Swastika (16 page)

Nordhausen, Germany

April 4, 1945

“Fritz!” Streicher snapped. “Where are you?”

The Hitler Youth returned to the sparks above Nordhausen.

The memory of that winter morning on the
Appellplatz
faded.

“Sorry, Father. I drifted off.”

“There’ll be no drifting off. I have a task for you.”

The Hitler Youth clicked his heels.

“For you
and
Hans.”

Jackboots stomping, the SS general led his sons and the corpse-counting bureaucrat into the yawning maw of Tunnel B. As soon as they entered, a deafening din assaulted them. Massive rockets rumbled toward them along the railroad tracks. Each thirteen-ton leviathan received its tail, fins, guts, and open-jawed snout at workshops in the cross-halls as it emerged from the deep. Like an army of ants, thousands of tiny slaves swarmed through the tunnel, one line going in and the other coming out. Lathes, drills, machine presses, jigs, files, and hammers produced a cacophony that ricocheted off the tight confines of the rock walls and down into the bowels of the assembly line. Countless clogs clomped across the concrete floor. Huge slabs of sheet metal clanged and moaned as welders bent and fused them into place. The stench of burned oil hung heavy in the air.

Up where the tunnel’s walls met the rounded roof, ventilation shafts panted like monstrous pneumatic lungs. The tunnel was alight with the brilliant blue rays of the welders and the yellowish cast of the bulbs that shone down from the ceiling. Slaves cried out under the blows of the
Kapos
like the choirboys of some satanic cathedral.

Tunnel A was the supply tunnel. It was used to send parts down to the cross-halls, where they were added to rockets cradled horizontally on railroad bogies that rolled them from north to south along the assembly line in Tunnel B. When a rocket was finished, it was moved to Hall 41, where it would be inspected and approved. Hall 41 had been excavated well below the floor level to give it more than fifty feet of clearance. A giant spanning crane hoisted the rockets off their cradles and stood them up on the tips of their tail fins. Several galleries scaled one whole side of Hall 41. Slaves and Nazi overseers worked on the various levels, inspecting the top-end components of each missile’s guidance system and tightening lugs, nuts, seals, and fittings in the open stomach of each upright shark.

Normally.

But not at the moment.

“How many hangings does this make?” Streicher asked.

The corpse-counting bureaucrat consulted his tally board. “Sixteen on March 3. Fifty-seven on March 11. Thirty on March 21. Thirty again on March 22. Plus these.”

SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, the commandant of Auschwitz from May 11, 1944, until its evacuation in January of this year, had become the new head of Dora-Mittelbau on February 1. Escaping the onslaught of the Red Army with him had been his SS executioners and thousands of living skeletons—most of them Jews. Days without food in those boxcar pens had taken their toll, and often more dead bodies than live prisoners had come down from the trains. Baer had dumped the hopeless transport cases and Mittelwerk casualties at the Boelcke Kaserne barracks in Nordhausen and left them to die slowly. Ironically, the RAF bombing raid had thwarted that plan. Then, to root out sabotage in the rocket factory, Baer had embarked on a slew of mass hangings in Hall 41.

Hangings like those that the Streichers and the corpse-counter had just walked in on.

The overhead crane spanned the hall like a rolling bridge. Hooked to it was a plank with twelve hangman’s nooses attached. The nooses were cinched around the necks of twelve trembling slaves, each with his wrists tied behind his back and his mouth gagged by a chunk of wood that was fastened at the base of his skull like a horse’s bridle. The gags were to prevent outbursts that might insult the SS. At the first mass hanging, a Russian had condemned them to eternal damnation, and Baer wasn’t the kind of commandant to stomach that.

With a whir, the crane began to rise.

Work had ceased in Hall 41 so that the hangings could be witnessed by all: the twelve slaves who would follow this dozen; their comrades, who would survive to work another shift; and the rocketeers still in the Mittelwerk.

Slowly, slowly, the crane rose to a height of twelve feet, lifting the soles of the hanged men five feet off the floor. At first, it seemed that nothing was happening, that the bodies were inert. But then the wretched marionettes began to stir. They kicked their legs about wildly, as if hunting for a foothold, then lifted their knees to their chests, then dropped them, then lifted them again. As the twitching and twisting continued, the bodies banged about, and legs began trying to climb other legs to loosen the grips of the ropes. Soon, frenzied spasms overwhelmed their muscles. Clogs dropped from feet and loose pants fell to ankles. As if gripped by that winter wind that had blown through Fritz’s memory, the hanged men thrashed around and kicked the empty air until—slowly, slowly—the kinetic frenzy waned. One by one, they settled down—a shudder here, a tremble there—with their heads angled sharply from their shoulders, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, and the ropes of the mechanical gallows dug deep into their necks.

With a whir, the crane began to lower.

A loosening of the nooses and the dead fell to the floor, where the undertaker slaves gathered them in their handcarts, heads and feet sticking out, to trundle the “pieces” off to Camp Dora’s crematorium.

With a whir, the crane began to rise.

The last twelve men hanged would be left to dangle for days as a deterrent to the other slaves. As each shift came in or went out, the men would have to push through this obscene display, setting the corpses swinging gently from their long noosed ropes in a literal
danse macabre
.

*    *    *

Hall 41 was the climactic fusion of the rocket and the Reich. Here hung the proof that modern industrial technology was morally compatible with slavery, mass murder, and barbarism. The rocketeers, not the SS, had been the ones to suggest solving the wartime manpower shortage by using slave labor to build von Braun’s V-2. Arthur Rudolph, the production manager of the assembly line at Peenemünde, had returned from a tour of the slave-driven Heinkel aircraft plant north of Berlin convinced that he held the key to their labor problem. Now that the rocket factory was in these tunnels, so was the office of von Braun’s production manager. At least once a day, Rudolph would stroll the assembly line, occasionally stopping to down a glass of schnapps with SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Forschner, the commandant overseeing the horror.

Magnus von Braun—Wernher’s brother—was head of gyroscope production. His office, too, was in the Mittelwerk. The guidance system of the V-2—a technical innovation called the
Vertikant
—used three gyroscopes: a pair to orient the missile in outer space and a third to shut off the engine at the correct velocity. The final gyroscopic tests could not be carried out on a horizontal missile, so Magnus von Braun did them in Hall 41.

Because the Baltic had remained the site of rocket testing, Wernher von Braun had stayed behind at Peenemünde. But he’d maintained communication with Hall 41, home of the “cucumber”—as team members had dubbed the olive green rocket. Hall 41 was where every new V-2 had its final tests. Von Braun’s plans had suddenly changed in February, however, when the Red Army closed in on Peenemünde. After relocating his staff here to the Harz Mountains, he himself had ended up in one of the small villages near Hall 41.

*    *    *

What might have been, Streicher wondered, if not for Bomber Harris?

If RAF Bomber Command hadn’t stopped Peenemünde in August 1943, V-2 production wouldn’t have been postponed until the following year. Because of Bomber Harris, the Reich had missed its best chance to pulverize Eisenhower’s D-Day invasion force by plunging a deluge of rockets down on the English ports of embarkation. There was no defense against the V-2. It blasted off to fantastic altitudes, then dropped down faster than the speed of sound to destroy its target before the enemy could hear it coming.

If only …

Instead, the Reich had been forced to rely on the Luftwaffe’s V-1. The “buzz bomb” had caused a lot of terror with its ominous noise—it came screaming in, the scream died, and there was an excruciating wait for the explosion—but it could be knocked out of the sky by a burst of ground fire, or by having its wing tipped up by a stalking Spitfire. The first pilotless radio-controlled cruise missile had hit London on June 13, 1944, a week after D-Day. Hundreds more had rained down on Britain over those summer months, but in the end, their military value was close to nil.

The Allies had landed.

And they were spreading out.

On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for Bomber Harris’s run at Peenemünde, where would Streicher be now? Himmler had used that attack to wrench control of the V-2 away from the regular army and place it in the hands of the SS. Streicher had built the Mittelwerk in these mountains to protect it against future Bomber Harris raids, and he’d engineered this tunnel assembly line to pump out between six and seven hundred V-2s a month.

That was more than twenty a day.

About a missile an hour.

Streicher was now the most technologically powerful Nazi in the Reich. After the briefcase bomb narrowly missed killing Hitler in the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, the führer had appointed Himmler his chief of army armaments. On August 6, the Reichsführer-SS had delegated his power to Streicher in order to accelerate deployment of the V-2.

At 6:43 p.m. on September 8, 1944, a plummeting thunderbolt had struck London to herald the arrival of the first V-2. The medium-range ballistic missile had been fired from Holland. By the end of that month, the SS had ordered that Work Camp Dora be separated from Buchenwald. That made it the only SS labor camp set up explicitly for weapons production. On November 1, the day it went independent, Concentration Camp Dora-Mittelbau had a population of 32,471 slaves. The sign of autonomy? It got its own crematory ovens.

The tally board in the corpse-counter’s hands told it all.

Hall 41 had churned out 5,789 V-2s.

Each rocket had cost the lives of nearly four slaves.

Streicher was proud of the empire of horror that he had created.

But now that empire was about to fall.

“Evacuate the tunnels,” he commanded the bureaucrat.

*    *    *

“Do we gas them?” the bureaucrat asked again.

Himmler’s standing order to the SS was that all proof of genocide had to be destroyed. The transport of death-camp survivors from the east had been an interim solution. But a final solution was needed to ensure that the subhumans would not be able to turn on the master race in the event of liberation. And those who had slaved in the V-weapons plant had to be stopped from passing Nazi secrets to the conquering Allies. The best way to accomplish that would be to herd the nearly thirty thousand slaves in Dora-Mittelbau into the factory tunnels along with all the V-2s, then block and seal every possible exit and pump in poison gas—all as a prelude to blowing the wonder weapons to hell and gone.

That, however, didn’t fit Streicher’s plan.

“No,” he said. “Evacuate the slaves, too. Get every freight car you can find and ship them out today.”

“Where to, General?”

“Bergen-Belsen. Or any camp with space.”

“But that’s—”

“Do it!” Streicher snapped. “Or you’ll join them!”

Dora-Mittelbau and the Mittelwerk factory were directly in the path of the invading U.S. Army. At first, the deserted valleys of the Harz Mountains had seemed the ideal place to hide the V-2 assembly line. The mountains were a refuge of wild and brooding beauty, of crags, ravines, dark green woods, and snug little towns with half-timbered houses. But now the war had come to the Harz from the air—in the form of the Reich’s arch-nemesis, Bomber Harris—and it would be here, on the ground, in a matter of days, when the Americans rumbled in.

Streicher’s plan called for them to find the V-2s.

“Where’s von Braun?” he asked.

“On his way to Oberammergau,” replied the bureaucrat.

“On the Vengeance Express?”

“No, General. The SS major is traveling by car.”

“Is he still in a cast?”

“Yes,” said the corpse-counter.

It was safe to travel open roads in the Harz only by night. Shortly before his thirty-third birthday, von Braun had been involved in a car accident. His driver fell asleep at the wheel, and the car veered off the road and crashed into an embankment. Von Braun had a broken arm.

“And the other scientists?”

“They’re on their way, General.”

“Key people?”

“The top five hundred, as you ordered. They’re on the Vengeance Express.”

Streicher nodded.

The V-2s would be found, but the brains behind them would not.

Bomber Harris, now with the added support of American planes, had set his sights on pulverizing Hitler’s Third Reich. The audacity of that bulldog warrior—who was trying now to do to the Reich what the Reich had done to the rest of Europe—had galled the führer past the point of madness. Hitler wanted vengeance at any price. But he knew that his ploy of having Streicher knock the British out of the war in a hail of rockets had failed. So Hitler now obsessed over a new plan.

So did Streicher.

And both exit strategies depended on a new device.

Die Glocke
: The Bell.

Vancouver

May 26, Now

Cort Jantzen got the jolt of his newspaper career when he sat down at his desk at
The Vancouver Times
and checked the overnight e-mails that had been sent to the cyber address at the bottom of his ongoing “Cyclops” column. Someone named Jason had posted a message with the subject heading “The Golden Fleece.” Intrigued by what seemed to be a reference to Greek myth, Cort opened both the e-mail and the jpeg file it included, only to drop his jaw at the sight of what popped up onscreen: the skin of a man gilded and plastered by blood to what appeared to be a high-rise window. In the background of the digital photo, Cort could make out the lights of North Vancouver.

The caption beneath the jpeg horror read:

Kurt Midas
A Golden Fleece for a Golden Fleece

A minute later, hard copy in hand, the reporter burst into the office of the managing editor.

“Don’t you knock, Jantzen?”

“Stop the presses, boss!”

*    *    *

The two newspapermen were sitting side by side at Editor Ed’s computer when the queen bitch walked in.

“Can’t you see we’re doing something important, McQueen?”

“Ed, I’ve got my piece on the stealth killer.”

“Throw it in the box. I’ll read it later. We got the Scoop of Scoops going on here.”

Bess McQueen sulked.

“Scram,” growled Editor Ed.

The queen bitch retreated.

The bum’s rush, Cort thought gleefully.

Editor Ed had punched the words “golden fleece” into a search engine, and it had come back with 125,000 hits. From among the many condensations of that myth, the précis he’d chosen read:

To establish that he was fit to be a king of the Greeks, Jason had embarked on a perilous sea quest in a ship called the
Argo
. With the help of his crew, the Argonauts, he was determined to bring back the legendary Golden Fleece. According to myth, the Golden Fleece was the skin of a fabulous flying ram that had been sacrificed to Zeus, overall king of the Olympian gods. It hung from a tree in Colchis, on the Black Sea, where it was guarded by a dragon that never slept. Drugging the dragon with a sleeping potion he’d got from a sorceress, Jason was able to capture the Golden Fleece and sail home, where he was crowned king.

 

“What an angle!” enthused Ed. “You’ve got the headline, Jantzen: ‘Vigilante Strikes Again and Contacts
Times
Reporter.’”

“Can we put the myth in a sidebar?”

“Whatever you want, sport. You’re the golden boy of the moment around here.”

“Thanks, Ed.”

“Don’t get weepy on me. What are you waiting for? It’s time to go hunt for
this
golden fleece. You’ve got a photo of the trophy but no crime scene.”

“I’m on it, Boss.”

“Set sail, Jason. Get your ass on the street.”

Outside the door to Editor Ed’s office, the queen bitch was still waiting for her audience with the boss. As Cort came out, he almost bumped into her. The rival crime reporters stared each other down.

“Eat your heart out, baby,” Cort finally said with a wink.

Back at his desk, he figured the best place to start was with the North Vancouver detachment of the Mounties. The killer of the Congo Man had struck in their jurisdiction, after all, and the background in the jpeg image clearly showed the North Shore. So the first call Cort made was to North Van GIS.

Bingo!

No need to hunt further.

The general investigation section—the homicide cops—confirmed that Mounties were currently working a murder scene at Lonsdale Quay, in a high-rise penthouse owned by Kurt Midas.

Cort and his spiral notebook were heading for the door.

North Vancouver

The crime reporter recognized Sergeant Winter as he strolled out of Kurt Midas’s high-rise. Right away, he grasped that Winter had been called in to this case—even if it wasn’t his—because it had some connection to the Congo Man’s murder.

Had the killer sent a jpeg to the Mounties too?

Or was it something else?

“A moment, Sergeant?” Cort said, homing in on the investigator. The reporter had been lurking about on the quay, probing for bits of information.

“Not now,” Winter said, waving Jantzen away.

“Heading for Special X?”

No reply.

This brush-off left Cort no choice, and he went for the sucker punch.

“Did the vigilante carve a Nazi swastika into the forehead of the African cannibal as well?”

Whap!

That stopped the cop in his tracks.

“What makes you ask that?” Winter asked, eyeing the reporter with rubber-hose suspicion.

“Read tomorrow’s paper.”

“I’d rather read it today.”

“This,” said Cort, whipping out a copy of the jpeg the killer had sent to him overnight. “See the swastika?” He stabbed his finger at the forehead of the human hide on the window.

The cop was trying to stay cool, but it’s hard to shrug off a boot to your knackers. His jaw muscles clenched.

“Where’d you get
that?
”

“From the vigilante. We’re pen pals now.”

“What else have you got?”

“His reason for skinning Kurt Midas.”

“Which is?”

“Read tomorrow’s paper.”

“Quit screwing around, Jantzen. This is serious stuff.”

“No, Sergeant!” the reporter said, flaring. “You quit screwing with me. Two days ago, when you came up from Mosquito Creek, I put to you some questions that I had a right to ask. You dismissed me like I was shit on your shoe. ‘Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: … freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media.’ Recognize it?”

“Of course. The Charter of Rights.”

“You had knowledge I wanted, and I didn’t get it. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and you’ve become the shit. I have knowledge you want, and I have every right to it. Well, Mr. Mountie, here’s the deal: either you get down from your high horse and work this out with me, or you wait for the morning paper like everybody else.”

“What do you want, Jantzen?”

“The same thing as you.”

“What’s that?”

“You tell me. Are you on your way to Special X? Would you like this crime to be your ticket into that elite? You know they’ll take it from you. Sure, they’ll second you to their investigation. They wouldn’t want the peons’ noses out of joint. You might get to carry their coffee or have some other minor role. But if you were tied to me, and I was tied to the killer, you’d be front and center in the Special X ranks.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Say that’s my agenda. What do
you
want?”

“Byline, Sergeant. I’m in a byline battle with a rival reporter. This case is
my
ticket to the top of the front page. If you team up with me to hunt for the vigilante—and I do mean
team up
with me, like Deep Throat did with Woodward and Bernstein—I’ll be the go-between who brings you his head on a platter. In return, you will give me an exclusive on how it all goes down from the
inside
.”

“In or out? Is that it?”

“Take it or leave it, Sergeant.”

“Let me buy you a coffee,” said the Mountie.

*    *    *

The discussion they were having was supposed to be “off the record.”

But these are not the good old days, and nothing is off the record now.

A surreptitious microphone caught every word.