Which will weaken us if they decide to take matters into their own hands, he thought. The French had a long way to go before they could stand up to the Reich, let alone match it, but what would happen if the German population was thoroughly sick of war? And they will know it.
He sighed as Voss saluted and left the room. If he’d known what Gudrun would unleash, when she’d started asking pointed questions, he would have gone to her father and… and done what? Konrad would still have been left in the hospital, trapped between life and death; his parents, his sister, his girlfriend utterly unaware of his condition. It wasn’t fair to blame Gudrun, he told himself sharply, for everything that had happened. The underlying weakness of the Reich, the steady collapse of the entire structure, had been underway long before she’d been born, let alone reached adulthood.
Her father might have told her not to meddle in politics, he thought. She might have been pulled out of the university and married to someone he chose, but would it have made a difference? Or would we have fallen harder because no one was prepared to stand up and point out that the Kaiser had no clothes?
He looked down at the map for a long moment. He’d approved of Gudrun as a possible wife for his son, back when the world had made sense. And then his feelings had grown mixed when she’d made it impossible for him to hide from the truth any longer. Part of him had been angry at her, even though he’d known it wasn’t her fault. And now she was a prisoner, taken by the SS. Volker knew, all too well, just what the SS would do with her, after everything she’d done to them. He’d hoped Gudrun — or her body — would turn up somewhere in Berlin, but there had been no sign of her.
She’s been taken to Germanica, he thought. And all we can do is hope they give her a quick death.
There was a tap on his door. He looked up to see his aide, looking grim.
“Herr Chancellor,” he said. “Minister Krueger is here to see you.”
“Show him in,” Volker ordered. “And then bring us both coffee.”
He schooled his face into impassivity as Hans Krueger was shown into his office. Krueger was a smart man, but he wasn’t a likeable man. He’d been on the former Reich Council and had switched sides, a little too quickly, after the uprising. Volker had no reason to distrust him — Holliston wouldn’t give Krueger a quick death if Krueger were captured — but there was something about Krueger that annoyed him. The man was more concerned with his figures than the real world.
And those figures can change the real world, Volker thought. There had been something oddly effeminate about the accountants in the factory, the men who could decide — seemingly on a whim — who was worth keeping and who could be fired. And Krueger had something of the same air about him. He was not a manly man. He cannot be trusted completely.
“Herr Chancellor,” Krueger said. He was carrying a leather folder under one arm. “Do you have a moment?”
“Too many of them,” Volker admitted. He wanted to be out there, doing something. “Is this important?”
“I’ve been running the latest set of figures,” Krueger said, quietly. He took a seat and opened the folder. “We’re looking at a total economic crash within three months.”
Volker sucked in his breath. “Are you sure?”
“That’s the best-case,” Krueger said. “Frankly, we’ve been pushing everything too hard over the last decade. We simply didn’t give our industrial base any chance to breathe.”
“I didn’t make those decisions,” Volker snarled.
“I know,” Krueger said. “But we still have to deal with the consequences.”
He looked grim. “It gets worse,” he added. “Food supplies are starting to run out.”
“Then grow more,” Volker said.
“We can’t, not immediately,” Krueger said. “Quite a few farmers were drafted into the army, Herr Chancellor. That had an impact on productivity. But we also drew most of our food from Germany East. Germany Prime — alone — cannot feed itself forever. We have already started expanding our farming capabilities, but it will be several years before they make an impact.”
He sighed. “And if we have an industrial collapse at the same time,” he added, “we will be staring at outright chaos.”
“Take food from the French,” Volker said, after a moment. “Or buy it from the Americans.”
“The French don’t produce enough food to meet our demands — even if they were willing to meet our demands,” Krueger warned. “They never pushed production — they knew we’d steal it. And the Americans will expect us to pay.”
“And we don’t have any cash,” Volker said. The Reich’s stockpiles of foreign cash had always been very limited. “There’s nothing we can use to pay the Americans.”
“If indeed they have the food on hand,” Krueger added. “They might not be able to meet our demands either.”
Volker cursed under his breath. The Americans had been helpful, but he couldn’t help thinking that the United States would welcome a German collapse. Whoever won the war would need to spend years rebuilding, years the Americans could use to make themselves invincible, utterly untouchable. They were already too far ahead of the Reich…
…And they weren’t even his real problem.
He gritted his teeth. “And if the entire population starts to starve…”
“We lose,” Krueger said, bluntly. “We need to take action, quickly.”
“And that means we need this war to end, quickly,” Volker agreed. “And if we don’t win soon, we’ll lose.”
Chapter Four
Germanica (Moscow), Germany East
29 October 1985
They were scared of her.
Gudrun clung to the thought, even though she felt utterly naked and utterly helpless. The SS was scared of her. They had stripped her down to her underwear, searched her so thoroughly that she doubted there was even a millimetre of her body that hadn’t been inspected, then chained her up so carefully that she could barely move. And if that hadn’t been enough, they’d repeated the search at regular intervals. Did they think she’d somehow managed to conceal a weapon even as they carried her into the very heart of their territory?
She knew it was insane — she knew they weren’t scared of her — but it was all that gave her hope. They’d driven her east, then transferred her to a plane. She wouldn’t even have known they were flying her to Germanica if one of her guards hadn’t said it out loud, clearly unaware she was listening. Or perhaps it had been deliberate. They’d wanted her to fear…
“They will try to break down your resistance,” Horst had told her. It felt like years since they’d been students together, plotting how best to bring down the Reich. “They will want to make you feel helpless, as if you have lost all control over yourself. And if you let them convince you that you are hopeless, you’re doomed.”
But it was hard, so hard, to keep from feeling helpless. Gudrun had been arrested before, but the SS hadn’t known who or what she was. They’d seen her as just another troublemaker, a student in the wrong place at the wrong time… and the experience had nearly proved too much for her. Now… they knew who she was; they knew what she’d done. She had no reason to expert mercy.