Black Sun Reich: The Spear of Destiny: Part One of Three

by Trey Garrison

  Deitel feared the man vastly overestimated the intelligence of his fellow men. And underestimated it—man would find a way to turn his purely defensive weapons into offensive ones no matter how task specific Tesla tried to make them.

  Rucker hefted the strange pistol, which looked a lot like a child’s toy. “It’s a ray gun, like in the Buck Rogers comic strip?”

  “No, no, no. It is a teleforce electrostatic projector,” Nikola said.

  There was a moment of silence. He didn’t realize more needed be said.

  Rucker gestured for more.

  “Oh, of course. It produces a stream of atomic clusters, yes?” Nikola said, wondering if that was enough.

  Another pause. Nikola rolled his eyes.

  “It’s a ray gun,” he said.

  “Will it kill those things the Nazis are making?” Rucker asked.

  “Lysander explained to me the creatures. Marvelous sounding. I would love for you to bring me back a specimen. But no matter—whatever manner of living creature the Nazis have created, its nervous system will be like all other animal life—powered by electrical impulses. At the base setting, this could stun an elephant. At a high enough setting, it will permanently disrupt the nervous system.”

  Rucker looked as uncomfortable handling Nikola’s ray gun as Deitel had been handling Rucker’s sidearm.

  “Is there any danger to the shooter when the tele . . . um, electromag . . . um. when I shoot it?”

  “Oh no. No no no. No. Safe as houses,” Nikola said. “Well, It may be prudent to shield your eyes and hands just in case. Well, there is some static discharge if the matrix builds up an excess cluster in the transformer. Well, I wouldn’t fire it more than three times every two minutes. Well, five minutes. And don’t let it get too hot. Or too cold. Or wet.”

  Nikola gave Rucker a small case full of other gadgets he said the pilot might find useful. Walking back to the car they’d borrowed, they heard a voice yelling to them from a third floor window.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t drop it!”

  “Are we bringing that on the plane with us?” Deitel asked. “What if it teleforces the engines? What if—”

  “Oh, knock it off. You’d worry the horns off a billy goat,” Rucker said. He looked again at the case holding Nikola’s death ray pistol. He pushed it toward Deitel.

  “Here, hold this,” he said.

  “Nein!”

  “Swell,” Rucker said. “One deadly experiment to deal with another deadly experiment. Why can’t we let the mad scientists fight it out?”

  Deitel considered.

  “Ja. Everybody knows what good fighters doctors and scientists are.”

  Somewhere over Tennessee, CSA

  En route to New York City

  When Lysander Benjamin told Deitel and Rucker he needed them in New York City by early morning, Deitel assumed that he meant in two days. It was past midnight and New York City was almost 1,600 miles northeast. Even in this modern world of 1928, that put the destination almost ten hours away. But now they were one-third of the way to the capital of the Union States; flight time so far just over one and a half hours.

  Austin to New York in a hair more than five hours.

  This marvel of speed was thanks to one of the Prometheus Society’s regents he’d met that evening—the amazing oil drill magnate and movie producer who was also an aviator and aircraft designer. He was the Freehold’s version of a Renaissance man—Howard Hughes.

  Born in the coastal city of Lamar, Hughes inherited a small fortune from his father’s manufacturing company, which owned the patent on a special drill bit design. He turned it into a large fortune by building Hughes Aircraft, headquartered in Austin, and a movie production company located in the Cabo Madera motion picture dream factory in Cabo San Lucas, Texas.

  It was Hughes’s own plane that was speeding Rucker and Deitel to New York.

  Hughes was piloting a twin-engine aircraft of his own design, the H-3 Hermes Racer, at a speed in excess of 320 miles per hour. It was almost half again as fast as the fastest military fighter in the world, and eighty miles per hour faster than the young heir’s first racer, the H-1.

  Rucker had carried on and on about the H-3’s groundbreaking design, saying it was one of the cleanest and most elegant aircraft designs ever conceived. He spoke in respectful tones about the way rivets were countersunk flush and the way the propeller had a cone-shaped housing, both of which reduced drag exponentially.

  The twin 28-cylinder Cyclone engines provided almost 2,000 horsepower each, making possible the incredible speeds the craft could achieve at high altitude. The craft could cruise at 40,000 feet without the pilot or passengers needing oxygen masks, thanks to Hughes’s other revolutionary innovation, the pressurized cockpit and cabin.

  Hughes, a tall man with a rich East Texas accent, was just twenty-three, but Deitel had read about the man often. Deitel was a motion picture buff, like many people in Germany before Hitler cracked down on foreign films, and knew Hughes’s growing film credits.

  Hughes had already directed two successful motion pictures, Everybody’s Acting and Two Arabian Nights, and the man was working on his third—an epic motion picture about aviation in the Great War with a budget of almost $3 million, the most expensive Cabo Madera production in history.

  Deitel couldn’t wait for the chance to visit Cabo Madera and its movie studios. And then the Brown Sombrero, Mann’s Chinese Theater, and the other wonders of the motion picture world down in the Freehold’s southwesternmost city. Exile to Texas had at least one benefit, he thought.

  Hughes was a meticulous and exacting man, Deitel noticed almost immediately. Many pilots are, he’d seen, and each had his own superstitious rituals. But Hughes took it far beyond anything the doctor imagined possible.

  When they arrived at Hughes’s private airfield, Hughes was doing a third engine check. After boarding, he checked the door latches and pressurization seals four times. Although Deitel had a normal and reasonable fear of flying, this constant checking and rechecking every aspect of the H-3 was oddly reassuring.

  Hughes had refused to shake hands, which Rucker told Deitel not to take as an insult. It was on of the man’s idiosyncrasies. The pilot’s control wheel, for instance, was covered in plastic wrap. Also, Hughes refused to take off until the ground crew removed a small stain—a bug impact—from the cockpit window. While he wasn’t looking, Rucker switched the two extra pillows on the two vacant seats on the starboard side and motioned for Deitel to pay attention.

  Before going back into the cockpit, Hughes looked around the cabin and seemed uncomfortable. His eyes ran over every inch of the cabin. He saw what was different then, switched the cushions back, smiled and gave the middle finger to Rucker, who couldn’t contain his laughter anymore. Later, Rucker cautioned Deitel not to help himself to any of the bottled milk in the little cabin refrigerator.

  Exhaustion and the surprisingly quiet drone of the aircraft’s powerful engines caught up with Deitel somewhere before the Kentucky border. When he awoke they were on approach to Manhattan and the sun was still a ways from rising. Rucker offered him something called a Coca-Cola.

  “From Atlanta. Pep you up,” Rucker said.

  The bottle said, DELICIOUS AND REFRESHING, IT INVIGORATES—STOP AT THE RED SIGN, and, WITH QUALITY COCAINE IMPORTED FROM BOLIVIA. It was an acquired taste, but it delivered what it promised. Deitel was wide-awake within minutes.

  Hughes had powered down the airplane’s considerable engines and dropped to 5,000 feet so as not to attract undue attention from spotters on the ground. He wanted to look like any other commercial flight. Above the city the air was dirty with coal and factory smoke, which stained the gray concrete of the mostly featureless buildings. A few passenger airships were making speed to the airship port where others were moored, and smaller police airships floated over the city keeping a watchful eye on the streets.

  Some of the wonderful old gothic architecture from the nineteenth century was evi
dent even from a mile up, but what dominated were the drab, boxy, utilitarian towers that made up the bulk of post-turn-of-the-century New York City.

  So much potential, Rucker thought. It could have been more than this.

  There was the beautiful greenery of Central Park. At least they got that right. In the center of the massive urban forest was the palatial Hamilton House, home to U.S. presidents ever since Washington, D.C., was abandoned in 1863 and razed by Confederate forces in retaliation for General Sherman’s burning of Knoxville. Over on the west side they could see the U.S. Capitol Building, seat of the Union Congress and the Political Bureau.

  Hughes banked the craft.

  “You two better get ready,” he said. “Five minutes to the drop zone and we’re losing the dark.”

  Drop zone?

  “We are to be parachuting, Herr Rucker?”

  “Not really. Get back here.”

  “Ah, good. I don’t like heights.”

  A hatchway to the belly of the H-3 opened to a small, oddly curved wooden and brass container about twice the width of a coffin and just a little deeper. It was padded with velvet-lined cushions, and there were two backpacks already inside.

  “Howard didn’t just build this twin-engine big bird for speed records. You’ll always get a faster bird with a smaller one-seater. No, this crate is made for getting in someplace fast, dropping something off, and getting out. As in, without anyone the wiser or able to catch you,” Rucker said as he secured a safety harness to the two of them and closed the top hatch.

  They could feel the bay doors opening below.

  From the cockpit over the internal radio speaker Hughes explained his brainchild, which he called a covert egress ejection pod.

  “The concept is to execute insertion without spotters seeing anything like a parachute. It’s dropped at about thirty feet over the water at near stall-out speed, and air brakes help the pod shed velocity even further. Internal gyroscopes keep it level so it enters the water at the proper angle, thus the impact doesn’t break every bone in your body.”

  Ach. Mein. Gott.

  “Is this safe?”

  Hughes didn’t hesitate.

  “I won’t lie to you, Doctor. No, not at all.”

  “Vas?”

  “Drop zone in ten, nine, eight . . .”

  “Herr Hughes, how many times have you employed this device?”

  “Including today?”

  “Ja!”

  “Today’s drop would bring it to . . . I think, one. Yes. One. Releasing pod.”

  Rucker whooped a cowboy yahoo.

  Deitel cried out, too. “I hate Texas!”

  And kept on repeating it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Manhattan Island

  New York City

  Capital of the Union States of America

  Rucker and Deitel were walking the streets of New York City and it wasn’t even 9:00 A.M. Almost exactly twenty-four hours before, Deitel had been standing on the tarmac in Colombia under the sweltering heat and the rising sun. Now he was chilled to the bone from the cold, damp air here in New York City.

  “Everyone in Texas is clinically insane,” Deitel was saying. “I speak as a medical professional.”

  “Hey, your people are making monsters. Actual, bona fide monsters. Don’t judge,” Rucker said.

  “I need a shower,” Deitel said.

  “You had a bath. The East River, it’s called.”

  Deitel sniffed the back of his hand.

  “That’s why I need a shower.”

  “Helps you fit in,” Rucker said.

  Deitel scratched furiously at the clothes he’d put on after the two dragged themselves and their inflatable boat out of the waterway under the Queensboro Bridge. Rucker had them change into very plain suits with industrial tailoring and cut from thick, itchy wool. The jackets were extremely high-waisted and the lapels very thin. The trousers were narrow and worn so that their socks showed, apparently the fashion here. They wore tweed scally caps that looked more ridiculous than Rucker’s straw cowboy hat.

  Rucker said they had to fit in with the locals, which also explained why for the first time Deitel saw Rucker without his big Colt pistol strapped to his thigh. He’d gone for a more subdued approach—twin .45 Webley compact revolvers in a shoulder harness rig.

  The Texans and their toys.

  They rounded a block to find yet another block of utilitarian, concrete tenements.

  “So, this is New York City,” Deitel said.

  “This is New York City.”

  Deitel sniffed. “I thought it would be bigger.”

  “Largest city in the Union States,” Rucker said. “Look, you’re not seeing this place at its best. It’s a good place that could have been great. The Old Quarter is something to see. It has the most amazing architecture. The underground art movement here is easily the rival of the art movements in New Orleans or Paris, and that’s in everything from jazz and painting to the theater scene. Last century, this place was a powerhouse in terms of cultures coming together, clashing, and evolving into something more than the sum of its parts. It just all went wrong around the turn of the century when the progressive and socialist movement drove out the capital and the old money. The decency laws drove out the thinkers and the artists. The eugenics movement drove out the old fashioned liberals, and the temperance movement drove out the fun.”

  Most of the buildings on their route, especially the public tenements, were built in the post-Wilson era of National Greatness and Austerity. In fact, only the strings of drying laundry—how did anything dry in this weather?—added any color to the city scene in this, the worker’s sector. Browns and grays and blues, mostly, and yellowed whites. But that was something.

  “This is the cultural center of the old American dominion, the national capital of the Union States,” Rucker said. “This is the center of their nation’s pride.”

  Deitel nodded.

  “What is that smell?” he asked.

  Rucker pointed up at some windows across the street, where a woman was pouring a chamber pot onto the gutter. Then he pointed at the carcass of a horse lying in the street up ahead.

  “This is what happens when everyone owns everything,” Rucker said. “No one takes care of anything.”

  “What causes this kind of . . . this?” Deitel said, sweeping his arm before them. “They were one of the leading economic nations as late as 1900.”

  “They all point the finger up here at something or another. Big Business. Big Banks. Big Labor,” Rucker said. “I think maybe they never stop to consider the problem is Big Ideas.”

  Deitel cocked his head. Rucker idly thought the body language resembled a dog trying to understand English.

  “All the promises their leaders make them. All the things they vote for themselves to get, and all the big projects that their leaders can stick their names on. Big Ideas,” Rucker said. “I think they’d be surprised at how well things would go if they’d just leave things alone.”

  Deitel shook his head. “But if everyone is just pursuing their own hedonistic desires, how can there be room for national goals such as—”

  “The conquest of Austria and the Czechs?”

  “That’s not fair, I’m talking about improving the people. Serving the greater good..”

  “What if people don’t want to be improved?”

  “The laissez-faire approach might work if people were perfect, but they aren’t.”

  “Why do people have to be perfect to be free?”

  “People have to be protected from their own excesses,” Deitel countered.

  “Look, if you’re free you own yourself. You can hurt yourself by too much food or too much liquor. You can ruin yourself at the poker table. You can piss you life away any number of ways,” Rucker said. “It would make you a damn fool and, if the preachers are right, a damned soul. But if you aren’t free to do all that, you’re not free at all. You can’t be free to stand up if you’re not free to sit do
wn and die.”

  “Do you really think people want the freedom to fail? To starve?” Deitel asked.

  Rucker did allow that their route took them purposefully through the worker districts on the east side—not the more prosperous and upscale districts on the west side so commonly seen on the newsreels—exactly because they would attract less attention here.

  The Union States weren’t all poverty and mediocrity like this. In other parts of the city the governing elite, party members, select industrialists, and chosen mercantilists provided the glamour and extravagance for which New York City was still renowned, despite the past three decades of economic stagnation.

  “So,” Deitel said, “I notice when you want to avoid discussing a topic, you start discussing economics or politics or Tennessee whiskey or anything but the obvious. So?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We’re on our way to contact your ex?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I was surprised to hear this, really.”

  “Shut up.”

  Deitel could barely contain his amusement.

  “Herr Hauptmann Rucker: romantic.”

  “You do know what ‘shut up’ means, right?”

  “One gets giddy at the thought of meeting the former Frau Rucker.”

  “I have a gun. Two guns. I can shoot you. Right here. New York City street. No one would notice.”

  “The mind reels imagining the kind of woman who would take your hand and your name.”

  Rucker actually growled.

  “Shut— If I tell you, will you agree not to bring it up again?”

  “Jawohl, mein hauptmann.”

  They turned west onto 72nd Street and found themselves in a press of humanity along the sidewalks.

  “Tell me about your ex-wife.”

  “My ex-fiancée. Not my ex-wife.”

  “Of course,” Deitel said insincerely.

  “I can and I will shoot you.”

  “Please, continue. No more peanuts from the gallery.”

  Rucker had to resist the urge to pull out a cigar to chew on. It would stand out here—creature comforts weren’t the norm in this extended depression. Discussing her always brought on the urge. Chewing a Cuban was the bad habit so many aviators picked up. Since a pilot couldn’t smoke a cigar in an open cockpit plane, they learned to chew them.