Blood of the Reich (13 page)

The villages, made of mud brick with flat clay roofs, blended with the dun-colored hills and were hazed by yak-dung fires. With the only trees growing in remote river bottoms, the dung was a substitute for wood. It was slapped into bricks by young girls and stacked at each residence for winter fuel, proudly lining the top of every courtyard wall and reaching to the sill of every window.

The village roads were dirt, each plod of the yaks raising a plume of dung dust. Ill-fed dogs would bark and snarl as the Nazis passed, lunging against felt-rope tethers. The Germans shared the winding, lumpy lanes with scarlet-robed monks who hiked down from monasteries perched like forts on nearby hills. There were also barley farmers, herdsmen, shopkeepers, and migratory traders. The women were pretty, the Germans noticed: high-cheeked, dark-eyed, with hair like black silk. But they were modestly wrapped against the wind in colorful dress and striped apron called a
pangden
that discouraged much discernment of their form. The SS men were restless for women, but had no idea how to obtain any in this strange, contemplative culture.

Raeder wanted one to dominate, to hear her cries, but he dared not risk it. The mission required discipline. The craving made him moody, and when Diels tried to joke with him about the dung and the dust, he snapped in reply.

Submission was what he’d wanted from Lotte, until she hinted to her family about his tastes. The marriage became too complicated and had to end. And the accident was nearly that, an accident—he’d not planned it at all—but when the muzzle swung to follow a flight of rising ducks and traversed her body, his finger had acted on its own. He’d pretended
that
shotgun had been at the bottom of the boat, accidentally set off, and had just enough celebrity to discourage too many close questions. So Lotte died in surprise, sprawled in the bottom of the boat, the top of her head gone and the rest gushing blood, her mouth gaping with questions he himself couldn’t answer.

She’d been beautiful, innocent, naive, and uncooperative. He needed to find something great here, something truly colossal, to cement his place in history so that he’d finally be able to sleep.

“What are you brooding about, Kurt?”

“Victory.”

Raeder wondered if titans like Himmler had their own demons.

Religion was everywhere. Prayer flags were strung at every sacred hill. Prayer wheels spun on the walls at each holy site. Pointed white chortens, reliquaries for souls and saints, poked up at town entrances like upside-down turnips, or gigantic, golden-topped spark plugs. Every second male seemed to be a monk, and the monasteries seemed the only real industry. People shuffled while working
mala
s, Buddhist rosaries of 108 beads.

But Raeder’s quintet was drawn more to the old abandoned military forts, called
dzong
s. These medieval strongholds were empty and haunted, replaced by the monastic strongholds of an overpowering religion. The SS men felt more at home in these fortress ruins than in the dark, smoky monasteries with their ominous chants. Raeder’s men scrambled through their labyrinth of rooms like boys at a German castle. Here, they speculated, their Aryan ancestors would have ruled.

“It was a more heroic, military age,” said Kranz, their archaeologist. “Now all they do is pray.”

The valleys were planted in mustard and barley because wheat would not grow at this altitude.
Chang
, the odd beer, was made from barley. Incised into cliffs above the farms were red-daubed Buddha statues, or painted black and white ladders symbolic of the long prayerful climb toward nirvana.

Tibetan technology was primitive—there were virtually no wheeled carts—but the Germans did occasionally encounter a waterwheel. One, near Gyantse, was used to mill barley. Another used the waterpower only to turn prayer wheels outside of a monastery, each revolution a radio beam aimed at God.

Lakes were turquoise or cobalt, vivid against the treeless hills, and birds hung over them like kites, rotating in the wind. The Germans’ porter Akeh, one of several Tibetans they’d hired, pointed out sites for sky burials, where the dead were dismembered and left for vultures to hasten the cycle of returning to the earth. The carrion birds were holy.

“Poverty, superstition, ignorance, prayer, and barbarism,” Raeder summed up one night as they camped by Lake Yamdok Tso, enjoying the luxury of a wood campfire fed by a nearby copse of stunted trees. “Reichsführer Himmler might begin to doubt that these Tibetans are or ever were Aryans, or that they could have left anything worth rediscovering.”

“We certainly haven’t found ruins of a nobler race,” said Muller. “Just crude forts.”

“Or any food beyond yak meat and barley cakes,” moaned cameraman Eckells. The
tsampa
cakes were as tasteless as they were commonplace.

“And yet we’re closer to heaven,” said Raeder. “The stars tight as a ceiling, the air sharp as a shard of ice. I think I know why they’re obsessed with religion. It’s the only occupation that makes sense here, a way to make use of this weird clarity. In such a case, might a civilization not make discoveries obscured to empires in lower, murkier places? Could the legends of Vril be true?”

“I don’t know, Kurt,” said Muller. “My God, they labor like peasants.”

“But they may have lost our secret wisdom,” said Kranz. “We need the help of the Tibetans, and for that we have to convince them that Germany and National Socialism are their natural allies.”

“With our runes and our swastikas,” said Diels.

“Our machines and our modernism,” said Eckells. “Our guns and our magnetometers.”

“Yes, and with our mysticism and belief in the past,” said Raeder. “Tibetans are a people lost in the past, and we seek it, too. They believe in lives beyond this one, and so does our
Reichsführer
. We’re the new druids, my companions, the black knights who will lead the world to the purity of ice. Come, let’s build up our fire and sing for our porters.”

Their fire blazed higher, light reflected on the lake, and red sparks climbed to mingle with cold stars overhead. The Germans began singing a Reich military anthem, voices carrying across the water.

Flame upraise!

Rise in blazing light.

From the mountains along the Rhine.

Rise shining!

See, we are standing

Faithful in a blessed circle,

To see you, flame,

And so praise the Fatherland!

Holy Fire,

Call the Young together

So that next to your blazing flames,

Courage grows . . .

They seized burning brands and began marching, circling their camp as the mules shifted nervously. Then they paraded down to the dark lakeshore and, at Raeder’s command, hurled the brands high over the water. The torches fell like meteors, hissing into the frigid water. Fire and ice, World Ice Theory. Everything a struggle between light and dark, white and black, hot and cold, the immaculate and the corrupt.

Then they toasted one another with schnapps, howling at the moon like German werewolves.

The Tibetan porters watched silently from the shadows.

14

Hankow, China

September 29, 1938

T
he shadow of the Nakajima fighter flickered across the train just before the bullets did, the soldiers aboard as startled as squirrels beneath a hawk. Hood was riding atop a boxcar to escape the crowding and the heat, and watched the havoc stitch toward him as men yelled and instinctively ducked.

The carnage was transfixing. There was only time for a shout of warning at the rising snarl of the engine and then the fighter’s machine guns chewed down the length of the lumbering cars, wood flying and the wounded yelping. Newly recruited Chinese infantrymen were blown from rooftop perches like chaff. The painted twin meatballs of the rising sun were clearly visible on the wings as the fighter banked overhead, and then it was coming for them again, hundreds of excited soldiers shooting a fusillade into the sky as the train engine’s whistle screamed warning.

It felt like they were crawling.

Hood pulled out the .45 that Duncan Hale had issued him and balanced on his knees as the plane came toward them again. The gun was slick and heavy. He wanted to hide but inside was no better protection; each strafing bullet was the size of a forefinger and could punch all the way to the roadbed. Their tormentor seemed to swell in size until it filled the whole sky. Hood’s pistol bucked as he fired, jarring his wrist and making it hard to aim. He vowed to take more practice. His rifle and shotgun were stored in his duffel below, and he suddenly incongruously worried that his belongings might take a bullet.

The tops of the freight cars ahead seemed to heave upward as the machine-gun fire struck, men jerking and tumbling, a catastrophic rupture that tore from car to car.

Hood braced himself for the explosion of his own flesh.

But then the machine guns stopped flashing, the Nakajima roared by, and the excited Chinese were left to fire their rifles at an empty sky. Hood actually felt the suck of the propeller. Then, as abruptly as it came, the plane was gone. Their train whistle kept shrilly blowing at nothing.

Maybe they wounded the pilot. Maybe the fighter ran out of bullets. Maybe it was low on fuel. But Hood knew that the only thing that saved his life during his harrowing journey to the chaotic new Chinese capital was that the plane aborted its second strafing run just moments before the stuttering spray reached him. Splinters rose in a fountain, a mesmerizing eruption, and then the fountain abruptly ceased one car ahead.

Born with a silver spoon in your mouth and dumb luck to cover your ass
, Hood thought.
Must have done something right in a previous life. Or you’re supposed to do something in this one to earn it.

The attack left chaos in its wake. Cars were splashed with blood, men moaned from the impact of the slugs, and whole boards had been knocked askew. But the train, its engine unmarked, didn’t slow. They chugged doggedly on, while the dead were rolled off to make more room for the shaken living.

Hood reloaded his .45 and tucked it back in its holster. The big pistol was less accurate than hurling rocks, but if it ever hit a target, it tended to stop it. This was his first combat, and he was relieved he’d had the presence of mind to shoot back.

They reached Hankow that night, the rail yard light a combination of kerosene lamps, paper lanterns, and bonfires steaming in light rain. Soldiers, coolies, nurses, nuns, and generals milled in the chaos of the depot. Blood was still dripping from the floorboards of Hood’s troop train when he stepped down, the leakage diluted by the wet. Fog and smoke mixed with the hissing steam of locomotives. A distant rumble was not thunder, but Japanese and Chinese artillery. Their reflected flashes were like sheet lightning.

The remaining dead were stacked like cordwood. Soldiers kept beggar children away from looting the bodies, so they swarmed Hood instead until he swatted them off. Old women pressed close to sell tea and steamed buns.

He ate one to reassure himself he was still alive.

You always knew it wasn’t over with Raeder
, he thought.

A rickshaw took Hood toward Chiang’s headquarters. Weaving through the crowded streets was like pushing through syrup. Everywhere were guns, munitions, heavily guarded pallets of rice, tins of fuel, and refugees. That’s what the Japanese were attacking, Hood decided: syrup. China was an endless sea of viscous honey that would ultimately swallow any invader.

In the meantime, millions would die.

Sir Arthur Readings had given him a letter of introduction to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Shanghai-born, American-raised Wellesley College graduate who had become the fluent link between China and the United States. Because of her interest in aviation, she was also secretary-general of the Chinese Commission on Aeronautical Affairs. In other words, the generalissimo’s wife ran the Chinese air force. Hood would need her permission to borrow Beth Calloway.

Madame Chiang was a petite Chinese woman with a large head who was not especially pretty anymore—power had hardened her—but who carried the commanding presence that comes from the blessing of a strong-boned face and incandescent eyes. She had a disconcerting southern accent from Georgia where she was raised, and a smile and animation that beamed with the energy of a lighthouse. China was fighting for survival, and this dynamo who bridged two worlds would do anything it took to save it.

“Tibet!” she exclaimed after examining the documents of introduction he’d been given by the Americans and British. “Even for us Chinese, that’s the edge of the world, a place of mystery and misunderstanding. And you say Himmler is sending an expedition there?”

“So I’ve been told. The mission’s leader, Kurt Raeder, is a man who accompanied one of my expeditions several years ago. Moody, but highly competent. And a Nazi. So I’ve been asked to learn what he’s up to, but he has a long head start. Which is why I need to borrow an airplane. Sir Arthur suggested an aviatrix named Beth Calloway.”