Swastika

by Michael Slade

  Zero-point energy—the Nazis had grasped—was the pulse of the universe.

  So what if gravity was a zero-point fluctuation force? That’s what the best brains of Nazi Germany had pondered in the two Streicherstab think-tanks in the climactic months of the Second World War. Because gravity, electromagnetism, and space-time are interrelated, could there not be an electromagnetic device that would mesh with those fluctuations in the zero-point energy field to cancel out the properties of gravity and inertia around a vehicle? In perturbing ZPE and distorting space-time, wouldn’t this device yield an anti-gravity effect, freeing the vehicle to levitate and—zoom!—take off?

  The answer was yes.

  As those Nazi scientists and the Weird Shit Division of the Pentagon knew only too well.

  As did this enigmatic Nazi punk, judging from the weighty anchor that had been propelled across the lab to pin Ajax to the Skunk Mine’s rock.

  So where was Lysol?

  Big Bad Bill ventured deeper into the mine. He followed several trails of blood of different vintages down to a barrier blocking the shaft. Here, the rock floor was caked with pools of blood, but there were no bodies. Ahead of him, the mine had imploded, and millions of tons of rubble had crushed any secrets that were buried beyond. Bill knew the secrets behind nature’s cover-up, though, for they were the same ones that his predecessor had suppressed in the surface world.

  Still, it was astounding to see the havoc wreaked by die Glocke as it had spun out of control, decades ago.

  Zero-point energy had fractured and fused the rock into something from another dimension.

  From hyperspace.

  Bill retraced his steps to the subterranean lab, where he paused for a moment to assess two bloody uniforms hanging on a pair of coat stands at the entrance to the dead-end tunnel. One was the uniform of an SS storm trooper; affixed to the helmet was a miner’s headlamp. The other was the uniform of a colonel in the post-war Red Army, but there were no trousers to go with the jacket. The Russian’s helmet also included a lantern.

  Role-playing? wondered Bill.

  Only then did he notice the workbench in the middle of the ruined lab. It was as if a vortex of destruction had whirled around its four edges and not disturbed its surface. As he approached the bench, Bill saw why. Damn if the Nazi punk hadn’t left him a message.

  Ringed around two sheets of paper like the circles on a bull’s-eye were the high-tech gadgets from Ajax’s kit and a jumble of unidentifiable metal objects. Somehow this weird scientist had transmuted the molecular composition of one material into that of another. An incredibly strong molybdenum rod, like those used in nuclear reactors, had been bent into an S-curve as if it was made of soft lead or tin. Bits of one metal were embedded into another. A length of steel had turned to lead at one end, as if an alchemist had been at work.

  Bill’s gaze, however, was drawn to the center.

  Stamped with a Nazi swastika and the ultra-secret warning of the Streicherstab were two blueprints. One depicted the circular exterior of die Glocke. Scrawled across that in blood were the English words “You fucked up!” The other blueprint was more alarming. On it was drawn a design for the Flugkreisel, its silhouette remarkably unlike that of the prototype that had crashed in New Mexico in 1947.

  A single bloody word was smeared across the image.

  The word was “Roswell.”

  * * *

  “Colonel! Something’s up!”

  Bill caught the adrenaline surge in the voice of the guard stationed outside the blown-open gate to the mine. Pressing in his earplug to hear the sentry better, Bill barked into his helmet mike, “What’s going on out there?”

  “Motion in the dark.”

  Gotcha, punk, Bill thought as he snapped the general order. “Red team, out of the mine! Go! Go! Go! Our guy must have slipped away as the chopper came down.”

  Single file and weapons at the ready, the strike force members dashed through the bowels of the mountain and out into the night, prepared to fan out in whatever direction the guard indicated. But no sooner had the last man exited than Bill found himself in a predicament that was going from bad to worse.

  “Halt! Police! Drop your weapons!” a disembodied voice ordered from the dark.

  One of the red team members spun around and opened up with an assault rifle in what he hoped was the right direction. In a flash, he was dropped by dual sniper shots. The rear of his helmet blew out as shrapnel.

  “Halt! Police! You’re surrounded!”

  Again, they got the yell.

  And suddenly Bill and his team were caught in a pool of blinding light, about as naked as Gypsy Rose Lee in her burlesque routine. Every weapon in the blackness surrounding them had its sights lined up on one of Bill’s men.

  Another soldier reacted.

  Another soldier went down.

  Bill’s mind kicked into overdrive to work out the permutations. It was a choice between fight, flight, or give up.

  By elimination, flight was the viable option.

  The pilot already had the rotors of the chopper turning. But before Bill could bark the “Get outta here!” order, something streaked across the darkness and leaped up through the open door into the cockpit. Cries of pain and the sounds of a struggle filled the wilderness quiet as the flyboy was dragged out through the far fuselage door. If Bill had bothered to study the myth of the Mounted Police, he’d have known full well that—like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his trusty mutt, King—they usually send in the dogs.

  Flight was no longer an option.

  Bill had more than enough guts to call for a last stand. He and his team would gladly go down swinging like the Texans at the Alamo. The only problem with going for that gold in this fucked-up situation—given the blueprints on the workbench back in the mine—was that Bill could take close to three hundred million Americans down with him.

  “Don’t be a knob!” warned the voice from the darkness.

  Not the most historic of battlecries, but that about summed up the realpolitik of Bill’s situation. So although it went against every fiber of his being, he reluctantly commanded his team to drop their weapons.

  Bill was stunned by the number of shadows that emerged from the nightscape. He had way too few troops on the ground to cope with such an insurgency.

  What a mess!

  Within minutes, the Mounties reduced Bill’s chaos to order. From their hiding places, marksmen “covered off” the invaders with bright red laser spots. The red team members dropped to their knees, their hands high in the air. One by one, they were cuffed and searched by cops.

  “Who’s in charge?” asked a mean-looking Mountie with the voice of prior commands.

  “I am,” responded Bill.

  Wrists secured behind his back, Bill was grabbed by Mr. Mean and his Native sidekick and hauled off to their commander.

  “I’m Chief Superintendent DeClercq,” announced the cop who confronted Bill. “You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of one of my officers, terrorist offenses under the Criminal Code, and whatever we uncover in the Skunk Mine.”

  Russkies

  Nordhausen, Germany

  July 5, 1945

  The first thing Maj. Bill Hawke had done when he saw the V-2 factory buried in Kohnstein Mountain was report the news back to the Pentagon’s chief of Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Paris. That was on April 11, the day the 3rd Armored and the 104th Infantry had liberated Nordhausen and Dora-Mittelbau.

  “Hot damn!” the colonel had said. “Good work, Major.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’ve got a future in the Pentagon, son.”

  “I hope so, sir.”

  “How many rockets are there?”

  “Hard to tell, Colonel. Most are in pieces. A few are half-built. It’s an assembly line.”

  “Are there a hundred?”

  “Probably.”

  “That’s the magic number we’ve been given by Army Ordnance at the Pentagon. We’re t
o grab a hundred of the Krauts’ V-2s and ship them off to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico for detailed study.”

  “Can do, Colonel. If I get support.”

  “You’ll get support, Major. But we gotta move fast. Germany was divided up at the Yalta yak in February. Nordhausen is in the Reds’ zone of occupation.”

  “The Russkies get the rockets?”

  “Fuck those Commie bastards. What you do is steal the V-2s in a way that doesn’t look like we looted the place.”

  * * *

  Special Mission V-2 had swung into action. As Army Ordnance assessed the inventory in the subterranean tunnels and tried to figure out how best to disassemble a huge quantity of parts and sub-assemblies and transport them to the port of Antwerp, a call went out for GIs with basic mechanical skills. The 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company was soon brought in. By rounding up captured German rolling stock and clearing the tracks to the factory, the Americans were able to trundle off the first forty-car trainload of Nazi rocket hardware.

  Meanwhile, Hawke was in command of the “gypsy team,” a band of roving experts who could be deployed on a moment’s notice to check out interesting discoveries. Their primary task was to find and interrogate the missing rocketeers.

  On May 2, Hawke struck gold.

  Two days after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, an anti-tank company of the 44th Infantry was on patrol just over the Bavarian border with Austria when a cyclist came down the road. The man on the bicycle was Magnus von Braun, Wernher von Braun’s English-speaking brother. He informed the surprised Americans that just up ahead at an Alpine hotel, the brains behind the V-2 was waiting to surrender to them.

  Hawke met von Braun the following day, in the Austrian town of Reutte, where the rocketeer had been taken for interrogation by Army Intelligence.

  “You’re top on my list,” Hawke said, tapping the roster of names of Nazi scientists given to him by the Pentagon.

  “And so I should be,” said von Braun.

  “What do you expect from us?” the major asked, getting straight to the point.

  “To give me the opportunity to conquer outer space.” Von Braun pointed his index finger toward the ceiling.

  “Why us?” Hawke asked.

  “We discussed that.”

  “When?”

  “Early this year.”

  “Where?”

  “Peenemünde.”

  “Who?”

  “My chief assistants and I.”

  “Huzel? Tessmann?”

  “And others.”

  “Why?”

  “I had received conflicting orders from the SS. Ernst Streicher, special commissioner for the V-2, had sent a teletype directing me to move my rocketeers to central Germany.”

  “To the Mittelwerk?” said Hawke.

  “To the Harz,” replied von Braun, sidestepping that trap.

  “And the other order?”

  “From the Reichsführer-SS himself. Himmler told me to command all of my engineers to join the Volkssturm and help defend that area against the Red Army.”

  “What did you decide?”

  “I told my staff that Germany had lost the war, but that we should not forget that we were the first to succeed in reaching outer space. We had suffered many hardships because of our faith in the peacetime future of our V-2s. Now we had a duty. Each of the conquering powers would want our science. The question we had to answer was, To which country should we entrust our heritage?”

  “That’s why you followed Streicher’s order, not Himmler’s?”

  “Certainly. To move west. We despise the French. We are mortally afraid of the Soviets. We do not believe the British can afford us. So that, by elimination, left America.”

  The Pentagon, of course, welcomed Wernher von Braun with open arms.

  * * *

  Special Mission V-2 had raced against the clock.

  On April 25, a patrol from the U.S. 69th Infantry had met a lone Russian horseman in the village of Leckwitz, not far from the Elbe River. The next day at Torgau, as part of the official link-up ceremony, Major General Emil F. Reinhardt had swapped salutes with Major General Vladimir Rusakov of the Soviet 58th Guards Infantry Division.

  The Russians were coming!

  To Nordhausen!

  Sometime around June 1!

  “Fuck those Commie bastards,” the colonel had told Hawke. So the GIs looting the factory tunnels had toiled night and day until they had enough components for a hundred V-2s loaded into railcars bound for Antwerp, where sixteen Liberty ships were waiting to sail for New Orleans. From there, American trains would trundle these spoils of war to the White Sands Proving Ground.

  The last train left the future Soviet zone on May 31.

  The cupboard was all but bare.

  * * *

  Von Braun was playing coy. A big negotiator, he was refusing to tell Hawke the whereabouts of his V-2 blueprints and other important papers. He was trying to make sure that without him and his rocketeers, the U.S. would be unable to make its captured hardware blast off.

  Arrogant prick, thought Hawke.

  The five hundred rocket scientists who were Streicher’s hostages on the Vengeance Express had been corralled at the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen for interrogation by Hawke and his intel experts. But there were still the thousands left behind around the Mittelwerk, and one of them, as it turned out, knew where Huzel and Tessmann had hid von Braun’s treasure trove. Through a little trickery—Hawke convinced him that the SS major wanted him to reveal where the archives were—that man directed the Americans to an old mine in the isolated mountain village of Dornten, several miles northwest of Nordhausen.

  There they encountered a new problem.

  The mine was in the future British zone of occupation.

  And the Brits were to arrive on May 27.

  Back on April 3, it had taken Huzel and Tessmann, with their little convoy of three trucks, thirty-six hours to transfer the fourteen tons of V-2 documents into a small locomotive and haul that cache down into the heart of the mine. There, von Braun’s assistants had carried his rocket records by hand into the shaft, which was then dynamited shut to conceal their treasonous secret.

  Hawke had only a week to go before the Dornten mine would fall into British hands, so there was a frantic scramble to evacuate the demolished tunnel and transport the recovered document crates back to Nordhausen. That was accomplished on May 27, as the British were setting up roadblocks to mark their occupation zone. All that Nazi paper—like all that Nazi hardware—was soon en route to America.

  Fuck those limey has-beens too, thought Hawke.

  Pax Britannica, your time has passed.

  Pax Americana, your day has come.

  * * *

  Time was running out.

  They called the Pentagon’s plan to export the Nazi rocketeers to Amerika Operation Overcast.

  On June 8, senior engineers from von Braun’s inner circle had returned to Nordhausen to help Major Hawke identify which of the thousands of Nazi technicians in the Harz should be evacuated to the American zone. Less than twenty-four hours before the Soviets were to arrive, some one thousand German V-2 personnel, and their immediate relatives, were boarded onto a fifty-car Nazi train, which chugged them forty miles southwest to the town of Witzenhausen.

  The town was just inside the American zone.

  With the rockets safe, the archives safe, and the brains in custody, it was time for Hawke to deal with von Braun.

  Army Ordnance had sold the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff on Operation Overcast. The official plan was to exploit the Nazi specialists to defeat Japan. As a reward, Hawke got a permanent post-war job at the Pentagon and a code name befitting all that he had accomplished in Special Mission V-2. Thenceforth, he was known as “Hardware.”

  “What is this?” von Braun asked, glancing down at the papers that Hardware had dropped on the table.

  “A contract for you and your rocketeers to work in America.”


  “For how long?”

  “Six months, it reads. But let’s agree on five years, between you and me.”

  “How many rocketeers?”

  “Your quota is one hundred.”

  “I’ll need at least … a hundred and fifteen,” said von Braun.

  This Nazi jerk is pulling my chain, Hardware thought.

  “We won’t let orders get in the way.”

  “Good,” said von Braun.

  Hardware held out his hand.

  The SS major shook it.

  “So who do you want from this list of POWs?”

  As Hardware watched the Nazi physicist put together his dream team from the brain trust of Hitler’s Reich, his mind filled in the war crimes certain names had committed.

  Yep, thought Hardware. This cover-up will take more whitewash than young Tom Sawyer and his dupes slapped on that fence.

  A lot more.

  * * *

  In the end, the clock was not running as fast as Army Ordnance had feared. It wasn’t until today—July 5—that the Red Army reached Nordhausen to assume its occupation from U.S. forces. As he waited for the Russkies to arrive for a tour of the tunnels, Hardware brushed his palms together and thought to himself, with righteous pride, Spic and span. Fuck these Commie bastards.

  Tasked with handing the stripped-down Mittelwerk over to the Russians, Hardware had tapped some of the local prisoners to “sanitize” the tunnels of rocket secrets.

  The warm summer sun was shining down on what had not so long ago been the industrial storage area outside the mouths of the Mittelwerk tunnels. The slaves were gone and the bodies were buried, but this former SS enclave still had a haunted atmosphere. Even in the sunshine, it seemed oppressively gray.

  The Russian colonel drove up in a dust-caked jeep. His name was Boris Vlasov, and Hardware thought he was a nasty piece of work. He wore the shit-colored uniform of the Red Army, with the same flared jodhpurs and knee-high jackboots as an SS goon. On the brow of his peaked cap sat a big red star. The high Slavic cheekbones of his bloated face were red and raw from shrapnel wounds. The undamaged flesh around his intense squint seemed to bear the permanent mark of a tank commander’s goggles.