Swastika (34 page)

“Who owned the ranch?”

“Streicher bought it.”

“How?”

“Through an impenetrable false front in Switzerland. It went ‘deep black.’ A ‘denial program.’ Streicher picked the scientists and forged the papers. No one knew who was there, or what they were really doing. The only thing we—
and
you—provided was security for a nebulous post-war defense project.”

“Who owns the ranch now?”

“Wheels within wheels, it seems. After 1947, we forgot about it.”

“What happened?”

“Streicher reassembled the Bell in the Skunk Mine. He picked up where the dead scientists had left off in the Sudeten Mountains. He was able to sneak in a new team of quantum physicists. The coast of B.C. is a smuggler’s dream.”

Hawke rapped the blueprint of the Bell.

“In their desperation to win the war, Hitler’s SS had fooled around with a branch of physics that we still don’t comprehend. Out of that cauldron of weird ideas had emerged a method for cracking the code of electrogravitics. Based on that, the Skunk Mine scientists were able to build two flying prototypes.”

“Anti-gravity platforms?”

“Right,” said Hawke. “The first was the Fireball. Unpiloted, it was remotely controlled. The Nazis had flown it at the end of the war. It had a metallic surface that reflected light like a mirror. In daylight, it looked like a shiny disk spinning on its axis. But at night, it turned into a burning globe.”

“The foo fighter?”

Hawke threw DeClercq a thumbs-up.

“The Streicherstab had designed it to be a flying bomb. It had a guidance system called
Windhund—
or wind-hound—that locked onto the change in polarity around our planes like a dog’s nose locks onto a strong scent. An oscillator canceled out our radar blips. Black Widows over the Reich got tailed by these strange orbs of light.”

“Is that what the Skunk Mine scientists flew past Mount Rainier?”

“A Fireball. As proof of concept.”

“The witness, Kenneth Arnold, saw nine saucers.”

“The rest were coruscations. Mirror images.”

“What became of that disk?”

“Anti-gravity worked, so they ditched it out in the Pacific.”

“And the other 850 sightings of UFOs that July?”

“It only took one visionary to spot Elvis alive at the mall,” replied Hawke.

“There are no little green men?”

“None that I know of. And believe me, I’d know,” said the spook.

DeClercq believed him.

“So what crashed at Roswell?”

“The
Flugkreisel.
The Flightwheel. Streicher’s ticket to freedom.”

“Was that its first flight?”

“Uh-huh. It was being blooded. Tested.”

“Why New Mexico?”

“In 1947, that was
the
state. Von Braun and his rocketeers were at White Sands, launching V-2s. And the world’s only nuclear strike force was at Roswell. The
Flugkreisel
looked like a flying top. It left a vapor trail of bluish-white ionization in its wake. The plan was to zoom the Flightwheel—with two flight engineers and a doctor in the cockpit—over both New Mexico locations, blow the minds of those below, then fly it north, back to the Phantom Valley.”

“What went wrong?”

“Who knows? Some monkey wrench in hyperspace. The team that finished the Flightwheel wasn’t the same team that had dreamed it up, so it might have been human error. More likely, the design was flawed. When the craft was found, some metals had transmuted into others. Disrupted hardware had torn apart. And if that wasn’t ‘extraterrestrial’ enough, the flesh of the crew had morphed into otherworldly shapes. If you didn’t know what had really happened, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that an alien spacecraft had landed.”

“Was Streicher on board?”

“No, he was back at the ranch. The crash of the
Flugkreisel
put his immunity deal with us in jeopardy. So that same day, he gathered every member of his new team in the experimental chamber of the Skunk Mine to work on adjusting the torsion field in the hope that would solve the problem. But they must have pushed the gadget too far. There was a huge implosion that turned the whole chamber into a tomb of fused rock.”

“That’s what blocks the mine today?”

“It’s like it never happened.”

“And anti-gravity?”

“It’s still the Holy Grail. The Flightwheel that was recovered from Roswell was too far gone to reverse-engineer. And all the blueprints from the Streicherstab were with Streicher and his team when they ceased to exist in the depths of the mine.

“Breakthroughs, by their nature, are quantum leaps that short-circuit the evolution of science. The trouble with Nazi technology was that it took
Nazis
to make it function. We couldn’t replicate the successes of the Streicherstab, so we returned the Skunk Mine and the Phantom Valley Ranch to the way they were. Then we boxed up the remnants of the Flightwheel and buried everything away until our physicists were able to make a breakthrough of their own. By flatly denying that anything had happened at Roswell, we goaded the conspiracy theorists into making wild claims that have allowed us to keep the truth secret since 1947.”

“You’re still keeping it from me.”

Hawke frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“Come on. No one knew about Streicher, and he never set foot in your country. You say that all you hid were some pieces of scattered debris and three anonymous corpses. You could have claimed you had a broken arrow—a wayward atomic bomb. Or an American saucer that didn’t work. Lots of hardware failures have made the news. With Roswell, something
forced
you to bend over backward to hide the truth. I’ll bet your secret involves the Flightwheel’s crew.”

Hawke snorted.

“Come clean,” warned DeClercq. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“The doctor in the cockpit?”

“Yes?”

“Was Josef Mengele.”

*    *    *

That’s what happens, DeClercq thought, when you climb into bed with Nazis.

Mengele epitomized the depravity of Hitler’s Reich. Somehow, he was able to elude Nazi hunters for close to thirty-five years. And even when he allegedly died from a stroke while swimming in Brazil in 1979, it took six years before a combined force of American, German, and South American authorities was able to locate his grave. In 1992, DNA tests on the recovered remains confirmed his identity. But now, Hawke was telling DeClercq that all of that was a lie to cover up the fact that the most hunted Nazi in post-war times had actually been killed during a Pentagon super-weapon test in 1947.

No wonder the Roswell Incident was still being spun today!

“How’d you pull that off?”

“With a lot of help,” replied Hawke. “Mengele was obsessed with doubles and twins. The Mengele that history tracks across Europe and South America was actually a doppelgänger chosen by the doctor himself to mask his escape. For various reasons, the thirty-odd folks who knowingly or unknowingly aided that deception never said a word. Meanwhile, the Roswell remains were kept in a freezer, and their DNA was preserved.”

“So you seeded the grave in Brazil with Mengele’s DNA?”

“Brilliant, huh? His skeleton hadn’t changed, so his DNA could be compared with that of his known son.”

“Why was Mengele aboard the Flightwheel?”

“That was Streicher’s doing. We were shocked. The doctor was smuggled in on one of the U-boat runs to assess the impact of the
Flugkreisel
’s test flight on the crew. Not content to stay on the ground, he wanted in on history in the making.”

“What do you make of these?” DeClercq asked, indicating the two bloody blueprints.

“The Streicherstab must have done with the Flightwheel what we did with the bomb. Manhattan Project scientists pursued more than one approach to splitting the atom. One method produced Little Boy and the second created Fat Man. Streicher must have done the same with anti-gravity, pursuing one approach at Pilsen and the other at Brno. I guess he didn’t trust us not to welsh on the immunity deal, and so held back notes and blueprints generated at Brno. That’s the site name stamped on these papers.”

“Someone found them.”

“Yeah, and tried to blackmail us. We received a sample, along with a demand for a billion dollars, earlier this week. That’s a lot of dough for what could be junk, so when we got your swastika query, we took the less costly route of trying to get hold of your file and searching the Skunk Mine. The anchor in the rock must have been moved by anti-gravity, so it’s possible that the Brno papers do correct the flaw that caused the Flightwheel to crash.”

“You should have paid the billion.”

“In hindsight, yes. But now we’ve really pissed off the extortionist and the papers are still out there. The only operatives killed so far have all been Americans, and they knew the risks. No Canadians have been killed in this operation, so I ask you to honor your deal with me and help the Pentagon recover the Brno blueprints. Imagine what will happen if they’re the real McCoy, and they fall into the wrong hands.”

Vancouver

No sooner had Dane crashed into sleep than the alarm seemed to go off by mistake. No such luck. It was time to get up if he was going to catch Robson MacKissock.

But first, a quick call to Special X.

“Corporal Hett.”

“It’s Dane. I’m awake,” he reported.

“You don’t sound rested.”

“I’ll catch up later. There’s someone I have to see. Nothing new on your front?”

“Nada,” said Jackie. “No Swastika Killer e-mail to Cort. No Stealth Killer truck sighted.”

“Bedtime for you, then. I’ll take over the watch.”

“Call if things get exciting?”

“Will do.”

*    *    *

Do teachers come any more old school than Professor Emeritus Robson MacKissock? Though in his eighties, the man was still larger than life, his leonine head crowned with a mane of wavy white hair, his body still robust from youthful development by rugby, soccer, and punting the backs while he was earning top place in classics at prewar Oxford.

The most enthralling lecturer at UBC in his heyday, MacKissock drew hundreds of auditors to his small classes. Sporting the full regalia of an Oxford don, he would stride the pit of a lecture theater way out here on the colonial edge of the civilized world and boom out his oratory as if he were Marc Antony begging friends and countrymen to lend him their ears. Greek gods like the old prof were hard to find these days, so even though the university had long since put him out to pension pasture, the students had him back for a roundtable in the classics reading room once a month. That’s where Dane found him after the meeting tonight.

“Harpies!” announced MacKissock, fluttering his fingers above an article in
The Vancouver Times.
He and Dane were encircled by shelves of dead-language texts, study carrels, and portraits of past department heads, the most imposing of which was the one of MacKissock himself. Outside, rain splattered the windows.

“Gang Girls Bully Blind Boy to Death” blared the headline that had caught MacKissock’s eye. “Lunch Money Stolen,” added the subhead. According to the report by Bess McQueen, a gang of girls from junior high had waylaid a special-needs student at a bus stop near his school and demanded all his money under threat of “de-panting” him. In a sightless effort to flee from them, he had darted out into rush-hour traffic and was run over by a car.

“Harpies?” echoed Dane.

“Fierce, filthy, flighty females,” expanded MacKissock. “Hideous haggish heads on the torsos of vicious vultures, with talons intent on tearing a man’s flesh from his bones.”

The professor flapped his robes like wings, billowing out what seemed to be decades of chalk dust and baring see-through patches in threadbare fabric.

“And the myth?” said Dane.

“Homer refers to Harpies in the
Odyssey,
but the best-known story involves Jason and the Argonauts. Harpies haunt an island in the Aegean Sea. There, they peck out the eyes of a king named Phineus and repeatedly snatch his food. When Jason rids him of the hateful demons, the blind man helps him find the Golden Fleece.”

By seeking out this expert in the field of Greek myths, Dane hoped to be able to predict who the Swastika Killer would choose as his next victim. If that psycho was preying on people selected from the pages of
The Vancouver Times,
who better to connect those articles to ancient mythology than Robson MacKissock? Harpies did fit the gang-girl angle nicely.

“Anything else?” the Mountie asked.

“Not that I can discern.”

The sergeant, however, had a second reason for this visit. The Swastika Killer appeared to have links to UBC: the vivarium was stolen from a university lab, and the Minotaur corpse was dumped within the labyrinth. If his knowledge of Greek mythology had an academic plinth, he had probably studied classics at UBC and had MacKissock as his prof.

“Did you ever teach a student who was pathologically obsessed with Greek myths?”

The classical scholar peered quizzically over the spectacles perched on the tip of his Roman nose.

“Do you suspect that
I
spawned this killer?”

“No,” said Dane. “But serial killers get psychologically tangled up in fantasy, and what fantasy world is more inspirational than the one you taught?”

“A moth to the flame?”

The Mountie nodded. “Greek heroes lend themselves admirably to role-playing.”

“Are you alluding to the alleged rape at the Argonauts party?”

Dane had no idea what MacKissock had in mind. But it sounded promising, so the sergeant played along.

“Tell me about it, Professor.”

“The Siren—that’s what we called her—was a remarkable student. Not only was she super-smart, but like Helen of Troy, she had a face and a figure that would launch a thousand ships. In fact, one of our colleagues became so besotted with her that soon after she graduated and joined the faculty, they tied the Gordian knot.”

“He married his student?”

“More precisely, I’d say she married him. Pulchritude that alluring has its pick of men. She was half his age, so I’d venture to say there was role-playing in the marital boudoir.”

“When was that?”

“The early seventies. The decade of free love.”

“And the rape?”

“
Alleged
rape. There was no charge or trial. The Siren was teaching a seminar on Greek and Roman myths. There were twenty registrants, and each assumed a character to dramatize in class. The seventies, you’ll recall, were awash with psychotropic drugs. The role-playing of the Argonauts—that’s what the students called themselves—spun out of hand and transformed into a quasi-cult. The Siren threw an end-of-term party at her home, and that’s where a female student playing Circe alleged she was raped by a classmate playing Odysseus.”

“Why no trial?” asked Dane.

“Circe was the enchantress of Homer’s
Odyssey.
Circe turned men into swine and tried to seduce Odysseus. The role, it seems, fit the claimant too well. Both her prior sexual history and her drunken behavior at the party scotched the likelihood of a conviction. The Argonauts disbanded, and the Siren, under a cloud of scandal, abandoned the faculty for married life.”

“What became of her?”

“She vanished in Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she and her husband took a trip to East Germany. When the next term started, he wasn’t back to lecture. As far as I know, they never returned to Canada.”

“He taught classics?”

“No, modern history. The Siren did a double major in both fields. She took a course in modern Germany under her soon-to-be husband. Swiss fellow. Brilliant. Independently wealthy. She married well. Owned a huge house near campus. Fit for a king. His seminal work is still a leader in its field.
Hitler and Eva Braun.
”