The perfect perfumed prince stood immaculate, in the middle of the destruction, neither burned nor asphyxiated. Mentally, Heim raised his eyes in despair. He had long since ceased to believe in God; this was just another example of the injustice that made up his world. The survival of the perfect perfumed prince responsible for this nightmare confirmed his disbelief in any form of divine providence. “Sir, I shall assemble the survivors. We should head back to the depot.”
The depot was a safe cantonment heavily guarded against attack. They had to get back there by dusk; the Partisans were closing in. They’d have seen the smoke and heard the explosions. They knew what was happening. Most of the Partisan bands had radios now. It was a fair bet that they’d been told of the strike, to find any survivors the Grizzlies had left and kill them.
“Our orders are to reach the 71st Division base area as soon as possible. We will go on.”
“With respect, sir, reaching the base area is no longer possible. We are barely a third of the way there. Even if we are left undisturbed, we will not make it by nightfall. We will be hard put to get back to the depot by then. It is cold now; when dusk comes it will be much, much worse. We can’t make it. Even if we could, the wounded couldn’t. We must go back.”
The perfect perfumed prince stared at the shabby, grizzled sergeant. Slowly Captain Wilhelm Lang realized the truth that lay behind the words he had heard. The stink of the burning vehicles and incinerated men drifted across him and with great annoyance he realized his spotless white scarf was in danger of being stained black by the soot from the fires.
“Very well Sergeant, we will head back for the depot area. With the guns gone, there is no point in carrying on anyway. For the sake of the wounded, we must return to the depot.”
“I’ve got the latest production figures from Germany, Loki. Third quarter, 1945. And the transportation requirements for military and civil resource allocations.”
Loki was leaning back in his high leather chair, looking out over Geneva, the wet roofs glistening in the morning sun. “Thank you, Branwen. Anything interesting?”
“I’ve only had a brief look but it looks like much the same as before. Steel, coal, nitrates; all have increased a bit but not much. Armored vehicle and aircraft production are holding steady. It looks like Speer’s reforms have finally finished working through the system. Production totals have been steady for two quarters now. I expect they’ll drop a bit in the fourth quarter as coal production gets diverted from industrial production to heating. If one goes up, the other goes down, there’s no slack left in the German economy any more. Everything they do these days is a zero-sum game, as one thing goes up, another goes down.”
Loki took the two-inch thick file and started to skip through the pages. “You know, this would all make a lot more sense if we had the American and Russian figures by way of comparison. We’ve no idea how much of the American economy is mobilized.”
Branwen snorted. “I had Manannan take a look of the American economy; more or less from what we can see they’ve produced and guesswork at the rest. He reckons the Americans have mobilized about half their productive capacity. To put that into perspective, they’re producing around two thirds of the world’s aircraft engines.”
“About half? I wonder why they haven’t mobilized the rest. German’s running, what eighty, ninety plus percent mobilized? And the Russians?”
“Germans at least that. Russia? No means of knowing. Most of their industrial infrastructure was in the area now occupied by the Germans. The Russians evacuated a lot and destroyed the rest but how much and what did they have to begin with? We don’t know. How much of what they evacuated has been returned to use? We don’t know. We do know the Americans have been building factories and resource recovery facilities in Siberia but their output? We just don’t know. Loki. It’s maddening. We know far, far more about the Germans than about the people we’re supposed to be working with.”
“With Stuyvesant over there at the heart of things, does this surprise you? I’m astonished he’s even told us there’s a war on. Ask Manannan mac Lir to drop up and see me this afternoon will you? I need to talk with him about the Americans and Russians.”
Branwen made a note on her pad. Manannan had some odd theories about the American war effort. He believed that something about it didn’t quite make sense. As if anything in the madness that was tearing the world apart made any kind of sense.
Loki started thumbing through the thick file again wondering if those who got the data understood where it came from. Masses of numbers from all over Germany. Mostly from little people who didn’t like what Nazi Germany stood for but were too afraid, either for themselves or their families, to do much about it. That, Loki could understand, he had seen the brutality of the Nazi regime for himself. But, a few economic figures, how many rifle bolts they had produced, how many trains went through a station, what the consist on those trains was, surely that didn’t matter? Loki snorted to himself. Individually, none of it did but put together by talented economists it meant a lot. Not just raw economic data either.
Loki’s spy ring, his Red Orchestra, had assembled a complete performance and design specification dossier on the Type XXI U-boat and got it through to the Americans. It had arrived in time for them to have a test boat, modified from a British S-class submarine, at sea before the first German Type XXI was in service. The Battle of the Atlantic might have looked quite different if it hadn’t been for that coup. “Natural oil production seems steady as well. The Russians did a good job in blowing up their oil fields. Mostly this comes from Romania. Synthetic fuel production is up but not enough, Germany is still running at a net deficit in fuel.” Loki found that satisfying.
“Consumption’s slackened off a bit. The end of the B-29 raids has reduced the amount of fuel the home defenses burned, and that’s been reallocated to the Russian Front. Also the submarine operations have been cut right back in the second and third quarters. You can see how much less fuel is going to the U-boat bases.”
Loki nodded. Fuel was the one German weakness, their one over-riding constraint. They were short of all types of fuel, bunker oil for ships, gasoline for aircraft engines, diesel fuel for armored vehicles, kerosene for jets. They just didn’t have enough. They spent their time shifting what supplies they had around, trying to make do with what they had. That’s what made the distribution of fuel supplies such a marvelous indicator of future operations.
Loki turned to the pages of railway transport data. So simple to obtain, just needed one man to count the wagons in a consist and drop the list in a dead letter box somewhere. Meaningless numbers. One of those who collected the train data had been caught by the Gestapo, but had talked his way out of the arrest. He had claimed that the numbers were his orders for black market goods, so many grams of sugar, so many of sausage. They’d believed him. Who would confess to being a black marketeer when interrogated by the Gestapo unless he was one? They’d beaten him senseless and dumped him in the street as a warning to other black marketeers — and the lists had kept coming.
Loki looked sharply at the train consists again and then at the summary. “Branwen, did you see this?”
“Hmm?”
“The consists of the trains heading east. The fuel shipments going through Kaunas are up 20 percent in the third quarter; those through Minsk and points south are down by the same amount. Kaunas is the rail nexus that supplies the northern end of the front. Especially the area from Petrograd to Archangel. Last time we saw that was second quarter, 1944.”