by Gary Jonas
“Works for me. We’ll probably get to kill some Nazis.”
I went to work hooking up my laptop. “It’s not much of a plan.”
“We have Esther,” Kelly said.
“Damn tootin’,” Esther said. “Once we’re there, I can scout ahead and help find Maria.”
“First, we don’t know where to get a boat.”
“At a marina. But we might be able to get close with a car,” Kelly said.
“If so, we need to strike tonight. Before they expect it.”
“How much time do we have to get the skull?” Kelly asked.
“Four days.”
“If it’s even in Argentina.”
“Computer is up,” I said. “I’ll try to track down the house online.”
Kelly stared at me. “If Himmler gets the skull, I… He can’t get it, Jonathan.”
“I agree. I don’t want to see a rise of the Fourth Reich either. But we can’t just rush in and get ourselves or Maria killed.”
“I snapped Himmler’s neck. I felt the life leave his body.”
“The head Nazis have been injecting themselves with magic for decades.”
“Why are they rising up now?”
I entered the Wi-Fi password, and started searching the internet. “Well, look at the world,” I said. “The United States has been disappointing its allies. Russia and China are gaining on the global stage. We have… Oh, hold on.”
Kelly moved to look over my shoulder at the screen. “What did you find?”
“There’s a monster called Nahuelito hiding in the lake. Might be the Loch Ness Monster’s cousin.”
Kelly sighed. “And here I thought you found something real.”
“You don’t know that Nahuelito isn’t real. Legend says it might be a plesiosaur.”
“Legend says you’re a dork.”
I laughed and kept searching.
“This might be what we’re after,” I said. “Operation Gray Wolf.”
“What’s that?” Kelly asked.
“Admiral Wilhelm Canaris set up escape routes for various Nazis back in 1943 in case the war went bad. Okay, this site looks interesting.” I clicked around, and found information on the house where Hitler supposedly died. Kelly read over my shoulder again, only this time she remained interested. And this time, there were coordinates.
“Punch them in,” Kelly said.
I did.
Google Maps came up with a satellite image of a section of a lake with a small beach and a mansion hidden from view of anyplace other than the air and one small section of the lake, which was tucked behind two small islands. From the looks of it, there was a dock for boats that could double as a landing site for a seaplane.
I zoomed out. A road marked 40 ran not too far from the house. We’d need to stop and make a trek through some thick woods to get there, but it was better than trying to steal a boat.
“Here we go,” I said. I checked the location, did a comparison to where we were. “We’re about an hour-and-a-half away from there.”
“Let’s steal a car,” Kelly said.
I checked the time. “Let’s rent one instead.”
“And leave a paper trail?”
I laughed. “If we get in there, they’ll know it was us. I don’t care about a paper trail. What I don’t want is to get arrested for stealing a car in a foreign country.”
“But killing people is fine.”
“You gotta have standards,” I said. “Killing Nazis is a lesser offense than stealing a car, wouldn’t you say?”
She shrugged. “If it’s Himmler, it’s a lesser offense than tracking in a bit of dirt on a muddy carpet.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We rented a Toyota Corolla from Hertz at 8:45 pm. We were on the road by 9:00 and at 10:30, I pulled off onto the shoulder. If my calculations were correct, once we entered the forest, we’d have to go a couple hundred yards to get to the clearing with the house.
I stepped into the woods, but Kelly put a hand on my shoulder. “Let me scout ahead,” she said. “You let your eyes adjust to the darkness. I’ll be back.”
“Don’t go in without me,” I said.
“I won’t. But if there are guards, I’ll take them out. Esther, will you come with me?”
“Absolutely.”
That meant I had to stay on the side of the road all by myself. I leaned against a tree a ways off the road, and settled in to wait.
The enormity of what we faced settled onto my shoulders. Going after Hitler’s skull was one thing, but finding out that Heinrich Himmler was still alive was something else. And if that psycho was alive thanks to magic, he could have an army of magical Aryan super soldiers ready to attack.
Nazi flags flying over Charlottesville came back to me, and I felt sick to my stomach. After World War II, the Nazis spread out all over the world, infiltrating society, pretending to be our neighbors.
Argentina was loaded with Nazis. So was America. True believers don’t just let go of their ideology; they bide their time, waiting for the right moment to rise up and seize power.
I’d read about the Golden Dawn in Greece, not to be confused with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they got their name from the secret society.
Spain was loaded with Nazis. Russia had Nazis. Those damn Nazis were everywhere.
About the time I’d creeped myself out about the rise of the Fourth Reich, Kelly returned.
“There aren’t any guards stationed around the mansion. It looked run-down and abandoned from the outside, so Esther and I went in.”
“You were supposed to come back for me.”
“The house is empty. There’s some old furniture, nasty chairs, old beds in some of the rooms, but the place hasn’t been occupied in a long time.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“The lack of guards suggests we’re in the wrong place.”
“So the conspiracy theorists online were wrong. And Theodor was wrong, too.”
“Not exactly. Esther?”
Esther materialized. “There’s an underground bunker behind the house.”
“They’re down there?”
She shook her head. “Most of it is caved in, but there are open areas down there. I couldn’t see anything because there wasn’t any light, but I could feel things. Walls, and tapestries, and at least one old chair.”
“How does this help us?”
“Underground bunker,” Kelly said. “Big.”
“And how,” Esther said.
“If Hitler needed a place to hide, you couldn’t have found a better place.”
“Okay,” I said. “So Theodor was simply not up to date. Can we check it out?”
“It’s mostly rubble,” Kelly said.
“But one of those websites said Hitler died here. He could be buried down there.”
“I’ll search for an entrance,” Esther said, and popped away.
“Follow me,” Kelly said, and led me through the woods to the clearing.
The house was huge, with a stone foundation and a wooden mountain cabin look. Except it was a lot bigger than a normal cabin.
We walked around front, and in the moonlight, I could make out the dark shape of an island across the bay. The dock was still there, and it was definitely big enough to handle a seaplane.
We went around back again, and Esther rose up through the ground.
“I found a way,” Esther said. “Get a wiggle on.”
She led us to the woods. She pointed to a wood and metal protrusion.
“Ventilation shaft?” I asked.
Esther nodded. “This way,” she said, and took twenty steps deeper into the woods. She pointed at a large rock on ground. “That’s not a rock.”
I used the flashlight on my phone to shine around the rock, and sure enough, it was a handle. I handed my phone to Kelly, crouched and gripped the rock. When I lifted, I grunted and didn’t even budge it.
“Push,” Esther sai
d.
I pushed on the rock.
Esther sighed. “Push down.”
I pushed down. The rock went down a few inches and clicked. Then it bobbed up about half an inch.
“Now lift.”
I lifted on the edge, and a lid rose up to reveal a concrete stairwell descending into the darkness. An inset groove held a metal rod. Kelly lifted the rod, and it swung up to lock in place. I lowered the lid, and now we had comparatively easy access to the bunker.
Using the flashlight to see where we were going, we ducked under the lid, and went down the stairs. The place smelled stale and dusty.
The stairs led to a tunnel, of course, and that dead-ended with a big piece of wood. A lever on the wall next to the wood was draped with cobwebs. Kelly pulled it down, and the wood moved inward. I pushed on it, and the secret passage swung open to a massive room.
My flashlight couldn’t reach the far end. A hallway led off to more rooms, and as we stepped into the big area, I moved the phone around to shine the light on tapestries and bookshelves. More goddamn swastikas.
I moved down a bookshelf to a table that held a photo album. Naturally, the album was emblazoned with yet another swastika. I opened the book. Pictures of Hitler in front of a crowd. Pictures of Hitler with a blonde woman I recognized as Eva Braun. Pictures of Hitler with Himmler. I flipped to one of the last pages. It was labeled 1960.
Color pictures of an older Hitler without the mustache. Eva Braun, also older, seated in front of the lake with the small island visible in the distance.
My heart skipped a beat and my gut tensed.
“Even after running into Himmler, I don’t think I really believed it until now,” I said.
Kelly leaned in to look. She nodded and spoke the words I couldn’t bring myself to speak aloud. “They were right. Hitler survived the war.”
I let the words hang there for a moment, then said, “But he’s dead now. Right?”
Kelly shrugged. “What do you want me to say, Jonathan?”
“I want you to say, ‘Of course he’s dead. That’s why we’re after his skull.’”
“Fine. Of course he’s dead. That’s why we’re after his skull. But if he’s alive, I hope I get the satisfaction of cutting off his head in order to get his skull.”
“Don’t even whisper anything about him still being alive.”
“Okay, and I won’t point out that Himmler is still alive.”
“Even after you killed him.”
“We’ll take his Nazi ass down,” Kelly said. “As for Hitler, so far everyone has said he died in 1970. Right?”
“Some of the reports I read suggested 1961 here in Argentina, but 1970 is the predominate date.”
“So let’s go with that.”
Doubt tickled the back of my brain, especially as we stood there gazing at photographs of Hitler alive and well in 1960.
We stood in that dark bunker where Hitler had actually drawn breath, and a shiver ran through me. And while I know my brain was reacting to my current knowledge, I couldn’t escape the fact that the room now felt weighed down by evil.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
What passed for professionalism broke the spell, and we gave the underground hideout a thorough search.
There were multiple rooms in the bunker. Most of them were in terrible shape. Portions had caved in, and other parts looked like they’d been intentionally demolished.
As we searched, I kept thinking about how Hitler and Eva Braun had walked these floors, talked about their plans for the future, joked and argued about life. When I pushed stones out of the way and found what might have been the master bedroom, I wondered if Hitler and Eva had made love in the crushed remains of the bed in the center of the rubble.
God, I hoped there were no little Hitler kids running around, though for all practical purposes, they’d be older than me if they existed.
I maneuvered through the bedroom, stepping over piles of stone, to get to a nightstand. There, covered in dirt and dust, was an old diary. I lifted it, shook off the filth, and opened it to the center.
Handwriting filled the pages.
The writing was in German, so I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but I kept it anyway.
The nightstand had a drawer, too, so I opened it. Inside was an unmarked wooden box. I unfastened the clasp and lifted the lid to reveal more glowing yellow tubes. A leather pouch sat in the drawer as well, and when I checked it, I found a syringe kit. So Hitler had continued his magical injections here as well.
“Jonathan?” Kelly called.
I smashed the yellow tubes, letting magic leak into the floor, then worked my way back to the hallway.
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to want to see this.”
Esther appeared before me. “Follow me,” she said and led me down a hallway to a study where Kelly stood over a table going over a variety of maps.
“What have you got?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Travel plans? Army positions? No clue.”
She turned the map toward me, and in the light of our combined cellphone flashlights, I studied a map with lines drawn in pen. Some countries were circled. The United States, of course, but also odd places like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Notes in German were scrawled in the oceans with lines going to each circle.
“We need to have this translated,” I said.
“Sounds like a plan,” Kelly said, and rolled up the map.
We finished searching the bunker, going through books in the library, and silverware in the kitchen, each utensil embossed with little swastikas. We found various trinkets and personal effects, but nothing else that seemed important to our goal of finding the skull.
The rooms creeped me out because while he wasn’t visible anywhere, and I knew his ghost wasn’t actually there, or Esther and I would have seen him, Hitler still haunted that bunker.
“Can you imagine living down here?” I asked Kelly before we left.
She shrugged. “It’s not like he couldn’t go above ground. For all we know, he lived in the house most of the time.”
“True,” I said.
“And for him it sure beat the alternative, though I must say I wish he’d died in the Führerbunker.”
“No doubt,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Esther went up first to make sure there were no Nazi soldiers waiting to blow us away.
Kelly and I went up the steep steps. I lifted the lid, lowered the metal rod, and closed the bunker. In the light from the phone’s flashlight, I could make out the straight lines of the lid in the grass and twigs, but a bit of rain or a stiff wind would hide it from the world soon enough.
It occurred to me that the Nazis had done a similar thing, infiltrating other parts of the world, hiding beneath the surface. Lying in wait until their Führer called them out to march in the open once more.
Somehow, I didn’t think those still hiding would march with tiki torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” No, they could easily rise to positions of power in government, seeming innocuous while they dismantled democracy from the inside. They could seed discontent, and raise an army of true believers. We’d all be in trouble then.
Looking at the world, I knew those seeds had been sown and watered, and would be too easy to harvest.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Santiago Cabrera had a jovial smile, dark hair, and big brown eyes that exuded warmth and intelligence. He was shaped like a pear, and stood all of five feet tall if he worked on maintaining his posture.
The desk clerk at the hotel recommended him because he supposedly spoke fluent English, and knew the history of the town better than anyone else. Well, better than anyone the desk clerk knew who spoke English, anyway.
We met Santiago at a local restaurant for breakfast where the lamps were designed to look like atom symbols with the bulbs around the center circle. Esther, Kelly, and I stepped into the restaurant, and Santiago stood and waved his hands over his head.
The restaurant was crowded with people eating little sandwiches and torts, and sipping coffee in large green cups.
Kelly was the only Chinese woman, and I was the only white guy, so Santiago had no trouble recognizing us.
We worked our way to his table at the back of the room. He pulled out a chair for Kelly, and gestured for her to be seated. He did not bother to pull my chair out.
“Greetings, travelers from afar,” he said. “I am delirious to mark your acquaintances.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said, thinking it would be rude to correct his statement.
He pointed at me. “Jonathan.” He pointed at Kelly. “Kelly.” He didn’t point at Esther because he couldn’t see her.
“This place is the berries,” Esther said.
“That’s right,” I said, answering Santiago, not Esther.
“That is too simplified, you aware,” he said, or seemed to.
It took me a moment to realize he didn’t mean too simplified. “Well,” I said, “we weren’t trying to stump you.”
“Cutting tree?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“Is quite right. Quite all right. Please for to accept my sorry.”
“No problemo,” I said.
“The English is new acquired,” he said and nodded. He rubbed his hands together and signaled for the waiter, an older man with a thin mustache, who wore black pants and a yellow shirt emblazoned with the cafe’s logo.
Santiago spoke to the man in Spanish, and the waiter nodded. He returned a moment later with menus.
“I can for to translation,” Santiago said.
“Just coffee for me, thanks,” I said.
“Same,” Kelly said.
Santiago ordered for us, though I suspect the waiter knew what we’d said.
“It is delirious to have American guests,” Santiago said. “What for to see would you like?”
We didn’t have time to mess around, so I figured I’d just cut to the chase. “We understand there’s a significant German population here.”