Major Matthew Rider, military background, under command of unknown officer of General rank in Whitehall. Now operating as counter-intelligence in London and occasionally West Berlin. Believed to be cell co-ordinator of a group of female operatives dedicated to assist the defection of prominent DDR personnel.
Amber grinned as she was described as a group of females. There were three photographs of young women who were allegedly members of Matthew’s team. The pictures were fuzzy and indistinct, having obviously been taken by telephoto lenses. Amber grinned, as she never used the same ‘face’ twice. She knew that she could equally easily become male, but she simply didn’t want to. In the solitude of her own room, she had experimented with various guises, both male and female.
Sometimes, she became what she felt Andrew would look like. It was disconcerting, as he was a tall, good-looking young man with a sad smile. She often wondered what her life would be like had she stayed as Andrew. Once she changed into Andrew and popped down to a pub where she was known as Amber.
It wasn’t an experience she repeated, as she still regarded herself as a girl, even in a male body, so as she had no intention of living a gay lifestyle as a man, she remained as a female, except when absolutely necessary. It was to her advantage, for in the world of the 1970s, the male was still the prime mover, and women were often not considered to be a possible threat in the field in which she operated. She could get in places as an attractive woman, where no male would even try.
Shaking her head, she brought her mind back to the present. She felt weary. Keeping her mental screen up took its toll. She wasn’t half way through the first building, so she knew she would have to leave soon if she was going to be able to get back to West Berlin before the proposed defection by the academics she’d met earlier.
Meanwhile, Matthew Rider, unaware of what was happening, was feeling completely useless. It was only by chance that an agent had seen the Stasi take Amber. Except the man didn’t know it was Amber at the time. He’d been watching the apartment above café, just in case anything went wrong. As soon as he’d seen the elegant female officer being thrown into the rear of the truck, he’d assumed the worst and called Matthew.
Matthew had contacted any and all his agents in East Berlin, to attempt to confirm or deny the initial report. The truck carrying the female officer had been seen to go into the Stasi HQ Complex several hours ago, yet no one of the girl’s description had been seen to leave.
Reluctantly, Matthew picked up the phone and called Whitehall. Brigadier Wallace wasn’t pleased that his favourite operative was unaccounted for.
“Get her back, Matthew, just get her back. I don’t care what it takes, just get her!”
“Yes sir, shall do.”
Matthew looked out of the window as dusk fell on Berlin. Just how the hell he was going to get to her was beyond him.
Dusk was the signal for the stings of bright lights to be illuminated all along the Wall. In most places, there was a fifty metre strip of barbed wire and mines, some patrolled by border guards and dogs. The small group of academics were hiding in a building that had been derelict since the end of the second war. The girl had told them to wait until they would be collected by another courier. Then they’d seen her thrown into the back of a truck. Ernst was still unsure of how she managed to call out to him, alerting them to leave by the back door. They’d done so, unaware of her fate, but made their way to the building she had told them about.
Ernst Roebuck was the eldest of the group. He’d seen the Nazis crush free thinkers and some of the greatest minds Germany had ever produced. So too the DDR machine was equally unforgiving of anyone who didn’t share the communist mind-set. The elderly man smiled sadly, for in the 1920s, he’d been a young man in his twenties, who had flirted with communism. He’d read Marx and believed that the true Marxist ideal of equality and shared wealth would rid the world of the problems that great wealth in the hands of a few had created. It was, therefore, with glee that he and those like him had welcomed the Red Army into Germany when Hitler and his fascist thugs were defeated.
However, it didn’t take long for him to realise that Sovietism was not the same thing. All the so-called communists did was replace the rich and influential with a different elite, an elite made up of the party faithful. The party came first, the individual a very poor second. In fact, the difference between the Nazis and the communists was only the name. For in the place of the Gestapo, the Stasi were double the menace and double the size. The Red Army was never far away, and nearly forty percent of the DDR’s young men and women wore a uniform. Lastly, the nation was a simple prison, with such restrictions on the citizens that even wartime Germans didn’t have to suffer.
Ernst was a survivor. As a scientist, his value had been appreciated by the Nazis, so he’d actually had it relatively good. But as the tide of war had turned, he’d had to work harder and the initial high wage and reasonable living conditions were eroded. The project he was working on was highly classified, for it involved the race to produce atomic weapons. Fortunately for the world, a combination of bureaucratic blunders, allied bombing raids, sabotage and the speed of the advancing allies meant they never completed their task. However, the DDR were only too happy for their work to continue, under the beady and watchful eye of the Russians.
He’d learned to keep quiet under the Nazis and although initially euphoric at the possibility of having a true Marxist state, the reality taught him that man would never allow true equality to be a factor of government. Greed and ambition were too powerful drives, so those in power simply created a different system, where the poor were still poor, and the nation’s potential and wealth was squandered by bad management and ill-conceived projects.
His dream was a united Germany where socialistic ideals could be merged with capitalist realities to form a strong and vibrant Germany. Together with three of his colleagues from the DDR Nuclear research facility near Dresden, they approached an Englishman at a trade fair in East Berlin a year ago.
Surveillance was tight, and informants were everywhere, but Ernst gave a suitably subtle hint that he and his friends were willing to escape, bringing some of the brightest scientific minds that the DDR had to offer.
They heard nothing for many months. In fact, Ernst believed that his approach had been too subtle. Then, out of the blue, contact was made.
He’d been on the bus from his work to the apartments that had been allotted to staffing the complex. He lived alone now, as his wife had died just before the end of the war in a bombing raid of Dresden. His daughter was married and lived in a small town near the Polish border. His son had died defending Berlin; he’d only been sixteen.
Ernst was still bitter and angry about the waste of German lives. He felt enormous anger towards the allies as they’d bombed these great historic German cities from a great height with no apparent cares that they were killing women and children. The fact that Hitler had decided to bomb English cities wasn’t lost on him, so he laid most of the blame for all the suffering at Hitler’s feet.
He remembered being angry that the bus was crowded. It wasn’t as if there were too many private cars. The few Trabants and Wartbergs that did exist were pathetic compared to the shiny Mercedes of foreign diplomats. The bus company could put on more busses at the peak times, so Ernst fumed silently as he stood for the first few stops on his five-mile journey.