Swastika

by Michael Slade

  * * *

  “I’ll take the first watch,” said Jackie. “You go home and sleep. Both of us were up last night, but thanks to that hit man at your home, you lost the night before too.”

  “You’ll phone if anything breaks?”

  “Sure. Now go home to Puss and the kittens.”

  As Dane was driving down Cambie Street, Gill Macbeth called his cell. “There was no swastika carved into the forehead underneath the bison mask. Does that make sense in light of the previous signatures?”

  “Yes,” replied the sergeant. “This psycho is losing his shaky grip on the switch that controls his dissociated identities.”

  “He no longer knows who he is?”

  “And we don’t know either,” said Dane.

  By the time he reached his condo, his imagination had come up with a way to kill two birds with one stone. Dr. Kim Rossmo was at work on a geographic profile that would reveal the most likely anchor points for the Swastika Killer. Dane was no profiler, but he had noticed something. The rattlesnake research lab, Medusa’s home, and the maze at the tip of Point Grey were all geographically linked to UBC. The university, he believed, also held a key to the next victim of the Swastika Killer. So before he climbed into bed to catch up on his lost sleep, the sergeant phoned the university. That done, he set the alarm on his clock-radio.

  The moment his head hit the pillow, Dane was out.

  * * *

  Swastika stared in disbelief at the swastika on the front page of The Vancouver Times. The symbol sat front and center for readers to see, just as he’d demanded in his last e-mail communication with Cort Jantzen, but it was the wrong symbol, and that error had spun his message around 180 degrees.

  The swastika in the Western world dates back to the Crux Gammata, a pre-Christian cross composed of four Greek capitals of the letter gamma. The arm of that third letter in the Greek alphabet bends to the right, so the swastika turns clockwise. When Hitler appropriated it for the Nazi Party, he twisted that swastika forty-five degrees. But instead of signifying the racial purity advanced by Hitler’s Third Reich, the swastika on the front page of the Times—with its counterclockwise arms—evoked the contentment sought by subhuman religions.

  Hindus!

  Buddhists!

  Native Indians!

  Untermenschen all!

  Because it wasn’t composed of the Greek letter gamma, the Times’ subhuman swastika—from the Sanskrit word Svasti, which means “happiness” or “well-being”—could turn either way. The most common Asian/Native version—the one used in the Times—turned in a counterclockwise direction, with the tip of one arm pointing straight up.

  You stupid fools!

  But as his rage began to cool down into cold, clear logic, Swastika grasped that he was being played for a fool. This mistake wasn’t caused by dyslexia or some printing screw-up. It was a deliberate betrayal by Cort Jantzen. Swastika had courted arrest by linking up with the reporter because he thought the newspaperman was a vigilante like himself, an Aryan crusader who understood that only the master race created Supermen.

  Okay, thought Swastika. We’ll play it your way. If betrayal is the game, so be it.

  His previous victims had all been chosen from stories published in The Vancouver Times.

  His next victim would come from the Times too.

  From a byline.

  The byline of Cort Jantzen.

  The Line Between

  Nordhausen, Germany

  July 5, 1945

  The formal handover of the Allied occupation took place in the roll-call square of Dora-Mittelbau. Beside the gallows and the Pfahlhangen post, liberated Poles had erected a huge crucifix to symbolize their suffering.

  The Nazi POWs were lined up single file and flanked by a detail of GIs with automatic weapons. Hardware was about to command the column to march when Vlasov growled something in Russian to his interpreter.

  “We demand our share,” the mouthpiece translated.

  “Of what?” Hardware asked. The V-2s, he predicted.

  “These prisoners of war.”

  Hardware shrugged his shoulders and said, “Take your half.”

  The two Allies stood face to face at the approximate center of the line of ragtag POWs. As the Russkie stepped back a few paces to count off from both ends of the line, Hardware studied the two youths directly in front of him. Both were sweating in the winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, and neither was more than fifteen. They were probably Werewolves, for they had been caught napping in the woods with their Panzerfaust bazookas. They might have carried out an attack if exhaustion hadn’t knocked them out and a U.S. patrol hadn’t pounced on them in their sleep. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and with similar features, they could have been brothers.

  The Pied Piper, thought Hardware.

  The way the American saw it, Hitler was the Pied Piper of Kraut youth. He had put these punks under his spell by playing his seductive flute. They had only to listen, and they would follow him anywhere. Never before in history had a generation of young people lived and breathed the propaganda of war for so long that they couldn’t recall the innocence of childhood. As the Nazi war effort grew more desperate, and adult men were killed off, the SS had been forced to seek its recruits from the ranks of the Hitlerjugend. These two had been captured with no ID papers in their pockets. As Hardware wondered what hid behind their hateful glowers, Colonel Vlasov rejoined him in front of the prisoners and sliced his arm down like a guillotine to divide the line into equal shares.

  The line between separated the two Über-Aryan youths.

  Vlasov shoved his to the left.

  Hardware moved his to the right.

  Minutes later, the transfer complete, the Americans and their POWs left the roll-call square.

  His job done, Hardware was going home.

  * * *

  Barbarossa—which sounds like “barbarism”—had been a fitting code-name for the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Droning bombers, diving Stukas, blitzkrieging panzers had torn into the flesh of the Motherland, launching the biggest battle in the history of the world. And in the wake of Hitler’s conquering army had come the Einsatzgruppen, Reinhard Heydrich’s mobile killing squads. The four “special action groups” had two orders: first, to “cleanse” Russia of its Jews; and second, to secure political order by liquidating every perceived enemy of the Reich.

  Most of Vlasov’s family had gone to the pits. The Einsatzgruppen killers had herded them, along with thousands of other men, women, and children, to the edge of huge graves to be shot one by one in the presence of the others. Large Aktions that cleansed thousands in Lvov, in Rovno, in Kharkov. The one that took all of Vlasov’s family, except his sister, was the massacre at Babi Yar, near Kiev, where thirty-five thousand people were shot in just two days. The killing squads had to work in shifts to complete the job.

  Vlasov had been a butcher before Barbarossa. It was hard enough to slaughter livestock day after day. But to slaughter people, to order them to strip naked and march them down to a mass grave … Well, Vlasov had learned to wreak revenge.

  More than a million Russians had died to defeat the Nazis at the Battle of Stalingrad. Like Napoleon’s army, Hitler’s had misjudged the onslaught of winter, giving Vlasov and his troops the strength to push forward, slowly and remorselessly, in the teeth of retreating rifle fire, spitting machine guns, shrapnel bursts from hand grenades, and the shocking booms of percussion artillery shells. But on they had pressed, through rain, snow, freezing temperatures, and soft, muddy ground, while the beleaguered Nazis ran short of manpower, oil, and ammunition. And now, the Red Army at last had the Third Reich in its grasp and was ready to strip it of every armament. But when Vlasov had taken control of the rocket works, the spoils of war had all been stripped away by “American rules.”

  The scheme was obvious.

  The Americans were doing backroom deals with any Nazis who could help the United States create the most powerful arsenal the world had ever seen.


  An arsenal they planned to use against Russia.

  It all made sense.

  So enraged was Vlasov by this capitalist deception that as soon as Hardware, his troops, and their half of the Nazi POWs had vanished from view, he whipped out the Nagant revolver holstered at his left hip—the gun he carried specifically for times like these, when the Tokarev semi-automatic pistol at his other hip wouldn’t do—and flipped open the cylinder to empty six of its seven chambers of bullets. After spinning the cylinder clockwise, he snapped it shut.

  The first to feel the cold muzzle pressed up against the flesh at the bridge of his nose was the Über-Aryan youth. The eyes of the fourteen-year-old widened, but he didn’t flinch.

  Click!

  Vlasov moved left to the next POW and aimed at his brain.

  The shaking man pissed his pants.

  Click!

  Five chambers left. The next POW was defiant.

  Click!

  The next.

  Click!

  The next.

  Before Vlasov could pull the trigger on one of the last three chambers, the POW in front of him cried out in Russian—he must have learned it from Slavic slaves in the Mittelwerk—“Don’t kill me! I’ll buy my life from you!”

  Vlasov paused. “With what?”

  “Information.”

  “Speak,” he demanded.

  “Him!” the terrified man barked, pointing back to the Über-Aryan youth. “He’s Ernst Streicher’s son.”

  The words so jolted Vlasov that he actually winced. His head jerked to the beginning of the rank, just this side of where his hand had marked the line between.

  “Streicher’s son?”

  “Hans Streicher. Can’t you see it in him?”

  “Yes,” agreed the Russian, and he pulled the trigger. The revolver bucked in his hand as a blood red spray exploded out the back of the whistleblower’s skull.

  On the Soviet colonel’s order, Hans Streicher was grabbed by two soldiers and hauled away from the line of POWs.

  “Kill them,” Vlasov commanded, and the machine guns opened up on the prisoners with successive bursts of fire until Streicher’s son was the only one left alive.

  Trinity Test Site, New Mexico

  July 16, 1945

  At 5:29:45 a.m. on this Monday morning, God spoke to Hardware for the first time. The lieutenant colonel—Hawke had been promoted for his new Pentagon job at Army Ordnance—was in New Mexico to prepare for the arrival of SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun and his team of rocketeers so that work could begin on beefing up the “arsenal of democracy.” Thanks to his top-secret clearance level, Hardware had earned a special invite to the Trinity test site to witness the birth of a weapon that promised to shock the world.

  So here Hardware stood in the early dawn light, as tense as he had ever been in his entire life, counting down the longest ten seconds in history.

  Three …

  Two …

  One …

  BWAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  First, there were just a few streaks of gold to the east, and it was so dim that you could barely see your neighbor. Then suddenly there was an enormous flash of searing light, the brightest light that any living creature had ever witnessed. That first atomic explosion created a blinding fireball that fused the desert sand into a green glass-like solid. The sacred blast bored its way through Hardware and produced a vision that was seen by more than the eye. What was a measly burning bush compared with a crater nearly twenty-four hundred feet across and ten feet deep? Hardware heard the word of God in that two-second revelation.

  Glory hallelujah!

  * * *

  Los Alamos produced two atomic weapons.

  The first—nicknamed “Little Boy”—was a gun-style weapon that used uranium 235. A slug of U-235 was projected down a gun barrel into the center of another chunk of U-235. That collision produced a nuclear explosion.

  At eight-fifteen in the morning on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the Little Boy uranium bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Half of the city was leveled, and somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred and thirty thousand men, women, and children died instantly.

  The Japanese had no idea that such a weapon existed.

  On the night of the day that the world got news of this bomb, Hardware had a dream. In it, he saw an internment camp at Ground Zero. Prisoners scurried around like ants, and a huge chimney loomed up from the center. All at once, the bomb went off—its thirteen thousand tons of TNT like the world’s largest blast furnace. And when the face of God retreated back to heaven, all that remained of the camp conjured up by his mind was a swirl of ash and bits of bone.

  Hardware awoke with a start, and the biggest erection he could ever remember.

  Waking up the wife to get a little relief, he spread her legs and climbed on top and launched his own V-2—for that’s the sexual fantasy that sprang to his mind, a rocket like the one the Nazis of Dora-Mittelbau were going to build for the land of the free—and he came in a nuclear blast of his own.

  * * *

  The second weapon—nicknamed “Fat Man”—used implosion to detonate plutonium. Explosives surrounded a plutonium ball, and when they were detonated, they compressed the ball to cause a nuclear explosion.

  With its large harbor and many hills, Nagasaki was called the San Francisco of Japan. On August 9, 1945, three days after Hiroshima, Fat Man dropped out of the belly of another B-29 to devastate more than two square miles of the city. Exploding with a force equal to twenty kilotons of TNT, the plutonium weapon was more powerful than Little Boy. Forty-five thousand citizens died instantly.

  Five days later, Japan surrendered and the war was over.

  * * *

  Nine months after Hardware’s nuclear explosion inside his wife, his son was born.

  They named the baby after his dad: Bill Hawke, Jr.

  A chip off the old block, the kid required a nickname. Hardware considered calling him Little Boy.

  But instead, the boy ended up with another handle.

  Big Bad Bill.

  Deep Black

  The Cariboo

  May 28, Now

  “But can I trust you?” Bill Hawke, Jr., asked.

  “You don’t have a choice,” said DeClercq. “I swore a declaration under the Security of Information Act. It’s in your pocket. And you have my word. I’ll keep my word if you don’t try to lie to me. But be warned. When I came out of retirement to head up Special X, I was hard at work writing a history of the Second World War. And if there’s one thing a Mountie knows, it’s the smell of horseshit. So what’s your Nazi secret?”

  “Overcast,” said Bill. “What does that mean to you?”

  “It’s the operation in which the Pentagon spirited Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun from the ruins of the Third Reich to America at the close of the war.”

  “Basically, we fucked the Russians.”

  “That you did,” said DeClercq.

  “But we had to do it under restrictive rules. Bleeding hearts in the White House and Congress tried to tie our hands.”

  “That didn’t stop you.”

  “We did what we had to do. The American eagle rules the world’s skies thanks to its beak and talons.”

  To DeClercq’s way of thinking, warlords like Bill Hawke were to blame for the dirtiest cover-up in U.S. history. Hundreds of thousands of American patriots had died making a heroic stand against the tyranny of the Swastika. Before they were even cold in their graves, however, the Pentagon had hatched a plan to absorb Nazi scientists into military think-tanks in the United States. Von Braun flew to America in September 1945. Shortly thereafter, he was joined by the rocketeers on the list that he himself had drawn up at the time of his surrender.

  Prisoners of peace.

  That’s what they’d called themselves.

  But it wasn’t the idea of using Nazi scientists to advance the development of U.S. missiles that dis
gusted DeClercq. It was the deception used to con the post-war world, paid for in the blood of honest men who had fought for truth and democracy. Many a time, he had made his own pacts with the devil—plea bargaining with criminals, for example, to catch more vicious predators—but in every case, the deal he’d made was scrutinized by those he served.

  DeClercq abhorred liars.

  Lying spread like cancer.

  The cancer had begun in 1946. The Pentagon had yearned to recruit more former Nazis for the Cold War arms race that was just beginning. But U.S. immigration laws barred entry by former Nazi Party officials, so President Truman expanded Operation Overcast into Project Paperclip, a top-secret mission to bring in Nazis who were supposedly untainted by war crimes.

  In April 1946, von Braun’s group test-fired their first reconstructed V-2 at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Once they had their Nazi wonder weapon, the Arlington warlords had no intention of laying it down, so they authorized Bill Hawke, Sr., and his cleaning crew to rid the immigration files of Hitler’s rocketeers of anything that might rile the sensibilities of Americans who truly believed in truth.

  Red-lining, the Pentagon called it.

  There was so much to red-line out of the Nazi rocketeers’ files. It was von Braun’s team—not Himmler’s SS—that had thought to use concentration camp labor to produce the V-2 at Peenemünde. Arthur Rudolph, the production manager, was the master of those slave workers. That’s how the V-2 group linked up with Ernst Streicher, the engineer behind Hitler’s final solution and the architect of twenty thousand slave deaths at Dora-Mittelbau.

  With the switch to the underground factory in the tunnels north of Nordhausen, Rudolph became production director. Though based at Peenemünde, still the site for rocket testing, von Braun was a force at the Mittelwerk. There, at a crucial meeting in May 1944, he and Rudolph decided to enslave eighteen hundred more skilled French POWs to bolster the workforce. To accomplish that, von Braun went to Buchenwald and spoke to the commandant. All the while, Rudolph was passing on sabotage reports to Streicher’s SS. That was the problem confronting Hawke and his red-line spooks. Instead of taking orders, many of their not-so-nominal Nazi golden boys had been issuing them.