In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

H
EINRICH
G
IMPEL GLANCED AT THE REPORT ON HIS DESK TO
make sure how many Reichsmarks the United States was being assessed for the
Wehrmacht
bases by New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. As he'd thought, the numbers were up from those of 2009. Well, the Americans might grumble, but they'd cough up what they owed—and in hard currency, too; none of their inflated dollars. If they didn't, the panzer divisions might roll out of those bases and take what was owed the Germanic Empire this year. And if they collected some blood along with their pound of flesh, the USA might complain, but it was hardly in a position to fight back.

Heinrich entered the new figures on his computer, then saved the study he'd been working on for the past couple of days. The Zeiss hard disk purred smoothly as it swallowed the data. He made two backups—he was a meticulously careful man—before shutting down the machine. When he got up from his desk, he put on his uniform greatcoat: in Berlin's early March, winter still outblustered spring.

Willi Dorsch, who shared the office with Heinrich, got up, too. “Let's call it a day, Heinrich,” he said, and shook his head as he donned his own greatcoat. “How long have you been here at
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
now?”

“Going on twelve years,” Heinrich answered, buttoning buttons. “Why?”

His friend cheerfully sank the barb: “All that time at the high command, and a fancy uniform to go with it, and you still don't look like a soldier.”

“I can't help it,” Heinrich said with a sigh. He knew too well that Willi was right. A tall, thin, balding man in his early forties, he had a tendency to shamble instead of parading. He wore his greatcoat as if it were cut from the English tweeds professors still affected. Setting his high-crowned cap at a rakish angle, he raised an eyebrow to get Willi's reaction. Willi shook his head. Heinrich shrugged and spread his hands.

“I'll just have to be martial for both of us,” Willi said.
His
cap gave him a fine dashing air. “Doing anything for dinner tonight?” The two men lived not far from each other.

“As a matter of fact, we are. I'm sorry. Lise invited some friends over,” Heinrich said. “We'll get together soon, though.”

“We'd better,” Willi said. “Erika's going on again about how she misses you. Me, I'm getting jealous.”

“Oh,
Quatsch,
” Heinrich said, using the pungent Berliner word for rubbish. “Maybe she needs her glasses checked.” Willi was blond and ruddy and muscular, none of which desirable adjectives applied to Heinrich. “Or maybe it's just my bridge game.”

Willi winced. “You know how to hurt a guy, don't you? Come on. Let's go.”

The wind outside the military headquarters had a bite to it. Heinrich shivered inside his greatcoat. He pointed off to the left, toward the Great Hall. “The old-timers say the bulk of that thing has messed up our weather.”

“Old-timers always complain. That's what makes them old-timers.” But Willi's gaze followed Heinrich's finger. They both saw the Great Hall every day, but seldom really looked at it. “It's big, all right, but is it big enough for that? I doubt it.” His voice, though, was doubtful, too.

“You ask me, it's big enough for damn near anything,” Heinrich said. The Great Hall had gone up sixty years before, in the great flush of triumph after Britain and Russia fell before the planes and panzers of the Third
Reich
. It boasted a dome that reached two hundred twenty meters into the sky and was more than two hundred fifty meters across: sixteen St. Peter's cathedrals might have fit within the enormous monument to the grandeur of the Aryan
race. The riches of a conquered continent had paid for the construction.

The dome itself, sheathed in weathered copper, caught the fading light like a tall green hill. At the top, in place of a cross, stood a gilded Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws. Atop the eagle, a red light blinked on and off to warn away low-flying planes.

Willi Dorsch's shiver had only a little to do with the chilly weather. “It makes me feel tiny.”

“It's a temple to the
Reich
and the
Volk
. It's supposed to make you feel tiny,” Heinrich answered. “Set against the needs of the German race and the state, any one man
is
tiny.”

“We serve them. They don't serve us,” Willi agreed. He pointed across the Adolf Hitler Platz toward the
Führer
's palace on the far side of the immense square next to the Great Hall. “When Speer ran the palace up, he was worried the size of it would dwarf even our Leader himself.” And, indeed, the balcony above the tall entranceway to the
Führer
's residence looked like an architectural afterthought.

Heinrich's short laugh came out as a puff of steam. “Not even Speer could look ahead to see what technology might do for him.”

“Better not let the Security Police hear you talk that way about a
Reichsvater
.” Willi tried to laugh, too, but the chuckle rang hollow. The Security Police were no laughing matter.

Still, Heinrich was right. When the
Führer
's palace went up, another huge eagle had surmounted the balcony from which the Germanic Empire's ruler might address his citizens. The eagle had been moved to the roof when Heinrich was a boy. In its place went an enormous televisor screen. Adolf Hitler Platz held a million people. When the
Führer
spoke to a crowd these days, even the ones at the back got a good view.

A bus purred up to the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
building. Heinrich and Willi got on with the rest of the officials who greased the wheels of the mightiest military machine the world had known. One by one, the commuters
stuck their account cards into the fare slot. The bus's computer debited each rider eighty-five pfennigs.

The bus rolled down the broad boulevard toward South Station. Berlin's myriad bureaucrats made up the majority of the passengers, but not all. A fair number were tourists, come from all over the world to view the most wonderful and terrible avenue that world boasted. Blasé as any native, Heinrich usually paid scant attention to the marvels of his home town. Today being what it was, though, the oohs and ahhs of people seeing them for the first time made him notice them, too.

Sentries from the
Grossdeutschland
division in ceremonial uniform goose-stepped outside their barracks. Tourists on the sidewalk, many of them Japanese, photographed the
Führer
's guards. Inside the barracks hall, where tourists wouldn't see them, were other troops in businesslike camouflage smocks. They had assault rifles, not the ceremonial force's old-fashioned
Gewehr
98s, and enough armored fighting vehicles to blast Berlin to rubble. Visitors from afar were not encouraged to think about them. Neither were most Berliners. But Heinrich reckoned up
Grossdeutschland
's budget every spring. He knew exactly what the barracks held.

Neon lights came on in front of theaters and restaurants as darkness deepened. Dark or light, people swarmed in and out of the huge Roman-style building that held a heated swimming pool the size of a young lake. It was open twenty-four hours a day for those who wanted to exercise, to relax, or just to ogle attractive members of the opposite sex. Its Berlin nickname was the
Heiratbad,
the marriage bath, sometimes amended by the cynical to the
Heiratbett,
the marriage bed.

Past the pool, the Soldiers' Hall and the Air and Space Ministry faced each other across the street. The Soldiers' Hall was a monument to the triumph of German arms. Among the exhibits it lovingly preserved were the railroad car in which Germany had yielded to France in 1918 and France to Germany in 1940; the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin compound; one of the gliders that had landed troops in southern England; and, behind thick leaded glass, the twisted, radioac
tive remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia.

Old people still called the Air and Space Ministry the
Reichsmarschall
's Office, in memory of Hermann Göring, the only man ever to hold that exalted rank. Willi Dorsch used its more common name when he nudged Heinrich and said, “I wonder what's happening in the Jungle these days.”

“Could be anything,” Heinrich answered. They both laughed. The roof of the ministry had been covered with four meters of earth, partly as a protection against bombs from the air, and then lavishly planted, partly to please Göring's fancy (his private apartment was on the top floor). The
Reichsmarschall
was almost fifty years dead, but the orgies he'd put on amidst the greenery remained a Berlin legend.

Willi said, “We aren't the men our grandfathers were. In those days, they thought big and weren't ashamed to be flamboyant.” He sighed the sigh of a man denied great deeds by the time in which he chanced to live.

“Poor us, doomed to get by on matter-of-fact competence,” Heinrich said. “The skills we need to run the Empire are different from the ones Hitler's generation used to conquer it.”

“I suppose so.” Willi clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I envy you your contentment here and now. I almost joined the
Wehrmacht
when I was just out of the
Hitler Jugend
. Sometimes I still think I should have. There's a difference between this uniform”—he ran a hand down the front of his double-breasted greatcoat—“and the ones real soldiers wear.”

“Is that your heart talking, or did you just remember you're not eighteen years old any more?” Heinrich said. His friend winced, acknowledging the hit. He went on, “Me, I'd fight if the
Vaterland
needed me, but I'm just as glad I don't have to carry a gun.”

“We're all probably safer because you don't,” Willi said.

“This is also true.” Heinrich took off his thick, gold-framed glasses. The street outside, the interior of the bus, and even Willi next to him turned blurry and indistinct. He blinked a couple of times, then set the glasses
back on the bridge of his nose. The world regained its sharp edges.

The neon brilliance of the street outside dimmed as the bus went past the shops and theaters and started picking up passengers from the Ministries of the Interior, Transportation, Economics, and Food.
More uniforms that don't have soldiers in them,
Heinrich thought. The buildings from which the new riders came were shutting down for the day.

Two ministries, though, like the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
never slept. A new shift went into the Justice Ministry to replace the workers who left for home. German justice could not close its eyes, and woe betide the criminal or racial mongrel upon whom its all-seeing gaze settled. Himself a thoroughly law-abiding man, Heinrich still shivered a little whenever he passed that marble-fronted hall.

The Colonial Ministry stayed busy, too. Much of the world fell under its purview: the farming villages in the Ukraine, the mining colonies in central Africa, the Indian tea plantations, the cattle herders on the plains of North America. As if picking that last thought from Heinrich's mind, Willi Dorsch said, “How many Americans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“The Americans have always been in the dark.” Heinrich clucked sadly. “Your father was telling that one, Willi.”

“If he was, he sounded more relieved than I do. The Yankees might have been tough.”

“Might-have-beens don't count, fortunately.” Isolation and neutrality had kept the United States from paying heed as potential allies in Europe went down one after another. It faced the Germanic Empire and Japan alone a generation later—and the oceans weren't wide enough to shield it from robot bombs. Now it was trying to get back on its feet, but the
Reich
didn't intend to let it.

Just ahead lay another monument to German victory: Hitler's Arch of Triumph. Heinrich had been to Paris on holiday and seen the Arc d'Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Elysées. It served as a model for Berlin's arch, and was a model in scale as well. The Arc d'Triomphe was
only—only!—about fifty meters tall, less than half the height of its titanic successor. The Berlin arch was almost a hundred seventy meters wide and also a hundred seventeen meters deep, so that the bus spent a good long while under it, as if traversing a tunnel through a hillside.

When at last it emerged, South Station lay not far ahead. The station building made an interesting contrast to the monumental stone piles that filled the rest of the avenue. Its exterior was copper sheeting and glass, giving the traveler a glimpse of the steel ribs that formed its skeleton.

The bus stopped at the edge of the station plaza. Along with everyone else, Heinrich and Willi filed off and hurried across the square toward the waiting banks of elevators and escalators. They walked between more displays of weapons from Germany's fallen foes: the wreckage of a British fighter shown inside a lucite cube, a formidable-looking Russian panzer, the conning tower of an American U-boat.