War Lord

by David Rollins

  I dropped the Glock’s mag and exchanged it for a fresh one before inviting myself in. Out on the road, a helpful secondary explosion accompanied by several shouts and a cry from a woman reinvigorated the crowd’s interest in the tanker while I stepped into a world that smelled of rosewood and furniture polish. The guards watching the security cameras in the other wings had better be distracted. If not, I’d know about it soon enough.

  Opposite the front door was a wide stairway up to the second floor – bedrooms, I guessed. I took a random left-hand turn instead and moved across a spacious lounge room where the furnishings were old and heavy and from another era. From what I could make out, the oil paintings on the wall were mostly religious scenes illustrating various impressions of either heaven or hell. Others showed children walking alone or holding an adult’s hand. There were busts, too – bronzes on marble plinths. The place felt less like a home and more like an art gallery dedicated to images that were a little on the creepy side. I kept working my way through the house – bathrooms, sitting rooms, a library and a reading room. I came to another locked door so I Glocked away its hinges. Inside was a study with a desk, a couch, a bookshelf, and a fish tank with a lamp pointed into it that flared brightly in the NVGs’ lenses and made me look away. Completing the furniture ensemble was a glass wall cabinet displaying various military automatic weapons. Oh yeah, and two large red, white and black flags with swastikas crossed over a bronze bust of Adolf Hitler raised on a plinth.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at the display, given what I knew about von Weiss’s lineage, but I was. At least my uneasiness about the decor was resolved. It paid homage to Germany of the 1930s – Hitler’s Germany. A quick inspection of the books revealed them to be mostly German-, English- and Portuguese-language natural history reference books on snakes and reptiles – no surprises there. The light caught a familiar title, the words pressed into the spine and finished with gold leaf. There were two volumes. I souvenired volume one, stuffed it into my webbing and went back to scouting the room. On the wall opposite the flags was a panoramic hand-colored photograph of a Nazi rally, Hitler in jackboots facing a bank of microphones. He was addressing what could easily have been half a million men in uniform. Above and behind Hitler a huge eagle perched on top of a swastika like it was squatting on an egg.

  The room was part study, part private shrine. There were other photographs on the walls of Nazi officers and officials. I recognized Himmler and Göring in separate pictures, in the company of another officer from the SS who didn’t look so familiar. But I’d seen one of the buildings in the pictures many times over the years – railway tracks leading to an archway beneath an observation tower in a broad front of red-brown brick. I didn’t have to read the caption to know this was the main gate to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp. Handwriting on the white mat around the photo confirmed it: ‘Hauptsturmführer Mengele. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Frühling, 1943.’ In the photo, a line of around twenty sallow, skeletal male camp inmates dressed in black and gray striped pajamas stared at the ground. Two SS guards accompanied them, one of them a dog handler leashed to an animal with a sloping hyena-like spine. The caption fingered Mengele as the unknown officer in the other Kodak moments. In this one he was smiling at the prisoners, enjoying a moment of benevolence. Or maybe he was considering what he could do to them back in his surgery.

  A shadow momentarily flickered in the small amount of light coming through the door. I had time to lift a hand to protect my head from the object swinging toward it. Something heavy gave my forearm a glancing blow and sent a bolt of pain shooting through the bone, and I backed away from the shadow, which was in fact a medium-sized guy with a flat, bearded face. He had a holster on his hip – empty. Maybe he was off duty when he saw the damage to the front door and came to investigate the reason for the excessive elbow grease applied to open it. He swung again before I could show him the Glock, but he misjudged the distance in the dark. Unless of course he was gunning for the fish tank, in which case he got plenty of wood on the ball. The glass shattered loudly, and then made even more noise when it all crashed onto the floorboards. I flinched, anticipating the rush of water, but there was none. The guard stood still, breathing hard, his eyes wide and suddenly frightened, looking at where the tank had been. He gave a scream, which strangled in his throat, dropped the brass candlestick dangling from his hand, and ran out the door. From the corner of the tunnel vision offered by the NVGs, I saw something long and black move across the floor, whippet fast, and disappear under a cabinet. Time to go before Rodriguez returned with more batters.

  *

  Two types of sirens approached, their interwoven wailing piercing the night. The fire brigade and the police, I figured. The crowd gathered around the burning truck had grown to about a hundred. Most of the ferocity had gone out of the flames though the bonfire was still generating plenty of heat. I stayed in the shadows as much as I could, keeping my back to the flames when I couldn’t, and made my way up the road. Three police cruisers and two fire trucks blew past in a traveling thicket of flashing electric light. Petinski met me a couple of hundred yards farther on in a stolen Hyundai, hidden from the street beneath an overhanging tree, its headlights winking. I jogged over and hopped in through the open passenger-side door.

  Petinski pulled onto the road and accelerated to the edge of wheel spin. ‘What happened?’ she asked when she saw me rubbing my forearm.

  ‘I bumped into something.’

  ‘You place the camera?’

  ‘No, I only got as far as the ground floor.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Things got a little hectic. I picked this up.’ There was a book in my hand, an old book bound in lightly tanned leather, a black swastika in a circle of gold embossed on the front cover.

  Petinski glanced sideways, read the title. ‘Jesus – Mein Kampf, Hitler’s anti-Semitic rant.’

  I opened it up to the title page and saw an inscription handwritten with a fountain pen in neat, tightly controlled script. The writing looked old-fashioned. I flicked on the overhead light. Mengele’s name was recognizable, but the rest was in German. My command of that language was limited to schnitzel, bratwurst, bier and Oktoberfest and all of those words were noticeably absent.

  ‘You read German?’ I asked. The signature began with a symbol in the shape of a lightning bolt, followed by an elaborate squiggle, just the kind of signature you’d expect from a Nazi.

  Petinski did a double take at the book and immediately pulled over. ‘You drive.’

  I left the book on the seat, got out and walked around the front of the car. Unfastening the chest webbing, I tossed it onto the back seat. ‘Might not be a good idea to check this car with valet parking at the hotel,’ I suggested.

  ‘We’ll leave it at Ipanema. Local police will pick it up.’

  It was getting toward eleven p.m., the traffic thinning out. Petinski stroked the book’s cover lightly with her hand. ‘This cover. It’s human skin.’

  ‘Human skin . . .’

  ‘That’s what I said. I’ve seen one before in a Holocaust museum. And the signature. It’s Hitler’s. The writing here says, “Dear SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele, National Socialism and the citizens of Germany owe you a sincere debt of gratitude.”’ Petinski flicked through some more pages. ‘Mengele returned from the Eastern Front in ’42. This edition was printed in 1940. It was probably Mengele’s personal copy, recovered sometime after he returned.’ She flipped through more pages, fascinated.

  ‘Mengele was on the Russian front?’

  ‘In the Ukraine. The record says he was wounded pulling three men from a burning Panzer.’

  ‘So the guy was a hero?’

  ‘A Nazi hero.’ She spat out the words. ‘They awarded him the Iron Cross First Class. His wounds prevented him returning to the fighting so he was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He arrived there in ’43. He made a name for himself performing experiments on people – children, and especiall
y twins. Maybe that’s the fine work the German citizens owed him a debt of gratitude for.’ There was a tremor in her voice.

  ‘What else is going on here, Petinski?’

  ‘My grandmother lost her twin sister as well as her mother and three brothers in that death camp.’

  I said nothing. Petinski might have been motivated by personal circumstances that went way beyond the facts of this case, but they weren’t getting us any closer to finding Randy or the bomb. I hoped someone else out there was doing better than us because from my reckoning we had just rolled into nine days to go. Or perhaps eight days. Or maybe six. Was the countdown specified on the note based on US Eastern Standard Time or US Western Standard Time or Northern Australian swampland time, or somewhere else entirely? Whatever, it was getting away from us fast.

  I drove to the curb and stopped.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Petinski asked.

  ‘We’re running out of time. Can I have your cell?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To find us another way into that favela. I want to have a look at von Weiss’s HQ up there. He must have one, right?’

  She passed me her phone. ‘Forget it, Cooper. We’d need a guide at the very least, someone from BOPE.’

  ‘What’s BOPE?’

  ‘Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais. That’s Portuguese for Special Police Operations Battalion – Rio’s anti-terror squad. They’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting cleaning up the favelas.’

  ‘Why trouble them? We’ll know we’re getting warm when we run into people with guns.’

  ‘That’s not practical.’

  ‘Neither is calling in the local anti-terror boys.’

  ‘Because . . . ?’

  ‘Think about it. Who lives in a favela?’ I asked.

  ‘People who can’t afford to live somewhere else.’

  ‘What sort of work do they do? The low-paid service jobs. They sweep the streets, dig the drains. Probably they’re the council workers, the nurses, the low-level government employees.’

  ‘Where’s this going?’

  ‘What about police work? That’s a low-paid service job too, isn’t it? It is where I come from. Like you said, the favela clean-up wasn’t all that successful. Maybe some of the folks asked to do the cleaning up have other interests, like being in on the action.’

  ‘I’m sure they recruit those squads from out of town.’

  ‘Do you know that, or are you speculating?’

  ‘I’m assuming.’

  ‘Anyway, what do we tell local law enforcement? That we’re on their home soil looking for one of our missing agents and a nuke?’

  ‘I get the picture,’ she said.

  Which was that if Uncle Sam wanted this shit kept under wraps, at least for the moment Petinski and I had no choice but to risk going it alone.

  Seventeen

  Céu Cidade – Sky City. As the name suggested, the favela held high ground. It sat on the saddle between two peaks with a valley on either side, the one where von Weiss had his home and the other given to warehouses. It was in this light industrial valley forty minutes later that Petinski and I crawled through mostly deserted streets, eventually parking among sprawling rundown buildings with shattered windows.

  ‘Leave the car and it’ll get stolen,’ Petinski observed.

  ‘Not if you stay with it,’ I told her.

  ‘Sorry – if who stays with it?’

  ‘Who do you think?’ I said.

  Petinski sighed like she knew this was going to come up. ‘Look, Cooper, I’m quite capable of taking care of myself. And if you get yourself into trouble, maybe I’ll take care of you too.’

  Sure. Petinski was well under a hundred pounds and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a fair proportion of them kept her bra occupied. I turned toward her and was about to say, ‘I don’t think so,’ when she took my hand and twisted my thumb in a way that felt like she’d dislocated it, providing a flash of intense pain that caused me to cry out. ‘Okay!’ I snapped. My hand was released and the pain instantly evaporated. ‘Jesus, Petinski . . . What the hell was that?’

  ‘I gave gymnastics away after the Olympics and took up Jiujitsu and Taekwondo. I was US Women’s Kumite Champion 2006 and 2010.’

  I wiggled my thumb. ‘So I’ll stay with the car and you check out the damn favela.’

  ‘No. Let’s both do this,’ she said, getting out of the vehicle. ‘Forget about the car. We can steal something else later if we need to.’

  You learn a lot about people when you travel with them.

  We each drank some water from bottles we’d brought with us, stuffed the essentials into a small pack, and a few minutes later we entered Céu Cidade via a brightly lit section of road containing a Hamburger Bob’s, a general store, a drinks and candy store, as well as shops selling furniture and welding services, a gas station, a motorcycle repair garage, a tire repair shop and a post office. I found a street number and confirmed that this was the post office on the FedEx package’s consignment note. Petinski snapped off a photo with her phone for future reference, and then took a shot of some graffiti on an adjacent wall of three monkey heads side by side: one with no ears, one with no eyes and one with no mouth. The rules to live by in Sky City . . .

  Above the retail area the streets darkened, became narrower, and the incline sharpened. The airless night was hot and thick with humidity and my t-shirt was already sticking to my back, my feet sweating in my Adidas. Starlight behind thin high cloud provided meager illumination. It was late and not too many folks were around for such a densely packed area – a few shirtless men in shorts doing late-night chores, the odd group of women sitting on stoops, the wet breeze funneling through open doors providing some relief from the heat. Dogs stood around, cats cantered between the darker shadows. Occasional motorcycles roared by, heading up or down. Almost no one paid us any heed.

  Even up close the homes here seemed to be piled on top of each other. And they were constructed from whatever material could be slapped together quickly: brick, cinderblock, wood, corrugated steel, poured concrete, old auto panels, metal sheeting and some items I couldn’t identify. Here and there light bulbs burned inside windows with no glass, electricity provided via a tangled spaghetti of black wiring over the streets and alleys. And in the air, hints of sewage, old grease, kerosene and samba music.

  We climbed up through the human anthill, following winding paths, uneven stairwells and narrow lanes. At one point, three shirtless young men appeared suddenly from the shadows and followed their own pungent body odor down the narrow chute toward us. I tensed for trouble, but none materialized. We came out into a wider alleyway and saw the silhouette of a young guy ahead lounging against the wall, smoking, a Belgian FN FAL assault rifle in his other hand, muzzle pointed absently at his toes. A red ember glowed in front of his face and smoke drifted in our direction. I smelled weed. The guy was humming a tune, occasionally breaking into the lyrics, and stopping regularly to spit on the ground. Hmm. Stoned, bored and armed. In short, trouble. We detoured around him, backtracking ten yards or so to cut through a slit of a walkway between houses that leaned into each other and seemed to meet in the dank, airless darkness overhead, blocking out the stars.

  We followed the walkway and exited soon after in a relatively open space, the intersection of a number of roads and paths. A view opened out to the east, toward Ipanema a couple of miles away, where the lights from another favela overlooking the beach glittered like gold dust tossed onto black velvet.

  Farther behind us up the hill, above the intersection, a row of spotlights burned with a white-hot intensity unusual in these parts. It appeared to be coming from a collection of walled houses, some kind of compound. Two motorcycles roared up the hill toward us. I drew back into the shadows, my arm across Petinski’s chest so that she got the message. The KTMs roared into view, passengers on the back armed with more assault rifles; they sped across the intersection and were cloaked by the shadows.

&nbs
p; Schloss von Weiss was close. Keeping out of the open, we reconnoitered the intersection and found the cavern that had swallowed the motorcycles. The lane kinked back on itself, followed a tunnel between some houses and came out below those spotlights, which were blazing down from a high cinderblock wall built by folks who knew how to build.

  We kept moving, scouting the wall. Twenty minutes later we had circumnavigated it and were back where we started. Down one end, back toward the location of the crooning doper with the FN, was a gate manned by four men. All were armed. One of them carried what appeared to be a light machine gun, a Belgian Minimi perhaps, or maybe the US version of the same, the M249. Whatever, it meant going through the front gate wasn’t an option. Not tonight.

  ‘What now?’ Petinski whispered.

  I looked around. Not much to play with. The compound wall was smooth. No way to climb it.

  ‘What are you planning, Cooper? You can’t storm it. There are only two of us, remember?’ Petinski pulled a cigarette packet–sized box from her pocket, turned it on and held it up. ‘A neutron detector,’ she explained before I could ask her what she was doing.

  ‘That’s gonna pick up a bomb in a basement over the wall?’

  ‘So they say. Uses a gallium arsenide wafer. Detects neutrons emitted from fissile materials. Extremely sensitive. If our bomb’s in the area, it’ll tell us.’ She tucked the instrument into a vest pocket.