Black Sun Reich (4 page)

And despite what he'd been told, Brazil seemed no more different than any other modern country—plenty of rich and poor and middle class. He was beginning to expect the same would hold true for the Texas Freehold, despite what he'd been told and despite Rucker telling him very little.

Another point along those lines—what he'd expected by way of treatment from someone who'd fought as a mercenary, versus the reality of how Rucker was treating him. Even if it was from a remove, Rucker was treating him without any malice.

Rucker was the first Texan that Deitel had ever met, and, yes, there was the cowboy hat he'd first seen him in. But Deitel had expected little more than an oversized crop duster for a charter plane. The
Raposa
was exceptionally modern.

To learn that Rucker was part of the militia force that so quickly brought an end to the Great War—it was a bit much.

At twenty-three, Deitel was too young to remember a lot of the war. It started when he was just nine and ended before he turned sixteen. But he'd studied the subject extensively. The conflict began in 1913 in Europe, three years before the Freehold got involved at all.

The worldwide conflagration started small enough. Everyone agreed on that point. Binding treaties and interventionist strategies had turned a minor regional conflict into a world war.

At first it was a European war. Then it grew into a war that quickly burned across Africa and threatened to consume Asia and South America in conflagrations between European colonies there. The northern Union States under President Wilson joined the war on the side of Imperial Germany in 1915. The Union States still held a grudge against England and France for their recognition of the Confederate States in 1863 and their recognition of the Texas Republic in 1835.

Meanwhile, the Confederate States sided with the British Empire and France, of course, for the same reason. The Great War never touched the North American continent, but only because the Union States and CSA both honored the terms of the Foggy Bottom Treaty of 1864, which established a demilitarized zone between the American powers. One war on their home soil was quite enough for northerners and southerners, despite their long-simmering hatred.

The Texas Freehold—one of the nine Anglo nations of North and Central America—remained neutral.

That changed in 1916. Sort of.

That year, a desperate France pleaded to Austin for help. As in 1861, during the War for Southern Independence, private citizens from across the Freehold banded together to form the Texas Volunteer Group, an entirely private militia. When the French called, Texans always obliged. Mercenaries, they were called by Imperial forces of the U.S., Germany, and Russia.

Within a few months of the call for help, tens of thousands of Freeholders were fighting in the trenches and in the skies of Europe alongside the French.

The Freehold itself, politically and formally as a nation, still remained officially neutral, since it was only their citizens under the banner of a private militia fighting in the war.

This unconventional state of affairs caused no end of uproar among both enemies and allies alike. For some reason most Freeholders couldn't fathom, it was considered noble and proper to fight a war with involuntary conscripts but improper for volunteers to fight under a private banner. Freeholders asked what kind of man would make someone pay for or fight a war he didn't want.

“You really have no qualms about dealing with Germans?” Deitel finally asked.

“Should I? War's long done, Dr. Deitel. We made war on the German military, not on German people.”

“Given how your people conducted war, we assumed you all hated Germans,” Deitel said.

Rucker cocked his head and an eyebrow.

“How do you mean, Doctor?”

“Your people were a terror. My nation fought the French and Englanders to a standstill. It was bloody and ugly, but the war was stable. Then you came. According to the histories I have read, you did not fight as we knew. You simply went around the trenches and fortifications. You attacked us from every side but the front. Your horse troops cut off entire regiments. Your rangers crawled into trenches at night and scalped our machine gun crews. They organized and trained French villagers behind our lines to conduct war, arming the old, women, and even children. You appeared from nowhere and faded back into the dark and the wilds. It was the stuff of nightmares.”

There was a long silence.

“It wasn't personal,” Rucker finally said with a shrug. “We just wanted to get it done with.”

Deitel couldn't have looked more confused and insulted if Rucker had stood and relieved himself in Deitel's coat pocket.

“Look, you bring us to a fight,” Rucker said, “don't expect us to come with our dancin' shoes.”

“Germany didn't bring you,” Deitel said. “You came at the request of the French.”

“Mais oui,”
Rucker said.

“I never understood the nature of the Freehold's ‘special relationship' with France,” Deitel said.

Rucker shrugged.

“They had our backs in the first revolution in 1776. Convinced Jefferson and the Founders to get rid of slavery. They were the first to recognize Texas in 1835. Hell, they gave us the Statue of Liberty. You seen the picture postcards—that lady standing on the shore off New Orleans. The French been with us in good times and bad,” Rucker said.

“Many say that your people conducted themselves like war criminals.”

“Do you want off the plane? I can arrange that,” Rucker said.

“Oh come now,” Deitel said.

“I've got the captain hat right here.”

Deitel gave a nervous laugh.

“I wasn't joking,” Rucker said. “We have parachutes and everything.”

Deitel opened and closed his mouth silently, then chose his words carefully.

“I don't mean to offend you personally, Herr Kapitan. It's just that, from what I've been taught, your people were like the savage Indians in the western American nations. And therefore I am shocked you'd allow one of my people here.”

“Strange definition of savage. We didn't make war on civilians and shell cities.
Merde.
We didn't bomb towns or use gas and dragon belchers. Besides, Far Ranger's company motto is ‘Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.' That includes Huns, I reckon.”

Deitel sniffed. There was more than a language separating the two.

“You're saying you have no ill will toward Germans now?”

“I haven't thrown you off the plane. War's done, like I said. Fair to say I'm not too keen on what's been happening since that coup by the Austrian corporal in 1922. But I don't concern myself with politics. If there's politics, it ain't my business. And I'm not offended. I just don't like being reminded about that time in my life.”

Deitel looked quizzically at the Mighty Fireflies patch.

“Them that I flew with is the one good thing to come out of that sorry mess,” Rucker said. “Also, your check didn't bounce.”

The smirk on Rucker's face was a poor disguise, Deitel thought.

Deitel considered silently: the English still called the various North American nations—the Union States, the Confederate States, the Texas Freehold, the Pacific Commonwealth, the Northwest Alliance, and so on—the “colonies.” He could see why. These people held an almost charmingly colonial view of modern geopolitics and the state. Isolationist. As if turning one's back on the world made it go away.

Then again, it didn't take all his medical training for Deitel to know that Rucker had scars—the kind that showed and the kind that didn't.

Two hours later

Austin

Texas Freehold

D
eitel was growing a little tired of the surprises. The flight itself from Airstrip One was uneventful. Rucker barely spoke; he really didn't like getting involved in anything political, but this was Chuy's call. The company needed the premium being paid to get Deitel to Austin with the utmost discretion.

The flight took the
Raposa
across the Gulf to the port town of Galveston, and then the churning refineries and the lights of the sprawling city of Lamar, one of the centers of the booming Texas oil business. As they descended on Austin, Deitel was wide-eyed as a tourist at the number of passenger rail lines, high-speed roadways, and the stately but swift airships. He expected wagons and horses.

Downtown Austin boasted a forest of skyscrapers, the largest and most beautiful being the eight-hundred-foot Maxwell Motor Building, easily the crown jewel of Art Deco architecture.

In the taxi on the way to their rendezvous, Deitel just didn't know what to make of what he saw on the streets. Or the streets themselves, so landscaped with greenery that thoroughfares seemed like parks. There was no rhyme or reason to the dress or the colors or the classes he saw intermingling on busy sidewalks and sidewalk cafés, shops, and businesses.

And yes, there were horses.

Of the races, of course, Europeans constituted the majority, but he saw all manner of folk and they moved among one another freely. And, he noted, most wore some sort of pistol holster, no matter how formal or ordinary or colorful their dress, and no matter if they were men or women.

Natural. Probably to deal with the wild Indian tribes, Deitel thought. He wondered why there weren't more cacti.

Through the taxi's windows drifted a cacophony of musical styles and the exotic smells of dozens of exotic cuisines. At stoplights he listened to people speaking their twangy southwestern English, which included a mélange of Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

He saw hobos and bums, as they were called here, but not as many as the state-run newspapers in the Reich said there were. No more than he'd see on the streets of Munich. He saw more Help Wanted signs in shop windows than he saw beggars.

It was chaotic and confusing and overwhelming and, somehow, intriguing.

There were garish advertisements and glittering neon signs everywhere, but not a single propaganda poster. Street performers and vendors sold everything from fruits and tobacco to items that ran to a more lascivious and adult nature.

It was scandalous, and ugly. No place for children.

Unsafe, Deitel thought. Decadent. Undisciplined and frightening. Crass and shallow. Commercialized.

The doctor wasn't surprised to see they were heading toward the large Capitol building, with its famous oak dome and pink granite. But the taxi drove right past the government building, turning onto Sixth Street and finally stopping in front of the Driskill Hotel.

Presently, the confused doctor found himself in a small reading room off the hotel lobby. It was a room like an English gentlemen's club, appointed with plush leather chairs, oak shelves, and the smell of cherry pipe tobacco. He'd been startled by the preserved, stuffed remains of a horribly discomforting creature displayed in a glass case in one corner. It was like a goblin from a
kinder
fable, or a malformed chimpanzee with huge batlike eyes, leathery ears, bat wings, and large fangs.

“It's a chupacabra,” Rucker said, seeing his curiosity. “The Chihuahua Outback is lousy with 'em.”

“This is like your famous ‘jackelope' joke for tourists?”

There was no smile. Rucker's right hand brushed the pistol strapped at his side, while the left reassuringly stroked the big Bowie knife on the opposite hip.

“There's nothing funny about chupacabras. They're serious as taxes and twice as dangerous.”

The smile or wink Deitel was expecting never came. Deitel knew that many of the creatures from his
kinder
tales were based in fact, but this creature was more fantastic than even the dwarf flying dragons of Madagascar.

Deitel turned to find their host, who had appeared from nowhere. Standing before the doctor and the pilot was the strangest little man the doctor had ever seen. He wore a slightly frayed purple jacket and a fanciful dress shirt with an overly long scarf. He had little pieces of paper marked with unreadable scribbles sticking out of his pockets, and pencils behind each ear. He had curly salt and pepper hair and spoke as though his thoughts were far ahead of his words.

Rucker leaned against the door, the picture of indifference. Deitel sat, like any German, at attention.

“Captain Rucker, thank you, er, for bringing our guest,” the odd man said. Turning to the doctor, he said, as he wrote something down on a scrap of paper, “I, sir, am Lysander Benjamin.”

Deitel clicked his heels and nodded.

“Don't do that,” Rucker muttered.

“I, of course, know who you are, Dr. von Deitel, and who you represent. I have nothing but the highest professional respect for Commodore Canaris. But—no offense—exactly why are you, er, that is, here? Why have you interrupted your studies in Rio? Why is that old man Canaris bothering you?”

Deitel stood and turned away, as if he could not face Benjamin when he spoke his next words. His shoulders slumped, but then he turned and faced the two men with all he could muster.

“Herr Benjamin, I bring a plea from Commodore Canaris. You may think you know of the evil being perpetrated within the Fatherland by the New Order,” Deitel said. “It is far worse than you imagine.”

Neither of the other two men spoke.

“We—the people I represent—believe the madmen who rule the Reich are about to unleash an abomination on the world. It's a madman's nightmare. It could be the end of all life as we know it, and the dawn of hell on earth.”

 

CHAPTER THREE

Wewelsburg Castle

Westphalia Region

Greater German Reich

T
he stone of the Renaissance castle in the northeast of Westphalia was perpetually as cold and damp as a corpse. The spring flowers and edelweiss, harbingers of the life season and the pride of the Alme Valley villagers, no longer grew near the keep. The once lively countryside lived in a perpetual winter, some said a perpetual nightmare. It was as if, villagers whispered, a darkness of the soul had fallen on the land. At night they locked their doors as strange animal cries and haunting moans drifted across the forests. Sometimes small animals and children would disappear with little trace. Occasionally a farmer would make the morbid discovery of a bloody child's dress. Some farmers spoke of night creatures like the trolls of old or the wyverns that had not been seen for a hundred years. But none spoke loudly. They knew from folk wisdom that speaking of dark magicks would only draw the attention of both conjurer and conjured.

A decade and a half ago this had been an idyllic world of mountains, rivers, and ancient forests giving life to a thriving, forward-thinking, modern western culture.

That time was gone. It died in 1913, when the call to arms went out:

“Now the sword must decide. In the midst of peace we have been attacked. Our homeland, united, has never been conquered. We will advance with God on our side as he was with our forefathers.”

These very words or words like them were spoken in English, German, Russian, Spanish, French—wherever old men wanted to call young men to the butcher's block.

The Great War, as it was called with no sense of irony or shame, had claimed millions of lives in butchery unprecedented over the span of five years. The mold for a new type of war was cast in Western Europe, with industrialized states locked in deadly conflict.

On the Imperial side, Germany, the Union States, the Ottomans, Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Persians. On the Allied side, France, Great Britain, the Confederate States, Italy, and finally the Propriedad de Brazil and the Texas Freehold.

Caught in the middle were millions of ordinary people who had no interest in killing or being killed.

The Great War gave the world industrial scale killing and modern, scientific horrors—machine guns, death gases, motorized beasts and mechanized crawlers, clockwork killers, airship bombers, steam rockets, and above all the abominable concept of “total warfare.”

The suicidal charges across No Man's Land had cursed the very soil of Europe with blood. The war turned much of the western German countryside into a vision not seen outside Dante's darkest musings. Much of Russia became a literal Dead Zone, depopulated of humans and now a barren wasteland where it was said monsters of old were coming again through a hell-mouth.

That was just the beginning of the twilight.

The bitter taste of surrender in what was left of the soul of Germany had given rise to the fanatical, collectivist cult of the hooked cross—the National Socialists. They seized power in 1922 in the Beer Hall Putsch and built a Third Reich on the ashes and bitterness of the Kaiser's Germany.

The leaders of this New Order, Hitler and his right-hand man Himmler, reordered Germany and what little was left of Western Russia into a shadow land of Bavarian mysticism, perverted sciences, fanatical socialism, and deadly eugenics. It was all hidden from the world behind the Black Iron Curtain.

And here, fully two hundred miles from the Deadlands on the western border along the Rhine, the shadows and cold pervaded the most.

This was the center of the Nazi Reich and the New Order—Wewelsburg Castle.

The original citadel was a treasure of German culture at the height of the Renaissance—refined, set against the welcoming countryside amid majestic mountains. But it was corrupted, like the whole country, when the National Socialists claimed it.

Where Berlin—renamed Germania—was the political capital of the Third Reich, Wewelsburg Castle was remade into the cultural, spiritual, and military headquarters of the New Order—the SS—that was the Reich's master.

SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had almost rebuilt the entire structure of Wewelsburg. Engineers had added an eighteen-meter-high wall in the shape of a three-quarter circle, with eighteen lesser towers surrounding the centerpiece called simply the North Tower. This was the centerpiece of the Reichsführung-SS, the leadership corps of the Schutzstaffel. It was the seat of power for Greater Germany.

The eastern portion of the sprawling castle grounds included the hall of the High Court of the SS, the Reich archives, the SS General's Hall, and the offices of the Ahnenerbe, the cultural and historic research society of the SS. Along the western edge were the legion of offices, communications, and operations facilities required of an organization as vast as the SS. To the south, Wewelsburg boasted a hydroelectric dam, airfields, an airship port, and facilities for a full panzer battalion.

The network of defenses, barriers, and weapons around Wewelsburg was unmatched outside the Führer's personal residences.

Within the walls, elite Waffen-SS soldiers in black leather, MP-32 submachine guns, coal scuttle helmets, and Senf masks—the SS storm troopers—patrolled every corner of the spear-shaped castle grounds as the black and red banner of the Reich fluttered overhead.

These storm troopers were the most fanatical of all the Waffen-SS, the SS military that was already eight times larger than the regular German army. The storm troopers were named for the deadly blitz units used in the Great War, and now served as the hammer of the new SS leadership. They were the shock troops of the New Order.

The black rubber, goggle-eyed Senf masks every storm trooper wore served multiple purposes. Storm troopers, of course, were not hesitant to use poison gas in their operations, and protected them as the gas masks they resembled. But the Senf masks also presented a frightening image to enemies and thus provided a psychological edge. The anonymity provided by the masks protected members of the SS from personal reprisals at the hands of terrorists. Finally—and most important in Himmler's mind—the masks created an image of uniformity and invulnerability. When a storm trooper fell, another exactly like him—black leather uniform, black helmeted and fearsome mask, took his place.

Only the best of the best of these storm troopers were assigned duty in the North Tower, for it was here where all the dark energies centered. It was the nexus of Teutonic esotericism, racial mysticism, and runic worship that gave the Nazi brand of socialism its indelible stain. While most of the world was blinded to the mystical arts or rejected them outright, the Nazis embraced them. But unlike the mystics and conjurers of the Far East who sought the power of natural magicks in ley lines and life energies, the Nazis focused on the darkest magicks, the ones born of death, suffering, and the darkness that crept into the world when demons of the Otherness managed to pry open a portal to the world.

Wewelsburg Castle was the soul of Hitler's promised Thousand Year Reich, but it was more than just a temple. Underneath the North Tower was the largest Difference Engine ever built, and networks of tunnels and laboratories where there were questions sane men were never meant to contemplate. Analog calculators of enormous complexity, used since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Difference Engines in Wewelsburg were put to uses far more sinister than Charles Babbage could have envisioned when he built the first one, which solely calculated numerically and through advanced algorithms.

On the upper floor of the North Tower stood twelve columns joined by a groined vault. Centered about this structure, focusing its energy, was the marbled white floor, the Black Sun rune, and a golden swastika at its zenith. In the center burned an eternal flame. Around it was a round table fashioned after the one of Camelot legend.

It was here that the man second only to the Führer held court. Reichsmarshal Himmler, not even thirty yet, stared into the eternal flame. He ran his smooth fingers over the trim of his Hugo Boss–designed pale gray and black-trimmed uniform, complete with its silver
sigenrunes
and oak leafs insignia.

Around this flame curved the table where sat the twelve most senior leaders of Himmler's inner circle—the Black Sun—which governed the course of the Third Reich, directed by and answerable only to Herr Himmler, and ultimately the Führer himself.

The Black Sun included Josef “Sepp” Deitrich, commandant of the Waffen SS, Hermann Göring, Reich Skymarshal of the Luft-SS, as well as commander general of the Gestapo, the director of the Internal Security Directorate, the two of them directors of the cultural, racial, industrial, scientific, and environmental branches of the civilian SS.

They were the New Order incarnate.

And they were bickering.

Again.

It happened every meeting, Himmler thought.

“This emphasis on the Americas—especially the Freehold—is unwarranted,” argued Anton Drexler, Hitler's mentor in the early days of the National Socialist party and founder of the occult and cultural Thule Society from which the party arose. “We need to focus on reclamation of the Damned Lands to the East, and our plans for retaking the territories stolen by the Versailles Treaty. The powers and creatures growing in the Damned Lands are ours for the taking, if we can bring them to heel.”

Drexler was now the spiritual voice of the Black Sun, but that didn't lessen his focus on strategic issues. “The Damned Lands,” he went on, “are a locus of dark ley lines and spiritual energies unlike anything in history. The massive scale of death from the war amplify the powers of the Otherness.”

Wilhelm Frick, the graying commandant general of the Gestapo and one of the older and senior members of the Black Sun, clapped his hand on the round table.

“I concur. I don't see much future for the Freehold. It's a decayed country. Granted, they don't suffer the economic stagnancy of the Union States or the social stagnancy of the Confederate States, but they are wholly inactive in the apparatus of the modern scientific state. Their government is anemic. They cannot be considered a threat to the Reich's future expansion in any way.
Mein Gott
, they have no standing army, no serious economic controls, and their government is rabidly noninterventionist. Everything about the behavior of their society reveals that it's half Judaized and the other half Latinized. They represent no threat to the New Order. They will collapse in due course.”

Colonel Uhrwerk, expressionless because of his black steel and brass mask, which looked like a cubist's representation of a face, said in his metronomelike mechanical voice, “That is what we thought a decade ago. Before we were driven from France and Belgium by an army of Freehold militia and mercenaries. You forget, I was at the Battle of Devil's Run at Cologne. I saw firsthand what a nonthreat they represent,” he added, and gestured to his own body.

Those at the table took a moment to appreciate the implications of Uhrwerk's statement—the “man” was now a clockwork cyborg, with what little remained of his original being encased in a complex life-support system powered by steam and almost infinitely intricate springs and gears. Then they erupted again into argument.

Himmler's number two man, Reinhard Heydrich, interrupted the raucous debate with the position of the only voice on the subject that mattered—the Führer. Everyone fell silent as the young assistant who looked like an SS recruiting poster—the handsome, idealized Aryan man—spoke.

“It has been the assumption of the Führer since the 1920s—possibly since the war—that Germany will again fight the Freehold despite their distance and ostensible political neutrality,” Heydrich said. “To those ends, in 1926 the Führer directed that we strengthen and prepare Germany for war against the Freehold on the North American continent.”

Despite all of the uniforms around the table, only a few were worn by experienced soldiers. One of those few—Waffen-SS commandant Josef “Sepp” Deitrich—scoffed.

“The problem of fighting the Freehold is that it is so far away,” he said. “You all know I am the first to embrace new battlefield technologies—I was one of the first panzer commanders in the Great War and the very first commander of the steam-mech-walker squadron at Verdun—but even I cannot imagine what we could build to bridge the distance.”

“The plans are being drawn up as we speak,” said the only man at the table not in a pale gray or black uniform, but rather, one that was sky blue with black and silver trim.

Hermann Göring, Reich Skymarshal and master of the new Luft-SS, smiled. “Already our engineers are at work creating wonder weapons the world has never imagined, based on the very steam and diesel technologies that almost won us the war. My engineers are imagining bombers and rockets that can cross oceans, and airships that can carry entire panzer companies.”

Heydrich nodded at the corpulent former ace who had brought the German air forces under the aegis of the SS.

“Further,” Heydrich said, “we believe our pact with President Kennedy of the Union States will allow us to secret men and matériel onto the North American continent, where we will establish a base of operations.”

Himmler's thin lips gave a glimmer of a grin, but he was not pleased with Heydrich's faith in the secret pact with the Union States.

The Union States was an unreliable ally. Certainly, many of the Reich's racial and progressive policies had been adapted from the policies first established by Hamilton House in the Union States capital in New York City. But though the Union States had embraced the primacy of the state and Joseph P. Kennedy's own opinion of the Jewish problem, which mirrored the Führer's, the Union States socialism was not the national socialism of Germany. Their state was held together by the charisma of their democratically elected president, not the strength and purity of a single
volk
embodied in an unquestioned and eternal leader. The Union States was an ally of convenience, not principle.