The Valkyrie Song
( Jan Fabel - 5 )
Craig Russell
Craig Russell
The Valkyrie Song
The heavens are stained with the blood of men,
As the Valkyries sing their song
Njal’s Saga
The lots of life and death were distributed by the Valkyries, the handmaidens of Odin in the warrior hall of Valhalla.
It was the Valkyries, their terrible war cries filling the heavens, who swept across the battlefield, gathering up the souls of those to whom they had allocated death.
In Old Norse, Valkyrja means chooser of the slain.
Prologue
I
Mecklenburg
1995
Sisters, she thought, are reflections of each other.
Ute sat and watched herself in younger reflection: Margarethe. Margarethe looked weary. And sad. It hurt Ute to see her like that: when they had been small, it had been as if the energy had been divided unequally between them — Margarethe had always been the livelier, cleverer, prettier sister. It also hurt Ute to see her sister in a place like this.
‘Do you remember,’ said Margarethe, gazing at the blue-tinged window glass, ‘when we were little? Do you remember we went to the beach and looked out across the Schaalsee and you said that one day we would sail away across it? To the other part of Germany — or to Denmark or Sweden — and you told me that it wasn’t allowed? Do you remember how angry I got?’
‘Yes, Margarethe, I remember.’
‘Can I tell you a secret, Ute?’
‘Of course you can, Margarethe. That’s what sisters are for. Just like when we were little. We always told each other secrets back then. At night, with the lights out; when it was safe to whisper, and Mamma and Papa couldn’t hear us. You tell me your secret now.’
They sat at a table near the window, which looked out over the gardens. It was a bright, sunny day and the flower beds were in full bloom, but the view was tinged slightly cobalt blue by the thick glass of the window. It must be because it’s special glass, thought Ute. The kind you can’t break. At least it was better than looking through bars.
Margarethe eyed the other patients, visitors and staff suspiciously. She shut them out again, confining her universe to herself, her sister and the blue-tinged view. She leaned forward conspiratorially to speak to Ute. In that moment she became again the pretty little girl she had once been. The very pretty girl she had once been.
‘It’s a terrible secret.’
‘We all have those,’ said Ute and rested her hand on her sister’s.
‘It will take me a long time to tell you. Lots of visits. I’ve not told anyone but I have to tell someone now. Will you come back to see me and hear my story?’
‘Of course I will.’ Ute smiled sadly.
‘You remember when they took Mamma and Papa away? Do you remember how we were split up and sent to different state care homes?’
‘You know I do. How could I forget? But let’s not talk about such things now…’
‘They sent me to a special place, Ute.’ Margarethe’s voice was lowered now to a breathy whisper. ‘They said I was different. That I was special. That I could do things for them that other girls couldn’t. They told me I could become a hero. They taught me things. Terrible things. So bad that I’ve never told you about them. Never. That’s why I’m here. That’s what’s wrong with me. All of these scary, horrible things in my head…’ She frowned as if the weight of what was in her mind pained her. ‘I wouldn’t be in here now if I hadn’t been taught to do such terrible things.’
‘What things, Margarethe?’
‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you now. But you have to promise me that after I tell you, you will make things right for me.’
‘I promise, Margarethe. You’re my sister. I promise I’ll make things right.’
II
Hamburg
January 2008
She was waiting for him.
She had tracked him from the moment he first came into view on Erichstrasse, opposite the erotic museum. He was coming towards her but could not yet see her. She backed into the darkness of the small cobbled square. This was where it would be. The square had no light other than that which leached in from the streets at either end, and was shadowed further by the two naked-branched trees that erupted from the unpaved disc of earth at its centre.
She was waiting for him.
As he approached she recognised his face. She had never met him, never seen him in the flesh, but she recognised him. His was a face from beyond the real world. A face she knew from the television, from the press, from posters in shop windows. A familiar face, but familiar from a parallel universe.
She hesitated for a moment. Because of who he was, there would be others. Attendants. Bodyguards. She stepped back into the shadows. But as he drew closer she saw that he was truly alone. He hadn’t seen her until he was almost upon her and she stepped out of the shadow.
‘Hello,’ she said in English. ‘I know you.’
He stopped, startled for a moment. Unsure. Then he said: ‘Sure you know me. Everybody knows me. You came here for me?’
She held open her coat and exposed her nakedness beneath and his face broke into a grin. She looped her arm around him and drew him into the shadows. He placed his hands on her, inside the coat, her skin hot and soft in the cold winter night. Her breath too was hot as she put her mouth to his ear.
‘I came here for you…’ she said.
‘I didn’t come here for this,’ he said, breathless, but he allowed himself to be pulled into the darkness.
‘And I didn’t come for your autograph…’ Her hand slid down his belly and found him.
‘How much?’ he asked, his voice quiet but tight with excitement.
‘How much?’ She drew back, looked into his eyes and smiled. ‘Why, honey, this is for free. This will stay with you for ever and you get it for nothing.’
She held his gaze but her hands moved fast and expertly. He felt his belt being loosened, his shirt being eased up; the cold night on naked skin.
He fell to the ground.
The cobbles were wet and cold beneath him and he gave a small startled laugh at his own clumsiness. He was slumped against the brick wall behind him, his legs splayed wide. Why had he fallen down? His legs felt as if they didn’t belong to him and he stared at them, wondering why they had simply given way under him. Then he gazed up at her: she stood astride him and the fire in her eyes terrified him. He vomited without warning, without first feeling sick. A sudden, bone-penetrating chill spread through his body. He looked at the vomit that covered his chest and the cobbles around him. It glistened black-red in the dim light.
He looked up at her again, as if she could explain why he had fallen; why there was so much blood. Then he saw it: the sliver of steel that glinted in her gloved hand. He felt something warm and wet inside his clothes. His trembling fingers found his shirt front and he tore at it, buttons flying into the dark and bouncing off the cobbles. His belly was split and something bulged from the wound, grey and glistening and wet, red-streaked in the half-light. Steam fumed from his rent belly and into the winter night. Blood surged rhythmically from the wound, keeping time with the pounding of his pulse in his ears. He felt cold. And sleepy.
The woman leaned down and used the shoulder of his expensive coat to wipe his blood from the blade. Then, with the same expert speed and precision with which she had stabbed him, she went through his pockets. After she took his diary, wallet and cellphone, she leaned towards him again, and he once more felt the heat of her breath in his ear.
‘Tell them who did this to you,’ she whispered, still in English. Still seductively. ‘Tel
l them it was the Angel who ripped you…’ She stood up, slipping the knife into her coat pocket. ‘Make sure to tell them that before you die…’
III
Twenty-four years before: Berlin-Lichtenberg, German Democratic Republic
February 1984
‘We’re talking about children here. We are talking about children here, aren’t we?’ Major Georg Drescher’s question hung in the smoke-laden air. Everyone remained silent while a young woman in a Felix Dzerzhinsky Watch Regiment uniform came in with a tray laden with a coffee pot and cups.
The Ministry for State Security — the MfS — of the German Democratic Republic, commonly and resentfully known by the population it purportedly served as the Stasi, occupied an entire city block in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The huge room in which Major Georg Drescher sat was on the first floor of the main Headquarters building on Normannenstrasse. The impressive conference room was dressed in oak panelling with a large map of Germany — East and West — dominating one wall. Next to the map was a large mounted escutcheon of the Ministry seal, the motto of which promised that the Stasi was ‘the sword and shield of the Party’. Like an aircraft carrier in a dry dock, a vast oak conference table dominated the centre of the room. A small bust of Lenin stood in the corner and, mounted on the opposite wall, portraits of General Secretary Erich Honecker and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke glowered disapprovingly at the assembly gathered around the table.
This was the Ministry’s conference chamber: a room for talking, for deciding strategies and planning tactics. This was where the world’s most successful secret police schemed against its enemies abroad. And against its own people.
The Stasi had other rooms. Rooms in this complex and, just a couple of kilometres to the north, at Hohen-schonhausen. Rooms where things other than talking were going on. Storerooms were stacked high with underwear stolen from the homes of potential dissidents: names and numbers tagged to each item so that, if ever the need arose, the Stasi’s specially trained tracker dogs would have a scent to follow. In other rooms, listening devices and special weapons were designed and constructed, poisons and serums developed and tested, while elsewhere countless hours of secretly taped conversations were transcribed, thousands of photographs developed, kilometres of clandestine film and videotape examined. Whole floors of the Stasi headquarters were devoted to the vast archive of files on citizens of the GDR. No state had ever amassed so much intelligence on its own people: information collected through the Stasi’s network of ninety-one thousand operators and three hundred thousand ordinary people who ‘informally cooperated’ with the Ministry for the good of the State, for money or for promotion at work. Or simply to stay out of prison themselves. One in fifty of the East German population spied on neighbours, friends, family members.
And then, of course, there were the other rooms. The rooms with the thickly padded soundproofed walls. The rooms where pain was an instrument of the State.
But this was a room for talking.
Drescher knew the man who sat at the top of the table: Colonel Ulrich Adebach was in uniform, as was the boyish-looking lieutenant who sat to his left smoking, with an open red pack of Salem cigarettes in front of him. Adebach was a heavy-set man in his fifties, greying hair brushed severely back and sporting an inadvisably Walter Ulbricht-type goatee. His shoulder boards showed he carried the rank of colonel. Major Georg Drescher, on the other hand, wore a sports jacket and flannels with a polo-neck sweater, all of which looked of suspiciously non-domestic design and manufacture. But, there again, as an officer of the Stasi’s HVA foreign-intelligence service, he enjoyed a level of contact with the West denied to almost all of his countrymen.
Drescher didn’t know the male officer sitting to the left of the colonel nor the older woman dressed in civilian clothes and Adebach had made no effort to introduce them. Drescher guessed that the young lieutenant whose uniform collar hung loose around his thin neck was Adebach’s adjutant. The air in the conference room was tinged blue with cigarette smoke and Drescher noticed that the young adjutant lit another Salem as soon as he had stubbed one out.
While everyone waited for the young female Watch Regiment officer to finish serving the coffee and leave the room, Drescher contemplated the lugubrious face of Minister of Security Erich Mielke as he scowled from his portrait. If General Secretary Honecker was East Germany’s Tiberius, then Mielke was its Sejanus.
Drescher suppressed a smile. Humour and imagination were not attributes appreciated in a Stasi officer. And a sense of inner silent rebellion certainly wasn’t. Drescher concealed all these aspects of his character whenever he was in the presence of his superiors. Whenever he was in the presence of anyone. But Drescher’s unique way of rebelling consisted of composing in his head caricatures that he would never commit to paper: imagining his superiors naked and in humorously compromising situations.
The female Watch Regiment soldier finished serving the coffee and left the conference room.
‘What are you saying? Are you telling me that you have moral objections to this operation?’ Colonel Ulrich Adebach asked, shattering Drescher’s mental picture of short, fat, joyless Erich Mielke naked except for a ballerina’s tutu and giggling like a schoolgirl while being spanked by General Secretary Honecker.
‘No, comrade colonel, not moral — practical. These girls all seem very young. We are talking about taking immature girls and setting them on an immutable course… sending them out on dangerous and complex assignments completely isolated from any form of direct command structure.’ Drescher grinned bitterly. ‘I have three nieces of my own. I know how difficult it can be to get them to tidy their rooms, far less carry out hazardous missions.’
‘The age range is between thirteen and sixteen years of age.’ Adebach didn’t return Drescher’s smile. ‘And they will not be deployed in the field for several years yet. Maybe I should remind you, Major Drescher, that I was fighting fascists when I was exactly the same age as some of these young women.’
No, you don’t have to remind me, thought Drescher, you’ve told me every time you’ve seen the slightest chance to lever it into the conversation.
‘Fifteen,’ continued Adebach. ‘I was fifteen when I fought my way through the streets of Berlin with the Red Army.’
Drescher nodded, but wondered what it had been like to kill fellow Germans; to stand aside while countless German women were raped by your comrades-in-arms. Or maybe not stand aside. ‘With respect, comrade colonel,’ said Drescher, ‘these are young girls. And we are not talking about combat. The heat of battle.’
‘Have you read the file?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you will know that we have very carefully selected these twelve girls. They all meet a consistent set of criteria. Each of these young women displays athletic or sporting ability, they are all of above-average intelligence and they all have, for one reason or another, displayed a certain disconnectedness in terms of their emotions.’
‘Yes. I saw that in the file. But that disconnectedness, as you put it, has for the most part come about from some psychological trauma in their pasts. I have to say that one could describe them as, well… disturbed. These are problem children.’
‘None of the girls is mentally disordered.’ It was the older woman who responded this time. Drescher was not surprised to hear her speak German with a Russian accent. ‘Nor are they truly sociopathic. But through experience or simply by nature they are emotionally less responsive than their peers.’
‘I see…’ said Drescher. ‘But surely that on its own is hardly a qualification for what we expect of them. I mean… how can I put this
… I know we live in the ideal society of gender equality and opportunity, but there is no doubt that the male… well, the male is more aggressive. Men are more inclined to violence. Killing comes more naturally.’
Adebach smiled wryly and rose to his feet. He walked around the table and stood behind the seated woman. ‘Perhaps I should i
ntroduce you,’ he said to Drescher. ‘This is Major Doctor Ivana Lubimova. The major has been assigned to us by our Soviet comrades. I should tell you that Major Lubimova also served in the Great Patriotic War. She fought with the Seventieth Rifle Division. Special weapons training at Buzuluk.’
‘Sniper?’ asked Drescher.
‘Thirty-three confirmed kills,’ said Lubimova, blankly.
‘And now you’re an army doctor?’ said Drescher, thinking of thirty-three dead Germans.
‘Psychiatrist. And not for the army.’
‘I see,’ said Drescher, and he knew that the matronly Russian hadn’t had far to come: just from Karlshorst, immediately to the south of Lichtenberg. KGB headquarters.
‘I specialise in the psychology of combat,’ continued the Russian. ‘What you have said is actually true: women are much less inclined to kill in hot blood than men are. The vast majority of murders around the world are committed by men and are fuelled by rage, sexual jealousy or alcohol. Or any combination of these elements. And you are also right to say male soldiers perform more aggressively in front-line combat, particularly hand-to-hand. However, when it comes to cold — blooded killing — planned, premeditated homicide — then the pendulum swings the other way. Women who kill often kill in cold blood and for motives other than rage: motives that can be quite abstract. That was why so many of my female comrades made such excellent snipers. That is why these girls are perfect for what we have planned.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Drescher. ‘The killing is only a small part of it. These girls… women… will have to exist isolated from their controls.’
‘That is where you come in, Major Drescher. You have a great deal of experience in Section A,’ said Adebach, referring to the ‘education’ unit of the Stasi’s HVA, responsible for training East Germany’s spies. ‘You will head up a team of instructors that will train these girls in the broadest spectrum of skills. The kind of skills they will need to infiltrate and maintain deep cover in the West.’ Adebach took his seat again.
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