Ragnarok (Twilight of the Gods Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “We have to move now,” he said, softly. “If we give them too much time, they will use it against us.”

  “Yes, Herr Chancellor,” Voss said. “But I should caution you that we need more manpower.”

  Volker sighed. Almost every male German in the Reich had some military skills - thanks to the Hitler Youth - but not all of them had gone into the military. They’d started training volunteers even before the siege of Berlin had begun, yet it would take months before the new recruits were ready for the demands of modern war. There was an entire army in South Africa, but getting it back to the mainland in time for the big offensive was impossible. Even disengaging from the South African War was proving tricky.

  “See what you can drag up,” he said, finally.

  “My staff did have an idea,” Voss said. “We could approach the French or the Italians for manpower.”

  Volker looked up at him, sharply. “Are they mad?”

  “Italy and France both have good reason to want to keep Holliston out of power,” Voss pointed out, dryly. “Fighting beside us would be better than fighting Holliston on his own, later.”

  “Hah,” Volker said.

  In truth, he wasn't sure how to react. The French could fight well, he’d been told, but they’d lost so badly in 1940 that they’d never recovered. Their infantry had a great deal of experience fighting in North Africa, yet could they stand up to combat in Germany East without panzers and jet fighters of their own? And the Italians were laughable. They’d been jokes back in 1940 and they were still jokes. Their empire would have fallen apart long ago if they hadn't been backed up by the Reich.

  And they weren't interested in crushing the life out of their territories, he acknowledged, ruefully. They might have lost their empires if their subjects hadn't realised that they were better masters than us.

  “If you can convince them to send troops, do so,” he said, finally. “But see what they want in exchange.”

  He shook his head in frustration. The Reich simply didn't have many diplomats. A year ago, the subject nations had known to obey - or else - while the North Atlantic Alliance had known better than to lower its guard, no matter what honeyed words came out of Berlin and the Reich. Now ... he didn't know quite how to talk to the French. Barking orders was no longer possible, but he didn't want to let the French walk all over him either ...

  “They’ll want political freedom,” Voss predicted. “And the return of Alsace-Lorraine.”

  Volker nodded. The French had made that demand before, back when Gudrun had tried to come to terms with them. And it was politically impossible. There wasn't a single ethnic Frenchman living in Alsace-Lorraine, not now. They’d all been driven out in 1950, when the Reich had been reshaping Western Europe after the war. The French hadn't even had the worst of it. Countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands had completely disappeared from the map. The lucky ones - the ones who couldn't pass for German - had been shipped into French North Africa.

  And the unlucky ones were exterminated, he thought, grimly.

  He’d been in the SS. He knew how Untermenschen were treated. And yet it had been a shock to realise just how many Untermenschen had been slaughtered. The dispassionate remarks in school textbooks utterly failed to convey the sheer horror of what the Reich had done. Volker wouldn't shed any tears for Untermenschen who had opposed the Reich, but how many of the Reich’s victims had been enemies? How many of the dead had been Germans who had been wounded in combat or born with defects?

  “See what they say,” he said. “But we can't give them Alsace-Lorraine.”

  It was going to be a nightmare, he predicted. The Reich knew how to handle subject states - they supported the Reich and did as they were told, in exchange for what scraps the Reich offered them - but independent states? What would happen when the French started to build up their armoured divisions? Or produce their own jet fighters? Or even develop their own nuclear weapons? Would they want revenge for forty years of oppression?

  “They may be satisfied merely to know that the SS beast has been slain,” Voss offered. He didn't sound confident. “We will see.”

  Volker sighed. “Begin drawing up the plans to take the offensive as soon as possible,” he said. “Even if we don’t have the French and Italians in support, we need to move anyway.”

  Which will weaken us if they decide to take matters into their own hands, he thought. The French had a long way to go before they could stand up to the Reich, let alone match it, but what would happen if the German population was thoroughly sick of war? And they will know it.

  He sighed as Voss saluted and left the room. If he’d known what Gudrun would unleash, when she'd started asking pointed questions, he would have gone to her father and ... and done what? Konrad would still have been left in the hospital, trapped between life and death; his parents, his sister, his girlfriend utterly unaware of his condition. It wasn't fair to blame Gudrun, he told himself sharply, for everything that had happened. The underlying weakness of the Reich, the steady collapse of the entire structure, had been underway long before she’d been born, let alone reached adulthood.

  Her father might have told her not to meddle in politics, he thought. She might have been pulled out of the university and married to someone he chose, but would it have made a difference? Or would we have fallen harder because no one was prepared to stand up and point out that the Kaiser had no clothes?

  He looked down at the map for a long moment. He’d approved of Gudrun as a possible wife for his son, back when the world had made sense. And then his feelings had grown mixed when she’d made it impossible for him to hide from the truth any longer. Part of him had been angry at her, even though he’d known it wasn't her fault. And now she was a prisoner, taken by the SS. Volker knew, all too well, just what the SS would do with her, after everything she’d done to them. He'd hoped Gudrun - or her body - would turn up somewhere in Berlin, but there had been no sign of her.

  She’s been taken to Germanica, he thought. And all we can do is hope they give her a quick death.

  There was a tap on his door. He looked up to see his aide, looking grim.

  “Herr Chancellor,” he said. “Minister Krueger is here to see you.”

  “Show him in,” Volker ordered. “And then bring us both coffee.”

  He schooled his face into impassivity as Hans Krueger was shown into his office. Krueger was a smart man, but he wasn't a likeable man. He’d been on the former Reich Council and had switched sides, a little too quickly, after the uprising. Volker had no reason to distrust him - Holliston wouldn't give Krueger a quick death if Krueger were captured - but there was something about Krueger that annoyed him. The man was more concerned with his figures than the real world.

  And those figures can change the real world, Volker thought. There had been something oddly effeminate about the accountants in the factory, the men who could decide - seemingly on a whim - who was worth keeping and who could be fired. And Krueger had something of the same air about him. He was not a manly man. He cannot be trusted completely.

  “Herr Chancellor,” Krueger said. He was carrying a leather folder under one arm. “Do you have a moment?”

  “Too many of them,” Volker admitted. He wanted to be out there, doing something. “Is this important?”

  “I’ve been running the latest set of figures,” Krueger said, quietly. He took a seat and opened the folder. “We’re looking at a total economic crash within three months.”

  Volker sucked in his breath. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s the best-case,” Krueger said. “Frankly, we’ve been pushing everything too hard over the last decade. We simply didn't give our industrial base any chance to breathe.”

  “I didn't make those decisions,” Volker snarled.

  “I know,” Krueger said. “But we still have to deal with the consequences.”

  He looked grim. “It gets worse,” he added. “Food supplies are starting to run out.”

  “Then grow mor
e,” Volker said.

  “We can't, not immediately,” Krueger said. “Quite a few farmers were drafted into the army, Herr Chancellor. That had an impact on productivity. But we also drew most of our food from Germany East. Germany Prime - alone - cannot feed itself forever. We have already started expanding our farming capabilities, but it will be several years before they make an impact.”

  He sighed. “And if we have an industrial collapse at the same time,” he added, “we will be staring at outright chaos.”

  “Take food from the French,” Volker said, after a moment. “Or buy it from the Americans.”

  “The French don’t produce enough food to meet our demands - even if they were willing to meet our demands,” Krueger warned. “They never pushed production - they knew we’d steal it. And the Americans will expect us to pay.”

  “And we don't have any cash,” Volker said. The Reich’s stockpiles of foreign cash had always been very limited. “There’s nothing we can use to pay the Americans.”

  “If indeed they have the food on hand,” Krueger added. “They might not be able to meet our demands either.”

  Volker cursed under his breath. The Americans had been helpful, but he couldn't help thinking that the United States would welcome a German collapse. Whoever won the war would need to spend years rebuilding, years the Americans could use to make themselves invincible, utterly untouchable. They were already too far ahead of the Reich ...

  ... And they weren't even his real problem.

  He gritted his teeth. “And if the entire population starts to starve ...”

  “We lose,” Krueger said, bluntly. “We need to take action, quickly.”

  “And that means we need this war to end, quickly,” Volker agreed. “And if we don’t win soon, we’ll lose.”

  Chapter Four

  Germanica (Moscow), Germany East

  29 October 1985

  They were scared of her.

  Gudrun clung to the thought, even though she felt utterly naked and utterly helpless. The SS was scared of her. They had stripped her down to her underwear, searched her so thoroughly that she doubted there was even a millimetre of her body that hadn't been inspected, then chained her up so carefully that she could barely move. And if that hadn’t been enough, they’d repeated the search at regular intervals. Did they think she’d somehow managed to conceal a weapon even as they carried her into the very heart of their territory?

  She knew it was insane - she knew they weren't scared of her - but it was all that gave her hope. They’d driven her east, then transferred her to a plane. She wouldn’t even have known they were flying her to Germanica if one of her guards hadn't said it out loud, clearly unaware she was listening. Or perhaps it had been deliberate. They’d wanted her to fear ...

  “They will try to break down your resistance,” Horst had told her. It felt like years since they’d been students together, plotting how best to bring down the Reich. “They will want to make you feel helpless, as if you have lost all control over yourself. And if you let them convince you that you are hopeless, you’re doomed.”

  But it was hard, so hard, to keep from feeling helpless. Gudrun had been arrested before, but the SS hadn't known who or what she was. They’d seen her as just another troublemaker, a student in the wrong place at the wrong time ... and the experience had nearly proved too much for her. Now ... they knew who she was; they knew what she’d done. She had no reason to expert mercy.

  And the only reason they went to so much trouble to take me alive, she thought, was because they want me for something.

  She shivered, helplessly. The temperature had been dropping for hours now, ever since she’d been taken from the airport and dumped into a prison cell, but none of the guards had offered her anything more substantial to wear. Her bra and panties, already torn by the repeated strip searches, provided no protection at all. She couldn't help wondering if she would catch her death of cold before the SS started torturing her, then decided the cold was probably part of the torture. Horst had warned her that they would do everything in their power to break her will, but his words hadn't been anything like enough to convoy the sheer sense of helplessness and futility pervading her body and soul. Her life was definitely no longer her own.

  The cell itself was completely empty, save for a bed and a bucket she was too chained up to use. She suspected it was yet another humiliation, although they hadn't fed her anything like enough for it to be a real problem. And they hadn't made any attempt to hide the cameras either, hanging four of them from the ceiling and wrapping them in steel mesh. Absurdly, the sight almost made her giggle. She was chained - and even if she hadn't been, she was too short to reach them, even if she stood on the bed.

  But they might have taller prisoners, she thought, Horst was a head taller than her - and she knew the SS prized height. For all she knew, Horst was a dwarf compared to some of his former comrades. Besides, the Slavs she'd seen had all been short and ugly, but was that true of all Slavs? And they clearly don’t want to take any risks.

  She forced herself to relax, even though it was futile. Her wrists and ankles ached; the metal belt they’d wrapped around her hips dug into her flesh and she was hungry, terrifyingly hungry. She’d never really gone hungry in her life, even though some of the food she’d had to choke down at school was barely a step or two above the slop fed to prisoners and Gastarbeiters. Now, she couldn't help feeling as though she didn't have the energy for anything. It wouldn't be long, she suspected, before she died ...

  ... And the hell of it was that a quick death would probably be a relief.

  The cell door opened. Two burly male guards stepped through, glaring suspiciously at her as if they expected her to have vanished somewhere in the last hour. Gudrun resisted the urge to rattle her chains at them; instead, she just waited - reluctantly - as they glanced around the cell, then yanked her to her feet and shoved her through the door. They didn't speak to her, they never did. Only one of her captors had spoken to her since she’d been taken prisoner and Gudrun hadn't seen her for days.

  She forced herself to stand still as they ran their hands over her body, telling herself - desperately - that it was Horst who was touching her. But it was hard to believe it - truly believe it - when their rough fingers were pinching at her flesh and tugging down her panties to check that she hadn't managed to conceal something between her legs. And this time, they were worse. Their hands were rubbing at her clit as if they expected her to enjoy it, their breathing growing deeper and deeper with anticipation as they pushed her over to the table and bent her over. She realised, feeling a surge of fear, that she was about to be raped ...

  “That will do,” a cool voice said.

  The guards started, then let go of her. Gudrun twisted her head and saw Hauptsturmfuehrer Katharine Milch standing there, looking grim. The older woman - the first woman she'd seen wearing a uniform - looked hellishly intimidating. If she had a right to wear that uniform, Gudrun thought, she wouldn't just be as good as a man, she’d be better. And she’d saved Gudrun from a fate worse than death ...

  ... Or had she?

  Did they really plan to rape me, Gudrun asked herself, or was she always meant to save me from them?

  It was impossible to tell. She knew just what horrors awaited prisoners, but she found it hard to believe that the SS guards in Germanica were so undisciplined that they would rape a prisoner without permission. And yet ... she couldn't help feeling relief, clinging to Katharine like a drowning man would cling to a lifejacket. But had the whole incident been set up to make her cling to Katharine? She had no way to know.

  She cursed under her breath as Katharine pulled her panties back into position, then helped Gudrun to walk slowly towards the door. It was hard, so hard, to walk with a chain wrapped around her ankles. If Katharine hadn't been holding her, she would have fallen over several times. And yet ... what was Katharine doing? Where were they going?

  It was a relief to be out of the cell, but the interior o
f the building wasn’t particularly reassuring. She couldn't help remembering the interior of the first prison she’d visited - and her old school, which had probably been designed by the same person. Grey walls, solid metal doors ... no signs on the walls, let alone paintings or anything else that would give the building personality. It was completely soulless ... she shivered, again, as they reached an elevator and stepped inside. The air was, if anything, growing colder. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering.

  She hadn't wanted to talk to Katharine, but she couldn't help herself. “Where are we going?”