Storm Front

Chapter Thirty-Two

Berlin, Germany

13 August 1985

It was hard, so hard, for Herman to remain calm. He knew precisely what had happened to his daughter, even before he’d managed to get a glimpse of her file at the station. Even if she hadn’t been marked as anyone special, even if she’d only been in the wrong place at the wrong time, she would be processed like any other prisoner. He’d administered the procedure himself, countless times. His fists clenched in helpless rage as recalled forcing prisoners to strip, both to make sure they weren’t carrying anything and to ensure they knew they were no longer the masters of their own destiny. Gudrun… how could she put herself in such danger?

She stood in front of him, breathing hard. Her clothes looked badly rumpled; her hair hung down in clumps, suggesting she hadn’t been allowed to shower while she’d been in the prison cell. She’d probably been left naked too – and, if they’d been feeling malicious, shoved in with a handful of tougher female prisoners. What had she been thinking? Didn’t she know what could happen to her? She could have vanished into the penal system and never been seen again. Even if she’d been exiled, as a young German lady of pure bloodline, she would still have had a very hard time of it.

He honestly didn’t know what to say, let alone do. Boys were easy to raise; it was simply a matter of letting them run free, combined with firm boundaries and strict discipline. But girls? His sisters had been good little housewives, obedient to their parents and then to their husbands. Gudrun… it had been a mistake, he was sure now, to allow her to go to the university. It had given her all the wrong ideas. He wished, now, that he’d forbidden her to sit the exams, let alone remain as a student. It would have been simple enough to find her a suitable man and ensure she married him. Now…

Gudrun looked at him, her face a strange mixture of defiance and fear. He’d seen it before on countless prisoners, mostly males; prisoners who weren’t broken, but unsure of themselves enough to remain quiet rather than risk compromising themselves. It was easy to see her grandmother in her face, the mixture of a strong chin and long blonde hair… Herman wished, suddenly, that his mother had remained alive. She would have known what to say.

And she never put up with any nonsense either, he thought, feeling a twinge of pain. Why had his mother died while Grandpa Frank, the drunken old bastard, survived? She would have taken Gudrun under her wing if I’d asked.

Gudrun broke the silence, finally. “Where’s mother?”

“Out,” Herman growled.

He glowered at her until she lowered her eyes. His entire world seemed to be shifting around him and he didn’t like it. His daughter was arrested and then his wife went out onto the streets with a gaggle of other housewives, bringing the entire city to a halt. He’d get an earful from the Captain tomorrow, he was sure, while the other policemen jeered at him for being unable to control his wife. But what was he supposed to do? Handcuff her to the kitchen stove? Beat her like a child? Adelinde would cut his throat the moment he fell asleep or poison his food. She was too proud to forgive him for such a humiliation.

“Tell me,” he said, as gently as he could. “What were you thinking?”

Gudrun raised her eyes. “I was thinking that I don’t want to be scared anymore.”

Herman blinked in surprise. “And you thought being arrested would keep you from being scared?”

“I didn’t know I would be arrested,” Gudrun said.

“Strikes are illegal,” Herman pointed out, coldly. That had changed, if the radio broadcast was accurate, but Gudrun had still gone to the scene of a crime. “You could be arrested merely for supporting the strikers. Several of your fellow students died supporting the strikers.”

Gudrun winced. She hadn’t known that, Herman realised. The student who’d brought her home – and damn the government for refusing to allow him to collect his daughter – hadn’t told her anything. No doubt he’d kept his mouth firmly shut, rather than deal with a torrent of female emotion. Young men tended to be cowards that way.

“You did something very stupid,” Herman told her, flatly. “I don’t know what they’re teaching you at the university, but defying the government can be very dangerous.”

Gudrun tilted her head, defiantly. She did look like her grandmother. “Someone has to take a stand.”

“But not you,” Herman snapped. “Did it occur to you that your family could have been destroyed? Your older brother’s career would come to an end, your younger brothers would be under permanent suspicion, your father would lose his job… do you really imagine that the government would not have hesitated to make an example out of all of us?”

“They’d have to do it to the families of everyone who got arrested,” Gudrun pointed out, coldly. “Father…”

Herman clenched his fists. “You were lucky,” he told her. “Do you know what could have happened to you? You could have been raped, Gudrun! You could have been sold to one of the combines as a farming wife…”

Gudrun looked shocked, then angry. “Is that what you do to the girls you arrest?”

“You…”

Herman bit off his words. He’d never taken advantage of his uniform – his wife would have been furious if he’d even thought about molesting a prisoner – but he knew what happened in some of the less pleasant prisons in the Reich. Young girls, sometimes younger than Gudrun, were raped and abused by the prison guards or their fellow inmates. No one in authority cared, either, not when the victims were criminals. Anyone in jail, as far as the authorities were concerned, had done something to deserve it.

“The prison guards are less concerned with the niceties,” he said, finally. “And you could easily have been sold to the farms, Gudrun. You would have been given to some farmer and expected to be his wife.”

Gudrun shuddered, then gathered herself. “But it didn’t happen.”

“It could still happen,” Herman insisted. “Gudrun…”

His voice trailed away. He’d never been good with words. He didn’t know how to tell his daughter just how scared he’d been, when he’d heard she’d been arrested. His sons were tough young men – he was proud of all three of them – but Gudrun was a girl, the apple of his eye. The thought of her being stuffed into a brutal prison, even one solely for female prisoners, was horrifying. Some of the female prisoners could be far nastier than the men.

“You will not return to the university,” he said, finally. “You will remain here, at home, until we find you a suitable husband.”

Gudrun felt as if she had been punched in the belly. That, or a beating, would have been far preferable to a strict ban on returning to the university. Her father wouldn’t give her an opportunity to sneak out, either. She’d be working for her mother from dawn till dusk, if she wasn’t being watched by Johan or Grandpa Frank. The thought was maddening. After everything she’d done, after even spending a night in jail, she was damned if she was becoming a housewife.

She could see the fear on her father’s face. He wasn’t scared of her, she could tell, but for her. She’d heard rumours about what happened to prisoners too, although she’d never dared ask her father before now if there was any truth in them. She hadn’t really wanted to know, not when her father might have been involved. And there was something else bothering her father, something to do with her mother. Where was she?

“No,” she said. Perhaps it was a bad tactic – it might be better to pretend to surrender for the moment and argue later, when her father had calmed down – but she was no longer the young girl she’d been. “I will not leave the university.”

Her father purpled. “You are my daughter and you will do as I say,” he snapped. “I will visit the university tomorrow and inform them that you are no longer a student…”

“You won’t,” Gudrun said. She met his eyes, knowing he would take it as a challenge. “I worked too hard to pass those exams to just throw them away.”

“Yes, you did,” her father snapped. “And what will spending the next four years at the university get you? A piece of paper that no one will respect?”

“The world may change,” Gudrun said. She was sure demand for computers would only grow throughout the Reich. If the stories of America were true, every household had a computer, perhaps even more than one. “And computer experts will be much in demand.”

Her father snorted. “You’re a young woman,” he said. “You should be turning out babies, not trying to find a job.”

“My boyfriend is a cripple,” Gudrun shouted at him, feeling her temper snap. “They didn’t even have the decency to tell me what happened to him! His father had to find out himself!”

She forced herself to calm down. “Father,” she said, “I understand how you feel. But I’m not going to throw this opportunity away because it could turn sour. Being a housewife could also turn sour.”

“Not if you treat your husband with respect,” her father said. There was a hint of something ugly in his tone. “Gudrun…”

“I won’t quit,” Gudrun said, drawing herself up to her full height. “And you can’t make me.”

She braced herself, unsure just how her father would react. He might order her to bend over the sofa for a thrashing or send her to her room while he called the university and informed them that she was no longer a student. She was directly challenging his authority, after all, just as she’d challenged the government. His pride in his role as head of the household wouldn’t let her get away with it.

But whatever he dishes out, she told herself, I can take it.

“I will discuss your future with your mother,” her father said, finally. “And your punishment for being so stupid as to put your life at risk.”

Gudrun bit down a comment about double standards – her father had congratulated her brothers for putting their lives at risk more than once, although she had to admit that they’d only ever risked themselves – and held herself at the ready. She’d been arrested by the police and threatened with a whole series of unpleasant fates. Her father’s punishments no longer sounded so fearsome. If Kurt had been a different person after his first deployment into a combat zone, she was a different person too.

“Go to your room,” her father ordered, finally. “Have a shower, then wait.”

“Yes, father,” Gudrun said.

Her father watched her through tormented eyes as she walked past him and up the stairs, but said nothing. There was no sign of her brothers, she noted; Kurt would be at the barracks, of course, but she had no idea where the younger boys were. Perhaps they were with friends, if her father had anticipated a row, or maybe they were just keeping their heads down, knowing their father was in a foul mood. It wouldn’t be safe to be seen.

She closed the door behind her, then undressed rapidly. Her skin felt unclean, reminding her she hadn’t showered for over a day… and that she’d been groped by a couple of policemen, one of whom had inspected her private parts. She shuddered at the memory – she no longer felt safe when she was naked – and then forced herself to don a towel rather than hastily dressing herself. It was no longer easy to walk down the corridor to the bathroom, she discovered. The sense of being watched was strong, even though she knew she was unobserved. Being in prison, even for a day, had left her with mental scars.

But I didn’t break, she told herself, as she stepped into the bathroom and locked the door. I didn’t tell them anything.

The thought made her smile before the implications caught up with her. As far as the police knew, she was just another student who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They hadn’t connected her with Sigrún, the writer of proclamations and dissident… they certainly hadn’t connected her to Konrad. There had been no reason to do more than strip-search her, no reason to ask more than a bare handful of questions. But if that ever changed…

Her body was shaking as she clambered into the shower and turned on the water. She’d never suspected Horst, not once. Many of the new spies were too obvious to be taken seriously, but Horst? He’d become a friend, even a potential boyfriend, without her having the slightest hint that there was something wrong with him. And if he’d done his duty and reported her from the start… she would have been thrown into prison, along with the rest of the Valkyries.

She shivered, even though the water was warm. Her father was worried for her, she knew; her mother would probably feel the same way. She’d tasted the coercive power of schoolmasters and BDM matrons from a very young age, but she’d been spared a glimpse at the true power dominating the Reich, keeping everyone in line. Now… she scrubbed at her body, trying to eradicate the sensation from where she’d been touched. It would be easy just to give up, just to surrender and allow her father to withdraw her from the university. Who knew? Her husband might be a kind man, willing to allow her to be more than just a housewife…

But that would be giving up, she thought, angry at herself. And I’ve come too far to give up.

She’d sneaked into a hospital, she’d started the Valkyries, she’d triggered the process that was bringing more and more people onto the streets, proving that the government was far from invincible. She was damned if she was just surrendering now. Konrad deserved better than to be forgotten by his girlfriend. If she couldn’t have him back, and she feared his father would simply turn off the life support, she could at least fight in his name.

There was a loud tap on the door. “Gudrun,” her mother’s voice said. She sounded different, somehow. “Are you in there?”

“Yes, mother,” Gudrun said, tiredly. Really, where else would she be, if she wasn’t in her room? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of sneaking into any of the other bedrooms. “I’m just finishing.”

“I’ll wait in your room,” her mother said.

Gudrun sighed, reminded herself that she could take whatever her parents chose to dish out, then dried herself hastily. Who knew what her mother would find if she decided to search Gudrun’s bedroom? She was sure there was nothing incriminating in plain view, but she didn’t want to take chances. Wrapping the towel around herself, she opened the door and hurried back to her bedroom. Her mother was sitting on Gudrun’s bed, resting her hands on her lap. She looked… different, in a way Gudrun couldn’t quite grasp. And there was no sign of her father.

“We need to talk,” she said, firmly.

“Yes, mother,” Gudrun said, closing the door and picking up her dressing gown. “I’m all ears.”

Oh, Gudrun, Kurt thought. What have you done?

He hadn’t expected the last two days to be anything more than constant physical training, shooting at the range and a host of other tasks to prepare the soldiers for combat operations in South Africa. The horror stories some of the experienced men had told him were enough to make it clear that they needed as much training as possible before they saw the elephant, despite the limitations of any training scenarios. But instead, the Berlin Guard had been ordered to muster and placed on alert. The old sweats insisted they’d never been ordered to prepare for immediate operations since the sixties, when Kurt’s father had been in the military. Kurt had been convinced there had been some kind of disaster. What else could explain the sudden shift in priorities?

But they’d mustered and waited… and waited… and finally been sent back to barracks. There had been so many rumours flying through the base that the CO had had to make an announcement, but it had been utterly incoherent. Strikers in Berlin, women on the streets, schoolchildren throwing mashed potato at their teachers… Kurt had been left wondering if it had been nothing more than an unscheduled drill. The explanation had just sounded impossibly absurd.

And then he’d heard the broadcast, when he’d gone on watch, and put the whole story together. The leaflets – the leaflets his sister had written – had been replaced with something else, a mass – and thoroughly illegal – labour movement. And their strike had brought women and children out onto the streets in support.

We might have been ordered into the city, to fire on strikers and students, he thought, as he checked the bulletin board. They’d been due to go out of the city for mountain training, but apparently the entire training schedule had been cancelled. And what would have happened when we’d been ordered to open fire?

The government had backed down, according to the radio, but he knew better than to take that for granted. If the training schedule had been cancelled, when the unit was due to go to South Africa, it could only mean that higher command had a use for the Berlin Guard closer to home. And that meant…?

He shuddered. What do we do if we are ordered to fire on women and children?