Ragnarok (Twilight of the Gods Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  The older woman gave her a cold look. “Someone wants to see you.”

  Gudrun winced as the elevator came to a halt. She had a nasty feeling she knew precisely who they were going to see. The doors hissed open, revealing a carpeted hallway leading down to a pair of heavy wooden doors. She stepped gingerly out of the elevator, silently relieved to walk on something other than cold stone; Katharine helped her down the corridor, snarling at her whenever she looked left or right. And yet, Gudrun couldn't help herself. The walls were decorated in portraits of the honoured dead, all looking too handsome and muscular to be real. She caught sight of a man who looked like Horst, drawn against a burning panzer and wondered, suddenly if he was a relative. Horst had never said much about his father, merely that he’d died in the wars ...

  Two SS stormtroopers stood guard outside the doors, their eyes barely flickering over Gudrun as she approached. They didn't even seem to be aware that she was practically naked! She felt a sudden flicker of anger as Katharine spoke to the guards, realising that she’d been right all along. The guards who had dragged her out of her cell had been acting, giving Katharine an opportunity to play the hero ... she pushed the thought aside, sharply, as the doors opened to reveal the largest office she’d ever seen. A single wooden desk was positioned at the far end, a man she recognised from his photographs sitting behind it. And seventeen men were standing against the wall, staring at her.

  Gudrun had to fight to keep from cringing. She’d been brought here - chained up, almost nude - to humiliate her in front of the men. Karl Holliston, sitting behind the desk, had planned the whole thing. He didn't think of women as fit for anything, save for being mothers, daughters and housewives. Exposing her was merely the first step towards undermining everything she’d done. It would be hard for any of the men to respect her after they’d seen her in such a fallen state ...

  She shivered. Two years ago, a girl she’d known - vaguely - had been expelled after allowing her boyfriend to take nude photographs of her. Gudrun and her girlfriends had been horrified. How could she have allowed her boyfriend to take photographs that might - easily - fall into the wrong hands? No one had ever looked at her the same way again. In the end, she’d emigrated to Germany South, where all that mattered was the right bloodline and the ability to bear children. Gudrun had no idea what had happened to the poor girl after that.

  Katharine pushed her forward, gently. Gudrun braced herself, stood as firmly as the chains would allow and began to walk towards the desk. The watching men made no sound, no catcalls nor expressions of pity; they just watched as she stepped forward. Holliston’s face twisted oddly as he studied her, his expression dark and cold. Gudrun shivered, despite herself. Holliston wasn't interested in anything, but power. He’d do anything to keep it.

  She came to a halt and stared at him, forcing herself to meet his eyes. She’d met enough powerful men - her father had always seemed all-powerful to her - to know that open defiance was rarely welcomed. Neither her father nor her male teachers had been pleased when she'd talked back to them, although - in all honesty - her mother and her female teachers had been pretty much the same. Hell, it had been harder to predict what would set her mother off ...

  “Gudrun,” Holliston said. His voice was very cold. “Battle-maiden.”

  Gudrun felt a hot flash of anger. Only Konrad had ever called her that, back when they’d been getting to know one another. He’d said it to tease her ...

  “You could have borne the Reich many strong sons,” Holliston continued. “Instead, you chose to bring it down.”

  It was hard to keep the smirk off her face, despite the danger. Holliston and his ilk had never considered that a mere woman could be dangerous. Hell, Gudrun had been eighteen when Konrad had been wounded. Old enough to marry, old enough to bear children, but not old enough to be considered a responsible adult. She’d practically been a minor child, as far as the law was concerned; she’d certainly enjoyed no greater rights at eighteen than at eight. But then, Holliston probably needed a woman to be a grandmother before he started taking her seriously ...

  She threw caution to the winds. “The man I was going to marry was wounded in one of your wars,” she said. There was no point in trying to hide it. She’d told the story often enough that it had probably reached Germanica by now. “And you didn't even have the decency to tell us what had happened to him.”

  Holliston showed no visible reaction to her words. “Your boyfriend gave his life in defence of civilisation,” he said. “You betrayed him.”

  Gudrun felt another surge of anger. That comment stung. Konrad would not have approved of her standing up to the Reich. He’d been a loyal SS stormtrooper. And she’d married Horst ...

  “He didn't die,” she said. “You kept him alive, unable to heal him and unable to just let him go. You betrayed him.”

  She forced her voice to harden. “You betrayed everyone.”

  “And you betrayed the Reich,” Holliston countered. “Or have you forgotten the oath you swore every day at school? And when you joined the BDM?”

  “I forgot nothing,” Gudrun said. He had a point, she had to admit. She’d been swearing loyalty long before she’d actually known what the words meant. “But the Reich betrayed its citizens first.”

  She leaned forward, almost overbalancing and falling over. “Konrad was your ideal,” she said. “Brave and bold, blonde and strong; I could have been happy as his wife, bearing his children and bringing them up while he fought to defend the Reich. But instead he was killed in an unwinnable war and you didn't even have the decency to admit what happened to him.

  “And if that is what you will do to Konrad,” she added, “what will you do to everyone who does not come up to scratch? Your stormtroopers killed young men in Germany Prime, they raped and abused young women. How can you claim to be fighting for the Volk when you abuse it?”

  She looked at the other men in the room. “What will happen to your sons? Or to your daughters?”

  “Be silent,” Holliston said.

  Gudrun ignored him. She’d been silent for too long. Eighteen years of her life had been spent accepting that her place in the world would always be subordinate to a man, even though she’d managed to win a place at university. She’d loved Konrad - she admitted it to herself - but she knew now she would never have been happy as a housewife, doing nothing more than cooking his food and bearing his children. And perhaps she would have been left alone if Konrad had gone back to the war and died there.

  “You and yours ruled the Reich for forty years,” she said, turning back to him. If these were going to be her last words, they were going to be good ones. “And yet you’re scared to let the people breathe. You ran the entire country into the ground! Do you really think I could have gotten anywhere if the people hadn't had a cause? You made your own enemies.”

  She allowed her voice to harden. “You did this to us,” she added. “Your entire claim to power is based on a lie.”

  “I do not expect you to understand,” Holliston said. His voice dripped contempt. “You’re only a girl.”

  Gudrun bit down on her reaction, hard. He wanted her to scream at him; he wanted her to explode in feminine rage, to prove to his allies that Gudrun was just an emotional girl - a child - whose opinion was too emotional to be valid. But she’d sat on the cabinet, back in Berlin. She’d learned more, she suspected, than he’d ever realised. And keeping her temper under control was only part of it.

  “I don’t think that anyone has any doubt that I am a young woman,” she said, shrugging as through her near-nakedness didn't bother her. “But does that make me wrong?”

  She looked up, her eyes moving from face to face. “Does that make me wrong?”

  Holliston made no attempt to answer the question. Part of her considered that to be a good thing, a tacit confession that he had no answer. But the rest of her knew it wasn’t ideal. She could be right - or wrong - and yet it didn't matter. She was still a prisoner, trapped hundreds of mil
es from her friends and comrades. And even if they knew where she was, getting to her would be almost impossible. She was doomed.

  “You will be interrogated until we have drained every last scrap of information from you,” Holliston informed her, instead. “And then you will be put on trial for crimes against the Reich.”

  Gudrun almost smiled. A trial? The Reich rarely bothered with trials. A criminal was guilty - if he wasn't guilty, he wouldn't be in jail. But she knew exactly what he had in mind. He could order her shot at any moment, but that would just make her a martyr. She’d be more dangerous to him in death than she’d ever been in life. He needed to break her - to discredit her - before he killed her. By then, death would probably be a relief.

  “Take her back to her cell,” he ordered. “And make sure she’s held securely.”

  “Jawohl, Mein Fuhrer,” Katharine said.

  Gudrun gritted her teeth as Katharine swung her around, then forced herself to walk towards the door. She was damned if she was showing weakness now, despite the humiliation. If she was a prisoner, she'd be a tough prisoner ...

  And maybe I can work on Katherine too, she thought, as she made her way out of the door and back down the corridor. She might have ideas of her own now.

  It wasn't much, she acknowledged. But it was all she had.

  Chapter Five

  Berlin, Germany Prime

  29 October 1985

  “Are you sure this is going to work?”

  Horst Albrecht shook his head, crossly. Kurt Wieland seemed to veer constantly between a determination to leave as quickly as possible and an understandable fear that they wouldn't be able to get past the first set of checkpoints. Horst didn't really blame him for being conflicted - he was an officer in the Heer, not someone who should be assigned to a stealth mission - but it was annoying. It was quite hard to see how Gudrun and Kurt were actually related.

  “There is no way to guarantee this will work,” Horst said. He glanced down at the forged papers, checking them again and again for any mistakes. It wasn't the first time he’d been an infiltrator, but the consequences for getting caught this time would be far worse. “If you want to go back to the infantry, go now.”

  He ignored Kurt’s flash of anger as he checked the final pair of ID cards. They weren’t precisely forgeries - they’d been produced at the SS office in Berlin - but they wouldn't match the records in Germanica. The SS had a mania for good records keeping - just about every German had a file, buried somewhere in the government bureaucracy - and a particularly alert officer might wonder why there wasn't a copy within reach. Horst would have been surprised if the SS-run government hadn't started changing everything it could, just to prevent the provisional government from sending spies and commandos into its territory.

  But changing all of the ID cards in Germany East would be a long and time-consuming process, he told himself. The ID cards had been changed once, years ago; it had taken months before every last set of old papers had been collected and replacements issued by the bureaucracy. And that had been in peacetime. There will be so much disruption in Germany East that changing the ID cards will be the least of their problems.

  “They should suffice,” he said, finally. “Are you coming?”

  “Of course,” Kurt snapped.

  Horst sighed, inwardly. Kurt had admitted, reluctantly, that he blamed himself for the whole mess. If he hadn't helped Gudrun break into the hospital, Gudrun would never have kick-started the whole chain of events that had led down to civil war. But Horst suspected Kurt was wrong. Gudrun, his wife and lover, was simply too determined to be deterred for long, even by her family’s disapproval. She would have found another way into the hospital.

  “Very good,” Horst said. He would have preferred to go alone, even though he knew that having a second pair of hands along might be helpful. He’d been steeped in SS culture and tradition almost as soon as he could walk; Kurt, for all of his undoubted bravery, lacked the background he needed to pass unremarked. “Read the papers and memorise them.”

  Kurt gave him a sharp look as he picked up the first folder. “Do you expect this to be necessary?”

  “It depends,” Horst said. He smirked, suddenly. “Are you circumcised?”

  Kurt glared. “No!”

  “Good,” Horst said. “It’s very rare for anyone to be circumcised in Germany East. If you had been, we would have had to alter the file to reflect that.”

  He picked up his own folder and read it through again, reminding himself of the details. It was a careful balance between truth and lies, classing him as a resident of Germany East on one hand and an SS Hauptsturmfuehrer with special orders to report to Germanica on the other. He knew enough about the various special operations divisions to pass for a commando, as long as he didn't run into an actual commando. It was all too possible that the person they encountered would know everyone in his unit by name or reputation.

  And I won’t know all the private jokes and traditions, he thought. I could be tripped up quite easily.

  “There’s a surprising amount of truth here,” Kurt said, finally. “Is it wise for me to be a native of Berlin?”

  “Your accent marks you out as a Berliner,” Horst said. Kurt would have lost the accent, if he’d been trained in Germany East. “There’s no point in trying to pass you off as an Easterner.”

  He scowled. Kurt’s accent was a problem, even though they’d done their best to compensate for it. There were plenty of SS officers who had been born and trained in Germany Prime, but in these days ... they’d just have to hope they didn't run into someone who would be automatically suspicious of a Westerner. It shouldn’t be that much of a danger. Karl Holliston had been born in Berlin, after all.

  “Never mind that,” he added. “Do you know the songs?”

  “Most of them,” Kurt said. He didn't sound pleased. “We learned them in the Hitler Youth.”

  “There’ll be some verses you weren't taught,” Horst said. He couldn't imagine parents being very pleased if their children had been taught the more bloodcurdling verses. “We’ll go over that later, just in case we are invited to sing with the men.”

  Kurt gave him a sidelong look. “Is that likely?”

  “The SS prides itself on being one big happy family,” Horst said. “There’s a great deal of rivalry, of course, but it’s never brutal.”

  “Really,” Kurt said, sarcastically.

  Horst nodded. It was rare - almost unknown - for officers in the Heer to socialise with their men, but SS officers were expected to spend a great deal of time with their men. And local units would often fraternise with other units. It was supposed to help, when the units were mashed together into improvised battlegroups. The men already knew and respected their new comrades.

  “The SS is not the Heer,” he said, finally. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming they’re the same, just because they use the same weapons. There’s a lot of little differences between them.”

  “And I might slip up because of them,” Kurt said. “Perhaps I’ll just let you do the talking.”

  “That would be a good idea,” Horst said, dryly.

  He put the folder down and opened up the latest set of reports from the front. The SS lines were firming up, unsurprisingly. Horst knew the Waffen-SS. They would have taken a beating, the defeat would have given them a terrible shock, but they were trained to recover from anything. He could imagine the officers moving from unit to unit, collecting stragglers and slotting them into the front lines; filling holes in some units, disbanding others until after the war. And probably doing whatever they could to slow down the advancing panzers as much as possible.

  They’ll need time to boost morale, Horst told himself. Stopping a panzer or two won’t be enough.

  Kurt looked up. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Slip through the lines,” Horst said. He tapped the papers. “We shouldn't have any trouble getting our hands on a jeep, once we show them our ID. And then we just head east to Germanica.�
��

  “That could take a while,” Kurt observed.

  Horst nodded. There were just over a thousand miles between Berlin and Germanica. Even if they took the autobahns, even if nothing got in their way, it would take at least five or six days to reach Germanica. And he knew there would be problems. There were plenty of checkpoints on the autobahns.

  And even if there weren't, he thought, they’ll be using them to rush supplies and men to the front.

  “So we reach Germanica,” Kurt added. “What then?”

  “We play it by ear,” Horst said. In truth, there was no way to come up with a proper plan until they knew the situation on the ground. “I have some ... contacts ... I might be able to convince to help us. If they refuse - or if we can't meet them - we will have to think of something else.”

  He scowled. He’d seen the Reichstag in Germanica before, back when he’d gone to the city for a Victory Day parade. It was a towering nightmare of stone and steel, protected by some of the finest stormtroopers in the Reich. And now, it was playing host to the self-promoted Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich. He would be surprised if the building wasn't ringed with defences, from antiaircraft guns to antitank weapons. It wouldn't be strange for Germany East.