The Apocalypse Watch (2 page)

“I’d appreciate it. I must be back in Munich by tonight.”

“Yes, we understand. Come, the
Kommandant
.” As the two men approached the heavy black wooden door with the scarlet swastika emblazoned in the center, there was a whooshing sound in the air. Above, through the translucent green screening, the large white wings of a glider swooped in descending circles into the valley. “Another wonder, Herr Lassiter? It is released from its mother aircraft at an altitude of roughly thirteen hundred feet.
Natürlich
, the pilot must be extremely well trained, for the winds are dangerous, so unpredictable. It is used only in emergencies.”

“I can see how it comes down. How does it get up?”

“The same winds,
mein Herr
, with the assistance of disposable booster rockets. In the thirties, we Germans developed the most advanced glider aircraft.”

“Why not use a conventional small plane?”

“Too easily monitored. A glider can be pulled up from a field, a clear pasture. A plane must be fueled, be serviced, have maintenance, and frequently, even a flight plan.”

“
Phantastisch
,” repeated the American. “And—of course—the glider has few or no metal parts. Plastic and sized cloth are difficult for radar grids to pick up.”

“Difficult,” agreed the new-age Nazi. “Not completely impossible, but extremely difficult.”

“Amazing,” said Herr Lassiter as his companion opened the door of the valley’s headquarters. “You are all to be congratulated. Your isolation is matched by your security. Superb!” Feigning a casualness he did not feel, Latham looked around the large room. There was a profusion of sophisticated computerized equipment, banks of consoles against each wall, starchy-uniformed operators in front of each, seemingly an equal mix of men and
women.… Men and women—something was odd, at least not normal. What was it? And then he knew; to an individual, the operators were young, generally in their twenties, mostly blond or light-haired, with clear, suntanned skin. As a group they were inordinately attractive, like models corralled by an advertising agency to sit in front of a client’s computer products, conveying the message that potential customers, too, would look like this if they bought the merchandise.

“Each is an expert, Mr. Lassiter,” said an unfamiliar, monotonic voice behind Latham. The American turned abruptly. The newcomer was a man about his own age, dressed in camouflage fatigues and wearing a Wehrmacht officer’s cap; he had silently emerged from an open doorway on the left. “General Ulrich von Schnabe, your enthusiastic host,
mein Herr
,” he continued, offering his hand. “We meet a legend in his own time. Such a privilege!”

“You’re far too generous, General. I’m merely an international businessman, but one with definite ideological persuasions, if you like.”

“No doubt reached by years of international observation?”

“You could say that, and not be in error. They claim that Africa was the first continent, yet, while others have developed over several thousand years,
Afrika
remains the Dark Continent, the black continent. The northern shores are now havens for equally inferior people.”

“Well said, Mr. Lassiter. Yet you’ve made millions, some say billions, servicing the dark and darker skins.”

“Why not? What better satisfaction can a man like me have than by helping them slaughter each other?”

“
Wunderbar!
Beautifully and perceptively stated.… You were studying our group here, I watched you. You can see for yourself that these, every one, are of Aryan blood. Pure Aryan blood. As are those everywhere in our valley. Each has been carefully selected, their bloodlines traced, their commitment absolute.”

“The dream of the Lebensborn,” said the American quietly, reverentially. “The breeding farms—estates actually,
if I’m not mistaken, where the finest SS officers were bred to strong Teutonic women—”

“Eichmann had studies done. It was determined that the northern Germanic female had not only the finest bone structure in Europe and extraordinary strength, but a marked subservience to the male,” interrupted the general.

“The true superior race,” concluded Lassiter admiringly. “Would that the dream had come true.”

“In large measure it has,” said Von Schnabe quietly. “We believe that a great many here, if not a majority, are the children of
those
children. We stole lists from the Red Cross in Geneva, and spent years tracing down each family where the Lebensborn infants had been sent. These, and others we shall recruit throughout Europe, are the Sonnenkinder, the Children of the Sun. The inheritors of the Reich!”

“It’s incredible.”

“We’re reaching out everywhere, and everywhere those selected respond to us, for the circumstances are the same. Just as in the twenties, when the stranglehold of the Versailles and Locarno treaties led to the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic and the influx of undesirables throughout Germany, so has the collapse of the Berlin Wall led to chaos. We are a nation in conflagration, the lowborn non-Aryans crossing our borders in unlimited numbers, taking our jobs, polluting our morals, making whores of our women because where they come from it’s perfectly acceptable. It’s totally
un
acceptable and it must stop! You agree, of course.”

“Why else would I be here, General? I have funneled millions into your needs through the banks in Algiers by way of Marseilles. My code has been
Frère—Brüder
—I trust it is familiar to you.”

“Which is why I embrace you with all my heart, as does the entire Brüderschaft.”

“So now let’s conclude my final gift, General, final, for you will never need me again.… Forty-six cruise missiles appropriated from Saddam Hussein’s arsenal, buried by his officer corps, who felt he would not survive. Their warheads are capable of carrying massive explosives as
well as chemical payloads—gases that can immobilize whole areas of cities. These are included, of course, along with the launchers. I paid twenty-five million, American, for them. Pay me what you can, and if it is less, I will accept my loss with honor.”

“You are, indeed, a man of great honor,
mein Herr
.”

Suddenly the front door opened and a man in pure white coveralls walked into the room. He glanced around, saw Von Schnabe, and marched directly toward him, handing the general a sealed manila envelope. “This is it,” the man said in German.

“
Danke
,” replied Von Schnabe, opening the envelope and extracting a small plastic pouch. “You are a fine
Schauspieler
—a good impersonator—Herr Lassiter, but I believe you lost something. Our pilot just brought it to me.” The general shook the contents of the plastic bag into his hand. It was the transponder Harry Latham had shoved between the rocks of a mountain road thousands of feet above the valley. The hunt was finished. Harry swiftly raised his hand to his right ear. “Stop him!” shouted Von Schnabe as the pilot grabbed Latham’s arm, yanking it back into a hammerlock. “There’ll be no cyanide for you, Harry Latham of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. We have other plans for you, brilliant plans.”

T
he early sun was blinding, causing the old man crawling through the wild brush to blink repeatedly as he wiped his eyes with the back of his trembling right hand. He had reached the edge of the small promontory on top of the hill, the “high ground,” as they called it years ago—years burned into his memory. The grassy point overlooked an elegant country estate in the Loire Valley. A flagstone terrace was no more than three hundred meters below, with a brick path bordered by flowers leading to it. Gripped in the old man’s left hand, the shoulder strap taut, was a powerful rifle, its sight calibrated for the precise distance. The weapon was ready to fire. Soon his target—a man older than himself—would appear in the telescopic crosshairs. The monster would be taking his morning stroll to the terrace, dressed in his flowing morning robe, his reward his morning coffee laced with the finest brandy, a reward he would never reach on this particular morning. Instead, he would die, collapsing among the flowers, an appropriate irony: the death of consummate evil among surrounding beauty.

Jean-Pierre Jodelle, seventy-eight years of age and once a fierce provisional leader of the Résistance, had waited fifty years to fulfill a promise, a commitment, he had made to himself and to his God. He had failed with the lawyers and in the sacrosanct court chambers; no, not failed, instead, been insulted by them, scorned by all of them, and told to take his contemptible fantasies to a cell in a lunatic asylum, where he belonged! The great General Monluc was a true hero of France, a close associate of
le grand
Charles André de Gaulle, that most illustrious of all soldier-statesmen, who had kept in constant touch with
Monluc throughout the war over the underground radio frequencies despite the prospect of torture and a firing squad should Monluc be exposed.

It was all
merde
! Monluc was a turncoat, a coward, and a
traitor
! He gave lip service to the arrogant De Gaulle, fed him insignificant intelligence, and lined his own pockets with Nazi gold and art objects worth millions. And then in the aftermath,
le grand
Charles, in euphoric adulation, had pronounced Monluc
un bel ami de guerre
, a man to be honored. It was no less than a command for all France.

Merde!
How little De Gaulle knew! Monluc had ordered the execution of Jodelle’s wife and his first son, a child of five. A second son, an infant of six months, was spared, perhaps by the warped rationality of the Wehrmacht officer who said, “He’s not a Jew, maybe someone will find him.”

Someone did. A fellow Résistance fighter, an actor from the Comédie Française. He found the screaming baby amid the rubble of the shattered house on the outskirts of Barbizon, where he had come for a secret meeting the following morning. The actor had brought the child home to his wife, a celebrated actress whom the Germans adored—their affection not returned, for her performances were dictated, not offered voluntarily. And when the war ended, Jodelle was a skeleton of his former self, physically unrecognizable and mentally beyond repair, and he knew it. Three years in a concentration camp, piling the bodies of gassed Jews, Gypsies, and “undesirables,” had reduced him to near idiocy, with neck tics, erratic blinking, spasms of throated cries, and all that went with severe psychiatric damage. He never revealed himself to his surviving son or the “parents” who had reared him. Instead, wandering through the bowels of Paris and changing his name frequently, Jodelle observed from a distance as the child grew into manhood and became one of the most popular actors in France.

That distance, that unendurable pain, had been caused by Monluc the monster, who was now entering the circle
of Jodelle’s telescopic sight. Only seconds now, and his commitment to God would be fulfilled.

Suddenly there was a terrible crack in the air and Jodelle’s back was on fire, causing him to drop the rifle. He spun around, stunned to see two men in shirtsleeves, one with a bullwhip, looking down at him.

“It would be a pleasure to kill you, you sick old idiot, but your disappearance would only lead to complications,” said the man with the whip. “You have a wine-soaked mouth that never stops chattering craziness. It’s better that you go back to Paris and rejoin your army of drunken vagrants. Get out of here, or die!”

“How …? How did you know …?”

“You’re a mental case, Jodelle, or whatever name you’re using this month,” said the guard beside the whip master. “You think we haven’t spotted you these last two days, breaking the foliage as you came to this very accessible place with your rifle? You were far better in the old days, I’m told.”

“Then kill me, you sons of bitches! I’d rather die here, knowing I was so close, than go on living!”

“Oh, no, the general wouldn’t approve,” added the whipper. “You could have told others what you intended to do, and we don’t want people looking for you or your corpse on this property. You’re insane, Jodelle, everyone knows that. The courts made it clear.”

“They’re corrupt!”

“You’re paranoid.”

“I know what I
know
!”

“You’re also a drunk, well documented by a dozen cafés on the Rive Gauche that’ve thrown you out. Drink yourself into hell, Jodelle, but get out of here before I send you there now. Get up! Run as fast as those spindly legs will carry you!”

The curtain rang down on the final scene of the play, a French translation of Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus
, revived by Jean-Pierre Villier, the fifty-year-old actor who was the reigning king of the Paris stage and the French screen as well as a nominee for an American Academy Award as a
result of his first film in the United States. The curtain rose and fell and rose again as the large, broad-shouldered Villier acknowledged his audience by smiling and clapping his hands at their acceptance. It was all about to erupt into madness.

From the rear of the theater an old man in torn, shabby clothes lurched down the center aisle, screaming at the top of his coarse voice. Suddenly he pulled a rifle out of his loose trousers, held by suspenders, causing those in the audience who saw him to panic, the panic instantly spreading throughout the succeeding rows of seats as men pushed women below the line of fire, the vocal chaos reverberating off the walls of the theater. Villier moved quickly, shoving back the few actors and members of the technical crew who had come out onstage.

“An angry critic I can
accept
, monsieur!” he roared, confronting the deranged old man approaching the stage in a familiar voice that could command any crowd. “But this is
insane
! Put down your weapon and we will talk!”

“There is no talk left in me, my son! My only son! I have failed you and your mother. I’m useless, a
nothing
! I only want you to know that I tried.… I love you, my only son, and I tried, but I failed!”

With those words the old man spun his rifle around, the barrel in his mouth, his right hand surging for the trigger. He reached it and blew the back of his head apart, blood and sinew spraying over all who were near him.