Storm Front

Chapter Seven

Schulze Residence/SS Safehouse, Berlin

20 July 1985

“Gudrun,” Liana Schulze called, as she opened the door. “Have you heard anything from my brother?”

Gudrun felt a stab of guilt as she looked at the younger girl. Liana was sixteen, on the verge of adulthood; hell, she could marry with her parents’ permission, if she didn’t want to finish her final year of schooling. And she’d always looked up to Gudrun, chatting happily to her about nothing in particular; Gudrun had always thought she’d make a good sister-in-law. But she didn’t dare tell the younger girl the truth. She’d speak to her father and he’d report Gudrun to the authorities.

“I haven’t heard anything from your brother,” she said. It was true enough. “I actually came to speak to your father.”

Liana’s face fell. Gudrun understood. She was the only child left in the house, now that Konrad had gone to war; she’d have no one to talk to, merely chores to perform for her mother. And she had to have known, at some deep level, that Gudrun hadn’t come to talk to her. Gudrun was eighteen and a university student to boot. Socially, they had very little in common. They’d hardly spend time together when Konrad wasn’t around.

“I understand,” she said. “Are you…”

Pregnant, Gudrun thought. She hadn’t gone all the way with Konrad. And it would have obvious that I was pregnant four months ago, if I was pregnant.

“No, but I do need to speak to him,” she said. “Is he in his study?”

“I think so,” Liana said.

She held the door open long enough for Gudrun to step inside and then closed it before leading the way through the living room and up to the door of Volker Schulze’s study. It was firmly shut, perhaps locked; Liana tapped on the door and waited for her father to invite her in before opening the door. Gudrun stepped past her and into the study.

“Gudrun,” Volker Schulze said. He lifted an eyebrow as he turned to face her. “What brings you to my house?”

Gudrun hesitated, bracing herself. Volker Schulze had always made her a little nervous, even though she had the feeling that her father was meant to make Konrad nervous. He looked like an older version of his son, his face marred by scars from a long career in the SS before he’d retired and found work as a factory foreman. His study was covered with mementos of his career, from a spiked helmet he’d salvaged from somewhere to a pistol he claimed to have taken from a British commando team in North Africa. A large chart hung on the far wall, showing the spread of the Reich.

And just how much of that chart, Gudrun asked herself, is a lie?

She pushed the question to one side. “Since we last spoke, I haven’t heard anything from Konrad,” she said, simply. “I was wondering if you’d heard anything from him yourself.”

Volker Schulze looked pensive. “I haven’t heard anything, no,” he said. Gudrun trusted he wouldn’t have kept anything from her, if he had heard something. “Do you have reason to worry?”

“I miss him,” Gudrun said.

“Young men have always gone to war,” Volker Schulze said, as reassuringly as he could. “I believe that young women like you have always waited for their heroes to come home.”

Gudrun winced before she could catch herself. One thing that had been hammered into her head at school was the importance of remaining faithful. A girl who dumped a boy while he was on deployment could expect to be a social pariah, even if the boy had been abusive and beaten her while they were together. Even if there had been someone else, she knew, it would have been cruel to dump Konrad while he was away. She would have waited for him to come home before telling him the bad news.

“But I’ve heard nothing,” she said, plaintively. Perhaps it would cover her lapse. “Where is he?”

“On deployment,” Volker Schulze said. He stood and patted her shoulder, awkwardly. “I was often out of touch for months at a time, Gudrun. Konrad may well be in the same position.”

He paused. “Are you…?”

“No,” Gudrun said, firmly. She groaned inwardly, resisting the urge to rub his nose in how she knew she wasn’t expecting a baby. “I’m not pregnant.”

“That’s good,” Volker Schulze said. “Gudrun, I understand how you feel, but Konrad isn’t choosing not to write to you. I believe he will contact you as soon as he can. He does love you and we, his parents, approve of you.”

Gudrun felt another stab of bitter guilt. Hilde wasn’t atypical; parents, particularly those who had lived through the deprivation of the war, wanted their sons to marry good housewives, women who could cook, clean and bear their grandchildren. They didn’t want academics, career women or even the handful of girls who’d made a career in the military; they assumed, perhaps correctly, that such women would never let their husbands boss them around in public. Konrad’s parents could easily have told him that they would never approve his relationship with Gudrun and the hell of it was that they might have had a point. Instead, they’d welcomed her into their house.

“I thank you,” she said, lowering her gaze. “Have you heard anything else from the front?”

Volker Schulze gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

“The news is always bland,” Gudrun said, carefully. “I was wondering if you’d heard something a little more detailed.”

“There are endless skirmishes with the insurgents,” Volker Schulze said. It wasn’t much more than she could have deduced from the news broadcasts, reading between the lines. “It may take longer than we had thought to defeat the niggers.”

Gudrun blinked. “The news said it would only be a short commitment.”

Volker Schulze gave her a long considering look. “There are people in my office,” he said, “who don’t really understand how the factory actually works. Therefore, they make promises they cannot keep to people who are equally in the dark about what’s actually happening and rely on the managers on the ground to cover for their failings.”

It took Gudrun a moment to realise what he was trying to tell her. If someone could be so out of touch in a small factory, and she had no trouble in believing it, how much more out of touch were the people in the Reichstag, the men who ran the country? Had they started the war in South Africa because they believed, honestly believed, that victory would be no harder than baking a cake?

“I believe my daughter misses you,” Volker Schulze said, after a moment. “You are, of course, quite welcome to visit any time you like.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gudrun said. It wasn’t entirely proper, but there would be a chaperone in the house if necessary. “And I’m sorry…”

“For not being pregnant?” Volker Schulze asked, dryly. “I respect the Reichsführer’s feelings regarding the need to raise the next generation of German men, but I am enough of a traditionalist to believe that the happy couple should be married before they start producing children. A child should know his father.”

Gudrun blushed, furiously. No one would really care if she was a virgin or not on her wedding night, not when everyone would understand her giving herself to her boyfriend before he went off to the war. The only real question would be if she’d had a child – and, if she had, what benefits the child could claim. Konrad’s baby could draw an SS pension as well as state child support; hell, if she claimed he’d been planning to marry her – and his family would likely back her up – she could claim his SS pension as well. But it was immaterial. She’d never let him take off her panties, let alone go inside her…

“I agree,” she said, torn between an insane urge to giggle and a growing urge to just turn and run. Talking to her mother about men had been quite bad enough. “Please will you let me know the moment you hear anything?”

“I’ll call your house directly,” Volker Schulze promised.

He escorted her to the door – there was no sign of his wife or daughter – and waved her through. Gudrun gave him an impulsive hug, then hurried down the steps and back onto the road that led home. She had several other people she wanted to talk to before night fell, before she was expected home to assist her mother with the cooking. And then…

His family doesn’t know, she thought, as she walked past a handful of soldiers making their way to the barracks on the outskirts of the city. She’d been sure of it, but it never hurt to make sure. They would have told me something if they’d heard anything.

She glanced at her watch, then turned the corner. A couple of boys she’d known from her first house lived there; she’d played with them as a little girl, before they’d gone to school and emerged too stuck-up to play with girls. They too had gone to the wars. No one would mind if she asked after them, surely? And one of them had been in the same unit as Hilde’s boyfriend. It would be interesting to hear what they had to say.

Horst Albrecht knew, without false modesty, that he was a very smart young man. Everyone had told him so, right from the day he’d entered upper schooling in Germanica and impressed his tutors with his intelligence. Indeed, his family had been so proud of him that they’d entered him into the SS Academy two years before the normal application date; the SS, somewhat to Horst’s surprise, had accepted him without question. It had taken him a while to see why his superiors might be interested in a spy who was barely old enough to shave. But, by the time he’d graduated from one of the covert programs, he’d come to see the value of an agent who was literally eighteen years old.

“The university is a breeding ground for ideas,” his trainers had told him, when he’d finally passed the course. Being a spy was far more than charging around like Otto Skorzeny, riding hot motorcycles and winning the hearts of beautiful women. “Some of those ideas will be very bad. Your task is to watch for those who spread bad ideas and report them.”

It hadn’t been hard, at first. Horst had entered the university with the 1984 class; he’d made friends, chatted happily to everyone and was generally well-liked by his peers. The students didn’t want to look beyond the surface, not when they were escaping a regimented existence for the first time in their lives. Horst had no trouble making friends and generally being popular; hell, he’d even had a couple of girlfriends.

He hadn’t expected Gudrun to be a troublemaker. Even now, hours after he’d made his slow way to the SS safehouse – it doubled as a boarding house for students from Germany East, supervised by a grim-faced matron who provided all the explanation other students needed for why they weren’t invited to the safehouse – he still couldn’t quite believe it. Gudrun was intelligent, true, and strikingly pretty; he might have dated her himself if she hadn’t been involved with an SS trooper. Her father was a policeman, her brother a soldier in the Berlin Guard… she hardly fitted the profile of a potential troublemaker. There were few petty little resentments in her life, save for being born female…

And she could overcome most of those problems by being a good student, Horst thought, as he opened the door into his apartment. A computer expert or rocket scientist would be worth her weight in gold, if she truly hated the thought of becoming a housewife.

And yet, she’d said, quite clearly, that her boyfriend had been quietly shipped home, his wounds covered up. Her concern – and her anger – was quite justified.

The apartment wasn’t big, although it was vastly superior to the military barracks or slave pens for the Untermenschen in Germanica. He dropped his bag on the bed, clicked the kettle on and prepared a mug of coffee. He’d long since grown used to the idea of never touching a drop of alcohol, even on Victory Day. Who knew what would come out of his mouth when he was drunk? Once his drink was ready, he placed it on the bedside table and lay down to have a bit of a think.

Technically, he should report Gudrun at once. She had doubts – and, instead of burying them, she was trying to do something, something that might easily turn out to be treacherous. Horst couldn’t imagine what she had in mind – eight students or eighty, armed rebellion was unlikely to succeed and she had to know it – but it was his duty to report her to his superiors and let them decide how to handle the matter. It might come to nothing, he knew, or it might become something truly serious. His superiors might decide to quietly vanish Gudrun and her fellows, shipping them off to Germany East or merely dumping them into a slave camp; the girls, at least, would make good breeding stock.

And yet, he too had his doubts.

He’d liked Konrad Schulze, the first time they’d met. It wasn’t something he could show, not when it would risk his cover, but he’d liked the older man. In some ways, Konrad had reminded Horst of his brother, who hadn’t actually vanished into America and never returned. He’d been blonde, blue-eyed and muscular, so muscular that Horst had wondered if he’d been used as the template for countless recruiting posters. Horst had even used his security codes to look up the young man’s file and discovered, to his amusement, that Konrad was on the short list for promotion. Someone thought very highly of him.

But they don’t now, Horst thought, savagely. They see him as an embarrassment.

It was a bitter thought. Konrad had been no covert agent, no undercover operative all too aware that even the merest hint of suspicion would mean instant death or permanent incarceration in a black prison. He’d certainly had no reason to believe he would simply be abandoned by his superiors, if he were caught by the enemy. No, he’d worn his black uniform proudly. Konrad should have been given full honours, if he’d been killed, or brought home on a pension if he’d been badly wounded. Instead…

He didn’t think Gudrun had lied, but it would be easy enough to check her story. The computers in the apartment – another reason not to let anyone who wasn’t an SS operative enter the building – were linked directly to the Berlin Network. He logged on, accessed the hospital records and searched for Konrad’s name. The computers were slow – they hadn’t had university students fiddling with the coding to make them a little more efficient – but it didn’t take him long to uncover records belonging to one Konrad Schulze. He’d been badly wounded – the file didn’t go into details, suggesting that no one had told the hospital administrators very much – and wasn’t expected to survive.

They should have triaged him, he thought, genuinely shocked. It was an accepted fact of military life that badly-wounded soldiers were often allowed to die so less-wounded soldiers could be saved, yet… it was clear, just from reading between the lines, that the medical staff had worked desperately to save him. And yet, the brain damage alone almost guaranteed that Konrad would never recover. The bastards could have given him a mercy killing and come up with a cover story: instead they seemed content to leave him on life support indefinitely. A hero… and they chose to leave him a vegetable!

Horst kept his feelings under tight control as he logged out of the hospital network, then checked the SS personnel database. Konrad’s file had been marked inactive – and it wasn’t the only one. Cross-referencing the database showed Horst several hundred other troopers who seemed to be permanently in bureaucratic limbo, marked as neither dead nor alive. And if that was true of the SS, it was very likely true of the army too.

She didn’t lie, he thought, numbly. And that means… what?

He turned the computer off, finished his coffee and lay back on his bed. He’d been raised to worship the SS, just like everyone else in Germany East. The SS was all that stood between the settlements and insurgents who would happily kill German men, rape German women and eat German children. He’d grown up reading horror stories, all of which had happy endings when the SS rescued the women or avenged their deaths. Joining the SS hadn’t been a hard decision at all. They’d been his heroes!

And now they were being betrayed, betrayed by their own leaders.

Gudrun would run into trouble, sooner or later. Horst had no doubt of it. She was intelligent, and she knew to guard her tongue around strangers, but she had no way of knowing how things worked in the world. Hell, she’d managed to invite an SS spy to her very first meeting! She couldn’t get very far without help…

…And Horst, who knew his duty called for him to report her, was seriously considering offering her that help.

It was a hard choice to make. If he were caught, his family would disown him – and it probably wouldn’t be enough to save their lives. It would be easy to alert the SS, to have Gudrun and the rest of the students put under surveillance, and put an end to the whole affair… but he didn’t want to put an end to the whole affair. He wanted her to do… what? What would she do if she proved her point?

Perhaps I’ll just wait and see if she has a plan, he told himself. And if she does, I can decide what to do about it.