Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  They saw a shimmer of force fields and fogs of particles, a part of the universe beyond normal human perception.

  The machine was rising to a scream as it accelerated. In the cluster of pipes that led to the red glow below, something broke and steam shot upward in a geyser.

  At last, Raeder ran. In fear.

  Something was being unleashed he didn’t comprehend. He retreated up the ramp that led out of this underground city.

  Hood wearily pursued, half staggering, since every nerve seemed on fire. The irradiation of staff energy was painful, exhilarating, numbing. His senses had been heightened, yet ached.

  At the entry of the machine room where the great door had been knocked askew and the bones piled, he turned back and aimed his weapon at the machine. A jolt shot out and there was a bang, more pipes punched and broken, wire unspooling. The machine whined higher.

  He didn’t want Nazis toying with this monstrosity again.

  Then the American was running up the central ramp, following Raeder. There was an explosion ahead, and a rush of cool air.

  When Hood got to the circular mandala door, he saw it had been blown to pieces. Raeder was somewhere beyond, on the surface of Shambhala.

  Hood trotted out, his body not just tingling but almost sizzling, a boil of electrons alive with a strange new music. Was this what death felt like? Was he dead? But no, he could see his own flesh, but it had a weird, radioactive glow. He was translucent as amber.

  Where was the mad Untersturmführer? It was night, the roof of the valley ablaze with stars, the snow glowing silver, the waterfalls iridescent lines of pearl. The entire valley was quivering from the tremors they’d unleashed. He could hear the rising shriek of the machine, far, far below.

  How to stop this madness before it escaped into the world?

  How to ambush Kurt Raeder before Raeder ambushed him?

  And then he had an idea.

  He ran down Shambhala’s main surface avenue, broken ruins rising to his left and right, the walls snaggletoothed and sad-looking. Had its inhabitants buried what was too terrible to have in the open? Had they fled when the energies they unleashed proved uncontrollable? Or had they made something they needed and simply returned to the stars?

  Then there was a crack, like a thousand whips being swung at once, and light seared by him and boomed off a valley wall. The whole cauldron shook. Snow and ice broke off the surrounding glaciers and avalanched down, bringing rock with it.

  Raeder had taken a shot at him.

  Hood turned and swept his own staff back at the ruins, letting loose a rippling sheet of fire that played over the devastation and turned the uppermost ramparts into shrapnel. Thunder rolled and reverberated. It was a battle of demons. Then he turned and ran again, down the river that ran through Shambhala.

  He was making for the narrow slit of a canyon where Raeder had dynamited the only path.

  Sheer blocking cliffs rose in front of him a thousand feet high. In the night it looked as if the river disappeared into a cave, so dark was the canyon, but he knew the cleft was like a sword stroke in the edge of a shield. He waited as the noise of their Vril shots grumbled away, trying to hear Raeder over the rush of the river. Where was the German hiding? Then he turned toward the gorge and lifted his staff, summoning every ounce of his will into bringing down those canyon escarpments. He pointed and thought.

  The universe seemed to flash into rebirth, light blazing. His arm snapped, broken, and the staff flew wide, sailing into darkness. He roared with pain. The rock walls that gripped the river fractured and leaned precipitously, but didn’t fall.

  One more, but he didn’t have it. His staff had broken on the boulders by the river. All the light had gone out of the amber crystal. His arm was shattered, his hand once more gushing blood. Hood turned to face the valley. The ground was shuddering from earthquakes below, and there was grinding as the machine in the deeps kept accelerating into overdrive.

  “I still have the machine gun, Kurt!” he yelled to give away his position by the damaged cliffs. It was his bravest lie. “I can still shoot you!”

  And then the biggest corona of all pulsed out toward him, the earth shook like a shocked muscle, and the mountain shattered.

  37

  A Boeing 747, over the Pacific

  September 7, Present Day

  No, Jake, I have not heard of Vril. Unless that’s the new cleanser that cleans the bathroom so you don’t have to.” Rominy was smart, but she didn’t spend her pretty little brain cells worrying about Nazi power sources. At least, not until now.

  “It’s a fictional name, a kind of code for what German theosophists hoped might be out there somewhere.”

  “German what?”

  “Just guys who provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of National Socialism, the creed of Hitler’s party. It did have a philosophy, you know.”

  “You bet. Blow up the world.”

  “In the 1930s many highly educated people took race and evolutionary theories quite seriously. After Darwin, it seemed self-evident that if you wanted to improve the human species—if you wanted it to evolve—then you bred the best with the best. People do exactly that every day. They want to mate with the prettiest or the smartest or the strongest or the richest. The Nazis simply thought you could apply that common sense to the group.”

  “Master race? Aryan supermen? Sore point for Jews?”

  “And Vril.”

  “Did I miss that Oprah episode?” She glanced out the window. The view over the Pacific looked exactly as it had hours ago. God, it was a long way to China.

  “It sounds goofy, like looking for a way to turn lead into gold, or the legend of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. Yet for thousands of years humans believed in a much more spiritual world than we do, in which gods or ghosts manifested themselves. Then along came science, everything opposed to science was labeled superstitious heresy, and ideas of exotic power sources like Vril were dismissed. Until modern physics came along.”

  “Cyclorama.”

  “Cyclotron. But it’s not just particle accelerators or atom smashers. It’s our whole concept of the universe. Now some people think the Nazis were on to something. Maybe Himmler’s Lewis and Clark expedition to Tibet wasn’t so wacky after all. Maybe Vril, or whatever you care to name it, really exists.”

  “And you think Benjamin Hood discovered this?”

  “Maybe. You know what an atom is, Rominy?”

  “Jake, I am literate.”

  “Bear with me. It was the Greeks who came up with the term. They looked at the world and saw that big things could be made of smaller things. Buildings out of bricks. Beaches out of grains of sand. And even sand could be ground down into dust or flour. Tiny and tinier. But was there a point at which things couldn’t get any smaller? Such a fundamental particle, they proposed, could be called an atom.”

  This was a moment in which women learned to humor men. You nodded as they held forth, and if you were really interested in the guy, you could smile in amazement or widen your eyes. If guys were smart, they learned that the inverse of this seduction was to pretend to listen sympathetically while the girlfriend kvetched about her day, and then rub her feet.

  Barrow plunged on. “It turns out the Greeks were right. There are fundamental particles called atoms. They come in nature in about ninety-two sizes, or weights, and out of them you can build anything we see in the universe. It’s like how you can make any English-language book from just twenty-six letters, or any song from just eight notes. You take the atoms of the periodic table and you can make anything. But here’s the problem. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists knew atoms weren’t the smallest thing after all. Do you know what they believed was smallest?”

  “The unholy heart of Ronnie Hoskins, my two-timing high school boyfriend?”

  He laughed. “Hey, I’m being serious, here.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Electrons, protons, and neutrons. Their number in an
atom controls the type of atom it is. Now we’re down to everything being made from just three things.”

  “Amazing.” She widened her eyes.

  “But then they wondered what would happen if they smashed those particles together.”

  “Boys do that with trains.”

  “It turns out there’s smaller stuff still. Quarks, and there are at least six varieties of those. Neutrinos, muons, leptons, a whole bunch of stuff physicists call a particle zoo. There are separate families of particles, called tribes. It’s bizarre, and confusing. A quark is a thousand times smaller than the nucleus of an atom, and remember I said that’s just a pinprick of the fuzz we call atoms. More than 99.99 percent of an atom is empty space.”

  “Jake, this is sweet, but why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because it drives physicists crazy. They’re romantics. They believe the universe is not only simple at the tiniest level, but that it needs to be simple to be aesthetic and neat and religious and right. They want to explain the whole shebang with a single equation so short you could fit it on a T-shirt.”

  “Like E=mc2.”

  “Exactly! That explains the relationship of energy to matter, that they’re two sides of the same coin. But then scientists have found four basic kinds of energy, too, the weak, the strong, electromagnetic, and gravity. It drives them crazy.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “At these smallest levels, everything goes woo-woo. A particle can be in two places at the same time. It can move from one spot to another instantly, without traveling through the intervening space.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Even worse is that all of the universe we can see, all that beautiful stuff that shows up in the Hubble telescope photos, isn’t everything. In fact it isn’t most things. Scientists think more than 96 percent of the stuff that makes up the universe is matter and energy we can’t see, or even detect. It’s called dark matter and dark energy.”

  “Earth to Jake. What does this have to do with Nazis?”

  “So. Some of the Nazis believed in an energy source called the Black Sun, buried at the center of the earth. Woo-woo, right? Except not entirely different from our ideas of dark energy, an energy so mysterious we can’t even detect it.”

  “How do we know it’s there?”

  “Something’s driving the universe apart faster than it should. That ‘thing’ has been labeled dark energy.”

  “And you take these physicists seriously?”

  “This is real! Okay, so now there’s this idea that there’s a smaller particle still, something a trillion times smaller than an atom, called a string. It’s a one-dimensional line, meaning it’s so small, this string has length, but no width.”

  She groaned. “Where’s my gin and tonic?”

  “And then when this string vibrates, it creates everything—everything—the way a vibrating violin string creates music.”

  “Music isn’t stuff.”

  “This music is. It’s all the stuff, all the energy.”

  “Why can’t I hear it?”

  “It’s not real music, Rominy. We’re talking metaphor. But you can hear it, too, since if these vibrations make everything—if they’re really the fundamental building blocks of atoms—then they made this jet and your ears and the air the engine noise travels through. It’s like the music of the spheres. The music of the cosmos.”

  She shifted in her seat, feeling something hard in her pocket poke her in the thigh. “And Nazis wanted the music.”

  “In essence, yes. What if you had a violin bow that could play these tiny, tiny strings and in so doing manipulate reality in ways we could barely imagine? I’m not talking just lead into gold. I’m talking matter into energy, and consciousness into action, and space into time and time into space. I’m talking extra dimensions, because string theorists think there may be a dozen or so we’re not even aware of, besides the usual four. I’m talking about walking through walls and teleportation and, well, magic. The Tibetans believe in tulpas, or beings created by conscious thought: that we can think things into existence if we understand how the universe really works. I’m talking about extraordinary abilities that the smartest people in the world searched for over many centuries. Wizards, alchemists, priests, and kings. It would be like the bow of God.” He looked at her expectantly.

  “Adolf Hitler wanted to play these strings?”

  “No, Hitler and the Nazis had no idea they existed. There were these legends of Vril, but no one in Germany had an idea what it really was or how it might be controlled. But since then we’ve had all these amazing discoveries in physics and suddenly this crazy 1930s idea sounds more plausible. What if an ancient civilization somehow figured this out centuries ago? Or some alien civilization came down to earth? What if Shambhala was a research center? Think about it—Tibet is the highest plateau on earth, the closest to angels and aliens, a natural landing point for a visiting civilization. What if someone, at some time, figured out how to play the music of the cosmos, to draw a bow across the fundamental strings?”

  “You think this is what my ancestor and the Nazis were after?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought. “These strings are really small, right? I mean, we’re talking about tiny violins.”

  “Teeny-tiny.”

  “So this is a tiny bow? Like, I’m not going to pick it up with my fingers?”

  “I don’t know. My suspicion is that they forged a great big bow that could play very little strings. You know, what’s come down to us in legends and stories is the idea of a stick—a magic wand, or a wizard’s staff—with magical powers.”

  “Like Gandalf.”

  “Exactly. And not just fictional wizards. Cardinal Richelieu carried a wand of gold and ivory his enemies thought had special powers. Newton was entranced not just by science but by alchemy and magic, and hunted for ways to transcend normal material boundaries. Nikola Tesla thought there was a connection between the mental and physical planes—mind over matter, if you will. What I think is that these legends have some basis in reality, that Shambhala devised very big tools—compared to subatomic particles—that could play this subatomic music and control the natural world with what we would call magic. What if they really existed? What if they still exist—in a hidden city that your great-grandfather found?”

  “Jake, this is starting to sound a little bigger than a newspaper scoop. A little scarier, too. And a whole lot crazier.”

  “Conceded. But maybe my weirdness makes a little more sense to you now. I seemed crazy because the story seemed crazy, until your car blew up. That’s when I knew this was real, and you had to be protected.”

  “I can protect myself,” she said automatically, even though the idea of a protector was not entirely unappealing.

  “Sorry. I mean you needed a partner. A friend.”

  She glanced down at the sheaf of diagrams. “You think the skinheads are after these staffs of Shambhala?”

  “Yes. Or at least after the idea that there’s something to the Shambhala legend.”

  Rominy sat back, thinking. She didn’t know if she was sitting next to a lunatic or Einstein. But then a thought occurred. She knew what had poked her thigh—the empty bullet cartridge she’d found on the floor of Jake’s pickup, behind the seats. Its meaning hadn’t been clear, but all this talk of big things and microscopic things had jarred her memory. She let her fingers touch it, next to her leg, but decided against pulling it out. Instead, she remembered its size. It was small, smaller than she imagined most bullet shells to be.

  In fact, the shell was the right size to hold a bullet that would make a small hole just like the one in Barrow’s rear window when they were being chased on the freeway.

  What was the shell from such a bullet doing inside Jake’s cab?

  Had that gunshot come from assailants she never saw as she was mashed down on the seat? Or from Jake Barrow himself?

  Should she challenge him on it?

  “Okay
, but I still don’t get it, Jake. You got me to go along, get the safety deposit box, find the mine, and retrieve the satchel. That’s my part as the heir, right? Why do you need me now?”

  He smiled, putting his hand on hers, covering where that gold ring burned on her finger. “Can’t you tell? I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  38

  Lhasa, Tibet

  September 10, Present Day

  Lhasa gave Rominy a headache, but then it gave almost all first-time visitors a headache. At nearly twelve thousand feet, it was one of the highest cities in the world. Yet its dizzyingly perched airport was still tucked in the valley of the infant Brahmaputra River, the runway surmounted by taller mountains that glowed like green felt. The sky was a deep blue and clouds drifted overhead like galleons. The topography was so steep that she and Jake had to take a tunnel to get to Lhasa’s neighboring valley. Golden willows and cottonwoods bordered gravelly rivers. Lines with flapping prayer flags were stitched from tree to tree like cloth graffiti, telegraphing prayers to the eternal. Buddhas peered down from niches in cliffs. Painted ladders symbolized ascension through reincarnation toward the final grace of nirvana.

  Tibet was a jumble of time. There were more oxen than tractors in the barley fields. The stone houses with small openings looked like fortresses compared to the glass expansiveness of American homes, and they were enclosed by adobe walls instead of white picket fences. Yet their geometry was more proportional and pleasing than a McMansion, with trapezoidal windows, walls alternately whitewashed or the color of the earth, and prayer flags fluttering from the four corners. There were bands of black and ocher at the eaves of the roofs, the tops flat because it so rarely rained.

  The sun burned with an intensity never felt in sea-level Seattle. Everything was crisp, the clarity defeating attempts at perspective because there wasn’t enough haze to judge distance. Shadows were intensely black; rock glittered. Even the facial bones of the Tibetans seemed sharp like their mountains, their skin the color of the earth. If you wanted to contemplate the workings of the universe, this was the place.