Chapter One Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-One
1st June 1961
Mitte, Berlin
Say what you will about the Germans, Jack thought to himself as he walked into the hotel bar, they were certainly as a group, punctual.
He was meeting Franz Richter and the Lawyer was already waiting in the bar though Jack was a few minutes early. Back in Dublin the time to start an informal meeting like this would have been considerably more nebulous.
“Herr Kennedy” Richter said.
Jack just nodded in return before sitting down across the table from Richter and waited in silence until the waiter came for his order.
“This case isn’t what it seems” Richter said once Jack’s drink arrived.
“I could have told you that” Jack replied, “Berta Beck lacks the means to pursue a case like this, so someone with deep pockets is backing this.”
“Yes” Richter replied, “It reads like a who’s who among the leaders and financiers of the far-right Monarchists and Nationalists.”
“You know this?” Jack asked, a bit bewildered.
“None of this is a secret” Richter said, “While Gräfin Katherine has a generally good public image, it is largely because most of the people writing about her are sympathetic to her. Those who hate her and what she represents have a very different take. They see how she has steadily amassed wealth and power. Not only can they no longer dismiss her, but they can see that she is still a relatively young woman and they fear what she might become over the next decade.”
“If that is true, then they cannot think that this lawsuit is the means to stop her” Jack replied.
“You work Criminal Law in Ireland” Richter said, “How often did you encounter people who bought into their own garbage?”
“Nearly every day” Jack said. They believed the sorts of things that they told each other about Kat behind closed doors and implied in the newspaper columns that they wrote. They were wrong about what she was, Kat was better than that while at the same time being far worse than they imagined. They might fear what she would be in a decade, if they knew the truth then they would be petrified about what was coming at them as soon as this lawsuit was over.
Munster, Germany
Months as a Staff Officer in Wunsdorf and Kurt finally got himself reassigned. However, it wasn’t to command a Panzer Brigade. Instead, he was sent to Munster to teach Junior Officers tactics in night fighting. It seemed that with a new generation of Sperber devices becoming standard equipment in all armored vehicles in the Panzer Corps, Kurt was seen as an expert in the field. When he had conducted his own evaluation of the latest device, he had discovered that the photoreceptors were less likely the burn out and the shock that came from the main gun of a Lynx didn’t knock the Sperber device out of action. Kurt knew that he really could have used this version of the Sperber device two decades earlier in 1943. Hell, he could have used the rest of Lynx for that matter, back then.
“Blue Six, where the Hell do you think you are going?” Kurt yelled into the microphone as he watched the movement of the Platoon that he was commanding tonight. Blue Six, or Lieutenant Michael von Preussen, or was it von Bohemia these days, was a bit of a surprise to Kurt. The young King of Bohemia was one of the young men who Kurt had been tasked with teaching to lead Companies.
“Sorry, Sir” Blue Six replied, “Could you repeat that?”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise to Kurt, but Michael was proving to be an aggressive Panzer Commander along the lines of what Kurt himself had taught him to be. The result was that Kurt was getting a dose of his own medicine. He could think of dozens of times when he had charged ahead after ignoring his commander’s voice as it had come over his headphones. Frequently, it had been the fact that Kurt had come out ahead alone that had prevented him from being disciplined in the wake of such occurrences. “Yeah, it worked this time but if you do it again…” Kurt had found himself using those words. None of this was helped by aggressive PCs being popular with the crews.
Tonight, how that was working was that the Platoon was in position to ambush an “enemy” column. Michael had grown impatient in exactly the same manner that Kurt himself would have a couple decades earlier. He could either let Michael come to grief or else he could back the play in hopes that he could salvage something from the bloody chaotic mess that was about to happen. He had about five seconds to make up his mind because even at night a Lynx wasn’t exactly inconspicuous and unless whoever was in charge of the opposing force was asleep, they would see it. In this were a real battlefield then he couldn’t afford to just let a Panzer get destroyed.
“Hell” Kurt muttered to himself before yelling “Everyone forward, form up on Blue Six!”
Kurt would give Michael the ass reaming that he deserved once this was over and the after action would reflect that Kurt was forced to improvise once Blue Six was out of position. No matter how this turned out, he already knew what the subject of the next lecture was going to be.
Kurt could hear the sounds of the various Panzer crews over the radio net. A charge like this might be stupid and wasteful, but it was thrilling. This happened to be exactly what they had signed up for.