And maybe I can work on Katherine too, she thought, as she made her way out of the door and back down the corridor. She might have ideas of her own now.
It wasn’t much, she acknowledged. But it was all she had.
Chapter Five
Berlin, Germany Prime
29 October 1985
“Are you sure this is going to work?”
Horst Albrecht shook his head, crossly. Kurt Wieland seemed to veer constantly between a determination to leave as quickly as possible and an understandable fear that they wouldn’t be able to get past the first set of checkpoints. Horst didn’t really blame him for being conflicted — he was an officer in the Heer, not someone who should be assigned to a stealth mission — but it was annoying. It was quite hard to see how Gudrun and Kurt were actually related.
“There is no way to guarantee this will work,” Horst said. He glanced down at the forged papers, checking them again and again for any mistakes. It wasn’t the first time he’d been an infiltrator, but the consequences for getting caught this time would be far worse. “If you want to go back to the infantry, go now.”
He ignored Kurt’s flash of anger as he checked the final pair of ID cards. They weren’t precisely forgeries — they’d been produced at the SS office in Berlin — but they wouldn’t match the records in Germanica. The SS had a mania for good records keeping — just about every German had a file, buried somewhere in the government bureaucracy — and a particularly alert officer might wonder why there wasn’t a copy within reach. Horst would have been surprised if the SS-run government hadn’t started changing everything it could, just to prevent the provisional government from sending spies and commandos into its territory.
But changing all of the ID cards in Germany East would be a long and time-consuming process, he told himself. The ID cards had been changed once, years ago; it had taken months before every last set of old papers had been collected and replacements issued by the bureaucracy. And that had been in peacetime. There will be so much disruption in Germany East that changing the ID cards will be the least of their problems.
“They should suffice,” he said, finally. “Are you coming?”
“Of course,” Kurt snapped.
Horst sighed, inwardly. Kurt had admitted, reluctantly, that he blamed himself for the whole mess. If he hadn’t helped Gudrun break into the hospital, Gudrun would never have kick-started the whole chain of events that had led down to civil war. But Horst suspected Kurt was wrong. Gudrun, his wife and lover, was simply too determined to be deterred for long, even by her family’s disapproval. She would have found another way into the hospital.
“Very good,” Horst said. He would have preferred to go alone, even though he knew that having a second pair of hands along might be helpful. He’d been steeped in SS culture and tradition almost as soon as he could walk; Kurt, for all of his undoubted bravery, lacked the background he needed to pass unremarked. “Read the papers and memorise them.”
Kurt gave him a sharp look as he picked up the first folder. “Do you expect this to be necessary?”
“It depends,” Horst said. He smirked, suddenly. “Are you circumcised?”
Kurt glared. “No!”
“Good,” Horst said. “It’s very rare for anyone to be circumcised in Germany East. If you had been, we would have had to alter the file to reflect that.”
He picked up his own folder and read it through again, reminding himself of the details. It was a careful balance between truth and lies, classing him as a resident of Germany East on one hand and an SS Hauptsturmführer with special orders to report to Germanica on the other. He knew enough about the various special operations divisions to pass for a commando, as long as he didn’t run into an actual commando. It was all too possible that the person they encountered would know everyone in his unit by name or reputation.
And I won’t know all the private jokes and traditions, he thought. I could be tripped up quite easily.
“There’s a surprising amount of truth here,” Kurt said, finally. “Is it wise for me to be a native of Berlin?”
“Your accent marks you out as a Berliner,” Horst said. Kurt would have lost the accent, if he’d been trained in Germany East. “There’s no point in trying to pass you off as an Easterner.”
He scowled. Kurt’s accent was a problem, even though they’d done their best to compensate for it. There were plenty of SS officers who had been born and trained in Germany Prime, but in these days… they’d just have to hope they didn’t run into someone who would be automatically suspicious of a Westerner. It shouldn’t be that much of a danger. Karl Holliston had been born in Berlin, after all.
“Never mind that,” he added. “Do you know the songs?”
“Most of them,” Kurt said. He didn’t sound pleased. “We learned them in the Hitler Youth.”
“There’ll be some verses you weren’t taught,” Horst said. He couldn’t imagine parents being very pleased if their children had been taught the more bloodcurdling verses. “We’ll go over that later, just in case we are invited to sing with the men.”
Kurt gave him a sidelong look. “Is that likely?”
“The SS prides itself on being one big happy family,” Horst said. “There’s a great deal of rivalry, of course, but it’s never brutal.”
“Really,” Kurt said, sarcastically.
Horst nodded. It was rare — almost unknown — for officers in the Heer to socialise with their men, but SS officers were expected to spend a great deal of time with their men. And local units would often fraternise with other units. It was supposed to help, when the units were mashed together into improvised battlegroups. The men already knew and respected their new comrades.
“The SS is not the Heer,” he said, finally. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming they’re the same, just because they use the same weapons. There’s a lot of little differences between them.”
“And I might slip up because of them,” Kurt said. “Perhaps I’ll just let you do the talking.”
“That would be a good idea,” Horst said, dryly.
He put the folder down and opened up the latest set of reports from the front. The SS lines were firming up, unsurprisingly. Horst knew the Waffen-SS. They would have taken a beating, the defeat would have given them a terrible shock, but they were trained to recover from anything. He could imagine the officers moving from unit to unit, collecting stragglers and slotting them into the front lines; filling holes in some units, disbanding others until after the war. And probably doing whatever they could to slow down the advancing panzers as much as possible.
They’ll need time to boost morale, Horst told himself. Stopping a panzer or two won’t be enough.
Kurt looked up. “Do you have a plan?”
“Slip through the lines,” Horst said. He tapped the papers. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting our hands on a jeep, once we show them our ID. And then we just head east to Germanica.”