The guards finally led her into a brightly-lit room. She flinched back from the light, long enough for them to secure her against a wall, and leave her. Moments later, before she could realise what was happening, another Russian entered and studied her thoughtfully. Caroline felt like a trapped animal under his gaze; it didn’t help that she was firmly secured to what felt like a shower pipe. The Russian was remarkably pale, with very dark hair; his eyes were soulless, almost lifeless. He was a nightmare made flesh.
“I am the commanding officer of the 4th FSB Security Battalion, Warsaw,” the Russian said finally. “You will identify yourself.”
Caroline couldn’t believe that he didn’t know her name already. The Russians had not only collected ID tags, but they had asked her, more than once, about her name, building up a picture of who they had in the camp, and why. She had cooperated as little as she could, but the Russians had been skilful at actually making their prisoners work for them, doing as much of the heavy lifting as they could without resorting to torture to ‘encourage’ them to talk.
“I am Caroline Morgan, reporter,” she said, and briefly outlined what had happened to her. She knew that holding anything back was a bad idea; the Russians were prepared to use torture if they felt that they had no choice. Caroline wasn’t a soldier, she was a civilian; she couldn’t have held out for long against pain, even if they had paid her. “What are you going to do to me?”
The Russian looked up at her. “The question has been discussed at the highest levels,” he said. Caroline, oddly enough, believed him. “We have faced a constant barrage of propaganda from Europe, condemning us for thousands of crimes and offences, some of them only theoretically possible. The European media has persistently taken the side of the enemies of Russia, along with the other enemies of the civilised world everywhere. I dare say that if French reporters had still been at work during the insurgencies, they would have claimed that the insurgents were actually somehow in the right, just because they were getting the short end of the stick.”
“I am a non-political reporter,” Caroline said. “I am not…”
He slapped her, hard, across her face. “You are a political reporter, all of you are,” he said. “You repeated the lies told by refugees and Chechens who had an axe to grind; you’d think that you would have learned something from Iraq, but no, you chose to repeat their propaganda. The media played a role in the European refusal to grant us the support we needed when we needed it; now, we need no support and we have our enemies at our mercy.”
Caroline could taste blood in her mouth. She looked for words to say, clever arguments that would win her freedom, but there were none. There was only force, and the threat of force… and Europe had acted as if both of those factors didn’t exist. She could have argued, she could have pointed out that the citizens of Poland and Germany… and perhaps even further west… hadn’t deserved occupation, but in the end, the Russians wouldn’t listen to her. Her own helplessness buzzed through her mind; the Russian could do anything to her, and she could do nothing about it. What hope was left for her?
“I see you have nothing to say,” the Russian said. His voice was icy cold, without a hint of gloating or pleasure. “A decision has been made about you, Morgan, and all of your kind. You have no place in the new world order.”
He drew his pistol and chambered a round. “Do you have any last words?”
Caroline felt oddly calm. “Go fuck yourself,” she hissed. She tried to kick the Russian, but it was impossible from her position; he just stepped back and watched her struggle to keep her balance. “One day, we’re going to kill all of you.”
“I don’t think that that will happen,” the Russian said, as he put the gun to her head. “The price of your socialist paradise was destroying the fighting spirit of the European Armies… and you gained your paradise at the cost of your freedom.”
He pulled the trigger.
Afterwards, they took her body, dumped it in one of the mass graves, and buried it unmarked under the Polish soil. No one in Britain would ever know for certain what happened to Caroline Morgan. Like so many others, she had just vanished in the nightmare that had consumed Europe.
Chapter Forty-Two: Covenants without Swords, Take Two
The problem with socialists, to use a general term, is that of the dog who had one bone. Carrying it in his mouth, the dog looked into the river, saw a second bone, and made a bite for it… with the predictable result that the first bone fell into the river and was swept away… leaving the poor dog with no bone. Humans do not have the excuse of being unintelligent animals.
Hanover, Germany
She was called Gudrun, a name that meant ‘battle-maiden’ to some ears; an irony that a handful of boyfriends had pointed out when they came face to face with her politics. Gudrun Krumnow was, in no particular order, nineteen years old, blonde, tall and shapely, and deeply devoted to the needy of the world. Like so many others in her position, she believed deeply and truly in the need to ‘Do Something’ to tackle the many issues of the world; she had marched in protests, sung songs in support of the Needy of the Week, and had generally made herself as helpful as she could. Her education had been limited; at nineteen, she had only a few years of university to go, years that she had already committed to the Causes.
She was unprepared for the real world; German industries, already staggering under the weight of European regulations on this and that, had no time to take on more uneducated people that they could never get rid of, or lose. The best of them had the motivation to use the –unofficial — opportunities to train to an acceptable level; few of them truly had the motivation. Years of being told that they were due vast rewards if they were patient had taken their toll on the youth of Germany; no government could challenge the issue of vast unemployment without losing power. In a very real sense, Germany — and the remainder of the EU — was being red-taped and taxed to death.
Gudrun and her family had cowered in their house as the first chaos began in Hanover, terrified of what would happen to them when the looters and insurgents found them hiding; Gudrun might have believed that they were the poor, and the underdogs must always be in the right, but sheer terror was overcoming her political beliefs. The sounds had been terrifying; she had always disliked the police — and had led a boycott of girls who dated police officers — but she had prayed then that the police would save her and her family. When Lord Mayor Paul Steiner — a class enemy, of course, despite him being Green — had used the army to end the disturbances, or at least confine them to a handful of districts within the city, Gudrun had been relieved.
And then she hated herself, feeling like a traitor; she had silently accepted the treatment of the rioters and the looters, treatment that rumour said had been brutal beyond belief. It had led to her first serious argument with her father, ending with her flouncing off to her room and hiding; her father had threatened to lift his hand to her for the first time in her entire life if she even thought about going out and joining the protests against Paul Steiner. Her father, a civil engineer, had known what Gudrun had refused to allow herself to believe; the streets were no longer safe for protesters, or indeed for any young girls. As the Russian armies had advanced closer, he had even considered abandoning the city, but where could they have gone? Gudrun had three sisters, each as pretty as she was, and her mother had held her good looks; how could one man protect them all against the evils of society’s breakdown? They had remained in the city, hiding; keeping their heads down and hoping that they would not be noticed.