But if that had been the sole work of the Monstrum Program, Austerlitz would’ve been no more a war criminal than Werner von Braun. Austerlitz’s theories for creating giant monsters had involved genetic experimentation on humans, and in the war years, there was no more readily available stock for human experimentation than Jews incarcerated in the numerous concentration camps spread out across the Reich.
And Der Roter had toured them all.
Auschwitz, Plaszow, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka.
Wherever he’d gone, he’d gathered up subjects for his tests. Men, women, children, it didn’t matter. Details on Austerlitz’s methods were varied and unconfirmed. There were eyewitnesses who claimed he had injected living subjects with animal matter, bombarded them with radiation, even surgically grafted living humans and beasts together. In one recorded instance, he’d stood by and watched a wolf try to devour the screaming man it had awoken to find itself attached to before both of them had died on the operating table.
Austerlitz. The man who would make monsters. A monster himself.
The worst kind.
How men like Austerlitz and Mengele had slipped through after the war, Boaz still didn’t understand. Not that he didn’t understand the method. Men could be bribed, or confounded, sure. Even the worst scum of humanity could find friends in like-minded circles.
No, it was how God Himself could have allowed these men to go unpunished that he couldn’t fathom. Numerous things he’d seen and experienced while a prisoner at Dachau had cumulatively caused him to lose his faith for a time, chief among them the loss of his parents and young sister. His parents had gone up the chimney and his sister had been killed in the medical barrack, though under what circumstances he had never learned. He had read of Sigmund Rascher’s altitude experiments with a portable pressure chamber though, and his blood coagulant trials, which involved shooting the subject in the neck or chest and watching them bleed to death. The doctors had immersed their charges in subzero temperature water to record the effects of freezing. They had blasted them with X-rays as a method of sterilization. Boaz had read each horrific account carefully, imagining his sister dying a different way each time. He had never been able to mentally choose a preferred fate for her. Each experiment had been torture, and to picture his sister under the cold lights of the medical barrack had been a kind of self-torture. He had always felt a particular hatred toward the Nazi doctors after that. Here were men who had turned their Hippocratic oath into a hypocritical oath. Here were the agents of the angel of death on earth, murderers in white.
The jeep pulled off the road and Magtaz cut the headlights and soon after, the engine. They could see the compound lights out on the plain.
Winnick leapt into the road, and Boaz heard the open bolts of the UZIs primed as he fished out his lowlight binoculars and crouched in the ditch. He was nearly too old for this kind of work. Nearly. Perhaps this would be his last field operation. But it would be a good one to end on.
God did not take a direct hand in punishing the guilty as He had in the old days. Boaz had come to accept that. It had taken fatherhood to teach him. You couldn’t raise a child, intervening in every single schoolyard dispute and expect them to be able to take care of themselves when they were grown. You had to let your child learn to handle himself a little, and the relationship between God and man was similar. This was Mossad’s role.
His boy Ari was in university now at Haddasah on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, studying to be, of all things, a doctor.
The compound consisted of a two story house and a large outbuilding, which observation had reported was some kind of laboratory, probably a hydroponics facility as Austerlitz was purportedly employed for a national agriculture firm conducting fertilization and soil enrichment tests.
This didn’t ring true for Boaz, personally. There wasn’t anything in Austerlitz’s education or career background to suggest he would be much use in the agricultural field. He had grown up on a farm, it was true, but he was no botanist. Human biology was his field. However, three months of surveillance hadn’t uncovered anything to suggest otherwise. Agricultural trucks came and went, and Mossad agents had delayed one at a weigh station and found nothing but soil samples inside.
But the outbuilding and the house were under armed guard always. Two stood on the porch, Kalashnikovs set foolishly aside as the sentries smoked and played cards, and two more were in a constant orbit around the laboratory. These were private security in plain clothes, and looked to be Paraguayans.
Lights in the house were off, lights in the high windows of the laboratory were on. Austerlitz was working late. Surveillance had never reported more than four guards, and Austerlitz’s assistants departed at five o’clock. He was alone.
The plan then, was to take him in the lab. Duskin would take out the guards with his Galil as Boaz, Winnick, and Eisenstark crept on their bellies across the dark plain to the outbuilding. Magtaz would wait in the jeep, ready to tear into the perimeter, pick them up, and race for the extraction point.
Boaz led the way, clipping the barbed wire and shuffling along, pacing himself, keeping his breathing easy. He was the old man of this bunch, having fought with Samson’s Foxes in the War of Liberation when he was twenty and again most recently in Lebanon, but he was in his late fifties now, and command was urging him to take a desk job. When he’d refused, and done the legwork on the Austerlitz operation, they’d reluctantly given it to him, though they’d asked him to be the wheel man and stay in the jeep.
Since his wife Rebecca had died in a PLO bombing in Tel Aviv four years ago though, he hadn’t had much desire to live the soft life. He kept in shape, and he was a war hero with friends in the cabinet. Nobody was forcing him to do anything yet.
But there was a tightness in his chest, and he could feel the young lions on either side of him champing at the bit to pass him in the tall grass. He knew this would be his last operation, but he had pushed hard for it.
He didn’t know that Austerlitz had killed his sister. Hell, Austerlitz didn’t even know himself, he was sure. But he had made up his mind that the doctor had. That made this worth it.
Anyway, he’d be damned if he waited in the jeep. Let Winnick and Eisenstark roll their eyes behind his back. They wouldn’t see him any more after this anyway. They’d be free to bully the PLO around and fantasize about nabbing Arrafat. He’d go home and wait for his son to graduate, maybe take up model railroading. A hell of a hobby for a guy who’d ridden a crowded boxcar to Dachau, but there it was. He’d always liked trains.
After an hour’s crawling, they passed the midpoint, and the door to the laboratory opened.
It was Austerlitz, in coveralls, his once red beard now snow white. He had some words with the guard at the door, patted his shoulder, and handed him something.
The guard nodded and went into the outbuilding, shutting the door behind him.
Austerlitz walked across the yard to the house, hailing the two guards on the porch, who leapt up from their card game and took up their rifles.
He waved them off and went past them into the house.
Boaz followed his progression upstairs by the lights that flicked on in the windows.
He looked to the laboratory. The light was still on.
What the hell was happening? Had he asked the guard to tidy up?
The upstairs bathroom light went on, and through the binoculars, he could see Austerlitz moving through the frosted glass, showering.
He looked back at Eisenstark and Winnick.
After a moment’s hesitation, he signaled for Eisenstark to follow him to the house, and ordered Winnick to the laboratory.
The two commandos looked at each other.
Dammit, don’t look at each other, do you your job, he wanted to say.
Eisenstark crept forward. Winnick shifted and began to crawl toward the lab.
Good boys. Boaz knew Duskin was watching them through his Starlight scope, and that he had seen Austerlitz. He would adjust his own pl
an accordingly, and relay the changes to Magtaz. It wasn’t a huge upset. The two guards on the porch were easy pickings, and Winnick could handle the single guard still patrolling the outbuilding. The only snag was the one that had gone inside. There were telephone wires leading from there. He could phone for reinforcements if alerted, and if he didn’t come in, Winnick would have to go in after him, and he’d be cut off from Duskin’s support.
Twenty minutes later they were lying in the front yard, close enough to hear the guards talking. Something bothered Boaz right off, and a sharp look at Eisenstark confirmed the kid had picked it up too. They weren’t speaking Spanish, nor Guarani, nor any of the other sixteen languages they should have been conversing in.
The two were speaking in Arabic.
Boaz glanced again at Eisenstark, and the younger man furrowed his brow.
What were Arabs doing here?
This could present complications.
He looked across the yard.
Winnick had left the grass and now crouched against the wall of the outbuilding, knife in hand. The remaining guard was walking oblivious toward the corner where his death waited to puncture his trachea.
There was no going back.
Boaz looked at Eisenstark and nodded.
The two of them stood up in the front yard, UZIs at the ready, in case Duskin missed.
Of course he didn’t.
The two guards looked up from their card game and blinked in surprise. An instant later the one on the left catapulted out of his seat when a big black hole popped open just under his chin. His partner stood up and fell back in his chair, leaving a cloud of pinkish precipitation where he had been standing, like those dust clouds that appear after the Road Runner has high tailed it for stage right.
Boaz and Eisenstark went up the porch steps, Boaz waving aside the playing cards that gently fluttered down like autumn leaves.
The door was unlocked but Boaz kicked it open anyway for expediency’s sake, and Eisenstark entered, checking corners with the barrel of his submachinegun.
No need for flashlights. They did a quick survey of the living room-kitchen-pantry-downstairs bathroom and headed up the stairs, following their memory of the house layout from the builder’s plans. No surprises. Not in the guest bedroom, not in the linen closet.
They reached Austerlitz’s bedroom.
The bathroom door was slightly ajar and Boaz heard the shower running.
He kicked the flimsy interior door nearly off the hinges. It smacked against the toilet.
The shower was empty.
The shot came from the bedroom, and he heard Eisenstark grunt and watched him fall to the side.
Boaz spun and charged back into the bedroom, heart pounding.
Austerlitz was aiming out of the closet with a Luger, only his balding head and one thin arm protruding from between the racks of clothes like some pale, skinny monster out of a child’s nightmare.
Boaz fired low, a single burst, and Austerlitz screamed and fell on his face, his knee blown out from under him.
Jesus Christ, forty years on the run and he might’ve just killed the old bastard.
But no, Austerlitz groaned and stirred.
Boaz crossed the room and kicked the Luger spinning into a corner. Covering the old man, he looked over his shoulder and saw Eisenstark getting to his feet, hand slapped to his left arm, blood pouring from between his fingers.
Boaz raised his eyebrows, and Eisenstark nodded.
“Is it him?”
Boaz reached down and yanked the old man to his feet by the white hair on the back of his head. His first thought was the old cliché, that the years had not been kind to the old murderer. But that wasn’t entirely so. He was old sure, but he had a paunch and tanned arms from the South American sun. His knee was a mess, streaming blood. He’d cut his lip in the fall and stained his close cropped white beard nearly back to its original red.
“It’s him,” said Boaz, finding a grin. “Chick-chack.”
“Sure. Chick-chack. So how come he was waiting in the closet?”
Boaz frowned. Good point. He shoved the old man across the room and Eisenstark took hold of the back of his neck. Austerlitz whimpered, limping.
Eisenstark dragged him out into the hall and down the stairs.
Boaz took out his signal light and broke the frosted bathroom window. He flashed it twice.
Out in the darkness, the headlights of Magtaz’s jeep winked on and began bouncing across the field like the luminous eyes of an oversized cat nodding in hungry anticipation.
He looked toward the laboratory and saw Winnick standing next to the door, primed. The first lab sentry lay on his face near the corner of the outbuilding in a spreading pool of blood.
Winnick kicked in the door....and froze.
Filling the entire doorway, clearly lit and outlined, was an enormous rolling yellow eye.
The dagger thin iris ceased its darting and focused on Winnick. It dilated.
Winnick shrieked and opened fire with his UZI.
The eye was peppered by nine millimeter rounds and a protective hood slammed shut over it.
There was a tremendous howling noise.
“Meyeroff! Meyeroff!”
It was Eisenstark downstairs.
Boaz shook off the shivering terror that had frozen him to the spot and smashed the bathroom window with his UZI.
He clambered through the aperture out onto the roof, rushed to the edge, and jumped down as the outbuilding crackled with a sound like timbers falling, the exterior lights blew. Something enormous burst out of the structure like a jack in the box and the walls fell away.
Winnick had emptied his UZI and was turning to run when something huge and dark arced up out of the ruins of the building and came down on him with an impact that Boaz could feel beneath his boot soles. Winnick just disappeared.
Eisenstark was cursing up a storm as the jeep headlights slashed across the front of the house and the vehicle squealed to a stop right in front of them.
“Come on! Come on! Come on!” Magtaz was yelling at the wheel.
Eisenstark flung the old man to the floor in back. Duskin was foregoing all his vaunted marksmanship and spraying the looming shadow that blotted out the stars with 7.62mm rounds.
Boaz barely leapt into the passenger seat as the tires spit gravel and the jeep lurched down the driveway headed for the road.
He recovered his SMG and turned in his seat to see the thing, stepping out of the collapsed building and shaking the debris from its leg and shoulders.
He couldn’t quit make out its shape. It had long ears and massive shoulders, arms like a huge gorilla, and it stood upright. The eyes were huge, yellow, and luminous not with reflected light, but some strange inner fire. Teeth glistened somewhere beneath them and dripped big splashes of saliva into the yard.
His mind could barely process what was happening. How had a monster that size been restrained in a building? How had they gotten it in? There were no hangar doors, so the building must have been erected around it. But why? What the hell had Austerlitz been doing out here?
Magtaz was screeching into the radio.
“Esther! Esther! This is Cousin Mordecai! Coming in! Coming in hot!”
“Cousin Mordecai, this is Esther,” came the sharp reply. “Do you have Haman? Over.”
The jeep smashed through the front gate and Magtaz cursed, nearly losing control. He dropped the radio and gripped the wheel, righting the jeep on the road and standing on the accelerator.
Boaz snatched up the radio.
“Esther, Esther!” he yelled, staring back at the huge thing that was now stomping down the driveway after them, higher than the house. It passed through the glow of the house lights, and he saw a hint of shaggy hair. “Haman is in hand, but we have a problem! Mega-Contact. Repeat. Mega-Contact.”
Duskin was reloading and Eisenstark was shooting over the taillights with his UZI while he kneeled on Austerlitz, but it was no use. They had nothing that co
uld put a dent in that thing. Not even grenades to slow it down.
Then it was loping, clearing twenty, thirty yards at a bound. They could hear it roaring, the noise bearing down on them, drowning out everything.
“Tell them-!” Magtaz yelled.
But Boaz never found out what was so important to relay to Esther. Something swept down and hit the driver’s side of the jeep like an express train and sent them spinning off the road. Boaz went flying out into the night and hit the ground too hard to care anyway.
He was broken to pieces. No amount of deliberately cultivated muscle and wishful thinking could have made the difference to fifty nine year old bones knocked flying out of a speeding jeep by a giant who-knows-what.
* * * *
But he didn’t die.
He existed for a while in a kind of waiting room somewhere between death and consciousness, floating in something that felt like a wading pool at the back of a dark, cold cave. He heard voices sometimes and tried to swim towards them, but he couldn’t move his arms and legs, couldn’t do anything but float. Couldn’t swim, couldn’t sink, couldn’t talk, couldn’t think. He wondered if maybe his whole career post-Dachau had been all in his head. Maybe there never had been an Israel or a Six Day War or a Lebanese invasion. Maybe he hadn’t done anything sordid in Cyprus or Athens after all, and maybe the Butcher of Riga was still above ground somewhere. Maybe there had never been any giant monsters. The latter especially did seem like a fantastic dream. In what kind of world could there be such things as had knocked over the jeep anyway?
He thought that maybe he was still a teenager in the camp, and that he had been selected for experimentation, not his sister, and that he was now lying in a tank of freezing water in the dark, and that the voices were the voices of Dr. Rascher and Professor Holzlöhner, comparing notes and remarking over him as he withered and died.
But then light had come, first dimly, as perhaps it was on the first day, and then brighter, until it became a buzzing light bulb in a wire housing.
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