On closer inspection, the killers realized that the binding wasn’t leather.
The binding was human skin.
Nor was the crest heraldic. It was a map-like tattoo stretched over a German-language copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Centered on the workbench was a sheaf of Second World War blueprints, calculations, and experiment notes—all printed on paper headed with the Nazi swastika and stamped with the ultra-secret warning of the Streicherstab.
Had they found the Holy Grail?
Like the documents that had been sent to the Pentagon with the extortion demand, these yellowing plans were just the warm-up, not the mother lode.
But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Perhaps deeper in the mine. Down where a mysterious 1947 explosion had obliterated sought-after Nazi technology—or so the Weird Shit Division had thought.
“Let’s go deeper,” said Lysol.
Ajax led.
Flanking the hole in the cavern, where the shaft continued into the black heart of the mountain, were two coat stands. From one hung the uniform of an SS storm trooper, and from the other the outfit of a Red Army colonel. Both were stained with blood, as were the helmets crowning both poles.
“This psycho needs a squeezing.”
“Coming up,” Ajax said.
The blood trail began not far beyond a meat hook that had been screwed into the rock. At this depth, there was no light from any source, but that made no difference to the killers’ ability to see. Their night-vision lenses operated on the principles of image intensification and infrared radiation. They amplified small amounts of light from the moon and the stars, and picked up on the energy emitted by all objects regardless of the ambient light conditions. Sensor readings determined which technology was to be used to supply the spooks’ night vision at any given moment.
Using infrared, Ajax and Lysol tracked the blood trail down to a barrier blocking the mine.
A blood pool stained the ground.
Here, the shaft appeared to have imploded. Millions of tons of rubble had crushed everything in sight, and the force released by whatever had gone wrong had both fractured and fused the granite into something strange and new.
Weird science.
An untapped force of nature.
The force had a name.
Zero point.
* * *
So accustomed to the subterranean silence had the spelunking killers become that when the blast of goose-step music roared down into the nether realm, they almost jumped out of their skins. Their cool killer training deserted them with the shock.
The Nazi had returned.
Neue Deutsche Härte heavy metal rock was cranked up to ear-splitting decibels.
FZZZZZZZ …
CRAAACKKKK …
The master of lightning, reincarnated, was at work.
Their H&K .45s leading the way, the Pentagon hit men retreated from the deep black hole.
Creeper
Vancouver
May 27, Now
Mr. Clean had spent the afternoon stalking the meddling Mountie around this one-horse city, gleaning intelligence with his parabolic mike and the other eavesdropping gizmos from his bag of tricks. At Special X and The Vancouver Times, Winter had fattened his case file with photocopies of everything pertinent to the swastika killings, then—after dinner alone at a Greek restaurant—he’d taken the file home for bedtime reading.
This spook had a black world answer for every obstacle. Sitting on a seawall bench out front of Winter’s home—just another jogger enjoying the balmy late May night with what appeared to be an athletic bag at his feet—Mr. Clean had looked down at what could have been a cellphone but was actually an infrared sensor that was invading the wall of the Mountie’s bedroom and tracking his body heat as he sat in bed.
The bedroom light had burned until 10:45, then it went out and the heat signature elongated, a sign that the cop was flat on the mattress.
Sweet dreams, thought Mr. Clean.
Nutcracker sweet.
For over an hour, as the spook’s watch crept past midnight, the cop hadn’t stirred. Satisfied that it was safe for him to pull a Watergate, Mr. Clean had slinked across the seawall to the shrub garden in front of the Mountie’s low-rise condo building. Hidden by the arced tails of a monkey tree, he’d climbed the downspout and pulled himself onto the balcony of Winter’s second-story suite.
Having got a floor plan for the suite upstairs off a realtor’s website, the skulker knew the general layout of the rooms within. At this end of the balcony, perimeter-alarmed glass doors opened into the living room, with the dining room and kitchen beyond. The hall at the rear ran parallel to the balcony, past a walk-in closet and the bathroom to the Mountie’s bedroom in the far corner. There, the cop slept what could be his final sleep.
Time to suit up.
In the moon shadows of the monkey tree, Mr. Clean silently unzipped the athletic bag. He was already sheathed in the armor of his Kevlar jogging suit. A gunslinger holster got clamped around his thigh. Into the holster went the Para-Ordnance Warthog, the hit man’s backup iron. Eyepiece, earpiece, mouthpiece. He outfitted his head with the same night-vision goggles and communications paraphernalia that Ajax and Lysol were wearing up in the Skunk Mine. Now he was satellite-tied.
The jogging suit came equipped with Velcro fasteners. The pouch affixed to his left pec held an infrared digital camera with an upload link to the eye in the sky. The pouch affixed to his right pec contained an air-jet tranquilizer gun that would give the sleeping cop a blast that wouldn’t leave a mark if that was the knockout Mr. Clean thought it best to use. Attached to the other thigh was a carrying case for the nutcracker. There wasn’t a non-eunuch alive who wouldn’t betray his own mother if that vicious gizmo had a grip on his balls and was running through its sequence of pressure plates, electric shocks, invasive needles, corrosives, corkscrews, twisters, and shredders.
Mr. Clean was ready for insertion.
He was going in.
* * *
A thin laser penlight cut cleanly through the glass of one balcony door, and a suction cup pulled the oblong piece out without triggering the alarm in the bottom of the wooden frame. Like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, Mr. Clean put his best foot forward and stepped into the Mountie’s living room. He wore skin-tight gloves on both hands to thwart forensic techs. Once inside, he drew his .45 pistol, already muffled with a silencer, from a side pocket of the athletic bag.
Mr. Clean cocked his unplugged ear.
Not a peep.
He crept to the rear of the suite and gazed down the hall toward the Mountie’s bedroom.
Not a twitch in the green world of the night-vision goggles.
He surveyed the living room and spotted the swastika file flipped open on the desk.
If the file had been intact, Mr. Clean might have stolen it and slipped away.
By taking the guts of the file into his bedroom to read, the unlucky cop had unwittingly signed his own death warrant.
The creeper entered the hall.
The black world had a secret.
The Nazis had one, too.
The Mountie was sniffing around the former and might have clued into the latter, and he had the file that could unravel both in the bedroom at the end of the hall.
The die was cast.
It was nutcracker time.
Mr. Clean would squeeze whatever the Mountie knew out of him, then cancel his permission slip to live.
So down the hall he crept. The bedroom door was ajar. Just to confirm that the cop was still asleep, the Pentagon hit man reached for the heat detector in the pocket of his pants, and that’s when, suddenly, deep black technology slammed into him.
Götterdämmerung
Berlin
April 30, 1945
Fifty feet above the führer’s rat hole, the Russians had overrun the Zitadelle. Operation Clausewitz—a hastily, ill-prepared plan to defend the inner ring of Berlin with a Volkssturm force of old men,
young boys, and crippled soldiers—had collapsed before this onslaught by the Red Army.
Berlin was on fire.
Spit-firing Katyushas, known as “Stalin organs,” filled the sky with a rain of rockets. As dive-bombers emptied their bellies, Russian artillery hammered the earth where the bunker was buried. Berlin was pounded by the big-bore gun the Soviets had captured at Tempelhof airport and turned back on the capital. Every shell burst shook the sandy soil upon which the city stood, causing it to quake like a shot-put pit. Toppled buildings crumbled into the streets.
Pea-soup green befouled the roiling sky, which was also smeared yellow, red, and orange with flashes and flames. Black smoke smudged the streets around burning ruins, and sulfurous ash alive with sparks and embers swirled through heaps of rubble and choked the air. Searchlights manned by Russians criss-crossed the clouds and the nightscape that cloaked the day. The dark waters of the Spree were stained by war, too. Flares, blasts, and blazing buildings reflected off the river as the current dragged mangled floaters downstream.
Tank traps on Weidendamm Bridge marked the perimeter of the Zitadelle. Streetcars had been tipped over and loaded with boulders to make barricades. Concertina barbed wire coiled like a nest of snakes. Nothing, however, could stop the Red Army tanks from rumbling around the rubble, their turrets swiveling to blast obstacles to smithereens. At ten a.m.—with the Battle for Berlin raging to its climax—the Ivans had launched an all-out assault on the Reichstag, the German parliament, which was defended by several thousand last-ditch SS troops.
The entire city was now a churned-up battlefield. The hellish landscape was littered with crashed planes and abandoned guns, the charred wrecks of overturned vehicles and discarded bazookas. Every street was an open graveyard. Months of bombardment by the British and the Americans, followed by the Russians’ artillery barrage, had left the corpses of soldiers, civilians, and livestock everywhere. Sprawled about in ghoulish poses, with their heads blown off, their bellies torn open, and their limbs severed, they polluted the air with an abattoir stench of rotting and roasted flesh.
The bodies of derelict soldiers, most in their mid-teens and still wearing their Volkssturm armbands and Hitler Youth uniforms, hung from the lampposts of cratered streets. “Traitor,” “Coward,” “Deserter,” “Enemy of His People,” blared the crude placards that had been strung around stretched necks. Each had been executed by the SS hangmen of the “flying court marshals.” Now their bulging blue eyeballs stared blankly at the carnage.
Rape was the Red Army’s revenge weapon, payback for what the Einsatzgruppen had done in Russia during the Barbarossa invasion of 1941. Since January, when Hitler went underground, 675,000 refugees had fled to Berlin, 80 percent of them women. Wearing traditional peasant dress, they trundled in on ox carts and horse-drawn wagons, with cattle, poultry, and swine as company. Some transported their recent dead in homemade coffins, and grandmothers clasped ravished granddaughters.
Today, the hunt was on for the women of Berlin.
Wild Sabine screams pierced the mechanical din of battle—booms from the artillery and rat-a-tat-tats from the machine guns at the Reichstag—as terrified naked women ran along rooftops pursued by Russian soldiers. Many leaped five or six stories to escape a dishonor that seemed worse than death.
So phantasmagoric was this Götterdämmerung that it was hard to separate the imagined from the real. In one smoldering tenement, Soviet soldiers blasted through the walls of an old cellar to get at a cluster of Berliners huddled around a candle. The first man to drag one of the women out into the street to be raped was gored through the chest by an elephant tusk and tossed high into the air. Before the woman could escape, a lion was upon her.
Zoo animals—their cages blown open—now roamed the ruins of the Reich.
* * *
The word Klapsmühle—nuthouse—best described the chaos in the cellar of the New Reich Chancellery. Casualties from the fierce street fighting in the Potsdamer Platz came stumbling into the crude emergency room. The wounded and the dying lay lined up on cots, waiting for the surgeon to clear his bloody operating table. Up to his elbows in entrails and spurting arteries, the doctor struggled to slice and stitch as the battery lamp above the table swung like a jerky pendulum.
Russian planes and artillery were bombarding the area of the chancellery and Hitler’s bunker. Concussion after concussion shook the cellar, wobbling the light while torn-apart soldiers babbled about losing battles and chewed-up youths bawled for their mothers.
As casualties died in anguish under the surgeon’s scalpel, women fleeing rape burst into the cellar. Some had used lipstick to paint red dots on their faces, in hopes that a simulated scarlet fever would keep them from being ravished.
Soon, more than two thousand Germans were crowded into the cellar. The dying, the mangled, and the raped fused into a distorted chorus. The stress of impending doom disintegrated inhibitions, and before long, orgy became an escape from the waiting. Broken-out liquor released primal instincts. The same women who had just fled their Red Army pursuers now crawled into the bedrolls of the nearest German soldiers. Nazi generals shed their pants to chase half-naked Blitzmädels—the women who ran messages back and forth between the bunker and the chancellery—around and over the cots of the dead, the dying, and the wounded. Bodies writhed in group sex off in the corners. The chancellery dentist’s chair held an erotic attraction. The wildest of the women enjoyed being strapped in and fucked in a medley of sexual positions.
The madhouse in the cellar had lost all sense of time. The sand in the spectral hourglass continued to flow, but the top bowl never emptied and the bottom bowl never filled. Death was all that would end Berlin’s waking nightmare, and until that death was announced to Berliners, the future hung suspended.
Hitler’s war had caused twenty million casualties. The past three months saw four million die in Central Europe. From January to April, half a million were gassed in Nazi concentration camps. But now it all came down to a single murder.
To Selbstmord in Hitler’s bunker.
* * *
Friday, April 13. Seventeen days before Selbstmord.
Champagne corks popped deep in the Führerbunker. Hitler wasn’t a drinker, but he shared in the festive mood. The death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was cause to celebrate!
As the party continued into the small hours of the morning, Hitler and Joseph Göbbels, the propaganda minister, retired to the führer’s study to thank their lucky stars. While Hitler contemplated the portrait of Old Fritz on the wall, Dr. Göbbels—nattily dressed in a clean shirt, white gloves, and polished boots—read aloud to him from Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great.
“Brave king,” the Doktor said, addressing Hitler with the words once addressed to Old Fritz. “Wait yet a while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds, and soon it will rise upon you.
“It’s written in the stars,” Göbbels reminded the führer.
Surely this was the Nazi victory that Hitler’s horoscope had prophesied for the end of April. Roosevelt’s death would mark the turning point. As Ernst Streicher had predicted on April 3, the U.S. First Army had seized control of the Mittelwerk two days ago, but only the V-1 and V-2 rockets were now in enemy hands.
The most important secret of the Third Reich was still safe in the depths of the Wenceslas Mine, well hidden in the Sudeten Mountains, near the village of Ludwigsdorf, where the German, Polish, and Czech borders converged.
“The Flugkreisel works!” Streicher had said.
It would save the Third Reich, just as Hitler’s fortune had foretold.
And die Glocke …
“Ah, die Glocke,” Hitler sighed, relieved.
That would transport him into the glorious future of his thousand-year Reich.
* * *
Sunday, April 15. Fifteen days before Selbstmord.
Hitler called her Tschapperl, a Bavarian word meaning �
�honeybun.” Since arriving in Berlin in mid-March, Eva Braun had resided in a private apartment in the chancellery. Now she had her bed and dresser trundled down into the lower bunker. She claimed the small suite just to the left of the führer’s quarters, next to the bathroom off his study. Her dresser—which was crammed with enough frilly things to allow her to change five times a day—took up half of Eva’s tiny new bedroom.
The manic hope raised by Roosevelt’s death was hard to maintain in the face of the relentless Russian advance. Eva’s move was a sign that Hitler would not retreat with his “mountain people” to the safety of the Eagle’s Nest in the Bavarian Alps, and that had caused the mood in the bunker to slide into depressive fear.
But not for Eva Braun.
To assuage the fear of Hitler’s bunker secretaries, Dr. Göbbels had set up a pistol range in the yard of the propaganda ministry, a ruined hulk of a building just next door. There, Eva joined the terrified women for daily target practice.
The secretaries dreaded their fate.
The Todesengel was preparing for murder.
* * *
Wednesday, April 18. Twelve days before Selbstmord.
A loud explosion blasted trees in the already devastated Tiergarten, beside the chancellery. Russian field artillery. This new threat made the führer shiver. In the closing week of the First World War, when Hitler was a corporal in the trenches on the Somme, he had been temporarily blinded by poison gas. Even then, before the ballistic technologies of today, Germany’s “Big Bertha” gun was able to hammer Paris from more than seventy miles away.
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