Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  “What are you, a Boy Scout?”

  “Eagle. Be prepared. I’m going to cook up something on my camp stove and we’ll think about it. Sleep on it, even. We’re close, Rominy. Closer than I’ve ever been. But we need to eat and think. I’m missing something.”

  So they did eat. The can of spaghetti, with carrot sticks as salad and M&M’s for dessert, apparently stretched Jake Barrow’s cooking skills to the limit. No wonder he’d been in frozen foods. While he heated she changed into some old-boy jeans he loaned her, cinching them in with a belt. Her heeled shoes were set aside for the boots, which did fit. She wondered about the girl who’d worn them but didn’t ask. Then she swept the place out with a fir bough, throwing away the ratty fur rug.

  It got cold as the sky darkened. Jake had gathered some wood and now he lit a fire in the old fireplace, the flames pushing aside the musty feel. The crackle and scent of smoke was reassuring. Rominy was more comfortable in the new clothes and warming cabin, but it also felt like she was losing her identity. She’d fallen down a rabbit hole.

  Jake heated water on the camp stove and used powder packets to make hot apple cider. The warmth relaxed her. Rominy still felt trapped at having to sleep here, but it was too late, and she was too tired, to think of any alternative. She unzipped one of the sleeping bags and draped it on herself like a quilt as she sat in the chair, considering it a shield against the chill of dusk and anything Barrow might try. Not that he tried anything. And not that she wouldn’t have been curious if he had tried something. He seemed to be leaving any move to her, which was good, except for the ways in which it wasn’t.

  She realized she’d phoned no one, since she had no phone. The radio had never been switched on. Had the MINI Cooper been identified with her? Was somebody searching? Her adoptive parents were gone and there was no real boyfriend at hand, but what were her friends thinking?

  She would miss work tomorrow. It seemed on another planet.

  “There’s obviously no mattress but I brought pads,” he said. “We’ll sleep on the floor and figure out what to do in the morning.”

  “We?”

  “You can sack out as near or far as you want. No drama.”

  She wished there was drama, just a little, so she could have the satisfaction of telling him to stick to his own side of the cabin, but he seemed as weary as she. So they bedded down on either side of the fireplace, a Puritan six feet between them.

  Rominy begged for sleep to come but her mind kept nagging at where she’d seen Hood’s pattern before. Some art museum, maybe, or a child’s book of mazes. Why couldn’t she think of it? She needed sleep! She sneezed from all the dust.

  And then it came to her with a bang like the explosion of her beloved car. She sat abruptly upright in her bag. It was utterly dark in the cabin, inky and spooky.

  “Jake, I’ve got it!” she hissed.

  No reaction.

  So she crawled out, still in jeans and her morning’s knit top—she wasn’t about to give him a peek at her panties, although she had considered it—and shook him. “Jake!”

  “What?” He’d already fallen asleep. Men!

  “I think I’ve got it! Hood’s map—it’s not contours, it’s a fingerprint.”

  “Huh?”

  “Light the lantern.”

  When he did so, both of them shivering in the cold of the cabin now that the fire was only dull coals, she reached inside the cookie tin from the bank and took out Hood’s mummified finger. Carefully she rolled it in the dust of a kitchen shelf and lifted the hissing camp lantern to study the dust. It had left the faint impression of a fingerprint. Then she looked at the inked calendar page. “This one.” Jake bent close. “See? This ridge has the same pattern as his finger.”

  He sucked in his breath. “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve no idea. It’s midnight in the middle of nowhere.”

  He grinned, looking up at her. “I rescued a genius,” he whispered in triumph. And then, before she had a chance to think about it, he kissed her.

  19

  Lhasa, Tibet

  September 21, 1938

  The close cropping of her hair had the effect of emphasizing the beauty of Keyuri Lin’s face: the dark eyes, the fine ears, the sculpture of cheek and chin and brow as she and Raeder stood in the glow of butter lamps off the main audience hall, the serene gaze of a gigantic Buddha filling the chamber like a cloud. She had the regal bone structure of a Nefertiti. There was also a calmness that Raeder didn’t remember from before. That crazed religion, he guessed.

  Serenity made him uneasy.

  Her presence in the Potala Palace was the worst luck, and yet he still felt the old desire. She was exquisite! Once more he ached to possess her, especially since as a nun she was more unobtainable than ever. Yes, the Germans were tormented by longing, as Reting had said, but wasn’t that what made them succeed?

  At the same time, his weakness irritated him. A fabled power at stake, and he wasted feeling for this woman? Any woman? Discipline!

  She studied him with an objectivity that surprised him; why wasn’t she more afraid? Maybe she thought she was untouchable because of the protection of the Reting and the nunnery. That was nonsense. Everyone was vulnerable. In the end, you had to rely on yourself.

  “You’ve come a long way from washing camp dishes,” Raeder began.

  “And you from hunting specimens for a museum, Herr Raeder. Now you’re a diplomat for Himmler and Hitler?”

  “I represent my country. It’s humbling.”

  “I very much doubt that.”

  Again, that disquieting self-confidence. “Does your regent know about our past together?”

  “He knows I’m a scholar of Shambhala. Its purity intrigues me.”

  If she was trying to insult him by referring to his impure tastes, he wouldn’t acknowledge it. “Why do you think Reting is willing to help us?”

  She thought. “The Reting is curious if you could actually find Shambhala, but isn’t unhappy at the thought of your failure, either. If you search for what you seek, there’s a good chance you’ll never return, and the problem you represent is solved. If you do return, he’ll take the secret from you. I suspect he finds humor in putting us together, a woman and the uniformed Nazis. And my research has alarmed him.”

  “Alarmed?”

  “What if myth is true? Dangerous opportunities. Delicious dilemmas.”

  Which was why he was here. “Why did you become a nun?”

  “You know that better than anyone.” Now she betrayed some coolness, a flash of bitterness, that actually reassured him. As long as he understood her, he could control her. He was already sifting possibilities.

  “Why do you study?”

  “You Europeans talked of these tales during Hood’s expedition, and after experiencing what I did, it was time to retreat and think. As the Buddha pondered, why is there suffering?” She held his eyes with her own, her hands splayed at her sides. “So tell me, Kurt Raeder, what I still wonder in the dark of every night: Did I cause my husband’s death by being friends with you?”

  “Of course not,” he lied. “His fall was an accident; I told you that.”

  “I wish I could believe you.”

  “You should believe your friends. I wanted to be a friend, Keyuri.”

  That lie hung like incense smoke above the lamps. Raeder had told it deliberately to provoke her. To maneuver her to doing what he hoped.

  She tried to mask her own calculations. “As to the legends, I wanted to learn the truth myself, before anyone else did. What if Shambhala does exist? Your Western curiosity incited my own. What is Tibet’s responsibility, then?”

  “Your regent says your responsibility is to work with us Germans. To help us. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m hearing you out.”

  “Do you think it’s in the Kunlun Mountains?”

  “That’s the most likely place.”

  “Is it possible to get there?”

 
; “It would take months. Winter is coming on.”

  He nodded. “The British held us too long in India. What if we had trucks or motor cars?”

  “You’ve seen Lhasa. There are none, except the Reting’s ceremonial car and those of the British. A wheeled vehicle could go only partway anyway.”

  “But cut months to days, no?”

  She glanced at the Buddha, massive, serene, a golden genie. “Yes.”

  He took a breath. If she really knew something useful, he had to try. “I loved you, Keyuri. In my own way. I’ve . . . reformed. Help me hire the British cars. You’ll be our guide, a nun above reproach. In return, we’ll share what we find with your kingdom. Germany is on the rise. It will be a partnership to save you from everyone—the British, the Chinese, the Russians. National Socialism will protect you.”

  “Maybe Tibet can save itself.”

  “Has it so far? Have Tibetans found and harnessed Shambhala?”

  She was silent.

  “Can the Tibetan army fight a modern invasion?”

  She looked up at the Buddha. Its stare was to infinity.

  “Time is short,” he pressed. “The world is about to go to war. How will your country survive it?”

  She shook her head. “The British won’t rent to you.”

  “Then you must get the cars for us. The Reting must. Buy the trucks. Steal them.”

  She looked at him with her great, dark eyes, or rather looked above him, as if studying some aura above his head. “Let me make inquiries.”

  She was going to do it. She was going to betray him as he hoped! Keyuri thought she was misleading him, but he could read the calculation in her eyes as easily as the text of a newspaper. Her hatred would prove to be the swiftest way. He bowed. “Even if we can’t be friends, we can be partners.” He smiled, the effort feeling like a crack in stretched parchment, his mind aghast at the irony, the karma, of having to deal again with this woman at all. But the Germans couldn’t afford to sit in frustration in Lhasa as they had sat in Calcutta. By next spring there might be world war.

  He would not play the Tibetan and British game.

  He would not let anyone else have Shambhala.

  “We’re facing treachery, my friends,” Raeder told his SS companions when they reassembled in their hostel in the city below the palace. Outside, donkeys and yaks jostled, vendors cried, monks chanted. A medieval backwater.

  “Treachery?” replied Kranz with surprise. “I thought we just won Tibetan help in finding what we seek. My God, did you see the gold in that edifice? I do feel like Pizarro! What else might be awaiting us in these mountains?”

  “That young woman is beautiful, too,” said Diels. “What I wouldn’t give for a taste of that. I wonder if she has sisters?”

  “I recognize that nun from my previous travels,” Raeder said. “We can’t trust her. We can’t rely on her to guide us until we ensure we’re in control.”

  “A nun?” asked Muller. “I’d think she’d be the one person we could trust. A nun or a monk. What’s wrong with that?”

  “She wasn’t a nun when I knew her,” Raeder said.

  “What was she, then?”

  “A widow. She worked on the Benjamin Hood expedition, her husband died, and I consoled her. Eventually we had a falling-out.”

  “What the hell does that mean? What’s going on here, Kurt?”

  Raeder hesitated. “I’m afraid she fell in love with me. Of course I had to leave her behind. The gap between our cultures was too great.”

  “My God. And this is who Reting chooses to guide us? Does the regent know?”

  “I’m not sure what that Oriental bastard knows or doesn’t know, or exactly what kind of help or interference he’s offering. You can’t tell what Asians are thinking.”

  “But why this woman?”

  “She became a student of the same mysteries I was curious about. I suppose I inspired her. Perhaps becoming a nun gave her access to secret records. Who knows? Reting Rinpoche is probably a simple man and simply thinks her knowledgeable—and expendable—if things go wrong.” He had to be careful his companions didn’t learn the full truth.

  “Did she recognize you?”

  “Of course. You saw us talk.”

  “Do you think she’s still in love with you?”

  “I’ve no idea. Well, yes. Probably. She may be hurt, or jealous, which is why we must tread carefully here.” The question of love was irrelevant, he believed. Raeder had bound her to have fun, out of earshot of the other scientists. She’d protested, which he ignored, and then begged, which he’d enjoyed. Then she’d surprised him by daring to crawl to Hood to complain, and the American had interfered. The expedition had broken up, Raeder hastily claiming he was the loser in a love triangle. Hood had agreed not to tell the truth, barely, in return for the German letting her go without a violent showdown that would have destroyed their reputations.

  I should have killed them all.

  But no, everyone’s scientific status was salvaged. And now, was there to be surprising reward from his mercy? Would Keyuri Lin be useful after all?

  Raeder still remembered how ripe she’d looked. Women could pretend they didn’t enjoy his appetites, but he knew better. That hatred when she suspected he’d killed her husband was also a form of respect, he believed, obeisance to the victor. It was foolish to feel shame for being human. Why did he have to be embarrassed by what was natural? Himmler was right. Religious commandments were a plot to emasculate the strong. He’d assumed the bitch Keyuri would disappear into some Tibetan marriage, and yet here she was in Potala Palace. A nun? A scholar of Shambhala? Was God laughing?

  No. This was luck that could be turned to his advantage.

  “I’ve paid one of our guides to follow where she goes,” he said. “She’ll try to betray me like Judas betrayed Jesus, so we have to move first.”

  What if he could not just use her but have her back?

  What if he could gain not just Shambhala but her submission?

  He was flushed, feverish, at the possibilities. Muller looked at him warily, and Raeder decided he didn’t like the geophysicist anymore. Julius was too judgmental. He wasn’t loyal. He wasn’t trustworthy.

  Their Tibetan guide Lokesh was loyal. At dusk he brought back word that Keyuri Lin had visited the British legation. Reader had expected that. Now they must get a move ahead of their opponents.

  “Lokesh, how would you like my black SS uniform?”

  The man’s eyes brightened. The costume was very stirring.

  That night a column of Tibetan soldiers silently surrounded the hostel of the German visitors. After listening to Keyuri Lin, the British consul had warned the Reting Rinpoche that the Nazis represented not aid but subversion. He’d obtained from the Potala a writ for the Germans’ arrest and interrogation, in joint action with Tibetan police. Ever since getting wireless warnings from Calcutta, British authorities had wondered what Raeder’s approaching party was up to. Now Lin had told them. A search for ancient powers? When the Nazis had no business being in southern Asia at all? Absurd. The sheer cheek of Himmler and his fellow bandits was breathtaking. It was time to teach the Hun a lesson.

  A full company of one hundred and fifty Tibetan soldiers, under the advisement of Captain Derrick Hoyle, readied to charge. An old artillery piece from Younghusband’s 1904 expedition was positioned opposite the hostel’s front door. One of the army’s two heavy machine guns was set up at the rear.

  The Germans could be seen moving through the small, dim windows.

  Finally a shrill whistle was blown and the British led the charge. Doors were smashed, entry forced. Hoyle shouted in German that Raeder was under arrest!

  No shots had to be fired. Their quarry meekly raised their hands.

  The soldiers took into custody five Tibetan porters attired in the full-dress uniform of Himmler’s SS.

  Raeder’s own men, equipment, and weapons were gone.

  Captain Hoyle snapped his swagger stick in frustr
ation.

  Several miles away, a British motorcar and heavy truck with a squad of English soldiers were racing north from Lhasa, winding up a dirt road to a pass that led to the broader plateau. Far to the north, the remote and mysterious Kunlun Mountains waited.

  A young Tibetan woman was guiding from the front seat of the lead car, having assured the English that they represented a more logical alliance in the hunt for ancient secrets than the restless Germans. The British legation thought this choice made perfect sense. If war was coming, the British Empire and nearby India would surely prevail. England was Tibet’s natural ally. The British truck towed a trailer loaded with extra fuel, food, explosives, and climbing gear. The vehicles wouldn’t get over the final worst terrain, but caravan trails would get the hastily organized expedition close enough to make a forced march feasible before winter descended.

  With luck, the Nazis who’d escaped India were already interned in Lhasa.

  And in return for Keyuri’s help, the English had sworn to turn over whatever they found to the Potala. Reting had nodded gravely at their offer, not believing it for a moment.

  The moon was up, the mountains silver, and the plume of dust from the hurrying vehicles was pewter in the gloom.

  Then a dark blockage loomed. The British driver of the lead car slammed on the brakes.

  A shaggy yak stood tethered in the roadway. Boulders prevented the vehicles from going around either side.

  “What the devil?” said Major Howard Southampton. He bounded out to investigate.

  Four men dressed in the yak-hair robes of Tibetan herdsmen materialized from the gloom. Bandits! Before the English could reach for their own weapons, the muzzles of German weapons were pressed to their ears.

  “Careful,” said Eckells in English. “I’m an Olympic shot.”

  “Hello, Keyuri,” the lead herdsman greeted, holding a Luger. “So convenient that you’ve gotten us an early start to Shambhala.”

  It was Kurt Raeder, his yak-wool cloak giving him the look of a shaggy bear.