“Well, believe it. According to him, it has to do with an envelope containing an order he can’t open . . . until they’re within sight of the American coast.”
Riley and Jack looked at each other, worried.
“Orders to detonate the bomb,” Riley murmured.
Kirchner nodded heavily. “So it seems.”
“Great,” Jack said with unexpected energy. “Then we’ve gotta find the bomb either way.” He leaned over the plan. “Did he tell you which hold it is?”
“I didn’t dare ask specifics, but he told me it’s in the bow, on the lower deck.”
“Good. Then we know where to start looking. Should we head out?” Jack said.
“Now?” Kirchner asked, surprised. “Without anything else?”
“It’d be better to wait a little,” Riley said. “They almost just discovered us, and I’d rather not start walking around the ship. Let’s give them a few hours to forget what happened, and we’ll go when the guards change shifts.”
“That still seems a bit soon . . .” Kirchner mused, like a paratrooper hesitating to jump at the last moment, searching for a handle to grab on to.
Riley put a hand on his shoulder and tried to sound calm. “Dr. Kirchner, we might not have another chance. So try to be brave, or everything we’ve done so far will be for nothing, okay?”
Kirchner closed his eyes for a moment, leaned on the bed frame, then stood up. “Got it,” he said, shrouded in seriousness.
“Cheer up, friend,” Jack said, taking a bottle of Jägermeister out of the cabinet and getting ready to serve three glasses. “We still have some time before we have to leave, and nothing’s stopping us from taking advantage of our friend Fromm’s stash.” He filled the glasses and raised his. “Salud!” he called.
“Cheers! Prost!” Riley and Kirchner joined in.
The three of them smiled and brought the glasses to their mouths, but they had a lot on their minds, and little of it was good.
54
After finishing half the bottle and coming up with a rough plan, they waited in Kirchner’s cabin for the watch to change. From there, they followed the map down the corridor to a side door.
“Here it is,” Kirchner said, glancing at the map and putting it back in his pocket. “Access to the holds in the bow.”
Riley gave Jack a look and told him to watch the hallway before he opened the door with a dull pop. A staircase down to a dark lower level appeared.
“Maybe we should’ve gotten flashlights,” Riley said, looking down.
“Don’t worry about that,” Jack said, reaching into his pocket and shaking a box of matches. “I always carry these.”
Riley put them in his pocket as he descended the iron staircase with Jack and Kirchner close behind. At the bottom, he lit a match. He found the light switch and turned it on.
They found themselves in a hold like the Pingarrón’s, but much larger, cleaner, and without the smell of diesel. It was about twenty feet high and sixty feet long, filled to the ceiling with boxes, cans of food, and mountains of potatoes. From what they could see, similar spaces were lined up one after the other from the stern all the way to the bow, each one separated by the same steel bulkheads.
“Shit,” Jack said, looking around. “Now I do believe the bastards have a gym and a pool.”
“Let’s go. We have no time to waste,” Riley said, heading toward the door that led to the next section.
They opened one door after another, each one leading to another hold full of supplies. None had ammunition or weapons, which must have been kept in the stern.
Finally they found one that was unlike the others. A metal plate stamped with a swastika and a large sign with a skull and crossbones that read “DANGER: DO NOT ENTER” in German hung on the door.
“My killer instincts are telling me this could be the place,” Jack said.
After stripping off the wire seal around the wheel-shaped door handle, there was nothing between them and the horrible weapon they’d come to destroy—the reason they’d gone that far, ready to sacrifice their lives.
But none of them moved.
It was like they were at the very gates of hell, and beyond that plain gray bulkhead a terrible end awaited—or worse, failure.
“Okay,” Riley sighed, shaking off his anxiety. He gripped the wheel with both hands. “Let’s see what’s hiding here.” He turned it counterclockwise and pushed the heavy door, which opened gently on its hinges.
Some light came in behind them, but it was far from enough to see beyond a couple of yards. Riley lit a match and went through the door, followed by Jack and Kirchner. He touched the bulkhead with his right hand, found the switch, and flicked it on.
They had all been waiting for that moment, imagining what the mysterious Wunderwaffe was. What would a weapon capable of leveling an entire city look like?
They were not prepared for what they saw. They stood blinking in sheer bewilderment.
There was no atomic bomb.
There was not even a typical, regular old bomb.
Nothing like it.
For a while, none of them could speak. There was really nothing to say.
Destiny had played a joke on them once again and unabashedly laughed in their faces. They were Hansel and Gretel finding out the birds had eaten their bread crumbs. Robert Scott and his expedition reaching the South Pole after months of extreme suffering only to discover a goddamn Norwegian flag planted a few days earlier. Odysseus’s sailors shipwrecked on the Phaeacian shores.
In that giant hold there was just a gurney with a folding privacy screen; a shelf with bandages, gauze, and syringes; a refrigerator for medical supplies; and a small desk with two wooden chairs.
That was it. A sickroom.
“What the hell . . .” Jack managed to say, taking a step sideways like he was dealing with an absurd mirage that could be erased with a change in perspective.
“A clinic,” Riley said, stifling a bitter laugh. “No atomic bomb, no Wunderwaffe . . . none of that.” He turned to Helmut, who still hadn’t recovered his speech. “It’s just a damn clinic.”
“I don’t understand,” Kirchner finally said, going up to the table. “Everything indicated that . . .” He ran his hand along a chair to make sure it was real.
Jack walked up to the shelf with his hands on his hips as if he were silently asking it for an explanation.
Riley slumped against the bulkhead, squatting down with his hands on his knees, too stunned to think straight.
Kirchner walked around the table and sat down. He opened the top drawer and pulled out a folder full of papers.
“And what now?” Jack asked. He turned to Riley. “What the hell do we do?”
“No idea, Jack,” he said, tilting his head back. “I swear to God I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“Maybe we should go back up,” Jack said. “Rethink the situation in view of”—he opened his arms—“this.”
Riley looked up at him. “You know they’d discover us right away, right? At least a dozen sailors saw us in the halls, not to mention that they already suspect us.”
“We could break into the armory and try to take the bridge.”
“Us three?” Riley said with a smile, motioning to the scientist who was engrossed in his new reading. “Are you drunk?”
Jack was far from offended. He laughed at his own suggestion and sat down next to Riley. “Then . . .” he asked the ceiling, “this is it?”
Riley sighed, exhausted. “This is it, my friend.”
They looked at each other and, nodding in mutual appreciation, shook hands.
“Gentlemen,” Kirchner called from the table. “Gentlemen. I think you should come here a moment.”
“Forget it, Doctor.” Jack tried to wave him over. “Come sit here with us.”
Kirchner looked up from the papers and eyed them strangely. “What are you doing?”
“Resting a minute, Helmut,” Riley said. “And given what’s awaiting us
I think you should do the same.”
He shook his head. “No, no. You have to come see this.”
“More papers?” Jack said with a poorly hidden smile. “Another secret Nazi operation to win the war? What now?” he mocked. “An explosive stretcher of unimaginable power? Come on, Doctor, let it go.”
But to their surprise, far from letting it go, Kirchner made a serious face they hadn’t seen till then, like they’d mentioned his mother on the day of her funeral. “Can you stop acting like idiots,” he hissed coldly, “and get the hell over here?”
Surprised by his commanding tone, they got up and walked over to the table. “What’d you find?” Riley asked, standing beside him with sudden interest. “Something related to the bomb?”
“Not exactly, but it’s related to Operation Apokalypse.” He paused. “I’m afraid we’ve been wrong from the start, or rather, I’ve been wrong. I assumed it was a fission bomb from the beginning, thanks to my job.” He shuffled the papers like an angry postman. “But I was wrong, you know? Completely wrong.”
Riley lifted his hands. “Hold on. Are you saying there’s no bomb? Didn’t we figure that out already?”
“No, Captain. You’re mistaken. We were all mistaken.”
Riley and Jack looked at each other. The old man’s off his rocker.
“Of course . . . We were mistaken,” Riley said as if talking to a child. “Thanks for the clarification.”
“But there’s no bomb! There never was!”
“We know, Doctor,” Jack said. “But that’s good, isn’t it?”
“No!” he said, standing up and thrusting the papers under their noses. “Operation Apokalypse is going forward, but it’s not what we thought.”
“Relax, Doctor,” Riley said, holding his arms to try to calm him down.
“How can I calm down?” he spat. “They’re going to die! Don’t you understand?”
Riley took a step back, disturbed. “Who’s going to die?”
Kirchner collapsed in the chair. “Everyone.”
Riley swallowed. “But who, Helmut?” He put a hand on his shoulder. “Who’s everyone?”
Kirchner stared at him over his round glasses. His look of desperation did not bode well. “Everyone. Men. Women. Children . . . The whole world.” He covered his face with his hands and leaned on the table as if he were about to cry in despair. “Those psychos,” he whispered, “want to wipe out the human race.”
55
Kirchner’s incomprehensible revelation hung in the air. Riley and Jack were sure they hadn’t heard him correctly.
The poor man had caved under pressure and disappointment. Riley was sure of it, but he still sat down at the table and removed Kirchner’s hands from his face.
“What do you mean by ‘wipe out the human race’?” Riley asked nervously as Kirchner looked into his eyes.
He was about to answer, but seeing Riley’s and Jack’s expressions, he decided to show them the documents instead. “Here. It’s a medical report from the chemical and biological department of the SS. See?” He pointed at the “TOP SECRET” at the top of each page. “It mentions Operation Apokalypse a couple of times, but in a context unlike anything we imagined. I’m afraid we’ve been mistaken from the beginning, terribly mistaken.”
“You don’t say,” Jack murmured, clearly alluding to the half-empty hold.
“Please, Helmut,” Riley said, “get to the point.”
Kirchner nodded several times as if he were agreeing with someone only he could hear. “What we didn’t know . . . what we couldn’t know . . . was the sadistic nature of this,” he said, holding up a page. “It’s . . . it’s abominable.”
“What are you getting at?” Jack said impatiently. “There aren’t any bombs.”
“Nothing to do with bombs,” Kirchner said, looking back at the documents. “The Wunderwaffe is called Aussterben, and it’s not a fission bomb—not at all.”
“Oh no? Then what the hell is it?” Riley said with a smirk as if expecting a joke.
“A virus.”
“A virus?” Jack asked. “Like the flu?”
“More like the plague.”
“That bad?” Riley asked, a tingle running down his spine. In the Middle Ages the plague had killed more than a third of the European population.
Kirchner seemed on the brink of collapse. “No, Captain . . . it looks like the Aussterben is worse. Much worse.”
“But how do you know? How do you know it’s that bad?”
Kirchner put a hand on the folder of documents. “Do you know what Aussterben means?”
“No idea.”
Kirchner looked into Riley’s eyes. “Extinction.”
Kirchner translated the report for them, going over the propagation vectors, virology, epidemiology, and symptoms of the virus the Nazis planned on using as a weapon.
He explained the content as he read. “It seems this virus was discovered near the Ebola River during a Nazi scientific expedition in the Belgian Congo in 1935. They isolated it and took it to Germany . . . and since then seem to have been experimenting with it, using concentration-camp prisoners as guinea pigs.”
Riley and Jack couldn’t understand everything he was talking about, but they got that it was a microscopic organism called a filovirus that spread from one host to another through contact with bodily fluids like sweat or saliva, or through the air like with a sneeze, which made it as contagious as the common flu. But here the similarities ended.
“The Aussterben virus,” Kirchner went on with increasing uneasiness, “has an incubation period between five and twelve days. Then the host starts to suffer symptoms similar to a particularly bad flu strain—fever, muscular and abdominal pain, and severe headaches. That’s just the first step before the final phase of the disease, in which the blood vessels start to disintegrate, causing a massive hemorrhage that leads to bleeding from every orifice of the body, including the pores of the skin.”
The report said Aussterben’s mortality rate was over 90 percent and it had no cure. It also included a terrifying list of places where the virus would spread most quickly and the ideal methods to release it undetected.
Schools topped the list. The infection of a few children would multiply exponentially in a matter of days. Before they felt symptoms, which would be confused with the flu, they would already have infected the rest of their classmates as well as their parents—and the parents would have infected their colleagues, friends, and close family members.
The list also included hospitals, train and bus stations, movie theaters, large sporting events, soup kitchens, and other crowded places, preferably enclosed, where it would spread best. A single agent, with a sprayer filled with his own fluids, could infect thousands in a few hours. And those would infect as many in the same day, and so on and so forth.
“A week later, there will already be tens of thousands of infections,” Kirchner said, his voice distorted in horror. “Two weeks later, when the first victims start to die and the health authorities find the flu epidemic isn’t what they thought, millions will have already been infected. They’ll be unable to mobilize a response and form a quarantine, since it will have already spread throughout the country. Three months later . . .” He looked up and stared at nothing. “Three months later . . .”
Jack stared at the papers Kirchner was reading. His expression had been growing more and more incredulous as the minutes passed. The same expression I must have right now, Riley thought.
“Hold on, Doctor. That’s enough,” Jack said.
“What?” Riley asked.
“I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “Can’t you see, Alex? It’s another one of those stupid Nazi fantasies, like the fucking bomb. Do you see it anywhere?” he said, looking around. “Whatever it says in the papers, I don’t believe a word.”
Riley nodded. “It’s true, Doctor. I agree with Jack. I don’t believe a disease exists that spreads like the flu and kills people by bleeding them to death. And even if it did,
not even the craziest Nazi leader would use it as a weapon. They’d realize it would eventually backfire.”
Kirchner put the folder down and waited a moment. “I understand your reservations, Captain,” he said, wiping off sweat with a handkerchief. “Unfortunately, I can’t speak to the veracity of these documents, but I think the American continent is relatively isolated, especially during wartime. There are no transcontinental flights, and navigation by sea is seriously compromised. Given the potency and speed of the illness, someone infected would have difficulty reaching Europe from the United States, not to mention Asia or Oceania.”
“But it could happen.”
“Yes, there is that possibility. But remember, if Aussterben reaches Europe, the Allied countries will be affected more than Germany. They’ve been working with the virus for years, so they probably understand it’s possible and are prepared to protect themselves somehow. Who knows,” he said pensively, “maybe they have some type of vaccine.”
“If the virus survives a trip across the Atlantic, it would help them win the war in Europe,” Jack said.
“That’s not the worst,” Kirchner added. “If the virus reaches Europe, isolated by the war, it’ll spread like wildfire over the whole continent and kill millions of people.”
“Tens of millions,” Riley said. “And when it spreads to Africa and Asia . . . it’ll be hundreds of millions.”
There was a tense silence before Kirchner shared his final conclusions. “I’m very afraid that Operation Apokalypse is designed to first destroy the United States before they enter the war against Germany and then decimate the human race”—he inhaled with difficulty, as if the air in the hold were becoming scarce—“almost to extinction.”
He took a long pause, then continued. He wore an expression like that of a bearer of bad news with no choice but to tell it. “If the virus drastically reduces the world population,” he said, his voice breaking, “conquering it would be child’s play for Germany with its military intact. Nazism would spread to the last corner of the earth, and the Aryans would be the dominant race, reducing everyone else to slavery. Adolf Hitler’s dream come true,” he concluded, lowering his head in defeat, “a planetary Third Reich.”
Captain Riley (The Captain Riley Adventures Book 1) Page 34