Ragnarok

Chapter Five

Berlin, Germany Prime

29 October 1985

“Are you sure this is going to work?”

Horst Albrecht shook his head, crossly. Kurt Wieland seemed to veer constantly between a determination to leave as quickly as possible and an understandable fear that they wouldn’t be able to get past the first set of checkpoints. Horst didn’t really blame him for being conflicted — he was an officer in the Heer, not someone who should be assigned to a stealth mission — but it was annoying. It was quite hard to see how Gudrun and Kurt were actually related.

“There is no way to guarantee this will work,” Horst said. He glanced down at the forged papers, checking them again and again for any mistakes. It wasn’t the first time he’d been an infiltrator, but the consequences for getting caught this time would be far worse. “If you want to go back to the infantry, go now.”

He ignored Kurt’s flash of anger as he checked the final pair of ID cards. They weren’t precisely forgeries — they’d been produced at the SS office in Berlin — but they wouldn’t match the records in Germanica. The SS had a mania for good records keeping — just about every German had a file, buried somewhere in the government bureaucracy — and a particularly alert officer might wonder why there wasn’t a copy within reach. Horst would have been surprised if the SS-run government hadn’t started changing everything it could, just to prevent the provisional government from sending spies and commandos into its territory.

But changing all of the ID cards in Germany East would be a long and time-consuming process, he told himself. The ID cards had been changed once, years ago; it had taken months before every last set of old papers had been collected and replacements issued by the bureaucracy. And that had been in peacetime. There will be so much disruption in Germany East that changing the ID cards will be the least of their problems.

“They should suffice,” he said, finally. “Are you coming?”

“Of course,” Kurt snapped.

Horst sighed, inwardly. Kurt had admitted, reluctantly, that he blamed himself for the whole mess. If he hadn’t helped Gudrun break into the hospital, Gudrun would never have kick-started the whole chain of events that had led down to civil war. But Horst suspected Kurt was wrong. Gudrun, his wife and lover, was simply too determined to be deterred for long, even by her family’s disapproval. She would have found another way into the hospital.

“Very good,” Horst said. He would have preferred to go alone, even though he knew that having a second pair of hands along might be helpful. He’d been steeped in SS culture and tradition almost as soon as he could walk; Kurt, for all of his undoubted bravery, lacked the background he needed to pass unremarked. “Read the papers and memorise them.”

Kurt gave him a sharp look as he picked up the first folder. “Do you expect this to be necessary?”

“It depends,” Horst said. He smirked, suddenly. “Are you circumcised?”

Kurt glared. “No!”

“Good,” Horst said. “It’s very rare for anyone to be circumcised in Germany East. If you had been, we would have had to alter the file to reflect that.”

He picked up his own folder and read it through again, reminding himself of the details. It was a careful balance between truth and lies, classing him as a resident of Germany East on one hand and an SS Hauptsturmführer with special orders to report to Germanica on the other. He knew enough about the various special operations divisions to pass for a commando, as long as he didn’t run into an actual commando. It was all too possible that the person they encountered would know everyone in his unit by name or reputation.

And I won’t know all the private jokes and traditions, he thought. I could be tripped up quite easily.

“There’s a surprising amount of truth here,” Kurt said, finally. “Is it wise for me to be a native of Berlin?”

“Your accent marks you out as a Berliner,” Horst said. Kurt would have lost the accent, if he’d been trained in Germany East. “There’s no point in trying to pass you off as an Easterner.”

He scowled. Kurt’s accent was a problem, even though they’d done their best to compensate for it. There were plenty of SS officers who had been born and trained in Germany Prime, but in these days… they’d just have to hope they didn’t run into someone who would be automatically suspicious of a Westerner. It shouldn’t be that much of a danger. Karl Holliston had been born in Berlin, after all.

“Never mind that,” he added. “Do you know the songs?”

“Most of them,” Kurt said. He didn’t sound pleased. “We learned them in the Hitler Youth.”

“There’ll be some verses you weren’t taught,” Horst said. He couldn’t imagine parents being very pleased if their children had been taught the more bloodcurdling verses. “We’ll go over that later, just in case we are invited to sing with the men.”

Kurt gave him a sidelong look. “Is that likely?”

“The SS prides itself on being one big happy family,” Horst said. “There’s a great deal of rivalry, of course, but it’s never brutal.”

“Really,” Kurt said, sarcastically.

Horst nodded. It was rare — almost unknown — for officers in the Heer to socialise with their men, but SS officers were expected to spend a great deal of time with their men. And local units would often fraternise with other units. It was supposed to help, when the units were mashed together into improvised battlegroups. The men already knew and respected their new comrades.

“The SS is not the Heer,” he said, finally. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming they’re the same, just because they use the same weapons. There’s a lot of little differences between them.”

“And I might slip up because of them,” Kurt said. “Perhaps I’ll just let you do the talking.”

“That would be a good idea,” Horst said, dryly.

He put the folder down and opened up the latest set of reports from the front. The SS lines were firming up, unsurprisingly. Horst knew the Waffen-SS. They would have taken a beating, the defeat would have given them a terrible shock, but they were trained to recover from anything. He could imagine the officers moving from unit to unit, collecting stragglers and slotting them into the front lines; filling holes in some units, disbanding others until after the war. And probably doing whatever they could to slow down the advancing panzers as much as possible.

They’ll need time to boost morale, Horst told himself. Stopping a panzer or two won’t be enough.

Kurt looked up. “Do you have a plan?”

“Slip through the lines,” Horst said. He tapped the papers. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting our hands on a jeep, once we show them our ID. And then we just head east to Germanica.”

“That could take a while,” Kurt observed.

Horst nodded. There were just over a thousand miles between Berlin and Germanica. Even if they took the autobahns, even if nothing got in their way, it would take at least five or six days to reach Germanica. And he knew there would be problems. There were plenty of checkpoints on the autobahns.

And even if there weren’t, he thought, they’ll be using them to rush supplies and men to the front.

“So we reach Germanica,” Kurt added. “What then?”

“We play it by ear,” Horst said. In truth, there was no way to come up with a proper plan until they knew the situation on the ground. “I have some… contacts… I might be able to convince to help us. If they refuse — or if we can’t meet them — we will have to think of something else.”

He scowled. He’d seen the Reichstag in Germanica before, back when he’d gone to the city for a Victory Day parade. It was a towering nightmare of stone and steel, protected by some of the finest stormtroopers in the Reich. And now, it was playing host to the self-promoted Führer of the Greater German Reich. He would be surprised if the building wasn’t ringed with defences, from antiaircraft guns to antitank weapons. It wouldn’t be strange for Germany East.

Kurt cocked his head. “You think we can do it?”

“I think we have to try,” Horst said.

He cursed under his breath. Gudrun had trusted him to protect her… and he’d failed. He’d been so wrapped up in his scheming — their scheming — that he’d missed the spy right under his nose. And now Gudrun was a captive. She’d be on her way to Germany East, if she wasn’t there already. There was no way he could just let her go. She was his wife, his lover, his friend. He couldn’t abandon her.

But he knew what would happen if he was caught. The SS might have some difficulty comprehending that Gudrun was more than just a puppet, but they would have no such difficulty with him. Horst was a traitor in their eyes, a young man who had betrayed everything he’d been taught to respect; he could expect no mercy if his former masters got their hands on him. He’d be lucky if he was merely tortured to death.

He looked back at Kurt. There was a resemblance between him and his sister, Horst admitted, although it was more physical than mental. Kurt’s face was a masculine version of Gudrun’s face, his blond hair cropped short to fit a helmet. And he’d fought well in the war, no one doubted his courage. But it took a different kind of courage to stand up against the entire Reich…

“This is your last chance to stay here,” he said, slowly. “Do you want to remain?”

“No,” Kurt said. “I’m coming with you.”

Horst nodded as he picked up the papers. “Where were you born?”

Kurt blinked, then realised what he meant. “Berlin, Braun Hospital,” he said. “My parents were Herman and…”

“Don’t volunteer information,” Horst said. It was something he’d been taught during basic training. Nervous people, people with something to hide, volunteered information. “They’ll think they’re being manipulated.”

He bounced question after question off Kurt, silently relieved that Kurt managed to keep his story relatively straight. It helped that much of the background information was actually true, but there were still risks. Whoever they encountered might know enough to poke holes in the narrative, then rip it apart. There was no way to be sure.

Kurt held up his hand. “Will they ask all of these questions?”

“I don’t know,” Horst said. “There’s a war on. They might not have time for a full interrogation. It depends…”

He shook his head. “If they wanted to give you a security clearance, they’d send officers to your home, your school, your training camp… they’d go through your life in minute detail before deciding if they could trust you or not. Some very good people have been denied clearances for reasons beyond their control. But here… if they have reason to be suspicious, they might just toss questions at you to see if you slip up.”

Kurt snorted. “What are the odds of us encountering someone who went to the same school as me?”

“Poor,” Horst said. “But don’t dismiss them entirely.”

He picked up the next set of papers. “We’re leaving this evening,” he added. “Getting through the lines is not going to be fun.”

“No,” Kurt agreed. “Getting shot by our own side would be embarrassing.”

Horst nodded. The Waffen-SS’s lines had been shattered, but they were already being pulled back together. It was plausible — quite plausible — that a couple of officers would get lost now, yet that wouldn’t last. The longer they waited, the greater the chance of being asked awkward questions that would lead to certain death. Horst would have liked to go earlier, but without the papers getting through the lines would be impossible. He could only hope the SS hadn’t shot Gudrun out of hand.

They won’t, he told himself, firmly. It was something to cling to. They’ll want to break her first.

He gritted his teeth at the thought. Gudrun wasn’t a common soldier. She certainly wasn’t a common politician. She was an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of people who had been denied the chance to breathe free, denied the chance to speak their minds to their lords and masters. The SS wouldn’t want to kill her; they’d want to turn her against her supporters…

And she might wind up wishing she was dead, he thought. He knew what they’d do to her, just to wear down her resistance before the real pain began. She might even try to kill herself.

He looked at Kurt. Kurt was an infantryman in the Berlin Guard. He hadn’t even seen fighting until the civil war, let alone the true horrors of an insurgency. Kurt had no conception of just what his sister might be going through, no real understanding of what the SS did to those it considered irredeemable enemies…

And if Gudrun is dead when we arrive, Horst promised himself, Karl Holliston will join her shortly afterwards.

“Father,” Kurt said, as the door opened. “Have you come to see us off?”

Horst winced. Herman Wieland looked to have aged twenty years in the last few days, although it was clear that he was holding himself under tight control. He had to be worried, Horst knew; he’d been a policeman, a man of power, yet he hadn’t been able to protect his daughter. His world had shifted on its axis even before Gudrun had been taken prisoner; now, he was clearly unstable, unsure of his place in the world. Horst didn’t really blame him for his doubts. Old certainties were fading everywhere.

“I’m going to the front,” Herman said, quietly. “I just came to say goodbye.”

Kurt stared. “Father!”

“I’m not as old as Grandpa Frank,” Herman said. “I can pull my weight.”

Horst frowned. “Berlin still needs policemen…”

“Berlin needs better policemen,” Herman said, softly. “And I need to do something.”

“You are a good policeman,” Kurt said. “Father, I…”

Horst looked at Herman and felt a sudden wave of sympathy. Herman had been a good policeman, in the eyes of his family, but much of the city would probably disagree. The Ordnungspolizei had been the face of the regime, the iron fist in the iron glove… in many ways, they were more detested than the SS. Herman might not have taken advantage of his position, but far too many other policemen had milked it for all they could get. And now that the regime had fallen, the police were coming under attack.

And there’s a war on, he thought, sourly. The enemy wasn’t that far from the gates. Berlin was practically under martial law. We don’t have time to worry about the police.

“Good luck,” he said. Kurt shot him a betrayed look. “We’ll bring her back.”

Herman gave him a ghost of a smile. “Have many children,” he said. “And name one after me.”

“Father,” Kurt protested.

“And you find a wife too,” Herman added. “Someone… someone more suited to the modern world.”

Horst kept his expression under control. Generations of German men — and women — had been raised to believe that a woman’s place was in the home, that the husband and father was the head of the household and his word was law. But Herman’s daughter had triggered a revolution and his wife had started to organise political meetings of her own. He couldn’t blame Herman for being confused, for wanting something else. The world had moved on, leaving him behind.

He still loves his family, Horst thought. But he doesn’t know how to relate to them any longer.

“Yes, father,” Kurt said. “If I make it home, I will find a wife.”

Herman nodded. He looked at Horst for a long moment, then turned and strode out of the chamber. Horst understood, all too well. Herman blamed him. Gudrun wouldn’t have been kidnapped if she hadn’t been with him…

There’s enough blame to go around, he told himself. And none of it is very helpful.

“Get some rest,” he ordered. He glanced at his watch, meaningfully. “It starts getting dark around 1800. We have to get through the lines before then.”

“I understand,” Kurt said. He sounded distracted. “Is he out of his mind?”

Horst bit down a whole string of unhelpful answers. “He was a soldier — an experienced soldier,” he said, finally. It was true. “And we need as many of them as we can get.”

He kept the rest of his thoughts to himself. Herman was fit for his age, but he was no match for an SS stormtrooper. There was no way he’d be able to keep up with the young men for long, although his experience might give him an advantage. But the provisional government was very short of experienced manpower. Herman might be needed, if only to teach lessons to the younger soldiers. They were going to war against one of the most formidable military forces in existence.

And he doesn’t want to come home, Horst thought. The modern world has no place for him.

He shook his head. It smacked of defeatism to him. Giving up was, perhaps, the only true sin. He’d certainly been taught never to give up during basic training. And yet, he understood the impulse all too well. Did he fit into the brave new world any better than his father-in-law?

“Go get some rest,” he repeated. There would be time to worry about the future after Gudrun was rescued and the war was over. “I want to be on our way at 1700.”

“Jawohl,” Kurt said.