Swastika (32 page)

“Sounds fantastic,” he said.

“Not really,” Hawke replied. “Think about it. What happens when you bring the same poles of two magnets together? North meets north? Or south meets south?”

“They repel each other and bounce apart.”

“Opposites attract. Likes diverge. So electromagnetism both pulls and pushes things. Gravity, inertia, and electromagnetism are component forces of zero-point energy. By spinning the Bell at high speeds, the Nazis created a coupling device that
directed
the flow of ZPE, exploiting those fluctuations in the quantum sea as they blinked in and out of existence in hyperspace. The most efficient shape to whirl up electro-gravitational lift is a disk. Charge a saucer-like disk positively on the top side and negatively on the lower, and it will exert thrust from the negative to the positive and rise skyward. In other words, it will manipulate gravity for an anti-gravity effect. Divide the disk into segments and dispatch part of the charge around the outer rim, and the saucer can be made to move in any direction.”

“Sounds simple.”

“It’s not. No more simple than splitting an atom. The device must be tuned like a radio to interact with the gravity and inertia components of the ZPE field. Tune it right and you can cancel them out. Tune it wrong and what you’ve got is useless.”

“Is that what the SS was working on in the Wenceslas Mine? The nuts-and-bolts hardware of a time machine for Hitler and an anti-gravity war machine for use against the Allies?”

“Down in the mine and above,” said Hawke. “They also fashioned a Stonehenge-shaped test rig on the surface. A rig sturdy enough to hold down the lift of a flying saucer.”

Now’s the time, thought the Horseman.

“So tell me about Ernst Streicher.”

The Pentagon spook blinked.

DeClercq cinched the hangman’s noose. “And don’t try to play me for a fool.”

Vancouver

For as long as the Aryan could remember, pigs had been his best friends. Even back when he was just a young boy living on a pig farm in East Germany, with his broken father and his simpleton of a mother. That his father was crippled both physically and mentally was evident as they went about their chores, mucking out the wallow in their scrub patch of a yard, birthing litters of tiny piglets in the barn, and hanging the pigs up from hooks in the slaughterhouse to slit their throats and butcher the carcasses down to pork.

Hunched and dragging one leg behind him like a ball and chain, the Aryan’s father had struggled through every workday aided by his only son. His wife stuffed the sausages they sold on market day. The tears that ran down his father’s face as each strung-up pig squealed for its life exposed how fragile he really was. Only later, when the boy was older, did his mother tell him that his father had spent twenty years enduring torture and humiliation in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison after the war.

Seared into the Aryan’s memory was the one time he’d met his father’s tormentor.

Colonel Boris Vlasov.

It was December 1979, and winter held East Germany in its hoary glove. The landscape behind the Iron Curtain stood frozen in time, locked forever in May 1945, on the ignoble day that the Third Reich had crumbled into ruins. Time had moved forward in the zones occupied by the United States, Britain, and France. But in the grim, gray zone occupied by the Soviet Union, where Red Army jackboots continued to stomp Germans in their homes, you could still dig wartime bullets out of most of the shell-shocked walls. Only on days like this, with fresh snow blanketing the earth and icicles glittering everywhere else, could a boy fantasize that he was in wonderland.

It was slaughter day, and all three were in the barn. Each wore the leather apron of that messy work, with traditional German rural clothing underneath. Forsaking lederhosen because of the cold, both he and his father wore brown trousers with suspenders over wool vests. The barn doors were open to the snowy countryside, but inside it was misty from the plumes of their breath and the condensation rising from the pools of warm red blood on the floor. The pigs were making such a racket that the family didn’t catch the sound of footsteps entering the barn.

Bang!

A shot was fired through the roof to grab their attention.

A line of icicles crashed to the ground and shattered into a thousand ruby red diamonds.

“Drop your knives,” the gunman yelled.

Russian soldiers quickly moved forward and cuffed the hands of the boy and his parents in front of their waists. Then one by one, starting with his father, they were hoisted up by their wrists like the hog-tied pigs still squealing fearfully on the slaughterhouse hooks. The Germans, however, weren’t hog-tied. Their legs hung free, so that they could just touch the blood-soaked floor. Hanging so their backs were to the open door, the terrified boy and his mother faced his father, six feet away.

The change in his father’s expression clearly signaled that worse was to come. The eyes widened in disbelief, as if he had just glimpsed a ghost, and the lips began to tremble. Soon his father broke into gibbers while trickles of urine ran down his toes to mix with blood on the floor.

“No, Vlasov!” he wailed.

His legs jerked this way and that like a marionette trying to break free of the strings that held it prisoner. The boy saw the shadow of the puppet master creep across the floor before he saw the man behind it. When he finally got a look at his father’s demon in the flesh, he was surprised to see that the man was little more than a walking, cancer-ridden skeleton.

“Yes, Streicher,” Vlasov snarled as he sucked in a final puff from his cigarette and dropped it in the gore at his feet. “Why do you think I released you from prison, if not for this? For you to experience what your father made me suffer in the war, I had to let you start a family.”

Vlasov unbuttoned his greatcoat to expose the outdated Stalinist uniform underneath. Through a hacking fit violent enough to cough up both lungs, he motioned his thugs to attack the boy and his mother.

“Rape them,” he rasped.

The boy was still wondering why the Russian had called his father Streicher—that wasn’t the name they went by—when the soldiers grabbed hold of his mother and ripped off her clothes. As she hung naked from the hook, they moved across to her son and stripped him, too.

“The boy first,” Vlasov ordered. “Remember, Streicher? How you screamed at Dora-Mittelbau?”

The last sound the boy heard before he passed out from shock was the high-pitched squeal from his own throat.

*    *    *

The boy had emerged from unconsciousness to find his father gone. The hook in front of him no longer held the crippled wreck of a man. Beside him, his mother hung bleeding, and that’s how they’d stayed until someone arrived to buy a meal of bratwurst.

That Christmas, a package addressed to the boy came in the mail. He opened the paper to find what at first seemed to be a leather-bound book. But the crest engraved into the cover was one he knew well, as it was the tattoo from the skin over his father’s heart.

What Vlasov had sent as a keepsake was a blood-splattered copy of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf.

*    *    *

Now it was his chore to slaughter the pigs for pork. But instead of stringing them up by their hind legs, as his father used to do, he hoisted them up by their front legs so he could pigstick them in the butt first. As he did, he fantasized about doing that to the Russian colonel.

Only pigsticking released the rage inside him.

With Russian spies everywhere in East Germany, it was too dangerous to dig too deeply into the name Streicher. Libraries were monitored and history books rewritten. He didn’t dare try until he reached high school, and even then he didn’t reap much of a payoff. Just one Nazi of consequence had borne that name: SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher. According to the book the Aryan read, that general had “died in the same cowardly way as Adolf Hitler. Two days after the Nazi surrender, he committed suicide in a forest somewhere between Prague and Pilsen.”

The Aryan hadn’t learned the truth until 1989.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, he and his mother were eating lunch in their farmhouse kitchen when a fancy BMW drove up and stopped by the pig wallow. The sexiest woman he had ever seen climbed out from the passenger’s side and swept her eyes around the yard with distaste.

The Aryan thought they were lost.

Seconds later, however, the driver stepped out, and the instant the pig farmer saw him, he knew this man was his dead father’s brother. No mistaking the Nordic blond hair, icy blue eyes, and Aryan bone structure of the stranger’s face.

“Hans!” his mother gasped, stumbling to her feet and dropping the bread knife to the grimy floor. She saw the resemblance, too, and thought her husband had returned to her. His ailing mother had never recovered from that horrific visit by the cancerous colonel and his gang-raping thugs.

“Say nothing,” the Aryan silenced her. “Leave all the speaking to me.”

The visitors from the West rapped on the kitchen door. That they had come from the other side of the Iron Curtain was evident from their car and their fashionable clothes. The woman cast her gaze at both pig farmers and around their kitchen as if she feared catching a sewer disease. Her luscious figure complemented her sable coat. The man wore an elegant gray leather jacket over matching slacks; a charcoal turtleneck was visible in the V at his throat. In East Germany, survival taught you to spot a hidden gun, and the Aryan caught the telltale bulge in one pocket.

“Bratwurst or blutwurst?” he asked on opening the door.

“Neither,” replied the man. “I’m here because I believe you’re the son of my brother, Hans.”

“Hans Streicher?” the Aryan said.

“We don’t use that name, do we?” cautioned the stranger. “That’s why I had a devil of a time tracking you down. But with the fall of the wall, certain Communist archives have cracked open. It took a chunk of cash to uncover the name your father assumed after the Russians released him from prison.”

“What’s your name?”

“Fritz. But I don’t use that either. May we come in? It’s chilly out here in the yard.”

The Aryan stood aside so they could enter. He noticed that the woman was careful not to brush against him. She wrinkled her nose as if she could smell pig shit in the kitchen.

“Hans!” his mother cried again, tears welling up in her eyes. “I knew you’d come back to me. We still have your tattoo. Let me sew it back on for you.”

“My mother isn’t—”

But that’s all he got out. Fritz Streicher elbowed the Aryan aside in his haste to engage the feeble woman.

“Show me,” the intruder from the West demanded.

“Stay put, Mother!” ordered the Aryan. “Why have you gone to the trouble of finding us after all this time? And how do I know you’re who you say you are?”

The man purporting to be his uncle turned his attention back to the son. “I’ve come to make you rich. Did your father never tell you how we got separated?”

The Aryan shook his blond head.

So Fritz Streicher told a story about two Werewolves captured by the Americans in the woods near Work Camp Dora. His story ended when the POWs were divided by the line that Colonel Vlasov cut between the Streicher brothers. With one gesture, he sent Fritz off with the GIs to a post-war life of luxury on Canada’s West Coast and condemned the Aryan’s father to Lubyanka prison and then a scrub existence on this pig farm.

Vlasov!

The mere mention of the name caused the Aryan to tense up tighter than the mainspring of a watch.

“You know that name?” Fritz Streicher asked, picking up on his nephew’s discomfort.

“Vlasov flayed my father and used the tattoo over his heart to bind a copy of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf.
”

“You have the book?”

“It was sent to me as a Christmas taunt.”

“Let me see it.”

“How will that make me rich?”

“
Us
rich,” corrected Fritz. “We’ll split the treasure.”

“What treasure?”

“Do you know who your grandfather was?”

A flash of insight. “SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher,” the pig farmer said.

“Near the close of the war, Hans and I were tattooed with different crests. The last time we saw our father, he told us that if anything should happen to him, we were to look to our legacy. And then he tapped us both on the heart.”

“The tattoos hide a map?”

“Half a map,” said Fritz. “Mine shows the outline of a castle. But I can’t recall what was hidden in Hans’s tattoo. We were too embroiled in events of the time, and then we got caught and separated by the line between. Only later did I work out the mystery behind the tattoos. Each by itself kept our father’s treasure hidden, but together they are the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Solve the puzzle and we will share the legacy left by him.”

“You’ve done well for yourself.”

Fritz Streicher shrugged. “Your grandfather smuggled out Hitler’s gold to finance the Fourth Reich. After your father and I got separated, I was asked by those who remained of the Third Reich to become paymaster for those on the run.”

“Why didn’t you save my father?”

“You’re far too young to know how impenetrable the Iron Curtain was in the decades after the war. The Russians, not the Germans, kept all the secrets. And even when the grip loosened in the late sixties, it would have been suicide for me to go to the East. Besides, your father dropped our name long ago. How would I have found him?”

“Show me your tattoo.”

The four of them were still standing in the kitchen. The woman in the fur coat seemed disgusted and antsy. She kept shifting her weight from foot to foot as if she was ready to go. The Aryan’s mother was nibbling her lower lip and wringing her hands in the apron of her grubby dirndl. Then she noticed the bread knife on the floor and crouched to pick it up from the dirt.

Fritz Streicher opened his jacket and tugged his turtleneck up from his belt. For a man verging on sixty, he was exceptionally lean and taut. Just as he’d said, the tattoo over his heart was a crest showing the battlement towers of a castle.

“What castle is that?”

“Not so fast,” said the Aryan’s uncle. “Get
Mein Kampf
and we’ll fit the jigsaw together.”

The pig farmer left the kitchen for his ground-floor bedroom, returning a minute later with the skin-covered Nazi bible. As his uncle began to slip his hand into the pocket with the telltale bulge, the Aryan held the book out on that side. So as not to arouse suspicion in the wary German, Fritz detoured his gun hand to receive the offering.

“Which castle?” his nephew pressed, refusing to release his grip on
Mein Kampf.

“Castle Werewolf,” Fritz said. “In the Sudeten Mountains.”

He yanked the book free from the young man’s fingers and passed it across to his other hand.

“During the war, the general had his headquarters there.”

As Fritz’s hand went back to the pocket with the bulge, a blur of motion passed in front of his eyes. Before he even realized that his throat had just been cut, the book was wrenched away from him. Slitting throats came naturally to the pig farmer, who had armed himself in the bedroom for a counterattack.

There were several reasons why Fritz had to die. First, he should have used Hitler’s gold to bribe Soviet officials into turning Hans over to the West. Second, he was certainly not intending to let his nephew and his sister-in-law live once he got what he wanted. Third, the Aryan was so wound up by the unfairness of having been abandoned to the atrocities of Colonel Vlasov that he could no longer restrain himself. And finally, he couldn’t imagine why he should split the treasure in the castle with somebody who already had too much.

So Fritz Streicher had to die.

And so did his wife.