slip that the program is called Projekt Saucer and involves the
construction of a saucer-shaped, vertical-rising aircraft. How far it has
progressed, he doesn’t say, but he does also let slip that the project is
highly secret, that it is Heinrich Himmler’s personal passion, and that
even Hitler is unaware of its existence.’
‘What was this Wilson like?’ Bradley asked, desperate to put a
human face on his faceless quarry.
‘Apparently a lot older than he looks,’ Pialowicz replied. ‘About
sixty-five years old.’
‘In 1940.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which makes him about seventy now,’ Bradley observed. ‘Yes.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. This Wilson is very strange. According to Stoll, John Wilson
is a man obsessed. He cares for nothing but his work and has few
scruples when it comes to doing it. That is one obsession. There are
others.’
Pialowicz glanced around him, at the ruins of the church, saw
nothing that he hadn’t lived with for a long time, so returned to the
subject.
‘He does not smoke, does not drink, and claims that his exceptional
youthfulness is due to some kind of lifelong diet. Also, he is obsessed
with extending his life span and, according to Stoll, is convinced that
any kind of extreme emotionalism, such as love or sexual passion,
encourages the aging process. Regarding his own sexual drives, he
claims to relieve them as functionally as humanly possible. And,
finally, while not sharing Heinrich Himmler’s insane notions of an
Aryan Super Race, he certainly believes and is striving for the creation
of a race of geniuses, devoted to science – of which he will naturally be
the leader. For that reason, he treats his own health and his work as the
base material for research, medical and scientific. In other words, he is
a man so objective, he is scarcely human at all... Very strange, yes?’ ‘Yes,’ Bradley said. ‘Very strange.’
He glanced back through the arched doorway of the annex and saw
other intelligence officers at other tables, interviewing other suspects,
collaborators, and allies. The sunlight outside was beaming in through
the stained-glass windows, which had remained unharmed, casting
striations of many colours over worn, harassed, and sometimes jubilant
faces. Big guns thundered in the distance and some people looked up.
The battle for Europe had moved on from this destroyed town and was
continuing elsewhere.
‘So in 1940,’ Bradley continued, ‘Wilson was still located in
Kummersdorf, south of Berlin. Do you know if he’s still there?’ ‘No,’ Pialowicz said, ‘he is not. About three weeks ago Wilson’s
team are split up for reasons we have not yet ascertained. But
according to our informants, Wilson and some others are moved by a
train filled with SS troops and concentration-camp prisoners to
somewhere in the southern Harz Mountains. Alas, we do not know where, though we
do have reason to believe that the area around Nordhausen, in Thuringia, is littered with large, well-disguised underground factories where the Nazi secret weapons are produced with the help of slave labour from nearby camps. We believe Wilson is
destined for one of those hidden factories.’
‘And the rest of his team?’
Pialowicz shrugged. ‘About a week after Wilson is moved out, the
rest of the team, including Schriever, Miethe, and Habermohl, is put on
a train heading for Prague, in Bohem, in Czechoslovakia. We have no
idea why. Nor do we know their final destination.’ Pialowicz shrugged
again, then raised his hands in the air. ‘This is all I can tell you.’ ‘It’s a helluva lot,’ Bradley replied. ‘More than you realize.’ Pialowicz smiled for the first time, then stood up and said, ‘For me
you will please find Kryzystina?’
‘We will,’ Bradley said.
He watched the young man walk out of the annex, sat there for a
few minutes in silence, trying to calm his excitement, then followed
him out of the church.
Too excited for coherent thought, he walked around the shattered
town, letting the sun shine on his face, observing the appalling ruins
and the troops and civilians moving around them, passing tanks buried
in rubble and overturned, scorched trucks, eventually arriving at
another church, which also was damaged. Stepping inside, he had to
adjust to the gloom. Then he saw hundreds, maybe a thousand or more,
refugees on the floor, lying on mattresses, surrounded by bits of
furniture, making coffee and soup on small paraffin burners, and
attending to the wounded and the dying, for whom there was still no
room in the remains of the hospital. Light beamed obliquely on them,
illuminating motes of dust, covering them in a silvery haze that made
them look slightly unreal.
It was a dream of life and death, of suffering and self- sacrifice, and
Bradley had seen it too many times on his journey through France.
Nevertheless, he was shaken, torn between faith and despair, and he
turned away from it, from man's stupidity and nobility, and hurried
back to the Church of St Pierre, to continue his work.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Ernst’s growing conviction that hell might be on earth was made concrete when, after his painful farewell to Ingrid, he returned to the Harz Mountains. For a week that seemed like a year, he divided his time between the nightmarish daily routine of the underground factories in Nordhausen and Wilson’s flying saucer construction plant nearby, just outside the old walled town of Kahla.
Desperate to avoid the daily whippings, public hangings, and shots to the back of the head in the bunkers of Nordhausen, all designed to keep the V-1 and V-2 assembly lines rolling, he spent most of his time in the underground factory at Kahla, pretending to supervise Wilson, whom he knew had seen through his pretence and was quietly amused by it.
‘You always seem so tense,’ he said to Ernst. ‘You must learn to relax.’
Ernst was fascinated by Wilson, fearing and admiring his old man’s wisdom, but mostly drawn to his air of icy invincibility and fascinated by his plans and theories, which admitted to no human doubts. He was completing his Feuerball, the remote-controlled anti-radar device that looked like a flying saucer but was only three feet wide and was, so he said, a flawless prototype for the larger, pilot-controlled saucer still on the drawing board.
‘If the Feuerball flies,’ Wilson said, ‘and responds to its commands, then the Kugelblitz will also fly when we have the time to complete it. In the meantime, every test that needs to be done can be done with the Feuerball. Very soon now I’ll try it against the Allied planes and see how it performs. I don’t doubt that it will work admirably.’
Humiliated by Brigette, deprived of Ingrid and his children, rarely able to forget that he had once been an engineer and now was merely observing the great achievements of Wernher von Braun and Wilson, Ernst leaned toward the latter, was ensnared in his web, and began to see his only hope for redemption in the dream of Antarctica.
‘Not with Himmler,’ Wilson confided. ‘We can’t trust him anymore. Personally, I never did for a second, but now I know I was right. Kammler and Nebe are talking. They see Himmler a lot. They say he hasn't been the same since the first great defeat in Russia, and like Hitler, he’s losing control and falling back upon fantasy. Astrologers and occultists, quack doctors and mesmerists – Himmler and
Hitler, soulmates, will eventually go down the same way.’
‘I could have you shot for saying that.’
‘But you won’t,’ Wilson said, ‘because you too have witnessed Himmler’s changing moods and know what he’s like.’
Which was true enough, after all. Ernst thought Himmler was going mad. The more the Allies advanced, the more distracted and crazy Himmler became, albeit in his quiet way. The Reichsführer, the bureaucrat, the chicken farmer, was quietly falling to pieces. He had forgotten Neuschwabenland, had lost confidence in Wilson, and now pinned all his hopes on Rudolph Schriever’s abortion of a flying saucer, on other obscure ‘secret’ weapons, and on his own demented plans for making a ‘private’ peace with the advancing Allies.
He was not the awesomely remote Reichsführer of the past, but a pitiful creature.
Not a man to trust.
‘Yet I steal from him,’ Wilson said. ‘I steal the gold from his mind of mud. I don’t believe in his mysticism, in his blond young gods of war, in his anthroposophy and theosophy and Rosicrucianism, in his bizarre dreams of Atlantis and Lemuria and the undefiled Aryan. These are the dreams of madmen, the visions of the demented; yet they do hold a kernel of truth: the transformation of man. I too believe in this, though not in the same sad way. I believe in man’s evolutionary drive toward the Superman. And I believe in biological mutation and mental enhancement.’
They sometimes walked out of the tunnels, into the day’s clear light, and gazed over the forested hills of Thuringia to the summer’s horizon. There were no whippings there. No hangings. No beatings. But somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, the world was at war.
‘Forget Himmler,’ Wilson told Ernst. ‘He’s just another Nazi lunatic. He’s raised muddled philosophy and primitive dreaming from the slime to the tortured blood and bone of an insane ideology. Blood and bone are acceptable – we’re here, after all, only to feed evolution – but his philosophy of ice and fire, his pitiful dependence upon Hörbiger, is enough to show us that he doesn’t belong to the real world. We will go to Antarctica, but not to further an idiotic SS élite. We will go to further what you once had and lost: the belief in science as an absolute, the one hope for mankind. You can recapture that dream, Ernst, but only through me. Forget Himmler. Betray him – yes, you must! – and regain your faith where it matters: in a colony devoted to science and unimpeded by ephemeral, earthly concerns. It has already begun, Ernst. The factories and accommodations under the ice have been completed and already a few hundred people have been shipped there, to prepare for our coming. Cast off your past, come with me, and get back what you lost. All the rest is lost anyway.'
Which Ernst knew was the truth, because the truth was undeniable: the Allied advance through France, the Soviets forming a pincer movement, Berlin crumbling in flame and smoke, his wife and family endangered; even his mistress, his whore, defeating him and laughing at his retreat. Yes, everything now defeating him and mocking his youthful dreams. And so Wilson, who had once seemed so distant, now seemed very close to him.
‘We need an escape route,’ Wilson said, back in his workshop, over the Feuerball, his steady gray gaze focused on the three-foot disc gleaming beneath him. ‘We need to get from here to Kiel in the Baltic, and from there to our friends in Argentina, then from there to Antarctica. Nebe can help us in this. He’s a vulture, but reliable. But to do it, he has to disappear, and that makes things difficult. You must do this for us, Ernst. You must help him disappear. When he disappears, when no one is looking for him, he can lead us to freedom. Do you understand, Ernst?’
‘Yes,’ Ernst said. ‘I understand.’
‘Arrange that and you can travel with me to Antarctica and become an even better engineer – no, a scientist! – than you’d ever imagined you could be. Do that and... you’re free!’
Ernst left Wilson in Kahla and returned to Nordhausen where, in the great tunnels, while the conveyor belts rolled, the SS guards cracked their whips, spines snapped at the end of ropes, gunshots ricocheted in the bunkers, and the German genius for organization was completely perverted. He had chosen this life – at some point he had decided – and so he swallowed his remaining guilt, cast shame aside for all time, and travelled back to Berlin by train and car for another meeting with Kammler.
He returned to a nightmare.
‘There’s been an attempt on the Führer’s life,’ Kammler told him in his office in SS headquarters. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the chief of staff to the commander of the General Army Office in Berlin, planted a bomb in a briefcase during a meeting in Führer Headquarters in Wolfsschanze. Miraculously, the Führer escaped with minor burns, but now all hell has broken loose. A planned military revolt in the city by Stauffenberg’s co-conspirators has already been put down, Stauffenberg, generals Beck and Olbricht, and their two adjutants have been executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse, other conspirators have committed suicide, and Himmler has already set up the machinery for an investigation of the uprising and is drawing up a death list containing hundreds of names.’
‘They were all involved in the attempted coup?’
‘Highly unlikely,’ Kammler replied. ‘But in situations such as this, guilt or innocence is often a matter of luck. Hundreds of men are going to die, Captain Stoll, and General Nebe may be one of them.’
‘Nebe?’
‘Yes, He has no alibi. At the time of the assassination attempt, you were in Nordhausen and I was in the Pas de Calais, supervising the rocket launchings – but Nebe was right here in Berlin, and since Himmler has never trusted him, he’s gone down on the death list.’
‘Does he know this yet?’
‘No. I caught a glimpse of the list in Himmler’s office only an hour ago. He was still filling in names.’
‘What do we do now?’ Ernst asked, feeling nauseous with fear.
‘It’s the perfect excuse for Nebe to disappear,’ Kammler said with a self-satisfied air. ‘In order to plan our escape route from Kahla to Kiel and collect troops trustworthy enough, and willing, to be our armed escorts during the journey, Nebe was always going to have to go underground. Our problem before was that his disappearance would have raised too large a question mark. However, now, if he disappears, it’ll be assumed that he simply fled in fear of his life, as so many will. So now he’ll disappear. He’ll go underground in Thuringia. We’ll protect him there until all this fuss has died down – if necessary, I can confirm that he was executed by my men – and then, when the dust has settled, he can surface with new papers and quietly start organizing what we need for our escape before the Soviets or Allies reach us.’
‘Excellent,’ Ernst murmured, his thoughts clogged with dread. ‘But who will... ?’
‘I personally will arrange it,’ Kammler said. ‘I have the required freedom of movement. Meanwhile, you’ll report directly to Himmler and become his right hand, thus ensuring that you remain above suspicion.’
Still haunted by the memory of the infamous Night of the Long Knives, and aware that a similar nightmare was about to be put into motion, Ernst, feeling sick to his stomach, said, ‘I really would rather not – ’
But Kammler stepped up to him and stared icily at him. ‘You will do it, Captain Stoll. You will do whatever he asks of you. You will be his right hand, his loyal subject, no matter what is asked of you. Do you understand, Captain?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst said.
He reported to the Reichsf
ü hrer. The nightmare closed in upon him. The death list was completed and the rounding up began and the days and nights after were filled with beatings and entreaties and roaring guns and blood-soaked, riddled corpses. They were shot in their homes, in floodlit courtyards, in their beds and in cars and in fields where the wind howled and bent the grass.
Ernst had to be part of it, prove his worth, show his loyalty, and he managed it by denying it, by pretending it wasn’t happening, or by convincing himself that those begging and sobbing
deserved what they got. The innocent died with the guilty, the same way, without mercy; and the ghastly climax was held in the great courtroom of the Kammergericht, where, for the cine-cameras, the most notable of the defendants were humiliated even as they were sentenced.
They were brought in wearing old clothes, haggard, unkempt, some deprived of their false teeth, all forced to hold their beltless trousers up, and then, when sentenced, were led out of the courthouse and into Plotzensee Prison where, in a small room, they were stripped to the waist and hanged from meat hooks with nooses made of piano wire.
Ernst and his fellow officers were obliged to look on, all sweating in the bright lights required for the cine-cameras that were taking moving pictures of the stripped bodies writhing in agony.
That’s when it ended, when Ernst was reprieved, and he returned to his bed in the SS barracks and slept the sleep of the damned, haunted by nightmares.
Meanwhile, the western front had collapsed, the fate of France had been sealed a few days before when General Patton’s divisions poured through the gap at Avranches, and the Allied bombing of Berlin was now reaching new heights of appalling efficiency. The ruins stretched as far as the eye could see; the sky was a constant pall of smoke.
Ernst was called to Kammler’s office and went dazed from lack of sleep. He was informed that General Nebe had gone underground in Kahla, in Thuringia. Nebe had been listed officially as missing, possibly dead in the recent mass executions, when many bodies had been buried unnamed. Ernst was to return to Kahla, to keep a close eye on Wilson. He was to leave the next morning.
Feeling haunted and lost, dispossessed of his soul, he returned to the barracks and started packing... and then heard the wailing of the air-raid sirens.
The noise seemed to cut through him, lacerating his stripped nerves, and something collapsed inside him: the final, sad remnants of his will. He lay on the bed and closed his eyes and begged the planes to turn back. Naturally, they ignored him, were soon above him, making the room shake, and then the darkness outside erupted and filled up with hellish noise. He covered his ears with his hands. It didn’t help at all. The noise seemed to fill his head, a vast symphony of destruction, and his bed shook and rattled as a brilliant light washed over him and the men in the other beds cursed and jumped up and ran for the door.
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 37