Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [8]
Ludmilla Serebrennikov, the treacherous and voluptuous siren, flourished both in the iron grip of Stalin’s dictatorship and under the corrupt jackboot of Hitler’s Germany. She achieved the remarkable feat of defecting from Uncle Joe’s Russia to Hitler’s Third Reich and then, when Adolf’s luck changed, defecting back again.
The beautiful Ludmilla always knew which side her bread was buttered, whether it was a Russian platzel or a sour loaf of German rye. When it became evident that one side was losing, Ludmilla simply switched to another.
Small matters like justice, honour, love, patriotism or personal loyalty never bothered the voluptuous, sinister, black‐haired Russian seductress. These concepts had no place in the keen mind lurking behind those beautiful ice‐blue eyes. She used men and discarded them.
Ludmilla’s career began with Russia’s vicious Stalinist secret service in the 1930s. Her assignment? To seduce and win the trust of a brilliant young scientist who was deemed to be disloyal to the Communist regime. This Ludmilla did with ease, insinuating her way into the scientist’s heart and laboratory. The evil beauty stole the secret formula his family had been jealously guarding for generations.
Abandoning the secret service colonel who had groomed her as his protégé, the treacherous ice‐eyed femme fatale headed west with the secret chemical formula. She chose a tall red‐haired young officer as her protector – at least as far as the border. Waiting there was another young officer, of the Nazi variety.
The red‐haired Russian ended up in a shallow grave and Ludmilla ended up in a fast car heading for Berlin, where she was to become the toast of Hitler’s soirees and tea parties. It was here that the intellectual elite of the thousand year Reich gathered to plan their conquest of the world – and the extermination of their enemies.
Chemistry was Ludmilla’s speciality and she had soon attached herself to one of Hitler’s leading military industrialists. The secret formula she brought out of Russia may have had blood on it but that didn’t put the Nazi scientists off.
Ludmilla used the formula to bargain herself into a position of power and prestige among the military research cabal who devised the Führer’s weapons of terror. Hell‐devices like poison gas and deadly germ agents.
And there were rumours of other weapons, mind drugs, strange chemicals that could warp men’s thoughts and beliefs, tearing their sanity asunder. No chemical secrets that could be prised from nature were too obscene for these monsters to use against men, women or children.
The red siren’s secret formula was thrown into the sinister bubbling cauldron of the Nazi war effort. And as the German war machine rolled across Europe, she lived the life of a princess in a corrupt kingdom.
Champagne flowed and sparkled like the jewels around the slender pale neck of this sinister black‐haired beauty. She was the toast of the intellectual elite. Hitler himself arranged a present for her birthday. The scientific specialists who made the Reich’s precision optics and ground lenses for the Luftwaffe presented Ludmilla with a pair of spectacles, said to be the most exact prescription ever made for human eyes. But as soon as the tide of war began to turn against Hitler, Ludmilla packed her spectacles, collected her personal fortune (always kept in the form of diamonds) and began making plans for her own departure and survival. As the western front collapsed and the Nazi war machine crumbled, Ludmilla escaped through the curtain of fire that surrounded Berlin and fled – back east again.
Re‐entering the Soviet zone she took with her samples of the same chemical she had originally stolen, its hellish recipe perfected by Hitler’s skilled technicians. Possessing this to barter with, and of course her own beauty, Ludmilla was soon back in a position of power. Ludmilla’s particular talents were again in demand as the Reds began to use all fashion of diabolical chemicals in their brainwashing experiments.
But Stalin’s Russia was too austere and impoverished