Swastika

by Michael Slade

  The explosion in the Tiergarten rattled Hitler’s imagination. Along with deadly gases like Tabun and Zyklon B, the Nazis had created a knockout gas that wasn’t lethal. It merely rendered victims unconscious for twenty-four hours, and could be lobbed in canisters or shells. German intelligence believed that the Russians had a similar gas. Hitler’s worst fear—and it would become a morbid obsession—was that their secret weapon, if aimed directly at the chancellery, would enable the Soviets to take him alive, “like a stunned animal in the zoo.”

  * * *

  Friday, April 20. Ten days before Selbstmord.

  With Berlin all but surrounded by the closing iron ring of the Red Army, Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in the traditional spot—the Ehrenhof, or Court of Honor of the chancellery. The führer insisted on the attendance of his two most trusted henchmen from the earliest days of his rise to power: fat, preening Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force; and Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS.

  Hitler’s last public act took place in the chancellery garden above the bunker. He awarded twenty twelve-year-old Hitler Youths with the Iron Cross for their heroic efforts in the defense of Berlin. The last photographs of the führer caught by newsreel cameramen were of him patting the cheeks of those Aryan boys.

  * * *

  Sunday, April 22. Eight days before Selbstmord.

  “Verloren!” shrieked Hitler. His color rose to a heated red and his face twisted into an unrecognizable mask. The men gathered in the bunker’s main conference room for the afternoon briefing recoiled from the verbal explosion. The führer had taken to carrying a tattered filling-station map of Germany in his tunic pocket, and he began to wave it in the air with his good hand as he bellowed, with spittle flying, “Leonidas at Thermopylae! Horatius at the bridge! Frederick the Great in 1762! Me in Landsberg Prison back in 1923!”

  And with that, Hitler slapped the map down on the table in front of his startled generals, then began shouting orders as if in the heat of battle. With his right hand, he started moving phantom Panzer divisions the war had long since destroyed around the map in complicated maneuvers that would surely turn the tide, while his flabby left clutched the table’s rim. That whole arm up to his shoulder trembled and shuddered, and he tried to brace his convulsing half by wrapping his left calf and foot around one leg of the table. But that leg was throbbing and shaking too, and he couldn’t control it.

  Suddenly, Hitler ceased ranting. His face turned chalk white, then went blue as his drugged mind finally grasped what he had just been told by his generals.

  The hated Communists were inside Berlin.

  Hitler was silent for several long minutes before he flopped down into his chair. He nodded.

  “Verloren.”

  Translation: “The war is lost.”

  * * *

  Having dismissed his generals, Hitler wobbled into his suite and unlocked the safe. From it, he withdrew most of his private papers, then had them lugged up to the garden and burned in the incinerator. Also in the safe was a large Walther pistol, which Hitler placed on the dresser in his bedroom.

  Next, he called Dr. Göbbels.

  Later that same day, the propaganda minister moved his wife and their six children into the upper level of the bunker. Each child was permitted to bring a single toy. Before abandoning his home near the Brandenburg Gate, Göbbels announced, over Berlin radio, “The führer is in Berlin and will die fighting with his troops defending the capital city.” This was the first time Berliners had heard that Hitler was in their city.

  * * *

  Monday, April 23. Seven days before Selbstmord.

  Blue Monday, as it came to be known by the bunker staff, brought another drug-addled explosion by the führer. The last stand of the Third Reich was under way, and the chancellery was taking sporadic hits from the Red Army’s long-range artillery. Suddenly, Martin Bormann stormed into Hitler’s study with a telegram in hand.

  “Treason, my führer!” he bellowed. “It’s a coup d’état! Hermann Göring is trying to seize power from you!”

  After Hitler’s birthday party, the portly Reichsmarschall had fled south to the relative safety of the Bavarian Alps, then he’d sent this telegram suggesting that he—Göring—take over as leader of the Third Reich, “if you, my führer, are now hindered in your freedom of action or decide to remain in Fortress Berlin.”

  Hitler went berserk.

  His blotchy face flushed crimson, his paranoid eyes glaring hate, his mustache, now white, twitching on drooling lips, the führer flew into a wild rage of bitterness and self-pity.

  “Göring is a degenerate! A crook! His bad example has led to corruption at all levels. He made a mess of the Luftwaffe and exposed us to massive air raids. He let the barbarians into Berlin. Treason and betrayal are rife in my inner circle! Now Göring has the insolence to try to usurp his führer? The people aren’t up to the challenge! Germans are unworthy of me. This war was forced on me by the Anglo-American plutocracy, the Marxist-Bolshevik world conspiracy, Jewish international finance, the Freemasons, the Jesuits—all the enemies who tried to stop me during the great struggle! Mein Kampf! Mein Kampf! Is this how my struggle ends? Security leaks everywhere I turn!”

  Hitler screamed the words, his fists clenched, his face scrunched, his eyes darting here, there, everywhere, as if he now suspected everyone around him.

  The madman dragged his palsied body to the emergency telephone exchange, where he surprised the operator.

  “SS-Obergruppenführer Streicher! Have you heard from him?”

  “No, my führer.”

  “Find him!” Hitler bellowed. “And bring him to me!”

  * * *

  Tuesday, April 24. Six days before Selbstmord.

  There was still no sign of Streicher by the time the Red Army cut the last overland roads into and out of Berlin.

  * * *

  Wednesday, April 25. Five days before Selbstmord.

  Having captured Tempelhof airport to thwart any escape from Berlin by plane, the Russians turned the Nazis’ big-bore, twin-purpose gun back on the besieged city and began to pound the hell out of Hitler’s capital as they breached the Zitadelle.

  Still no sign of Streicher.

  * * *

  Saturday, April 28. Two days before Selbstmord.

  Hysteria gripped the Führerbunker at nine o’clock that night when a German-language broadcast was picked up from Radio Stockholm. The story had originated with a San Francisco-based Reuters man who was covering the organizing of the United Nations. Acting on a tip, he’d reported that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was secretly trying to negotiate peace with the Allies through a Swedish count.

  Pandemonium erupted in the bunker.

  Himmler a traitor! There was treason everywhere. No wonder Streicher had failed to come through for Hitler. Was it Himmler’s plan to use die Glocke to save his own skin?

  While the führer paced the shrinking confines of his subterranean hellhole, buttonholing whomever he could to wave the offending bulletin in their face, a drunken general raced up and down the central passage, claiming that Himmler was plotting to deliver Hitler’s corpse to Eisenhower as proof of his intent.

  “Body snatchers!” Hitler cried.

  That was too much.

  A ghoulish SS plot by Himmler to barter the führer’s remains—the sacred ashes of the Third Reich.

  “Blood!” Hitler demanded.

  “Now!”

  Foo Fighters

  Over the Rhineland, Germany

  November 27, 1944

  “What the hell are those lights over there?”

  The spook who’d voiced the question was just along for the ride. Seated above and behind the pilot, in what was usually the gunner’s position, he was a lieutenant from intelligence.

  “Probably stars,” the pilot replied.

  “I don’t think so. They’re coming straight for us.”

  The P-61 Black Widow was on p
atrol in the pitch-black sky above the Rhineland, where the broad, winding river bordered the wild heights of the Black Forest. Five months after D-Day, the 415th Night Fighter Squadron of the U.S. 9th Army Air Force was hunting for bogies that might attack British bombers on their way to pound the piss out of the Fatherland. If they were lucky, the American aircrew would get a chance to hit a Nazi train or a truck convoy attempting to move men and materiel under the cover of darkness. The intel officer kept mum about why he was really riding shotgun.

  What the spook had spied off their starboard wing was a constellation of pulsing lights. The unidentified flying objects jolted the pilot into banking sharply to aim the night fighter’s four cannons and machine guns at what had to be Nazi attackers. At the same time, he radioed ground control to get the number of planes caught by radar.

  “Negative.”

  “What?”

  “No bogies in your sector.”

  “There must be.”

  “No blips. You’re on your own.”

  The Black Widow definitely wasn’t alone. True, there was silence except for the P-61’s twin engines, but the glowing disks—ten of them—were zooming in fast on this “lone wolf” mission.

  “What do you see?” the pilot asked his radarman. The night-sight expert crouched over the scope of his airborne-intercept radar in the well behind the intel lieutenant.

  “Negative, Skipper. The sky ahead is clear.”

  “What the hell …?”

  “Fire!” barked the spook.

  Boosting the throttles, the pilot went for the lead UFO, but as the American guns were about to spit tracers into the dark, the exhaust burners of the bogies—or whatever had caused that otherworldly glow—dimmed and snuffed out. The P-61 jinked to check its blind spots. Nothing. Where had those disks gone? They weren’t ball lightning, and they weren’t St. Elmo’s fire, and their darting movement was unlike the flight of any known aircraft in the arsenals of either side.

  So what were the UFOs?

  No one knew.

  But the radarman was able to give them a name. A Chicagoan, he was a fan of the newspaper comic strip Smokey Stover, the Foolish Foo Fighter. “Foo” was a bastardization of the French word feu, for “fire.” Smokey, a fireman whose boss was Chief Cash U. Nutt, drove around in a two-wheeled fire truck known as the Foomobile. Smokey was fond of saying, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.” He called himself a foo fighter, instead of a firefighter, and because the mysterious UFOs appeared to be fiery disks of unknown origin, they too were dubbed foo fighters. The name stuck.

  * * *

  Pilots who had foo-fighter sightings over Western Europe between September 1944 and April 1945 were consistent in how they described the puzzling UFOs. The phosphorescent balls glowed amber, red, or white and were three to five feet in diameter. Each disk was metallic and seemed to generate light. None made propulsion noise or left a vapor trail. There was something electromagnetic in how they flew. Foo fighters were able to home in on Allied aircraft as if guided to them by remote control. Their rates of climb, maneuverability, and ability to take evasive action were extreme. Steep dives, sharp banks, and defensive tricks couldn’t shake them. They tagged along as if magnetized, never fired a shot, and didn’t explode in proximity. Then they peeled away and vanished into the blackness of the Third Reich.

  The Cariboo, British Columbia

  May 27, Now

  FZZZZZZZ …

  CRAAACKKKK …

  Even the pounding bass line couldn’t suppress the cacophony summoned by this Nazi’s infernal machines. At the center of it all, surrounded by the monitors and dials that ringed his subterranean workbench, the Eurotrash freak sat consulting the swastika-stamped plans and tweaking settings and twizzle knobs. As the heavy metal rockers thrashed Amerika, the Aryan’s shadow blitzkrieged around the walls of the gold-flecked cave like a ghost from some long-ago battlefield.

  The spooks were spooked.

  From the standpoint of Newtonian physics, what Ajax and Lysol were witnessing was impossible. This self-trained gizmo addict was able to subvert gravity with just the blueprints from the Streicherstab and an intuitive grasp of electromagnetism. Using a setup cobbled together from supposedly obsolete salvage, he was tapping into the quantum mechanics of Max Planck. Amid the high-voltage effects of a spark-gap, which was snapping ear-splitting shock waves down into the mine, the wizard at the heart of the zone of influence manipulated a forest of humming aerials and dishes. Phantom forces plucked hunks of scrap metal off the rocky floor and levitated them in thin air.

  Like foo fighters.

  Whatever the Nazi was doing, the fireworks were awesome. In the time they’d spent spying on him from the black hole of the tunnel, Ajax and Lysol had watched the punk maneuver identified flying objects like frying pans and spools of wire as if they were remote-controlled model planes. He could make them slide horizontally or hover in place—and with the flick of a dial that bent aerials toward a target wall, he was able to shoot them in a powerful ballistic arc as if they’d been propelled by a sudden energy boost.

  Not only did he levitate objects and move them around, but he also bent them, broke them, and caused them to explode. In military jargon, his was a “lift and disruption” weapon. But how did it work? Did he trigger opposing electromagnetic fields so each canceled the other out? Did he whirl electromagnetic fields in some unfathomed way? Whatever he was doing, he seemed able to channel a flow of zero-point energy toward any object within his zone of influence. By affecting the quarks and gluons of quantum mechanics, did he teeter on the verge of time dilation? Were pockets of space-time being transmuted down here? It certainly looked that way from what the Pentagon spooks saw happen to the anchor.

  Rusted and barnacled as if recovered from the bottom of the sea, it was the largest chunk of junk on the ground. It was probably heavier than all three men in the mine combined. To lift it, the Nazi had to crank several dials to their red-line level, and then he cranked several more once the anchor hovered in the air. This appeared to turn the solid anchor transparent, visible in outline yet invisible in mass. It was both there and not there at the same time.

  The spooks had seen enough.

  It was time for the nutcracker to make the Nazi sing.

  Time to give up Hitler’s long-lost secret.

  The mother lode?

  The Nazi was swiveling the antenna farm toward the target wall—in preparation for another cross-cavern hurl?—when suddenly all hell broke loose. The ceiling lights began to glare intensely, as if pushed to the maximum capacity of their filaments, and they soon bathed the floor of the mine with such searing incandescence that illumination burst into the spooks’ black hole. Like jailbreakers caught in a searchlight sweep of a prison yard, they froze and hoped not to be seen. The Eurotrash punk aimed a finger of accusation at the intruders, and then he cranked a knob to the max.

  FZZZZZZZ …

  CRAAACKKKK …

  “Jesus!”

  Both spooks yelped.

  The spark-gap exploded with a shock wave of such magnitude that it blew their eardrums. A bolt of lightning zapped from the Nazi’s fingertip toward the mine hole. The ceiling lights blew, spewing a shower of red-hot filaments. The cavern plunged into an eerie, sizzling darkness. Tongues of phantom flame licked up the target wall and around the throat of the mine. The lab was sucking energy from who knew where. All at once, the anchor flew across the cavern as if guided to its target by the lightning bolt. One of the arrowhead prongs crunched through Ajax’s skull and nailed him to the concave granite.

  The shock wave had shattered the lenses of both spooks’ high-tech goggles. Lysol missed the plight of his partner because he was plucking at the glass shards in his eyeballs. Then, through pain and blindness, his survival training kicked in.

  Where was his gun?

  His palm swept the littered floor.

  Where was the bag with his backup gun?

  He groped around in the dark.

  H
is fingers found the bag where he had dropped it on the ground. As he felt for the zipper, steel punched through the back of his hand like a sword.

  A sword!

  He recalled the plaque on the blood-splattered box.

  SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.

  A cold voice snarled above and behind his ear.

  “Run for your life, pig.”

  The blade drew back and the bag was kicked away.

  “Oink, oink,” the Nazi grunted.

  Lysol cried out as the pigsticker was jabbed deep into one cheek of his butt.

  Hands flailing in front of him, stumbling down into the depths of the mine where Nazi secrets lay, the blind man ran for his life.

  Home Invader

  Vancouver

  Mr. Clean was in peril because of a pregnant cat.

  Sure, his parabolic mike had caught what he wanted to hear about the swastika file. And yes, his infrared detector had placed the Mountie in bed. But the Pentagon spook had relied too much on the technological wizardry of Big Brother’s eyes in the sky, and not enough on intel from the ground.

  For if he had bothered to delve into the emotional landscape of the Horseman, he might have learned that Dane was grieving the death of Papa and had brought his grandfather’s feline, Puss, home to see her through birthing her litter. And because Dane knew nothing about pregnant cats, he had put Puss to bed on a blanket in the confines of the hall closet. Birthing might be messy, after all, and he didn’t want to foul his entire home.

  The Mountie, of course, was in bed when that infrared gizmo had picked up his body signature through the outside wall. But as Mr. Clean was scaling the downspout to the balcony, Puss had let out a mewl of discomfort that woke Dane from sleep. So out of bed he had padded, to check on what was wrong. Figuring time was nigh for the blessed event, he—as he had on many nights of camping on the cold, hard ground with Papa—had lain down on the floor of the walk-in closet alongside Puss, intending to catnap until he knew the expectant mom was stable. That’s when Mr. Clean had laser-beamed into his home.