A few weeks earlier, on June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold had reported experiencing a mid-flight flashing in his eyes, “as if a mirror was reflecting sunlight at me.” Then he saw what he thought were nine luminous aircraft flying near Mount Rainier, in Washington State. Each craft seemed to be shaped like “a pie plate” and flew “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” A press report of his remarks gave birth to the term “flying saucer,” and by the end of July, Arnold’s one sighting had exploded into more than 850 reports of unidentified flying objects.
By suppressing the truth behind a cover story about a weather balloon, the Pentagon had tapped into the rising hysteria over aliens from space. If the cover-up succeeded, mission accomplished. And if it was exposed by conspiracy theorists as an attempt to cover up something unbelievable, rational minds would conclude that the outlandish incident was fabricated by kooks.
A win-win situation.
But what really piqued DeClercq’s interest was the fact that fifty years later—in 1997—the Pentagon was still playing that spin-doctor game. Why would “The Roswell Report” undercut the “weather balloon” story by introducing Project Mogul and then engage the “alien” issue with some drivel about test dummies and the unlikely simultaneous crashing of two balloons, unless there actually was something being covered up.
The Pentagon doth protest too much, thought DeClercq.
Okay, a “flying disk” crashed at Roswell. If there were three crash sites leading from northwest to southeast, that would line up with Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest. If you continued to follow that line farther north, you’d eventually arrive at the Skunk Mine in British Columbia. In that mine, the Mounties had found this Pentagon spook, whose motive for being there was hidden somewhere in Nazi blueprints for a flying saucer. Those blueprints were stamped with swastikas and had been drawn at the Streicherstab, the brain trust of the man in charge of all super-weapons at the close of the Second World War—SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.
* * *
“You know about Streicher?” said Big Bad Bill.
“To my mind,” DeClercq replied, choosing his words carefully so as not to expose his bluff, “what became of Ernst Streicher is perhaps the most puzzling mystery to come out of the fall of the Reich. As Nazis fled west to be captured by you Americans instead of the Russians, Streicher went east, to the most dangerous place there was for him. Czech partisans were summarily executing every Nazi they seized. But Streicher’s body was never found, and we don’t know how he died. One version has him bursting out of a cellar in Prague, charging the Czechs like a Norse hero bound for Valhalla, then being shot in the back by his aide-de-camp to give him as glorious a death as Hitler’s. In other versions, Streicher killed himself in various Czech woods.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Bill.
“There are too many clues that suggest he survived. First, for no discernible reason, General Patton’s Third Army crossed the Czech frontier on May 6, just two days before Nazi Germany surrendered, to penetrate deep into the future Soviet zone and search the Skoda Works.”
DeClercq tapped the word “Streicherstab” on the blueprints on the table.
“Patton was after Streicher because of all the sightings of ‘foo fighters’ over the Reich by American pilots. And you did make contact with him. That’s obvious because you failed to try him in absentia at the Nuremberg war trials. Martin Bormann’s body was never found, despite reports that he’d died while trying to break out from the Führerbunker. Streicher’s corpse also never turned up. So why try Bormann at Nuremberg, but not the monster who engineered the concentration camps and the gas chambers? There’s only one reason. Streicher offered the Pentagon something so spectacular that your predecessors had no choice but to deal with him.”
It was Hawke’s turn to tap the Streicherstab blueprints.
“Surely you get the implications of a war machine like this? A real flying saucer propelled by fuelless power? There would be no limit at all to what you could do. It would take off like a rock out of a slingshot and turn on a dime. The rate of acceleration would defy your imagination. In flight, it wouldn’t make a sound. No one would hear you coming. It would stop abruptly, but there’d be no need for seatbelts. Your cockpit crew would feel nothing more than what we feel now from the tremendous speed of our orbiting, revolving earth. Arm it however you want—guns, bombs, lasers. Or nuclear weapons. A fighter like that would rule the world.”
The glittering eyes were back.
“So Streicher made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”
“Could you?” said Hawke. “Remember the Cold War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? Nuclear terror?”
DeClercq nodded. “When was contact made?”
“The summer of ’45.”
“Where?”
“South America. In the dying days of the war, Streicher had flown the Bell to Paraguay. The Pentagon had no one else to deal with. Before escaping from Nazi Germany, he had killed every scientist who’d worked on the project.”
“Except himself,” said DeClercq.
“He was an engineer.”
“What deal was struck?”
“What you’d expect. If he could produce a functioning anti-gravity war machine, we’d give him the same break we gave scientists like von Braun—a clean slate. History would record his death in Prague in the final days of the war, and he could live out his life under a new identity, free of Nazi hunters.”
“So you let him into the States?”
“Fuck no!” said Hawke, genuinely affronted.
“He stayed in South America?”
The spook shook his head.
That’s when it dawned on the Mountie.
“Christ, we took him in?”
* * *
There goes the moral high ground, thought DeClercq.
As he listened to Hawke describe the ins and outs of the Streicher conspiracy, he began to grasp the unwitting complicity of his own country, and even of the Mounted Police, in the cover-up. So secret was the project that only those directly involved knew it existed. The spook who ran it out of a maverick division of the Pentagon, and was the only American who knew that the engineer of the Holocaust was involved, was someone called Hardware. In the 1940s, there was no better place for the Chronos Project than the Phantom Valley Ranch. Buried in the hinterland of British Columbia, the Skunk Mine was the perfect replacement for the Wenceslas Mine. So throughout the summer and fall of 1945, the last Nazi U-boat in operation went up and down the West Coast of North America, transporting Bell components under the green sea with the blessing of the Pentagon.
“Who owned the ranch?”
“Streicher bought it.”
“How?”
“Through an impenetrable false front in Switzerland. It went ‘deep black.’ A ‘denial program.’ Streicher picked the scientists and forged the papers. No one knew who was there, or what they were really doing. The only thing we—and you—provided was security for a nebulous post-war defense project.”
“Who owns the ranch now?”
“Wheels within wheels, it seems. After 1947, we forgot about it.”
“What happened?”
“Streicher reassembled the Bell in the Skunk Mine. He picked up where the dead scientists had left off in the Sudeten Mountains. He was able to sneak in a new team of quantum physicists. The coast of B.C. is a smuggler’s dream.”
Hawke rapped the blueprint of the Bell.
“In their desperation to win the war, Hitler’s SS had fooled around with a branch of physics that we still don’t comprehend. Out of that cauldron of weird ideas had emerged a method for cracking the code of electrogravitics. Based on that, the Skunk Mine scientists were able to build two flying prototypes.”
“Anti-gravity platforms?”
“Right,” said Hawke. “The first was the Fireball. Unpiloted, it was remotely controlled. The Nazis had flown it at the end of the war. It had a metallic surface that reflec
ted light like a mirror. In daylight, it looked like a shiny disk spinning on its axis. But at night, it turned into a burning globe.”
“The foo fighter?”
Hawke threw DeClercq a thumbs-up.
“The Streicherstab had designed it to be a flying bomb. It had a guidance system called Windhund—or wind-hound—that locked onto the change in polarity around our planes like a dog’s nose locks onto a strong scent. An oscillator canceled out our radar blips. Black Widows over the Reich got tailed by these strange orbs of light.”
“Is that what the Skunk Mine scientists flew past Mount Rainier?”
“A Fireball. As proof of concept.”
“The witness, Kenneth Arnold, saw nine saucers.”
“The rest were coruscations. Mirror images.”
“What became of that disk?”
“Anti-gravity worked, so they ditched it out in the Pacific.”
“And the other 850 sightings of UFOs that July?”
“It only took one visionary to spot Elvis alive at the mall,” replied Hawke.
“There are no little green men?”
“None that I know of. And believe me, I’d know,” said the spook.
DeClercq believed him.
“So what crashed at Roswell?”
“The Flugkreisel. The Flightwheel. Streicher’s ticket to freedom.”
“Was that its first flight?”
“Uh-huh. It was being blooded. Tested.”
“Why New Mexico?”
“In 1947, that was the state. Von Braun and his rocketeers were at White Sands, launching V-2s. And the world’s only nuclear strike force was at Roswell. The Flugkreisel looked like a flying top. It left a vapor trail of bluish-white ionization in its wake. The plan was to zoom the Flightwheel—with two flight engineers and a doctor in the cockpit—over both New Mexico locations, blow the minds of those below, then fly it north, back to the Phantom Valley.”
“What went wrong?”
“Who knows? Some monkey wrench in hyperspace. The team that finished the Flightwheel wasn’t the same team that had dreamed it up, so it might have been human error. More likely, the design was flawed. When the craft was found, some metals had transmuted into others. Disrupted hardware had torn apart. And if that wasn’t ‘extraterrestrial’ enough, the flesh of the crew had morphed into otherworldly shapes. If you didn’t know what had really happened, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that an alien spacecraft had landed.”
“Was Streicher on board?”
“No, he was back at the ranch. The crash of the Flugkreisel put his immunity deal with us in jeopardy. So that same day, he gathered every member of his new team in the experimental chamber of the Skunk Mine to work on adjusting the torsion field in the hope that would solve the problem. But they must have pushed the gadget too far. There was a huge implosion that turned the whole chamber into a tomb of fused rock.”
“That’s what blocks the mine today?”
“It’s like it never happened.”
“And anti-gravity?”
“It’s still the Holy Grail. The Flightwheel that was recovered from Roswell was too far gone to reverse-engineer. And all the blueprints from the Streicherstab were with Streicher and his team when they ceased to exist in the depths of the mine.
“Breakthroughs, by their nature, are quantum leaps that short-circuit the evolution of science. The trouble with Nazi technology was that it took Nazis to make it function. We couldn’t replicate the successes of the Streicherstab, so we returned the Skunk Mine and the Phantom Valley Ranch to the way they were. Then we boxed up the remnants of the Flightwheel and buried everything away until our physicists were able to make a breakthrough of their own. By flatly denying that anything had happened at Roswell, we goaded the conspiracy theorists into making wild claims that have allowed us to keep the truth secret since 1947.”
“You’re still keeping it from me.”
Hawke frowned. “What makes you say that?”
“Come on. No one knew about Streicher, and he never set foot in your country. You say that all you hid were some pieces of scattered debris and three anonymous corpses. You could have claimed you had a broken arrow—a wayward atomic bomb. Or an American saucer that didn’t work. Lots of hardware failures have made the news. With Roswell, something forced you to bend over backward to hide the truth. I’ll bet your secret involves the Flightwheel’s crew.”
Hawke snorted.
“Come clean,” warned DeClercq. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“The doctor in the cockpit?”
“Yes?”
“Was Josef Mengele.”
* * *
That’s what happens, DeClercq thought, when you climb into bed with Nazis.
Mengele epitomized the depravity of Hitler’s Reich. Somehow, he was able to elude Nazi hunters for close to thirty-five years. And even when he allegedly died from a stroke while swimming in Brazil in 1979, it took six years before a combined force of American, German, and South American authorities was able to locate his grave. In 1992, DNA tests on the recovered remains confirmed his identity. But now, Hawke was telling DeClercq that all of that was a lie to cover up the fact that the most hunted Nazi in post-war times had actually been killed during a Pentagon super-weapon test in 1947.
No wonder the Roswell Incident was still being spun today!
“How’d you pull that off?”
“With a lot of help,” replied Hawke. “Mengele was obsessed with doubles and twins. The Mengele that history tracks across Europe and South America was actually a doppelgänger chosen by the doctor himself to mask his escape. For various reasons, the thirty-odd folks who knowingly or unknowingly aided that deception never said a word. Meanwhile, the Roswell remains were kept in a freezer, and their DNA was preserved.”
“So you seeded the grave in Brazil with Mengele’s DNA?”
“Brilliant, huh? His skeleton hadn’t changed, so his DNA could be compared with that of his known son.”
“Why was Mengele aboard the Flightwheel?”
“That was Streicher’s doing. We were shocked. The doctor was smuggled in on one of the U-boat runs to assess the impact of the Flugkreisel’s test flight on the crew. Not content to stay on the ground, he wanted in on history in the making.”
“What do you make of these?” DeClercq asked, indicating the two bloody blueprints.
“The Streicherstab must have done with the Flightwheel what we did with the bomb. Manhattan Project scientists pursued more than one approach to splitting the atom. One method produced Little Boy and the second created Fat Man. Streicher must have done the same with anti-gravity, pursuing one approach at Pilsen and the other at Brno. I guess he didn’t trust us not to welsh on the immunity deal, and so held back notes and blueprints generated at Brno. That’s the site name stamped on these papers.”
“Someone found them.”
“Yeah, and tried to blackmail us. We received a sample, along with a demand for a billion dollars, earlier this week. That’s a lot of dough for what could be junk, so when we got your swastika query, we took the less costly route of trying to get hold of your file and searching the Skunk Mine. The anchor in the rock must have been moved by anti-gravity, so it’s possible that the Brno papers do correct the flaw that caused the Flightwheel to crash.”
“You should have paid the billion.”
“In hindsight, yes. But now we’ve really pissed off the extortionist and the papers are still out there. The only operatives killed so far have all been Americans, and they knew the risks. No Canadians have been killed in this operation, so I ask you to honor your deal with me and help the Pentagon recover the Brno blueprints. Imagine what will happen if they’re the real McCoy, and they fall into the wrong hands.”
Argonauts
Vancouver
No sooner had Dane crashed into sleep than the alarm seemed to go off by mistake. No such luck. It was time to get up if he was going to catch Robson MacKissock.
But fir
st, a quick call to Special X.
“Corporal Hett.”
“It’s Dane. I’m awake,” he reported.
“You don’t sound rested.”
“I’ll catch up later. There’s someone I have to see. Nothing new on your front?”
“Nada,” said Jackie. “No Swastika Killer e-mail to Cort. No Stealth Killer truck sighted.”
“Bedtime for you, then. I’ll take over the watch.”
“Call if things get exciting?”
“Will do.”
* * *
Do teachers come any more old school than Professor Emeritus Robson MacKissock? Though in his eighties, the man was still larger than life, his leonine head crowned with a mane of wavy white hair, his body still robust from youthful development by rugby, soccer, and punting the backs while he was earning top place in classics at prewar Oxford.
The most enthralling lecturer at UBC in his heyday, MacKissock drew hundreds of auditors to his small classes. Sporting the full regalia of an Oxford don, he would stride the pit of a lecture theater way out here on the colonial edge of the civilized world and boom out his oratory as if he were Marc Antony begging friends and countrymen to lend him their ears. Greek gods like the old prof were hard to find these days, so even though the university had long since put him out to pension pasture, the students had him back for a roundtable in the classics reading room once a month. That’s where Dane found him after the meeting tonight.
“Harpies!” announced MacKissock, fluttering his fingers above an article in The Vancouver Times. He and Dane were encircled by shelves of dead-language texts, study carrels, and portraits of past department heads, the most imposing of which was the one of MacKissock himself. Outside, rain splattered the windows.
“Gang Girls Bully Blind Boy to Death” blared the headline that had caught MacKissock’s eye. “Lunch Money Stolen,” added the subhead. According to the report by Bess McQueen, a gang of girls from junior high had waylaid a special-needs student at a bus stop near his school and demanded all his money under threat of “de-panting” him. In a sightless effort to flee from them, he had darted out into rush-hour traffic and was run over by a car.
Swastika Page 34