Swastika (26 page)

At trial, his lawyer had tried to get the jury to buy dissociative identity disorder—what used to be called multiple personality disorder, before it was relabeled in the
DSM-IV,
the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
—as his client’s defense. The attorney had used the usual background evidence to establish the split. His client was the only child of a “hard father” who drank to excess and beat up both his wife and his son. The timid boy was terrified of his old man, a towering bully who wielded the threat of death over him. Caught in a mind-trap of never-ending risk, the boy had a fight-or-flight mechanism that never shut off, leaving him only one psychological escape: to
identify
with the aggressive personality of his dad. He would feel safe only if he became a bully himself. According to his lawyer, that set up the split in his personality. The boy both despised and admired his abuser. The good part of him hated his father. The bad part of him yearned to be a thug like him.

The kicker, however, was supplied by his mother.

She, too, was terrified of her husband, but she coped by sexualizing other relationships. Mom’s the nurturer, so sexual abuse by Mom breaks the greatest trust bond of all. The confused lad’s only psychological escape from
that
Freudian trauma was to hide away the “bad part” of himself as a separate dissociated identity that he no longer knew existed.

And that, his lawyer told the jury, was how the Trog spawned.

Exactly what the Trog was, Dane had little idea. But according to the lawyer, it was the Trog who tore the victim apart with his bare hands. His defense was that the Trog was insane, and because that split-off identity was not recognized by his client, who was legally sane, his client should be acquitted.

The lawyer made it sound as if dissociated identities are separate people, instead of distinct personality states that periodically seize control of the consciousness and behavior of a person with a fractured mind. Arguments like that are largely why the concept of multiple personality disorder is now obsolete.

Dane never did find out whether that jury had bought the “Trog-dunit” defense. Before the verdict could be delivered, the accused had smashed his skull against the wall of his cell and died from a brain hemorrhage.

The classic case of dissociative identity disorder, of course, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The split between good and evil was what dissociated the doctor from the psycho in Stevenson’s novel. A similar psychological rift causes most genuine cases of dual personality. A traumatized child copes with overwhelming abuse by not experiencing it. His brain uses the mental mechanism of dissociation to seal off fearful parts of his personality. That evil identity gets locked away from his consciousness like a sleeper cell within his fractured mind. Eliminated and forgotten, the Hyde-like demon lurks unknown for years, or even decades, until some sort of stress forces the dissociated identity to seize control of the imperiled consciousness.

The shift from Jekyll to Hyde and back again was known as “doing the switch.” But Dane always thought of it as “
throwing
the switch.” In his mind, he pictured the transformation being like a Broadway play performed on a well-lit stage. Soon you know all the characters, and everything appears to be integrated: identity, memory, consciousness, and perception of the environment. Then suddenly the stage goes black and a spotlight glares, and standing there is a terrifying character you’ve never seen before. The other characters have vanished into the blackness, as if they were never onstage. Then—
flash!—
the lights come on again and the bad guy is gone, and none of the returning characters have any knowledge of having relinquished the stage.

Now, as Dane studied the two case collages on the Strategy Wall, the lawyer in him began to suspect that something psychologically different was going on here.

What if the Nazi monsters they were hunting were like the chimera of Greek myth?

Could it be that the Swastika Killer and the Stealth Killer were not two separate people at all? Could they be a pair of mentally conjoined Siamese twins—two killers rolled into one—mistakenly separated on the Strategy Wall by an illusory dividing line?

Hyde and Hyde?

Sudeten Mountains, Germany

May 4, 1945

Hitler was dead, but still the war raged on.

Having eradicated every trace of his Pilsen and Brno special projects group from records in the Prague offices of the Skoda Works, Ernst Streicher had commanded the pilot of the transport plane to fly northeast to the Sudeten Mountains. There, where Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia joined borders, the diehard city of Breslau had held out for over two months against the encircling Red Army. In the dead of winter, with the Oder River frozen over, the city’s besieged women and children had tried to escape the vise-like grip of the Soviets, but most were either gunned down as they ran or left to freeze in the sub-zero temperatures. “Every house a fortress!” was now the battlecry. Artillery explosions blew buildings apart, and the fighting in the streets was as ferocious as that at Stalingrad. Five Volkssturm regiments of elderly men and Hitler Youths—the only males left in the city—battled above ground with anti-tank grenades or struggled hand-to-hand with Russians down in the stinking sewers.

The death throes of the Third Reich.

The next-to-last gasp.

Gazing out from the cockpit of the Junkers as they descended into Opeln, Streicher could see the fires of Breslau in the near distance, then—
bump, bump, bump
—they were on the ground. Opeln was a special evacuation staging area. Heavy-duty cargo planes with the ability to fly thousands of tons of equipment, documents, and personnel to fugitive havens anywhere in the world were being loaded with loot from around the crumbling Reich. The runway was abuzz with activity as the SS general deplaned into drizzling rain. His six-engine Junkers was the largest “truck” in sight—
Kommando
slang for vehicles from the winged motor pool. The four-engine 290s working the escape route up to Norway—which was still under Nazi control—were painted with yellow-and-blue markings to disguise them as aircraft from neutral Sweden. The 290s flying the southern route to Nazi-sympathetic Spain wore green camouflage.

Idling alongside the runway were trucks of the terrestrial kind. No sooner had the cargo bay of the Junkers opened than they drove out onto the landing strip and began to load the belly of the plane with crates of gold and art treasures plundered from the houses of Jews.

Under his coat, Streicher carried a box of blueprints and lab notes from the think-tank at Brno. A truck stood waiting for him in the rain. Ducking out of the drizzle, the SS engineer climbed in to the passenger’s seat.

“Where to, General?” inquired the driver.

“The castle,” Streicher directed.

*    *    *

From east and west, from north and south, this part of Europe had always been the crossroads for conquerors. Through here had passed the Teutonic knights on their way to challenge the Muslims in the Holy Land. In retaliation, the Ottoman Turks had battled up through the Transylvanian realm of Vlad the Impaler and crossed the Danube at Vienna. To fortify their eastern flank and shield western Europe from invasion, knights of the Middle Ages had filled these mountains with stone castles on virtually unassailable outcroppings. The central feature of every German citadel is its
Bergfried,
a tall watchtower adapted from Roman forts. The silhouette of each castle is as individual as a fingerprint.

The castle that now towered above the truck as it snaked its way through the teeming rain, its tires clinging precariously to the medieval road, was the headquarters the general had used to oversee various tests in the Wenceslas Mine. The outline of the fortress was the same one that Fritz had tattooed over his heart to look like a family crest.

Just in case …

“Wait here,” the general ordered as the driver stopped in front of the dripping gatehouse.

Streicher crossed to the front door and made for the Knight’s Hall, where he’d spent many a stormy evening, with schnapps in hand and Wagner on the phonograph, pacing about like Lohengrin, the Aryan knight of the Holy Grail. Now, as twilight grayed the sky beyond the leaded-glass windows, he approached the long mantelpiece that spanned the far wall. With a pocketknife, he opened the hidey-hole to the left of the fireplace, just where the Iron Cross was mounted in the tattoo of the Knight’s Hall over the heart of his younger son, Hans.

Just in case …

Removing the blueprints and lab notes from the box beneath his coat, Streicher stashed them in the hole and resealed it. His exit strategy was fraught with danger, so for his own sake, he thought it wise to keep an ace up his sleeve. If the Americans double-crossed him and he got killed, his sons would figure out the puzzle. And though neither of them knew about or had been to Schloss Werwolf, they would be able to fit their tattoos together to identify this hiding place. And once they’d retrieved the blueprints for what would undoubtedly be the most awesome weapon the world had ever seen, they would be able to exchange them with the Pentagon for a post-war life of wealth and freedom.

Mission accomplished, the general turned his back on the Knight’s Hall in Castle Werewolf and strode out through the gatehouse to the waiting truck.

“To the mine?” the driver asked.

Streicher nodded.

Down one mountain and up another, the Opel truck labored under a constant shifting of gears. Rain lashed the windshield in such a torrent that they were in endless peril of driving off the road and plunging down into the valley below.

“Stop!” Streicher ordered at the crest of the summit.

The truck braked.

“Hurl this over the edge,” Streicher commanded, passing the empty document box to the driver. “Make sure you toss it out far enough that it will never be found.”

Rain slanted into the truck as the driver swung open the door and jumped down into the mud. The wail of the wind drowned out all sounds as he approached the ledge. As he threw the box into the air above the cliff face, his body absorbed the dual sucker punches of a bullet to the back of his head and a flat-footed stomp against his spine to propel him over the precipice.

A secret is guaranteed only if one person alone knows it.

That person climbed back into the truck and drove it the rest of the way to the mine.

*    *    *

Lightning forked and thunder grumbled as the general splashed the truck through pockmark puddles along the road southeast of Waldenburg, a coal-mining town close to the Czech frontier. The single-lane route followed the tracks of an old prewar railway, built to link the region’s resources to the outside world. As he wound his way up into a valley flanked by tall trees, Streicher passed through three checkpoints of strict SS security. Cleared of suspicion, he curved around a bend, and there the valley opened into a camouflaged marshaling yard. Turf-topped wooden planks called sleepers roofed six lines of track where the railhead met the shaft of the Sudeten coal mine. A derelict building with high arched windows loomed next to the pit, while across the valley stood a red brick house that dated back to the nineteenth century, just like the workings below ground. Spotted from the air, this operation would look like it always had, but down here you could see the concrete bunkers and blockhouses that Streicher’s slaves had built into the thick hillside.

The tunnels in the Sudeten Mountains—this one especially—were the core of Streicher’s high-tech kingdom, the places where the best brains in Germany had been testing the next generation of weaponry, including
die Glocke.

But now those brains were packing up.

A convoy of Opel trucks occupied the railhead yard. Positioning his vehicle so that it could be loaded too, the SS general stepped out into the rain and marched directly into the yawning mouth of the Wenceslas Mine.

Having developed the cruise missile—the V-1—and the ballistic missile—the V-2—the Nazis had pressed on with other futuristic gizmos in Streicher’s eastern realm. Unbelievable gadgets like an atomic bomb and a supergun called the “Busy Lizzie,” which could hit most cities in Britain from gun placements in France, as well as sound waves, air vortices, jets of compressed air, and a death ray (a focused beam of light called a laser) to bring down Allied aircraft. Another plan involved turning the upper atmosphere into a high-voltage conductor that would fry the enemies’ Lancaster, Halifax, Flying Fortress, and Liberator bombers before they reached their targets. Preposterous weapons that no rational mind would accept, but the scientists of the Streicherstab had conceived them anyway.

Along with
die Glocke.

The Bell.

Blueprints for those wonder weapons had been sent from the think-tanks in Pilsen and Brno to an underground weapons plant—code-named “Giant”—clawed into the core of a Sudeten mountain by Gross-Rosen slaves. The Bell, under development in the Wenceslas Mine, was to have been connected to Giant by a six-mile tunnel, but time had run out on the Third Reich before Streicher’s complex could be completed.

Now, as the last of the crates containing the dismantled Bell were carted up to the convoy of trucks from the experimental chamber deep in the mine, the general descended against the scientific exodus for one last look at his handiwork. If his exit strategy was to succeed, no trace could be left behind.

The chamber was hundreds of yards below ground, and the deeper the general sank, the colder it became. Thick cabling had once fed power into the mine, but now, with that rolled up and hauled away, Streicher had to rely on the flashlight in his hand. Entering the chamber, he swept the beam around. All the light illuminated was naked rock.

“Good,” he told himself.

Streicher’s imagination recalled what had been. The dome of the vault was covered with ceramic tiles overlaid with thick rubber matting. At the center of the chamber had sat
die Glocke,
a bell-shaped, metal gadget fashioned around a pair of concentric cylinders that spun in opposite directions. A tall, yard-high, Thermos-like flask encased in lead had jutted up like a phonograph spindle at the core of the bull’s-eye.

A violet-colored metallic liquid something like mercury was stored in the flask. Each R&D test lasted a minute and involved covering the Bell with a ceramic shield and whirling those cylinders until the device emitted an eerie pale blue glow. During the tests, any electrical equipment within a radius of five hundred feet short-circuited, and five scientists exposed to electromagnetic side effects from the original test had died excruciating deaths.

So unhealthy was exposure to the Bell that after each test, Gross-Rosen slaves spent an hour hosing down the chamber with brine. The rubber matting on the ceiling had to be replaced after only two or three tests, and the entire setup—except for
die Glocke
itself—was dismantled and reinsulated after ten whirls.

In November 1944, the testing had expanded to include experiments on plants, animals, and human tissue. Initially, everything placed within the electromagnetic field of the Bell had been destroyed. The plants turned white as their chlorophyll decomposed, eventually disintegrating into a puddle as thick as axle grease. Animal blood gelled and distilled into separate components, while a crystalline substance hardened within the human tissue samples to decay them from the inside with no abhorrent smell. By January 1945, Streicher was ready to test the Bell on human guinea pigs, and luckily for him, the Red Army was about to liberate Auschwitz, necessitating a Nazi retreat to Gross-Rosen.

*    *    *

Of all the monsters spawned by Hitler’s Third Reich, none surpassed Dr. Josef Mengele. Calling Eva Braun the Angel of Death was an SS joke. The infamous doctor at the most horrific of the Nazi extermination camps was the
real
Todesengel.

As the trains pulled into Auschwitz from mid-1943 on, they began disgorging bewildered wretches who had endured a days-long ride with no food, no water, no toilets, and no fresh air, in cattle cars that packed them in a hundred to a crate. The doomed were met by cudgel blows from shouting guards and the snapping fangs of snarling German shepherds that herded them up a ramp to the SS officer waiting serenely above.

“Raus! Raus!”

Out! Out!

As the tide of human misery stumbled up from the trains, special guards searched the prisoners to cull the matching pairs.

“Zwillinge! Zwillinge!”
they bellowed.

Twins! Twins!

Seemingly oblivious to the stench of burning flesh that belched from the smokestacks of the crematoria, the officer at the top of the ramp whistled an operatic tune. How surreal he looked in the midst of this devastating scene, with his polished black boots planted slightly apart, his Death’s Head cap worn rakishly to one side of his perfectly styled dark hair, and his handsome face that made women swoon. His signature was the white cotton gloves on his hands. The thumb of one glove rested on his pistol belt. The fingers of the other held a riding crop that flicked left or right as each new arrival passed.

Links oder rechts.

Left or right.

Death to the left. Life to the right.

With each snap of the riding crop, the Angel of Death chose who went directly to the gas chambers and who went to the barracks.

That was Streicher’s first view of Mengele on his visit to Auschwitz to engineer a greater throughput for the camp’s killing machine.

The general liked what he saw.

For what he saw in Mengele was a duplicate of himself.

There was so much about Mengele for the general to admire. The doctor had studied eugenics at the University of Munich so that he could unlock the source of human imperfections and develop his “theory of unworthy life.” He had earned his Ph.D. for his enlightening thesis, titled “Racial Morphology Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups.” After receiving his medical degree at the University of Leipzig, he was awarded the position of research assistant in the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biological, and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. In 1938, at age twenty-seven, the doctor had joined the SS as a genetic purifier, and he had welcomed the establishment of concentration camps during the war because they provided the opportunity to experiment
in vivo
on subhuman beings. In May 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz with a mandate “to unlock the secrets of genetic engineering and devise methods for eradicating inferior gene strands from the human population as a means for creating a Germanic super-race.”