Swastika (21 page)

*    *    *

Monday, April 23. Seven days before
Selbstmord
.

Blue Monday, as it came to be known by the bunker staff, brought another drug-addled explosion by the führer. The last stand of the Third Reich was under way, and the chancellery was taking sporadic hits from the Red Army’s long-range artillery. Suddenly, Martin Bormann stormed into Hitler’s study with a telegram in hand.

“Treason, my führer!” he bellowed. “It’s a
coup d’état!
Hermann Göring is trying to seize power from you!”

After Hitler’s birthday party, the portly Reichsmarschall had fled south to the relative safety of the Bavarian Alps, then he’d sent this telegram suggesting that he—Göring—take over as leader of the Third Reich, “if you, my führer, are now hindered in your freedom of action or decide to remain in Fortress Berlin.”

Hitler went berserk.

His blotchy face flushed crimson, his paranoid eyes glaring hate, his mustache, now white, twitching on drooling lips, the führer flew into a wild rage of bitterness and self-pity.

“Göring is a degenerate! A crook! His bad example has led to corruption at all levels. He made a mess of the Luftwaffe and exposed us to massive air raids. He let the barbarians into Berlin. Treason and betrayal are rife in my inner circle! Now Göring has the insolence to try to usurp his führer? The people aren’t up to the challenge! Germans are unworthy of me. This war was forced on me by the Anglo-American plutocracy, the Marxist-Bolshevik world conspiracy, Jewish international finance, the Freemasons, the Jesuits—all the enemies who tried to stop me during the great struggle!
Mein Kampf! Mein Kampf!
Is this how my struggle ends? Security leaks everywhere I turn!”

Hitler screamed the words, his fists clenched, his face scrunched, his eyes darting here, there, everywhere, as if he now suspected everyone around him.

The madman dragged his palsied body to the emergency telephone exchange, where he surprised the operator.

“SS-Obergruppenführer Streicher! Have you heard from him?”

“No, my führer.”

“Find him!” Hitler bellowed. “And bring him to me!”

*    *    *

Tuesday, April 24. Six days before
Selbstmord
.

There was still no sign of Streicher by the time the Red Army cut the last overland roads into and out of Berlin.

*    *    *

Wednesday, April 25. Five days before
Selbstmord
.

Having captured Tempelhof airport to thwart any escape from Berlin by plane, the Russians turned the Nazis’ big-bore, twin-purpose gun back on the besieged city and began to pound the hell out of Hitler’s capital as they breached the Zitadelle.

Still no sign of Streicher.

*    *    *

Saturday, April 28. Two days before
Selbstmord
.

Hysteria gripped the
Führerbunker
at nine o’clock that night when a German-language broadcast was picked up from Radio Stockholm. The story had originated with a San Francisco-based Reuters man who was covering the organizing of the United Nations. Acting on a tip, he’d reported that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was secretly trying to negotiate peace with the Allies through a Swedish count.

Pandemonium erupted in the bunker.

Himmler a traitor! There was treason everywhere. No wonder Streicher had failed to come through for Hitler. Was it Himmler’s plan to use
die Glocke
to save his own skin?

While the führer paced the shrinking confines of his subterranean hellhole, buttonholing whomever he could to wave the offending bulletin in their face, a drunken general raced up and down the central passage, claiming that Himmler was plotting to deliver Hitler’s corpse to Eisenhower as proof of his intent.

“Body snatchers!” Hitler cried.

That was too much.

A ghoulish SS plot by Himmler to barter the führer’s remains—the sacred ashes of the Third Reich.

“Blood!” Hitler demanded.

“Now!”

Over the Rhineland, Germany

November 27, 1944

“What the hell are those lights over there?”

The spook who’d voiced the question was just along for the ride. Seated above and behind the pilot, in what was usually the gunner’s position, he was a lieutenant from intelligence.

“Probably stars,” the pilot replied.

“I don’t think so. They’re coming straight for us.”

The P-61 Black Widow was on patrol in the pitch-black sky above the Rhineland, where the broad, winding river bordered the wild heights of the Black Forest. Five months after D-Day, the 415th Night Fighter Squadron of the U.S. 9th Army Air Force was hunting for bogies that might attack British bombers on their way to pound the piss out of the Fatherland. If they were lucky, the American aircrew would get a chance to hit a Nazi train or a truck convoy attempting to move men and materiel under the cover of darkness. The intel officer kept mum about why he was really riding shotgun.

What the spook had spied off their starboard wing was a constellation of pulsing lights. The unidentified flying objects jolted the pilot into banking sharply to aim the night fighter’s four cannons and machine guns at what had to be Nazi attackers. At the same time, he radioed ground control to get the number of planes caught by radar.

“Negative.”

“What?”

“No bogies in your sector.”

“There must be.”

“No blips. You’re on your own.”

The Black Widow definitely wasn’t alone. True, there was silence except for the P-61’s twin engines, but the glowing disks—ten of them—were zooming in fast on this “lone wolf” mission.

“What do you see?” the pilot asked his radarman. The night-sight expert crouched over the scope of his airborne-intercept radar in the well behind the intel lieutenant.

“Negative, Skipper. The sky ahead is clear.”

“What the hell …?”

“Fire!” barked the spook.

Boosting the throttles, the pilot went for the lead UFO, but as the American guns were about to spit tracers into the dark, the exhaust burners of the bogies—or whatever had caused that otherworldly glow—dimmed and snuffed out. The P-61 jinked to check its blind spots. Nothing. Where had those disks gone? They weren’t ball lightning, and they weren’t St. Elmo’s fire, and their darting movement was unlike the flight of any known aircraft in the arsenals of either side.

So what were the UFOs?

No one knew.

But the radarman was able to give them a name. A Chicagoan, he was a fan of the newspaper comic strip
Smokey Stover, the Foolish Foo Fighter
. “Foo” was a bastardization of the French word
feu
, for “fire.” Smokey, a fireman whose boss was Chief Cash U. Nutt, drove around in a two-wheeled fire truck known as the Foomobile. Smokey was fond of saying, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.” He called himself a foo fighter, instead of a firefighter, and because the mysterious UFOs appeared to be fiery disks of unknown origin, they too were dubbed foo fighters. The name stuck.

*    *    *

Pilots who had foo-fighter sightings over Western Europe between September 1944 and April 1945 were consistent in how they described the puzzling UFOs. The phosphorescent balls glowed amber, red, or white and were three to five feet in diameter. Each disk was metallic and seemed to generate light. None made propulsion noise or left a vapor trail. There was something electromagnetic in how they flew. Foo fighters were able to home in on Allied aircraft as if guided to them by remote control. Their rates of climb, maneuverability, and ability to take evasive action were extreme. Steep dives, sharp banks, and defensive tricks couldn’t shake them. They tagged along as if magnetized, never fired a shot, and didn’t explode in proximity. Then they peeled away and vanished into the blackness of the Third Reich.

The Cariboo, British Columbia
May 27, Now

FZZZZZZZ …

CRAAACKKKK …

Even the pounding bass line couldn’t suppress the cacophony summoned by this Nazi’s infernal machines. At the center of it all, surrounded by the monitors and dials that ringed his subterranean workbench, the Eurotrash freak sat consulting the swastika-stamped plans and tweaking settings and twizzle knobs. As the heavy metal rockers thrashed
Amerika
, the Aryan’s shadow blitzkrieged around the walls of the gold-flecked cave like a ghost from some long-ago battlefield.

The spooks were spooked.

From the standpoint of Newtonian physics, what Ajax and Lysol were witnessing was impossible. This self-trained gizmo addict was able to subvert gravity with just the blueprints from the Streicherstab and an intuitive grasp of electromagnetism. Using a setup cobbled together from supposedly obsolete salvage, he was tapping into the quantum mechanics of Max Planck. Amid the high-voltage effects of a spark-gap, which was snapping ear-splitting shock waves down into the mine, the wizard at the heart of the zone of influence manipulated a forest of humming aerials and dishes. Phantom forces plucked hunks of scrap metal off the rocky floor and levitated them in thin air.

Like foo fighters.

Whatever the Nazi was doing, the fireworks were awesome. In the time they’d spent spying on him from the black hole of the tunnel, Ajax and Lysol had watched the punk maneuver identified flying objects like frying pans and spools of wire as if they were remote-controlled model planes. He could make them slide horizontally or hover in place—and with the flick of a dial that bent aerials toward a target wall, he was able to shoot them in a powerful ballistic arc as if they’d been propelled by a sudden energy boost.

Not only did he levitate objects and move them around, but he also bent them, broke them, and caused them to explode. In military jargon, his was a “lift and disruption” weapon. But how did it work? Did he trigger opposing electromagnetic fields so each canceled the other out? Did he whirl electromagnetic fields in some unfathomed way? Whatever he was doing, he seemed able to channel a flow of zero-point energy toward any object within his zone of influence. By affecting the quarks and gluons of quantum mechanics, did he teeter on the verge of time dilation? Were pockets of space-time being transmuted down here? It certainly looked that way from what the Pentagon spooks saw happen to the anchor.

Rusted and barnacled as if recovered from the bottom of the sea, it was the largest chunk of junk on the ground. It was probably heavier than all three men in the mine combined. To lift it, the Nazi had to crank several dials to their red-line level, and then he cranked several more once the anchor hovered in the air. This appeared to turn the solid anchor transparent, visible in outline yet invisible in mass. It was both there and not there at the same time.

The spooks had seen enough.

It was time for the nutcracker to make the Nazi sing.

Time to give up Hitler’s long-lost secret.

The mother lode?

The Nazi was swiveling the antenna farm toward the target wall—in preparation for another cross-cavern hurl?—when suddenly all hell broke loose. The ceiling lights began to glare intensely, as if pushed to the maximum capacity of their filaments, and they soon bathed the floor of the mine with such searing incandescence that illumination burst into the spooks’ black hole. Like jailbreakers caught in a searchlight sweep of a prison yard, they froze and hoped not to be seen. The Eurotrash punk aimed a finger of accusation at the intruders, and then he cranked a knob to the max.

FZZZZZZZ …

CRAAACKKKK …

“Jesus!”

Both spooks yelped.

The spark-gap exploded with a shock wave of such magnitude that it blew their eardrums. A bolt of lightning zapped from the Nazi’s fingertip toward the mine hole. The ceiling lights blew, spewing a shower of red-hot filaments. The cavern plunged into an eerie, sizzling darkness. Tongues of phantom flame licked up the target wall and around the throat of the mine. The lab was sucking energy from who knew where. All at once, the anchor flew across the cavern as if guided to its target by the lightning bolt. One of the arrowhead prongs crunched through Ajax’s skull and nailed him to the concave granite.

The shock wave had shattered the lenses of both spooks’ high-tech goggles. Lysol missed the plight of his partner because he was plucking at the glass shards in his eyeballs. Then, through pain and blindness, his survival training kicked in.

Where was his gun?

His palm swept the littered floor.

Where was the bag with his backup gun?

He groped around in the dark.

His fingers found the bag where he had dropped it on the ground. As he felt for the zipper, steel punched through the back of his hand like a sword.

A sword!

He recalled the plaque on the blood-splattered box.

SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.

A cold voice snarled above and behind his ear.

“Run for your life, pig.”

The blade drew back and the bag was kicked away.

“Oink, oink,” the Nazi grunted.

Lysol cried out as the pigsticker was jabbed deep into one cheek of his butt.

Hands flailing in front of him, stumbling down into the depths of the mine where Nazi secrets lay, the blind man ran for his life.

Vancouver

Mr. Clean was in peril because of a pregnant cat.

Sure, his parabolic mike had caught what he wanted to hear about the swastika file. And yes, his infrared detector had placed the Mountie in bed. But the Pentagon spook had relied too much on the technological wizardry of Big Brother’s eyes in the sky, and not enough on intel from the ground.

For if he had bothered to delve into the emotional landscape of the Horseman, he might have learned that Dane was grieving the death of Papa and had brought his grandfather’s feline, Puss, home to see her through birthing her litter. And because Dane knew nothing about pregnant cats, he had put Puss to bed on a blanket in the confines of the hall closet. Birthing might be messy, after all, and he didn’t want to foul his entire home.

The Mountie, of course, was in bed when that infrared gizmo had picked up his body signature through the outside wall. But as Mr. Clean was scaling the downspout to the balcony, Puss had let out a mewl of discomfort that woke Dane from sleep. So out of bed he had padded, to check on what was wrong. Figuring time was nigh for the blessed event, he—as he had on many nights of camping on the cold, hard ground with Papa—had lain down on the floor of the walk-in closet alongside Puss, intending to catnap until he knew the expectant mom was stable. That’s when Mr. Clean had laser-beamed into his home.

The floorboards of the condo were interconnected.

Dane was lying on the floor when he felt the slight heave come in from the living room next door.

Someone was invading his home.

He didn’t know who.

But a homicide cop in the Mounted makes a lot of deadly enemies in the course of his crime-busting career. Dane wasn’t about to come out of the closet and introduce himself.

He didn’t have his gun.

At night, he kept that close at hand in his bedroom, in case he ran into trouble like this.

So all he had was the element of surprise.

One hand on the floorboards to track approaching vibrations from soft-shoe footfalls, the other clenched around the knob of the closet door, the defender held his breath and waited.

Squeak!

Dane knew that floorboard.

This was
his
home.

He knew every squeak and draft and nook and cranny.

Now!
he thought.

And whipped open the door.

The force of the flying door caught the spook completely off guard. The whack from the wood wrenched the H&K from his grasp, triggering a muffled shot as it flew. The door swung wider to slam him full in the face, driving the lenses of the night-vision goggles back into his eyes and smashing the bones in his nose. As the .45 clattered to the floor and Mr. Clean stumbled back in shock, the Mountie grabbed him by the throat of his Kevlar jogging suit and yanked him forward, driving his fist as hard as he could into the shattered pulp of the intruder’s nose and the eyeball-bursting goggles. The slug that had torn through the plank of the door left him with little doubt that this was combat to the death, and while Dane didn’t have a nutcracker like the one in the pouch on the spook’s sneaky uniform, he did have the version that had served Stone Age warriors since war first began.

It was called a kneecap.

The direct hit to the crotch had such outrage behind it that the home invader was lifted right off his feet and propelled out of the bedroom hall to crash down supine at the rear of the living room.

With his blinders on, Mr. Clean couldn’t see.

But so incensed was he that some peon had dared to thwart the master plan that he struggled to overcome bunching muscles in his spastic groin and the excruciating pain that tore a battlecry from his throat to go for another weapon.

His hand was closing on the butt of the Warthog at his hip when he heard a sound that was like checkmate to a chessplayer.

“Phhhhht!”

By reaching for the next generation of black world weapons, Mr. Clean had mistakenly overlooked the firepower still in play.

The H&K .45 scooped up in Dane’s fist.

There’s only one rule of engagement in the Mounted Police: don’t draw your sidearm except to shoot to kill.

The kill shot wasn’t to the heart, which was protected with Kevlar armor. The kill shot wasn’t to the brow of the head, which was crowned with metal goggles. The kill shot was to the smashed-in nose, where Dane’s skinned knuckles had struck flesh, blood, and bone.

“Phhhhht!”

“Phhhhht!”

“Phhhhht!”

Arlington, Virginia

With the beak of his mouth gaping open and the talons of his fingers clawing the edge of his desk, Big Bad Bill hunched over his satellite speakers.

Ajax had yet to report in from the Skunk Mine. The dead air from that satellite link grew more ominous with each second that ticked by on Bill’s watch.

Even more disconcerting was the showdown now going on in the home of the meddling Mountie, every blow of which was being bounced here from the open mike of Mr. Clean’s headset.

“Phhhhht!”

“Phhhhht!”

“Phhhhht!”

Thank God, thought Bill.

He recognized the whispering of the silencer-equipped .45 carried by all Pentagon hit men.

“Is he terminated?” Bill asked through the plug in Mr. Clean’s ear.

No answer.

Then he heard a voice that was familiar to him from conversations picked up earlier by that parabolic mike, a voice that seemed to be about as far away as someone standing over a body on the floor.

“Who the hell are you?” Winter asked rhetorically.