Swastika (29 page)

Nordhausen, Germany

July
5,
1945

The first thing Maj. Bill Hawke had done when he saw the V-2 factory buried in Kohnstein Mountain was report the news back to the Pentagon’s chief of Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Paris. That was on April 11, the day the 3rd Armored and the 104th Infantry had liberated Nordhausen and Dora-Mittelbau.

“Hot damn!” the colonel had said. “Good work, Major.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve got a future in the Pentagon, son.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“How many rockets are there?”

“Hard to tell, Colonel. Most are in pieces. A few are half-built. It’s an assembly line.”

“Are there a hundred?”

“Probably.”

“That’s the magic number we’ve been given by Army Ordnance at the Pentagon. We’re to grab a hundred of the Krauts’ V-2s and ship them off to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico for detailed study.”

“Can do, Colonel. If I get support.”

“You’ll get support, Major. But we gotta move fast. Germany was divided up at the Yalta yak in February. Nordhausen is in the Reds’ zone of occupation.”

“The Russkies get the rockets?”

“Fuck those Commie bastards. What you do is steal the V-2s in a way that doesn’t look like we looted the place.”

*    *    *

Special Mission V-2 had swung into action. As Army Ordnance assessed the inventory in the subterranean tunnels and tried to figure out how best to disassemble a huge quantity of parts and sub-assemblies and transport them to the port of Antwerp, a call went out for GIs with basic mechanical skills. The 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company was soon brought in. By rounding up captured German rolling stock and clearing the tracks to the factory, the Americans were able to trundle off the first forty-car trainload of Nazi rocket hardware.

Meanwhile, Hawke was in command of the “gypsy team,” a band of roving experts who could be deployed on a moment’s notice to check out interesting discoveries. Their primary task was to find and interrogate the missing rocketeers.

On May 2, Hawke struck gold.

Two days after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, an anti-tank company of the 44th Infantry was on patrol just over the Bavarian border with Austria when a cyclist came down the road. The man on the bicycle was Magnus von Braun, Wernher von Braun’s English-speaking brother. He informed the surprised Americans that just up ahead at an Alpine hotel, the brains behind the V-2 was waiting to surrender to them.

Hawke met von Braun the following day, in the Austrian town of Reutte, where the rocketeer had been taken for interrogation by Army Intelligence.

“You’re top on my list,” Hawke said, tapping the roster of names of Nazi scientists given to him by the Pentagon.

“And so I should be,” said von Braun.

“What do you expect from us?” the major asked, getting straight to the point.

“To give me the opportunity to conquer outer space.” Von Braun pointed his index finger toward the ceiling.

“Why us?” Hawke asked.

“We discussed that.”

“When?”

“Early this year.”

“Where?”

“Peenemünde.”

“Who?”

“My chief assistants and I.”

“Huzel? Tessmann?”

“And others.”

“Why?”

“I had received conflicting orders from the SS. Ernst Streicher, special commissioner for the V-2, had sent a teletype directing me to move my rocketeers to central Germany.”

“To the Mittelwerk?” said Hawke.

“To the Harz,” replied von Braun, sidestepping that trap.

“And the other order?”

“From the Reichsführer-SS himself. Himmler told me to command all of my engineers to join the Volkssturm and help defend that area against the Red Army.”

“What did you decide?”

“I told my staff that Germany had lost the war, but that we should not forget that we were the first to succeed in reaching outer space. We had suffered many hardships because of our faith in the peacetime future of our V-2s. Now we had a duty. Each of the conquering powers would want our science. The question we had to answer was, To which country should we entrust our heritage?”

“That’s why you followed Streicher’s order, not Himmler’s?”

“Certainly. To move west. We despise the French. We are mortally afraid of the Soviets. We do not believe the British can afford us. So that, by elimination, left America.”

The Pentagon, of course, welcomed Wernher von Braun with open arms.

*    *    *

Special Mission V-2 had raced against the clock.

On April 25, a patrol from the U.S. 69th Infantry had met a lone Russian horseman in the village of Leckwitz, not far from the Elbe River. The next day at Torgau, as part of the official link-up ceremony, Major General Emil F. Reinhardt had swapped salutes with Major General Vladimir Rusakov of the Soviet 58th Guards Infantry Division.

The Russians were coming!

To Nordhausen!

Sometime around June 1!

“Fuck those Commie bastards,” the colonel had told Hawke. So the GIs looting the factory tunnels had toiled night and day until they had enough components for a hundred V-2s loaded into railcars bound for Antwerp, where sixteen Liberty ships were waiting to sail for New Orleans. From there, American trains would trundle these spoils of war to the White Sands Proving Ground.

The last train left the future Soviet zone on May 31.

The cupboard was all but bare.

*    *    *

Von Braun was playing coy. A big negotiator, he was refusing to tell Hawke the whereabouts of his V-2 blueprints and other important papers. He was trying to make sure that without him and his rocketeers, the U.S. would be unable to make its captured hardware blast off.

Arrogant prick, thought Hawke.

The five hundred rocket scientists who were Streicher’s hostages on the Vengeance Express had been corralled at the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen for interrogation by Hawke and his intel experts. But there were still the thousands left behind around the Mittelwerk, and one of them, as it turned out, knew where Huzel and Tessmann had hid von Braun’s treasure trove. Through a little trickery—Hawke convinced him that the SS major wanted him to reveal where the archives were—that man directed the Americans to an old mine in the isolated mountain village of Dornten, several miles northwest of Nordhausen.

There they encountered a new problem.

The mine was in the future British zone of occupation.

And the Brits were to arrive on May 27.

Back on April 3, it had taken Huzel and Tessmann, with their little convoy of three trucks, thirty-six hours to transfer the fourteen tons of V-2 documents into a small locomotive and haul that cache down into the heart of the mine. There, von Braun’s assistants had carried his rocket records by hand into the shaft, which was then dynamited shut to conceal their treasonous secret.

Hawke had only a week to go before the Dornten mine would fall into British hands, so there was a frantic scramble to evacuate the demolished tunnel and transport the recovered document crates back to Nordhausen. That was accomplished on May 27, as the British were setting up roadblocks to mark their occupation zone. All that Nazi paper—like all that Nazi hardware—was soon en route to America.

Fuck those limey has-beens too, thought Hawke.

Pax Britannica,
your time has passed.

Pax Americana,
your day has come.

*    *    *

Time was running out.

They called the Pentagon’s plan to export the Nazi rocketeers to
Amerika
Operation Overcast.

On June 8, senior engineers from von Braun’s inner circle had returned to Nordhausen to help Major Hawke identify which of the thousands of Nazi technicians in the Harz should be evacuated to the American zone. Less than twenty-four hours before the Soviets were to arrive, some one thousand German V-2 personnel, and their immediate relatives, were boarded onto a fifty-car Nazi train, which chugged them forty miles southwest to the town of Witzenhausen.

The town was just inside the American zone.

With the rockets safe, the archives safe, and the brains in custody, it was time for Hawke to deal with von Braun.

Army Ordnance had sold the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff on Operation Overcast. The official plan was to exploit the Nazi specialists to defeat Japan. As a reward, Hawke got a permanent post-war job at the Pentagon and a code name befitting all that he had accomplished in Special Mission V-2. Thenceforth, he was known as “Hardware.”

“What is this?” von Braun asked, glancing down at the papers that Hardware had dropped on the table.

“A contract for you and your rocketeers to work in America.”

“For how long?”

“Six months, it reads. But let’s agree on five years, between you and me.”

“How many rocketeers?”

“Your quota is one hundred.”

“I’ll need at least … a hundred and fifteen,” said von Braun.

This Nazi jerk is pulling my chain, Hardware thought.

“We won’t let orders get in the way.”

“Good,” said von Braun.

Hardware held out his hand.

The SS major shook it.

“So who do you want from this list of POWs?”

As Hardware watched the Nazi physicist put together his dream team from the brain trust of Hitler’s Reich, his mind filled in the war crimes certain names had committed.

Yep, thought Hardware. This cover-up will take more whitewash than young Tom Sawyer and his dupes slapped on that fence.

A lot more.

*    *    *

In the end, the clock was not running as fast as Army Ordnance had feared. It wasn’t until today—July 5—that the Red Army reached Nordhausen to assume its occupation from U.S. forces. As he waited for the Russkies to arrive for a tour of the tunnels, Hardware brushed his palms together and thought to himself, with righteous pride, Spic and span. Fuck these Commie bastards.

Tasked with handing the stripped-down Mittelwerk over to the Russians, Hardware had tapped some of the local prisoners to “sanitize” the tunnels of rocket secrets.

The warm summer sun was shining down on what had not so long ago been the industrial storage area outside the mouths of the Mittelwerk tunnels. The slaves were gone and the bodies were buried, but this former SS enclave still had a haunted atmosphere. Even in the sunshine, it seemed oppressively gray.

The Russian colonel drove up in a dust-caked jeep. His name was Boris Vlasov, and Hardware thought he was a nasty piece of work. He wore the shit-colored uniform of the Red Army, with the same flared jodhpurs and knee-high jackboots as an SS goon. On the brow of his peaked cap sat a big red star. The high Slavic cheekbones of his bloated face were red and raw from shrapnel wounds. The undamaged flesh around his intense squint seemed to bear the permanent mark of a tank commander’s goggles.

No salutes were exchanged.

Vlasov’s cohorts didn’t fool the major one bit. Sure, they drove up in a jeep and packed pistols, but their new, oversized uniforms and lack of battlefield decorations betrayed them as closet civilians. U.S. Army Intelligence knew all about the Soviet “trophy battalions.” The job of these Russkie counterparts to Uncle Sam’s V-2 detectives was to ferret out Nazi rocket technology for Joe Stalin’s Chief Artillery Directorate. No doubt these thick-set peasants all carried Commie wish lists of Fatherland hardware and rocketeers.

Tough luck, Colonel.

Hardware sensed the growing tension as he ushered the colonel and his trophy hunters through the Mittelwerk. It was a lot colder in the tunnels than the temperature dictated. The Russkies got an eyeful of the factory assembly line, but just a few indications of what had been there when the Yanks arrived. When they emerged from the dark, shielding their eyes against the blazing sun, the Commies were no more enlightened than they’d been before they went in.

“How many men did you lose in the war?” Vlasov asked through his interpreter.

“Three hundred thousand,” Hardware said proudly.

“We lost eight and a half million!”

Hardware flicked out a Lucky Strike and offered it to Vlasov. The Russkie ignored the smoke.

“When we took Berlin, where were you?” Vlasov asked in a voice shaking with clenched rage.

Hardware ignited a match with the nail of his thumb.

“Holding back on the Elbe,” Vlasov scoffed.

“Ike gave you the glory. Be thankful,” the major said. No way was he going to take shit from this borscht-eating peon. “If it was up to me, the Stars and Stripes would have flapped on top of the Reichstag, not the hammer and sickle.”

“This”—Vlasov jerked his thumb toward the tunnels—“is all we get!”

The major stared the Russkie dead in the eye.

“Be thankful you’re getting anything,” he said, winking.

The Cariboo

May 28, Now

Time was ticking down on the deadliest secret in the Pentagon’s closet, and Bill was pissed that that time was being wasted by this straight-arrow Mountie. By the time Uncle Sam got through with him, Chief Superintendent DeClercq wouldn’t be able to get a job scooping poop at the Calgary Stampede.

Bill paced the interview room.

From the Phantom Valley Ranch, the Lone Ranger and Tonto had driven him in an unmarked police car along the Cariboo Highway toward the former ghost town of Barkerville. At Wells, the cops had locked him up in the hoosegow of the local redcoat detachment, and he was now heating his heels as he watched precious minutes tick away on the wall clock. With each jerk of the minute hand, Big Bad Bill imagined the secret cache of Streicherstab documents slipping further away.

In frustration, he slammed his fist down hard on the table.

Bill would tear the balls off this yokel.

So where the hell was he?

*    *    *

DeClercq was decked out in the red serge tunic of Review Order No. 1. With a weaponless Sam Browne, riding breeches, high boots, brown leather gloves, the felt Stetson, and several medals on his chest, he came down the hall toward Dane, Jackie, and Cort. It was rare for commissioned officers to don the historic color—their everyday working uniform was blue—but the chief had carried his red serge north just in case he was called upon to address the media following the arrest of the Stealth Killer.
The Vancouver Times
had accused the Mounties of ignoring “the less dead,” “the disposable people,” so the chief had planned to give that case the full Monty.

Instead, Special X had trapped a different quarry.

And now DeClercq had a different use for the iconic uniform.

“Chief,” said Jackie, standing up, “I just got a call. Another Greek-myth corpse was dumped overnight in Vancouver. A bunch of high-tech gadgets were found on the body.”

“Dumped where?” DeClercq inquired.

“In a maze at UBC. If you don’t need us here, we want to fly back down.”

The chief turned to the reporter. “Do you have a camera on you?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Jantzen.

“Good. Here’s what I want from you …”

*    *    *

Oh, sweet mother of Jesus, thought Big Bad Bill. What does this redcoat prick hope to do? Relive the War of Independence? Refight the Battle of Saratoga? Get real, pal.

The Mountie crossed to the recorder and punched it on.

“Chief Superintendent DeClercq has entered the room.” He turned to his suspect. “You know my name. What’s yours?” he asked.

“That’s classified information,” Bill replied.

“Classified by whom?”

“That’s classified, too,” parried Bill.

“Name, rank, and serial number. Let’s start with that.”

Bill was sitting. The redcoat was standing. So Bill pushed back his chair and stood up to face the Mountie eye to eye.

“I demand to speak to your commander-in-chief.”

“So speak,” said DeClercq.

“Not you. A
military
man. I demand to speak to someone with real authority.”

“I’m listening.”

“Get off it. You’re just a cop. I want the man in command of your armed forces.”

“It doesn’t work like that up here.”

“It does where I come from.”

“But you’re not down where you come from, are you? This is
my
jurisdiction. You will obey Canada’s laws. So I’m asking you one more time, what’s your name?”

“I refuse to answer. Turn that thing off.” Bill crooked his thumb at the recording device.

“This interview is terminated,” said DeClercq, and he punched off the recorder as requested.

“Okay, Mountie-man, listen up,” said Bill. “You have no idea who you’re fooling with. You’ve got five seconds to read me my rights, then I want the American ambassador on the phone. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll quit jacking around. The last thing you want is a fight with Uncle Sam.”

“What’s your name?”

“Fuck off.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“Give me my
rights.
”

“What rights might those be? Only people have rights. So until I get a name out of you, those rights are in abeyance. And I
will
get your name—and get to the truth—one way or another. Just so you know what you’re fooling with, I’ll lay my cards on the table.”

DeClercq opened his briefcase and withdrew several photos.

“Yesterday, this unidentified hit man broke into the home of one of my officers and tried to kill him. No one does that unless they want to deal with me.”

The redcoat dropped a crime scene photo of the dead Mr. Clean onto the table.

“This high-tech spy gear was found with that body.”

The redcoat dropped a photo of the contents of the black world’s cleaning kit onto the morgue shot.

“The unidentified hit man was after a file containing photos of murder victims with swastikas gouged into their flesh. The question is, Did you order these killings?”

The redcoat dropped photos of the Cyclops, the Golden Fleece, and Medusa onto the pile.

“The swastikas in those photos led us to the Skunk Mine, and what did we find there but this gutted corpse branded with swastikas and stripped of clothes identical to those worn by the burglar killed in the condo.”

The redcoat dropped a photo of Ajax onto the rapidly rising pile of images.

“The high-tech spy gear seized in the mine matched the gear we found at the attempted hit.”

The redcoat pulled a number of see-through evidence bags out of his briefcase.

“These gadgets were ringed around this.”

He dropped a photo of the blueprint scrawled with the words “You fucked up!” onto the table.

“And around this.”

He topped the pile with a photo of the blueprint with “Roswell” smeared across it.

“I’d say that looks like a flying saucer, wouldn’t you? And what I see stamped on both blueprints are Nazi swastikas. The same sort of swastikas as those carved into the bodies that brought you and your hit men here. Why, I wonder? But you’re not talking. So I have someone for you to meet.”

The redcoat gathered up the photos and stuffed them into a brown manila envelope. Backtracking to the door, he swung it open to reveal a man with a digital camera. Bill couldn’t move fast enough to cover his face, so—
flash!
—the spook’s mug shot was captured by the lens.

“Tell our suspect who you are,” the Mountie said.

“Cort Jantzen,” replied the reporter, flashing a press card. “I work for
The Vancouver Times.
”

“Thank you, Mr. Jantzen,” the redcoat said. “If you wait a minute, I’ll have a scoop for you.”

DeClercq shut the door and held up the envelope. “That reporter is on his way down to Vancouver, where we’ve just discovered the body of the next swastika victim. I suspect that victim is another of your hit men, since we have recovered the same spy gear as that found with the other two.”

Lysol, thought Bill. “Let me go!” he ordered. “This case is a matter of national security.”

“So you did screw up?”

“Get out of my way, Redcoat!”

“One way or another, I
will
get to the truth. While you’re sitting in a cell thinking you pulled one over on me, the contents of this envelope will be published around the globe—along with the headshot just taken of you. Then we’ll see who’ll come forward with information that will rip the mask off your face.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Watch me,” said DeClercq.

Big Bad Bill looked on as the Mountie moved toward the door. If what was in that envelope escaped from this room, he would never be able to get the genie back in the bottle.

“Whoa!” said Bill as the Horseman opened the door.

DeClercq turned.

“Whoa
who?
” he asked.

“Whoa, Chief Superintendent.”

As Bill uttered those pacifying words, which came so hard to his lips, he prayed to America’s God that they had some sort of Official Secrets Act in this godforsaken wasteland.