madness. It seemed hard to grasp, but they had very little understanding of the outside world. They judged all others as treacherous because they were treacherous themselves.

Don’t pity the bastards, he told himself, as they walked past a gaggle of teenage girls wearing knee-length skirts and giggling loudly. They would probably have been marched home by the police, before the uprising; their parents would have beaten them for acting in such a lewd manner, if they weren’t too relieved that their daughters had returned at all. Pity instead their victims.

The sound of shooting grew louder as they approached the front lines, passing a handful of men in police uniforms manning a barricade. His escort took him through the lines, then nodded towards a man standing in a CP. Andrew recognised him instantly, even though he’d exchanged his normal uniform for a field tunic and cap. But then, the SS had hundreds of snipers prowling the battlefield. A man wearing the grand uniforms the Wehrmacht designed for its senior officers would make a very tempting target. Andrew had attended exercises, conducted at Fort Hood, where a couple of snipers had snarled up a military advance for days, just by taking out a handful of officers. The Wehrmacht would be foolish if it didn’t realise the danger too.

“Field Marshal,” he said, as Voss dismissed the escort with a wave of his hand. “Thank you for allowing me to come.”

“It’s nothing,” Voss said. Andrew didn’t know him as well as he knew his predecessor, but it was easy enough to see the irritation under the affable exterior. And yet, was it real? Voss had learned his trade in a political snake pit. He might well know how to conceal his innermost feelings, then project a false front. “The Chancellor wanted you to see what was happening.”

Andrew nodded, looking past Voss to the map mounted on the wall. A pair of operators, their ears permanently pressed to phones, were constantly updating it, adding red arrows as the Waffen-SS pushed further and further into Berlin. Andrew was no expert, but General Knox had told him that the Battle of Berlin was turning into an absolute nightmare. A building could be declared secure, only to become very insecure indeed as the defenders sneaked back into it and opened fire on the SS from the rear. And, as the SS kept moving, they were smashing more and more buildings. Andrew couldn’t help wondering if they were doing their best to make sure that no one could survive in the wreckage.

We had to destroy the village in order to save it, he thought. An American officer had said that, back during the Mexican War. The communists had been too deeply entrenched, he’d argued, for the limited American forces on hand to clear the village. And so he’d ordered it firebombed to ashes. And now the SS is doing the same to an entire city.

He looked at Voss, sensing – for the first time – the growing concern beneath the facade. The German was a Junker, heir to an established military tradition that long predated the United States of America, a tradition that even Hitler and Himmler hadn’t been able to destroy completely. And yet, the man was on the brink of despair. He had more than enough firepower to halt the offensive, if only he had the time to bring it to bear on his foes…

And he might not have the time, Andrew thought. Whoever takes Berlin takes the Reich.

“It’s bad,” he said, finally. “But it’s always darkest before the dawn.”

Voss snorted, rudely. “You Americans,” he said, as he turned to walk towards the door. “So sentimental.”

Hauptsturmfuehrer Katharine Milch kept her expression carefully blank as she listened to the dozy cows manning the soup kitchen, silently grateful for the intensive training she was forced to undertake before she was cleared for duty. The SS might have a role for female agents, but it was no more inclined to take the average woman and turn her into an operative than the Wehrmacht. A seductress was one thing, a woman willing and able to use her natural charms to seduce someone into saying something incriminating; an operative was quite another. Katharine had had to work hard from the day she’d determined what she wanted to do with her life, while the women surrounding her had been given their freedom on a platter.

And not much of that, she thought, as a woman in fine clothing started ladling out the pork and leek soup. They may be upper-class bitches, but their husbands are the ones with real power. There’s no true freedom here and they know it.

She watched the refugees carefully as they trudged in and out of the kitchen, each one taking a bowl of soup, a piece of bread and a glass of pure water. They looked broken, perhaps pushed beyond endurance by having to leave their homes… Katharine snorted at the sheer foolishness of believing that was the worst that could happen. She’d endured worse, even before joining the SS. The refugees still had their lives, they still had their beauty… they could rebuild, if they wished. But instead they were moaning about how unfair it was that they only got a small portion of food.

“I heard that the policemen and their families get more food,” she said, when an opportunity arose. The silly women were twittering away, repeating and embellishing rumours as though they were facts. Such foolishness would never be tolerated in Germany East. Stupid women – or men – didn’t last long out there. “And that some of them are selling ration cards to their friends.”

“Of course not,” one of the older woman said, indignantly. “My husband is a policeman and he would never do such a thing!”

Katharine concealed her amusement as two of the other woman started wittering, questioning the first woman closely. They were fools, but such foolishness had its uses. No matter how much the first woman might deny it, the seeds of doubt were planted and would grow rapidly into more and more rumours. By the time they reached the ears of someone in authority, the entire city would have heard the rumours…

…And a certain percentage would believe them.

She shrugged and returned to her work, content to allow the women to carry on the conversation alone. She’d leave as planned, knowing that the rumours would spread – and, like all rumours, grow in the telling. And no one would be able to trace them back to her.

It isn’t quite the same as direct action, she thought, as she finished up. But it may be just as effective in the long run.