Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Fifty-Six
14th September 1964
Kreuzburg, Berlin
Scribbling her thoughts down in the latest notebook that contained her diary, Anne knew that she should be working on editing her latest manuscript. Instead, she was procrastinating by writing about the latest antics of her friends and family or the stories she had read in the newspaper.
An Interviewer had once asked Anne if her novels were intended to be allegories. That had caused her to take a step back and take a look at what she had written over the previous years and discovered that it was easy apply that interpretation to them. All of her novels featured characters who were not so different from herself living through times of rapid change. The difference was that setting them in an environment remote from her own in an imagined copper or bronze age made it far enough removed from her own life to be able to write effectively and have it published.
Through all of that, Anne was still a prolific diarist and that had extended into dozens of notebooks that she kept on a shelf in her home office. Included were things like getting books published, meeting the man who would become her husband for the first time, her marriage and the birth of her children. All of that was so deeply personal and included many embarrassing details about herself as well as those she loved. She simply could not imagine her diaries ever getting published, not in a million years. If the novels she wrote were anything like those, she would simply be unable to let them go.
Leni had a different perspective about it, even going so far as to offer to edit Anne’s diaries herself. Anne knew that would only last until Leni reached the pages that dealt with how she had been the one who had found Leni collapsed on the bathroom floor of the old house that they had lived in, bleeding out from where she had slit her wrists. It didn’t take much imagination to see what Leni’s reaction to reading about Anne’s reaction to her suicide attempt would be.
There were also things in there about everyone else who had lived in that house back then. The tabloids would eat up those parts, especially the bits about Katherine or Gia and present them without context. Anne loved them all like family and didn’t want to expose the details of their lives or her own. Yet still she wrote in her diary every day. Including ever greater numbers of the details about her circle of friends and family. It was not as if the details of her own life were something that anyone would ever actually want to read. Anne knew that she was just not a very exciting person.
Prague, Bohemia
Like with the Lynx before it, the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Leopard was being assembled by ČKD in Prague and the design had been somewhat altered to suit the needs of the Bohemian Army. No one had a problem with this because it had spurred innovation, the same sort that had resulted in the Lynx II with its 10.5cm main gun and SPz series of APCs. As the patron of the corporation, Michael was more than happy to go take a look at the new Panzer and he felt very much like the proverbial child in a candy store as he climbed down into the turret through the commander’s cupola.
Looking at all the various controls for the range finding and fire control systems, Michael found them both familiar and a bit daunting at the same time. While similar to the systems he had trained with, they were clearly more advanced. The radios though, they were exactly the same. Michael flipped the switch to turn one of the radios on and the turret was filled with Rock & Roll music from a station in Prague. That happening had been an easy prediction.
Glancing down at the Gunner’s seat, Michael saw the controls for the turret itself. The firing pedals, the knobs and gages for aiming the shots to the selected shells. Looking over at the loaders seat and the ready rack of shells. Michael saw that the Panzergranate 39 had been eliminated from the inventory. He had heard about that happening, but to actually see it. That felt like a bit of his childhood imaginings had gone with it. What had replaced it though, was an odd combination of shells that he was not yet familiar with. Supposedly, the Leopard’s main gun had been designed to accommodate them, by making the barrel a smooth bore in response to the Russians doing something similar. Michael knew that he could see for himself by opening the gun breech, something he was reluctant to do. As much as he disliked spending his time that way, he was going to have to knuckle down and spend some time studying the new Panzer by reading the guidebooks. Whoever wrote those had an amazing talent for making any subject seem tedious and dull.
Climbing out of the turret, Michael saw that the regular crew of the Panzer were staring at him, without venturing comment. Everyone knew that he had commanded a Platoon of Lynx II Panzers in Korea, so they assumed that he was an expert in matters like these. It was aggravating because one of the lessons that Kurt had taught him was that if he wasn’t listening to what others said it was inevitable that he would mess something up. It was hard to listen when the other guy wasn’t speaking.
“So?” Michael asked them, “What do you think of the new ride?”
As it turned out they had plenty to say after all.