Chapter One Thousand Eight Hundred Five
7th July 1967
Potsdam
Despite everything else that happened, life had resumed. It was not as if nothing had happened, but in a city that had a long history and had taken worse blows in living memory, shock didn’t last long and didn’t pay the bills. Like always, once the glass was swept up and the injured had started to be released from the hospital it was easy to move on to the next thing. If Louis had to guess, it was a part of human nature.
Louis Ferdinand had been typing a column that would run in several newspapers but kept getting distracted. The topic was the proposed strategic alliance between Junkers AG, Sud-Ouest, and Hawker Siddeley with the intention of competing with Focke-Wulf-Dorner, which was moving into a dominant position in the European Airline Market as well as the American aerospace giants, Boeing, and Curtis. Louis thought that it was a good idea. All three of those corporations brought something to the table and did a bit of competition ever hurt anyone?
Instead he kept looking at the fuzzy black and white photograph on his desk and Louis marveled at the technology that made it possible. He had seen photographs taken on the moon, every corner of the globe and the depths of the oceans. Still, those didn’t have the deep personal connection to Louis that this one did. The photograph was of the scan of his second grandchild, he or she was going to be born in seven months give or take.
When Friedrich and Suga had returned from the secured location where they had been sent, Suga had complained about how it had been uncomfortable and cold for her under that mountain, completely claustrophobic was how she had put it. Louis had gently chided her for talking about a location that didn’t officially exist and was one of the most deeply held secrets of the Fallschirmjäger who guarded it, more secret than even the nuclear program.
To maintain domestic tranquility, Freddy had agreed to take Suga in for a medical checkup that he didn’t feel was necessary because the previous one had only been a few weeks earlier and Suga had been under observation by the Royal Physician the entire time. Louis had reminded his son that there were some battles that should not be fought. Now that Friedrich was an Associate at the Berlin Law Firm where he had done his Legal Apprenticeship at, anything that got him out of the office for a few hours was welcome. That trip to the hospital had been when the photograph was taken, and it had been concluded that Suga’s pregnancy was progressing normally.
If only all the news out hospitals was as good. Louis had gotten a call from the Administrator at the University Hospital in Halle, it seemed that Kristina had presented herself in his office and demanded that disciplinary action be taken against her because she had missed two entire shifts that she had been scheduled for on Sunday and Monday. Not only had he known exactly where she was the entire time, he been one of the Hospital Administrators who she had been on the phone with when she had worked to coordinate the relief effort.
Louis had told him to send Kristina home for a few days and not to bother with any official reprimand. The odds were high that Kristina would find some other means of self-flagellation without his help. That got a bewildered response of the sort that Louis was all too used to after twenty-five years of his daughter’s occasionally odd behavior. Louis just wished that she would allow herself to be happy for once. Looking at an unrelated report on his desk about the scheduled refit of ships in Kiel, a thought about what to do about Kristina occurred to him.
North Sea, mouth of the Elbe River
The statement made by the Emperor had disgusted Andreas. It was full of platitudes about how the individual or individuals responsible for the terrorist attack would be brought to justice. Everywhere that he had looked, people had been enraptured by those words. Louis Ferdinand identifying himself as a servant of the people and lauding the efforts of his parasitic spawn in the relief effort had made Andreas see red. Still, he realized that he couldn’t do anything about it. Mithras had gone after them directly and that had gotten him a one-way ticket to the Fechtel Mountains, the location of the so-called Valley of Death where prisoners got the privilege of carving granite with basic hand tools until the nature of that work left them too broken to cause the State more trouble.
Still, it didn’t take a genius to realize that the State and Federal Police were on his trail. Unless Andreas wanted to join Mithras in Flossenbürg, he needed to quickly get as far from Berlin as he could. Though he had no plan, getting to Hamburg and onto a ferry bound for England had seemed like the right call. He had no idea what he would do once he would get there. Moving on to somewhere even further away seemed like a good idea.
Standing at the rail watching the coast of Lower Saxony fade in the distance, Andreas kept expecting helicopters full of Police Commandos to storm the ship guns blazing. That never happened though and he was greatly relieved as Germany disappeared over the horizon.