Swastika

by Michael Slade

  And if you tried?

  They’d come for you in the middle of the night. To hard-key the front door, they’d core the lock with a platinum tool driven in by a hammer blow, then snip the chain with bolt cutters and burst into your home like gangbusters. On being wrenched awake, all you’d see would be black silhouettes in body armor and Kevlar helmets. A Colt Commando snub-barreled assault rifle would pin your forehead to the pillow. Dazed and confused, you’d be dragged off into the night to a domestic version of Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. Your trial would be held in secret, for reasons of “national security.”

  “Pardon our jackboots. They’re the price of freedom.”

  Eradication. Disinformation. Compartmentalization. That was the model the Pentagon had designed to replace the sieve that had leaked the secrets of the atomic bomb. “Plausible deniability.” “Need to know.” There were now so many layers spread out horizontally in a system meant to be denied that even those who ought to be in the know weren’t. Who knew what technologies were being developed in the Pentagon’s black world? It was so labyrinthine and unaccountable that even the president was in the dark.

  What kept it glued together was phantasmal fear.

  Fear of the unknown.

  It also helped to have alien fear-mongering in the tabloids. Stories reporting orbs of light hovering in the sky. Stories claiming that the Pentagon was test-flying recovered alien spacecraft. Whistleblowers going public with revelations of secret work being done on otherworldly UFOs near Area 51.

  Who knew what to believe?

  Occasionally, however, some snoop closed in on the hidden truth. For at the heart of the black world, there sat a secret so dirty and volatile that—no matter what the cost—it could never be allowed to see light. The cover-up had been so successful that the truth had stayed suppressed since 1947. The Weird Shit Division would stop at nothing to keep it that way, so Big Bad Bill’s mission for Mr. Clean was simple: Find out what Sergeant Winter knows about the Roswell Incident and the Nazi swastika papers. And if he’s within a hundred miles of the truth, take him out.

  Mr. Clean had eradicated a lot of stains for Bill.

  But this was something special.

  Mr. Clean was going to add a Mountie to the many notches on his gun.

  Two guns, actually.

  One for the hit.

  The other as backup.

  The gun for the hit was a German-made Heckler & Koch SOCOM (Special Operations Command). When the Pentagon went searching for a new sidearm for special ops groups like the Navy SEALS, the H&K was the weapon of choice. It chambered a .45 ACP-caliber round from a twelve-cartridge magazine and came with both an attachment for a combined laser/infrared spotter and a threaded barrel for a silencer. Resistant to saltwater spray and mud, the pistol had withstood a battery of tests so harsh that it could be said that the Mk.23 was indestructible. It was the ideal down-and-dirty weapon for Mr. Clean.

  Ironically, his backup gun was Canadian-made. Who would have thought that a nation bent on gun control would have come on so fast and strong as a manufacturer of quality handguns? Quality counts in a life-and-death firefight, so Mr. Clean—a cautious assassin who valued his own life—packed the Para-Ordnance Warthog as a lifesaver.

  A Canadian gun smuggled into Canada from the States to take out the greatest of Canadian icons.

  You gotta love it, thought Mr. Clean.

  The “kits” that Ajax and Lysol had smuggled across the Canadian border contained more exotic, high-tech spy gizmos than that lovable old coot Q had ever supplied to James Bond. A country that can put a man on the moon and build undetectable bombers can certainly breach any security wall put up by hick cops. The Weird Shit Division had surreptitious access to police communications around the globe. So even before Mr. Clean had driven the rental car off the airport parking lot, he was eavesdropping on both the Mountie dispatchers at Dane Winter’s RCMP detachment in North Vancouver and all of Winter’s private radio and cell calls.

  Ain’t technology wonderful?

  As Ajax and Lysol were lifting off in a plane they’d chartered to fly them north to the Cariboo, Mr. Clean set off on the same route that the sergeant had driven less than an hour ago, on his return from the Razorback. Intercepted dispatch calls from the detachment told Mr. Clean that a murder had been discovered at Lonsdale Quay. Winter’s calls informed him that the sergeant was responding to the new killing, and that it was somehow tied to the murder of the African refugee under the Mosquito Creek overpass. Mr. Clean knew all about that murder because the photo he’d been given of Sergeant Winter was from yesterday’s edition of The Vancouver Times. The photo showed Winter and another Horseman, identified as Insp. Zinc Chandler, standing over the corpse of a huge black man who’d been impaled on a riverbank.

  Lonsdale Quay.

  That was the place to start.

  North Vancouver

  To see him leaning nonchalantly against the waterfront rail, a camera slung around his neck, you would mistake him for a tourist awed by the panoramic spread at the foot of the mountains. Mount Baker, in Washington State, dominated the southeast horizon. The downtown skyline across the harbor reflected back from the sparkling brine of Burrard Inlet. Here the SeaBus chugged toward the North Shore; there a seaplane jumped from wave to wave in its effort to take off for Vancouver Island. The green oasis of Stanley Park and the tented spider webs of the suspension bridge masked the freighters anchored out in English Bay.

  In fact, the camera—the eye and ear of the Weird Shit Division—was digitally ogling the two men on the quay outside the high-rise murder scene. One of those men was Sgt. Dane Winter. Mr. Clean recognized the other man as Cort Jantzen, the reporter whose headshot had accompanied his story about the body beside Mosquito Creek.

  Built in to the camera lens was a parabolic mike so sensitive that it caught every breath. It sent the words spoken by Winter and Jantzen up to the plug in Mr. Clean’s ear. At the same time, audio-visual information was bounced off a military satellite and transmitted in real time to a receiver on the wide desk in Big Bad Bill’s office at the Pentagon.

  Bill studied the Mountie onscreen.

  Bill listened to the reporter describe how he was contacted by the killer who carved swastikas into foreheads.

  Bill heard the Mountie ask the reporter for copies of everything to add to his file.

  When the conversation was over and the two men onscreen parted ways, Bill called Mr. Clean with pointed instructions: “Get hold of that file no matter what the cost.”

  Spoils of War

  Nordhausen, Germany

  April 11, 1945

  The Nazis had tried to stop them with a barrage of V-2s. Twelve of the supersonic rockets had been launched from Holland toward the Remagen bridgehead, where the U.S. Army was preparing to cross the Rhine. The missiles had landed in a scattered pattern around the Ludendorff Bridge, but just one of Hitler’s vengeance weapons had done damage. Striking a house about three hundred yards east of the bridge, it had killed three American GIs.

  Still, Major Bill Hawke had been intrigued. The rockets explained why this intelligence officer from something called “Special Mission V-2” was embedded with front-line U.S. troops.

  Teamed with the 3rd Armored Division for a rapid advance into central Germany, the 104th Infantry—the so-called Timberwolves—had broken out of the Remagen bridgehead on March 25, 1945, to drive a spearhead deep into the heart of Hitler’s Reich. As the Nazi war machine crumbled beneath the treads of their Sherman tanks, the GIs were forced to battle it out with pockets of fanatical SS resisters, desperate, hungry irregulars in the ragtag Volkssturm, and Werewolf commandos in the Hitler Youth.

  Timberwolves against Werewolves.

  The last howl of Hitler’s Reich.

  As the American troops rolled inexorably into Germany, Bill Hawke followed the Werewolf phenomenon on his radio. Radio Werewolf—the latest propaganda ploy by Joseph Göbbels—whipped up the clandestine commandos, inciting them to leap out of th
e woods when the Allies passed by and inflict as many casualties as possible. In the Ruhr, Hawke had witnessed a Werewolf assault. A pack of wild-eyed youths had swarmed a single file of tanks, yowling as they scrambled up to engage the turret crews hand-to-hand. GIs old enough to be their fathers had to shoot them dead in order to survive themselves.

  The intel Hawke was receiving reported Werewolf assassination squads creating mayhem all over the Reich. On March 25, the day this drive began, young commandos had taken out Franz Oppenhoff, the new American-appointed mayor of Aachen. A pack of ten-year-olds had ambushed GIs in Koblenz, and Werewolves had killed three of the top brass at Frankfurt am Main. The Yanks were appalled by how young some of their attackers were. Two of those they’d executed as spies for attempting to blow up an Allied supply convoy were sixteen and seventeen, and one young POW was no more than eight.

  Hitler as Pied Piper, thought Hawke.

  Still, nothing could stop the U.S. juggernaut. The thrust continued through cold, gray drizzle and dark, forbidding nights. Towns with tongue-twisting names—Holzhausen, Niederingelbach, Dalwigsthal, Eibelshausen—were overrun. Easter Sunday and April Fools’ Day slipped by in the push. It took only two weeks for the 3rd and the 104th to reach the Harz Mountains, and as they neared the town of Nordhausen, Hawke received an intelligence advisory that he passed on to both commanders.

  “Expect something a little unusual in the Nordhausen area.”

  * * *

  On April 11, 1945—the morning the U.S. Army liberated Nordhausen—Maj. Bill Hawke was driven into Boelcke Kaserne in a Jeep. Hawke was a man who physically resembled his name. His hair was so closely cropped to his skull that it could have been the hood of that feathered raptor; his hooked nose mimicked the predator’s beak. His shifty eyes were always on the lookout for prey, and the fingers that chain-smoked Lucky Strikes were as long, as thin, and as bony as talons. A comic-strip addict, Hawke was hooked on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, so hunting for rockets was a military mission tailored to him.

  Stepping out of the Jeep and dusting off his khakis, Hawke gazed around the charred ruins of Boelcke Kaserne, still smoking from the week-old RAF firebombing. At least fifteen hundred corpses were scattered around ground craters or rotting in the barracks. The four hundred or so survivors were little more than skeletons covered with skin. As the major crossed from the Jeep to a shattered concrete building, he glanced down into a crater that had been converted into an open grave. Some of those at the bottom were still alive. For days, they had been struggling to get out from under the weight of those piled on top, but the task was too much for their starved, emaciated muscles.

  “Private,” Hawke yelled back to the driver, “they could use some help here!”

  He entered the battered barracks.

  So this was what the Nazis meant by the term Vernichtungslager. This extermination camp for ill prisoners didn’t use the poison gas the Nazis saved for Jews, but rather let nature take its course through slow starvation and lack of medical care.

  Bedded down on straw in nauseating filth, men too weak to move lay alongside their dead comrades. Some of these wretches were decaying even before they passed on. Others were stacked like cordwood under the staircase to the second floor. Bombs from the British air attacks had ripped large holes through the roof and ground flesh and bones into the cement floor. The stench from the decomposing corpses soured the sooty air, and no matter where the major looked, he saw mouths gaping with horror. It was like stumbling into the midst of the Black Death. Hawke had seen enough.

  Lighting a cigarette, the major went back outside.

  Now there were zombies lurching around the craters and tripping over the dead lining the ground. These living dead were bug-eyed men in baggy striped rags. Their legs and arms were devoid of flesh, their legs barely able to keep them on feet so swollen that they couldn’t take shoes. As they weaved and tottered about Nordhausen camp, Hawke noticed the prison numbers and colored triangles on their ill-fitting coats: green for real criminals, pink for homosexuals, red for political prisoners, and yellow for Jews. Numbers were tattooed on their bony arms as well. The backs of most coats had horizontal stripes crossing the vertical ones, evidence of the lashings that had cut the material and torn into raw flesh.

  As Hawke stood out in the bomb-cratered yard, sucking the life out of his Lucky Strike, a shattered man with one foot in the grave shuffled toward him. With tears trickling down his pale, blood-drained face, the shrunken bone-rack stopped in his tracks, struggled to straighten his hunched-over spine, and slowly raised a shaky arm to salute his liberator.

  Crushing the Lucky under his boot, Hawke snapped his own hand up to his helmet.

  “What’s that, buddy?”

  The Frenchman was trying to speak English.

  “… something fantastic …”

  Hawke cocked an ear.

  “… inside the mountain …”

  The Frenchman lowered his arm, one knobby finger jittering as it pointed north.

  “Major!”

  It was the driver.

  “The Third Armored liaison is on the radio.”

  Hawke crossed to the Jeep and took the transmitter. Crooking his thumb back at the liberated prisoner, he told the driver to “Give the frog a drink.”

  “Hawke,” Hawke announced.

  “Major,” replied the voice on the receiver, “you’d better get up here pronto and see what we’ve got.”

  * * *

  The Jeep bounced off along the road across this alpine plateau, leaving behind the burghers of Nordhausen to bury the dead of Boelcke Kaserne under the muzzles of outraged GIs’ guns. A hundred German civilians had been rounded up on the streets of the deeply Nazified town and were put to work as Hawke and his driver bumped off toward the southern slope of Mount Kohnstein, a broad ridge that hunched up like the hackles of a werewolf about to spring. While the town folks were divided into work crews—some to gather the bodies, others to dig mass graves with spades or their bare hands—the Jeep swung up alongside the railway yard and stopped at a T-intersection in front of the SS camp.

  The left arm of the T led to the gates of the Dora compound.

  The right arm of the T ran along the face of the Kohnstein to a pair of huge tunnels.

  “Turn right,” ordered Hawke.

  One of the Timberwolves met them in the junkyard at the entrance to Tunnel B. From there, railway tracks ran into the camouflaged hole in the mountain. While part of the 3rd Armored Division had battled its way into Nordhausen, the rest of the tank force and the 104th Infantry Division had entered this underground works from the north, through the Junkers Nordwerk. A mile-long slog through the Kohnstein had brought them out here, and the GIs had then angled west to liberate the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. What they had seen in the tunnels had prompted the call to Hawke.

  “Show me,” the major said.

  The Timberwolf ushered the intel officer past rows of V-2 combustion chambers that looked like hourglasses that had run out of time. Passing beneath the camouflage netting that hid the tunnel’s yawning mouth from RAF bombsights, they stepped into the subterranean gloom of a gigantic limestone shaft with a semicircular roof supported by steel beams. Electric wires with dim yellow lights dangled down from the murky ceiling like tentacles. Occasionally, there were bright bursts from flashbulbs triggered by an army photographer.

  Then Hawke saw them.

  “Jesus-fucking-Christ!”

  The Mittelwerk tunnels were like a space-age magician’s cave. Freight cars and trucks loaded with long, slender, finned missiles—there could have been a hundred of them—were strung along the tracks. Orderly rows of V-2 parts and sub-assemblies were laid out on work benches and shelves. It reminded Hawke of the assembly lines in Detroit. Some of the hardware pieces he recognized from weapons salvaged after earlier attacks: an Argus pulse jet destined for the “flying bomb,” a gyrocompass destined for the nose of a rocket, compressed air bottles. His footsteps echoed down from the
ceiling as he walked around, his boots treading concrete slick with oil.

  Drawers, some half-open, were full of tools.

  A coffee cup sat on an SS guard’s desk beside a tented book.

  Signs in German and other languages warned workers not to touch this or to go in that direction.

  Work had evidently stopped just the day before. The assembly line still had its power switched on, precision machinery remained in working order, and the ventilation system continued to hum. It was as if the factory force had gone out for lunch and would soon return to work.

  Hawke stopped beside one of the railcars to study the guts of the V-2 rocket on its flatbed. The metal outer skin had yet to be welded on, so he could see its internal workings, pipes, and wires. As an intel officer with deep roots in the American Southwest, Hawke had heard rumblings about a top-secret project established to create an astonishing weapon called an atomic bomb. Hitler’s Third Reich was in its final countdown, but there would still be war in the Pacific. What the U.S. Army had here was a proven delivery system that could be armed with an atomic weapon—if such a thing was feasible—to blast the Japs back to the Stone Age.

  It was true what they said back home.

  God did bless America.

  * * *

  From the Mittelwerk factory, the Jeep carried Hawke back past the SS camp to the gates of the slave compound. There, flanked by electric fences on both sides, he walked between the administration and Gestapo buildings to the roll-call square, where most of the six hundred remaining slaves could be found.

  The major examined the gallows and the Pfahlhangen post, then went down to “the bunker” along the southern edge of the camp. This prison within a prison was normally so tightly packed with condemned saboteurs that none of them could lie down and rest. It was all a torturous prelude to slow strangulation on the gallows.

  From there, the major strolled up toward the crematorium, a small, shallow-peaked building with a huge phallic chimney jutting up from the roof. As far as he could tell from the ghosts he saw drifting around the barracks, most of those deported to Dora to build the wonder weapons had been Russian, Polish, or French. The Jews came later, after the Nazis had fled Stalin’s Commies on the eastern front.