German women were raped by your comrades-in-arms. Or maybe not stand aside. ‘With respect, comrade colonel,’ said Drescher, ‘these are young girls. And we are not talking about combat. The heat of battle.’
‘Have you read the file?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you will know that we have very carefully selected these twelve girls. They all meet a consistent set of criteria. Each of these young women displays athletic or sporting ability, they are all of above-average intelligence and they all have, for one reason or another, displayed a certain disconnectedness in terms of their emotions.’
‘Yes. I saw that in the file. But that disconnectedness, as you put it, has for the most part come about from some psychological trauma in their pasts. I have to say that one could describe them as, well… disturbed. These are problem children.’
‘None of the girls is mentally disordered.’ It was the older woman who responded this time. Drescher was not surprised to hear her speak German with a Russian accent. ‘Nor are they truly sociopathic. But through experience or simply by nature they are emotionally less responsive than their peers.’
‘I see…’ said Drescher. ‘But surely that on its own is hardly a qualification for what we expect of them. I mean… how can I put this
… I know we live in the ideal society of gender equality and opportunity, but there is no doubt that the male… well, the male is more aggressive. Men are more inclined to violence. Killing comes more naturally.’
Adebach smiled wryly and rose to his feet. He walked around the table and stood behind the seated woman. ‘Perhaps I should introduce you,’ he said to Drescher. ‘This is Major Doctor Ivana Lubimova. The major has been assigned to us by our Soviet comrades. I should tell you that Major Lubimova also served in the Great Patriotic War. She fought with the Seventieth Rifle Division. Special weapons training at Buzuluk.’
‘Sniper?’ asked Drescher.
‘Thirty-three confirmed kills,’ said Lubimova, blankly.
‘And now you’re an army doctor?’ said Drescher, thinking of thirty-three dead Germans.
‘Psychiatrist. And not for the army.’
‘I see,’ said Drescher, and he knew that the matronly Russian hadn’t had far to come: just from Karlshorst, immediately to the south of Lichtenberg. KGB headquarters.
‘I specialise in the psychology of combat,’ continued the Russian. ‘What you have said is actually true: women are much less inclined to kill in hot blood than men are. The vast majority of murders around the world are committed by men and are fuelled by rage, sexual jealousy or alcohol. Or any combination of these elements. And you are also right to say male soldiers perform more aggressively in front-line combat, particularly hand-to-hand. However, when it comes to cold — blooded killing — planned, premeditated homicide — then the pendulum swings the other way. Women who kill often kill in cold blood and for motives other than rage: motives that can be quite abstract. That was why so many of my female comrades made such excellent snipers. That is why these girls are perfect for what we have planned.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Drescher. ‘The killing is only a small part of it. These girls… women… will have to exist isolated from their controls.’
‘That is where you come in, Major Drescher. You have a great deal of experience in Section A,’ said Adebach, referring to the ‘education’ unit of the Stasi’s HVA, responsible for training East Germany’s spies. ‘You will head up a team of instructors that will train these girls in the broadest spectrum of skills. The kind of skills they will need to infiltrate and maintain deep cover in the West.’ Adebach took his seat again.
Drescher sipped his coffee and smiled: Rondo Melange. Drescher was a man who enjoyed good coffee. He had tasted the best around the world — in Copenhagen, in Vienna, in Paris, in London — but for Drescher nothing compared with Rondo. It was one of the few things that the GDR manufacturing monolith had managed to get right.
‘What do you have in mind?’ Drescher said.
Adebach nodded to his adjutant, who passed a file to Drescher. ‘Are you familiar with the Japanese term kunoichi? The kunoichi was the female counterpart of the male ninja. Both kunoichi and ninja were trained as the ultimate assassins, but there was a recognition that gender had a role to play in how they went about their tasks. The kunoichi were expert in all forms of unarmed combat, but they were also trained in the art of seduction. They were experts on the human body, both on how to make it respond erotically and on where the weak spots were: how to kill swiftly and with the minimum of force and, whenever necessary, leaving little or no evidence of violence. They were also experts at concealment — disguising themselves as servants, prostitutes, peasants — and concealing weapons or improvising them from household objects. Added to this, the kunoichi were the ultimate poison-masters: they were trained in botany and could extemporise a deadly toxin from what they found growing around them. What we are aiming to achieve, Major Drescher, is to develop our own kunoichi force and bury it deep in the fabric of Western capitalism. These operatives will have all the skills of the kunoichi… but they will also be expert with every form of modern weapon.’
‘Why?’ asked Drescher. ‘I mean, why specifically this type of operation? Why now? And why are the Stasi being asked to run it?’
‘I’m sure the comrade major won’t mind me saying this’ — Adebach nodded in Lubimova’s direction — ‘but we have by far the best success rate in penetration of Western security services and organs of state. Of course, we enjoy an advantage that none of our allies in the Pact possesses — we speak the same language as our main opponent.’ Adebach lit a Sprachlos cigarette and drew on it slowly.
‘As to why we are launching this now…’ Major Lubimova picked up Adebach’s thread. ‘We need new strategies to fight the West. We need to use a scalpel rather than a blunt instrument. As you know, we have just stood down from our greatest mobilisation. Late last year the West took us to the very brink of full-scale nuclear war. We now believe that NATO did not realise how close we came to launching a pre-emptive defensive attack. The so-called “Operation Able Archer Eighty-three” turned out, after all, simply to be a NATO exercise, but it was the biggest deployment of Western arms and forces since the end of the War. The capitalists were stupid enough to make it completely accurate, right down to the transmissions they sent between command structures. Transmissions which we intercepted. Added to which, our monitoring revealed that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in daily encrypted contact with President Reagan, often several times a day. What we didn’t know then, but do now, is that this contact was about the Americans invading Grenada, and not preparations for a major war. It was simply two imperialists squabbling over who had the colonial rights to a scrap of land.’
‘I can tell you, Major Drescher,’ said Adebach, ‘that the ordinary man and woman here or in the West will never know how close we came to cataclysm. The only thing that prevented all-out nuclear war was the collection and analysis of intelligence by the covert intelligence services — on both sides, it has to be said. Our agents only just managed to stop the Cold War turning hot. We have got to find new ways of striking at the enemy without escalation to war. Your department has achieved great things in infiltrating the West with intelligence gatherers. Our experience last year has emphasised just how impractical it is to use conventional military means against each other. If we have to take the fight to our enemy then we must do so on the “invisible front”. We have several operations in planning, all of which aim to use intelligence, sabotage and subversion as they have never been used before. This is one of them. These young women will become our weapons deep inside enemy territory. They may sit there in the West and never be deployed, or they may be in continual use, depending on the prevailing political situation. The main thing is that, if the need arises, they can seriously impair the enemy’s capabilities, or disrupt their plans.’
‘By assassination?’ Drescher refilled his coffee cup. ‘I have to say, comrade colonel, that we already have the means and personnel to carry out eliminations in hostile territory.’
‘We’re not talking about Scandinavian journalists or the odd errant football star,’ said Adebach, with a glance across at Mielke’s portrait. ‘I am talking about the ability to kill key personnel, even leaders, in the West. And, where the need arises, to do so without raising suspicion. For example, we have a plan to infiltrate a Valkyrie into one of the terrorist groups we sponsor in the West.’
‘Valkyries?’ Drescher suppressed a grin. Barely. He knew of Adebach’s fondness for Wagner. ‘Is that what we’re going to call them? Isn’t it all a bit, well… Wagnerian? It sounds like they could have been a special division of the Nazi League of German Girls.’
‘That is the code name we’ve assigned to them,’ said Adebach sternly. ‘Your job, Major Drescher, is to head the team of instructors who will train these young women. Twelve girls, of whom only three will make final selection for deployment. And these final three… let me put it this way: there will never have been three assassins,
