The apartment wasn’t big, although it was vastly superior to the military barracks or slave pens for the Untermenschen in Germanica. He dropped his bag on the bed, clicked the kettle on and prepared a mug of coffee. He’d long since grown used to the idea of never touching a drop of alcohol, even on Victory Day. Who knew what would come out of his mouth when he was drunk? Once his drink was ready, he placed it on the bedside table and lay down to have a bit of a think.
Technically, he should report Gudrun at once. She had doubts – and, instead of burying them, she was trying to do something, something that might easily turn out to be treacherous. Horst couldn’t imagine what she had in mind – eight students or eighty, armed rebellion was unlikely to succeed and she had to know it – but it was his duty to report her to his superiors and let them decide how to handle the matter. It might come to nothing, he knew, or it might become something truly serious. His superiors might decide to quietly vanish Gudrun and her fellows, shipping them off to Germany East or merely dumping them into a slave camp; the girls, at least, would make good breeding stock.
And yet, he too had his doubts.
He’d liked Konrad Schulze, the first time they’d met. It wasn’t something he could show, not when it would risk his cover, but he’d liked the older man. In some ways, Konrad had reminded Horst of his brother, who hadn’t actually vanished into America and never returned. He’d been blonde, blue-eyed and muscular, so muscular that Horst had wondered if he’d been used as the template for countless recruiting posters. Horst had even used his security codes to look up the young man’s file and discovered, to his amusement, that Konrad was on the short list for promotion. Someone thought very highly of him.
But they don’t now, Horst thought, savagely. They see him as an embarrassment.
It was a bitter thought. Konrad had been no covert agent, no undercover operative all too aware that even the merest hint of suspicion would mean instant death or permanent incarceration in a black prison. He’d certainly had no reason to believe he would simply be abandoned by his superiors, if he were caught by the enemy. No, he’d worn his black uniform proudly. Konrad should have been given full honours, if he’d been killed, or brought home on a pension if he’d been badly wounded. Instead…
He didn’t think Gudrun had lied, but it would be easy enough to check her story. The computers in the apartment – another reason not to let anyone who wasn’t an SS operative enter the building – were linked directly to the Berlin Network. He logged on, accessed the hospital records and searched for Konrad’s name. The computers were slow – they hadn’t had university students fiddling with the coding to make them a little more efficient – but it didn’t take him long to uncover records belonging to one Konrad Schulze. He’d been badly wounded – the file didn’t go into details, suggesting that no one had told the hospital administrators very much – and wasn’t expected to survive.
They should have triaged him, he thought, genuinely shocked. It was an accepted fact of military life that badly-wounded soldiers were often allowed to die so less-wounded soldiers could be saved, yet… it was clear, just from reading between the lines, that the medical staff had worked desperately to save him. And yet, the brain damage alone almost guaranteed that Konrad would never recover. The bastards could have given him a mercy killing and come up with a cover story: instead they seemed content to leave him on life support indefinitely. A hero… and they chose to leave him a vegetable!
Horst kept his feelings under tight control as he logged out of the hospital network, then checked the SS personnel database. Konrad’s file had been marked inactive – and it wasn’t the only one. Cross-referencing the database showed Horst several hundred other troopers who seemed to be permanently in bureaucratic limbo, marked as neither dead nor alive. And if that was true of the SS, it was very likely true of the army too.
She didn’t lie, he thought, numbly. And that means… what?
He turned the computer off, finished his coffee and lay back on his bed. He’d been raised to worship the SS, just like everyone else in Germany East. The SS was all that stood between the settlements and insurgents who would happily kill German men, rape German women and eat German children. He’d grown up reading horror stories, all of which had happy endings when the SS rescued the women or avenged their deaths. Joining the SS hadn’t been a hard decision at all. They’d been his heroes!
And now they were being betrayed, betrayed by their own leaders.
Gudrun would run into trouble, sooner or later. Horst had no doubt of it. She was intelligent, and she knew to guard her tongue around strangers, but she had no way of knowing how things worked in the world. Hell, she’d managed to invite an SS spy to her very first meeting! She couldn’t get very far without help…
…And Horst, who knew his duty called for him to report her, was seriously considering offering her that help.
It was a hard choice to make. If he were caught, his family would disown him – and it probably wouldn’t be enough to save their lives. It would be easy to alert the SS, to have Gudrun and the rest of the students put under surveillance, and put an end to the whole affair… but he didn’t want to put an end to the whole affair. He wanted her to do… what? What would she do if she proved her point?
Perhaps I’ll just wait and see if she has a plan, he told himself. And if she does, I can decide what to do about it.
Chapter Eight
Wewelsburg Castle, Germany
20 July 1985
It was blasphemy to even consider it, but there were times when Reichsführer-SS Karl Holliston thought that Heinrich Himmler had been a very strange man. Karl understood the value of strength – and the will to use it – as much as any other SS officer, yet Himmler’s obsession with the occult had undermined the last five years of his career, allowing him to be gently nudged aside by his former subordinates. Wewelsburg Castle itself was a grand monument to that obsession; parts of the castle had been redesigned to look like something from the Grand Order of Teutonic Knights, while other parts were designed to serve as the SS’s western centre of operations. There was even a monument to the Holy Grail in the lower levels, perched in the centre of a round table.
And some of Himmler’s other ideas might have caught on, if he’d had longer, Karl thought. Shrines to the old gods, grand ceremonies of might and magic…
He shook his head in rueful amusement. Rumours of virgin sacrifices and blood oaths had hovered around the castle for as long as the SS had occupied it – and, indeed, there were some very strange cults and secret societies rumoured to exist within the SS itself. Karl had never seen anything to indicate that they even existed, but that proved nothing. The SS was a multitude of competing factions and some of them were very secretive indeed. And yet, what need did they have of the old gods? All that was needed was the will to power.
A strong will can overcome anything, Karl thought, remembering his training as a young officer. They’d been pushed to the limit, the weak falling by the wayside or dying in training; the survivors strong enough to keep going, whatever the world threw at them. It had been twenty years since Karl had seen active service, since he’d been promoted into a desk job, but he’d done his best to stay in shape. And the will to power is everything.