Behind him, a door opened.
“Your aide told me I’d find you up here,” Voss’s voice said.
Volker didn’t turn. “I like looking at the city,” he said. “It reminds me of what we’re fighting for.”
Voss stepped up beside him. “I never liked Berlin,” he said. “There were too many people here.”
“Perhaps,” Volker said. It was true, he supposed. Anyone who wanted to make a name for himself would come to Berlin, given time. There had been no shortage of talk over the last two decades about restricting the growth of the city’s population. “But it’s also the capital of the Reich.”
He sighed as he peered towards a particularly dark section of the city. The power distribution network had failed there, after an SS suicide squad had attacked the transformers and destroyed them. Normally, it would have been a simple repair, but there was nothing normal about a city under siege. The engineers swore blind they were working on the problem, yet there was a lack of spare parts. And there were several other parts of the city where the electrical supply was hanging by a thread…
And if we can’t keep Berlin lit, he thought grimly, what good are we?
The thought sent a cold shiver running down his spine. There was no way to avoid the simple fact that the Reich Council — in its various incarnations — had ruled the Reich for over thirty-five years, ever since Adolf Hitler had died. It had enjoyed a certain legitimacy through sheer longevity. But his government had barely been in existence for a couple of months. It certainly didn’t control the state as completely as the Reich Council had done.
And, in overthrowing the Reich Council, he reminded himself, we proved that a government could be overthrown.
He shook his head, bitterly. He’d looked into the hidden history of protest movements within the Reich — communists, democrats, feminists — and they’d all ended badly, so badly they’d been scrubbed from history and almost forgotten. Indeed, he’d never heard of women demanding rights after the war. The SS had crushed the movement — the women themselves had been dispatched to Germany East — and everyone had pretended that it had never happened. But the women had been lucky, compared to the communists. They’d wound up hanging from meathooks in cellars below Berlin.
Voss cleared his throat. “Herr Chancellor?”
Volker cursed under his breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. Confessing weakness had always bothered him, but he trusted Voss. The Field Marshal had had ample opportunity to take power for himself after the Reich Council had fallen. “I was woolgathering.”
“The lead units are in position,” Voss told him. “We can launch the offensive at daybreak.”
Volker glanced at him. “I would have thought that was a little predictable.”
“We don’t have the finely-tuned army we’d need to launch a night-time offensive,” Voss reminded him. “If we had more time…”
“We don’t,” Volker said, sharply.
He turned to look at the other man. Voss knew — he was one of the few who did — just how little time the Reich actually had. They needed to win — quickly — or they would lose, no matter who came out ahead. Holliston would inherit a broken country if he ever retook Berlin. And yet, Volker didn’t dare risk so many men without some guarantee of victory…
Don’t be stupid, he told himself, sharply. There is never any guarantee of victory.
It was tempting, chillingly tempting, to call off the offensive. He could do it, too. But there would be someone who wouldn’t get the message, who would launch an attack without support and get slaughtered for it. And that too would be bad.
“Launch the offensive as planned,” he ordered. “Pocket and destroy the bastards.”
“Jawohl, Herr Chancellor,” Voss said.
Volker nodded as he led the way towards the door. He would have liked to convince the stormtroopers to surrender, but he knew that was unlikely. Even without the atrocities to fuel anger — he’d been quietly warned that his soldiers could not be expected to take prisoners — the stormtroopers would be unlikely to surrender without being hammered into the ground first. They were tough.
And they will die to defend a man who fled Berlin rather than fight, Volker told himself, bitterly. He’d been a stormtrooper. If things had been different, he might have been one of the black-clad men on the other side of the front lines. And their deaths will be for nothing.
Herman couldn’t sleep.
The makeshift accommodation was staggeringly uncomfortable, leaving him with aches and pains even as he tried to catch a few hours of sleep. He couldn’t remember having any troubles sleeping on the hard ground — or a handful of blankets — when he’d been a paratrooper, but he’d been nearly thirty years younger at the time. Now… he felt old and frail, even as he tried to sleep. Part of him honestly worried that he wouldn’t be able to get up and walk in the morning.
He glanced at his watch, then at his comrades. They seemed to have managed to fall asleep, although some of them might be lingering on the very edge of awareness. He still recalled days from his youth when his comrades had sworn blind he’d been asleep, although he’d been awake and aware — or thought he’d been awake and aware — the whole time. Back then, he’d thought nothing of a forty mile forced march through the mud. Now…
I’m too old for this shit, Herman thought. It was 0530, according to his watch; the offensive was scheduled for dawn, still two hours away. I could be back home and in bed…
He scowled as he forced himself to stand up, despite his aching body. There was no point in trying to sleep, not now. He wasn’t a young man any longer, able to survive on a few hours of sleep. Carefully, he picked his way to the door and peered outside. The guard was sitting on the ground, snoring quietly. Herman felt a hot flash of anger as he stared down at him, knowing it was sheer luck that an inspector hadn’t passed. The entire unit would be in deep shit if their guard had been caught sleeping.
And if we’d been caught by the enemy, he thought, we’d all be dead.
He removed the guard’s weapon, then hissed at him to wake up. The guard jumped, one hand reaching for the rifle that was no longer there; Herman held it up, fighting down the urge to slam the butt into the guard’s face. He was no longer in the police force.
“You fell asleep,” he growled. The guard looked younger than him, although not young enough to pass for a fresh-faced young man right out of the training centre. “You could have gotten us all killed.”
He scowled as the guard began to splutter excuses. Yes, they were in the middle of an armed camp; no, that didn’t excuse the guard falling asleep. Herman’s old instructors would not have hesitated to hand out harsh punishment to the entire unit, even during training; now, in the middle of a war, a soldier could be shot for falling asleep on guard. There was no excuse for doing something so stupid that an enemy could simply walk up to the makeshift barracks and lob a couple of grenades inside.
“Idiot,” he said, finally. “Give me a cigarette and it won’t go any further.”