Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

“It was so real.”

  “It was a dream. Settle down. It’s too early to get up.”

  She wiggled against him, glad of his warmth and nearness. “You’re up.”

  “I’m just glad to see you, as Mae West said.”

  “You know, I didn’t mean for us do that last night,” she whispered.

  “I did. I like you.”

  “And I still don’t know anything about you, Jake, not really.”

  “You will. This is a good start.”

  “I’m usually more reserved.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Unusual circumstances.”

  “Extraordinary circumstances.”

  “Spec-tac-ular circumstances,” and he began to laugh, so she had to turn to kiss him to get him to stop and, well, another half hour went by.

  Finally he told her to rest in the warmth of the bed while he got up to build a fire and put water on the camp stove. She watched him as he pulled on his jeans. Yep, he was as fit as she’d surmised in the Safeway store, eye candy in Dogpatch. He seemed in awfully taut shape for a keyboard jockey, so he must really be trying to get his money’s worth from a health club membership. Was he too vain?

  Stop being so judgmental! One minute Rominy is buying Lean Cuisine, and the next she’s in a wilderness cabin with stud muffin reporter. Was any of this real? She lazily viewed him as he pulled on his shirt.

  “You’ve got a tattoo.” It was on his right shoulder.

  “Yeah. Almost a cliché these days.”

  “What’s it of? A circle something?”

  “A sun wheel. Old traditional art. Tibetan, among others. I liked the design.”

  “Chosen after three beers too many?”

  “Oh no, I thought about it quite carefully.”

  “I like it,” she decided.

  “It’s supposed to be good luck.”

  She had a vague memory of having seen something similar somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where.

  “We’ve still got a mystery to solve, you know,” she said.

  “We’re not supposed to indulge our appetites until we do,” he agreed.

  “But now I’m hungry.”

  “So we’ll eat and then we’ll figure this out.” The camp stove kettle whistled and he poured hot water into a mug with instant coffee. “I’ve got a Kellogg Variety Pack.”

  “You do know how to impress a girl. Will you turn your back while I dress?”

  He sipped, looking at her. “No. I don’t think so.”

  Which was not entirely bad, since he did seem appreciative.

  The sun eventually came up, lighting the trees and cabin, and they turned again to Hood’s odd map with its fingerprint contour lines. It still looked more like a Rorschach blot than a treasure map, but there had to be some meaning to Hood’s weirdness. Had he cut off his finger just for this, like van Gogh sawing off his ear?

  There was a directional arrow on the map, with an N presumably marking north. Jake oriented it with his survey map, but there was no obvious correlation between the two.

  “It’s like half a clue,” said Rominy.

  “I hope he was sane when he did this.”

  She went back to the cookie tin with its contents. “He left us a compass, too.”

  “To use that, you have to know which way you’re trying to go.”

  “It’s amazing it still works.” She turned, to watch the needle spin. Nothing happened. “Except it doesn’t.” She turned again. “It’s broken. Frozen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The needle always points the same way on the dial. Sort of northeast.”

  Jake took it from her and tapped the instrument. The needle didn’t budge. “You’re right.”

  “What if that’s a clue?”

  “Why would a broken compass be a clue?”

  “What if he fixed the compass so it wouldn’t turn and then put it in the safety deposit box with his finger?”

  “You mean it’s a bearing, a heading?”

  “Yes.”

  “But from where?”

  “I think we have to assume this cabin. Find where we are on your survey map, use the compass bearing, and draw a line.”

  Jake did so. The line crossed several mountains, but it still wasn’t clear which, if any, was supposed to match Hood’s fingerprint. “We’re still missing something. What next, Woodward?”

  She pondered. “Elementary, my dear Bernstein. The other stuff in the tin has to mean something, too. The only question is, what?”

  He shook his head. “Oh boy, this is not like jotting notes at a press conference. My brain does not work like this. A pistol and a scarf? It makes no sense, this calendar has no guidepost, no . . . wait a minute. Is that gun loaded?”

  “God, I hope not. I waved it around in the bank. With seventy-year-old ammunition?”

  He picked it up, aimed it away, and worked the mechanism with an efficiency that surprised her. Did Jake know about guns, too? A shell, green with age, was ejected. It fell on the floor.

  “Oh my, what if it had gone off?”

  “Well, it didn’t.” He picked the round up, studying it curiously. “Look.” He moved the bullet to the calendar. Its diameter matched the hole that had been made through the pages to hold the calendar up. “The hole is ragged. I think Ben Hood shot through this baby before he drew his map, or finger, or whatever the heck he was doing.”

  “Why?”

  He pointed at the open pages. “To give a reference point. Either where we’re going or where we are.”

  “Yes!” She liked this collaboration. “Where we are, I’m guessing. Our starting point. So your compass bearing can be drawn from the bullet hole.”

  Using the N to orient the broken compass, Jake drew a line from the hole the .45 bullet had made across the calendar map to the northeast. It crossed Hood’s fingerprint. “Which means?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The scarf. What’s that for?”

  “Your great-grandfather was a lunatic, wasn’t he? Or completely paranoid, locking everything away until a relative comes along to claim it—someone who likely wouldn’t be with the government, or Tibet, or the Nazis. And here you are, junior detective.” His tone was admiring, which she liked. Rein it in, Rominy.

  She picked up the scarf and examined it. The silk was dirty, frayed white, and unremarkable in every way. Had it been given to him by some potentate in Tibet? Or was there something hidden in its meaning? What would a junior detective do? Or a man at the end of his life at the end of a terrible war? She held it up to light from a window. Parts seemed cleaner than others. Which meant . . . what?

  “Jake, light your lantern.”

  “Sun’s up, Rominy.”

  “Light it anyway. I need some heat but I don’t want to hold this by the fire and risk setting it ablaze.”

  The lantern was the old gas type, and its mantles flared to life with a familiar hiss. In short order the glass cylinder enclosing the mantles was too hot to touch, and Rominy held the scarf near the light. “This is something we used to do as kids.”

  “Hold scarves to lanterns?”

  “Invisible ink. You can use juices, honey, diluted wine, urine, you name it. Coke, even. You mix with water, write, and let it dry. You can’t see it.”

  “Until you heat it?”

  “Yes. Voilà!” Brown characters had appeared on the scarf. Rominy pulled it away and they read.

  360/60/60=1”

  “That’s perfectly clear,” Jake joked.

  “No, it obviously means something. Is it a date? A year has 365 days, not 360.”

  “The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians started with that as the length of the year, before astronomy was refined. And that’s why we use it for bearings today. I think three hundred sixty means degrees, like compass degrees. This is another bearing, perhaps. Sixty . . . plus sixty. That’s one hundred twenty, about opposite where the needle is fixed. And one is . . . I don’t know.”

  “Why have another bearing?�
�

  “To cross the first?”

  “But it wouldn’t cross. It just leads in the opposite direction. That doesn’t help.”

  “Let me think.” He pursed his lips, studying the relics, in a way she thought was irresistibly cute. Yes, she’d fallen. “Have you ever used a nautical chart?”

  “No,” she said, silently condemning her own lack of caution in affairs of the heart, but then sometimes magic just happened, didn’t it? And . . .

  “The nautical mile is based on the length of one-sixtieth of a degree, or one minute of one degree of latitude on the earth’s surface. That’s a distance just a little longer than our land mile.”

  “But his invisible writing has two sixties.”

  “Which would suggest a nautical second, which my boating days taught me is about a hundred feet. A hundred and one, I think.”

  “So one inch on his map equals a hundred feet.”

  “Is that all? That means to his fingerprint from the bullet hole is only a few hundred yards.”

  She looked at the cloth again. “Wait. Is this another number?”

  They peered. Less distinct than the first were more numerals: 72.1.

  “Look at your contour map again.”

  “So?”

  “What if it’s seventy-two point one times a hundred and one feet? Where does that put us?”

  He multiplied it out. “That’s seven thousand two hundred eighty-two feet. That could be”—he looked from modern map to Hood’s fingerprint and back again—“the far side of this peak here, Lookout Mountain and Teebone Ridge, toward Eldorado.”

  “Plot it on your USGS map.”

  “Here, about. Below Little Devil Peak, above Marble Creek Canyon.”

  “And what are the coordinates?”

  He read them off.

  “I think that’s where we need to go,” she said. “A little tricky to find in the woods, I’m guessing.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “I have GPS. We can use it to walk exactly to this spot.”

  “Cool! Then what happens?”

  “I don’t know. He seemed to go to a lot of trouble to plot this, but then make it obscure. If you didn’t have the contents of his safety deposit box, nothing would make sense. Maybe our interpretation is still off. But I think you’re on to something, Rominy. We follow this frozen bearing the required distance and find . . . treasure. Maybe.” His tone was cautious. He was trying to control his hope. “What are the coins for, then?”

  Rominy thought a moment and then beamed, triumphant. “That’s easy. You said yourself these mountains are riddled with old mines. We’re going to find a gold mine!”

  “I like your optimism.”

  “Maybe he found something in Tibet to help him mine.”

  “I’ll get the daypacks,” Jake said.

  “I’ll clean up the breakfast. When you go out, could you check for ghosts and skinheads?”

  “And raccoons.”

  Jake had started a garbage sack the night before. He was out by his old truck, dragging stuff from his big toolbox and poking around in the cab, when Rominy stooped to scrape leftovers into the bag. She saw he’d lumped in some perfectly good recyclables: the spaghetti can and two plastic water bottles. Odd for a Seattle boy; he was no tree hugger. She decided to fish them out for proper disposal. When she did so, something small, round, and shiny dropped from some crumpled paper towels where it had been caught. Had Barrow lost a coin?

  Diving past strands of spaghetti, she picked it up. Not a coin but some kind of small battery. Odd that he’d think to toss one here.

  Then a thought occurred. She glanced out the window; he was still busy. So she opened her purse, took out her cell phone, and opened its back.

  Its battery was missing.

  She put the discarded one in. The phone still didn’t power on.

  22

  Toward the Kunlun Mountains, Tibet

  September 30, 1938

  The Germans drove seven hundred miles north and west of Lhasa, first on a winding caravan track through a maze of mountains, and then on the trunk road that led across Asia toward Kashmir and the Karakoram. A hundred miles before Karakoram Pass, they turned north again into wilderness, so high and unpopulated that they no longer encountered any nomads. Animals watched them curiously and without fear, not understanding what the two-legs were. Raeder itched to kill some—they wandered near enough to try the submachine gun—but hunting would only slow them down. The distant peaks were getting whiter as autumn began, the snow line lower each morning.

  The Kunlun Mountains, a two-thousand-mile-long range that parallels the Himalayas, forms the northern border of Tibet. It lay along the horizon like a white wall, remote as the moon. Keyuri Lin had combined her fragmentary clues from the old peches, or books, with ancient legends to turn Tibetan mystery into a tangible goal, a gamble like Columbus’s sailing west to go east. Now the roof of the world swallowed them as they drove into a geographic vacuum. Maps were blank here.

  When the British motorcar broke down after thirty straight hours of dirt roads and steppe trails, its tires blown, Kurt Raeder’s party siphoned its gas tank and unceremoniously rolled it off a hillside. They whooped as it bounced and spun, pieces flying off like bright marbles.

  The truck and trailer made it for three more days, some of the Germans riding like coolies on the towed cart.

  Then they came to an impassable gorge.

  It was as if God had taken the earth into two mighty hands and cracked it across its crust. This was not a canyon, it was a rock crevasse, a split in the plateau that extended as far as the eye could see in either direction. Water glinted at its depths, a thousand feet down. The lip of the other side was a tantalizing fifty yards away. The rift was effective as a moat.

  “Now what?” asked Muller.

  “We cross it,” said Raeder.

  “Impossible,” said Diels. “We need a balloon.”

  “Nothing is impossible for National Socialists. And your idea of a balloon is not a bad one, if we had means to make one.” Raeder inventoried the truck and trailer. “Unfortunately I don’t see how.”

  “Maybe we can drive around it?”

  “Through those boulder fields? How far, and what if the Tibetans are pursuing? Detour and delay could ruin everything.”

  “We could throw a light line to someone on the other side,” Eckells said.

  “Do you see anyone, Franz?” Muller asked. He sat on a rock.

  “One of us climbs down and up the other cliff.” Eckells peered over the edge. “But we don’t have rope enough for the entire route. A single slip . . .” Their cameraman/political officer was the most eager of the group, and the most stupid.

  Raeder paced the edge like an impatient animal. “Let me think.”

  “Perhaps this is why no one has ever found Shambhala,” said Muller.

  Raeder ignored him, scratching a design on the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What if we could shoot a line across? Eh, comrades? A rope to shimmy across?”

  “Shoot with what?”

  “Our truck. Look. I have an idea.”

  The truck’s exhaust pipe became their cannon muzzle. The vertical stakes of the front grill were dismantled, crossed, and bent to make a grappling hook. The lightest line they dared trust a man’s weight to was tied to the hook’s cross and carefully coiled next to their makeshift launcher. Gunpowder became the charge, and a revolver was dismantled to provide a trigger and firing pin.

  “We’re going to blow our eyes out,” Kranz said nervously.

  Raeder grunted. “You sound like my mother.”

  “I’m going to film it on camera,” promised Eckells. He backed away. He was not as stupid as the others thought.

  A sloped trench had been dug and the butt of their launcher braced against the dirt. The muzzle of the exhaust pipe pointed across the canyon, the pole of the grappling hook inserted like a ramrod. Someone had to get down in the trench to pull the trigger.

  “I�
�ll do it,” Diels finally said, “if someone else is first across.”

  “That will be me,” Raeder said.

  Diels closed his eyes and squeezed. There was a boom, the tube jerked, and the archaeologist yelled as hot metal lacerated his arm. The butt of the makeshift cannon had burst. But their hook was arcing like a rocket, line unreeling like a writhing snake. The grapnel struck ten yards beyond the far side and Raeder pulled until it caught on a boulder.

  He swiftly tied their end to the truck. “Back enough to give it tension!”

  Then he slung a heavier rope coil on his shoulder, grasped the line, wrapped his legs, and pulled himself out into thin air. It was like watching a spider bob in the wind, a thousand feet above a maw of rocks.

  Foot by foot, he pulled himself across, the line sagging but not breaking.

  “Heil Hitler!” he called from the far side.

  In astonished acknowledgment, they raised their arms.

  The heavier line was pulled back across the chasm. Flywheels from the truck were unbolted to make a crude pulley system for a rope cradle. By the end of the day even Keyuri had been conveyed across, along with all the food, water, and ammunition they could carry. The truck was left, bottomed on rubble and leaking oil. The remaining canisters of gasoline were left in the trailer.

  Raeder turned to Keyuri. “Are we close enough to trek from here?”

  “Somewhere on the far side of that.” She pointed to a horizon of snow-dusted hills ahead.

  He nodded. “I know you could lead us into oblivion.”

  “My people want Shambhala’s secret, too.” She shouldered a pack.

  “Yes. And if you mislead us, you’ll never see Lhasa again.”

  “If we find it, I may not see Lhasa, either. No one has ever returned, Kurt.”

  Raeder didn’t tell Keyuri the Germans wouldn’t return to Lhasa either. Maybe they’d sneak through China to the Japanese. Or go north to the trans-Siberian railroad and take ship at Vladivostok on the Pacific to avoid Communist scrutiny in Moscow. But the safest route might actually be west, through the wilds of Afghanistan to Persia. A direction in which no power, including Tibet, was likely to stop them. A route that brought them and the secret of Shambhala safely home to Germany.