The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  But he wasn’t going to Bondi Beach just yet. Instead, he bought a ticket for the 10.45 to Cambridge. It takes just under an hour to cover the fifty miles that separate London and the university city. As the suburbs gave way to intermittent flashes of open fields, he ran over what he had been able to discover of Standartenführer Bodo Ritter. The man had carved out a low-key career as an academic in the art department of an obscure south German university. And there he would almost certainly have stayed, but for the discontent with Germany’s economic ills that drew him to the increasingly popular National Socialist Workers’ Party and their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler.

  At some point in the early 1930s Bodo Ritter had been introduced to a charming Argentine-German called Richard Darré, a rising star in the Nazi party and the SS, and it was through Darré that he met Heinrich Himmler. One of Ritter’s main areas of research had been early Germanic folklore. In Himmler he had a ready audience for his theories, which, in turn, won him an invitation in 1935 to join the SS-Ahnenerbe, the organization’s Ancestral Heritage, Research and Teaching Society. Bodo’s later career would show him as a man with an eye for an opening, and he recognized his opportunity in Himmler’s fascination with the origins of the Germanic peoples. In a few years he had made himself indispensable and was appointed to the SD, the Reich security service; just another petty bureaucrat in Hitler’s industry of repression.

  ‘I hope you have a strong stomach.’ Chris, the young research assistant at the Imperial War Museum’s records facility at Duxford, placed a file on the wooden desk.

  Jamie gave a grim nod as he studied the tattered beige oblong containing who only knew what horrors. It looked as if it hadn’t been opened for years, but that wasn’t surprising. These days not many people were interested in the international military tribunals that had tried the top Nazis for war crimes at Nuremberg. Everything that needed to be said had been said. All the arguments chewed over in the sixty odd years since. And Bodo Ritter was small fry compared to the men he followed into the dock.

  ‘You said you were mainly interested in Ritter’s career after nineteen forty-two?’

  ‘That’s right. But I’d also like to get a handle on the kind of men I’m dealing with.’

  Chris leafed through the file. ‘Then I suggest we start here.’ He laid a sheaf of faded papers on the desk. ‘This is a copy of Ritter’s sworn statement to a civilian lawyer of the US Advocate General’s staff in nineteen forty-seven. You have to understand that in Nuremberg terms this was just a sideshow.’

  Jamie nodded. ‘I know he was tried by an American military court and not with any of the big names.’

  ‘Good, so I don’t have to go into the background. As you can see, the first few paragraphs cover his life before the war, his university career and his subsequent enrollment in the SS. Then …’ He passed Jamie the documents.

  In early 1941, I was frustrated that, although in uniform, I had not been able to make a contribution to the war effort as a soldier. At that time plans were being finalized for what became Operation Barbarossa and I was made chief of Sonderkommando 4, which would operate under Einsatzgruppe C, within the area of the Sixth Army; that is, the Ukraine. During the period of my service as chief of the Sonderkommando 4, from the time of its organization in June 1941 until January 1942, I was assigned, at various occasions, with the execution of communists, saboteurs, Jews and other undesirable persons. I can no longer remember the exact number of the executed persons. According to a superficial estimate – the correctness of which I cannot guarantee – I presume that the number of executions in which the Sonderkommando 4 took a part lies somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000. I witnessed several mass executions, and in two cases I was ordered to direct the execution. In August or September 1941 an execution took place near Korosten. Seven hundred to a thousand men were shot. I had divided my unit into a number of execution squads of thirty men each. First the subordinated police of the Ukrainian militia, the population and the members of the Sonderkommando seized the people, and mass graves were prepared. Out of the total number of persons designated for the execution, fifteen men were led in each case to the brink of the mass grave, where they had to kneel down, their faces turned towards the grave. At that time clothes and valuables were not collected. Later on this was changed. The execution squads were composed of men of the Sonderkommando 4, the militia and the police. Then the men were ready for the execution. One of my leaders who was in charge of this execution squad gave the order to shoot. Since they were kneeling on the brink of the mass grave, the victims fell, as a rule, at once into the grave. The persons which still had to be shot, were assembled near the place of the execution, and were guarded by members of those squads, which at that moment did not take part in the executions. I supervised personally the executions I have described here, and I saw to it that no encroachments took place. Sonderkommando 4 has killed women and children, too. In September or October 1941, Einsatzgruppe C placed a gas van at my disposal, and executions were carried out by means of this method.

  I have read the foregoing deposition consisting of five pages, in the German language, and declare that it is the full truth to the best of my knowledge and belief. I have had the opportunity to make alterations and corrections in the above statement. I made this declaration voluntarily without any promise of reward and I was not subject to any duress or threat whatsoever.

  Nüremberg, 6 June 1947

  (Signature) Bodo Ritter

  A chill descended that seemed to eat into Jamie’s bones. It wasn’t the horrors – the deaths of fifteen thousand men, women and children and God knew how many more – but the dispassionate way Ritter described them. No regret, no guilt or sorrow, just a cold, hard recital of the facts.

  And after the facts came the lists. Lvov, Domobril, Zhitomir, Mielnica, Novo Selista, Volhynia, Zloczow, Drohobycz, Kamenka and Stryj. Beside each Ukrainian town a careful accounting for Himmler’s number-hungry bureaucrats. Jews, Jewesses, Jewish children, communist, partisan; beginning in tens, then hundreds and eventually, at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev, tens of thousands.

  And after the lists, the reality. Witness statements from soldiers who had seen the horrors at first hand, from men who had taken part, from survivors who had crawled naked and bloody from the death pits and, somehow, lived to tell the tale. Bodies heaped in layers, with the living made to lie upon the dead waiting to be killed in their turn. The desperate cries of the wounded. A small hand reaching out from a sandy grave in a silent plea to be finished off. Blood welling in fountains from the earth as the murderers attempted to disguise the enormity of their crime. Bodo Ritter’s war.

  ‘Christ.’ Jamie met the other man’s eyes across the table.

  ‘Yes, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There were at least forty sonderkommando operating behind the front lines as the Germans advanced into Russia, from the Baltic coast to the Crimea. The Nazis were extremely proud of what they were doing and kept detailed records. Fortunately, some of them survived the war, which is why men like Ritter were brought to justice. Of course, the Wehrmacht and the SS and local militias often did their dirty work for them, so the figures you see in these papers are a minimum. It’s likely that between one and a half and two million men, women and children – and that doesn’t include Russian prisoners of war – were murdered over a two-year period.’

  ‘He makes it all sound so … reasonable.’ Jamie shook his head at the thought. ‘Just another day at the office.’

  Chris nodded. ‘Men like Ritter didn’t think in terms of humanity. Only in numbers. The Einsatzgruppen commanders were lawyers and policemen, Nazi party functionaries. Ask them why they did it and they’d shrug their shoulders and tell you they were only doing their duty. Obeying orders.’

  Jamie turned to a second, much shorter deposition made by the same man a few days after the first.

  In July 1942, I was taken ill. This was not uncommon in soldiers who carried out our task. It was a job that took its t
oll on even the hardest. I asked to be transferred to a fighting unit, but as a result of my particular expertise being known to the Reichsführer-SS, I was seconded to a new and experimental command – SS-Hauptampt der Kunst und Kulturschätze – which later became known as Geistjaeger 88.

  Ritter gave an account of his unit’s specific tasks and areas of operation and at the end was appended a list of personnel, almost all of whom were listed as dead or missing.

  SS-Standartenführer Bodo Ritter, SS-Sturmbannführer Max Dornberger, SS-Untersturmführer Gerd Wolff, SS-Unterscharführer Berndt Hartmann …

  By the time he reached the final page of the file, a facsimile of Ritter’s death certificate following his hanging at Landsberg prison in 1950, Jamie felt exhausted, but he spent another hour making his own copy of the Ritter testimony before heading for home. As he left the gates of the Duxford complex, the young man he had been with a few moments earlier picked up the phone in his office.

  ‘You wanted to know if anyone took an interest in the Bodo Ritter file?’

  VIII

  ‘I THINK I’VE got something for you.’

  ‘Sorry, can you repeat that. This line’s not too good. Who am I speaking with?’

  ‘It’s Jamie Saintclair. From London. We talked about Geistjaeger 88.’ He hoped the line was bad enough to hide his disappointment that Danny Fisher hadn’t remembered him. But Detective Fisher had just finished a fourteen-hour shift that involved a long day scrambling through Brooklyn’s biggest garbage facility in the hunt for missing body parts and her numbed mind needed a few moments to recognize the Englishman with the sexy accent.

  ‘Oh. Hi there.’

  ‘I think I’ve got something for you,’ he said again.

  ‘Go.’

  It took a second before he worked out that ‘go’ meant speak. ‘Geistjaeger 88 was set up in nineteen forty-two as a rival to Herman Goring’s art-looting organization, but it had a slightly more specialized remit.’

  ‘Uhuh?’

  ‘Its task was to hunt down works of art and historical artefacts linked to the occult. Himmler believed that if he could harness the power of the past, the Third Reich would be able to build super-weapons that would allow Hitler to bring the world to its knees. We’re talking death rays and flying saucers here.’ He explained the former Bavarian chicken farmer’s obsession with the origins of the Aryan race, which had spurred him to send expeditions to Tibet and Siberia in the search for the underground cities of the Vril, a mythical people said to have been the inhabitants of sunken Atlantis. ‘Among other things, he believed that the Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ as he hung on the cross, had magical powers that would help the Nazis achieve world domination. Berndt Hartmann was one of the men whose job it was to track it down. Hartmann didn’t fit your normal image of an SS man. Most of them were just as you see them in all the pictures: tall, blond and very Germanic, in a square-jawed, bullet-headed kind of way. At the start of the war they had to have flawless criminal records and you could be chucked out for having a single missing tooth. According to the sketchy description Ritter gave his interrogators, Hartmann was short, skinny and he’d just been released from jail in Hamburg after doing time for bank robbery. Ritter was a clever chap. When he was appointed to command G 88 he very quickly worked out that the job required a team with a special combination of talents. One of those talents was an ability to open a locked safe without blowing up or burning what was inside. That’s where Hartmann came in. Ritter took a liking to him and he became Geistjaeger 88’s safecracker and unofficial mascot. They would have trawled Europe looking for anything of religious or ritual significance. They’d target museums, private art collections, churches for the bones of the saints, splinters of the true cross; that kind of thing. One of Himmler’s top men, a fellow called Walter Schellenberg, wrote after the war that he spent months touring churches in Italy looking for the last known copy of the Roman historian Tacitus’s work Germania, because it was thought to hold the earliest clues to the origin of the German peoples. There’s a theory that Schellenberg actually found the sword of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, but if he did it disappeared with thousands of other treasures at the end of the war. That sword is said to have been involved in magic rituals. Himmler loved that type of thing. The occult was his passion.’

  ‘I thought slaughtering Jews was his passion?’

  ‘Actually, he was quite a reluctant killer, physically that is, but that’s not the point. Geistjaeger 88 operated in southern Russia, Romania, Hungary and France, but in the great battles that followed D-Day they were forced to retreat back to Germany with everyone else. I’ve found a specific reference to them in May nineteen forty-five as part of a hotchpotch of SS units defending the Reichschancellery.’

  ‘How does that help us?’

  ‘Their commander, Standartenführer Bodo Ritter, survived the war. He seems to have got out before they were trapped. Most of the rest were killed, but two of them just disappeared.’

  ‘Let me guess. Hartmann?’

  ‘Berndt Hartmann and Max Dornberger.’

  There was a pause as she considered the names.

  ‘What do we know about Dornberger?’

  ‘Next to nothing, except that he was the unit’s political officer, which probably makes him a rabid Nazi.’

  Danny tested the new information for possibilities for a few moments before discarding it. Something else occurred to her. ‘Hey, I almost forgot. I have a picture I’d like you to take a look at. I’ll e-mail you right this second.’

  He heard the click as she sent the message and they waited for it to drop into Jamie’s inbox.

  ‘So what does an NYPD detective do when she’s not catching killers?’ he said to fill the silence.

  ‘Are you flirting with me, Mr Saintclair?’

  He laughed. ‘If I am, you should call me Jamie.’

  ‘She sleeps, Mr Saintclair. She works, she eats and she sleeps. Not quite as glamorous as being an art dealer.’

  He was about to disabuse her of the preposterous notion that his life was in the least glamorous when the computer gave a distinct ‘beep’ as the e-mail arrived. It contained an attachment and he double clicked to download it.

  ‘Just bear with me a second.’

  ‘Sure, take all the time you want.’

  The image that appeared on the screen was of a stylized single eye, topped by a curving brow, and it looked oddly familiar, except for one thing.

  ‘At first glance, I’d say it looks Egyptian.’

  ‘That’s what our experts over this side of the pond reckoned. Trouble is we can’t find anything that links the dead family, or any of their potential killers, to Egypt. The question I have to ask you is: do you know anything that might tie it to this Nazi ghosthunter outfit or Heinrich Himmler and his obsession with the occult?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘And the answer is?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  He could feel her disappointment at the other end of the line.

  ‘Maybe it would help if I knew where you found the symbol?’

  ‘It was on one of the victims.’

  ‘When you say on, what specifically do you mean?’

  ‘Specifically?’ She hesitated, unsure just how much information to reveal. ‘Well, Mr Saintclair, it was carved into her forehead with the point of a hunting knife. Now what do you think of that?’

  IX

  IT HAD BEEN three long days since the last half-conscious monologue. Three days of frustration and doubt. Paul Dornberger had barely dared move from his father’s side in case he missed something vital. He had called his employer and asked for a few days’ leave, with the excuse that he feared the old man was dying. At times that had been true. Max slipped between semi-consciousness and coma, and for seventy-two hours had barely uttered a word. Paul had spent the first few hours in a fever of anticipation. What happened next? What had they found when they eventually escaped from the perpetu
al darkness? But later the niggling worm of doubt had begun boring into his brain. Was he going mad? Surely only a madman could believe that Max Dornberger had lived through this two-millennia-old fairytale. There were a dozen reasons why it could be in his father’s head. Perhaps he had read it in a book, or it was a scene from one of those surreal movies of the thirties? The old man’s mind was crumbling. There was no reason why he couldn’t have made it up. In either case, he was wasting his time here. Yet there was another possibility that made it worth continuing. If he discarded the possibility – the insanity – that Max Dornberger was relating an event he had lived through, what if the old man was dredging up a memory of a tale that had been passed down from father to son through the centuries? Word-of-mouth stories told around campfires and on death beds in the old way. A forgotten family legacy buried deep within the subconscious.

  On the bed beside him, Max Dornberger clawed his way up to the place of the dream and Paul reached for the recorder as he resumed his saga.

  The fifty remaining men of the Second Cohort stumbled blinking from the darkness into the light.

  We emerged into a narrow, steep-sided valley in the centre of the mountains, accessible only by the tunnels we had just negotiated. On the far side, carved from the living rock, lay a wondrous sight. Soaring columns of red sandstone flanked the doorway of a great temple.

  The valley stretched for a mile from left to right, a bleak, boulder-strewn fissure that looked as if it might have been cut by a giant axe. No living thing, man nor beast, was in sight, and I ordered my legionaries to draw swords and advance in line to secure the temple. It was the work of moments to cross the hundred and fifty paces that separated the cave mouth and the building and soon we were standing in its shadow on a flag-stoned court. In scale and magnificence, the temple would count as one of the wonders of the world, and was as out of place in this barren wilderness as a gladiator in the House of the Vestals. Intricate carvings of gods and kings covered the walls, which were cut by niches for statues of the queen who had ordered its construction and of strange, half-human, half-animal creatures; men with the heads of dogs, crocodiles, snakes and hawks. And, in the centre of the lintel, a single staring eye. Clearly the eye was Dido’s symbol, or that of the god whose will ruled here, for it also adorned the great altar, cut from a single block of stone, which stood in front of the temple steps. The polished surface was stained with the blood of the last sacrifice, but there was worse to come. ‘Mars save us.’ I heard the whisper from the soldier to my right and saw him make the sign against evil. I could not help following him as I realized what I was seeing. In a shallow bowl carved into the top of the altar lay the body of a child, its belly slit the way an augur might slit a chicken to read from its entrails. In the same instant we froze as a tall figure in a green robe appeared at the top of the stairs screaming insults in a stumbling, heavily accented Latin.