He frowned at the thought. Might the navy actually do something useful and ship troops south? The rebels couldn’t harm the fleet and the Americans were unlikely to start a war by attacking German ships… unless they thought they could win. Karl knew he would have started the war in an instant if he thought he could win outright and he assumed the Americans had the same attitude. What else could explain the steady pressure they kept on the Reich?
“That’s a very tempting offer, Herr Reichsführer,” Voss said, finally. “Of course, this may put the Luftwaffe in the opposite camp.”
“Which would put the Kriegsmarine in ours,” Karl observed. The navy would hardly be likely to concede anything to the Luftwaffe. Give the flyboys an inch and they would take a mile. “We can hold them at bay.”
“Let us hope so, Herr Reichsführer,” Voss said. “But the logistics are still a major headache.”
“We can ship troops south,” Karl said, and explained his reasoning. “The rebels will find it harder to interrupt those supply lines.”
Chapter Nine
Albert Speer University, Berlin
23 July 1985
“I checked with a number of people I know,” Gudrun said, once the room was locked and the bug was listening to bad American music. “Konrad’s father is still unaware that his son is anywhere other than South Africa, while four other families have not heard anything from their children, even censored letters, for the last couple of months. Three of their children had a habit of writing at least once a week before suddenly going silent.”
She took a breath. The fourth… she’d had to screw up all her courage to visit, for she’d known the father by reputation and nothing she’d heard had been good. His wife had left him shortly after the children had reached adulthood, which proved he’d treated her badly; the Reich wouldn’t look too kindly on a wife who abandoned her husband, denying her both a divorce and the right to remarry. Two minutes of standing on his doorstep, feeling his eyes leaving trails of slime across her breasts, had convinced her that the bastard’s son had every reason not to write to his father. There was no way to know if he was dead or alive.
I should have taken Kurt, she thought, although that would have been far too revealing. He would have asked too many questions.
“That’s what I found anyway,” she said. “What about the rest of you?”
“I checked with my maternal auntie,” Sven said. “She told me that her eldest son has gone silent too, although his letters are always irregular. My paternal grandfather, however, said he’d received a heavily-censored letter from his middle son only last week. It wasn’t very detailed, but it was something.”
Gudrun listened, quietly, as the remaining students offered their own observations. If they’d had doubts, she realised, they’d lost them. Too many of their military relatives had gone silent at once. Even the ones who rarely wrote home had gone completely silent. It chilled her to the bone when she considered the implications. Statistically, for a group of eight students to know over thirty soldiers who’d stopped writing to their families, the casualty rates had to be terrifyingly high.
“I came across something else,” Horst said, once everyone else had finished. “My second cousin is married to a soldier on deployment. She got a letter from him asking after a friend who’d been wounded and sent home. So she checked with the guy’s wife – she knew the lady personally – and the wife didn’t know anything about it. The poor woman went to ask questions and then… nothing.”
Gudrun blinked. “Nothing at all?”
“Nothing,” Horst confirmed. “Someone told her to keep her mouth shut or else.”
Hilde leaned forward, her face pale. “How can you be sure?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation,” Horst said. “They could have easily told her that her husband was fine, if he was fine. But they were clearly unwilling to admit he was wounded.”
He looked at Gudrun. “You might want to ask the person who helped you sneak into the hospital just how many other soldiers are held there,” he added. “I’d bet good money that there are more wounded distributed around the Reich.”
“I wouldn’t take that bet,” Sven said.
“Me neither,” Gudrun said. She looked from face to face, bracing herself. They had already crossed the line, but it wasn’t too late. “We know the government is lying to us – that it has lied to us many times before. What do we do about it?”
“What can we do?” Hilde asked. “If we start asking questions, we will get kicked out of the university.”
Gudrun nodded. The one topic that was off-limits at the university was the Reich itself. A few students had questioned that, back in the early days, and been unceremoniously expelled. Hell, they weren’t encouraged to study more than the STEM subjects. Any student who showed more than minimal interest in the social sciences was likely to run into trouble.
“Then we can’t ask questions here,” she said. She’d been thinking about it ever since she’d discovered what had happened to Konrad. “We need to spread the word.”
“We could send messages through the computer network,” Sven offered. “People like me have been sending covert messages without the SS reading them ever since the network was established.”
“Or they just don’t care,” Horst pointed out, darkly. “What are you actually doing online anyway?”
Sven coloured. “Could you send a message without it being trapped in the filters and read?”
Horst looked back at him. “Could you send a message without it being traced back to you?”
“Easily,” Sven said. “You just wipe the record of it being sent from the network. It looks as though the message spontaneously appeared in the recipient’s inbox.”
Gudrun held up a hand. “Yes, but we need to reach as many people as possible,” she said, carefully. “How many people do you know who have access to a computer?”
There was an awkward pause. “Very few, outside the university network,” Sven conceded, finally.
“That’s true,” Gudrun said. “I don’t have a computer at home. Is there anyone in this room who does have a private computer?”
“No,” Michael Sachs said. “My father would explode if I suggested spending ten thousand Reichmarks on an American computer.”
Gudrun nodded. Her father would have pretty much the same reaction. It would cost much of his yearly salary, assuming he could purchase one in the first place… and, once he had it, it wouldn’t be much use. Gudrun had a typewriter she shared with her younger brothers and that had been quite expensive enough. Buying a printer would cost another five thousand Reichmarks and linking it up to the national computer network would be impossible. The Reich wouldn’t want to put such a powerful communications tool in everyone’s hands.
“So… what do we do?” Hilde asked. One hand toyed with her hair as she spoke. “We cannot risk adding more people to our group, can we?”