There was an ear-shattering explosion and the bear let the broken halves of the submarine tumble into the water, to dive once more and forever to the floor of the strait.
“God almighty!” LeDuc exclaimed, limping up alongside Hallauk now.
The two of them were soaked to their skin and drenched in monster blood, but unharmed.
“Hal, you and your friend here just saved Ottawa and the C.I.C.”
Hallauk grinned brightly.
“This humble man was only doing what he thought best.”
“Humble? You’re going to have to lose that trait if you’re going to hang around me, my boy.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled package of broken cigars, and lit one.
He held out the other to Nanuq.
“I’ve got work for you, if you want it, and we could desperately use your help. Uh, and his, of course,” he said, glancing back at the towering bear wading around the frozen SS beast in the middle of the strait.
Nanuq took the offered cigar curiously, smelled the tobacco, and put it in between his lips.
LeDuc leaned in and lit it.
“Say, Hal. What happens now, with him?”
“Now Nanuq takes his reward,” Hallauk said, shrugging and drawing the smoke in.
He coughed.
And the bear gave a mighty snort and lunged toward the head of the frozen Sea Wolf. Its jaws closed around the wolfish skull and the ice began to crack with a noise that made them both clamp their hands on their ears.
* * * *
He was no longer Hal Anawak, his uncle.
He was Matthew Anawak again.
But he knew everything. He had fought all the secret battles, in the forests and the ocean, against submarines and monsters. He had watched Nanuq bat Soviet spyplanes out of the sky. He felt the loss of George LeDuc to throat cancer four years ago.
And he knew the bear’s price.
He took the mask from his face and looked at his uncle.
Hal was smoking a cigar and staring at him.
“George got me smoking these things,” he said. “Should never have started. You’d do well to quit those cigarettes, too.”
“You’ve got cancer.”
“Yeah,” Hal nodded, stubbing the butt out in a brass ashtray. “They’d have to cut my throat to dig it out. It’s alright, Matthew. It’s time for me to pay back Nanuq. The question is, what’re you gonna do?”
Matthew watched the dying smoke curl up from the ashtray and dissipate somewhere near the low ceiling.
“In the Plains cultures, tobacco’s used ceremonially,” he said. “You present it as a gift to elders.”
“Not among our people.”
“Uncle Hal, they’re all our people. Aboriginals everywhere.”
“Kid, I’ve worked hard to keep the Inuit from getting the same raw deal.”
“I know. I know all about it. This is how you’ve called in favors all these years.”
“A giant bear’s a pretty good bargaining chip,” Hal said.
“You’ve single-handedly kept Canada in the Monster Race in exchange for autonomous rights for the Inuit.”
“Yeah. George helped a lot with that. He taught me English, and the ins and outs of dealing with the white men. I owe him a lot. I named the cultural center in Ottawa for him a few years back. After he died.”
“I remember.”
Matthew put his head back on the chair and stared at the ceiling.
“In this world, without a monster, a nation’s got no voice.”
“I know what you’re gettin’ at, kid. But I’m an Inuit first, Canadian second.”
“But you’ve gone against the Canucks before,” Matthew insisted, leaning forward.
“How do you know that? The mask?”
“Nobody even knew about Nanuq until two years ago, when that whole Israeli thing happened,” Matthew said. “After that, the Treaty insured everybody had to put their monsters on the table. But if you brought Nanuq to the C.I.C. in ’43, that means he was around for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he didn’t participate.”
“Sendin’ Nanuq against a city. So many civilians,” Hallauk muttered, shaking his head. “That’s not what the bear is for.”
“And Korea? I never heard of a giant polar bear fighting there.”
“We didn’t have any business there.” Hallauk said. “I’m sorry, Matthew. We didn’t. Your dad, he thought different.”
“He was wrong. You were right. It wasn’t our war.”
“But if me and Nanuq had been there, maybe your dad...”
Matthew shook his head.
“And what about Vietnam?”
Hal opened his hands and shrugged.
“Canada ain’t in Vietnam.”
“Is it because of you?”
Hal stood up and paced.
“We got no business there, Matthew. Too many kids would’ve had to go over. You, if you ever came back. I couldn’t take that chance of losing more family in some damn fool jungle fight.”
He went to Matthew and took the mask from his hands, turned it over thoughtfully.
“They came to me with it,” he said. “Caused a big argument with the Americans, but I said no. They sent their own monsters into those jungles. Johnson and the Gator. The Gator didn’t come back.”
He set the mask on the mantle, straightened it.
“I wouldn’t use the bear to invade the States, Uncle Hal. Just to give the Indians there a voice.”
“You’re talking about an international incident, Matthew. There are subtleties to this stuff. God, back in ’43 we almost came to blows with the States over who had the right to that Johnson thing. If me and Nanuq hadn’t come along...” he sighed and threw up his hands. “Hell, Matthew. What you do with the bear is your own business. I sure won’t have anything to say about it. But before you pick that mask up again,” he said, gesturing to the thing on the mantle, “you got to understand. Nanuq has his price.”
* * * *
Matthew rose early, but not as early as Hal. He found the old man outside the igloo, feeding the dogs and ruffling their shaggy coats.
They were both dressed in traditional fur parkas, and Hal wore a pair of caribou bone iglaak slitted goggles. They were in sparse winter camp in the foothills, near the fiord where it had all begun.
“Thought you were never gonna get up,” Hal said, his breath puffing in the cold air.
Matthew smiled. They’d driven the dogs all the way from Kangiqsualujjuaq, and Hal had used the time to answer his questions, teach him all that the mask hadn’t already.
“Moment of truth, kid,” Hal said.
He took the mask from the inside of his parka. Matthew hadn’t seen it since the cabin, but he had known it was with them somehow, like a silent companion, or something tailing them through the cold wastes, just out of sight.
Hal kneeled down and set the mask in the snow, lingered on it with one hand, perhaps praying quietly, perhaps saying goodbye. Then he stood up. A gust of wind kicked up, stirring the snow into little shifting eddies and causing the dogs to howl and press close together.
“You follow the piqujait of our family, or you go back to sunny California. No shame in either. But I’m going out there,” he said, pointing to the snowy mountains, shrouded in a descending curtain of pure white. “You can keep the mask or you can leave it here, but the next time you put it on, you know what it means.”
He had said nothing about Alcatraz the whole trip. Neither of them had.
“So. This is goodbye?”
“Nah,” said Hal. He stepped across the camp and grabbed the kid by his ears, pulled him close, and touched noses with him.
“That’s goodbye.”
He grinned, and took off his bone goggles. He slid them over Matthew’s nose.
He walked past him then, and out of the camp, feet crunching in the snow.
“You know the way home, kid,” he called over his shoulder. “So long.”
Matthew did know the way home, just
as he knew every inch of the coastline, every crook of mountain, and the foibles of each of the sled dogs.
He knew everything that Hal knew, and that was everything his grandfather had known, all the way back to the first angakkuq that called the bear to fight back the yellowhaired kavdlunait (and as Hal himself did again, in a way, back in ‘43). The mask had told him most of it, and Hal had filled in the blank spots.
A tremendous roar shook the mountains, bouncing off stone and shifting snow and causing the hackles of dog and man to rise.
And deep in the midst of the whiteness into which Hal’s fading footprints led, Matthew saw a smudge of black on high, and two burning blue eyes.
He looked down at the mask. The snow drifted swiftly across its carved face, burying it, swallowing it.
Matthew put his hands in his pockets and shivered.
* * * *
“We invite the United States to acknowledge the justice of our claim. The choice now lies with the leaders of the American government, to use violence upon us as before to remove us from our Great Spirit's land, or to institute a real change in its dealing with the American Indian. We do not fear your threat to charge us with crimes on our land. We and all other oppressed peoples would welcome spectacle of proof before the world of your title by genocide. Nevertheless, we seek peace.” - Richard Oakes, Mohican, IAT.
It was Thanksgiving Day, a little before noon.
Fisherman’s Wharf was crowded with a boiling ocean of long-, left wing humanity, shouting slogans and waving signs, pressing against a navy blue wall of San Francisco’s finest. The police faced the multi-colored mob with their riot shields set, a fence of scowling Spartans, batons at the ready.
The slogans and the shouting died out as Johnson rose to its feet in the middle of the police circle. The crowd reared back momentarily, a few shrieks breaking out, as the shadow of the hairy biped fell across them.
Johnson was nearly a hundred meters tall, its features entirely hidden by ropes of long mossy hair. Some in the media had nicknamed it Cousin It for its passing resemblance to the hairy character on The Addams Family. The rising counterculture, often ridiculed for their own long hair, pointed to Johnson ironically as their representative in the federal government. Johnson was on t-shirts.
But Johnson was the least popular long hair on the Wharf today.
It had a massive canvas sack over its shoulder, olive green. Some had expressed disbelief at the audacity of the GSA’s plan that been leaked to the news outlets, that Johnson was going to wade out to Alcatraz Island and gather up the insurgent Indians like wayward kittens and carry them back into police custody. But there it was, and at the sight of it the protesters forgot their fondness for and awe of the legendary creature and returned to the barricade line, hollering angrily up at the beast.
A few threw rotten produce up at it, but it would have taken Joe Namath to score a hit. But Johnson would not have noticed it anyway.
The hairy colossus turned its occult face from the excited crowd and walked to the water’s edge, an event that caused windowpanes to rattle and residents blocks away to phone into emergency services and the police and demand to know if an earthquake were under way.
Johnson dipped its massive toe into the water, recoiled, then hopped into the bay, sinking to its thighs.
Heedless of the roar of the mob, it began to slowly wade out across the bay, causing the ships to bob in their moorings.
Seagulls circled the strange creature curiously, like a halo, as it left the shore behind.
In the center of the police, a few officers in military dress and men in expensive suits and sunglasses watched the creature’s progress. Then the vegetables and furry fruit began to seek them out, and they retreated into a nearby limousine.
TV helicopters kept pace with the monster, pattering at a safe distance, zooming in on Johnson for the benefit of the home audience, record numbers of whom were tuning in to see those damn hippie Indians get what was coming to them.
A pair of Coast Guard boats escorted it.
On Alcatraz Island, the hundred members of the Indians of All Tribes watched the monster’s slow advance across the bay. They were men, women and children of a dozen different nations. Apache, Arapaho, Eskimo, Cherokee, Sioux, Ho Chunk, Mohawk. Their ancestors would’ve had nothing in common with each other. But now they were uniform in two things; their mistreatment at the hands of the white government, and their purpose.
Richard Oakes was among them, their handsome Mohawk leader. He’d sent their demands to President Nixon and the besieging GSA and FBI officials.
They had legally reclaimed the unused penitentiary and The Rock on which it stood under the Treaty of Ft. Laramie.
They wanted an American Indian Cultural Center and Museum established on Alcatraz. A Native Spiritual Center, and a center for Native studies.
The feds’ answer was making its way across the bay.
They lined the chipped and sea-scoured walls, now scrawled with INDIANS WELCOME and UNITED STATES INDIAN PROPERTY in big red letters, black hair, red armbands, the grandchildren of buckskinned warriors in denim and polyester. Some women and children watched the wading beast stoically, wrapped against the chilly sea air in colorful blankets. A few men sat in a circle, wailing and pounding out a soul soaring Lakota rhythm on a tom-tom, as a boy bristling with eagle feathers danced defiantly across the concrete.
Inside a makeshift booth within the prison, a young Santee Sioux named John Trudell keyed the mic to broadcast what he thought would be his last broadcast of Radio Free Alcatraz.
The Coast Guard cutters were the first to grind to a halt, a few of the men in orange life vests nearly pitching over the bows of their craft as the boats suddenly stopped dead in the water, as surely as if they’d hit a dock pylon. The engines groaned and smoked. Propellers chopped the water and then buzzed and chipped against solid ice, stopping altogether.
Men scurried on the decks to peer down at the thick ice spreading before their amazed eyes. It moved as quick as fire, and encompassed both boats, freezing them solidly in place before moving on across the bay, straight for the unsuspecting Johnson, up to his waist now in the bay.
The news choppers caught wind that something was wrong and circled in place, shutters clicking.
Then Johnson let out a confused, apelike huff and stopped its advance. The ice encircled the creature, and crept up its belly. The creature thrashed, and the ice cracked and gave way.
Just as quickly, it renewed itself, and like quicksand, the harder the monster fought, the more entombed it became, until its powerful arms were pinned to its sides, and the glistening ice had frosted over its elbows, encasing Johnson in what looked like a glass column.
On the Wharf, every neck craned, every eye watered to see across the Bay. The limousine doors opened and the men who had gone inside to sit out the extraction stumbled out to see with their own eyes, shouting for subordinates to bring them binoculars.
Johnson moaned plaintively, pitifully, and shivered.
And at the foot of Alcatraz Island, something broke the surface of the water, something white as a mountain, and nearly as tall. It arose, water streaming from its sloping shoulders.
And at the sight of it, the Indians cheered.
The Master of All Polar Bears, Mighty Nanuq, shook the water from itself like a wet dog, and the cool bay water poured down on the Indians in a pelting rain. They laughed and cheered, and the drums thundered and the boy in the eagle feathers danced hard, though his costume wilted in the rain.
The bear roared out across the bay.
The mob on the Wharf went crazy.
The audience at home leaned forward in their La-Z-Boys or stood up, disbelieving, from their sofas.
John Trudell passed his microphone across the table to his guest speaker, who set his mask on the table, keyed in, and said, across Radio Free Alcatraz into the ears of the stern men in suits who were listening and gripping the arms of their chairs two thousand eight hundred and fifteen
miles away;
“This message is for the United States Government, and President Richard Nixon. My name is Matthew Anawak, anglakkuq of the Inuit. From this day forward, Alcatraz Island is Indian land.”
A Haunt of Jackals
And I will cut off your carved images and your pillars from among you, and you shall bow down no more to the work of your hands; Micah 5:13
The jeep bounced along the rutted country road through the sultry Itapua countryside several kilometers north of Hohenau, packed with four men in dark clothes and harnesses strapped with weapons. Though it was a moonless Paraguayan night, the headlights were off, the driver trusting to the dual tube AN/PVS-5 nightvision goggles he wore.
This wasn’t going to be like Eichmann.
No easy snatch and grab at a bus stop, no sitting on him at a safehouse and then smuggling him out of the country on a commercial flight.
Boaz Meyeroff was headed for a guarded compound with three younger Shabak men (or were some of them Mossad? He didn’t remember) toting UZIs, a Galil, and OB-44 SOPELEM binoculars. Somewhere in a bare field a few kilometers to the south, a plane was waiting to take them out of reach of President Stroesser’s pyragüés.
This would be a paramilitary extraction. There was a possibility of hard contact. Not like Eichmann at all.
But Meinhard ‘Der Roter’ Austerlitz was nothing like Adolph Eichmann either.
Eichmann had been an administrator in the SS. A pig, sure. Responsible for thousands of dead Jews during the war, yes. But he’d never got his hands dirty. He’d killed with a pencil, like Leopold Fischer, or Himmler.
Austerlitz was the kind of Nazi that, if brought in handcuffs before the Knesset and the TV cameras, would have people in the streets, howling for his blood. He was an Amon Goeth. A Joachim Mrugowsky, a Josef Mengele.
In short, he was a prize beast. A head for the wall.
Austerlitz had been part of the Nazi Monstrum Program, a pioneering scientific operation which had laid some of the early groundwork for the current state of international mega-monster proliferation. The Monstrum Program had attempted to harness or create and field giant monsters for the Axis during the war. They had met with little success. A single creature, some kind of mutant wolf, had landed in the upper reaches of Canada in late 1943, but had been destroyed handily by Canada’s national creature. The program didn’t recover from that setback in time to swing the war for Hitler.
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