Black Sun Reich (15 page)

Deitel raised his hand. “That seems a bit anachronistic.”

“Very good, Doctor,” Terah said. “At this time, metallurgy was unheard of in West Africa. They wouldn't—or shouldn't—have had the refined iron available for Antonius to use in the production of steel.

“In fact, the indigenous population of sub-Saharan Africa never developed even the most primitive iron metallurgy, nor any metallurgical technology,” she explained. “And yet Antonius wrote he was able to forge high-quality weapons. They were so well made he continued to use them even after he made it back to Legio III Augusta's headquarters.”

Antonius's own writings showed that the centurion increasingly grew paranoid that other officers envied his weapons. His journal entries seemed less balanced after the African expedition, Terah said.

“After the Tacfarinsas expedition, Antonius's unit was transferred to a remote post in modern-day Tunisia, Ammaedara. It is known that very few members of Legio III Augusta survived the transfer. The unit and the post seem to have faded from history.”

Chuy's brow twisted. “You mean the records are lost?”

“We believe the legion was lost. Antonius survived and was transferred to Legio III Gallica, where he was reduced in rank despite his patrician status. This legion served under the prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate,” Terah said. “And that's the last update from Dr. Renault's research. That's according to his unrevised notes, gathered for us by our cousins in French intelligence.”

“That's it?” Rucker said. “That doesn't exactly get us to the spear, you know.”

“That's why we have to get to Dr. Renault before the Nazis do. The Nazi's expert, Dr. Otto Rahn, has led the Huns on a wild goose chase. He's the German medievalist who is simultaneously seeking the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. His days are probably numbered, owing to his lack of success so far and the fact that he's secretly a homosexual,” she said. “For all his errors so far, he is a great scholar, and our people at Prometheus are trying to get him to defect before the Gestapo discovers his private proclivities. We're thinking he is intentionally misdirecting the German efforts.”

“Meanwhile,” Lysander said, “we know the Nazis obtained a sample of some sort related to the true spear, and now for more than merely satisfying Hitler's obsession, they want to find it.”

Biels added: “We don't know how the spear is connected, but our Difference Engine calculations incorporating all the available data say it figures directly and perhaps even causally into Project Gefallener.”

The ability of Difference Engines to take raw numerical data and translate it into complex algorithms and statistics had grown exponentially since Babbage debuted the very first engine in London in 1851. The analog calculating devices of yesterday had grown into brass and mechanical devices that could store entire libraries worth of data variables.

“Why do people think the spear has power?” Rucker asked. He wasn't much for dealing with belief as he was with fact.

“Theories abound in philosophical, religious, and alchemical circles,” Terah said. “It could very well be that the Spear of Destiny has power because it was washed in His blood. Except for our visiting doctor, we've all had experiences dealing with the power of certain holy relics from various cultures. Science hasn't explained these phenomena—”

“Yet,” Rucker interjected.

“Fine, yet, but that doesn't make them any less real,” Terah continued. “Certainly the blood of Christ is powerful in the Christian faith; it is even symbolically or, in the case of Catholics, literally consumed. But the common denominator in terms of Christ's blood is salvation and life, not power, conquest, death, and decay.”

“But it could be something about the spear itself, right?” Rucker asker her. “The anachronistic iron ore in Africa.”

Lysander nodded.

“That's the other direction Renault's research is taking,” Terah said. “No one has yet found the African tribe that Antonius describes in his journals.

“There is the issue of the meteoric iron,” she continued. “The only other place with such a high degree of ancient meteoric iron is north of the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia, and south in the western fields of Antarctica. Modern expeditions to West Africa date several of the deposits of meteoric iron to as far back as 5000 B.C., so that fits. Beyond that, there seems to be nothing fantastic about the meteoric iron itself.”

“That we know of yet,” Lysander added. “We may not know what we should be looking for, or how to look for it.”

“This is starting to sound very like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne,” Rucker said. “I like it.”

Lysander took the slide projection control from Terah and inserted his own magazine of slides.

“So we don't know what it does or why it's important,” Rucker said.

Lysander shook his head.

“The Nazis want it for Project Gefallener, which is reason enough for us to make sure they don't get it,” he said.

Around the room there understanding nods. Even from Rucker.

Lysander took Terah's place in front of the group.

“Now you need to know who we're up against. Working with our own sources inside the Third Reich and our allies in the Deuxième Bureau and British MI6, we have determined the agents from the SS and Black Sun leading this quest for the spear.”

He clicked the first slide. It showed a brutally handsome, young blond SS officer with a classically stern Germanic scowl: a service photo.

“Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler's number two. He's calling the shots here, but he operates from Castle Wewelsburg. Don't let the short leash fool you—that man will be a real danger if and when he climbs out from Himmler's shadow.”

Click.
A grainy picture of a bald man in brass rim goggles and a white lab coat filled the screen.

“The scientific mastermind is Dr. Johannes Übel, a man as twisted as he is brilliant. If you look up ‘sociopath,' you'll find his picture. Driven from the medical profession long before the Great War for his human—his inhuman—experiments, he found a ripe field of experimental subjects serving as a field surgeon for the German army in prisoner of war camps. He escaped prosecution after the war, returning to Germany only after Hitler came to power. Given his age and the fact that he performed his medical residency in London, I have always suspected he may be the White Chapel Ripper.”

“The who?” Deitel asked.

“Jack the Ripper,” Rucker said.

The next slide was a surveillance photo at a German training camp. It showed a tall, thin German officer in a white uniform and cape, wearing a black gas mask over a scarred and hairless pate.

“This is Der Schädel,” Lysander said. “The Skull. Said to be Hitler's personal instrument of interrogation and punishment. He wears that breathing apparatus at all times. It's rumored he has the power to infect men's minds, but by what magic or scientific means, we don't know. Is he a mutant? A sorcerer? Even Heinrich Himmler himself is said to fear the man.”

Click.
An older man with a poorly groomed beard and a look in his eyes that said he had only a nodding acquaintance with reality.

“Anton Drexler. The occult and spiritual heart of the Nazi party. He was Hitler's mentor in the early days of the National Socialist party. He founded the Thule Society, a group of powerful German captains of industry obsessed with the mystical world, particularly the Aryan mythology and Atlantis.”

Another slide. Another mask.

“Colonel Uhrwerk. There's no history on this man. He's part of the Black Sun inner circle, but if has any records prior to 1926, they've been purged.”

“Uhrwerk must be his code name,” Deitel offered. “It's not a German name I've ever heard, and it translates as ‘timepiece work' or ‘clock work.' ”

“More than you can imagine,” Lysander said. “Who he was before 1926, we don't know. What we do know is he is more a machine than he is a man. It could be just his body. It could even be his mind. Like Der Schädel, he's rarely seen, and when he is, he's wearing that metal mask. If it is a mask. Our insider says that in the Black Sun, he's a voice of ruthless logic—maybe one of the best thinkers the Black Sun has.

“And, of course, they have the combined might of the Waffen-SS, the SD, the Gestapo, and the entire Third Reich at their disposal.”

“And the home field advantage,” Chuy added helpfully.

Lysander turned on the overhead light, then concluded the briefing that Terah had begun.

“We have two crates of equipment ready to load onto the
Raposa
. If things get too hot and you need heavy firepower, our friends in Paris have put the Eleventh Choc at your disposal. Here's the frequency and code. I believe your old friend Captain Blackadder heads up the battalion now.” he said to Rucker.

The Eleventh Choc was the French elite mercenary shock parachutist battalion, a special operations unit officially unaffiliated with the French military. Like the French Foreign Legion, it accepted volunteers regardless of nationality or past crimes.

“Whoa,” Rucker said. “I don't think it will come to that.” He pocketed the napkin on which Lysander had written the cipher and frequency he'd need.

“Pray it doesn't. Captain, your team will consist of Terah, Dr. Deitel, and Chuy,” Lysander said.

“Make sure
she
,” he pointed with his chewed cigar at Terah, “understands who's in charge.”

“Fox, your first task is to make contact with Dr. Renault and learn what you can as to where the spear is now,” Lysander said. “He's in Rome, conducting research at the Vatican archives, working from offices at Sapienza—Università di Roma. He's the key to finding the artifact. This cannot fall into the hands of the Nazis. The fate of the entire world hangs in the balance.”

“Business as usual, then.”

“My boy, I'm not joking or exaggerating. If the Nazis get their hands on the spear, they will bring death and darkness to the entire world.”

The look in Lysander's eyes took Rucker aback.

“I . . . I understand. Yes. Yes, sir,” he said quietly to his old friend.

In a louder voice, Rucker addressed his team: “All right everyone—wheels up in twenty. We're in a race against the master race. Get your war paint on and don't get caught watching the gate swing.”

Chuy and Terah were out the door to supervise the
Raposa
's loading. Lysander and Biels were destroying all the notes taken in the room—except the ones that went into Lysander's pockets. Deitel quietly approached Rucker.

“I signed up for this fight, but I'm not sure what it is I will be able to contribute,” he said.

“I don't think I know of a time when a doctor isn't handy.”

“I also don't know what it is we're going to be doing.”

“Well, the Nazis want to bring the creatures of nightmare into this world, right?”

“Yes.”

“Seems I recall when we first met, you said that's exactly what you Germans thought of my people during the war,” Rucker said.

He drew his pistol, spun it, and checked the load. In a flash he spun it again and slid it into the holster.

“The Nazis want nightmares? Reckon we'll oblige them.”

C
limbing back out onto the structure of Airstrip One through a ventilation shaft below had been easy. More challenging was the shear twenty-foot free climb up the side of the outer hull in the howling winds and bitter cold of the altitude. It was worth it when he pressed the diaphragm of a stolen medical stethoscope to the bottom corner of the conference room window. He mentally took notes of everything.

Skorzeny waited until the last of the group had left the conference room before opening the window and crawling in. The needles of pain in his slowly warming fingers reassured him he hadn't developed frostbite.

Now he needed a radio.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Wallachia Region of Romania

Eastern Europe

Encampment just outside Piteşti

P
roof of the Creator's good taste, local folklore held, was his masterpiece along the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. It was a splendor to even the most jaded eye, a piece of natural paradise easily the rival of the biblical Eden.

The largest mountain range in Europe and some would say the equal in beauty to the more renowned Alps, the Carpathians—especially to the south in Wallachia—were a treasure trove of diversity in terms of artworthy landscapes, untrammeled forests, piedmont plains, and the abundance of wildlife. The eastern and southern portions of the mountain range were home to the largest concentrations of brown bears, wolves, chamois, and lynxes—making it prime hunting ground for Eastern European nobility going back centuries. The hollows and fields, the deep virgin forests and placid lakes, and the mazes of verdant, hidden valleys meant one could travel for days without seeing a soul or a sign of civilization.

It was therefore little wonder why so many tribes of the nomadic Romani people—“Gypsies,” as they were called by the ignorant—made this part of the world a primary encampment site for so many months of the year. Romani clans would travel throughout Wallachia, Moldova, and Transylvania, setting up camp outside the cities and villages to do business and celebrate life as travelers.

On this particularly gorgeous spring evening one Romani camp set up outside the town of Piteşti was definitely focused on celebration—a family wedding. Of course, it was also true that for the Romani, marriage was also a business proposition, but that was far from everyone's mind.

The encampment was perfectly located to maximize God's wedding decorations, Jaelle Luncă reflected. It centered on the terraces above the right bank of the Argeş where the river met its tributary, and right at the edge of the deep sylvan forests and water meadows. The fifteen-year-old bride was brimming with life and love. Even the colors of the blooms seemed more vibrant than Jaelle's dreams. Off to the north she could just make out the Făgăraş Mountains. The flowers along the bank looked ever so slightly wilted. Waving her hands, she muttered a few syllables of the ancient language and the flowers shimmered and then blossomed brighter. She smiled at her handiwork.

This was her day, Jaelle thought, the day she would become a
bori
, a bride, and a fully grown woman, a Romni, after all the years of adhering to the purity required by the
marhime
laws. But even better, the union would join her into her husband's family, which would end a decades old conflict between the families. Love would restore the balance in the community, creating a bond that transcended conflicting truths.

She smiled at the mothers and daughters cooking the vast quantities of treats that would be consumed well into the night and likely into the next day, as such festivities go for the Romani. Crusty bread was laid out with jars of spicy-sweet
ajvar
canned the previous autumn. The alluring aroma of paprika-laden dishes like stuffed cabbage and chicken paprikash competed for attention against the smoky taste of lamb and beef roasting on spits over open fires. Spinach crepes and musaka were being piled high on platters.

She saw the men pouring drinks from barrels, while boys not yet in their teens hovered on the periphery, smoking cigarettes. One of her bridesmaids sat outside her tent, filing her nails with an emery board. Nearby, the
lăutari
were warming up their instruments with a jaunty, almost jazzy tune.

As the sun set over the Argeş, Jaelle almost wept at how perfect the day had turned out, and at the promise of passion that the night ahead held.

T
he policeman's favorite calling hour is 4:00
A.M.
It is the time when people enter their deepest level of sleep. Being suddenly awakened at the hour causes maximum disorientation and confusion, rendering suspects most helpless. Thus it would have been the prime hour to commence the raid on the Gypsy camp. But it was not. The wedding party was still going on at 4:00
A.M.

Even in the darkness, the sickly white shine of the Skull's head stood in stark contrast to the black gas-mask apparatus he wore. Beside him stood an angular figure in a steel mask. Where the Skull's breathing always seemed labored, Colonel Uhrwerk made no sound at all.

The whole situation at this camp tonight was suboptimal for Colonel Uhrwerk. Given the uncertainty in trying to pick up the trail of the Spear of Destiny because of the sloppy fieldwork of Himmler's “scholar soldiers,” he needed to maximize the shock in these encampment attacks so they could conduct their search and get out quickly.

A few deaths wouldn't matter—Romanian officials cared almost as little about Gypsy life as did the Reich. But Uhrwerk's team were on foreign soil, and the more disruption and violence they caused—even against these dirty nomads—the more the Germans risked discovery by Romanian authorities. And there were still twenty-three Gypsy camps remaining on their target list.

It wasn't just that these camp raids were suboptimal for Uhrwerk. It was the whole operation. It was a game of random guesswork disguised as a proper search matrix. Thus, Uhrwerk was left trying to impose efficient and logical tactics on a fundamentally inefficient and illogical strategy. If he were capable of frustration, he would have felt it.

Certainly, he considered, this flawed and wasteful approach to finding the spear did not originate with Reinhard Heydrich. No. The man was too fundamentally intelligent and methodical. This was Himmler's doing, the Reichsführer-SS having been goaded by the impatience of both Drexler and Hitler.

Uhrwerk made a mental note: cultivate Heydrich.

Again he scanned the Gypsy camp some two miles away and shrouded in the gloom of the predawn hours. He summoned Jäger to his side.

Haupsturmführer Karl Jäger was commander of Heydrich's newly created Einsatzkommando 2, composed of ten of the most ruthless SS storm troopers and three
nachtmenn
. They traveled through the Romanian countryside in a covered troop truck and field car with no markings.

Like Uhrwerk and Der Schädel, Jäger and his storm troopers wore the light olive overcoats, caps, and paraphernalia of Romanian state police officers. They did not wear their Senf masks.

The deception had its limits. The SS men were too proud as soldiers to operate like slinking spies. Under their Romanian coats, they all wore their proper SS uniforms. And no one would mistake the
nachtmenn
for human, much less Romanian; they were kept leashed in the troop truck. So far, in five other such night raids on Gypsy camps in the past two days, they had not been loosed.

“Haupsturmführer, are your men in position?” Uhrwerk asked.

“
Jahwohl,
Herr Colonel.”

“Then you will commence the raid on my signal.”

Uhrwerk admired speed and efficiency, and once again Einsatzkommando 2 had shown just that in securing the camp mere minutes after he gave the order. Of course, there were five Gypsies dead—well within acceptable limits and within the range of calculated expectation, given the variables and the state of the camp at the moment of assault.

Now all of the adult Gypsies—thirty-four men and forty-one women—were huddled on their knees in the camp center, with their hands on their heads, while the disguised storm troopers tore violently through their possessions.

Separately, one old Gypsy woman had been assigned by a storm trooper to watch over the twenty-eight adolescents and thirteen infants who were kept separate from the center of the camp. Having them out of the area of activity pacified worried adult prisoners.

Uhrwerk calculated the elapsed time and the total area of the occupied campsite, and allowing for standard deviation and several x variables, calculated the odds of finding the spear in this physical search to the fifth decimal point. Success was unlikely. As he expected.

After the search, Der Schädel would employ his unique gifts to interrogate every likely adult who might have some knowledge of which clan claimed the spear. Der Schädel's methods were admirably quiet and efficient compared to the methods traditional Gestapo interrogators employed, if more disturbing to onlookers. Then the Gypsies would be bound, blindfolded, and warned to never speak of this under orders from the “Romanian state police.”

“Neither item is here, Herr Colonel,” Jäger reported in due time. The search was finished within just three minutes of Uhrwerk's predicted calculations.

“Very well, Haupsturmführer. Withdraw your men to encircle the Gypsies at a distance while Der Schädel conducts his own search,” Uhrwerk ordered.

Nine SS storm troopers stood guard over the seventy-five Gypsy adults but at a distance. As hardened and indifferent to human suffering as the troopers were, they wanted as much distance as possible from what Der Schädel would be doing.

The tall, lanky figure approached the neat semicircle of crowded, kneeling Gypsies, who were following the order to stare at the ground. None saw him reach up and remove his gas mask, opening his mind to the chaotic swirl of thoughts. He almost lost himself in the maelstrom of emotion and information. But then his mind, like a raptor soaring above a hive of insects, caught scent of what it so craved. It was the sweet taste of their collective fear. In their minds, each victim felt the chill in their soul of being touched by darkness so alien and wrong, it made them want to flee into the night. They saw in their minds' eyes the rising silhouette of a many tentacled, formless Otherness, a thing so hideous its very gaze was like tendrils encircling and freezing their hearts. They felt the dark presence grow, enveloping them all in a helplessness and hopelessness beyond all despair.

Der Schädel feasted on their mental screams, gaining the strength to seize control of the vortex of chaotic thought. He focused it on one after another of the sobbing Gypsies. When he fixed on a single subject, their fear was amplified, and he in turn consumed their very essence—his mind growing in dominance. They turned out their minds, revealing all he asked.

One by one he sifted through their minds, demanding to know who was the keeper of the spear, and not finding the answers he sought. His anger only fueled his hunger, and the more he slaked, the more he himself became lost in the terrible ecstasy of their suffering.

Slowly, so as not to traumatize his own grip on reality, Der Schädel withdrew from their collective consciousness. He replaced his mask, severing the final link. Every Gypsy collapsed like bodies on a battlefield..

Uhrwerk knew Der Schädel had found nothing before he even reported. Der Schädel retreated to the field car, his energy spent. Uhrwerk was about to give orders to withdraw from the camp when a new variable arose that he hadn't factored: a drunken Gypsy man hiding in one of the caravans fell on two of the storm troopers. Faster than the eye could follow, the Gypsy attacker slashed the first soldier's throat quite cleanly. A fountain of warmth sprayed in the Gypsy's eyes, and his second attack was therefore sloppy. He ripped open the second soldier's overcoat before he finally found the jugular. He then picked up one of the dropped machine pistols and turned it on Uhrwerk. The exhausted, drained mass of Gypsies recovered enough to watch what happened next.

The long burst from the Schmeisser and better than average aim put twenty of the thirty-two rounds fired into Uhrwerk's upper body, groin, and head. The bolt fell on the empty chamber after the last bullet.

Every soul—even the storm troopers—froze. Uhrwerk stood his ground, examining the impact points in his body with casual curiosity. The Gypsies began whispering in their Romi tongue about the devil walking among men. Then, almost too quick for the human eye, Uhrwerk stepped forward and stabbed his hand through the drunken Gypsy's sternum, seizing and crushing the man's heart. His other hand grabbed the top of the Gypsy's skull and spun the head 180 degrees with a sickening crackle that sounded like a dry bundle of twigs being broken.

The Gypsies screamed. Some tried to crawl away in abject terror, only to be kicked by the remaining storm troopers. One Gypsy man pointed at both the dead storm trooper and Uhrwerk, where the Romanian police overcoats were torn, revealing their unmistakable foreign pedigree. The word “Nazi” spread through the clan immediately.

Uhrwerk was disappointed in what had to happen next. Not because he had any emotion about killing all the adults in the village. It was because of the waste of the time it would take to eliminate the evidence.

“Haupsturmführer Jäger, you know what must be done. Release the
nachtmenn
,” Uhrwerk ordered. He strode calmly over to where Der Schädel was resting.

There was a snarl and a howl as the
nachtmenn
leapt from the truck, bounding like panthers across the open ground. They tore into the band of Gypsies with tooth, claw, and tusk. Bones crunched between teeth and the
nachtmenn
fed as their victims still cried out. Even the most hardened of storm troopers found something else to look at.

Ignoring the carnage, Uhrwerk gave orders to Der Schädel.

“Take care of the children,” he said dispassionately.

Der Schädel nodded. Taking a labored breath, he removed his mask, revealing his true countenance. The mask shielded his mind from the outside world. There was only so much he could take, but the harder the illusion he had to cast, the more direct his mind had to be.

Der Schädel reached out to the mind of the old Gypsy crone the storm trooper sergeant had put in charge of the children and infants. He saw through her eyes the children gathered in the tent at the edge of the camp. They were all huddled together and crying in fear at the sound of the nearby gunfire. The old woman's mind was tired and weak, but her innate protective instinct toward the
kinder
was remarkably strong. Der Schädel used that very instinct against her. He reached out and spoke, his words becoming her thoughts.