Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  I moved through the pine-scented woods as I had first come, sleeping rough for two nights until I found a village where I could catch a ride on a freight train toward Kraków. I spent a week there, found the place we had lived, even spoke to old Mrs. Liszka, who had raised poultry for the shops and restaurants my parents had frequented before the war. She looked different now. Everyone did. But she remembered me and wished she had good news, or any news. When I told her about Ishmael, she put her hands up in front of her face, her fingers splayed as if she was catching a ball, and closed her eyes. She stood like that so long that I did not know what to do, and when she looked at me again she seemed older and sadder than ever. So I thanked her, though she had told me nothing, and left.

  I fought the crowds outside the temporary offices—the awkward alliance of the old Polish bureaucracy that had been absorbed into the new Soviet order—and stood in lines for three days, reciting my parents’ names and those of every relative I knew, no matter how distant. At first, I was cheered that they had records of where they had gone, but as each one was chased down, the awful truth became harder and harder to avoid. I had not dared seriously consider the possibility, and the fact of those stamped documents, presented to me by a hard-faced woman whose eyes betrayed only weariness, left me hollow, emptied out of feeling, of self, so that for the next few days, I experienced a kind of madness.

  My family was gone. All of them.

  As the stories of the camps came out and the full horror of the Nazi occupation came to light, what little hope I had left faded to nothing, so that all that was left was a kind of hard kernel, made of defiance, rather than faith. When everything is lost, it is better not to remember what you had.

  And I had nothing.

  A week later, I left Kraków forever.

  The Russian chokehold on the borders was tightening every day, and it was getting harder to move around, so I went where I could without going through checkpoints and waiting for my papers to be approved. In my case, this meant the long trek north to Gdansk, cushioned as best I could in an empty boxcar. Once in the port, I would find a container ship bound for the West.

  I boarded the first ship I could, stowing away below decks, but two of the crew found me and threw me back on the dock, leaving me with a bloody lip and an empty purse. I was more cautious thereafter, watching the moored ships and trying to get a sense of their schedules before risking another attempt. There was nothing directly bound for France or England, but I eventually got one to Gothenburg, which would do for a start. My food rations were getting low, and though I had grown used to eating little, I would need to replenish my supplies somehow in Sweden, though I knew nothing of the language or customs of the place, so finding work seemed unlikely.

  They found me on the third day, and though they did not beat me, they would not feed me, and said I had to get off before they reached port. The captain, a Lithuanian who stank of alcohol at all hours, would not, he said, be responsible for smuggling undocumented immigrants, no matter how much I argued that the Swedes would not turn me away. In sight of the cranes and warehouses of the Gothenburg docks, he put me on a smoky tug that moored alongside for the purpose and sent me to another ship that was about to leave port. It was an altogether bigger, sleeker, more modern looking vessel than I had left, and it had guns.

  “This is a warship!” I protested. “I am not a soldier.”

  “Or a sailor,” said the Lithuanian, sucking on a ragged cigarette. “And therefore not my problem.”

  The men on board spoke English, and for a moment I thought I had been lucky, that I would be disembarking in London, but when I was called before the duty officer, I learned otherwise. He was perhaps thirty, athletic and clean-cut, with bright blue eyes that considered me with a touch of humor. His uniform was crisply pressed and spotless except for a smear of oil on one sleeve that he kept dabbing at irritably.

  “Speak English?” he demanded.

  “A little,” I said. Before the war, one of our neighbors had married a pretty English girl who had made a game of learning Polish from the local kids. In the process, because I liked words, I had picked up some of her own language. The language of Shakespeare, she had called it. I do not know if she survived the war.

  “You might want to work on that,” he said. He smirked, as if at a private joke, considering me, then extended a strong hand. I took it, my own hand feeling small and feeble in his, and he gave it a single brisk shake. He spoke again, but I did not understand all he said, and instead framed a single question.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re an escort destroyer,” he said. “The USS Kitchener. We’ll be joining a troop ship out of Cherbourg, bound for New York City.”

  I stared at him. “America?” I said.

  “The one and only. No other stops. Take it or leave it.”

  AND SO I CROSSED THE ATLANTIC. I PLANNED TO TAKE THE next ship back to Europe as soon as we reached port, but I was well fed on the journey, well treated by the sailors, and the feared encounters with lost U-boats never happened, so that by the time we reached the extraordinary skyline of New York, I could not remember why I had not planned to stay.

  I had also made good progress with my English, speaking with the crew whenever I could, and reading voraciously throughout the voyage. The Captain had given me some dog-eared miniature paperbacks—mysteries and a couple of classics by Twain and Dickens—and these I consumed, the hard work of reading turning to pleasure as my vocabulary expanded. When the weather was calm, I sat in the sun on the deck with my books, the pages bubbled and uneven from the salt spray, and when I ran into a word I didn’t know, I’d approach one of the crew and ask. It got so they saw me coming and competed with each other to provide the best definitions, bickering good-humoredly, working their way up the chain of command when they needed a ruling. Somehow, without really meaning to, I had become the USS Kitchener’s mascot.

  The crew talked about their hometowns, their sweethearts, the things they had seen in the war, but no one ever asked me what I had been through, and I started to suspect that they had been ordered not to talk to me about it. The Captain knew about my family, the ghetto, the Wenceslas mine, even that fateful day when the planes tried to leave and the Russians came, because I had told him in my first meeting with him, blurting it all out in the hope that he wouldn’t send me back.

  I came through Ellis Island on the last day of August 1945, throwing my Polish papers over the side of the ferry, and saying that I was nineteen so I could work. Captain Jennings sponsored my citizenship, and no one seemed to doubt that I was as old as I had claimed, though I was still slightly built.

  “It’s the eyes,” said one crewman. “It’s like they came from someone else, or they’ve seen … I don’t know.”

  He was grinning when he started speaking, his tone light, like he was merely remarking on a curiosity, but something happened to the smile midway through the thought and it went away, leaving him with an awkward, haunted look, and though he was talking about my eyes, he couldn’t hold them.

  I felt strange. It reinforced the idea that I was not one of them, though what I was now, I did not know. I had been a Polish Jew, a child. I wasn’t sure which of those things still applied in this vast and unfamiliar land, and when I thought about it for long, I felt a tide of panic rising in my chest. I had no friends, no family, no sense of who I was, and no way of putting food in my belly, let alone of building any kind of real life here.

  As if to prove the point, I struggled in my dealings with the immigration people. Though my English was much improved, I did not understand everything they said to me, and the result was frustrating and humiliating. How was I supposed to function in this society when I lacked even the basic means of communication? I was still housed on the destroyer for now—illegally, I suspected, and solely at the discretion of the Captain. Since he had taken me under his wing, I threw myself on his mercy, requesting that he come with me to my next interview. To my immense relief
, he did not hesitate. He accompanied me through the form-filling and interviewing. The immigration official did not seem cowed by him exactly, but he tended to loom over the proceedings, and I never seriously doubted that they would let me into the country. The surprise came after.

  Telling me he had something to discuss with me, the Captain took me to a bar where the sailors gathered, and ordered me a beer, “you being a grown up and all,” he said. I said nothing, sipping at the yellow liquid and trying to hide my wince of distaste.

  “Tell me about the mine,” he said at last.

  I shrugged, not wanting to go over it all again. America was to be my new beginning. I didn’t want to rehash my past anymore.

  “I already told you,” I said.

  “Tell me about the henge and what you saw under it,” he said. He had always been friendly in his dealings with me, and he still was, but for all his feigned casualness, his eyes now held an intensity I had never seen before. There was something specific he wanted to know.

  I didn’t care, and thinking that the sooner I got past it, the faster I could leave it behind, I told him everything in detail: the concrete flytrap henge, the power system, the bell below it and the strange material it was made of. I told him the odd behavior of the guards, the heightened layers of secrecy, and the ruthless way in which Ungerleider had attempted to eradicate the work detail as soon as our task was complete.

  He frowned thoughtfully, staring at his beer glass, and said nothing for a long moment before nodding.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said.

  I immediately began to shake my head, but he raised a hand.

  “There might be work in it,” he said. “Pay.”

  “I don’t need it,” I said. It was a lie, and he knew it, but he let that slide.

  “It’s not about what you need, Jerzy,” he said, and his manner was different now, as if he had decided to say something he had hoped he wouldn’t have to. “A few weeks ago everyone in this city was celebrating the end of the war.”

  “Yes,” I said. “So?”

  “So what if it isn’t over?”

  I stared at him.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “The Japanese …”

  “I’m not talking about the Japanese,” he interrupted. “Or the Italians. Or even the Germans. I’m talking about the Nazis.”

  I made a face. “What’s the difference?” I said.

  “The Germans are a people. They are bound by blood and geography and history. The Nazis are something quite different. What binds them is an ideology, a worldview, and a purpose. The Germans were defeated. In time, they will rebuild as a functioning nation, and their sense of who they are will change. But the Nazis … We killed a lot of them, and some of the survivors will turn back into Germans, like people waking from a nightmare. But we did not cut the head off the snake. Some of them live on, in Germany and …” he shifted in his seat, and I sensed his nervousness, “elsewhere.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “You said there were three planes,” he said. Reading my confusion, he pressed on, his voice low and urgent. “At the Wenceslas mine. Three big cargo planes, loaded with whatever came out of the underground factory.”

  “Yes,” I said, wary of his sudden intensity, unnerved by it.

  “You shot one down,” he said. “One was captured by the Russians. What happened to the other?”

  “I told you. It got away,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about this.” The memory and his mood were getting to me.

  “But where did it go?”

  “I don’t know. Berlin?”

  “No, that’s just it,” he said, his eyes bright, his voice now barely above a whisper. A huddle of sailors at the bar burst into raucous laughter, and the sudden sound actually made me jump, but Captain Jennings’ eyes did not leave mine. “There’s no record of it going there or being shot down. Allied air superiority was close to total by then. We know what was in the air over Germany. We spent the last months of the war in the waters of the Flensburg Firth, in the Schleswig-Holstein region of Northwest Germany, where the last Nazi government holed up in the final weeks, after Berlin fell and Hitler killed himself. The British have the airfield now, and I think your Messerschmitt Gigant may have gone there.”

  I thought this through. “If that was one of the last places to fall, that makes sense,” I agreed. “But why does it matter?”

  Captain Jennings took a sip of his beer, glanced over his shoulder and leaned forward.

  “Because it wasn’t the only cargo plane that went into Flensburg that remains unaccounted for,” he said.

  “So it was hidden away?”

  He shook his head. “You know what else Flensburg was famous for?” he asked. “Why we were in the area in the first place?”

  I shook my head, my apprehension mounting.

  “Submarine yards,” he said. “When the Germans surrendered, all U-boats that were at sea—according to the official story—were ordered to surrender. Many did not. Some were at large for months. Some remain unaccounted for. Some made for South America.”

  “No,” I scoffed. “It’s too far. We would have been told.”

  He smiled at that and shook his head slowly. When he spoke, it was in a measured tone, the information coming easily, as if he had spent a long time considering it.

  “We have people in South America,” he said.

  “What do they say?”

  “They say the U-530, a type 9C/40 submarine commanded by Otto Wermuth, reached Mar del Plata, in Argentina, on July tenth. U-977, a type 7C, commanded by Heinz Schaffer, got there two weeks ago, having been off the radar for more than two months. No one knows exactly what route he took or where he went along the way. The last known base for the sub was Flensburg.”

  He sat back.

  “Why would the Nazis go to Argentina?” I asked, intrigued in spite of myself.

  Jennings’ face broke into a rueful smile.

  “Because they can,” he said. “Perón is welcoming them with open arms. Especially if they can pay, and a lot of them can.”

  I stared at him, and he, knowing what I was thinking, nodded. The Nazi coffers were stuffed with all they had looted from Europe, particularly from its Jews.

  “They go via Spain, because Franco lets them,” said Jennings. “Or Genoa. There are Nazi sympathizers who cover for them, hide them, and there are others who just don’t care who they are or what they have done, so long as they can pay. Either way, there are ratlines right to Buenos Aires. And Rio. Other places that we haven’t found out about yet. Paraguay, maybe Chile. Who knows where else? They go because they know what will happen if they stay.”

  “The war is over,” I said.

  He seemed to consider that for a moment, then shrugged it off.

  “The Allies have been saying for years that defeating the Nazis won’t be the end for them,” he said. “There will be trials before the year’s out. You know better than most, what the Nazis did. There were crimes committed that go beyond simple war crimes. They know that. And they’re bolting.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “I think that some of what you saw in the Wenceslas mine made it out of Germany. I have no idea if it made it onto one of those submarines, but I’d like to find out. And I’d like to be involved in making sure that the Nazis don’t rise up—armed with whatever they were building in those underground factories—in South America.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you are telling me,” I said, though I suspected the answer.

  “Because it matters to you,” he said. “You pretend it doesn’t, but it does.”

  I shook my head, but I feared that if I tried to speak, my voice would break.

  “We’re going,” he said. “The crew of the Kitchener. Got our orders today. A long trip south, to escort a pair of captured Nazi submarines back to New York. Come with us.”

  I found my voice. “What? I’ve be
en at sea for months! I finally get some solid ground under my feet and you want me go back on the water? Why do I have to keep telling people I’m not a sailor?”

  “You could be,” said Jennings. “You’ve seen things, people, including some who are doing their damnedest to disappear. You’re a witness, which could be useful in making sure that doesn’t happen. You’re also a citizen, or as near as makes no difference. Out of work. About to be dropped in a country you don’t know, without friends or family to cushion the fall. And what better way to repay the government of the great nation that hauled your sorry Polish ass out of the water than to join up and serve on the very vessel that saved your hide? Sounds kinda poetic, don’t you think?”

  He grinned then and I found myself—ridiculously, impossibly, grinning back. It must have been the beer.

  24

  ALAN

  Dreamland, Nevada

  “PHASE 2,” AS MORAT CALLED IT, REQUIRED ANOTHER bus ride and hours of sitting around waiting for clearance. By the time Alan—still annoyed by the implausibility of the flight simulator—went through his fourth security checkpoint, he’d decided that nothing could be worth the wait.

  He was wrong.

  Alan stood on an expanse of runway as the moon rose over the dark Nevada cliffs, staring. He had known the Astra TR3B “Locust” was supposed to be triangular, but seeing it still caught him off guard. Seen at from above it would look like an equilateral triangle with a pair of vertical fins at the back. Standing on the airstrip and looking at it from the side it was slim, with only a central bulge for the cockpit on the triangle’s topside, its lines smooth, even elegant, and its edge was blade-like.