Swastika

by Michael Slade

  That was another clue to Bill’s trade.

  Nazi weapons.

  The music playing softly in his office wasn’t Wagner. The music was Bach, another German.

  There was something binary about Bach that spoke to the genes in Big Bad Bill. Bach’s music, so ordered and contrapuntal, had technology as its soul, so naturally it appealed to the highly organized ciphers that sparked in Bill’s brain.

  The bookshelf to Bill’s right offered another clue.

  Commander Ian Fleming had been a British intelligence officer during the Second World War. As such, he’d organized a ragtag commando unit to plunder Nazi technology. Called 30 Assault Unit RN, it ignored the rule book in its roughshod exploits. In the battle for Cherbourg, the unit was assigned the task of capturing German naval headquarters. Their behavior in savoring the spoils of war was described as “merry, courageous, amoral, loyal, lying toughs, hugely disinclined to take no for an answer from foe or fräulein.” Later, Fleming’s private army was subordinated to the team of British tech-pirates dubbed T-Forces. Five thousand strong, T-Forces advanced with Monty’s Twenty-first Army Group and the U.S. Army, looting any Nazi secrets churned up in the onslaught.

  Out of that experience, and the roguish exuberance of 30 Assault Unit RN, Fleming created 007, James Bond.

  Because the Weird Shit Division was in the same line of work as Fleming’s factual and fictional creations, Bill was a fan of the Bond books. Most of his first editions were signed by the author. Not only did he have all the Richard Chopping covers, but he also had the rarest Bond book of all: the recalled first edition of The Man with the Golden Gun, with the cover whose embossed golden gun had oxidized.

  Bill identified with Bond.

  They were both licensed to kill.

  * * *

  The Weird Shit Division was spawned by the atomic bomb.

  On August 2, 1939, about a month before the start of the Second World War, Albert Einstein wrote his famous letter to the president of the United States:

  Sir:

  Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy … Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration … This new phenomena would also lead to the construction of bombs …

  Roosevelt appointed a Uranium Committee and gave it $6,000 for experiments. By 1940, the press was full of speculation about nuclear fission. If uranium was bombarded with neutrons, the theory went, that might induce a nuclear reaction, producing more neutrons in a massive chain reaction that might escalate into a huge explosion in the blink of an eye. The result: an atomic bomb.

  But by the time the U.S. entered the war in 1941, you couldn’t find a mention of fission in the papers. It was as if the subject had never arisen. In Pentagon-speak, the bomb had “gone black.”

  Ironically, the large-scale U.S. atomic project started on December 6, 1941, the day before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. August 1942 saw it named the Manhattan Project. Right from the beginning, the secret had leaked like a sieve. Sure, it held until the dropping of the bomb on Japan, but in the meantime, the Soviet Union had acquired the most classified American technology in U.S. history. It exploded its own bomb within a few scant years.

  But if the Manhattan Project was a faulty security model, there was successful subterfuge with the Philadelphia Experiment.

  How’s this for science fiction?

  In 1943, scientists experimented with making navy ships invisible to radar by charging them with intense electromagnetic fields. The ship used as a guinea pig was the USS Eldridge, a navy destroyer berthed in Philadelphia. Huge electric generators and radio-frequency transmitters were used to wrap the ship with an electromagnetic cloak. The first test that July rendered the Eldridge invisible to the naked eye, with only the trough of displaced water under its hull proof that it was still there. Fifteen minutes later, it reappeared, and the crew complained of severe nausea and memory loss. The second test that October caused the Eldridge to vanish from its berth in Philadelphia and reappear a moment later some 250 miles away, at a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. During the time lapse, the ship and its new crew had been transported into a “parallel dimension.” Some of the crew had been atomized and were never seen again. Those who made it back with the Eldridge were either physically disabled or driven mad by the ordeal. Five of them had suffered a worse fate. While being transported through the other dimension, the ship had materially transmuted to accommodate human flesh. The Philadelphia Experiment had fused them right into the metal of the destroyer.

  Weird shit, huh?

  Some sort of paranormal mystery?

  An outlandish myth with a psychotic whiff of paranoia wrapped in conspiracy?

  In fact, the Soviets had a word for truth masked by fiction.

  Disinformatsiya.

  That marvel of disinformation had been the brainchild of Big Bad Bill’s predecessor in this office. Code-named Hardware, he was a legend both in and after his time. What Hardware had realized was that the best way to hide a super-classified secret in plain sight was to mix the truth with so much unbelievable science fiction that anyone divulging it would appear to be nuts. If the Pentagon was going to develop weird shit weapons like the atomic bomb in its non-existent black world, then what America needed was a keeper of its secrets: a Weird Shit Division in Washington that would function as an airlock between that black world and the white world of Uncle Sam’s public face.

  The British had used disinformation during the war. To protect the nation’s radar secrets from the Luftwaffe, RAF intelligence agents had leaked the myth that fighter/bomber command pilots could see in the dark because of all the carrots they ate as kids. Hardware had learned from that that disinformation takes on a life of its own once you seed it in the public’s imagination. Even today, it’s damn near impossible to avoid parents who pass on that disinformation as worldly wisdom: “Eat your carrots. They’re good for your eyes.”

  Bouncing off that, Hardware had crafted the mandate of the Weird Shit Division: If you spin the weird shit going on in the black world into even weirder shit and serve it to the public as “low-hanging fruit,” their collective imagination will spin your subterfuge into the weirdest shit of all.

  Ergo, Hardware’s lie about the phantom ship.

  Disinformation.

  The Philadelphia Experiment had indeed taken place. The test was known as “degaussing”—that is, trying to cancel a ship’s magnetic field by cloaking it with such intense electricity that nearby light and radar waves would distort. That optical illusion was supposed to render the vessel invisible to both the human eye and electronic sensors. What more could the navy ask for than invisible ships? Unfortunately, the degaussing degaussed the brains of the crew as well, because thoughts are nothing but nerve impulses triggered electrically. The Pentagon didn’t want mind-scrambled sailors babbling far and wide about what had happened to them, so the Weird Shit Division had mixed a lot of hooey with the facts to neutralize the truth.

  To this day, the Philadelphia Experiment is equated with kooky stuff like wormholes and parallel dimensions.

  And Stealth.

  * * *

  Big Bad Bill had a Stealth cover-up of his own to augment Hardware’s disinformation.

  The UFO had crashed in the small hours of the sweltering night of July 11, 1986. Those in the immediate area, and for many miles around, had heard a supersonic boom up in the black sky, then felt a thunderous pressure wave flatten the scrub on the ground. A moment later, whatever it was slammed into Saturday Peak, in a desert canyon twelve miles away from Bakersfield, California. The whole horizon lit up like the Fourth of July, with flames flashing heavenward as if they were shooting stars and the thunderclap from that enormous explosion deafening the ears of shocked onlookers.

  Within minutes, Bill had scr
ambled a Pentagon “red team” to lock down the site. Helicopters full of soldiers brandishing assault rifles and wearing night-vision goggles had swooped down on the area, which bordered the Sierra Nevadas and Sequoia National Park. Challenge their authority and you would get shot. Bill’s order was simple: Don’t let the secret out at any cost.

  With dozens of brushfires blazing on the edge of the forest, a cleanup crew from the Weird Shit Division set to work, gathering up every trace of what had crash-landed and then sifting the dirt within a thousand yards of the point of impact, before finally seeding the UFO’s crater with obsolete bits of metal that would have alien-hunters and conspiracy theorists scratching their heads for years.

  The seeded clues were from a vintage 1960s fighter.

  The fighter was a Voodoo.

  Disinformation, with black superstition attached.

  Hardware would have been proud.

  * * *

  The man who let the secret out was President Ronald Reagan. In November 1988, with the Soviet Union crumbling and the Pentagon itching for daylight tests—and the man himself on his way out of the Oval Office and yearning to be given credit—the commander-in-chief had revealed that a secret squadron of F-117A Stealth fighters had been flying out of a classified Nevada airfield for over five years. Unfortunately, one had crashed near Bakersfield in 1986.

  The Stealth was a weird-shaped thing. The product of pure math, physics, and algebraic formulae, it was a bunch of geometric angles somehow fashioned into the silhouette of a jet. It had none of the aerodynamic curves of a regular warplane. Instead, it carried a multitude of flat, ugly panels. Each surface—or facet—was angled in such a manner that it would reflect an incoming radar beam away, and thereby shrink the “radar signature” of the Stealth fighter down to the size of a wasp’s.

  You can’t shoot down what you can’t “see.”

  That the Stealth—unlike the bomb—had been kept secret for half a century, since the days of the Philadelphia Experiment, was testimony to the effectiveness of the Weird Shit Division and its commanders, Hardware and his successor, Big Bad Bill.

  How had they kept a secret that big for so long?

  You don’t fuck with Uncle Sam if you know what’s good for you. Those who had tried had mysteriously disappeared and never been seen again.

  Of course, of all the dirty little secrets of the black world, none was dirtier than the cover-up by the Weird Shit Division of what had happened in July 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico.

  That crazy UFO yarn, complete with clandestine autopsies on big-headed aliens.

  There was a clue to the baffling secret behind the Roswell Incident in the clutch of framed photos on the wall above Big Bad Bill’s shelf of Bond books. One photo, taken at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, in 1947, captured the Peenemünde Rocket Team. These 126 Nazi rocketeers were blasting off V-2 missiles for the Pentagon at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Heading them was SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun. In the group photo, he was the man in the front row with his hand in one pocket of his dark slacks. Roswell, New Mexico, was 125 miles east of the White Sands Proving Ground.

  The UFO that crash-landed there had been the darkest secret of the black world for well over half a century, and now that secret was in danger of public exposure on two fronts.

  A secret to acquire.

  And a secret to keep.

  The pile of papers stamped with the Nazi swastika had reached the Weird Shit Division by way of a dummy address in Switzerland. A little coercion had revealed that the package really came from a post office in central British Columbia. That had set off alarm bells in Big Bad Bill’s mind, for shortly after the Roswell Incident in 1947, the Skunk Mine in the Cariboo Mountains of that same Canadian province had imploded.

  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

  Was this confirmation?

  For here, on the computer screen in Bill’s Pentagon office, was a supposedly secret signature check by an FBI cyber cop at VICAP in Quantico, Virginia, on behalf of an RCMP cyber cop named Rusty Lewis at ViCLAS in Vancouver, British Columbia. The officers were searching for any case with a “Nazi swastika” signature. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bill had acquired unfettered access to everything known about everybody. So the Weird Shit Division’s search for links to “Nazi swastika” signatures like the one stamped on the pile of wartime documents had quickly revealed the RCMP’s own search for matches to hold-back evidence in a B.C. murder case.

  What kind of hold-back evidence?

  Bill had to know.

  According to the Mounties’ request to the FBI, authorization for information on the Vancouver case had to be obtained from the investigating officer, Sgt. Dane Winter.

  Bill reached for the last truly secure phone in America.

  This was a job for Mr. Clean.

  Tomorrowland

  Nordhausen, Germany

  April 4, 1945

  SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun had stood on this very spot not long ago and placed one hand on Fritz Streicher’s shoulder as the Hitler Youth gazed up at the vast night cosmos. Von Braun had come to Dora-Mittelbau to check on the progress of the concentration-camp slaves he himself had handpicked at Buchenwald. You could never be too paranoid in the Third Reich, as von Braun had learned at two o’clock in the morning on March 22, 1944, the day before his thirty-second birthday. That was the morning when, by the direct order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, three Gestapo agents had knocked on his apartment door and then shuffled him off to prison in Stettin for defying the SS. Even though time was now tight in the production of the V-2 “wonder weapon,” the rocketeer had nevertheless found a moment for the son of the slave-driving commandant who oversaw every aspect of the Third Reich’s secret armory.

  “One day,” von Braun had said, choosing his words with care, for he’d been arrested for voicing the fact that his future interest in the V-2 wasn’t as a weapon, “our rockets will have blown the Allies away. The same technology that will annihilate our enemies will then launch us into outer space.”

  The doctor of physics was a handsome, haughty man, the son of a German baron. As a boy, he had entered a school established by Frederick the Great, and soon became obsessed by the book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space) by Hermann Oberth. As a teen, von Braun had experimented with space-age propulsion by strapping a cluster of solid-fuel rockets to a wagon that he shot down a crowded street. From there, he moved on to tests at a vacant army proving ground, quickly winning a contract to develop weapons for the Nazis. Under a military grant, he earned his Ph.D. in the theoretical and practical problems of liquid-propellant rocket engines. By the age of thirty, von Braun was the head of technical development at Peenemünde. This area—south of Sweden, east of Denmark, north of Berlin—was an isolated, secure, wooded pocket of Germany, on the island of Usedom, where the mouth of the river Peene met the Baltic Sea. A huge complex at Peenemünde was home to two thousand rocketeers and four thousand other personnel. It was there, on October 3, 1942, that von Braun had first launched the best of Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffe—revenge weapons—the awesome V-2.

  The space age had begun.

  So here von Braun and Fritz had stood not so long ago, gazing up into the outer reaches of a new frontier while the Nazi rocketeer wowed the enthralled Hitler Youth with this promise of tomorrow.

  “Big, reliable, powerful rockets. That’s what the Reich needs. And the same rockets that we fire to defend our Fatherland will soon take us up to orbit the earth.”

  “Battle stations,” Fritz said, “shooting death rays. Missile shields raining rockets on the Untermenschen. Control space and we will control the world.”

  “Think bigger,” von Braun urged Fritz. “Think of the moon and beyond. Before you are my age, young man, I will land a man on the moon.”

  “You and my father,” Fritz corrected.

  “Yes,” von Braun said quickly. He glanced behind him at the tunnels burrowing
into Kohnstein Mountain to reassure the SS general’s son. “Without your father, I couldn’t build such rockets. One day, men will look back on what we created here and realize that this was the birth of everything to come.”

  * * *

  Operation Hydra—the opening raid of Operation Crossbow—had brought the Nazi rocketeer to Dora-Mittelbau.

  At 1:10 a.m. on August 18, 1943, the bam-bam of antiaircraft guns had jerked Wernher von Braun awake in his Peenemünde home. His head was muddy with confusion, but that disappeared when the first high explosives rocked his residence. The bombers were trying to catch and kill the V-2 engineers as they slept in their beds.

  Leaping out of bed, von Braun began to dress. He was interrupted by a blast that shattered his windows and blew the doors off their hinges. Half-dressed in a pajama top and trousers, with a trench coat draped over his shoulders and bedroom slippers on his feet, the rocketeer rushed out into the garden to stare up at the moonlit sky.

  Lancasters by the hundreds …

  Halifaxes, too …

  It looked as if RAF Bomber Command had ordered every plane it had to hit Peenemünde.

  Boom … Boom … Boom …

  The ground shook beneath him.

  Nearly eighteen hundred tons of bombs came tumbling out of the sky as waves of four-engine shadows—close to six hundred in all—passed across the mocking face of a cruel moon. The bomber stream was endless. Those who created the V-2s were targeted first, and then the bombers shifted their merciless sights to the production plant and the development works.

  Artificial fog from smoke generators obscured the rocket complex as von Braun made his way through the British bombing raid to the V-2 factory and his brain trust—the experimental station. Searchlights swept under the full moon while shells from Peenemünde’s flak batteries exploded in the sky. Target-marking flares descended from the British planes and were followed by deafening bomb blasts amid bursts of blinding light. By the time von Braun arrived at his think tank, at least twenty-five buildings in that development works—including House 4, the headquarters—were ablaze or damaged.