Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred One
3rd October 1964
Mitte, Berlin
“For the last time!” Suse yelled as she pulled the strap of her bookbag over her shoulder. “This is not a date!”
Her mother just smirked at that and Suse stormed out of the house. Dating Manfred would be gross, she had known him her entire life and he was basically her cousin.
Not for the first time Suse regretted telling her parents that she had agreed to tutor Manfred von Mischner. That wasn’t the only aggravating aspect of this whole thing. When Suse had asked what he had wanted to study, Manfred had pulled out a copy of Panzer Corps Officer’s Entrance Exam. It seemed that he had trouble with the mathematics section and the score required to gain admission had been raised recently. Suse had done her best to hide her anger upon seeing that. Both of them came from families with long traditions of service, just the difference between them came down to a chromosome and Suse seeming to get every questionable trait that her parents had to offer.
Suse had her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat as she made her way through the city streets until she got to the clubhouse of the organization that ran the Football League that Manfred was a part of, where they had agreed to meet this afternoon. For some reason he didn’t want his parents to know what he was up to. Considering the role that Aunt Helene played in Government and Uncle Hans’ career she would think that they wouldn’t have a problem with any of it. Manfred insisted on secrecy though.
While the club rules stated that they were oriented primarily towards young men and boys, girls were allowed into certain parts of the clubhouse, actually the ground floor of an office building in Mitte, the lobby and canteen mostly. Suse was to remain under the watchful eye of the staff at all times. Once she had been read the riot act about how no funny games were to be played on the premise, Suse had discovered that the staff approved of her actual purpose there.
Suse met Manfred in the canteen, it was a medium sized room with mismatched tables and chairs. A pair of refrigerators and just enough of a kitchen to heat up food that had been prepared elsewhere were provided. Like they had the week before, they sat down at the table and started going over the sample math problems. Suse was finding her patience tested by having to explain to Manfred the process so that if he was presented with a different set of problems, he could solve them. Unfortunately, that was when two of his friends walked in and started rummaging through one of the refrigerators.
“Just who is this Manny?” One of them asked as he drank from a bottle of pop that he had found, looking at Suse.
“A friend Adi” Manfred replied with pretend nonchalance, “She’s helping me with this stuff.”
“Still with this Army rot” Adi said looking at the papers scattered on the table, his unnamed friend snickered at that. “There are other, better ways to waste your life than driving Panzers around.”
“He’s too big for that” Suse said, “So he’s trying to get into the Dragoons like his father.”
“Yes, they like the Panzer crews to be small” The unnamed friend said, “Is that what you are for cupcake.”
“I couldn’t meet the standard. You have to be able to lift twenty-five kilograms” Suse said and knew that she had made a mistake as soon as she said it. Adi and the unnamed friend clearly found something about that amusing.
Getting up, Suse started to gather her things.
“Do you even weigh twenty-five kilos?” Adi asked before he grabbed the lapels of Suse’s coat and lifted her off her feet.
“Don’t be an ass Adi” Manfred said, “You were warned about pulling stunts like this, put her down before she hurts you.”
Adi and the unnamed friend laughed at that, not knowing that Suse was getting ready to kick him as hard as she could in the groin…
Instead, Adi dropped her and Suse was hardly able to keep her feet when she landed. Adi and his unnamed friend were still laughing as they left the room.
“Sorry about them” Manfred said, “They can be like that at times.”
“I don’t care” Suse replied as she wondered where the staff who were supposed to be keeping an eye on her had vanished to. All of the times that people had treated her as a helpless little girl coming back to her. “Just pick a different place next time.”
Arabian Desert
There were few things that offended the eye more than an oil field like the one that Nassim Abdullah was looking at. A couple decades earlier, he would have cheerfully butchered the workers who had come from a place called Texas. They were rude men who thought nothing of spending their days in a nearly constant drunken stupor. He was even starting to wonder if they were worse than even the British.
The thing that was staying his hand was that the Humble Oil & Refinery Company was paying him extremely well to keep their people alive. While the Company’s stated reasoning was that he was to provide security from other tribes, it was his own that controlled the area that they were operating in. There was also the matter of a rival American corporation paying off a different tribe a couple hundred kilometers away. Humble was more than happy to give Nassim dozens of the M-9 rifles that the U.S. Army was practically giving away according to the Texans. There was also the offer of heavier weapons that had been hinted at.
Like always, Nassim didn’t even pretend to trust the Americans. He drove the hardest bargain he could and for some strange reason that had caused the Executives he had dealt with to show him a small sliver of respect. Still, he could tell that their own foolish pride blinded them in that plus so many other ways. Oddly, the Americans were acting much like the Turks who had finally left the Arabian Desert decades earlier. In a place like this it was easy to see that past and present revealed what the future held.