Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (40 page)

But in such a world of extreme political systems, war cannot be forgotten for too long, and it returned to them in the form of the three pints of ale and a worried expression on Jack’s face – however much they tried to delay the obvious.

“I’ve got news.”

Even now, Alan tried a joke. “Hitler’s dead.”

“No.”

“Franco’s dead?” Alan and William hopefully asked in unison. Jack smiled at the Geordie and Scot combination, despite himself. His insides churned inside him.

“No. Sadly.”

“Bastard will never die,” Alan mused, in deep regret. Mary spat on the floor. Even with Spain’s nominal neutrality or ‘non-aggression’ in Hitler’s war, Spanish volunteer divisions had fought in the Wehrmacht and SS, fascist support was still evident, and they viewed
El Caudillo
with visceral, undying hatred.

William agreed. “He’ll outlive us by thirty years at least, the little bastard. And his friends.” He pointed at Alan, suddenly animate. “You think Sanjurjo and Mola
both
died in
accidental
plane crashes? I’m telling you, Hitler and Mussolini will explode in a Focke-Wolf one day, mark my w–”

“Art’s just passed me a message,” Jack stated firmly. That shut them up.

He slipped the note into Alan’s hand, covertly, breathing “dispose of it.” The lithe figure smartly stepped out, heading to the toilets. Even with the room to themselves, the possibility of being seen reading from a note was a foolish risk to take. In dangerous times, they’d learned that even eliminating the smallest risks could be vital.

“Looks like this is it,” Jack told them redundantly.

This time, Mary took his hand, squeezing in a firm pinch while snatching William’s in her left.

“No going back.”

“Is everyone ready? Not,” Jack quickly added, seeing his friends’ eyebrows raise, “that I need to ask.”

“To pending news!” William smiled wryly, raising his pint. They clinked glasses, in an enforced jollity that none of them felt.

“That old feeling, eh?”

“That old feeling.”

They drank to that. Presently, Alan returned, but to their instant dismay he wore an ashen look, palpable worry showing in eyes that darted here and there, unable to focus on anything for longer than a second. He slid into the booth, and downed two thirds of his pint with a mighty swig.

“Well?” Jack queried.

Alan gave a small snort of laughter, humourlessly. He took a moment to compose himself, fixing his eyes on the table in front of him.

“Well… now it begins.”

“What begins?”

“The SS,” the Geordie muttered.

“Will you fucking well tell us what the SS is bloody beginning?” Jack exploded, quickly hushed by the others. Alan looked shaken.

“France and Holland are obviously pacified, with resistance raging here. Hitler’s Praetorian Guard and high priests are coming over to oversee an SS consolidation of German power in England. At least, I’m assuming England – Wales and Scotland will be cut off at this rate, aye? Volunteer units and all that, probably, membership to the BUF, puppet governments and all that, aye?”

He was babbling, eyes moving laterally, and when his vision finally focused ahead of him, he saw that the other three were staring at him uncomprehendingly. Composing himself, Alan sighed.

“Major players are coming. Rumour has it one is setting up shop here permanently. But they’re both coming, from a source in the SS itself.”

“Who, Alan? Bleeding hell!” Jack cried out, exasperated. The anticipation was wearing on nerves and patience that were already strained thin.

Again, that deep sigh. Alan hadn’t sighed – or even so much as
grimaced
– when they attacked a Spanish village held by fascists and Catholics in early ‘37. He’d been laughing during the battle, even after his hand was shot.

“Heinrich Himmler… and Reinhard Heydrich.”

The ensuing silence was deafening; Mary imagined that the only sound heard in that room was the furious beating of their hearts, hammering heavily. Her own thudded in her ribcage, and she distractedly pressed a hand to it, trying to control her breathing.

Jack exhaled slowly. He’d been unconsciously holding his breath so long he felt dizzy. William sat with his heads clasped behind the great mane of his head, looking up at the cracked ceiling. Jack didn’t move, but every muscle in his body was tensed.

“Himmler… AND Heydrich?”

To his relief, his voice was strong.

“The two most dangerous men in Europe,” William muttered, unnecessarily.

Jack stared at Alan. “They’re sending both of them? Why is the police and Gestapo chief coming here with Himmler? How can they both just bunk off?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s so bloody important about them coming here? All these months later? Ninety percent of the country’s just getting on with it. As long as they’re fed, no one gives a damn now about the armistice, they just wish Jerry would piss off back to mainland Europe and leave us in peace.”

“I don’t know,” Alan repeated tensely.

William hugged Mary, who smiled bravely. “They are not very nice men,” she said, which lightened the mood somewhat with its profound understatement.

Her lover, smiling now, queried Alan.

“What are you thinking, big lad?”

Alan didn’t answer, and the smile was wiped off William’s face. He and Jack had the same dawning realisation, and their eyes met in quiet horror. They were a special group of saboteurs from the off; veterans of Spain, and from what they could tell, they hadn’t even been recruited conventionally by the
unconventional
standards of the auxiliaries. Based in
London
. Not a village, or up in Coventry, or Liverpool, Leeds, York, Sunderland, Glasgow. London. The island capital, heart of the Empire.

Alan noted their reaction, and snorted mirthlessly, supping his pint.

“So,” William declared, a little too loudly into the silence. “What do we know? Göring supposedly said ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’. So the wee blond fellow is a bit of a nasty little man. Organised most of the purges, pogroms, persecution measures and police actions in kraut-land since Hitler’s rise.”

Alan snorted again. They ignored him, knowing he would overcome his pessimistic lethargy. He always did.

William continued, “Himmler is the overlord. Heydrich is the cold steel of the SS that unifies and runs the SD, Gestapo and German police. These guys created and maintain the system of fear that we swore to stamp out. While Hitler’s swanning around his mountain or his great chancellery, these guys are running the police state, midnight callers, internment camps, the whole death machine. They are the greatest menace on earth.”

“What difference does Heydrich make?” Mary asked curiously.

They knew why. For her, from what she’d seen of both political extremes in her ravaged country, it was the system that trapped them. Even Franco had only been part of a junta of generals, before Sanjurjo’s plane crash that led to a vote for unified command. Even then, it had taken Mola’s plane crash to bring the Generalísimo to total authority. And the systems she had believed in were huge collectives, with less in the way of individual drive.

“A lot,” Jack said darkly.

“Germany is different. After the first purges and the Nuremberg Laws they might have toned things down,” William explained. “The economy improved, all other parties had been wiped out, the Jews–” he stopped, horrified with himself. “… ah… well, it was
these
two centralising the German police forces and merging them into the SS that maintained the police state. And stirring things up year after year, along with Goebbels and Streicher, to keep things at fever pitch. Not to mention they kept the camps going…”

Alan finally piped up.

“Heydrich matters a lot. They call him “the Blond Beast,” or “The Hangman.” He keeps the SS Empire ruling Europe, the evil genius behind their schemes. Apparently he’s the most switched on of the entire bunch of rotten apples, and the most ruthless. Some say they’re all scared of him – Goring, Goebbels, Hess… even Hitler and Himmler.”

“The perfect guest,” Jack observed. “Brilliant.”

“He’s obviously here to take the reins on suppression. Perhaps send in his Security Police instead of the army, to flush ’em out. Or to work the cities. Or set camps up, who knows?”

“Camps, oh God,” Jack muttered, shaking his head. “Savages.”

“Animals,” Mary spat, with feeling.

They empathised. Only after leaving France did they realise how close they – in particular, she – had come to internment there. Other fleeing Republicans had not been so lucky. Many were still there.

“They’ll be setting camps up for sure,” Jack mused, morosely. Alan shrugged.

“We don’t know that.”

“Why else would they both be coming here?” William pointed out.

They argued the toss and theorised for several minutes longer, until Mary started viewing them with suspicion. There was something a little too conversationally blasé about the debate, and she coughed, pointedly at Alan. He nodded, resignedly.

“It’s all on us,” he confirmed.

“
¿
Que?” she scowled.

“We’ve got to kill Himmler. Heydrich too, if we can.”

Jack had been absorbing the implications of the note for several minutes, and so retained his faculties on hearing it. While Mary gave way to shock, his composure was intact.

“Why
Himmler
? If Heydrich’s so bloody dangerous?”

“Just going on the instructions. Makes sense on paper I suppose – get the top dog. Kill Himmler, and if possible, take out his chief gangster.”

They shared a look.

“Ho
way
, that would be smarter, if you ask me,” Alan forced a laugh. “I reckon taking out the blond one would be smarter. But specifically, orders are ‘kill the chief’. Take out the SS leader and we strike a real blow to Berlin.”

Silence fell on them. “I feel sick,” William admitted. It helped destroy the dramatic effect of the previous statement, but did little to assuage the tension.

An ugly, black tension hung in the air at St George camp no.5.

Total silence was being observed, and the psychological torture of ignorance to one’s fate was allowed to work its evil spell on the group of thoroughly dispirited men. They stood lined in nervous rows at the roll call position, but no shouts were heard. The absences in their ranks were only too apparent. Things had been going
so well
, you could almost see them thinking. But the minority group of whisperers were insistent; they drew their lines in the sand. Escape was duty. Obedience was treachery. The SS was enemy.

There was no free England to return to. But the compulsion to flee was too strong.

And these SS, if they needed further illustration after May 1940, were not the fanatical Anglophile detritus of Nazi pseudo-soldiers they’d believed them to be.

Tommy raised his eyes from the floor, the position and pose that the majority of the internees in the yard had determinedly stuck to for the twenty-five minutes they’d been stood there. Impatience wore his nerves down. He stared with equal determination at Lieutenant Hoffman, whose downcast eyes told the same tale as that feared by the assembled British men. Tommy stared at him desperately in something between anger and pleading, until the big German sensed his plaintive gaze and looked up. Hoffman offered only an imperceptible shake of the head, and looked away again.

The mood was as black as the jackboots of stern SS troopers, gazing unsmiling at the Brits from the parade ground, with several silhouetted up in the watchtowers overlooking the camp yard. None wore Waffen-SS military jackets; all were now clad in close-fitting tunics, the sleek, silvery
feldgrau
of Hugo Boss. It was the same transformation that Major Wolf and Hoffman had made so soon into the internment period; a subtle morphing into glossy parade ground soldiers from rugged men of war.

Eventually, the approach of a distant car could be heard, and some men jolted unpleasantly with the reports from the exhaust. Those men who had been under heavy barrage in the frenzied retreat along the Pas-du-Calais in particular winced, flinching in unpleasant recognition of the ugly mechanical sounds, distant as they were. Stanley, who’d served in the Great War, moved not a muscle; the Sergeant’s chin and chest were out, maintaining the quintessentially British stiff upper lip, a proud stance.

They’d expected a truck; it was a cattle cart. First easing in through the main gateway of the outer compound – a horseshoe passage in the wire from the watchtowers standing sentient – in and past the long building, and then finally, the cart shuddered to a halt and stopped at the barbed wire gates leading into the furthest corner of the compound; the barrack huts of three companies of the British Expeditionary Force interned at camp no.5.

The cattle cart disgorged its weary cargo; men, whose faces were spattered with blood, limping tiredly in a pitiful group through the gates. The soldiers escorted them in followed, and lastly, with a brisk march that made his jackboots clip-clop across the asphalt ominously came the hostile presence of Major Jochen Wolf.

The German officer
gleamed
black. The portentous contours of his dark expression were perfectly reflected in the perfect black cloud, and everything the colour represented was embodied by his menace. Though the ceremonial all-black SS uniform was still absent – to the continuing confusion of some of the British lads, to whom the ‘blackshirts’ of Moseley, the originals of Mussolini and then the SS were the embodiment of fascism itself – however, the suave, custom-fitted field grey tunic clung to him inside the outer black layer of leather trench coat that descended over a foot past the top of his black jackboot.

The captured men stood in a line, facing their own comrades from the companies. Major Wolf suddenly threw his long coat off with a quick, singular movement, flinging it back to his aide. Now grey from the kneecaps up, he was no less impressive for it; the Iron Cross dangled from his left breast pocket, and the space between his fastened collar, in pride of place over the Adam’s apple.

His tone was superficially pleasant, but it was glaringly obvious that the officer’s severe demeanour was beyond cold. He exuded an icy demeanour that would not have been out of place in the Antarctic. Major Wolf could have frozen the Serengeti.