Black Sun Reich (7 page)

Everything slowed to a crawl.

Deitel saw a body throw itself in front of the pistol and heard its owner's voice holler
“Nein!”
It was curiously like his voice. Then it came to him: it was his voice. He heard the suppressed German's Walther PPK's pop, then heard a deeper explosion like a cannon, followed by several more. The SD man's chest seemed to cave in.

Deitel turned to see three of the newcomers and Rucker extending smoking pistols in the direction where the SD man lay, now well and truly ventilated.

“Damn, Kid, you walloped the hell out of that kraut,” Rucker said to one of the men with him when the roar of the shots died. It was a boy who couldn't have been more than seventeen.

“Figured four to one wasn't really fair for an old man like you,” Kid Boyington replied.

Another of the newcomers grabbed Deitel's shoulder roughly and glared.

“So this kraut is with you, Fox?” the man asked Rucker. To Deitel, he sneered, “That it, Hans? You with Fox?”

Rucker pulled the man away from Deitel roughly.

“Yeah, Lindy, he's with me. Mind your manners,” Rucker said. “Oh, and his name is Kurt. Dr. Kurt von Deitel. Don't forget it.”

Rucker put a hand on Deitel's shoulder and smiled through the blood dripping from his nose. “Thanks, Doc. Taking a bullet like that. Didn't think you had the
heuvos
.”

Deitel smiled back.

Wait. What?

He looked down at his body and noticed the hole in his suit jacket just below the breast pocket.
Gott!
I've been shot!
He must have been in shock since he didn't feel it yet. Frantically he tore off his jacket, but there was no blood on his white shirt.

“Clean miss,” Rucker said, “but not for lack of you trying to catch the thing.”

Deitel felt his legs go and he sat straight down on the cool sidewalk. Now the adrenaline came, way too late.

“You know,” Rucker finally said, picking up his cowboy hat from the ground and easing it back on his head, “Here I thought you were just some anemic little fancy boy from the dandy side of Germany.”

“Um, thank you?” Deitel said, still processing what had just happened.

“But you got some big brass ones clanging down there, don't you?” Rucker said, yanking Deitel to his feet. “C'mon. First round at Dutchy's is on me.”

Deitel was still shaking from the adrenaline rush, staring off into the distance. He got his bearings and stood.

“Will . . . will there be tacos?”

 

CHAPTER FIVE

Dutchy's Brass Monkey

Austin

Texas Freehold

T
he beer was cold, the bluegrass trio was loud, and the logs in the brick oven were flaming. The sign outside read
DUTCHY'S BRASS MONKEY,
and there was in fact a brass monkey as the centerpiece of the bar.

There was also a real monkey. It smoked cigarettes.

A sign above the door said
F
LIARS
ONLY
, but they'd let Deitel in, and he was still wondering about the spelling. The walls of Dutchy's tavern told the whole history of heavier-than-air aviation in pictures, old advertisements, and actual aeroplane parts. It ran from Glenn Curtiss's first powered flight in 1901 to the transoceanic passenger planes of today. The ceiling fans were made from the early wooden propellers that were used until 1917. There was no place for lighter-than-air memorabilia. Most notably absent in the bar was anything relating to the history of airships, which rose to primacy in the late 1800s and even today were the dominant form of air transport for both people and goods.

Fliers weren't fond of airship men and vice versa.

A wing from a 1910 civilian biplane—all wood frame and canvas—decorated the wall above the water closets. The tabletops were made from pieces of high-test aluminum composites salvaged from more modern planes. The alloy was the Brazilian discovery that changed airplane design and construction fundamentally, especially in the closing days of the Great War.

Pictures of individual pioneers in flight engineering and flight itself were cast about on the walls. Here Curtiss. There the Wright Brothers. On a shelf apropos of nothing was an old hand crank from the dawn of the biplane era. Of course, there were pictures of aerial squadrons from the wartime Texas Volunteer Group, set amid rather raucous graffiti that served as a memorial to downed fliers.

Deitel found two pictures of the 315th Mighty Fireflies. In the first there were ten men—including Rucker—posed in front of a Curtiss Hornet biplane. It was dated August 1917. The second showed eleven men posed in front of a Curtiss Dragonfly, one of the first combat monoplanes. It was dated February 1918. Only five of the men from the first picture were in the second; the survivors looked like they'd aged ten years.

Centered over the bar was an engraving on a stone slab. Even Deitel recognized it—the commandments for aerial combat as written by the very first man to master aerial combat, German ace Oswald Boelcke.

DICTA BOELCKE

1. Try to secure advantages before attacking. If possible keep the sun behind you.

2. Always carry through an attack when you started it.

3. Fire only at close range and only when your opponent is properly in your sights.

4. Always keep your eye on your opponent and never let yourself be deceived by ruses.

5. In any form of attack it is essential to assail your opponent from behind.

6. If your opponent dives on you, do not try to evade his onslaught but fly to meet him.

7. When over the enemy's line, never forget your own line of retreat.

Deitel felt a little mauled and manhandled by all the hearty backslaps and the drinks they kept pushing into his hand. He'd asked for schnapps and got Tennessee whiskey. He'd asked for a lager and got Tennessee whiskey. The four men who'd come to his and Rucker's rescue in the alley were all telling loud stories with bold and boisterous laughs. They all seemed to welcome him in their rough way—except the one they called Lindy, who still glared at him whenever their eyes met.

Claire Chennault was the oldest of the group, probably in his mid-thirties, so they all called him Pappy. All but the youngest of this group, the fifteen-year-old mascot they called Kid Boyington, had served together in France—Jim Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Lindy. They wore leather flight jackets over their civilian clothes, with patches that proclaimed
3RD TEXAS VOLUNTEER AIR GROUP—MIGHTY FIREFLIES
.

Chennault's booming voice cut right through the noise of the bar and the band's volume.

“. . . when from nowhere this red Fokker triplane buzzes the aerodrome—we don't know what happened to the spotters. Anyhow, it drops Rucker's boots and cap. We all figured the bastard was the one what shot the Fox down,” he said, clapping Rucker on the shoulder. “So Lindy here, who just arrived over from Dallas, gets on the thirty-caliber machine gun, and as the kraut flew back over to dip his wings, he opened up on the Fokker, smoking him.

“Which wasn't kosher,” Chennault added for Deitel and Boyington's benefit. “But he was seventeen and a greenhorn.

“We're all standing around shocked at what just happened. Captain Blackadder, our Royal Air Corps liaison, is cursing a blue streak at Lindy. And then when we hear this voice from overhead yelling, ‘Don't shoot me, you miserable bastards!' we look up and there's Rucker floating down, a bottle of the Baron's cognac in one hand, and the Baron's Dachshund cradled in the other. In his socks and not much else.”

The whole table roared even though it was apparent they'd heard the story dozens of times.

“He taken Baron Richtofen's favorite plane, his best hooch, and his dog,” Chennault said. They were all laughing so hard they were banging the table and wiping tears.

After another round of drinks and stories and, eventually, when the other fliers cleared off, Deitel finally had a chance to ask what the hell had happened in the alley.

“It was a Gestapo bag team,” Rucker explained. “They would have gunned me down and taken you away. It's pretty clear now—whatever is going on with the information you brought us, the Gestapo and the SD know something. Just not sure what or how much.”

The prospect was frightening, but weighed against duty, was a small matter.

“How does an armed SD team get into Texas?” Deitel asked.

“Probably by way of the Union States. Brought in by members of the Texas Bundists,” Rucker said.

“You allow Nazis in your country?”

Rucker sighed. “Yeah, that's the problem with people being free to be themselves—they're free to be themselves. Still, it's not like they get much traction with folks.”

“We said that in 1921.”

Rucker shook his head. “That's the rub. Either you trust people's better nature and maybe you get hoodwinked once in a while, or you go down the path of assuming everyone's bad nature, which is what the goose-steppers want when you break it all down. And if we make laws to protect people's freedom from what the goose-steppers want, then we just did their job for them.”

“Your system can't last, you know, Herr Rucker.”

“Maybe not. But I'd rather crash a bird taking her up than nose her into the ground intentional. And you'd be surprised at how well she's handled so far. I'm figuring not much beyond the propaganda gets heard about the Freehold in the Fatherland.”

The band took a break and they could speak in quieter tones.

“Why didn't you shoot the second two SD men?” Deitel asked. “In the alley? Before you dropped your pistol.”

“I was wondering that myself. I reckon I was thinking if I could knock the second two out we might lose the other four. When this thing goes off, it pretty well announces to the world where you're at.”

Rucker pulled out his pistol and offered it to Deitel, handle first. Deitel held it at first like it was a snake that might strike him. It looked like a melding of the old classic cowboy pistols and the newer, modern semiautomatics. Along the side Deitel read the inscription—
COLT SELF-DEFENSE ENGINE MODEL 35.
It was long, wooden-handled, and a combination of brushed steel and brass. Where a wheel would have been on an old revolver, there was a rectangular cartridge. The workings were beyond him, but there was visceral beauty he couldn't deny even if, as a doctor, all guns offended him.

Carefully, he handed it back to Rucker, who twirled it on his finger and slid it effortlessly into its holster.

Deitel took another sip of his whiskey and then swept his arm over the group of fliers at the bar.

“Your comrades seem very welcoming. Except the one called Lucky Lindy. Who, I must add, seems very familiar.”

“Lindy? Yeah, he was in all the papers back in 1924. First solo flight across the Atlantic—New Orleans to Paris in the
Spirit of San Antonio
,” Rucker said. “A year later he got duped by Goebbels's propaganda machine and was quoted saying some nice things about old Adolf. After that, when newspaperman Henry Mencken broke the story in the
Times Herald
about the concentration camps and the starvation in former Poland, Lindy's stock dropped considerable, even though he was as appalled as anyone by what the Nazis are up to.”

Deitel recalled all the press the young aviator had received, even in Germany. And he remembered the man's intemperate remarks praising the New Order in its early years.

“You and Herr Lindy both appear very young to have served in the war.”

“We were. Both of us were barely seventeen, and we lied about our age,” Rucker said. “They needed pilots bad.”

“ 'They' as in your country, or ‘they' as in the Texas mercenary company?”

“Now now, Doc. You know the Freehold sat the war out. This was strictly a private affair for those of us young, dumb, and unbridled enough to want to join in that organized slaughterhouse.”

“
Ach
. Texas and the Swiss. I'm sorry, I do not understand this rigid adherence to neutrality you so treasure.”

“Wars ain't pretty. Most aren't worth the fuss. Oh, maybe a few were, I don't know. But even when they're right, they don't do much good for anyone. If someone tries to kill you, you have to try to kill 'em right back, as my grandpappy Mal used to say. But there's no profit in it and you lose something even when you win . . .”

Deitel didn't want to interrupt Rucker's pause; he could tell the flier was trying to find the right words to something difficult.

“. . . Maybe we're just still gun-shy from the reckoning we had a while back with all the blood spilled after the San Marcos Massacre in 1846.”

Seeing Deitel's blank expression, Rucker added, “That's when Bloody Santa Ana tried for the third time to take Texas. What his men did at San Marcos was an obscenity. Texans went a little blood crazy. Marched the whole Texas army down to Mexico City”—blank look—“you know it as Jefferson Ciudad now—and, well, it got awful.

“Mexico City was burned to the ground. A lot of people who never wanted anything more than to feed their families and go about their business died, just like had happened in San Marcos. Many Mexicans fled south. Many more chose to swear allegiance to the Republic of Texas. Too many died on both sides.”

He took another sip.

“The Union States and the Northwest Alliance had the sins of their Indian Wars. Texas has the sin of the Mexican War,” Rucker went on. “That kind of revenge-taking does something to your soul, whether you're a man or country and whether you're right or not.”

Deitel wasn't entirely sure Rucker was speaking only of events from the nineteenth century.

“After the smoke cleared and people started thinking clear again, they realized they'd rung a bell that couldn't be unrung. Best they could do was resolve not to do it again,” Rucker said. “I always figured that's why they named the new city after Jefferson. That man always was the biggest champion of second chances North America ever saw. Said that's what this continent was for.”

Despite his extensive and exclusive education, all of this was new to Deitel. The history of North America, its union, its divisions, its many nations today—all of that was barely touched on even in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “but that was almost ninety years ago. Why is this neutrality instinct still so strong today?”

“I don't know that I know,” Rucker said. “This country was founded by folks who just wanted to be left alone. If you want to be left alone, you gotta be willing to leave alone. Plus, it's easier doing business with folks in other lands when your government hasn't been mucking around with the locals. It's easier to make money than it is to make war.”

Deitel shook his head, trying to hide his disgust at these people's continued, crass focus on the material.

“Yet you and many of your countrymen—even if it was as a private militia—fought in the Great War.”

Rucker nodded slowly.

“Just because we don't go colonizing and conquering don't mean we're pacifists. Hell, like as not any man or woman you see on the street from here to Cabo is carrying an equalizer,” he said. “Nothing sinful about using a gun in defense. It's only when you pull it first.”

“So your free society requires that you walk around ready to kill all the time. It's barbaric,” Deitel said.

Rucker ignored that.

The German and the Texan ordered another round.

“You are right when you say that we Germans do not really understand your culture,” Deiter said. “Your government—it is forbidden to meddle in religion and commerce. Your nation's army, air corps, and navy are a tenth the size of most western countries. Your government enters no protection treaties, even with your beloved French. You have no national manifest and no colonial expansion beyond your endless business ventures, which seem to pop up all over the world and aren't directed by anyone but their greedy capitalist owners.”

“And?” Rucker asked.

“To us—and forgive me if this sounds rude—this lack of direction is anarchy and self-indulgence. I don't advocate anything like what the National Socialists represent, but a modern nation needs a proper modern state. From our perspective, a modern state cannot be administered efficiently without progressive central planning.”