Swastika (11 page)

How had they kept a secret that big for so long?

You don’t fuck with Uncle Sam if you know what’s good for you. Those who had tried had mysteriously disappeared and never been seen again.

Of course, of all the dirty little secrets of the black world, none was dirtier than the cover-up by the Weird Shit Division of what had happened in July 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico.

That crazy UFO yarn, complete with clandestine autopsies on big-headed aliens.

There was a clue to the baffling secret behind the Roswell Incident in the clutch of framed photos on the wall above Big Bad Bill’s shelf of Bond books. One photo, taken at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, in 1947, captured the Peenemünde Rocket Team. These 126 Nazi rocketeers were blasting off V-2 missiles for the Pentagon at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Heading them was SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun. In the group photo, he was the man in the front row with his hand in one pocket of his dark slacks. Roswell, New Mexico, was 125 miles east of the White Sands Proving Ground.

The UFO that crash-landed there had been the darkest secret of the black world for well over half a century, and now that secret was in danger of public exposure on two fronts.

A secret to acquire.

And a secret to keep.

The pile of papers stamped with the Nazi swastika had reached the Weird Shit Division by way of a dummy address in Switzerland. A little coercion had revealed that the package really came from a post office in central British Columbia. That had set off alarm bells in Big Bad Bill’s mind, for shortly after the Roswell Incident in 1947, the Skunk Mine in the Cariboo Mountains of that same Canadian province had imploded.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Was this confirmation?

For here, on the computer screen in Bill’s Pentagon office, was a supposedly secret signature check by an FBI cyber cop at VICAP in Quantico, Virginia, on behalf of an RCMP cyber cop named Rusty Lewis at ViCLAS in Vancouver, British Columbia. The officers were searching for any case with a “Nazi swastika” signature. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bill had acquired unfettered access to everything known about everybody. So the Weird Shit Division’s search for links to “Nazi swastika” signatures like the one stamped on the pile of wartime documents had quickly revealed the RCMP’s own search for matches to hold-back evidence in a B.C. murder case.

What kind of hold-back evidence?

Bill had to know.

According to the Mounties’ request to the FBI, authorization for information on the Vancouver case had to be obtained from the investigating officer, Sgt. Dane Winter.

Bill reached for the last truly secure phone in America.

This was a job for Mr. Clean.

Nordhausen, Germany

April 4, 1945

SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun had stood on this very spot not long ago and placed one hand on Fritz Streicher’s shoulder as the Hitler Youth gazed up at the vast night cosmos. Von Braun had come to Dora-Mittelbau to check on the progress of the concentration-camp slaves he himself had handpicked at Buchenwald. You could never be too paranoid in the Third Reich, as von Braun had learned at two o’clock in the morning on March 22, 1944, the day before his thirty-second birthday. That was the morning when, by the direct order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, three Gestapo agents had knocked on his apartment door and then shuffled him off to prison in Stettin for defying the SS. Even though time was now tight in the production of the V-2 “wonder weapon,” the rocketeer had nevertheless found a moment for the son of the slave-driving commandant who oversaw every aspect of the Third Reich’s secret armory.

“One day,” von Braun had said, choosing his words with care, for he’d been arrested for voicing the fact that his future interest in the V-2 wasn’t as a weapon, “our rockets will have blown the Allies away. The same technology that will annihilate our enemies will then launch us into outer space.”

The doctor of physics was a handsome, haughty man, the son of a German baron. As a boy, he had entered a school established by Frederick the Great, and soon became obsessed by the book
Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space)
by Hermann Oberth. As a teen, von Braun had experimented with space-age propulsion by strapping a cluster of solid-fuel rockets to a wagon that he shot down a crowded street. From there, he moved on to tests at a vacant army proving ground, quickly winning a contract to develop weapons for the Nazis. Under a military grant, he earned his Ph.D. in the theoretical and practical problems of liquid-propellant rocket engines. By the age of thirty, von Braun was the head of technical development at Peenemünde. This area—south of Sweden, east of Denmark, north of Berlin—was an isolated, secure, wooded pocket of Germany, on the island of Usedom, where the mouth of the river Peene met the Baltic Sea. A huge complex at Peenemünde was home to two thousand rocketeers and four thousand other personnel. It was there, on October 3, 1942, that von Braun had first launched the best of Hitler’s
Vergeltungswaffe
—revenge weapons—the awesome V-2.

The space age had begun.

So here von Braun and Fritz had stood not so long ago, gazing up into the outer reaches of a new frontier while the Nazi rocketeer wowed the enthralled Hitler Youth with this promise of tomorrow.

“Big, reliable, powerful rockets. That’s what the Reich needs. And the same rockets that we fire to defend our Fatherland will soon take us up to orbit the earth.”

“Battle stations,” Fritz said, “shooting death rays. Missile shields raining rockets on the
Untermenschen
. Control space and we will control the world.”

“Think bigger,” von Braun urged Fritz. “Think of the moon and beyond. Before you are my age, young man, I
will
land a man on the moon.”

“You
and
my father,” Fritz corrected.

“Yes,” von Braun said quickly. He glanced behind him at the tunnels burrowing into Kohnstein Mountain to reassure the SS general’s son. “Without your father, I couldn’t build such rockets. One day, men will look back on what we created here and realize that this was the birth of everything to come.”

*    *    *

Operation Hydra—the opening raid of Operation Crossbow—had brought the Nazi rocketeer to Dora-Mittelbau.

At 1:10 a.m. on August 18, 1943, the
bam-bam
of antiaircraft guns had jerked Wernher von Braun awake in his Peenemünde home. His head was muddy with confusion, but that disappeared when the first high explosives rocked his residence. The bombers were trying to catch and kill the V-2 engineers as they slept in their beds.

Leaping out of bed, von Braun began to dress. He was interrupted by a blast that shattered his windows and blew the doors off their hinges. Half-dressed in a pajama top and trousers, with a trench coat draped over his shoulders and bedroom slippers on his feet, the rocketeer rushed out into the garden to stare up at the moonlit sky.

Lancasters by the hundreds …

Halifaxes, too …

It looked as if RAF Bomber Command had ordered every plane it had to hit Peenemünde.

Boom … Boom … Boom …

The ground shook beneath him.

Nearly eighteen hundred tons of bombs came tumbling out of the sky as waves of four-engine shadows—close to six hundred in all—passed across the mocking face of a cruel moon. The bomber stream was endless. Those who created the V-2s were targeted first, and then the bombers shifted their merciless sights to the production plant and the development works.

Artificial fog from smoke generators obscured the rocket complex as von Braun made his way through the British bombing raid to the V-2 factory and his brain trust—the experimental station. Searchlights swept under the full moon while shells from Peenemünde’s flak batteries exploded in the sky. Target-marking flares descended from the British planes and were followed by deafening bomb blasts amid bursts of blinding light. By the time von Braun arrived at his think tank, at least twenty-five buildings in that development works—including House 4, the headquarters—were ablaze or damaged.

Finally, at 2:07 a.m., the bombers flew away, tailed by Messerschmitt 110s with new
Schräge Musik
guns. For von Braun, however, the battle had just begun. He spent the rest of that long night repeatedly risking his skin to try to salvage the secret documents of his lifelong obsession from the fire that was consuming House 4.

With the light of dawn had come a stark realization.

Von Braun had a mortal enemy in the British air marshal who was planning the Crossbow raids.

Henceforth, he would be up against Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris.

*    *    *

The Peenemünde raid had set off a whirlwind of fury at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s remote headquarters in the forests of East Prussia. December 1941 had marked a jolting turnabout in the
Kriegsglück
—war luck—of the Third Reich. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s overwhelming assault on the “Bolshevik horde” of the Soviet Union, had resulted in months of Nazi triumphs over the Red Army … until the blitzkrieg got mired in the snows of the Russian winter. That same month had seen America enter the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Not only did Germany suddenly have to match the industrial output of three major powers, but the climactic Battle of Stalingrad had—in Churchill’s words—torn the guts out of Hitler’s army. More than one million Nazi soldiers had been lost on the eastern front, three hundred thousand of them at Stalingrad. Only ninety-three thousand had survived to surrender to the Bolsheviks on January 31, 1943. Faced with a manpower crisis, the führer had but one hope: the wonder weapons—the
Wunderwaffe
—of SS-Major Wernher von Braun and his fellow scientists.

Now this!

“The Bomber hit Peenemünde,” Himmler said. He had traveled to the Wolf’s Lair from his own nearby headquarters, High Forest, on the morning of that British attack twenty months ago.

“Harris!” Hitler fumed, his color rising.

“Yes. Overnight.”

“How bad is the damage?”

“Deployment of the V-2 has been set back months.”

“Months we don’t have.”

“Yes,” agreed the SS leader. “The Bomber wants our rockets. The RAF will come again and again. The Bomber won’t stop until every V-2 is useless scrap.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Pass control of the rockets to the SS.”

For years, Heinrich Himmler had wanted to turn the SS—established as Hitler’s bodyguard service—into a private fiefdom. Assigned the task of maintaining security throughout the Reich, he had expanded that into building a huge network of concentration camps to supply slave labor for factories he wished to have dependent on his SS—and to exterminate “racial degenerates.” From twenty-five thousand inmates on the eve of the war, the population of the camps had climbed to well over half a million by 1943—and that didn’t include the millions of
Untermenschen
who’d already been gassed and cremated in Auschwitz, Dachau, and the other death camps. The power of the SS had grown to such perverse proportions that the Black Corps had its own combat force, the thirty-eight fighting divisions of the Waffen-SS, which didn’t take orders from the Wehrmacht, the regular German army. Cross Himmler and his Gestapo agents would come knocking on your door. The SS leader was the most sinister warrior of the Reich, and all that he required to make his power base absolute was complete control over all the secret wonder weapons in Nazi development.

Here was his chance.

The henchman who stood before the führer didn’t look like a man of violence. He looked more like an intelligent elementary schoolteacher than he did a monster. Today, Himmler wore the less-threatening field gray SS uniform that he’d had tailored to his slender, middle-sized physique. With an air of quizzical probing, his gray-blue eyes peered out through the round, thin-rimmed lenses of his glittering pince-nez. The trimmed mustache beneath his straight nose slashed a dark line across his pale features. The even white teeth that backed his constant, set smile were flanked by a hint of mockery at both corners of his colorless mouth. The most telling feature of his less-than-Aryan face was his conspicuously receding chin, for it revealed a defect in his genes. As Himmler addressed Hitler—another master racist who lacked the coveted features—he clutched his peaked SS cap in his slender, blue-veined, almost girlish hands, so the skull and crossbones of the Death’s Head badge winked at the führer.

“Harris doesn’t fight like an Englishman. He fights like
us
.”

“Fire with fire,” Hitler said begrudgingly.

“The Bomber is no Montgomery.”

Himmler was alluding to Monty’s gentlemanly behavior after the Battle of El Alamein, when he had invited his dust-covered adversary from the trounced Afrika Korps into his tent for dinner so they could analyze the tank war they had just fought.

“Harris plans to bomb us into submission. That man will stomach casualties that make his cohorts blanch. The only way to protect the V-2 is to produce it underground.”

“Build a factory?”

“Yes,” said Himmler.

“We don’t have enough workers.”

“I do. In the camps.”

Hitler shook his head. “We must use
German
labor. Or we’ll have security leaks.”

“We already do. The V-2 was betrayed by spies. How else would Harris have known the location of Peenemünde?”

“The risk is too great.”

“No,” said Himmler. “It’s the ideal solution. We can use slaves to burrow the tunnels and to build the V-2s. Having the prisoners underground guarantees secrecy. They can be cut off, with no escape, from the outside world. We can send in criminals as
Kapo
bosses. The plan is watertight.”

“But can it be done?” asked Hitler.

“I have just the man to do it.”

*    *    *

SS-General Ernst Streicher was a rocket himself. His climb through the ranks of the SS had been meteoric over the past two years. And unlike those Aryan rejects Hitler and Himmler, Streicher was as Nordic as an
Über-
Nazi could be. Not only was he the blondest man in the Third Reich, but his eyes were the iciest of blue. An architect and a civil engineer by training, the forty-two-year-old construction whiz had been a Nazi Party insider since 1931 and a member of the SS since 1933. Utter ruthlessness and endless energy had turned him into a driving force that got things done.

Streicher had made his bones in the agriculture and air ministries by perfecting a way to mass-assemble hangars, barracks, and such. Recognizing that the Aryan poster boy was cut from the same cloth as SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler had tasked him with building the ultra-secret extermination camps and gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, and Maidenek.

Streicher’s meticulously crafted design for Auschwitz had caught the attention of a delighted Hitler. The führer had instantly grasped that he had the ability to retain control of the minute details of a project without losing sight of its strategic goals. That, Streicher had proved in blood by drawing up plans to increase the capacity of the death camps to fourteen million, and by upping the daily output of their gas chambers and ovens from ten thousand to sixty thousand victims.

That engineer was the ideal tool for this job.

One week after the Peenemünde raid and Himmler’s meeting with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, Streicher had dispatched the first contingent of slaves from Buchenwald to Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Their arrival on August 27, 1943, was witnessed by Fritz—then thirteen—and his brother, Hans. Their father planned to toughen up his motherless sons.

“Kretiner!”

Idiot!

“Arschficker!”

Ass-fucker!

“Dreck!”

Shit!

“Krematoriumhund!”

Crematory dog!

The insults and the blows began as soon as the first trucks from Buchenwald disgorged their human cargo outside the yawning mouths of a pair of tunnels that wormed into Kohnstein Mountain. The site selected by the SS for its new “hardened” underground V-2 factory had begun life as a gypsum mine in 1917. In 1936, following Hitler’s seizure of power, the mine had been transformed into a highly secret petroleum reserve for the Reich. Two parallel tunnels, “A” and “B”—each one a mile long and big enough to swallow two railroad trains, with enough space left over for service trucks and towering machinery—were bored into the mountain. A series of cross tunnels—each five hundred feet long—connected the main runs at regular intervals like the rungs of a ladder. With a total subterranean capacity of thirty-five million cubic feet, the S-shaped network had the potential to become the biggest underground factory in the world.