The square brick chimney of the crematorium belched oily smoke night and day.
* * *
The screams!
Fritz was in one of those trances he found it hard to break away from. He had snapped out of it long enough to step back into line beside his father and brother, but the sparks above Nordhausen had hypnotized him again. If he listened hard enough, he could hear plaintive bellows. Shouting from the factory tunnels at his back. Screams from the blazing inferno of Boelcke Kaserne. Shrieks from all the ghosts that haunted Dora’s roll-call square.
The square where his Über-father had enforced his will.
“The Will to Power.”
Just as Nietzsche had prophesized—and as Fritz had learned by rote in the Hitler Youth.
Rousted from their barracks before the break of dawn, the factory slaves began each day in the Appellplatz, where heads were counted and punishments imposed. Fritz thought back to one cold winter morning that he knew he’d never forget.
“Achtung!”
That day, thousands of wooden prisoners’ clogs had smacked the paving stones with the order to stand at attention. The night before, one of the slaves had tried to escape, so all of the prisoners had been awakened early for the punishment known as Stillstehen. Freezing sleet had begun to fall as the men came together in the Appellplatz. Hemmed in by the dripping, low, flat buildings of Camp Dora, they had waited for hours in a U-shaped formation while the inclement weather got worse.
Standing …
Standing …
Standing still as one by one the weakest dropped.
By the time Fritz had arrived with his father and brother, the sleet was turning to snow. The Häftlinge—the prisoners—were clad only in rags, and the biting cold had frozen the stiff tatters to their skin. Some leaned on makeshift crutches because of putrefying wounds. Those with TB spit up the last of their lungs. Those with pleurisy shook from fever. Those with dysentery shitted out their guts, and the yellow discharge hardened to ice on their buttocks. As each weakling dropped, the thinning ranks huddled closer together for warmth. With not an ounce of fat to insulate their bones from the chill, the men shuddered and shook while haggard eyes bulged out of waxy skulls.
“Durch Kamin!”
“Through the chimney.”
That’s all he had to say, the Lagerführer who ran this punishment theater for Fritz’s father. The words echoed what every slave had heard in the standard welcoming speech: “You came in through that gate, and you’ll leave through that chimney.”
To emphasize the point, the Lagerführer snapped his swagger stick like a whip at each fallen man, then pointed up to the crematorium on the hill, which even at that early hour belched gray smoke at the tumbling flakes.
Dead or dying, the slaves on the ground would be ash by the next day.
“Auf der Flucht erschossen!”
Another SS expression.
“Killed during an escape attempt.”
That was the cue for Horse Face to haul the attempted escapee out into the square, where a trestle had been erected near the central gallows.
Horse Face was the Lagerältester, a criminal inmate who wore a black triangle as a sign that he was a hangman and torturer. Strong, swarthy, and dark-haired, he had a face shaped like a horse’s, with a low forehead above a prominent chin. Psychologically, he was ideal for this job. The rage that seethed within him could be quelled for a while by the death of a hapless slave.
“Fünfundzwanzig am Arsch!” the guards began to chant.
“Twenty-five on the ass.”
Horse Face bent the attempted escapee over the trestle and tore the ragged trousers off his behind. He then lit into the man with his cudgel, thrashing his buttocks and genitals to shreds.
“Fünfundzwanzig am Arsch!”
The screams!
“Pfahlhangen!” ordered the Lagerführer, moving the program on to the next act. Fritz felt as if he were Caesar’s son in the emperor’s box at the Roman Colosseum. Standing in the open end of the U, the Hitler Youth had the best view of the roll-call square. Not only could he watch what went on at center stage, but he could also catch the reaction of the crowd.
Feed him to the lions!
Thumbs-down to any gladiator on the ground!
An icy wind was picking up as the Pfahlhangen began. The Pfahl was an upright post that had been erected next to the gallows. Horse Face dragged the attempted escapee across to the post, tied the slave’s hands together in the small of his back, attached a pulley cord to his wrists, then hoisted him up. So excruciating was the shoulder pain that the slave began screeching again. Before abandoning the man to his fate, Horse Face strung the sign for would-be escapers about his neck.
“Hurra, hurra! Ich bin wieder da!” it read.
“Hurrah, hurrah! I’m back again!”
That done, the time had arrived for the Gestapo to harvest its bounty of flesh. The first fifty rockets, delivered back in January 1944, had proved to be so flawed because of poor welding, shoddy electrical connections, and other factory problems that many disintegrated right after launch. To get to the bottom of the repeated test-fire disasters, Wernher von Braun had sent Dieter Grau, one of his engineers, to the underground factory. After probing its assembly line, Grau had found the cause to be sabotage.
The slaves could undermine the rockets in many ways. They knew just where to loosen or tighten a screw to interfere with a V-2’s performance. They would urinate on the wiring to short-circuit electrical contacts. They would accept faulty parts that didn’t meet specifications, or fail to install vital components. They would make welds on fins that couldn’t withstand launch stresses. No matter the cause, the effect was the same: Nazi rockets blew up or veered off course.
The SS cure for sabotage was to call in the Gestapo, who now ruled the Mittelwerk factory with an iron grip. A network of informers escaped torture and abuse by snitching on others when the rockets failed to work. Von Braun’s missiles were so critical to the survival of the Reich that no quarter was given to those who threatened V-2 production. To fool with the Gestapo was to end up like this.
“Stillgestanden!” the Lagerführer barked.
Their boots shining like polished black steel, Streicher’s Gestapo henchmen marched across to the six-hooked gallows in the center of the quadrangle. The snow was slanting into the square on the wind, piercing the eyes and ears of shivering slaves. Each sub-zero gust made the ropes blow this way and that. Fritz couldn’t tell if it was the weather or the Gestapo’s list of saboteurs that was wrenching the sobs from frozen lungs.
When the first number was announced, Horse Face grabbed the doomed prisoner from his place in line, cinched his wrists behind his back, then hauled him to the gallows beside the wretch suspended from the Pfahl post.
“It was a scrap of leather!” the condemned man shouted. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I took it to make a belt. I’ve lost too much weight! My trousers won’t stay up!”
The trembling man faltered and crumpled to his knees. Horse Face kicked him, caving in his ribs. The next kick smashed in the slave’s face. The Lagerältester yanked him onto a stool beneath one of the ropes and slipped the noose around the groaning man’s neck.
Horse Face mumbled as he kicked away the stool.
Slow strangulation was the Gestapo specialty, so they made sure the drop wasn’t long enough to snap the cervical vertebra. Instead, the man was left to strangle by his own weight.
Twelve saboteurs were hanged that winter morning. Two gallows’ full. Finally, the Lagerführer called out, “Fertig!” That marked the end of that punishment and time for work, punishment of another kind.
Thousands of slaves from the square were herded out through the concentration camp’s gate to march the quarter mile to the mountain tunnels. Those who were snitched on that day by the Gestapo’s spies would end up hanging on the gallows at roll call the next morning.
Streicher had consulted his watch. It was almost six a.m. “Fritz, Han
s, hungry? Time for a hot breakfast.”
As Fritz had turned to walk away that winter morning, he’d glanced back over his shoulder. Snow had turned those who had dropped during Stillstehen into heaps of white ice. The same had happened to the first six saboteurs, who’d been cut down from the gallows and discarded on the paving stones. The six who were still hanging from their nooses twirled with the gusts of wind that blew across the quadrangle. The snowdrift at the bottom of the Pfahl post was red with blood that had dripped from the would-be escapee’s gashes. No longer moving, he’d frozen to death.
If Fritz listened hard enough, he could still hear him scream.
Razorback
Cascade Mountains, British Columbia
May 26, Now
At just after dawn on this clear-skied morning, the helicopter lifted up off its pad on Sea Island, in the mouth of the Fraser River, and began a glorious flight up the inland valley. Overnight winds from the west had cleared the valley of air pollution. Sitting in the seat beside the chopper’s pilot, Dane faced the dazzling fire mask of the rising sun as it peered over the stockade of jagged eastern peaks.
This flight to the Mountain—for him, it was always the Mountain, with a capital M—had actually begun decades ago, when Dane was only three.
They call it “the Graveyard of the Air,” that stretch of 120 air miles east from Vancouver to Princeton, in the heart of the Cascade Mountains. Too many pilots have crashed there, and some of their planes have never been found. The dangers are always multitudinous, but winter is the worst. Storms sweeping in from the Pacific are hurled abruptly upward as they batter the precipitous walls of the Cascades. Turbulent air screams over the towering ridges and plummets down the lee side in a whirling maelstrom, just like rapids do over rocks in rivers. Fierce winds race at all angles, for mountains also brew up their own fantastic storms. The result is a standing wave—a waterfall of wind—that can disappear from under a plane with a sickening jolt, like a floor collapsing beneath your feet.
And then there’s ice.
In an instant, damp mountain air can plaster a plane with tons of solid rime, weighting it down appreciably and disrupting the airflow that keeps the wings lifted up.
In 1945, on his liberation from the Stalag Luft POW camp, Keith Winter had returned to Canada from Bomber Command and applied to join the RCMP. The Mounties reorganized Air Division in 1946, staffing it with recruits who’d flown operations in the war. Keith rose quickly to pilot staff sergeant on the West Coast, where he flew a Beaver floatplane on the Fraser River.
Later, Keith’s son, Troy, had followed his father into the red serge and Air Division. Dane’s dad was promoted up the ranks to helicopter sergeant of the RCMP’s JetRanger. He and Papa became known as “the flying Winters.” The winter of the accident, Keith’s sister-in-law had suffered a stroke in Princeton. Because it wasn’t known how long she would live, Troy had rented a private plane to fly both his mother and his wife inland to be at his aunt’s bedside. Papa, in a cast with a broken leg, had stayed in Vancouver with three-year-old Dane.
Before that day was out, Keith was a widower and Dane was an orphan.
In the jargon of pilots who braved the Graveyard of the Air, Troy and his passengers had run into a “cumulo-granitus” cloud. The weather in the Cascade Mountains had changed en route, and the plane, ambushed by the shifting conditions, had struck a snowy peak. Just to the east of Mount Slesse—where a North Star had crashed back in 1956, killing all sixty-two people aboard—a search pilot had spotted a metallic glint in the cirque of the Razorback. Closer examination revealed it to be the tail section of a plane bearing the fuselage number of the one that Troy had rented. But before the bodies could be recovered, an avalanche had buried the wreck under tons of snow. To this day, the Razorback remained their grave.
* * *
The Fraser River snaked along the valley like molten gold. Upstream, the bedroom communities of Greater Vancouver gave way to the fertile farmlands of rural enclaves: Langley, Matsqui, Abbotsford, and Chilliwack. Beneath the helicopter, boats and log booms carved wakes along the river while rush-hour traffic began to clog the Trans-Canada Highway. Dead ahead loomed the peaks of the bloodthirsty Cascades, their icy fangs running red with the flush of dawn. Veering southeast off the main artery, the chopper tracked the Chilliwack River past Cultus Lake, whose waters sparkled with silver as if to promote the steelhead angling for which it was famous. The overhead rotor thumped louder as they gained altitude, climbing over Slesse Park, with its monument to those who’d died in the 1956 crash, then soaring up along an evergreen slope and around the shoulder of a wicked rampart of rock.
Dane yawned several times to unplug his ears. The helicopter flew by an ugly scar that had been gouged out of the vertical, gray granite cliff at 7,600 feet. The scar marked the spot where, driven down by a ferocious wave of wind, the North Star had crumpled and broken apart, before plummeting another two thousand feet.
“The Razorback,” the pilot said, pointing. And there it was to the east—the Mountain that had crushed the life out of Dane’s father, mother, and grandmother.
Like a stegosaurus, the Razorback had staggered triangular plates jutting up along its ridge spine.
“We’ll set down there,” the pilot told both passengers through the headphones.
Though it was late May, the dead-end valley was still an avalanche cauldron. The chopper closed in on a flattish saddle between two precipitous walls of rock, a spot selected by the pilot because it had no snowcap to drop on the landing site. At 8,200 feet, it was near the summit of the Razorback. So precariously unstable were the snow masses clinging to this horseshoe of icebound pinnacles that the thumping of the rotors as they flew over the cirque sent tons of white thundering down the right-angled cliffs like a waterfall.
As the chopper landed, snow billowed from the ground.
Two men climbed down from the helicopter. The pilot remained in the cockpit … to be ready, just in case. Dane wore the Mounties’ famous red serge, an icon almost as internationally recognizable as the Coca-Cola logo. The other man’s tunic was also red, but the rest of his uniform differed. Instead of the Stetson, he wore a Glengarry hat with a regimental bison-head badge on the side. Instead of blue breeches with a yellow side-stripe, he wore a kilt with a sporran. Instead of riding boots with spurs, he wore knee-high argyll socks with red garters and white spats over black oxfords. Tucked into the top of his right sock was a boot knife: the sgian dubh.
Every thread in the tartan of the kilt had meaning. The background theme color matched Dane’s dark blue riding breeches and the saddle blanket of the Musical Ride. The scarlet cross-hatch picked up the red tunic of the frontier riders of the plains. The yellow thread represented Dane’s cavalry stripe; the sienna brown thread the bison at the heart of the Mounties’ badge; the forest green thread the maple leaves around the edge of their crest; the sky blue thread their new peacekeeping role with the United Nations. The accent color was white, which has spiritual significance for Native peoples and symbolizes strength and endurance. White was also the color of the lanyard that Dane had strung around his neck and attached to the butt of his gun. If he dropped his weapon in the heat of a shoot-out, it would still be at hand.
“Ready?” the pipe major asked.
Sucking in a deep breath, Dane nodded and walked to the edge of a precipice that plunged thousands of feet to the constantly stirring, crevassed snowfield below. Then he crooked his right arm to his hat in the RCMP salute.
The first note of the last post cut cleanly through the thin air of the mountain wilderness. Keith had done his duty both in war and in peace, and the time had come for Dane to do his duty by Papa. Troy had gone to his grave here, so the bugle blew for his duty, too.
Old Celtic legend holds that of all the musical instruments created, the bagpipes speak to the other world. The dead can hear them, and know they are mourned. That’s why the lone piper bids farewell to the fallen at Mountie funerals, and it’s why the w
heeze of filling bagpipes sounded now, followed by drone pipes and the finger-holed chanter mourning Keith and Troy with a Scottish lament, “Flowers of the Forest.”
As he listened to the pipes and stood mute in the minute of silence that followed, Dane experienced a strange epiphany. All his life, he had feared this dreaded place, but now that he was up here at the top of the world, where Gabriel could be blowing his trumpet at the gates of heaven, the sergeant was overwhelmed by the awesome energy of the Mountain. We all have to die and rest somewhere, and no place on earth could be more exultant than this.
His soul leaped at the bugle call of “The Rouse”—what the layman incorrectly calls reveille—its stirring notes calling out to the fallen in the next and better realm. Dane found himself awaking to who he was as a man, as if all the threads of his being had woven together into a pattern with as much meaning for him as that tartan had for the Mounted Police.
Reaching into his pocket for his Swiss Army knife, he opened the box of cremated remains and slit the plastic sack with the blade. As the blue windbag of the pipes wheezed again, Dane scattered his grandfather’s ashes to the breeze, watching as they drifted out over the valley, then wafted down slowly to rest at long last with the spirits of his beloved wife, his dutiful son, and his daughter-in-law.
With the honors for Keith and Troy complete, the goodbye turned to the mother and the grandmother Dane could not remember. If there was a more inspiring tune in this world than “Amazing Grace” played on the bagpipes, he had yet to hear it. Echoes from the Razorback’s steeples joined the notes of the lone piper as the wilderness honored the Winters with its phantom pipe band.
* * *
Less than ten minutes after the rotors of the chopper had ceased whirling back at the heliport—and while he was still changing out of the red serge and into plainclothes—Dane got a call on his cell.
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