Christopher Nuttall - Ragnarok

She looked at the other men in the room. “What will happen to your sons? Or to your daughters?”

“Be silent,” Holliston said.

Gudrun ignored him. She’d been silent for too long. Eighteen years of her life had been spent accepting that her place in the world would always be subordinate to a man, even though she’d managed to win a place at university. She’d loved Konrad — she admitted it to herself — but she knew now she would never have been happy as a housewife, doing nothing more than cooking his food and bearing his children. And perhaps she would have been left alone if Konrad had gone back to the war and died there.

“You and yours ruled the Reich for forty years,” she said, turning back to him. If these were going to be her last words, they were going to be good ones. “And yet you’re scared to let the people breathe . You ran the entire country into the ground! Do you really think I could have gotten anywhere if the people hadn’t had a cause? You made your own enemies.”

She allowed her voice to harden. “You did this to us,” she added. “Your entire claim to power is based on a lie.”

“I do not expect you to understand,” Holliston said. His voice dripped contempt. “You’re only a girl .”

Gudrun bit down on her reaction, hard . He wanted her to scream at him; he wanted her to explode in feminine rage, to prove to his allies that Gudrun was just an emotional girl — a child — whose opinion was too emotional to be valid. But she’d sat on the cabinet, back in Berlin. She’d learned more, she suspected, than he’d ever realised. And keeping her temper under control was only part of it.

“I don’t think that anyone has any doubt that I am a young woman,” she said, shrugging as through her near-nakedness didn’t bother her. “But does that make me wrong?”

She looked up, her eyes moving from face to face. “Does that make me wrong?”

Holliston made no attempt to answer the question. Part of her considered that to be a good thing, a tacit confession that he had no answer. But the rest of her knew it wasn’t ideal. She could be right — or wrong — and yet it didn’t matter. She was still a prisoner, trapped hundreds of miles from her friends and comrades. And even if they knew where she was, getting to her would be almost impossible. She was doomed.

“You will be interrogated until we have drained every last scrap of information from you,” Holliston informed her, instead. “And then you will be put on trial for crimes against the Reich .”

Gudrun almost smiled. A trial? The Reich rarely bothered with trials. A criminal was guilty — if he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t be in jail. But she knew exactly what he had in mind. He could order her shot at any moment, but that would just make her a martyr. She’d be more dangerous to him in death than she’d ever been in life. He needed to break her — to discredit her — before he killed her. By then, death would probably be a relief.

“Take her back to her cell,” he ordered. “And make sure she’s held securely.”

“ Jawohl, Mein Führer ,” Katharine said.

Gudrun gritted her teeth as Katharine swung her around, then forced herself to walk towards the door. She was damned if she was showing weakness now, despite the humiliation. If she was a prisoner, she’d be a tough prisoner…

And maybe I can work on Katherine too , she thought, as she made her way out of the door and back down the corridor. She might have ideas of her own now.

It wasn’t much, she acknowledged. But it was all she had.

Berlin, Germany Prime

29 October 1985

“Are you sure this is going to work?”

Horst Albrecht shook his head, crossly. Kurt Wieland seemed to veer constantly between a determination to leave as quickly as possible and an understandable fear that they wouldn’t be able to get past the first set of checkpoints. Horst didn’t really blame him for being conflicted — he was an officer in the Heer , not someone who should be assigned to a stealth mission — but it was annoying. It was quite hard to see how Gudrun and Kurt were actually related.

“There is no way to guarantee this will work,” Horst said. He glanced down at the forged papers, checking them again and again for any mistakes. It wasn’t the first time he’d been an infiltrator, but the consequences for getting caught this time would be far worse. “If you want to go back to the infantry, go now.”

He ignored Kurt’s flash of anger as he checked the final pair of ID cards. They weren’t precisely forgeries — they’d been produced at the SS office in Berlin — but they wouldn’t match the records in Germanica. The SS had a mania for good records keeping — just about every German had a file, buried somewhere in the government bureaucracy — and a particularly alert officer might wonder why there wasn’t a copy within reach. Horst would have been surprised if the SS-run government hadn’t started changing everything it could, just to prevent the provisional government from sending spies and commandos into its territory.

But changing all of the ID cards in Germany East would be a long and time-consuming process , he told himself. The ID cards had been changed once, years ago; it had taken months before every last set of old papers had been collected and replacements issued by the bureaucracy. And that had been in peacetime. There will be so much disruption in Germany East that changing the ID cards will be the least of their problems .

“They should suffice,” he said, finally. “Are you coming?”

“Of course,” Kurt snapped.

Horst sighed, inwardly. Kurt had admitted, reluctantly, that he blamed himself for the whole mess. If he hadn’t helped Gudrun break into the hospital, Gudrun would never have kick-started the whole chain of events that had led down to civil war. But Horst suspected Kurt was wrong. Gudrun, his wife and lover, was simply too determined to be deterred for long, even by her family’s disapproval. She would have found another way into the hospital.

“Very good,” Horst said. He would have preferred to go alone, even though he knew that having a second pair of hands along might be helpful. He’d been steeped in SS culture and tradition almost as soon as he could walk; Kurt, for all of his undoubted bravery, lacked the background he needed to pass unremarked. “Read the papers and memorise them.”

Kurt gave him a sharp look as he picked up the first folder. “Do you expect this to be necessary?”

“It depends,” Horst said. He smirked, suddenly. “Are you circumcised?”

Kurt glared. “No!”

“Good,” Horst said. “It’s very rare for anyone to be circumcised in Germany East. If you had been, we would have had to alter the file to reflect that.”

He picked up his own folder and read it through again, reminding himself of the details. It was a careful balance between truth and lies, classing him as a resident of Germany East on one hand and an SS Hauptsturmführer with special orders to report to Germanica on the other. He knew enough about the various special operations divisions to pass for a commando, as long as he didn’t run into an actual commando. It was all too possible that the person they encountered would know everyone in his unit by name or reputation.

And I won’t know all the private jokes and traditions , he thought. I could be tripped up quite easily .