Storm Front

Chapter Thirty

Berlin, Germany

12 August 1985

“This is getting out of hand,” Hans said. He glanced at his watch, meaningfully. It was late at night and dusk was slowly settling over Berlin. “The troubles are threatening to spread to a dozen other cities.”

“Then we clamp down on them,” Holliston insisted. The Reichsführer-SS hadn’t given up, not yet. “We should crush the strikers in their lairs.”

“If we kill the strikers, we lose part of our pool of trained labour,” Hans said, wearily. The argument had been going in circles for hours, as more and more reports flooded in from all over the Reich. “If they have time to damage or destroy the machinery in the factories, we will have to replace it… and that will put yet another hole in our budget. And if we order the police or the troops to open fire on the women… we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.”

“He’s right,” Field Marshal Justus Stoffregen said. The Head of OKW leaned forward, his face pale. “There are already rumours spreading through the Berlin Guard, Herr Reichsführer. If they are sent in to clear the streets of women, I believe they will refuse to obey orders.”

“So arrest them for mutiny,” Holliston snapped.

“There hasn’t been a mass mutiny since we were stabbed in the back in 1918,” Stoffregen said. “A single coward could be arrested easily – his own barrack mates would hand out some rough justice if he wasn’t arrested quickly enough – but a collective mutiny would be much harder to suppress. The soldiers might turn their guns on the arresting officers.”

Holliston let out an angry hiss. “This is what you get for not indoctrinating soldiers properly!”

“Not all of us believe in the doctrines preached by the SS,” Stoffregen said. “We want our soldiers to take advantage of fleeting opportunities, not wait for orders while the moment slips away.”

Hans held up a hand. Normally, he would have enjoyed watching the military and the SS at loggerheads, but they didn’t have time to continue the pointless argument. They’d played the only cards they could – firing unionists and clearing the streets – and both had failed. The strikers were still holding out, thousands of others had come onto the streets in support and Berlin, as day turned to night, had ground to a halt. Even if the strike ended at midnight and the city went back to normal, it would take months – if not years – to repair the damage.

“This argument is immaterial,” he said, flatly. “We have to admit, right now, that we are on the verge of losing control.”

He repeated the facts, once again. “There are rumblings of trouble right across the Reich,” he said, firmly. “I suspect we will see more strikes tomorrow – I believe that some corporations are already considering closing their plants for the duration of the crisis, which will only provoke their workers further. Our police have refused to disperse the women in the streets; our soldiers are unlikely to fire on the women if ordered to do so. We have pushed matters as far as we can, without causing serious damage, and we can go no further. The population no longer trusts us, the workers no longer expect us to defend them against their corporate masters, the Untermenschen see their chance for freedom and even the police and soldiers are restless. Our Reich rests on a knife-edge.”

“We can fight,” Holliston said.

“We can try,” Voss muttered, “but there won’t be much of a Reich left afterwards.”

Hans nodded in agreement. “The Americans are already moving ahead of us,” he reminded the council. “A long period of civil unrest in the Reich, even if we manage to keep a grip on power, will give them the chance to make their lead insurmountable. And then the legacy of the great Adolf Hitler will be lost forever!”

He willed them, desperately, to believe. The American ABM system was bad enough – if the Americans thought that they could stop ninety percent of the Reich’s missiles, they might decide that they could survive a nuclear war – but their steady advance into space was worse. The Economic Intelligence Service was already predicting the next generation of space-based weapons, concepts right out of American science-fantasy movies that, if turned into reality, would render most of the Reich’s armed forces obsolete. The Reich, already dangerously behind the United States, could not allow itself to lose any more ground. If they did…

If they did, we might as well call Washington and ask President Anderson for terms, he thought, sourly. We couldn’t possibly win if they deploy space-based weapons against us.

“I agree,” Stoffregen said. “It’s time to put an end to the matter.”

“And how,” Holliston asked icily, “do you intend to do that?”

“We concede most of their demands,” Hans said. “Let them have their unions, for the moment; let them have their freedom of speech and assembly. Let them even start offering independent candidates to the Reichstag.”

“Out of the question,” Holliston snapped.

“It makes no difference,” Voss said, amused. “The Reichstag is powerless.”

“Unless these… independent candidates start voting to block our proposed budgets,” Holliston pointed out. “What do we do then?”

It was, Hans had to admit, a good question. Technically, the Reichstag was responsible for approving laws and budget proposals. None of the proposals put forward by the Reich Council had ever failed to pass, of course; the Reichstag knew it had no power to do anything other than rubber-stamp the proposals. But if there were independents elected to the Reichstag… who knew what would happen then?

“We control the bureaucracy,” he said, finally. He tried to make his tone as reassuring as possible. “Let them make their speeches, if they wish. It will make no difference. The important detail is that we will be buying time.”

“We cannot end the war,” Holliston snapped.

Hans nodded, although he knew the war couldn’t be allowed to continue for long. But the military might not support him if he proposed otherwise, not when Holliston – damn the man – had been making private deals with the senior officers. The war would have to continue for a few months, at least. By then, he’d know just how badly the budget needed to be slashed to keep the Reich afloat.

“We can shift responsibility onto the South Africans,” Voss offered. “If we provide training and equipment – even a handful of units of French volunteers – we can slowly draw down our own commitment. Let the bastards fight for their own country.”

They are, Hans thought. The Italians hadn’t put up much of a fight when the Arabs revolted – and the French hadn’t done much better – but the South Africans were tough. They were just outnumbered so badly that only superior training and their foes disunity had kept them from losing the war within the first year. And maybe they will be glad of a few hundred thousand French volunteers.

“Then we offer to concede most of the demands,” Hans said. “And release the prisoners as a gesture of good faith.”

“They’re guilty of unauthorised political activity,” Holliston insisted. “They cannot simply be let free.”

“So is most of Berlin, now,” Hans countered. “Do you want to put the entire city in the extermination camps?”

“This isn’t Warsaw or Moscow,” Voss agreed.

“Germanica,” Holliston snapped.

Hans winced, inwardly. Moscow – Stalin’s capital – had been battered to rubble by savage street fighting as the Germans forced their way into the city. Half of the population had died at their posts; the remainder had been rounded up, marched into a concentration camp and starved to death. The city had been rebuilt shortly after the end of the war – it had been the hub of the USSR’s road and rail network – and renamed Germanica. These days, it was an SS stronghold, the core of Germany East.

“Let them go,” he said, gently. “It will help to buy us time.”

“Very well,” Holliston snapped. “Let it be done.”

“You’re late,” Standartenfuehrer Erdmann Schwarzkopf observed.

“I had problems convincing the police of my identity,” Horst said, shortly. He was sick of being told he was late. “They did not believe me at first.”

He scowled at the humiliation of admitting that he’d practically been arrested by his own side. If he’d had an SS card, getting past the policemen would have been simplicity itself, but the card would have been far too revealing if Gudrun or another student had seen it. As it happened, he’d had to let them take him to a processing station and speak to an SS officer there – and, by the time he’d been processed himself, several hours had passed.

Schwarzkopf shrugged. “These are not easy times.”

“No,” Horst agreed. He bit down the urge to lodge a complaint against Krabbe. “I never expected to see the streets of Berlin filled with whining women.”

“Me neither,” Schwarzkopf said. He sounded, for once, just a little unsure. “A number of students were arrested, mostly in front of the factories. I need you to review their files and mark any that require special attention.”

Horst frowned, inwardly, as he took the set of folders. Every student had a dossier, kept within the RSHA; he had no doubt that the SS’s bureaucrats were hastily updating them even now, at least for the students who’d been arrested. They might be released – computer experts were invaluable – but being arrested in such a compromising position would haunt them for the rest of their lives. And yet, they were the lucky ones. Someone without their training would be halfway to Germany East by now.

The first batch of students were largely unfamiliar to him, although he vaguely recognised one of the young men as a braying fool who’d bragged of his family connections to anyone who’d listen. One of the young girls – his eyes lingered on the photos of her processing for longer than he knew they should – had a brother who’d gone to war and never returned; he hoped, as he returned the first stack of files, that her loss wouldn’t be held against her. She had an excellent motive for joining the Valkyries.

“That young man is a loudmouth,” he said, tapping his folder. “But I don’t think he’s a real troublemaker. He has too much to lose.”

Schwarzkopf eyed him, sharply. “Two of the other spies have classed him as a potential dissident.”

Horst forced himself to keep his voice level. “Mein Herr, he talks too much,” he said. He was tempted to drop the idiot in hot water, but that would be cruel. “A dissident would be quieter, I believe.”

“His talk is already seditious,” Schwarzkopf pointed out. He picked up the next set of folders and held them out. “And these?”

The first two folders showed boys he didn’t recognise, but the third folder belonged to Gudrun. He glanced at her photographs first, hoping that his superior would think he was admiring her body if he showed any reaction, then checked the rest of the file. Thankfully, Gudrun seemed to have been classed as someone who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than a potential dissident. The bureaucrats hadn’t known she’d been engaged to Konrad before he’d been sent to South Africa. Having a policeman for a father probably told in her favour, although she also had a tie to the SS. Horst made a mental note to consider that later, wondering what the tie actually was. Gudrun’s elder brother was in the Berlin Guard, not the Waffen-SS, and her other brothers were still in the Hitler Youth. It was unlikely as hell they were already marked down as potential SS recruits. Only bad fiction for impressionable young men involved children serving as full-fledged secret agents charged with hunting down spies.

“I know her from my classes,” he said. He made a show of looking back at the pictures. “I was planning to court her.”

“I can understand why,” Schwarzkopf said. “Pretty, definitely; her bloodline shows no trace of non-Aryan blood.”

Horst flushed on Gudrun’s behalf, silently praying she never found out that he’d looked at her naked photographs, then frowned as the implications struck him. If she’d wanted to marry an SS officer, she needed a certificate of racial purity, a confirmation that her parents and grandparents had been of pure German blood. He wondered, suddenly, why someone had looked up Gudrun’s bloodline – it wasn’t normally done outside the SS – but the file provided no answer. There had to be a connection between Gudrun and the SS he wasn’t seeing.

“I may still do so,” he said. He put the file back and took the next one. “Unless it would impact on my career…”

“It probably wouldn’t,” Schwarzkopf assured him. “She doesn’t seem to be one of the ringleaders.”

And let us hope you’re telling the truth, Horst thought, as he checked the next file. If a competent spy saw us together, you might wonder…

“Another loudmouth,” he said, dismissing the subject. The male student was two years older than him and completely unconnected to Gudrun. “This one, however, was involved with inciting students to go to the factories.”

Schwarzkopf frowned. “Are you sure?”

“He wasn’t the only one,” Horst said. He would have preferred not to mention it, but the idiot just had to shoot his mouth off in public, where one of the other spies would definitely have heard. Better he ended up in an interrogation chamber than Horst himself. “There were a couple of others I don’t know so well.”

“Several students are also dead,” Schwarzkopf said. “They may have hoped to be killed.”

“Only the Arabs charge into battle praying for death,” Horst said. The SS praised death before the dishonour of running away, but even the most fanatical unit understood the value of a tactical retreat. “I don’t think the students would have enough bravery to make a fight of it.”

“This one did,” Schwarzkopf said. He held up another file. Inside, there was a picture of a brutally-wounded young man. “Do you recognise him?”

“Hartwig,” Horst said. He hadn’t liked the young man – he’d lured Gudrun into danger – but he hadn’t deserved to die so savagely. “Hartwig Rhineland. Another loudmouth.”

“Noted,” Schwarzkopf said. They ran through the rest of the files quickly. “Do you know any of the students personally?”

“A few,” Horst said. Thankfully, he knew more than just Gudrun and the Valkyries. “I have classes with them.”

“We have orders to release them tomorrow morning, save for a handful who merit further investigation,” Schwarzkopf said. “Do you want to drive any of them home?”

Horst kept his expression blank with an effort. He needed to talk to Gudrun – and he needed to do it before she vanished into her home. Her father was a policeman, after all; he’d be embarrassed when he discovered that his daughter had been arrested, even if it didn’t blight his career for the rest of his life. Horst knew what his father would have done if he’d gotten into real trouble and he doubted Gudrun’s father would take it any better. But then, Gudrun was a girl. She might just be grounded for the rest of her life instead.

But if he showed any interest in any of the girls, his superior might wonder why… unless, of course, he gave them a good reason.

“I can drive Gudrun home,” he said, pasting a smile on his face. “She might appreciate it.”

“She might,” Schwarzkopf said. “We’re asking students to drive the arrestees home, rather than allow their parents to collect them in a body. Listen carefully to what she says as you drive her home. If she happens to say anything actionable, report it to us.”

“I will,” Horst said. He’d check the car overnight, just to make sure no one had added any new bugs. Disabling the one he knew about and making it look like an accident would be easy, but disabling a new bug would raise eyebrows. “Will you inform her parents she’s going home?”

“I believe there will be a formal announcement,” Schwarzkopf said, casually. “For the moment, however, I suggest you wait. The streets are not safe at the moment.”

Horst managed to keep himself, barely, from making a sarcastic remark. The police, instead of arresting strikers or rioters, had managed to dump an SS agent into a processing centre. If they’d known what he’d done, it would have been a great success, but as it happened it had merely been a minor hiccup. But when his superiors complained, the police would be less willing to take suspects into custody, even ones who were clearly breaking the law…

“Yes, Mein Herr,” he said, instead.

Volker listened to the radio broadcast in some disbelief. The government was… surrendering? The strikers were to be forgiven? The fired workers were to be allowed to return to work? The union was to be legalised – along with many of the other rights they’d demanded when they’d taken over the factories? It sounded almost too good to be true.

And it probably is too good to be true, he thought, darkly. He’d been in the SS, after all; they might concede ground when it could not be held, but they refused to simply let it go permanently. They’ll start preparing for the next round.

“We won,” Joachim said. He sounded as surprised as Volker himself. “Didn’t we?”

“For the moment,” Volker said. They’d have to move fast to capitalise on their success before the government recovered its balance. “But this is only the first round. I imagine they’ll do what they can to undermine us.”

He sighed. “And they haven’t agreed to end the war, Joachim,” he added. “They’re making concessions, not surrendering. We have to be ready for their counterattack.”