Karl considered it for a moment, then dismissed the thought. It wasn’t as if he would have treated her any differently. Pregnant or not, Gudrun was too dangerous to be allowed to live unmolested. Normally, the female relatives of traitors would be shipped east and married off to men struggling to tame the frontier, but Gudrun was a traitor herself. Her mere existence was an offense against the natural order.
“Never mind,” he said. “How about her health?”
“Generally speaking, Mein Führer, she’s in rude health,” the doctor said. “If there was any starvation in Berlin, she wasn’t starving. The last few days, of course, won’t have been easy for her, but she’s not suffered any permanent damage.”
“Very good,” Karl said. Perhaps the titbit about Gudrun not starving — when the reports indicated that Berlin had been on the brink of starvation — could be used against her. “Can you break her?”
The doctor frowned. “It would depend on just what you wanted, Mein Führer,” he said, carefully. “Anyone can be broken, but…”
“I want her alive, able to answer questions, and ready to condemn her former allies,” Karl said, shortly. “She is not to be a quivering mass of jelly when we put her in front of the cameras.”
“Yes, Mein Führer,” the doctor said.
Karl fixed him with an icy look. The doctor had a proven track record for breaking his subjects, but not all of them had been useful afterwards. And Karl needed Gudrun to be useful.
“If she is useless to me afterwards,” he warned, “you too will be useless to me.”
The doctor swallowed. “Yes, Mein Führer,” he said. He’d only survived so long, even in the SS, because of Karl’s patronage. If Karl dumped him, for whatever reason, he’d be lucky to live long enough to flee the city. “But breaking her so completely will take time.”
“We have time,” Karl assured him. “But I want her ready as soon as possible.”
Chapter Eight
Berlin, Germany Prime
29/30 October 1985
The night was bitterly cold.
Horst kept quiet, very quiet, as he led the way eastwards. They’d been shown through the lines surrounding Berlin an hour ago, then warned to keep their heads down as they walked towards the enemy lines. The possibilities of being shot by a roving patrol were higher than Horst cared to admit, particularly if the patrol captured them first. After the first atrocity reports, the defenders had lost all interest in taking prisoners.
Fools, he thought, grimly. The war will take longer if the enemy soldiers think they can’t surrender.
Kurt was doing better than he’d expected, he had to admit, although that could be just his prejudice talking. Gudrun’s brother had been an infantryman, after all. He would have been trained to move silently from place to place. His actual experience was somewhat lacking, Horst knew, but there was no way to change that in a hurry. All they could do was keep moving and hope they didn’t run into trouble until they crossed the lines.
The darkness seemed to press in around them like a living thing as they followed the road eastwards, keeping a wary eye out for vehicles or aircraft. A handful of shapes loomed up in the distance, slowly revealing themselves to be burned-out panzers or trucks; a number of buildings, destroyed in the fighting, bore mute testament to the savagery the SS had unleashed on Germany Prime. Horst knew — at a very primal level — just how ruthless the SS could be, but this was madness. He liked to think he would have switched sides, even without Gudrun, if he’d been forced to witness such a nightmare. But he knew it wouldn’t have been easy.
He frowned as he saw a pair of bodies lying on the ground, stripped naked. They were both male, he noted; their SS tattoos clearly visible on their arms. In the darkness, it was hard to tell what had actually killed them — he certainly didn’t want to touch the corpses — but the provisional government had been getting reports of other enemy bodies being stripped as the SS retreated. Their comrades would have a better chance at survival if they took everything they could from the honoured dead.
And they wouldn’t turn on their own, he thought.
He brooded as they headed onwards, leaving the bodies behind. The SS stormtroopers were taught to be loyal to their units, first and foremost. It was unlikely that any of them would switch sides, unless they did it in a body. They’d be abandoning men who depended on them. Horst knew he wouldn’t be comfortable just walking away, if he’d been assigned to the Waffen-SS. It was lucky — for Gudrun, for Germany, for everyone — that he’d largely been on his own in the university. Even his fellow infiltrators hadn’t been his true comrades.
The bridges were in ruins, they discovered, as they approached a river. Horst had half-expected to have to swim — which would have delayed them badly — but thankfully there were enough chunks of debris sticking out of the water to allow them to scramble across. He couldn’t help thinking that the bridge would need several months of repair work — it would be quicker, perhaps, to start putting pontoon bridges together to rush the panzers eastwards. He tensed as they reached the far side, expecting to run into an enemy patrol, but there was nothing. The entire bridge had simply been abandoned.
They must be concentrating on setting up lines further to the east, Horst thought. And they may have lost more trained manpower than we thought.
He scowled at the thought. It had been a long time since the Waffen-SS had fought a conventional war, but they must have learned something from their advance to the west. The bridge would make an ideal place to give the advancing panzers a bloody nose. He’d certainly seen the tactic practiced often enough during basic training. But instead… they’d just fallen back, abandoning the bridge. It suggested that morale was very low.
“We keep moving,” he hissed to Kurt. “We need to make contact with their lines before the sun rises.”
The night seemed to grow louder as they kept walking, engine noises and the occasional gunshot echoing out in the distance. Horst cursed under his breath — of course the stormtroopers would be jumpy — but kept walking anyway. The provisional government had command of the air. Logically, moving panzers and other armoured vehicles around would be done at night. Or so he told himself.
He looked up at the stars, silently checking their position. They were still moving east, if he was correct. It wouldn’t be long, surely, before they walked into an enemy position. They had to have patrols covering the road. There was no way they would just allow the panzers to charge up towards Warsaw, not when they needed to buy time to rebuild their armoured formations. The SS was good at regenerating its units, but even with the best will in the world it would take longer than they had to rebuild…
“Halt,” a voice barked. “Hands in the air!”
“Do as they say,” Horst muttered, raising his hands. He scanned the terrain ahead of them, but there was nothing to see in the darkness. The enemy had to have dug into the side of the road. He raised his voice a moment later. “Don’t shoot! We’re friendly!”
A pair of black-clad stormtroopers materialised out of nowhere, one wearing a heavy pair of night-vision goggles on his forehead. Horst felt a flicker of sympathy — the bugs had never been worked out of the system — and then tensed as the stormtroopers glared at them. There was a very real possibility of being taken for deserters — or even men who had lost contact with their units in the chaos — despite the papers they carried. And if they were taken for deserters, they might be shot out of hand.