Storm Front (Twilight of the Gods Book 1)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Gritting his teeth, he hurried towards the gates. It could be a trap, he knew; his superiors might have reasoned out his role in the whole affair and called him in for interrogation. But Krabbe didn’t seem to be trying to follow him. If Horst had wanted to arrest someone on suspicion, he would have made sure the suspect didn't have a chance to saunter off into the backstreets and escape. A public arrest would be easy enough - and, he was sure, it would arouse no comment. Unless that was what he was meant to think.

  It makes no sense, he reassured himself, firmly. They wouldn't ask me to visit if they knew what I’d been doing, they’d grab me before I could escape. And so... whatever they want me for, I’m not in trouble myself.

  Hoping to hell he was right, he headed onwards through nearly-deserted streets.

  ***

  The sound of the riot - or protest march, or whatever the hell it was - quietened alarmingly, much to Herman’s relief, as the military police took over the sealed zone and marched the hundreds of prisoners away to an uncertain destination. Herman was relieved just to see the back of some of the prisoners, particularly the ones who just would not shut up about how important they were and how the policemen would be shovelling shit in Germany East tomorrow if they didn't release their prisoners immediately. Let the military police handle the assholes, Herman told himself, and take whatever punishment was due.

  “We’re to head back to the muster point,” Caius said. The radio network had been having hiccups. Some idiot back at the station, according to rumour, had scrambled all the channels for some silly reason. “The military police are to take over the barricades.”

  Herman shrugged. The barricades were no longer necessary, now that most of the watching civilians had gone back home as soon as the military police arrived. God alone knew what they were saying, what rumours were spreading through the city, but for the moment he found it hard to care. The buildings within the sealed zone had either been locked up tight by the strikers, who were now trapped, or emptied by the military police. Herman rather doubted that anyone taken into custody by the military policemen would be enjoying the experience.

  He followed Caius back to the van and scrambled inside. The vehicle roared to life; he sat back and forced himself to relax, despite the tension. He’d expected worse, somehow, than merely putting up the barricades. But then, the military policemen had done the real job...

  And it isn't over yet, Herman thought. The strikers will still have to be handled, somehow.

  “We’re being diverted,” the driver called. “There’s a new crowd of people spilling out onto the street.”

  Herman said nothing, but he worried as the van lurched. The strikers were bad enough; who else was joining the protests and why? Caius and several of the other policemen hurled questions at the driver, but he didn't know anything more than what he’d already said. All they could do was wait, checking their weapons and equipment, until the van came to a halt one final time. The door opened, revealing a residential street... and hundreds of women of all ages marching down it, wearing their finest clothes.

  Caius gasped. “What the hell...?”

  Herman could only agree. He’d been prepared for rampaging students or workers, perhaps even Gastarbeiters, not women. Many of them were middle-aged, the same age as his wife, wearing outfits that cost more money than he cared to think about. They all looked to be respectable German womenfolk, wives and mothers; indeed, some of the women were even carrying their children in their arms or pushing prams. He knew how to handle rioters, but women? The thought of charging them, of using tear gas to break up their ranks, was unthinkable. And then his blood ran cold as he saw his wife in the throng.

  “Adelinde?”

  “Your wife?” Fritz asked. “You’d better get her out of here before all hell breaks loose.”

  Herman nodded, then hurried away from the clump of uncertain policemen. At least he had something to focus on, besides absolute confusion and unwillingness to treat the women as just another bunch of rioters. The Captain would have to be insane to order the police to attack the crowd, not when it was so clearly composed of women and children. Herman knew he would go deaf if the order was ever given... and, if his superiors were wise, they’d accept it rather than risk triggering a mutiny.

  “Adelinde,” he said, as his wife looked up at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Marching,” Adelinde said. She’d never argued with him in public before, even though she ruled the household with an iron hand. “They’ve arrested our daughter.”

  Herman staggered backwards. Gudrun had been arrested? Of course she had, his thoughts yammered at him. It wasn't as if he had any other daughters. And yet... he hadn't seen her among the prisoners, but that proved nothing. Hell, Adelinde could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion and stuck to it in defiance of all logic and reason.

  “You have to go home,” he said. He was the man of the house, damn it! His wife shouldn't be embarrassing him, let alone defying him, in front of his comrades. “Adelinde...”

  His wife tilted her head, looking alarmingly like his strong-willed mother. “Our daughter is under arrest,” she said, “merely for being a student. I’m not going home when she’s in danger.”

  Herman found himself unsure what to say, let alone do. Adelinde had always defended her children, even as she meted out strict discipline. He pitied the teacher who’d sent home a note accusing her children of atrocities. But coming out onto the streets, risking arrest or worse... he felt sick as he realised what Gudrun might have gone through already and what might be waiting in her future. His daughter was no criminal, no Gastarbeiter bitch with no rights; she was a good little German girl, smart enough to be a university student, old enough to be a wife and a mother.

  His wife read the expression on his face. “She’s your daughter,” she hissed. “Start doing your duty as a father and find her!”

  “We’re not going home,” an older woman said. She was well-dressed enough that Herman had no trouble believing that her husband was both wealthy and very well connected. God knew she certainly sounded snooty enough to believe herself above rebuke, let alone punishment. “We want change.”

  “We want our sons home,” another woman said. A dozen other women took up the cry. “We want an end to the war.”

  Defeated, Herman could only turn and walk back to the other policemen, uncertain what he could say to them. Women were meant to obey their menfolk, first their fathers and then their husbands. But Adelinde had defied him, publicly. And, if she was right about Gudrun being arrested, he couldn't blame her.

  Fritz eyed him as he rejoined the small clump of policemen. “Well?”

  “I have to make a few calls,” Herman said. “Until then, we do nothing.”

  And hope to hell our superiors don’t do something stupid, he thought, privately. Almost every policeman he knew was married. How many other wives and daughters of policemen had joined the marching women? He was damned if he was firing on a crowd that included his wife, the mother of his children. But what do we do if we are ordered to fire?

  Chapter Thirty

  Berlin, Germany

  12 August 1985

  “This is getting out of hand,” Hans said. He glanced at his watch, meaningfully. It was late at night and dusk was slowly settling over Berlin. “The troubles are threatening to spread to a dozen other cities.”

  “Then we clamp down on them,” Holliston insisted. The Reichsführer-SS hadn't given up, not yet. “We should crush the strikers in their lairs.”

  “If we kill the strikers, we lose part of our pool of trained labour,” Hans said, wearily. The argument had been going in circles for hours, as more and more reports flooded in from all over the Reich. “If they have time to damage or destroy the machinery in the factories, we will have to replace it... and that will put yet another hole in our budget. And if we order the police or the troops to open fire on the women... we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.”


  “He’s right,” Field Marshal Justus Stoffregen said. The Head of OKW leaned forward, his face pale. “There are already rumours spreading through the Berlin Guard, Herr Reichsführer. If they are sent in to clear the streets of women, I believe they will refuse to obey orders.”

  “So arrest them for mutiny,” Holliston snapped.

  “There hasn't been a mass mutiny since we were stabbed in the back in 1918,” Stoffregen said. “A single coward could be arrested easily - his own barrack mates would hand out some rough justice if he wasn't arrested quickly enough - but a collective mutiny would be much harder to suppress. The soldiers might turn their guns on the arresting officers.”

  Holliston let out an angry hiss. “This is what you get for not indoctrinating soldiers properly!”

  “Not all of us believe in the doctrines preached by the SS,” Stoffregen said. “We want our soldiers to take advantage of fleeting opportunities, not wait for orders while the moment slips away.”

  Hans held up a hand. Normally, he would have enjoyed watching the military and the SS at loggerheads, but they didn’t have time to continue the pointless argument. They’d played the only cards they could - firing unionists and clearing the streets - and both had failed. The strikers were still holding out, thousands of others had come onto the streets in support and Berlin, as day turned to night, had ground to a halt. Even if the strike ended at midnight and the city went back to normal, it would take months - if not years - to repair the damage.

  “This argument is immaterial,” he said, flatly. “We have to admit, right now, that we are on the verge of losing control.”

  He repeated the facts, once again. “There are rumblings of trouble right across the Reich,” he said, firmly. “I suspect we will see more strikes tomorrow - I believe that some corporations are already considering closing their plants for the duration of the crisis, which will only provoke their workers further. Our police have refused to disperse the women in the streets; our soldiers are unlikely to fire on the women if ordered to do so. We have pushed matters as far as we can, without causing serious damage, and we can go no further. The population no longer trusts us, the workers no longer expect us to defend them against their corporate masters, the Untermenschen see their chance for freedom and even the police and soldiers are restless. Our Reich rests on a knife-edge.”

  “We can fight,” Holliston said.

  “We can try,” Voss muttered, “but there won’t be much of a Reich left afterwards.”

  Hans nodded in agreement. “The Americans are already moving ahead of us,” he reminded the council. “A long period of civil unrest in the Reich, even if we manage to keep a grip on power, will give them the chance to make their lead insurmountable. And then the legacy of the great Adolf Hitler will be lost forever!”

  He willed them, desperately, to believe. The American ABM system was bad enough - if the Americans thought that they could stop ninety percent of the Reich’s missiles, they might decide that they could survive a nuclear war - but their steady advance into space was worse. The Economic Intelligence Service was already predicting the next generation of space-based weapons, concepts right out of American science-fantasy movies that, if turned into reality, would render most of the Reich’s armed forces obsolete. The Reich, already dangerously behind the United States, could not allow itself to lose any more ground. If they did...

  If they did, we might as well call Washington and ask President Anderson for terms, he thought, sourly. We couldn't possibly win if they deploy space-based weapons against us.

  “I agree,” Stoffregen said. “It's time to put an end to the matter.”

  “And how,” Holliston asked icily, “do you intend to do that?”

  “We concede most of their demands,” Hans said. “Let them have their unions, for the moment; let them have their freedom of speech and assembly. Let them even start offering independent candidates to the Reichstag.”

  “Out of the question,” Holliston snapped.

  “It makes no difference,” Voss said, amused. “The Reichstag is powerless.”

  “Unless these... independent candidates start voting to block our proposed budgets,” Holliston pointed out. “What do we do then?”

  It was, Hans had to admit, a good question. Technically, the Reichstag was responsible for approving laws and budget proposals. None of the proposals put forward by the Reich Council had ever failed to pass, of course; the Reichstag knew it had no power to do anything other than rubber-stamp the proposals. But if there were independents elected to the Reichstag... who knew what would happen then?

  “We control the bureaucracy,” he said, finally. He tried to make his tone as reassuring as possible. “Let them make their speeches, if they wish. It will make no difference. The important detail is that we will be buying time.”

  “We cannot end the war,” Holliston snapped.

  Hans nodded, although he knew the war couldn't be allowed to continue for long. But the military might not support him if he proposed otherwise, not when Holliston - damn the man - had been making private deals with the senior officers. The war would have to continue for a few months, at least. By then, he’d know just how badly the budget needed to be slashed to keep the Reich afloat.

  “We can shift responsibility onto the South Africans,” Voss offered. “If we provide training and equipment - even a handful of units of French volunteers - we can slowly draw down our own commitment. Let the bastards fight for their own country.”

  They are, Hans thought. The Italians hadn't put up much of a fight when the Arabs revolted - and the French hadn't done much better - but the South Africans were tough. They were just outnumbered so badly that only superior training and their foes disunity had kept them from losing the war within the first year. And maybe they will be glad of a few hundred thousand French volunteers.

  “Then we offer to concede most of the demands,” Hans said. “And release the prisoners as a gesture of good faith.”

  “They’re guilty of unauthorised political activity,” Holliston insisted. “They cannot simply be let free.”

  “So is most of Berlin, now,” Hans countered. “Do you want to put the entire city in the extermination camps?”

  “This isn't Warsaw or Moscow,” Voss agreed.

  “Germanica,” Holliston snapped.

  Hans winced, inwardly. Moscow - Stalin’s capital - had been battered to rubble by savage street fighting as the Germans forced their way into the city. Half of the population had died at their posts; the remainder had been rounded up, marched into a concentration camp and starved to death. The city had been rebuilt shortly after the end of the war - it had been the hub of the USSR’s road and rail network - and renamed Germanica. These days, it was an SS stronghold, the core of Germany East.

  “Let them go,” he said, gently. “It will help to buy us time.”

  “Very well,” Holliston snapped. “Let it be done.”

  ***

  “You’re late,” Standartenfuehrer Erdmann Schwarzkopf observed.

  “I had problems convincing the police of my identity,” Horst said, shortly. He was sick of being told he was late. “They did not believe me at first.”

  He scowled at the humiliation of admitting that he’d practically been arrested by his own side. If he’d had an SS card, getting past the policemen would have been simplicity itself, but the card would have been far too revealing if Gudrun or another student had seen it. As it happened, he’d had to let them take him to a processing station and speak to an SS officer there - and, by the time he’d been processed himself, several hours had passed.

  Schwarzkopf shrugged. “These are not easy times.”

  “No,” Horst agreed. He bit down the urge to lodge a complaint against Krabbe. “I never expected to see the streets of Berlin filled with whining women.”

  “Me neither,” Schwarzkopf said. He sounded, for once, just a little unsure. “A number of students were arrested, mostly in front of the factories. I
need you to review their files and mark any that require special attention.”

  Horst frowned, inwardly, as he took the set of folders. Every student had a dossier, kept within the RSHA; he had no doubt that the SS’s bureaucrats were hastily updating them even now, at least for the students who’d been arrested. They might be released - computer experts were invaluable - but being arrested in such a compromising position would haunt them for the rest of their lives. And yet, they were the lucky ones. Someone without their training would be halfway to Germany East by now.

  The first batch of students were largely unfamiliar to him, although he vaguely recognised one of the young men as a braying fool who’d bragged of his family connections to anyone who’d listen. One of the young girls - his eyes lingered on the photos of her processing for longer than he knew they should - had a brother who’d gone to war and never returned; he hoped, as he returned the first stack of files, that her loss wouldn't be held against her. She had an excellent motive for joining the Valkyries.