Death's Head Legion (9 page)

The short doctor could barely contain himself.

“And then I can immediately proceed with Project Gefallener,” he said, clapping his hands.
“Es vunderbar!”

All eyes to turned to Himmler. He nodded. “I see no reason not to proceed. There is no cause for further delay. If successful, Project Gefallener will fundamentally redirect our efforts in the expansion of the Reich. Are there any objections?”

Colonel Uhrwerk rose.

“Reichsführer, I accept that there is great anticipation among the leadership to engage Project Gefallener and that it will alter our long-term strategies, but I urge that we proceed more deliberately. Prudence dictates we await the recovery of the spear and experimentation in Dr. Übel's labs in Deep Hold 13,” he said, his words as measured in tone as tempo.

Himmler considered the colonel's words, shook his head and rose. The master of the Black Sun—the second most powerful man in Germany—addressed his dark acolytes.

“
Nein
, Uhrwerk,” he said. “Gentlemen of this knightly order, we stand on the precipice of history. The spear will soon be in our hands. We have all longed for those who could fundamentally transform Germany and bring about the New Order, and we see now that we are the ones for whom we have longed. It is we, alone, who can usher in this new Camelot, this New Order for the Aryan race. We alone carry on our backs the hopes and dreams and the very spirit of National Socialism—our tomorrow—and these are dreams and hopes in which we can believe.”

Himmler walked the perimeter of the round table.

“It is a New Order where the good of the people and the good of the state are aligned and in perfect harmony. An order of collective action, collective good, and collective iron will. We must make the hard choices to prepare Germany for a new age,” he said. “Colonel Uhrwerk, you and Major Hoffstetter are to take charge of this mission to Poenari Citadel. I want your airships ready to take off tomorrow at dusk.”

Uhrwerk and Hoffstetter nodded in acknowledgment. Untersturmführer Hans Bonhoeffer was already making mental notes for reference by Deitrich and Hoffstetter.

Himmler paused, and turned his gaze toward the two paintings at the center of the eastern wall—Freidrich II of Prussia who first united Germany, and Adolf Hitler, the man who would unite the world under German rule.

“Gentlemen of the Black Sun, Project Gefallener and its next phase, Project Freidrich, are the answers for a German people told for so long by so many to be cynical, fearful, and doubtful about what we can achieve,” Himmler said. “With this, we can put our hands to the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

Every man and aide around the table in the SS General's Hall rose, clicked his heels, and raised his right hand in salute.

“Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

A
n hour later Untersturmführer Hans Bonhoeffer was running the operations in the busy Waffen-SS headquarters building at Wewelsburg Castle, organizing and communicating to field offices all of the orders from Deitrich and Hoffstetter that would be necessary to comply with Himmler's ambitious plan. It was an amazing logistical undertaking—transporting over thirteen hundred volunteers, commandos, engineers, and scientists, plus twenty metric tons of lab equipment, power generators, provisions, weapons, and communications gear over nine hundred miles into Romania under cover of night.

From the window in the commandant's office where he was working, Bonhoeffer could see the North Tower, where once again his general officer, Sepp Deitrich, was reporting to Heydrich the progress of operations. There wouldn't be a better time, he thought, brushing back the little commas of dark hair from his forehead. From the pocket of his black service tunic he removed two devices about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The Waffen-SS headquarters building had four dedicated communications rooms alone, and Wewelsburg Castle itself had a huge communications complex on the west end of the Wewelsburg grounds occupying almost 50,000 square feet of space spread over three stories. But still, the head of the Waffen-SS had three fully independent wireless devices in his office for personal use.

His sharp blue eyes squinting as he worked, Bonhoeffer attached the devices at two hard points on one of the sets. It would effectively mask and scramble the transmission. Then he tuned the transmitter to a low-frequency setting used only by the Deuxième Bureau—the French intelligence service—and began a short coded message. The contents would be relayed from a listening station in Luxembourg and on to Paris. From there it would be sent securely to the Austin office of a certain napkin note-taking coordinator of information and director of collections for the Prometheus Society.

Bonhoeffer began his transmission.

“Chevalier, this is Robin. Priority message for the Clockman. Finally have the grocery list for that special dinner Uncle Henry has been planning. Recipe as follows . . .”

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Aboard the luxury airship
Graf von Götzen

Somewhere over central Greece

I
t started easy enough. It should have been a milk run. The biggest obstacle to freeing Professor Renault was Skorzeny, and he was trussed up like a Christmas goose and snoring like a fat man. Taking out the plainclothes Gestapo men guarding the valuable cargo bay went smoothly. Terah approached the two while pulling a small steamer trunk on wheels. She pouted a little, showed more than a little cleavage, batted her eyes, asked for help, and then pulled her pistol. An application of ether solved the problem of what to do with the goons. Once they were tied up and secured on the dolly alongside Skorzeny's sleeping form, Rucker kicked in the bay door.

That's when everything went to hell.

Rucker, Terah, and Deitel charged through the door, all three aiming pistols at the figure with his back to the door wearing a white SS uniform with a red-lined cape. In his talonlike right hand he held the leather mask he always wore in public. His skull was sickly white, hairless and scarred.

He was Hitler's personal interrogator and punisher.

Der Schädel.

The Skull.

In front of Schädel, Professor Renault was tied to a chair. Deitel assessed the poor victim from a distance—he didn't dare move closer until Der Schädel was rendered harmless—but he saw no obvious wounds or signs of injury. Yet the man was moaning in agony.

“Hands up, chalky,” Rucker said.

Der Schädel cocked his head slightly, seeming only then to acknowledge their arrival. His head swiveled slightly to his right. Rucker almost saw Der Schädel's profile. More scars on his milky face, and it looked like most of his nose and upper lip were missing, as were his earlobes. The scars didn't look like the result of an injury or accident. They looked self-inflicted. Regular. Surgical?

Der Schädel made as if he was going to replace his mask—who could blame him? Rucker thought—but then like a flash he wheeled to his left and waved the outstretched claw of his left hand. Deitel and Terah found themselves slammed against the cargo bay bulkhead by an invisible force. They both sank to the ground, unconscious.

Rucker found he couldn't move. He couldn't even squeeze the triggers of his pistols. He looked Der Schädel full in the face. The German's dark, sunken eye sockets, his lipless grin, and his gaunt, alabaster skin stretched so taunt and thin over his bony face that it looked translucent—certainly his code name fit.

Watching as if from outside his body, Rucker saw Schädel put his bony hands behind his back and take a casual stroll around the area.

“Well, then,” Der Schädel said. “You are the latest enemies of the Reich who would stand in the way of our Führer's New Order. You probably think you know who I am. But you do not. I am far worse than your darkest nightmares.”

Sweat broke out across Rucker's body.

“Now, who are you? Ah, I see you served in the war. Very interesting. A Texan, no less. Descended from Huguenot, Scottish, and Nordic stock. A crusader and a mercenary. Oh yes, this is fertile ground. Captain Rucker, I presume.”

Rucker assumed he must have had some movement in his face, because Der Schädel seemed to notice his confounded expression.

“They call me the Skull for more than the obvious reasons,” Der Schädel said. “I, too, served in the Great War. It was where this”—he indicated his face –“all got started. But before that, I was a doctor of psychiatry in Vienna. Let me show you.”

Rucker felt a piercing heat in his mind, as if a hot knife had plunged into his forehead. Light exploded behind his eyes. He was no longer alone in his own conscience. Like a rapist would a woman's body, Der Schädel had entered his mind. He saw Der Schädel's life unfold as though it were his own.

Rucker now knew himself to be a brilliant young Austrian student, fascinated by how the mind works. The conscious and the subconscious, the ego, superego, and the id—all of it a puzzle he was under a compulsion to understand. But what he saw was colored through a lens not in any of the books he studied or the lectures he audited in the psychiatric schools of Vienna. As Der Schädel, he saw how minds differed according to race and destiny. He knew that Dr. Freud only tapped the surface of explaining this remarkable Difference Engine we call the human brain. He knew he would map the whole of the human mind and its capabilities.

In medical school, he saw himself pushing his initial research beyond the boundaries of conventional, mediocre psychiatry. He didn't experiment on dogs or apes—he had no interest in dog or ape minds. Rucker—Der Schädel—wanted to see what really drove man's mind. That is where he experimented.

Rucker saw himself welcoming troubled patients of all social levels to his home clinic on the quiet cobblestone avenue in Vienna. He pushed the patients mentally to vast extremes in their emotions, and he felt the rush of power and understanding that each push brought. That feeling became something he craved.

At first he pushed because of how good it felt. Then he pushed because it felt bad when he didn't. Each time, he had to push further for that same explosion of pleasure.

Rucker watched himself talk a woman into taking a brass letter opener and plunge it into her bosom, the blood flowering on her dress in a most erotic manner. He saw a boy brought to him because of his emotional highs and lows. Through gentle therapy and loving advice, he talked the boy into laughing at everything. All the time. To the point where the boy could not sleep or eat. He saw the boy committed to an insane asylum, where he died within a fortnight still laughing, rigor freezing a grinning rictus on his angelic face. He felt the surge of power and lust from convincing a man the only way to end his constant anger was to beat his wife and child to death with a candlestick. Rucker felt the sublime pleasure, like a mild opium rush, from the patient he talked into an apathy so severe the man simply stopped eating, drinking, and moving.

He saw that for Der Schädel, it was delightful. He watched as if it were his own life as Schädel unleashed all manner of emotions and motives locked in patients' minds. He learned he could cultivate their fears, manipulate their hostilities, and flood their sense of guilt and regret. The patients he valued most served his purposes as loyal servants. Then he took this unique gift beyond the reality of personal pleasure. He began to bend the ears of more and more powerful people in Vienna, working his way into the avenues of power. Very quickly, though, he realized how small were his young man's ambitions. Too simple. Base avarice and greed. Distasteful. So small.

Rucker saw himself arrested in 1913 on orders of the Vienna medical society. Escaping the dank iron cell of prison was easy enough—the trek through the wilderness to Germany far less so, as he was alone with few minds on which to feed. The cold nights in the woods were all the more awful for the hunger and loneliness he felt. He was a people person, after all.

In Germany, he saw himself change his identity easily enough—just a wave and a word with a clerk in a spartan office building—and enlisting in the Great War. Rucker/Der Schädel relished the crowds and the chaos of war. He excelled as a rifleman and then a sniper. He was happy for the first time after the disgrace of Vienna, but yearned to touch minds with his own. Before, it would take hours of intimate contact and interaction with patients. Now, as with his rifle, he knew he must try to touch minds at a distance.

Once at the front, he watched a target for hours, reading every move and interpreting emotions, motives, and character. He slowly felt the tendrils of his mind entwining with the target's. It got to where he could predict exactly where and when a man would move. Rucker saw himself wagering with his spotter, Helmut. He would take aim near his target and bet on exactly when the soldier would enter his crosshairs. It was a delightful game. It made trench life bearable, even if the other soldiers—small-minded fools just like the mendicants in Vienna—were uncomfortable with him. They kept their distance and spoke in whispers when he was around. As if he couldn't read every one of them and know the disgust they felt.

Now, Der Schädel removed the pistols from Rucker's hands and placed a chair behind him. “Sit,” he commanded.

For a moment Rucker was back in his own mind. He sat. Then he was back in German trenches, once again living Der Schädel's life.

Rucker watched a handlebar-mustachioed old man in an ill-fitting uniform with so many medals on his chest that he leaned to the left pin an Iron Cross on his uniform. It was for killing people. He killed as many as five Allied soldiers a day. The challenge of reading—of getting to know—the targets became his only joy. Soon he found himself working without a spotter. He watched as his trench mates tried to distance themselves from him. In an office with a mud floor, a weary line officer told him he'd been awarded leave in occupied Paris.

As Schädel shouldered his travel pack to leave, he told his former spotter, Helmut, that while he would enjoy Paris, Helmut could take the war no longer. As the steam truck pulled way from the rear embarkation point, Schädel watched in his mind's eye as Helmut walked into his squad's bunker, pulled the pin on a grenade, and blew up the entire squad. The others on the truck looked up in morbid curiosity at the small explosion in the bunker. Rucker/Der Schädel did not.

At first he found Paris was boring and depraved. The women were already easy enough for the taking, and no matter what sexual depravities piqued his curiosity, he could find partners to carry them out. Rucker knew it wasn't what he craved. Schädel could make them do anything. Rucker/Schädel felt dirty. Like Caligula. Out of intellectual curiosity he tried to come up with some deviant acts that he could manipulate a woman, man, or several people into performing. He wondered how low he could make them sink. Sodomy. Pederasty. Bestiality. Sexual torture. Sexual cannibalism. Necrophilia. Rucker saw it all play out in candlelit rooms, in hotel parlors, in gas-lighted streets.

He watched, and he knew then that there was no limit to the sickness of the human mind and motive. There was no end to the evil and filth of which man was capable.

Rucker saw it sicken Der Schädel as much as it sickened him. He sickened myself. In a moment of clarity and regret, he went to the cathedral at Notre Dame to find—to beg—forgiveness of something better than this foul creature man. Instead he found priests who, after little prodding, admitted they had doubts about what they pretended to believe. Rucker/Der Schädel wanted to rip away his skin. He wanted to be clean. He felt his skin blister as he bathed in scalding water. He felt the cut and sting of the razor as he dry-shaved his body. He felt the blood trickle down his back and limbs as he scourged it. Like a snake he tried to shed his skin by flensing the outer layers. He wanted to be born anew. He wanted to be free of being human.

Rucker saw himself in a dirty Paris alleyway behind a surgeon's home. He saw the surgeon's fat wife open the door. At a touch she sank to her knees sobbing, living one of her many old nightmarish regrets over and over. The startled surgeon looked up from his dinner and started to protest this intruder, but with little more than a touch and a word he was doing Rucker's bidding.

Rucker was laying on the surgical table. He heard the drip of blood onto the floor. He felt the scalpel as the surgeon—on Rucker's direct orders—remove every extraneous bit of the human weakness from him—the temptation inherent in the flesh.

Rucker felt the entire surgical process as Der Schädel had felt it. He underwent the medical flensing of his skin, his ears, his nose, his face—his entirety—while conscious and without anesthetization; he had to maintain his manipulation of the surgeon throughout the process. He felt every agonizing, cleansing moment of the scalpel cutting away every inch of excess flesh moment. A warm center of dull pain welled up comfortably in his stomach, spreading out through his body. It seemed it would it never end. He felt the bandages wrapped over the burning of the antiseptic.

He awoke a day later, still on the table. The surgeon was on the floor. He'd cut his own throat. He felt the bandages. He could feel pressure but little in the way of pain or any other sensation. The surgeon had done his work. He had removed the softness, leaving only the beauty like the hard inner core. Flesh stripped to a minimum. Nerves all but gone. All that remained was that which survives human weakness and deaths—the skeleton.

Rucker saw that Der Schädel never returned to his unit at the front. He saw himself hide his new, pure face beneath bandages. He watched as he talked another soldier into throwing himself into the Seine holding a large stone. He took the man's identity and medical discharge papers as the man sank into the cold embrace of the river. He did return to hunting, this time in Paris, not at the front. Now, his targets were whoever struck his fancy. Rucker felt Der Schädel's disgust with the weak and depraved. Women always caused the most commotion, although Rucker/Der Schädel found it amusing to target a child on a playground and then predict which way his toddler sibling would run—toward or away from the body—and get both of them in one sweep. He saw himself shoot a man at close range in front of his wife, and then he convinced the woman she'd never seen him. There was a tartness to the flavor of the pleasure that flowed into him that time, and every such challenge only strengthened his ability.

More scenes of wonton, cold-blooded murder unfolded before him. Old men. Women. Children. Babies shot in their cribs. Anger welled inside Rucker's gut, as well as disgust. But he also felt Der Schädel's joy. It was almost sexual.

Rucker saw the headlines in the German papers about the Armistice. He saw himself back in Vienna, where from the shadows he took his vengeance on the medical board members who had driven him away from his home and his practice.

He saw through Der Schädel's eyes himself sitting at an outdoor café, drinking a beer through a glass straw. He saw the chance meeting with Reichsführer Himmler. The mousy man inquired about his war injuries. When he probed the man's mind, he was astonished to find underneath this bland exterior a purity of purpose and an absence of emotional empathy like nothing he'd ever encountered. There was a complete lack of any sense of guilt or small-minded morality. Rucker felt the man was his lost kin.