Ragnarok

Chapter Eight

Berlin, Germany Prime

29/30 October 1985

The night was bitterly cold.

Horst kept quiet, very quiet, as he led the way eastwards. They’d been shown through the lines surrounding Berlin an hour ago, then warned to keep their heads down as they walked towards the enemy lines. The possibilities of being shot by a roving patrol were higher than Horst cared to admit, particularly if the patrol captured them first. After the first atrocity reports, the defenders had lost all interest in taking prisoners.

Fools, he thought, grimly. The war will take longer if the enemy soldiers think they can’t surrender.

Kurt was doing better than he’d expected, he had to admit, although that could be just his prejudice talking. Gudrun’s brother had been an infantryman, after all. He would have been trained to move silently from place to place. His actual experience was somewhat lacking, Horst knew, but there was no way to change that in a hurry. All they could do was keep moving and hope they didn’t run into trouble until they crossed the lines.

The darkness seemed to press in around them like a living thing as they followed the road eastwards, keeping a wary eye out for vehicles or aircraft. A handful of shapes loomed up in the distance, slowly revealing themselves to be burned-out panzers or trucks; a number of buildings, destroyed in the fighting, bore mute testament to the savagery the SS had unleashed on Germany Prime. Horst knew — at a very primal level — just how ruthless the SS could be, but this was madness. He liked to think he would have switched sides, even without Gudrun, if he’d been forced to witness such a nightmare. But he knew it wouldn’t have been easy.

He frowned as he saw a pair of bodies lying on the ground, stripped naked. They were both male, he noted; their SS tattoos clearly visible on their arms. In the darkness, it was hard to tell what had actually killed them — he certainly didn’t want to touch the corpses — but the provisional government had been getting reports of other enemy bodies being stripped as the SS retreated. Their comrades would have a better chance at survival if they took everything they could from the honoured dead.

And they wouldn’t turn on their own, he thought.

He brooded as they headed onwards, leaving the bodies behind. The SS stormtroopers were taught to be loyal to their units, first and foremost. It was unlikely that any of them would switch sides, unless they did it in a body. They’d be abandoning men who depended on them. Horst knew he wouldn’t be comfortable just walking away, if he’d been assigned to the Waffen-SS. It was lucky — for Gudrun, for Germany, for everyone — that he’d largely been on his own in the university. Even his fellow infiltrators hadn’t been his true comrades.

The bridges were in ruins, they discovered, as they approached a river. Horst had half-expected to have to swim — which would have delayed them badly — but thankfully there were enough chunks of debris sticking out of the water to allow them to scramble across. He couldn’t help thinking that the bridge would need several months of repair work — it would be quicker, perhaps, to start putting pontoon bridges together to rush the panzers eastwards. He tensed as they reached the far side, expecting to run into an enemy patrol, but there was nothing. The entire bridge had simply been abandoned.

They must be concentrating on setting up lines further to the east, Horst thought. And they may have lost more trained manpower than we thought.

He scowled at the thought. It had been a long time since the Waffen-SS had fought a conventional war, but they must have learned something from their advance to the west. The bridge would make an ideal place to give the advancing panzers a bloody nose. He’d certainly seen the tactic practiced often enough during basic training. But instead… they’d just fallen back, abandoning the bridge. It suggested that morale was very low.

“We keep moving,” he hissed to Kurt. “We need to make contact with their lines before the sun rises.”

The night seemed to grow louder as they kept walking, engine noises and the occasional gunshot echoing out in the distance. Horst cursed under his breath — of course the stormtroopers would be jumpy — but kept walking anyway. The provisional government had command of the air. Logically, moving panzers and other armoured vehicles around would be done at night. Or so he told himself.

He looked up at the stars, silently checking their position. They were still moving east, if he was correct. It wouldn’t be long, surely, before they walked into an enemy position. They had to have patrols covering the road. There was no way they would just allow the panzers to charge up towards Warsaw, not when they needed to buy time to rebuild their armoured formations. The SS was good at regenerating its units, but even with the best will in the world it would take longer than they had to rebuild…

“Halt,” a voice barked. “Hands in the air!”

“Do as they say,” Horst muttered, raising his hands. He scanned the terrain ahead of them, but there was nothing to see in the darkness. The enemy had to have dug into the side of the road. He raised his voice a moment later. “Don’t shoot! We’re friendly!”

A pair of black-clad stormtroopers materialised out of nowhere, one wearing a heavy pair of night-vision goggles on his forehead. Horst felt a flicker of sympathy — the bugs had never been worked out of the system — and then tensed as the stormtroopers glared at them. There was a very real possibility of being taken for deserters — or even men who had lost contact with their units in the chaos — despite the papers they carried. And if they were taken for deserters, they might be shot out of hand.

“Identify yourself,” the leader snarled.

“Johann Peltzer and Fritz Hanstein,” Horst said. “Our papers are in our jackets.”

He braced himself as the stormtroopers took the papers and inspected them carefully, using a flashlight to make out the words. Logically, the stormtroopers should send them onwards to Germanica as soon as possible, but nothing was the same any longer. They might wind up being ordered to serve in the SS divisions or…

The stormtrooper saluted, smartly. “You have orders to return to Germanica, Herr Inspector?”

“Yes,” Horst said. Posing as members of the SS Inspectorate was a risk, but very few stormtroopers would want to attract their attention. “We need transport back to the Reichstag.”

“I’ll have you escorted to the camp, Herr Inspector,” the stormtrooper said. “The Standartenführer will arrange transport for you.”

“Thank you,” Horst said.

He kept his expression under tight control as they were escorted up the road and into an enemy camp. Dozens of tents, all concealed under camouflage netting; hundreds of stormtroopers, most desperately catching up on their sleep before they had to return to their duties. There weren’t many vehicles in evidence, he noted, but that proved nothing. The Waffen-SS would probably have spread out their panzers, gambling that they would have time to concentrate their forces before the Heer began its advance. He glanced into a large tent as they passed and swore, under his breath, as he saw the wounded. The odds were good that none of them would survive the coming offensive.

They picked the wrong side, he told himself.

But it wasn’t convincing. No one had expected a civil war, not even Gudrun. Very few soldiers had voted with their feet, even when military bases had turned into battlegrounds; they’d stayed with their comrades rather than following their own inclination. And most of the Waffen-SS would be fanatically loyal. They knew what sort of chaos would be unleashed by the revolution. The Untermenschen would rise up in revolt all over the Reich.

He sucked in his breath as he saw a tall man, wearing a Standartenführer uniform, standing in front of one of the tents. A Standartenführer would not be so easily bullied, Horst knew; he’d want to make it clear that he was in charge, despite the wide-ranging authority granted to the Inspectorate.

“Heil Holliston,” the Standartenführer said.

“Heil Holliston,” Horst returned. He held out his papers. “We require immediate transport back to Germanica.”

The Standartenführer looked back at him evenly, then carefully went through Horst’s papers, one by one. They should pass muster, Horst knew, but if the Standartenführer insisted on checking with Germanica… they’d be caught, before the mission had even fairly begun. And then… they’d be lucky if they were only marched out of the camp and shot. It was quite possible that Holliston had marked Horst — and any member of Gudrun’s family — down for special attention.

“Very well, Herr Inspector,” the Standartenführer said. “We are sending a convoy of the wounded up to Warsaw in the morning. You may accompany them.”

“We need a vehicle that can take us all the way to Germanica,” Horst said, firmly. It would be perfectly in character for an Inspector to demand the very best, regardless of the practicalities. “Herr Standartenführer…”

“We don’t have anything that can be spared,” the Standartenführer said. He sounded too tired to care that he had just interrupted an Inspector. “You’ll have to go with the convoy.”

“Very well,” Horst said, trying to sound irritated. “We’ll inspect the camp while we’re waiting.”

The Standartenführer gave him a ghastly smile. “Make sure you tell Germanica that we need more supplies out here, Herr Inspector,” he said. “This camp is not going to hold against a determined offensive.”

“Of course,” Horst said.

He saluted the Standartenführer, then led Kurt out of the tent. Dawn was just beginning to glimmer in the distance, a wavering line of light heralding the approach of the day. He resisted the urge to yawn as he nodded to the sentries, then strode over to the medical tent and glanced inside. There were hundreds of wounded, including dozens who were too badly injured to be saved. The others… he shuddered as he recalled some of the horrors they’d uncovered in the files. He had never known — never even considered — that the Nazi Regime would kill its own wounded soldiers…

But they did, he thought.

He looked away, unwilling to meet the eyes of men he knew would probably be killed if they didn’t die soon. The files had made it clear, written in glowing tones by people who didn’t even have the decency to be ashamed of what they’d done. Hundreds of thousands of Germans — good Germans, men with the proper bloodlines — had simply been exterminated, murdered by their own government. And that had been the least of it. Children born with birth defects — even minor birth defects — had been murdered too…

And we never knew, he told himself. None of us ever realised what had happened.

It made him wonder — again — what had happened to his father. Uncle Emil had told Horst that his father had been killed in one of the wars — and Uncle Emil should have known — but he hadn’t gone into detail. Did he know what had happened? Or had something been covered up? There was no way to independently verify anything they’d been told. For all Horst knew, his father had been so badly wounded that he’d been murdered by his own government.

And I might never know, he thought.

He wandered through the camp, doing his best to memorise the details. He’d probably be called upon to give a report when they reached Warsaw, even if they were given a vehicle and told to make their own way to Germanica. And there might be a chance to slip a report back to Berlin, even though he knew it was unlikely…

Two hours later, they were called over to join a small collection of trucks heading east. The wounded didn’t look very comfortable — the trucks had clearly been designed to transport goods, rather than people — but none of them were in any fit state to complain. Horst bit down the urge to make sarcastic remarks — he couldn’t help noticing that none of the badly-wounded men were being shipped to Warsaw — as he clambered into the front seat. Kurt followed him as the lorry roared to life. Thankfully, the enlisted man in the driver’s seat didn’t seem inclined to make conversation.

“Get some sleep,” he urged Kurt. “It’s a long drive to Warsaw.”

He kept a wary eye on the sky as the convoy lurched down the road to the autobahn. It was unlikely that the Luftwaffe would deliberately target wounded men, but any prowling pilot wouldn’t know what the trucks were carrying until it was far too late. Besides, wrecking the SS’s logistics network would suit the Provisional Government perfectly. But there seemed to be no aircraft in the sky.

They’re digging in, he thought, as they passed a line of stormtroopers working on a trench network. And getting ready to make us bleed.

He scowled, inwardly, as they passed more and more signs of enemy activity. Trenches, weapons positions, a handful of panzers dug into the undergrowth so they’d be almost completely invisible, except at very short range. A number of trenches were being dug by men and women in civilian clothes, people he assumed had been conscripted by the SS during the march towards Berlin. He couldn’t help noticing that most of the civilians were middle-aged, with no children, teenagers or elderly. It struck him as an ominous sign.

They could have shipped the children east, if they weren’t already evacuated, he told himself, slowly. He wanted to believe it. Hell, if there had been teenage boys in the towns and villages, they would probably have been conscripted into the army. If the children were still there…

He shook his head, sourly. There were just too many secrets buried in the Reich’s past. A few hundred children, torn from their parents and raised as Germans in Germany East, would hardly be the worst of them. He glanced at Kurt, then closed his eyes himself. They’d need to be alert when they reached Warsaw.

It felt like he hadn’t slept at all when the truck finally lurched to a stop. Horst elbowed Kurt — he’d managed to sleep through the entire drive — then clambered out of the vehicle, just in time to see a small army of medics carting the wounded into the city. A number had died in transit; their bodies were dumped to the side, waiting to be placed in a mass grave. It wasn’t common for bodies to be returned to their families, not in Germany East. Horst… had simply never wondered just how sinister the procedure was until now.

Makes it easier to hide something, he thought.

“Herr Inspector,” an Obersturmbannführer said. “We have readied a car for you to drive east.”

Horst allowed himself a moment of relief. He’d feared they would have to take the railway, which would have gotten them there quicker… but forced them to pass through a whole series of checkpoints. Transit within Germany East was heavily restricted. He thanked the officer coldly — as if it was the very least he could do — and then allowed himself to be led outside. The car — a Volkswagen painted black — was already waiting for them. A small flag fluttered from the radio aerial on the roof, identifying the vehicle as an official car; a packet of maps lay on the front seat, just to make it easy for them to find their way to Germanica.

“Try not to drive at night, Herr Inspector,” the Obersturmbannführer warned. “I suggest you stop at settlements along the way.”

Kurt frowned. “Might I ask why, Herr Obersturmbannführer?”

“There have been a number of reported attacks along the roadside,” the Obersturmbannführer told him. “It’s safer to sleep in a settlement.”

Horst nodded, slowly. He’d thought the bandits had been cleared out of the western sections of Germany East, but it was clear they were having a resurgence. And why not? Most of the defenders had been marched west to fight the civil war. Germany East was huge. Forty years of occupation hadn’t been enough to exterminate every last trace of Slavic resistance.

“We will find a place to sleep in the settlements,” he said, frankly. It would be another risk — the settlements might also check their credentials — but it had to be done. “I thank you.”

“Just make sure they know we need reinforcements, Herr Inspector,” the Obersturmbannführer said. “We stripped the city bare to support the offensive…”

He stopped talking, suddenly. His words were far too close to defeatist. And defeatism was punishable by death.

Horst winced at the thought. What wasn’t?

“I’ll make sure they know,” Horst assured him. “We have orders to give our report to the Führer in person.”

He climbed into the car and checked it, carefully. It wasn’t that different from the cars he’d learned to drive when he was younger; indeed, the only real difference was a military radio installed beside the steering wheel. Civilians weren’t allowed radio transmitters without a special licence. Who knew what they might put on the airwaves?

But we will need to summon help if we run into trouble, Horst thought. If an Obersturmbannführer was prepared to admit the existence of bandits to a pair of inspectors, the situation had to be worse than it seemed. And if we do, we might attract far too much attention.

He turned the key. The engine roared to life,

“Let’s go,” he said. They’d stop, once they were well outside the city, to inspect the car for hidden surprises. “We’ll get as far as we can before it gets dark.”