Chapter Two Thousand Seven Hundred
21st July 1978
Langeoog, East Frisian Islands
Kat was sitting on the porch of her house on the beach watching as Asia and her son Heinrich, or Henri as he liked to be called, were walking along the tideline with Kris. Kat was a bit astonished that Henri was going to be turning fifteen next week, it made Kat wonder where the years went. As far as Kat tell he was a normal enough teenager with an interest in girls, cars, and football in no particular order. Asia and Kris had been nudging him towards going to University, but despite having never really known his father, Ludwig von Hesse, Henri was considering a few other options.
Anne, Judita, and Lenni had arrived the night before with Lenni and Anne’s respective children further disrupting things in the beach house. That was much to the annoyance of Marie Alexandra whose hope had been a couple of peaceful weeks on Langeoog before the horde of vacationers arrived at the start of the official holiday season next month. She really liked it here during the off-season weekdays when she had the whole beach more or less to herself. Now Marie was having to put up with a full house.
The impromptu reunion of Kat’s girls had been unplanned, but having everyone free came so rarely these days so they had seized the opportunity. This had come on the heels of Asia’s announcement this week that she was resigning from being an Instructor for the BND Academy in Falkensee and would no longer be Mistress of the Keys of the Imperial Court. She had told Freddy and Suga that the events of the prior days were proof to her that she was no longer effective in the role that she had played for so long, probably too long when it came down to it. They needed to find new Mistress of the Keys who had a better understanding of the times they were living in. There had been a mole in the highest levels of the Government and like so many others she had not seen what should have been painfully obvious. Suga had been a bit put out by that development having only recently gotten the Maid of the Chamber, Kat’s daughter Marie, living in the same time zone even if it was only for a couple months. There was talk about trying to call Gia, but Kat knew that she spent her summers at her house in the Trans-Baikal specifically because it was impossible to reach her there.
Kris had told Anne that it was probably for the best because Asia letting that part of her life go. A few months earlier Asia had told Kris something that she had not told anyone. About how Doctors and Orderlies at Danvers had total control of her, and what they had done was just unspeakable. Asia had described what the electroshock had been like, how it felt like she had died a thousand times. Yet it had been afterwards, when she had escaped from that hellish place that the most devastating thing had been learning that rescue had come at the cost of everything that Asia had loved most for the second time in her life. It had been her role in the Court of the Empress and her connection with the BND that had taken so much from her. From what Kat had seen, while Asia hadn’t necessarily found happiness, there was an acceptance of her past. Perhaps Kris was correct about these things.
Pusan, Korea
“I thought that the First Division got this guy last year?” Erich said as the briefing concluded.
This was a briefing of the Leutnants and Senior Noncoms of the Company now that they had finally received the orders that they had been waiting for. A self-styled Pirate King had been operating out of the Riau Archipelago as well as the Northern Coasts of Borneo and Java. Apparently, he had been causing trouble for the British and the Dutch for years. It had been his indiscriminate raiding of shipping through the Malacca Strait that had brought German involvement, though during the briefing, Hauptmann Dunkel had mentioned that pretty much everyone in the region wanted this guy to become very dead, the sooner the better, and this time they wanted to see a corpse. The High Seas Fleet was sending a strong element of the Pacific Squadron and that included Erich’s Company to help make that happen.
“Some cockroaches are really good at avoiding getting stomped on” Karl said. That was probably the most apt description for what would probably be less a pirate hunt and more of an anti-partisan campaign in the islands of the South Seas. While the Hauptmann hadn’t spelled it out explicitly, this would probably keep them busy for a considerable amount of time.
“And what are we supposed to do with our American problem?” Erich asked. Erich’s Platoon still had the American Gunnery Sergeant attached to it. Not that Erich found the American to be a bad guy, he just wasn’t sure how much he wanted Tyrone Lee around if they were in the field and things got hairy.
“Let him see” Karl replied, “He is here to observe and in this case our superiors want him doing exactly that. In the spirit of International Cooperation, of course.”
There was a round of laughter about that.