The Aryan hadn’t learned the truth until 1989.
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, he and his mother were eating lunch in their farmhouse kitchen when a fancy BMW drove up and stopped by the pig wallow. The sexiest woman he had ever seen climbed out from the passenger’s side and swept her eyes around the yard with distaste.
The Aryan thought they were lost.
Seconds later, however, the driver stepped out, and the instant the pig farmer saw him, he knew this man was his dead father’s brother. No mistaking the Nordic blond hair, icy blue eyes, and Aryan bone structure of the stranger’s face.
“Hans!” his mother gasped, stumbling to her feet and dropping the bread knife to the grimy floor. She saw the resemblance, too, and thought her husband had returned to her. His ailing mother had never recovered from that horrific visit by the cancerous colonel and his gang-raping thugs.
“Say nothing,” the Aryan silenced her. “Leave all the speaking to me.”
The visitors from the West rapped on the kitchen door. That they had come from the other side of the Iron Curtain was evident from their car and their fashionable clothes. The woman cast her gaze at both pig farmers and around their kitchen as if she feared catching a sewer disease. Her luscious figure complemented her sable coat. The man wore an elegant gray leather jacket over matching slacks; a charcoal turtleneck was visible in the V at his throat. In East Germany, survival taught you to spot a hidden gun, and the Aryan caught the telltale bulge in one pocket.
“Bratwurst or blutwurst?” he asked on opening the door.
“Neither,” replied the man. “I’m here because I believe you’re the son of my brother, Hans.”
“Hans Streicher?” the Aryan said.
“We don’t use that name, do we?” cautioned the stranger. “That’s why I had a devil of a time tracking you down. But with the fall of the wall, certain Communist archives have cracked open. It took a chunk of cash to uncover the name your father assumed after the Russians released him from prison.”
“What’s your name?”
“Fritz. But I don’t use that either. May we come in? It’s chilly out here in the yard.”
The Aryan stood aside so they could enter. He noticed that the woman was careful not to brush against him. She wrinkled her nose as if she could smell pig shit in the kitchen.
“Hans!” his mother cried again, tears welling up in her eyes. “I knew you’d come back to me. We still have your tattoo. Let me sew it back on for you.”
“My mother isn’t—”
But that’s all he got out. Fritz Streicher elbowed the Aryan aside in his haste to engage the feeble woman.
“Show me,” the intruder from the West demanded.
“Stay put, Mother!” ordered the Aryan. “Why have you gone to the trouble of finding us after all this time? And how do I know you’re who you say you are?”
The man purporting to be his uncle turned his attention back to the son. “I’ve come to make you rich. Did your father never tell you how we got separated?”
The Aryan shook his blond head.
So Fritz Streicher told a story about two Werewolves captured by the Americans in the woods near Work Camp Dora. His story ended when the POWs were divided by the line that Colonel Vlasov cut between the Streicher brothers. With one gesture, he sent Fritz off with the GIs to a post-war life of luxury on Canada’s West Coast and condemned the Aryan’s father to Lubyanka prison and then a scrub existence on this pig farm.
Vlasov!
The mere mention of the name caused the Aryan to tense up tighter than the mainspring of a watch.
“You know that name?” Fritz Streicher asked, picking up on his nephew’s discomfort.
“Vlasov flayed my father and used the tattoo over his heart to bind a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
“You have the book?”
“It was sent to me as a Christmas taunt.”
“Let me see it.”
“How will that make me rich?”
“Us rich,” corrected Fritz. “We’ll split the treasure.”
“What treasure?”
“Do you know who your grandfather was?”
A flash of insight. “SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher,” the pig farmer said.
“Near the close of the war, Hans and I were tattooed with different crests. The last time we saw our father, he told us that if anything should happen to him, we were to look to our legacy. And then he tapped us both on the heart.”
“The tattoos hide a map?”
“Half a map,” said Fritz. “Mine shows the outline of a castle. But I can’t recall what was hidden in Hans’s tattoo. We were too embroiled in events of the time, and then we got caught and separated by the line between. Only later did I work out the mystery behind the tattoos. Each by itself kept our father’s treasure hidden, but together they are the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Solve the puzzle and we will share the legacy left by him.”
“You’ve done well for yourself.”
Fritz Streicher shrugged. “Your grandfather smuggled out Hitler’s gold to finance the Fourth Reich. After your father and I got separated, I was asked by those who remained of the Third Reich to become paymaster for those on the run.”
“Why didn’t you save my father?”
“You’re far too young to know how impenetrable the Iron Curtain was in the decades after the war. The Russians, not the Germans, kept all the secrets. And even when the grip loosened in the late sixties, it would have been suicide for me to go to the East. Besides, your father dropped our name long ago. How would I have found him?”
“Show me your tattoo.”
The four of them were still standing in the kitchen. The woman in the fur coat seemed disgusted and antsy. She kept shifting her weight from foot to foot as if she was ready to go. The Aryan’s mother was nibbling her lower lip and wringing her hands in the apron of her grubby dirndl. Then she noticed the bread knife on the floor and crouched to pick it up from the dirt.
Fritz Streicher opened his jacket and tugged his turtleneck up from his belt. For a man verging on sixty, he was exceptionally lean and taut. Just as he’d said, the tattoo over his heart was a crest showing the battlement towers of a castle.
“What castle is that?”
“Not so fast,” said the Aryan’s uncle. “Get Mein Kampf and we’ll fit the jigsaw together.”
The pig farmer left the kitchen for his ground-floor bedroom, returning a minute later with the skin-covered Nazi bible. As his uncle began to slip his hand into the pocket with the telltale bulge, the Aryan held the book out on that side. So as not to arouse suspicion in the wary German, Fritz detoured his gun hand to receive the offering.
“Which castle?” his nephew pressed, refusing to release his grip on Mein Kampf.
“Castle Werewolf,” Fritz said. “In the Sudeten Mountains.”
He yanked the book free from the young man’s fingers and passed it across to his other hand.
“During the war, the general had his headquarters there.”
As Fritz’s hand went back to the pocket with the bulge, a blur of motion passed in front of his eyes. Before he even realized that his throat had just been cut, the book was wrenched away from him. Slitting throats came naturally to the pig farmer, who had armed himself in the bedroom for a counterattack.
There were several reasons why Fritz had to die. First, he should have used Hitler’s gold to bribe Soviet officials into turning Hans over to the West. Second, he was certainly not intending to let his nephew and his sister-in-law live once he got what he wanted. Third, the Aryan was so wound up by the unfairness of having been abandoned to the atrocities of Colonel Vlasov that he could no longer restrain himself. And finally, he couldn’t imagine why he should split the treasure in the castle with somebody who already had too much.
So Fritz Streicher had to die.
And so did his wife.
The rage that powered the whirling sweep of the razor-sharp blade
was so intense that it almost severed the sexy woman’s head right off her furry shoulders. Lustmord, the Germans called it, this feeling of absolute power that turned the Aryan into a superman, unleashing the killer within.
“Hans!” his mother wailed, dropping to her knees beside the dead man on the floor.
How pathetic.
How unworthy of the master race.
Ashamed of this feeble woman, the Aryan crouched down and slit her throat too.
* * *
To be a sausage-stuffer in post-war East Germany was to be ribbed about Georg Grossmann. Many a time had the Aryan heard about how Georg had ground up and sold more than fifty people as frankfurters on the platform of the Berlin train station. Inspired by that story, the pig farmer had skinned Fritz’s tattoo from over his heart, then processed his victims as he had so many pigs before them, grinding the meat into sausages and the bones into meal. Both products sold out at the farm’s stall the following market day.
Getting rid of the car was easier. He drove the BMW to a destitute city and left it unlocked, with the key in the ignition. In the blink of an eye, it vanished forever.
The reunification of Germany saw East Germans flooding to the West for a better life. The Aryan let it be known that his mother had joined the economic exodus. West German relatives had taken her away to Cologne. Soon, he’d follow.
When he arrived at Castle Werewolf in what was now Poland, the former pig farmer matched the dark outline against the tattoo from his uncle’s chest. The castle was being renovated to capitalize on a burgeoning tourist trade in unshackled Poland, so the Aryan managed to get work on the site. He was guided by the inky cross in his father’s tattoo to the mantel in the Knight’s Hall and what he thought would be a cache of gold. Instead, he found nothing but scientific papers.
Cheated again!
Well, not quite.
There was still a chance that Hitler’s gold could be mined on the West Coast of British Columbia. His uncle’s pocket had given up a sizable wad of ready cash, some traveler’s checks, and several credit cards, as well as a Canadian passport with an address in Vancouver. Packing up the scientific papers, which had to have some value, the Aryan had abandoned the Fatherland for this Lebensraum half a world away.
His dreams of Hitler’s gold, however, were not to be.
By 1990, the bullion vaults hidden behind the walls of the replica bunker were empty of Nazi loot. It didn’t really matter. Psychologically, the Aryan was more suited to the isolation of the Phantom Valley Ranch, so over the intervening years, the Cariboo mine had been his home base.
But now the phoenix of the Fourth Reich was dying.
Hitler’s bunker was where the Aryan would make his last stand.
First, he would kill the traitor who betrayed him.
Then he would kill every cop and Pentagon hit man who came to take him down.
The Roswell Incident
The Cariboo
Before he entered the interview room to offer the Pentagon spook a choice between public exposure or private confession, DeClercq had delved into the Roswell Incident and reduced it from all its gobbledygook down to a set of solid, confirmed facts.
Those facts were these: Sometime in the first week of July 1947, the morning after a fierce overnight thunderstorm, a New Mexico rancher named Mack Brazel saddled up a horse and rode out to check on his sheep. He found some unusual debris strewn around one pasture. Whatever crash-landed there had gouged a shallow trench for hundreds of feet across the hard ground. After taking a few pieces to show his neighbors, Brazel drove into Roswell to report the incident to Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox passed the information on to officials at Roswell Army Air Field, home base of the 509th Bomb Group, the air unit that had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. military locked down the crash site and retrieved the wreckage, which was first moved to Roswell Army Air Field, then later was flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. On July 8, 1947, the commander of the 509th, Colonel William Blanchard, issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a “crashed disk” had been recovered. The news made headlines in thirty afternoon papers across the nation.
Within hours of Colonel Blanchard’s press release, the commander of the Eighth Air Force, General Roger Ramey, issued a chaser release explaining that the 509th Bomb Group had misidentified a weather balloon and its radar reflector as a crashed disk. To prove the point, Ramey displayed the balloon’s remnants in his office and allowed some photos to be snapped. The press reported the correction on July 9.
To this day, that remains the Pentagon’s official position.
Case closed.
Those facts, of course, gave rise to wild speculation about a top-level cover-up.
According to the legend of the Roswell Incident, Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working for the Ballard Funeral Home, received several telephone calls from the mortuary officer at Roswell Army Air Field. He wanted to know about the availability of hermetically sealed caskets and the best way to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for a few days without altering the chemical composition of the tissues. That evening, Dennis drove to the army hospital, where he saw two military ambulances stocked with pieces of wreckage marked with weird symbols. Inside the building, he began speaking with a nurse he knew, but MPs threatened him physically and forced him to leave. The next day, he met the nurse in a coffee shop, and she told him that she had assisted two doctors doing autopsies on several non-human bodies. One body was still in good shape, but the others were mangled. She drew a diagram of these non-human creatures. Within days, she was sent to England, and never returned.
Similar strong-arm techniques were used on other Roswell witnesses. Mack Brazel was sequestered for a week by the military, for example, and sworn to secrecy on his release. Sheriff Wilcox was told that he and his family would be killed if he ever talked about what he had seen while investigating the crash. Any bits of wreckage that surfaced were immediately seized. But none of that could squelch the rumor that there were three crash sites. The debris field that Brazel had found was in the middle. Thirty miles to the southeast, investigators had come upon what remained of the flying disk and its crew. And a few miles northwest, there was a touchdown point of fused sand and baked soil.
DeClercq, however, was most intrigued by Major Jesse Marcel. As the intelligence officer at the 509th Bomb Group, he was involved in the recovery of the Brazel wreckage. On July 8, the day of the Blanchard press release, Marcel took some of the debris to Texas to show to General Ramey. In his office, that debris was switched for the weather balloon that later appeared in the press photos. When he was interviewed about the wreckage in 1979, Marcel stated, “It was not a weather balloon. Nor was it an airplane or a missile.” The debris “would not burn. That stuff weighs nothing. It wouldn’t bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a sledgehammer. And there was still no dent.”
In 1994, a U.S. congressman asked for “information on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its alien occupants near Roswell, N.M., in July 1947.” That spawned “The Roswell Report: Case Closed,” a paper released by the military later that year. “There is no dispute that something happened near Roswell in July, 1947,” it concluded. “The Roswell Incident was not an airplane crash … a missile crash … a nuclear accident … [or an accident involving] an extraterrestrial craft.” Instead, it was an accident that resulted from a “Top Secret balloon project designed to attempt to monitor Soviet nuclear tests, known as Project Mogul.” The so-called Roswell Incident, the report concluded, grew out of “overreaction by Colonel Blanchard and Major Marcel, in originally reporting that a ‘flying disk’ had been recovered.” The report dismissed rumors of the recovery of “alien bodies” at Roswell, insisting the wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon. “There were no ‘alien’ passengers therein,” it stated.
Case closed. Again.
The following year, a British film producer allegedly d
iscovered footage of the alien autopsy. Widely considered a fake because the surgeons disregard conventional autopsy techniques, the film nonetheless contributed to a strange epilogue.
In 1997, the Pentagon revisited “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” It concluded that “‘aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high-altitude balloons for scientific research.” In other words, the Roswell Incident was really just an accident involving two balloons: one from Project Mogul, the other full of test dummies.
Case closed.
This time, we mean it.
* * *
Robert DeClercq did not believe in little green aliens in flying saucers. He did, however, believe in conspiracies and cover-ups.
During and after the Second World War, the U.S. government had used its own personnel for radiation experiments. The CIA had secretly tortured drugged-out mental patients to test mind-control techniques.
Disinformation, the chief knew, works best when mixed with the truth. Something had crashed at Roswell in 1947, and the rumors surrounding the Roswell Incident were generated by rival press releases issued by the Pentagon.
No balloon could gouge a trench hundreds of feet long into desert shale, scattering debris over a large area. A flying disk, on the other hand, would skid across hard shale like a skipping stone. But the official position of the Pentagon is that the “crashed disk” story was an “overreaction” on the part of Colonel Blanchard. So prone to overreacting was William “Butch” Blanchard that he was chosen to supervise the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the post-war years, this hysterical man was given command of all atomic bombers. And then—having overreacted at Roswell—he went on to conduct atomic tests on the Bikini atoll, to train the crews of intercontinental nuclear strike forces, to set up Strategic Air Command, and to rise to the level of vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force.
Overreaction?
DeClercq didn’t believe it.
Assuming a “flying disk” did crash, and Blanchard’s press release was true, how would the Mountie—were he a Pentagon spook—cover up what had occurred? How better than to hide the truth in plain sight?
Swastika Page 33