Her body was shaking as she clambered into the shower and turned on the water. She’d never suspected Horst, not once. Many of the new spies were too obvious to be taken seriously, but Horst? He’d become a friend, even a potential boyfriend, without her having the slightest hint that there was something wrong with him. And if he’d done his duty and reported her from the start… she would have been thrown into prison, along with the rest of the Valkyries.
She shivered, even though the water was warm. Her father was worried for her, she knew; her mother would probably feel the same way. She’d tasted the coercive power of schoolmasters and BDM matrons from a very young age, but she’d been spared a glimpse at the true power dominating the Reich, keeping everyone in line. Now… she scrubbed at her body, trying to eradicate the sensation from where she’d been touched. It would be easy just to give up, just to surrender and allow her father to withdraw her from the university. Who knew? Her husband might be a kind man, willing to allow her to be more than just a housewife…
But that would be giving up, she thought, angry at herself. And I’ve come too far to give up.
She’d sneaked into a hospital, she’d started the Valkyries, she’d triggered the process that was bringing more and more people onto the streets, proving that the government was far from invincible. She was damned if she was just surrendering now. Konrad deserved better than to be forgotten by his girlfriend. If she couldn’t have him back, and she feared his father would simply turn off the life support, she could at least fight in his name.
There was a loud tap on the door. “Gudrun,” her mother’s voice said. She sounded different, somehow. “Are you in there?”
“Yes, mother,” Gudrun said, tiredly. Really, where else would she be, if she wasn’t in her room? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of sneaking into any of the other bedrooms. “I’m just finishing.”
“I’ll wait in your room,” her mother said.
Gudrun sighed, reminded herself that she could take whatever her parents chose to dish out, then dried herself hastily. Who knew what her mother would find if she decided to search Gudrun’s bedroom? She was sure there was nothing incriminating in plain view, but she didn’t want to take chances. Wrapping the towel around herself, she opened the door and hurried back to her bedroom. Her mother was sitting on Gudrun’s bed, resting her hands on her lap. She looked… different, in a way Gudrun couldn’t quite grasp. And there was no sign of her father.
“We need to talk,” she said, firmly.
“Yes, mother,” Gudrun said, closing the door and picking up her dressing gown. “I’m all ears.”
Oh, Gudrun, Kurt thought. What have you done?
He hadn’t expected the last two days to be anything more than constant physical training, shooting at the range and a host of other tasks to prepare the soldiers for combat operations in South Africa. The horror stories some of the experienced men had told him were enough to make it clear that they needed as much training as possible before they saw the elephant, despite the limitations of any training scenarios. But instead, the Berlin Guard had been ordered to muster and placed on alert. The old sweats insisted they’d never been ordered to prepare for immediate operations since the sixties, when Kurt’s father had been in the military. Kurt had been convinced there had been some kind of disaster. What else could explain the sudden shift in priorities?
But they’d mustered and waited… and waited… and finally been sent back to barracks. There had been so many rumours flying through the base that the CO had had to make an announcement, but it had been utterly incoherent. Strikers in Berlin, women on the streets, schoolchildren throwing mashed potato at their teachers… Kurt had been left wondering if it had been nothing more than an unscheduled drill. The explanation had just sounded impossibly absurd.
And then he’d heard the broadcast, when he’d gone on watch, and put the whole story together. The leaflets – the leaflets his sister had written – had been replaced with something else, a mass – and thoroughly illegal – labour movement. And their strike had brought women and children out onto the streets in support.
We might have been ordered into the city, to fire on strikers and students, he thought, as he checked the bulletin board. They’d been due to go out of the city for mountain training, but apparently the entire training schedule had been cancelled. And what would have happened when we’d been ordered to open fire?
The government had backed down, according to the radio, but he knew better than to take that for granted. If the training schedule had been cancelled, when the unit was due to go to South Africa, it could only mean that higher command had a use for the Berlin Guard closer to home. And that meant…?
He shuddered. What do we do if we are ordered to fire on women and children?
Chapter Thirty-Three
Berlin, Germany
15 August 1985
“I’m glad to see you made it back alive,” Ambassador Turtledove said. “I was starting to worry.”
“It could have been a great deal worse,” Andrew assured him. “And we got the pictures out, which is something.”
“Definitely,” the Ambassador said. He waved a hand at the comfortable chairs. “Please, take a seat. I trust they weren’t too unpleasant?”
“Just slammed us into a cell for a couple of days,” Andrew said. “No search, no beatings… they must be going soft.”
“They certainly backed down when the entire city ground to a halt,” the Ambassador agreed, calmly. His secretary appeared with a couple of mugs of coffee. “Washington needs a full report, Andrew. What the hell is going on?”
“The cracks in the Reich have finally started to break open,” Andrew said. He took a long sip of his coffee before continuing. He’d expected worse when the Germans had swept him and Marshall off the streets, but the Reich had had worse problems than a pair of Americans poking their noses into the strikes. “We always knew they would, one day.”
The Ambassador nodded. His family was Jewish, although Andrew didn’t think he practiced himself. The Reich had slaughtered every Jew it could catch, without exception; there was no group in the United States that hated the Nazis as much as the Jews. He was mildly surprised the Nazis hadn’t protested Turtledove’s appointment – he was human, unlike the shambling monsters German children were taught to fear – but the Ambassador rarely met anyone outside the highest echelons of the Reich. It was unlikely the German population even knew his name.
“My contacts were predicting trouble,” Andrew added, after a moment. “The real question is just how far the Reich will reform.”
“It looks as though they have conceded everything,” the Ambassador noted. “Do you believe that’s true?”
Andrew shook his head. “I don’t see the old regime surrendering power so easily,” he said, carefully. “They were caught by surprise, I suspect, by the sheer volume of the strikes and street protests. The next time, sir, they will be a great deal better prepared.”
He took another sip of his coffee. “Legalising unions and protest groups may seem like a concession,” he added, “but it forces the leaders to come out into the open. They’ll paint targets on their backsides for the Waffen-SS to kick. I would be surprised if they weren’t already seeding the protest groups with spies and agent provocateurs, just to provide an excuse for crushing the crowds and arresting the leaders.”