Karl nodded. They’d slipped one assault team to Berlin via helicopter, but that trick wouldn’t work twice. He’d be astonished if they even managed to get a helicopter over the front lines without it being intercepted and shot down. Any assault teams would have to make their way over the border on foot, just to make sure they avoided detection. Katharine would have to do the same herself.
“Very good,” he said. “Once you’re in Berlin, you are to make contact with underground elements that have remained in place and plan the capture or assassination of the so-called provisional government. This is to be done when they are coping with our offensive, so they have no time to put replacements forward to take command. Ideally, I want them held in place until they can be forced to issue an order to surrender; if necessary, you are to kill them and smuggle their heads out as proof.”
“They would be fools,” Katharine observed tonelessly, “if they all stayed in one place.”
“Capture or take out as many as you can,” Karl said. He shrugged. “Taking them alive would be nice, but killing them is acceptable.”
He reached into his desk drawer and produced a file. “Except for this one,” he said, holding the file out to Katharine. “I want her alive.”
“Gudrun Wieland,” Katharine read. She skimmed through the file with ease, her brow furrowing slightly. “The one who started all this.”
“So they say,” Karl said. He wasn’t sure it was true. Katharine might be a professional killer, but very few women could match her. Gudrun Wieland’s file made it clear she was nothing more than a university student. Maybe they claimed she’d started the chain of events that led to the uprising, but Karl rather doubted it. There was a man hiding behind her, he was sure, someone who remained unidentified. “I want her alive.”
Katharine quirked her eyebrows. “May I ask why?”
“They have turned her into a symbol of their cause,” Karl said, bluntly. “A true flower of German womanhood, the lover of a wounded boy, the heroine who avenged him… such a symbol cannot be merely killed. She must be forced to recant before she is patted on the backside and told to go back to the kitchen.”
He felt a sudden hot flash of anger that disturbed him. It was impossible to believe that Gudrun was the true leader of the uprising, the person who’d started the first pebble rolling down the hillside. Her background – father a policeman, brother a soldier, boyfriend an SS stormtrooper before he was badly wounded – told against it. And yet… if she was guilty, Gudrun had fooled a great many people. She’d even been arrested, only to be released for lack of evidence. It was far more likely that someone had talked her into posing as the founder, after she’d been arrested.
And if she is guilty, he thought, she will pay for it.
There were… techniques… used for breaking women, women and their male relatives. He wouldn’t hesitate to order them used, just to make it absolutely clear that Gudrun Wieland would not be able to hide behind her sex. If she was guilty, she’d be tortured to death… it went against the grain to inflict such horrendous punishment on a German girl, but it had to be done. And then her entire family would be killed too…
Serves them right for letting her get out of hand, he thought, nastily. Her father should have beaten any trace of rebelliousness out of her before she grew into a young woman.
“I will certainly do my upmost to ensure she is brought here,” Katharine said coolly, breaking into his thoughts. “But you do realise that smuggling one prisoner, let alone a dozen, out of Berlin will not be easy?”
“You may have to keep them under wraps in the city until it falls,” Karl said. Berlin was vast, easily large enough for an experienced team to hide for weeks if necessary. The normal surveillance systems were completely offline. “I know it won’t be easy, but it has to be done.”
“I understand, Mein Führer,” Katharine said. She rose, a movement that drew his attention to her chest. “And we will do our very best to deliver the traitors to you in chains.”
Chapter Five
Near Vichy, France
2 September 1985
“Wake up,” Horst said, poking her shoulder lightly. “We’re almost there.”
Gudrun opened her eyes, then stretched. Sunlight was pouring in through the windows, revealing that they were driving up a mountainside road towards a large French building half-hidden in the foliage. Guards could be seen everywhere, manning the gates and patrolling the grounds, wearing desert tan uniforms and flat caps that reminded her of something she’d seen back in school. The Foreign Legion, she recalled, as the driver took them through the gates and parked outside the chateau. Foreigners who’d travelled to France to fight for her – and leave their pasts behind.
Horst scowled. “They’re not supposed to be here,” he said, grimly. “By treaty, the Foreign Legion isn’t meant to return to Mainland France.”
“They’re probably making a statement,” Gudrun said. “Trying to tell us they won’t be pushed around any longer.”
She rolled her eyes in irritation. Being a councillor – even one without portfolio – had been an education in more ways than one. She’d known there was something deeply wrong about the Reich ever since she’d discovered just what had happened to her former boyfriend, but she’d never truly grasped the full extent of its evil. The Vichy French had been Germany’s unwilling allies since 1940, trapped within the Reich’s network of satellite states, unable to move to partnership or escape Germany’s grasp. The slightest hint of nationalist sentiment would have been enough to get the panzers moving, back before the coup.
And the French were lucky, compared to some of the others, she thought, numbly. At least there’s still a nation that calls itself France.
“Here we are,” Horst said, as a man in a light brown suit opened the car door. “Just remember not to give away more than we have to give away.”
Gudrun shot him a dark look as she stepped out into the warm air. France was warmer than Germany, she’d been told, particularly as the world inched remorselessly towards winter. A number of her teachers had even made fun of the French, insisting that they were weak because they’d grown up in such a pleasant climate. Gudrun wasn’t sure if that was true – she’d been told thousands of lies at school – but she put the thought firmly out of her mind anyway. This was a bad time for a three-sided war.
“We cannot afford major trouble on our western borders,” Volker Schulze had said, before she’d departed Berlin. “If we have to make concessions to keep the French quiet, we will make concessions.”
Horst stayed behind her as she was escorted through a pair of doors and into a sitting room that was, quite evidently, a place for holding clandestine discussions. She’d half-expected to travel to Compiègne Forest, where Hitler had laid down the terms for France’s surrender and submission to the Reich, but the French had offered the Chateau Picard instead. In some ways, it was a relief. Her predecessors might have enjoyed rubbing France’s collective nose in just how helpless it was before Germany, but she had to admit it would make it harder to hold talks now. They needed the French in a reasonably cooperative mood.
“Fraulein Wieland,” the French Premier said, in excellent German. “Welcome to Chateau Picard.”