Project Icarus - Disavowed Series 01 (2021)

by Shah, R D

  “Well, I agree we’re past it, but have we reached the point yet?”

  “And what point would that be, Ethan?”

  “The point where you tell me what the fuck is going on, McCitrick. You send me into that crazy old bastard’s house without so much as heads-up to the danger I was walking into… And then there’s Daedalus… John!”

  McCitrick looked entirely unfazed. He unfolded his arms and rested them either side of the table edge. “Firstly, it’s McCitrick to you. Only old acquaintances and friends call me John, and we’re neither. Secondly, the point is that half of Her Majesty’s government has been wiped out in a single day, including the PM. COBRA is frantically attempting to ensure the continuity of a government for the whole of the nation, and it’s just a matter of time before politicians begin making power grabs for the top spot. It’s bloody chaos out there. But we can’t let the people know that.”

  McCitrick now delivered a single jab with his finger in Munroe’s direction. “And you’re bitching about having to deal with some old man? Grow up, Ethan. This is a big boy’s game. I thought you knew that.”

  The chew-out made no impact on Munroe and he jabbed his finger straight back towards McCitrick. “And it could have been a whole lot worse if I hadn’t got you the information on the bomb.”

  “That’s the only reason you’re sitting here right now, and despite your whining – which, just so we’re clear, I’m not interested in hearing about again – I want to make you an offer.”

  Munroe couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was a steely resolve and determination that resonated from the man, and that Munroe did respect. “OK, McCitrick. What’s the offer?”

  McCitrick pushed himself off the table and picked up a silver TV remote from the side of the desk. “Usually I would never fast-track what I’m about to say, but given the bloody mess the country is in, and the weight being brought down on all of us, I’m making an exception. So screw the pleasantries and let’s get straight to the point. The offer is to join us at DS5 – but before you even consider it, there are some things you should be aware of, so pay careful attention. The information I disclose here and now is not only above top secret, but the men and women under my command are sworn to secrecy on pain of death. It sounds medieval but, and I shit you not, once the offer is accepted, then that’s it, you’re in for life or until you retire, and even then never a word can be spoken about what it is we do. Ever. We recruit only from those in the special forces, and even then their talents and skills must be of the highest calibre.”

  McCitrick clicked the remote and the monitor lit up, showing footage from a colour CCTV camera of a man jumping from a balcony onto a car roof as someone above shot at him with a carbine. “I got this from our contact in France. Don’t worry, it’s the only copy.”

  Munroe sat up in his seat and watched the CCTV footage that had been spliced together from road cameras, showing his escape from the Humvees and ending with him exiting his car and bringing Kessler’s Humvee to a crashing stop with only a few shots.

  “Some might say that was a bloody foolish stunt,” McCitrick said, pausing on a frame showing Munroe still aiming his weapon at the upturned vehicle. “I say it was a calculated action backed by years of military training and a lot of guts. Quite a move, Ethan, although I’m betting it was mostly instinctual. Still, it’s a shame Kessler got away.” The footage now skipped ahead, to after Munroe had driven off. Another Humvee appeared at the crash and two men pulled Tobias Kessler from the wreckage before driving off.

  Munroe remained silent, quietly enjoying the rare opportunity to watch his own handiwork as McCitrick tapped on the remote once more, bringing up CCTV footage from inside the restrooms back at Brest airport.

  “If the French public knew there were hidden security cameras in public airport toilets there’d be an uproar. Unfortunately 9/11 changed all that.”

  They both watched as his attackers were disarmed and subdued before Jax’s arrival and then the aftermath as each body was hidden within the cubicles before he paused it on a still of Munroe gouging out the tracker from his waist.

  “Again, good work, and realising you had a tracker on you shows an aptitude for thinking outside the box, which are the qualities we look for in our operatives.” McCitrick fast-forwarded to another section of the tape showing Munroe standing over his bald attacker perched on the cubicle toilet with the ice pick in his hand and Jax at his side. “Why didn’t you kill him, Ethan? Why leave any witnesses?”

  The question drew a raised eyebrow from Munroe and he considered it before replying. “What would have been the point? Daedalus already knew I was there, and there was no need to take the man’s life just for the sake of it.”

  McCitrick eyed him judgingly before finally nodding, clearly satisfied by the answer. “DS5 operatives mostly work alone, and it’s not just their skills we rely on but their moral judgement out in the field, something you’ve shown you possess.”

  Jax had been testing him back in the restroom. In the heat of things she’d given him the option to kill the man, leaving it up to him to make the final decision. Clever.

  McCitrick’s little show was turning into an evaluation, and although he was keen to know what was on the end page of his speech, Munroe kept his mouth shut. Those dead at Parliament deserved that at least.

  “We don’t accept walk-ins here, Ethan, we work on crossed paths, a bit of destiny if you will. You can’t climb the ladder to end up in DS5, you fall into it, and you have done just that. How’s your history, Captain?”

  McCitrick’s reference to rank had Munroe siting up sitting up straighter on pure reflex and he bobbed his head. “Military or cultural?”

  “Global.”

  “Iraq or Korea?”

  McCitrick gave a grim smile and he expelled a snort. “Oh, a bit further back than that. Do you know what the problem with world history is?”

  “Yes,” Munroe said, crossing his legs and getting comfortable for the lecture he knew was coming, “it’s written by the winners.”

  “Exactly. Winner takes all, including the truth.”

  “Always been that way, always will.”

  “Yes, and the winners teach it to their children. A few generations in and it’s gospel. I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about a boy who was born into a broken home and grew up with all the pathology that such an environment instils. Insecurity, mistrust, resentment. But this little boy was different. This little boy was also born with an absolute belief in himself and a determination that most never learn to harness. As he grew his resentment focused into courage, and only when his world collapsed around him did those feelings manifest into a sheer hatred of those who, as he saw it, had betrayed him. It was this burning desire for revenge and power over these people that propelled him onwards towards fulfilling those twisted aspirations, and he managed it too, much to the misery of those he hated.”

  “It’s a lovely fairy tale, but if you are referring to me then you’re far off the mark. You should know, considering you have my entire history on hand. I’ve never had a desire for revenge or power,” Munroe said, even though he wasn’t entirely sure this Brothers Grimm story was directed at him. He watched as McCitrick’s eyes widened at the suggestion.

  “This isn’t about you, Ethan, although your beginnings were vaguely similar. This is about a man becoming the very embodiment of the worst characteristics of humankind. The people he hated were not just a select few, but the world as a whole. It was a world he sought to change, and he came very close to pulling it off, too.”

  Munroe almost let slip a laugh as he finally realised who they were talking about, but the seriousness in McCitrick’s expression restrained him. What the hell the man in question had to do with anything was a mystery. “Are we talking about… Adolf Hitler?”

  McCitrick sat motionless on the edge of the table, his arms folded. “What would you say if I told you that the ‘Führer’ never died in his bunker underneath the war-torn s
treets of Berlin? What if I told you that he, and many of his high-ranking cronies, made it out alive and escaped justice?”

  “I’d say you were crazy.”

  A menacing smile crept across McCitrick’s face. “Then consider me admitted, because your view of world history is about to change… irrevocably.”

  Chapter 18

  Munroe’s first thought was that this was another test, one of his gullibility, but as he gazed at McCitrick and his stony expression he began to think better of it. “It sounds like you’ve been spending too much time on YouTube and going down the Alex Jones rabbit hole. Seventy-odd years of taught history, hundreds of historical books and countless scholars would disagree with you.”

  “True, but as I said, history is written by the victors. Everything else just bleeds off. Do you know how the greatest lies are forged and upheld, Ethan?”

  “By hiding them between two truths,” Munroe replied, and his assessment brought a taut smile to McCitrick’s lips.

  “Fifty million dead and the necessity of not giving millions of German troops a banner to flock to at the end of the war are pretty solid truths, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would say so.”

  “Then let me disclose to you the reality you find yourself in. The truth that only the victors can offer.” McCitrick raised the remote control towards the monitor and clicked.

  The picture of an elderly gentleman wearing a light blue suit, perhaps in his eighties, standing over a birthday cake and surrounded by children appeared on the screen. With short black hair and deep wrinkles around his eyes and cheeks the man was smiling as he prepared to press a large cake knife into the icing. The clean-shaven man was so familiar, yet not, and at a glance it would have been easy to dismiss as an innocuous family photo.

  “It’s remarkable how the simple shaving of such an iconic moustache can be such an effective mask.” McCitrick said as Munroe moved from his seat over to the table, transfixed by the photo. “He was eighty-three when this was taken, somewhere in Argentina. The exact location is unknown, but we do know he died nine years later, in 1981, at the ripe old age of ninety-two.”

  Munroe was now mesmerised and he stood there examining every wrinkle, every contour of the old man’s face as McCitrick continued, his voice remaining calm and unwavering.

  “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that the old bastard saw the advent of space travel, computers and the modern world that he indirectly helped create through his butchering and lust for world domination. And never has such a travesty of justice been so repellent, and unknown to the people of the globe.”

  Munroe still said nothing, continuing to study the image, until after a few more moments of near-hypnotic scrutinising he tore his gaze from the photo and turned towards McCitrick. “How?”

  McCitrick pressed at the remote again and brought up a map of Europe displaying the last days of World War Two, the black swastika representing the last refuge of Nazi power in Berlin surrounded by the Soviets on one side and the Americans on the other. “Hitler’s body was never found. It was said to have been burnt to a crisp on his orders. The leader of the Reich had no wish to end up like Mussolini, whose body was hung from a lamp post for show and beaten to a bloody pulp along with his mistress. The advancing Soviets got there first and took what was left, but Stalin insisted it wasn’t Hitler. Allied high command believed it was a ruse to allow the Soviets to keep the war going, and in doing so snatch up more of Europe, which ultimately would have continued into the Pacific to make a land grab in Japan. No, the war in Europe had to end, and so his death was reported and concluded as suicide. Can you imagine, Ethan, if the German Army and all the devout Nazi believers had realised Hitler was still alive! With that kind of loyal fanaticism the war would have raged on. The German Army would never have surrendered in droves, as they did, and the world would have been set ablaze again for many years, with millions more dead. Far better to end it all with a single suicide, which many of his contemporaries likened to ‘the breaking of a spell’.”

  Munroe was dumbstruck by the idea, but before he bombarded McCitrick with questions, he needed to know something. “Just so were clear, this isn’t a test, is it? You’re on the level.”

  McCitrick almost laughed out loud. “It’s hard to digest, I know. I had the same reaction upon first hearing it. The wartime Allies bought into Hitler’s death… Churchill, though, did not. Within days of Germany’s surrender a covert team of British and American investigators were sent into the Führer’s bunker, and what they found caused an emergency meeting between Churchill and President Harry Truman, which is how this whole thing of ours got off the ground.”

  “And that was?”

  “They found a secret access hatch leading directly from Hitler’s private room, via a network of tunnels, to the old U6 subway station, exiting next to Tempelhof airport. Back in 2015 a team of researchers had the same idea and actually found it using sonar equipment, but we made sure the news cycle moved on, quickly. Twenty-four-hour rolling news is a godsend for intelligence operations. But back then, it was concluded that this was how the little bastard escaped, and then went on to South America via U-boat. It soon became the perfect place for ex-war criminals, due to the Nazi leanings of Argentine President Juan Perón.”

  The admission caused Munroe to fall silent in shock for a moment while McCitrick stared at him, gauging his reactions. “So the stories are true.” He’d heard the conspiracy theories over the years, and they were now confirmed as McCitrick gave a heavy nod of his head.

  “There are still whole German communities deep within the Argentinian and Brazilian forests. The lasting legacy of their Nazi fathers. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. They have little to do with Daedalus, or not anymore, at any rate.”

  “So the internet gossip got it right,” Munroe said, filled with fascination by the idea.

  “Some of it, yes. Gossip is a hard thing to regulate, but easy to manipulate, and we’ve done a good job of it over the years. You see, Churchill recognised that if the world knew Hitler and his top Nazis had got out it would be nothing short of a worldwide beacon for far-right extremists and sympathisers, and after five years of war that had taken the world to the brink, he wasn’t about to let it all resurface. And so an operation was put in place. One of the last things Churchill signed off on, which evolved into a secret charter between Great Britain, America and France. A clandestine organisation was formed to hunt, track and monitor any emergence of whatever the remaining Nazis might want to achieve.”

  “And that was?”

  “Simple, and exactly what you’d think. A Fourth Reich, which would last for the thousand years Hitler had promised.”

  Munroe sat back down in his chair and exhaled a deep breath as he tried to take stock of the bombshell that had just dropped on him. It had been almost eighty years since the end of the war, and to think that the original Nazi clan had maintained a presence was difficult to comprehend. “Shouldn’t you have taken care of it by now? You’ve had long enough.”

  McCitrick looked unoffended by the insinuation. He rested back down on the edge of the desk and leant forward. “You make it sound so easy. The war ended in the biggest displacement of human beings of the twentieth century. Possibly in the history of humankind. My predecessors had no idea the SS, knowing the war was lost back in 1943, had spent years cultivating the escape lines to South America. The huge amount of money they had stolen from Europe was used to create new lives and networks for those bastards and, from what we’ve learnt in the years since, they were planning this resurgence of Nazi doctrine long before the war ended. That’s why there was no surrender until after Hitler’s supposed death. Why the army, civilians, kids, pensioners, were all ordered to fight for every last metre of dirt. To give them time to fulfil their escape plans… and it worked a bloody treat.”

  “But so many of Hitler’s inner circle were caught or died trying to escape,” Munroe replied, instinctually wanting to push back against the tall tale
he was hearing.

  McCitrick on the other hand appeared to be enjoying this retelling, like a man who had bottled up secrets for years and could finally tell someone else what he knew. “Sure, many were caught, but look at who they were. In the final days of the war Hermann Goering demanded he take over from Hitler and then surrendered. Heinrich Himmler tried to make a deal with the Allies and subsequently committed suicide. These were the weak links in Hitler’s inner circle, and he was more than happy to feed them to the dogs. A long time back we got our hands on one of the original insiders, an old man at the time but an SS general during the war who had escaped to Argentina. He told us that no one except Hitler and Martin Bormann, his personal secretary, knew the full picture of the escape plan. Hitler had been paranoid about being betrayed and considering the number of drugs he was on it’s understandable, but he was proved right. Goering and Himmler went to their deaths never knowing they had an out, and if they’d held steady they would have escaped as well.”

  “How about Bormann? I read they found his bones during excavations under the Rhine a few years ago.”

  McCitrick laughed out loud sarcastically. “Yeah,” he chuckled, “after almost a century, and among thousands of previously undiscovered war corpses, they just happen to come across the skeleton of one of the most famous war criminals ever. Hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? We pushed that story when interest in escaping Nazis caught the public’s fascination back in the late nineties, and then had it confirmed a decade later when improved genetic testing became available, just so it seemed more plausible. It was total bullshit though. We caught Bormann back in the sixties and handed him over to Israel, on the express understanding he would be dealt with by a military tribunal, in secret. He was hung in 1968 after being convicted by a ‘jury of his peers’.” McCitrick sniffed at the idea. “In reality he didn’t stand a chance, and good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.”