JF05 - The Valkyrie Song Read Free Page A

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 newstrategies 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 havenever 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, three killing machines so perfect. Until then, you, comrade major, will be father, mother, confessor, teacher and keeper of these girls. It’s all in there …’ Adebach nodded to the file in Drescher’s hands. ‘Take that with