Storm Front (Twilight of the Gods Book 1) (17 page)

He let go of Gudrun’s wrist.  “Every time I close my eyes, I see
her
face,” he muttered, reaching for the bottle.  “If I remain drunk all the time, it helps... I keep thinking about killing myself, but what good would that do?”

“I don’t know,” Gudrun said.  It had been easy to dismiss Grandpa Frank when he’d just been a disgusting old man.  Now... now she wasn't sure
what
to think.  “But what else
can
you do?”

“I was taught that suicide was a mortal sin,” Grandpa Frank said.  “And yet, surely what we did in the
Einsatzgruppen
was even worse.

“We told ourselves that they were subhuman.  We told ourselves that we were strong and they were weak and the strong had rights to use the weak as they saw fit.  We told ourselves that their mere existence was a threat to the
Reich
, that they had to be destroyed to save ourselves from certain destruction.  And yet, after what I did, I can no longer believe it...”

His voice trailed off.  “You wrote that leaflet,” Grandpa Frank said.  “And you could possibly pass for a BDM girl if you wore your uniform and kept your eyes downcast.”

“I did,” Gudrun confirmed.  There was no point in trying to deny it.  “Grandpa...”

“The state isn't going to let you get away with it,” Grandpa Frank hissed.  “They’ve buried so many would-be reformers over the years.  Don’t ever underestimate how far they’re prepared to go to root out all opposition to their rule.  But don’t stop.  Don’t let them get away with it.”

He leaned back in his bed.  “I told myself there was nothing I could do,” he whispered, as he closed his eyes.  “And at the time, maybe I was right.”

Gudrun waited, her heart pounding in her chest, but he said nothing else.  She checked his breathing - for a moment, she thought he’d finally let go of life and surrendered to death - and then relaxed as she realised it was stable.  Rising to her feet, she walked out the door and headed down to her room.  Suddenly, the threat of her father’s anger seemed unimportant, compared to what she’d been told.  She felt sick to even consider her grandfather having an affair with anyone...

But he wasn't an old man at the time
, she told herself, as she closed the door behind her - there was no point in locking it - and sat down on the bed. 
He wouldn't have been much older than Kurt
.

Her thoughts were so jumbled up that it was a relief when she heard someone tapping at the door.  She braced herself, grimly prepared to take whatever punishment her father decided to mete out, then blinked in surprise as Kurt opened the door and stepped into the room.  He was holding the leaflet in one hand.

“You may as well read it,” he said, as he closed the door.  “I managed to talk father out of beating you, but it would probably be better if you didn't show your face until tomorrow.”

Gudrun swallowed.  “Thank you,” she said, as she took the leaflet.  It was identical to the leaflets she’d handed out only a few hours ago.  “What did you
say
to him?”

“Told him you’d jump to the worst possible conclusion, because that’s what girls do,” Kurt said.  He ignored the rude gesture she aimed at him.  “And that you probably thought Konrad was mentioned by name.”

He lowered his voice.  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Gudrun.”

“I know,” Gudrun said.  She looked up at him.  “Are you going to betray me?”

“How could I without revealing that I sneaked into the hospital beside you?”  Kurt asked, dryly.  “You couldn't have done it without me.”

That
was true, Gudrun knew.  But betraying the person who’d helped write and distribute the leaflets would probably have won him forgiveness.  He wasn't a student, after all; he was a Berlin Guardsman who was probably bound for South Africa soon...

“Thank you,” she said, instead.  “I’m not going to stop.”

“I know,” Kurt said.  “You’re as stubborn as father.”

“And if I wasn't a girl, he’d have something to be proud of,” Gudrun snarled.

“He’s had a bad day,” Kurt reminded her.  “The girls he had to round up would have been very like you - some of them might only be a year or two younger.  He didn't join the police for
that
.”

Gudrun shrugged as her brother patted her on the shoulder and rose, heading for the door.  As far as she could tell, the Order Police were
intended
to push people around.  Why else would anyone join up?

“Get some rest,” Kurt advised.  “You have to go back to university tomorrow.”

“I know,” Gudrun said.  “Thank you.”

Chapter Sixteen

Reichstag,
Berlin

28 July 1985

It was not, Hans Krueger decided, going to be a particularly pleasant meeting.

He’d been expecting a vote on the deployment of additional troops to South Africa - his sources had told him that the SS was trying to strike a deal with the military - and had been preparing for a long argument when the news about the protest leaflets reached the Ministry of Finance, followed by an urgent demand for an immediate meeting.  He’d obtained one of the leaflets from the security office, read it while walking to the
Reichstag
and made his way up to the central meeting room.  The others had already arrived and were seated around the table.

“This is a crisis,” Karl Holliston said.  The
Reichsführer-SS
had one of the leaflets unfolded in front of him and was glowering down at it.  “Someone spread seditious propaganda in Berlin itself and escaped!”

Hans took a seat, forcing himself to remain calm.  The SS - and the other security forces - would be embarrassed, if not humiliated, by the whole affair.  He didn't blame them.  It was physically impossible for them to patrol the entire
Reich
, let alone maintain a level of omnipresence second only to God’s.  Their control rested on fear, rested on the population believing that they might be under surveillance at any moment, that anything they said might be recorded and used in evidence against them at a later date.  To have someone - or a small group of traitors - pull off such a coup in the centre of Berlin would call their capabilities into doubt.

“Let us not turn this molehill into a mountain,” he said, as he dropped his own copy of the leaflet on the table.  “Annoying as this is, it is a very minor issue.”

“Any defiance of the
Reich
is a major issue,” Holliston snapped.  “By now, copies of this damnable tissue of lies are spreading through the city!”

Hans frowned.  “They are?”

“
Yes
,” Holliston said.  “Apparently, a number of copies were dropped into letterboxes all over Berlin.  We’ve had at least a dozen handed in to the local police.  This is not an isolated act of protest, but a calculated strike against the authority of the
Reich
!”

“So we track down the people responsible and eliminate them,” Field Marshal Justus Stoffregen said.  “That should not be too difficult.”

“It may not be that easy,” Hans said.  He hadn't had long to think about the implications, but he
was
a veteran of countless political wars.  “We need to treat this very carefully.”

“We need to stamp on these traitors as hard as we can,” Holliston insisted.

“It isn't that simple,” Hans said.  “How many leaflets were
not
handed in to the police?”

He pressed on before anyone could try to answer an unanswerable question.  “This leaflet urges people to ask questions about other soldiers who have dropped out of contact, neither writing to their families nor returning home on leave,” he said.  “How many civilians in Berlin have relatives in South Africa, relatives who have seemingly vanished because we have not told their families about their conditions?  It will not be long before people start putting together the full story.”

“They are not encouraged to ask questions,” Holliston said.

Hans gave him a sharp look.  “You plan to keep two mothers from talking about their children?  Or two housewives from worrying about their husbands?  Right now, I imagine, word is spreading, no matter what we do about it.  There is no way we can deny everything and expect to be believed.”

“Radio Berlin can tell the
Reich
that the leaflets are talking nonsense,” Holliston insisted.

“But they’re
not
talking nonsense,” Hans snapped back.  “And the population will
know
they’re not talking nonsense.”

“Then we tell the population that the soldiers died in a good cause,” Holliston said.  “We shift our policy to honouring the dead and tending to the wounded!”

“That would add credence to the leaflet’s claims,” Field Marshal Gunter Voss said.  “It would also make it look like we were allowing these... these
rebels
to dictate our actions.”

Holliston scowled at him, angrily.  “And they also want free elections to the
Reichstag
,” he said.  “Are we going to tamely surrender power?”

“We could give them what they want,” Hans pointed out.  “The
Reichstag
hasn't had any real power since 1944.”

“The Nazi Party has governed this country since 1931,” Holliston said.  “In fifty-four years, we have risen to a position of global dominance our forefathers couldn't possibly have imagined.  Our armies are the strongest in the world; our settlers are turning the wastelands of Russia and the Middle East into new civilisations.  There is no reason to give power to a bunch of whining civilians who have done
nothing
to earn it.”

Hans frowned, inwardly.  There
was
a certain degree of social mobility in the
Reich
, either through the military, the SS or the Nazi Party bureaucracy.  He’d started out as a young bureaucrat, after all, and Holliston - to give the devil his due - had been a brave stormtrooper who’d seen genuine action.  But the odds of
anyone
reaching the
Reich
Council were staggeringly low and, by the time they actually reached high office, they would be so thoroughly ingrained with the ideals of their particular branch that they’d have trouble seeing anyone else’s point of view.  There were far too many bureaucrats, after all, who couldn't understand why small businesses were complaining about the tax burden.

“I think we have to admit,” he said slowly, “that everything has just changed.”

He tapped the leaflet with one finger.  “We have been using trickery to hide the fact that the death rate in South Africa is alarmingly high - and that isn't the only thing we've been trying to hide.  The state of our economy...”

“To hell with the economy,” Holliston thundered.

“That’s precisely where it’s going,” Hans said, mildly.  “We have been robbing Peter to pay Paul for the last decade, using the loot from our conquests and our captive markets to paper over the cracks in the system.  Now, we are running out of time; now, people are going to be asking questions; now, our
reaction
to those questions will only give the charges against us” - he tapped the leaflet again - “more credence.  You know as well as I do that people talk, that word is going to spread through the
Reich...
”

He forced himself to calm down with an effort.  “And
you
ordered the BDM girls to be corralled in the square,” he added.  “Just how many mothers do you think you panicked when they heard that their little girls were under arrest?”

“Those girls were helping to spread these damnable leaflets,” Holliston said.

“There isn't a shred of evidence that the
official
BDM girls were doing anything other than handing out the standard propaganda leaflets,” Hans said. 
That
might have been a lucky break; he’d long suspected that no one actually bothered to
read
the leaflets, no matter what they might have been told at school.  “They’re not Jews, Karl.  You can't arrest - even for a couple of hours - fifty-seven schoolgirls and expect no one to comment on it.”

“I suggest,” Voss said, “that we focus on the issue at hand.  Do we have any leads at all?”

“We’re working on it,” Holliston said.  “There have been some...
clashes
between the different organisations involved in securing Berlin.  The SS should take the lead, but the
Gestapo
and the Order Police think differently.  I propose that the SS should formally take command of the counter-rebel operation.”

Hans frowned.  The SS had lost control of the Order Police in the fifties, after Himmler had overreached himself. 
No one
outside the SS - and quite a few factions within the SS - had been keen to see Himmler in sole control of the security services.  And he wasn't blind to the implications of handing Karl Holliston so much power.  He’d take what he could and then make it permanent, perhaps even using it to boost himself into supreme power.  Had he even started handing out the leaflets in the first place?  Hans wouldn't have put the thought past him.

And he may think I started it
, he thought, morbidly. 
But neither of us really wants to undermine the Reich itself.

“We can discuss that later,” he said.  “What do we know?”

“The leaflets were distributed by at least three girls, all wearing BDM uniforms,” Holliston said.  “Only a couple of the witnesses were paying close attention; one reported a girl with long dark hair, another insisted he’d seen a blonde with a very large chest.”

“The witness was a teenage boy, I assume,” Voss said.

Hans fought to hide his smile.  “It could easily have been a middle-aged man,” he pointed out.  “Was it?”

“It was a soldier, home from the wars,” Holliston said, curtly.  “As far as we can tell, all of the BDM girls who were trapped within the square were linked to matrons, so we believe that the fakes left the square before the alert was sounded and made their escape into the city.  So far, we do not have any leads on just who spread the rest of the leaflets, but we are working on it.  There aren’t, however, many places the leaflets could have been printed.”

Voss took the leaflet from the table and inspected it.  “The paper is softer,” he said.  “Not absorbent enough to be useful, unfortunately, but it isn't a
perfect
copy.”

Holliston gave him a sharp look.  “A small printing shop could have done it,” he said, “and we will follow them.  However, the most likely place where the leaflets were produced is the university.”

Hans swore under his breath.  Holliston had always hated the university, hated how it brought American ideals into even a relatively small population of students.  And yet it was necessary.  No one knew better than Hans just how badly the
Reich
was falling apart, just how desperately they needed to reinvigorate their technological base.  The students might be the only thing capable of saving the
Reich
from itself.

“We shut the university down,” Holliston continued, “and investigate all the students for seditious leanings.”

“That would do a great deal of damage to our already weakened economy,” Hans pointed out, tartly.  “The computer network alone would be badly hampered if we refused to allow university-taught experts to work on it.  And without that...”

“Our forefathers didn't have a computer network,” Holliston snapped.

“They weren't facing anyone who did, either,” Hans countered.  “The Americans have been leveraging their computer network and using it as the base for a whole new series of technological developments.  If we shut our network down, as sparse as it is compared to the American design, we might as well shoot ourselves in the head and save time!”

“And yet we have to buy computers off the Americans,” Holliston said.  “How do we know we can even
trust
them?”

“The university will give us better computers in time,” Hans said.  It was an old argument, but the truth was that the United States had moved far ahead.  Reverse-engineering some of the more advanced machines the
Reich
had...
obtained
from the US had proved impossible, while what computers the
Reich could
produce were unsellable outside the
Reich’s
captive market.  “We just need to give it time to flourish.”

“You’ve been saying that for five years,” Holliston reminded him.