Gudrun blinked. “So what?”
“So what?” Horst repeated. “You cannot change the past. There is no way you can go back in time and convince Adolf Hitler not to invade Russia, or force the Reich Council not to hand it over to the SS. You have to deal with the situation you have, not the situation you want. And, right now, what you have is an endless insurgency that demands the harshest possible measures to bring it to an end.”
“Which have now been exported westwards,” Gudrun said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she added. “Can you leave me alone for a while.”
Horst frowned. “You do have an appointment at the transit barracks…”
“Cancel it,” Gudrun snapped, sharply. She knew she was hurting him, but she found it hard to care. “Just leave me alone.”
She wondered, just for a long moment, what Horst would do. Shout back at her? Part of her would have welcomed a shouting match, even if they’d probably be overheard by everyone in the bunker. Or hit her? It wasn’t uncommon, but she would have hit him back… and who knew what would happen then? And yet, the pain would have dulled her fears…
“I’ll get some rest,” Horst said, rising. “And I would suggest you get some rest too.”
Gudrun snorted. It wasn’t easy to sleep alone, now. She’d grown far too used to having a warm body in her bed, even though her father would definitely notice something – if he hadn’t noticed already. There had been the odd tension between him and Horst, after all. She watched Horst leave, his back stiff and felt a flicker of a very different guilt. She’d practically chucked him out of the room they shared. But she needed to be alone for a while, alone with her guilt.
She looked at the final photograph – the remains of the church, surrounded by armed guards – and then picked up the list of known townsfolk. Records were a mess now, she knew; it was unlikely that everyone on the list was dead. It was quite possible that some of the smarter townsfolk had seen what was coming in their direction and driven westwards, trying to stay with relatives in Hamburg or Kiel. And yet, she knew that most of the people on the list were dead. Older civilians with nowhere to go, children too young to get married or join the military… and women, married to men who were currently serving in South Africa. It would be months, perhaps, or years before their husbands learned they’d been widowed.
Something has to be done, she thought, numbly. But what?
She sighed. Perhaps it was time to learn how to pray.
The unmarked aeroplane looked, to the civilian eye, to be identical to the other aircraft on the tarmac. It was large, easily forty metres from nose to tail; indeed, the only obvious difference was the complete lack of markings. And yet, to Andrew, it was easy to tell that the aircraft was American. There was a smoothness to the aircraft that was lacking in the Reich’s designs. It touched down neatly, the pair of escorting fighters flashing over the airfield and heading into the distance. Andrew couldn’t help hoping that they found a pair of prowling easterner aircraft on their way home. The bombing of Berlin was growing more intensive as the front lines moved closer.
“That’s the fifth shipment,” General William Knox said. “You think they’re not going to try and take them apart?”
Andrew shrugged as the aircraft came to a halt, the ground crew already running forward to open the hatches and start unloading before the airfield came under attack again. The Reich might consider the airfield to be a state secret – despite being close to Berlin, it wasn’t shown on any official map – but the SS knew about it. They’d even tried to bomb it twice before, although it had cost them a pair of long-range bombers. He’d seen the wreckage as they’d driven towards the airfield.
“I think they’ve already captured a few,” he said. It had been a concern – a very valid concern – back when the US had started shipping Stingers to South Africa. If the Germans captured a missile launcher, the doubters had said, they might be able to reverse-engineer the technology and start supplying it to their clients. “And in any case, the risk is acceptable.”
Knox smiled. “Is that your choice to make?”
Andrew grinned. “It was the President who made the final call,” he said. “If the provisional government wins the war, we find ourselves talking to a government that owes us a favour – and, just incidentally, might be better for Germany than their old government. But if the SS wins the war, we go straight back to the days when nuclear war seemed a very real possibility.”
“I am aware of the reasoning,” Knox said, a little tartly. “But the Reich’s long-term health isn’t our concern.”
“It is,” Andrew said. “If they get desperate, they might do something stupid in hopes of getting out of the trap.”
He shook his head, then watched as the first set of pallets were unloaded and transported towards the warehouse. The Stingers were designed to be idiot-proof, even though he knew that some idiots could be very clever indeed when it came to breaking things. If they could be used by illiterate tribesmen from somewhere with an unpronounceable name, they could be used by German soldiers who were both literate and aware of the importance of following instructions. The handful of printed instructions attached to each of the missiles – in German – would be more than enough for them.
And it might just convince most of the soldiers that the weapons were produced in the Reich, Andrew thought. The days when German weapons had dominated the world were long gone, but he had to admit that some of their designers were quite ingenious. Their general technological base had been falling behind America’s for quite some time, yet they sometimes came up with ideas the US had missed. Hopefully, that will make it harder for them to believe that the provisional government is talking to us.
“I’m due to go to the front tomorrow,” Knox added. “They were quite keen on warning me about the dangers.”
Andrew nodded. “You could be killed,” he pointed out. “Or captured.”
Knox made a rude gesture with his hand. “I didn’t join the marines to sniff flowers,” he said, sarcastically. “Or to count trees in Siberia.”
“If you get killed, there won’t be any official protests,” Andrew reminded him. “And if you get captured…”
He scowled, allowing his words to trail away. A handful of covert intelligence operatives – and observers – had been captured by the Reich, only to vanish without trace. God knew the United States had done the same, with German agents captured in Latin America, but it still pained him. The US promised its defenders that none of them would be left behind, even to the point of threatening a major conflict with Mexico, yet pushing the Reich around was far more risky. If Knox were captured, there would be no demands for his return. His widow would be given a sealed coffin and told her husband had died in the line of duty.
This is a shitty world, he thought, grimly. Poor Marian doesn’t deserve to lose her husband like that.
“I know the risks,” Knox said. “But when are we ever going to get a better chance to see our foes in action?”
Andrew nodded, curtly. Orbital and high-altitude reconnaissance had told the United States a great deal about the Reich, ranging from flaws in the latest panzers to the limitations of German antiaircraft weapons, but they needed more. Knox was right. A US observer, embedded with the provisional government’s defenders, would be able to learn a great deal about how the Reich actually worked. And such data would come in handy, Andrew knew, if the US ever had to go to war. Just knowing that the armour on the panzers was weaker than they’d supposed was a titbit of information that was worth its weight in gold.