Swastika (33 page)

The rage that powered the whirling sweep of the razor-sharp blade was so intense that it almost severed the sexy woman’s head right off her furry shoulders.
Lustmord,
the Germans called it, this feeling of absolute power that turned the Aryan into a superman, unleashing the killer within.

“Hans!” his mother wailed, dropping to her knees beside the dead man on the floor.

How pathetic.

How unworthy of the master race.

Ashamed of this feeble woman, the Aryan crouched down and slit her throat too.

*    *    *

To be a sausage-stuffer in post-war East Germany was to be ribbed about Georg Grossmann. Many a time had the Aryan heard about how Georg had ground up and sold more than fifty people as frankfurters on the platform of the Berlin train station. Inspired by that story, the pig farmer had skinned Fritz’s tattoo from over his heart, then processed his victims as he had so many pigs before them, grinding the meat into sausages and the bones into meal. Both products sold out at the farm’s stall the following market day.

Getting rid of the car was easier. He drove the BMW to a destitute city and left it unlocked, with the key in the ignition. In the blink of an eye, it vanished forever.

The reunification of Germany saw East Germans flooding to the West for a better life. The Aryan let it be known that his mother had joined the economic exodus. West German relatives had taken her away to Cologne. Soon, he’d follow.

When he arrived at Castle Werewolf in what was now Poland, the former pig farmer matched the dark outline against the tattoo from his uncle’s chest. The castle was being renovated to capitalize on a burgeoning tourist trade in unshackled Poland, so the Aryan managed to get work on the site. He was guided by the inky cross in his father’s tattoo to the mantel in the Knight’s Hall and what he thought would be a cache of gold. Instead, he found nothing but scientific papers.

Cheated again!

Well, not quite.

There was still a chance that Hitler’s gold could be mined on the West Coast of British Columbia. His uncle’s pocket had given up a sizable wad of ready cash, some traveler’s checks, and several credit cards, as well as a Canadian passport with an address in Vancouver. Packing up the scientific papers, which had to have
some
value, the Aryan had abandoned the Fatherland for this
Lebensraum
half a world away.

His dreams of Hitler’s gold, however, were not to be.

By 1990, the bullion vaults hidden behind the walls of the replica bunker were empty of Nazi loot. It didn’t really matter. Psychologically, the Aryan was more suited to the isolation of the Phantom Valley Ranch, so over the intervening years, the Cariboo mine had been his home base.

But now the phoenix of the Fourth Reich was dying.

Hitler’s bunker was where the Aryan would make
his
last stand.

First, he would kill the traitor who betrayed him.

Then he would kill every cop and Pentagon hit man who came to take him down.

The Cariboo

Before he entered the interview room to offer the Pentagon spook a choice between public exposure or private confession, DeClercq had delved into the Roswell Incident and reduced it from all its gobbledygook down to a set of solid, confirmed facts.

Those facts were these: Sometime in the first week of July 1947, the morning after a fierce overnight thunderstorm, a New Mexico rancher named Mack Brazel saddled up a horse and rode out to check on his sheep. He found some unusual debris strewn around one pasture. Whatever crash-landed there had gouged a shallow trench for hundreds of feet across the hard ground. After taking a few pieces to show his neighbors, Brazel drove into Roswell to report the incident to Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox passed the information on to officials at Roswell Army Air Field, home base of the 509th Bomb Group, the air unit that had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The U.S. military locked down the crash site and retrieved the wreckage, which was first moved to Roswell Army Air Field, then later was flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. On July 8, 1947, the commander of the 509th, Colonel William Blanchard, issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a “crashed disk” had been recovered. The news made headlines in thirty afternoon papers across the nation.

Within hours of Colonel Blanchard’s press release, the commander of the Eighth Air Force, General Roger Ramey, issued a chaser release explaining that the 509th Bomb Group had misidentified a weather balloon and its radar reflector as a crashed disk. To prove the point, Ramey displayed the balloon’s remnants in his office and allowed some photos to be snapped. The press reported the correction on July 9.

To this day, that remains the Pentagon’s official position.

Case closed.

Those facts, of course, gave rise to wild speculation about a top-level cover-up.

According to the legend of the Roswell Incident, Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working for the Ballard Funeral Home, received several telephone calls from the mortuary officer at Roswell Army Air Field. He wanted to know about the availability of hermetically sealed caskets and the best way to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for a few days without altering the chemical composition of the tissues. That evening, Dennis drove to the army hospital, where he saw two military ambulances stocked with pieces of wreckage marked with weird symbols. Inside the building, he began speaking with a nurse he knew, but MPs threatened him physically and forced him to leave. The next day, he met the nurse in a coffee shop, and she told him that she had assisted two doctors doing autopsies on several non-human bodies. One body was still in good shape, but the others were mangled. She drew a diagram of these non-human creatures. Within days, she was sent to England, and never returned.

Similar strong-arm techniques were used on other Roswell witnesses. Mack Brazel was sequestered for a week by the military, for example, and sworn to secrecy on his release. Sheriff Wilcox was told that he and his family would be killed if he ever talked about what he had seen while investigating the crash. Any bits of wreckage that surfaced were immediately seized. But none of that could squelch the rumor that there were
three
crash sites. The debris field that Brazel had found was in the middle. Thirty miles to the southeast, investigators had come upon what remained of the flying disk and its crew. And a few miles northwest, there was a touchdown point of fused sand and baked soil.

DeClercq, however, was most intrigued by Major Jesse Marcel. As the intelligence officer at the 509th Bomb Group, he was involved in the recovery of the Brazel wreckage. On July 8, the day of the Blanchard press release, Marcel took some of the debris to Texas to show to General Ramey. In his office, that debris was switched for the weather balloon that later appeared in the press photos. When he was interviewed about the wreckage in 1979, Marcel stated, “It was not a weather balloon. Nor was it an airplane or a missile.” The debris “would not burn. That stuff weighs nothing. It wouldn’t bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a sledgehammer. And there was still no dent.”

In 1994, a U.S. congressman asked for “information on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its alien occupants near Roswell, N.M., in July 1947.” That spawned “The Roswell Report: Case Closed,” a paper released by the military later that year. “There is no dispute that something happened near Roswell in July, 1947,” it concluded. “The Roswell Incident was not an airplane crash … a missile crash … a nuclear accident … [or an accident involving] an extraterrestrial craft.” Instead, it was an accident that resulted from a “Top Secret balloon project designed to attempt to monitor Soviet nuclear tests, known as Project Mogul.” The so-called Roswell Incident, the report concluded, grew out of “overreaction by Colonel Blanchard and Major Marcel, in originally reporting that a ‘flying disk’ had been recovered.” The report dismissed rumors of the recovery of “alien bodies” at Roswell, insisting the wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon. “There were no ‘alien’ passengers therein,” it stated.

Case closed. Again.

The following year, a British film producer allegedly discovered footage of the alien autopsy. Widely considered a fake because the surgeons disregard conventional autopsy techniques, the film nonetheless contributed to a strange epilogue.

In 1997, the Pentagon revisited “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” It concluded that “‘aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high-altitude balloons for scientific research.” In other words, the Roswell Incident was really just an accident involving
two
balloons: one from Project Mogul, the other full of test dummies.

Case closed.

This time, we
mean
it.

*    *    *

Robert DeClercq did not believe in little green aliens in flying saucers. He did, however, believe in conspiracies and cover-ups.

During and after the Second World War, the U.S. government had used its own personnel for radiation experiments. The CIA had secretly tortured drugged-out mental patients to test mind-control techniques.

Disinformation, the chief knew, works best when mixed with the truth. Something had crashed at Roswell in 1947,
and the rumors surrounding the Roswell Incident were generated by rival press releases issued by the Pentagon.

No balloon could gouge a trench hundreds of feet long into desert shale, scattering debris over a large area. A flying disk, on the other hand, would skid across hard shale like a skipping stone. But the official position of the Pentagon is that the “crashed disk” story was an “overreaction” on the part of Colonel Blanchard. So prone to overreacting was William “Butch” Blanchard that he was chosen to supervise the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the post-war years, this hysterical man was given command of
all
atomic bombers. And then—
having overreacted at Roswell
—he went on to conduct atomic tests on the Bikini atoll, to train the crews of intercontinental nuclear strike forces, to set up Strategic Air Command, and to rise to the level of vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force.

Overreaction?

DeClercq didn’t believe it.

Assuming a “flying disk” did crash, and Blanchard’s press release was true, how would the Mountie—were he a Pentagon spook—cover up what had occurred? How better than to hide the truth in plain sight?

A few weeks earlier, on June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold had reported experiencing a mid-flight flashing in his eyes, “as if a mirror was reflecting sunlight at me.” Then he saw what he thought were nine luminous aircraft flying near Mount Rainier, in Washington State. Each craft seemed to be shaped like “a pie plate” and flew “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” A press report of his remarks gave birth to the term “flying saucer,” and by the end of July, Arnold’s one sighting had exploded into more than 850 reports of unidentified flying objects.

By suppressing the truth behind a cover story about a weather balloon, the Pentagon had tapped into the rising hysteria over aliens from space. If the cover-up succeeded, mission accomplished. And if it was exposed by conspiracy theorists as an attempt to cover up something
unbelievable,
rational minds would conclude that the outlandish incident was fabricated by kooks.

A win-win situation.

But what really piqued DeClercq’s interest was the fact that fifty years later—in 1997—the Pentagon was
still
playing that spin-doctor game. Why would “The Roswell Report” undercut the “weather balloon” story by introducing Project Mogul and
then
engage the “alien” issue with some drivel about test dummies and the unlikely simultaneous crashing of two balloons, unless there
actually
was something being covered up.

The Pentagon doth protest too much, thought DeClercq.

Okay, a “flying disk” crashed at Roswell. If there were
three
crash sites leading from northwest to southeast, that would line up with Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest. If you continued to follow that line farther north, you’d eventually arrive at the Skunk Mine in British Columbia. In that mine, the Mounties had found this Pentagon spook, whose motive for being there was hidden somewhere in Nazi blueprints for a flying saucer. Those blueprints were stamped with swastikas and had been drawn at the Streicherstab, the brain trust of the man in charge of all super-weapons at the close of the Second World War—SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.

*    *    *

“You know about Streicher?” said Big Bad Bill.

“To my mind,” DeClercq replied, choosing his words carefully so as not to expose his bluff, “what became of Ernst Streicher is perhaps the most puzzling mystery to come out of the fall of the Reich. As Nazis fled west to be captured by you Americans instead of the Russians, Streicher went east, to the most dangerous place there was for him. Czech partisans were summarily executing every Nazi they seized. But Streicher’s body was never found, and we don’t know how he died. One version has him bursting out of a cellar in Prague, charging the Czechs like a Norse hero bound for Valhalla, then being shot in the back by his aide-de-camp to give him as glorious a death as Hitler’s. In other versions, Streicher killed himself in various Czech woods.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Bill.

“There are too many clues that suggest he survived. First, for no discernible reason, General Patton’s Third Army crossed the Czech frontier on May 6, just two days before Nazi Germany surrendered, to penetrate deep into the future Soviet zone and search the Skoda Works.”

DeClercq tapped the word “Streicherstab” on the blueprints on the table.

“Patton was after Streicher because of all the sightings of ‘foo fighters’ over the Reich by American pilots. And you did make contact with him. That’s obvious because you failed to try him
in absentia
at the Nuremberg war trials. Martin Bormann’s body was never found, despite reports that he’d died while trying to break out from the
Führerbunker.
Streicher’s corpse also never turned up. So why try Bormann at Nuremberg, but not the monster who engineered the concentration camps and the gas chambers? There’s only one reason. Streicher offered the Pentagon something so spectacular that your predecessors had no choice but to deal with him.”

It was Hawke’s turn to tap the Streicherstab blueprints.

“Surely you get the implications of a war machine like this? A
real
flying saucer propelled by fuelless power? There would be no limit
at all
to what you could do. It would take off like a rock out of a slingshot and turn on a dime. The rate of acceleration would defy your imagination. In flight, it wouldn’t make a sound. No one would hear you coming. It would stop abruptly, but there’d be no need for seatbelts. Your cockpit crew would feel nothing more than what we feel now from the tremendous speed of our orbiting, revolving earth. Arm it however you want—guns, bombs, lasers. Or nuclear weapons. A fighter like that would rule the world.”

The glittering eyes were back.

“So Streicher made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

“Could you?” said Hawke. “Remember the Cold War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? Nuclear terror?”

DeClercq nodded. “When was contact made?”

“The summer of ’45.”

“Where?”

“South America. In the dying days of the war, Streicher had flown the Bell to Paraguay. The Pentagon had no one else to deal with. Before escaping from Nazi Germany, he had killed every scientist who’d worked on the project.”

“Except himself,” said DeClercq.

“He
was
an engineer.”

“What deal was struck?”

“What you’d expect. If he could produce a functioning anti-gravity war machine, we’d give him the same break we gave scientists like von Braun—a clean slate. History would record his death in Prague in the final days of the war, and he could live out his life under a new identity, free of Nazi hunters.”

“So you let him into the States?”

“Fuck no!” said Hawke, genuinely affronted.

“He stayed in South America?”

The spook shook his head.

That’s when it dawned on the Mountie.

“Christ,
we
took him in?”

*    *    *

There goes the moral high ground, thought DeClercq.

As he listened to Hawke describe the ins and outs of the Streicher conspiracy, he began to grasp the unwitting complicity of his own country, and even of the Mounted Police, in the cover-up. So secret was the project that only those directly involved knew it existed. The spook who ran it out of a maverick division of the Pentagon, and was the only American who knew that the engineer of the Holocaust was involved, was someone called Hardware. In the 1940s, there was no better place for the Chronos Project than the Phantom Valley Ranch. Buried in the hinterland of British Columbia, the Skunk Mine was the perfect replacement for the Wenceslas Mine. So throughout the summer and fall of 1945, the last Nazi U-boat in operation went up and down the West Coast of North America, transporting Bell components under the green sea with the blessing of the Pentagon.