by TR Kenneth
The three teens released their carabineers and grinned with accomplishment. Chet Logan, the skinny youth with the name of a cowboy and the heart of a bean-counter, was the first to identify it. “It’s a German Eiheits Diesel!” he exclaimed. “Look! You can still see the mount where the Breda gun was on top of the truck bed!”
“How long has this been here?” Dallas Ann asked, perusing it suspiciously.
“A long time. Just look at the rust,” Chet said, watching the orangey red dust sprinkle to the ground where his hand touched the truck.
“Yep, it’s been here since the war.” Mac was happy to give the kids a lesson. “The Nazis planned the Alpenfestung, the Alpine Redoubt, as they called it, where they might make a last stand. It was rumored to mostly just be an invention by their propaganda minister, Goebbels, but it’s a fact they used these mountains to stash arms, valuables, documents, from the beginning.”
He watched Wentford Holmes III climb into the driver’s seat of the truck and pretend to take the wheel, long since pillaged.
Chet cautiously climbed into the back of the truck. Wentford followed, ploughing him aside. “Where’s the gun?” Wentford demanded, kicking the mount as if the huge gun might just appear.
There was always an asshole in the group, Mac thought, and they were usually the children of tort attorneys or evangelicals. Go figure.
“Long gone. The Allies were pretty thorough removing ordnance after the surrender.” He helped Dallas Ann scramble to the truck bed. The sun had melted all the snow, revealing wet rusty metal. “Just don’t fall through. I think it’s solid but it’s been through seventy or more winters.”
Wentford leapt to the top of the mount and pretended to play battle with an imaginary gun, evaporating Dallas Ann and Chet who stood politely by. He leapt and pounded away foolishly, as teens do when they become the perfect storm of Adderall and narcissism.
Dallas laughed. Chet looked resentful. Wentford made particular effort to annihilate him, pounding his feet for emphasis.
Suddenly the truck shuddered. The sound of metal ripping was followed by a heavy boom.
“Whoa!” Dallas Ann exclaimed, lunging for the metal bars along the edge of the truck bed.
They all watched as a huge barrel-like structure was birthed below the crumbling truck. The tank rolled to the edge of the cliff and fell, bouncing once, then twice along the rock face before becoming lodged in a crevice about fifty feet below. Mac squatted and looked down, where the tank clung to the precious space on the ledge.
“That must’ve been the gas tank.”
“Why is it not rusted like the truck?” Dallas Ann asked, squatting next him.
“Not made of steel, that’s for sure. Pretty high-grade aluminum for a gas tank.” Mac shrugged. “Sorry to have to tell you this, guys.” He looked up the face of the cliff. “The fun part’s over. Now we have to go back. Up there.” He jabbed his thumb upward.
The four of them looked up the mountainside, like angels to heaven.
Behind them, the grotesque form of the rusted truck appeared crouched as if it were ready for a meal. A beast out of Dante’s Inferno.
PART FOUR
Upon Heydrich’s death, Hitler had his safe blown open and acquired the documents therein. With incredible anger and agitation, Hitler read Heydrich’s big file named Adolf Hitler. When he was finished, he shouted like a madman and told Bormann, “Heydrich was more dangerous that we thought! He had us all within the grasp of his hands!!! What would have happened to us had he lived!?”
Testimony of the SS Officer who was present
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE FRANKFURT GATE for Singapore Airlines was an odd mix of manufactured German rathskeller stuck in a cold corridor of terrazzo marble and uninspired mall from 1974. There was access to a first-class lounge, but Stag decided to pass. No point in meeting up with the crowd early, he reckoned, ironically. Things were going to get awkward soon enough.
In the meantime, he was on the internet with a new device in Maguire’s name. Dedman’s documents and devices were safe in his carry-on. He had just started to read about Jan Vanderloos, President of Tarnhelm South Africa, who had been struck by a debilitating stroke, when Suites Class seating was announced. The Airbus 380 was the largest aircraft commercially available. It had twelve single suites that could convert to six doubles, and he was pretty confident Tarnhelm had booked all of them. They sure as fuck didn’t want an audience.
He was the first to board. The suites were like individual cubicles that each had an adjoining wall to another. The wall could come down and create a double bed when it was time for sleeping. Individual privacy was maximum, which he was happy to have. He didn’t relish spending the next few hours staring at a bunch of men who wanted to kill him. No, he was going to take the meeting, outline his plan to them, then try to relax in that viper’s nest, in his double bed in the sky.
Make that a double bed in the sky with Givenchy pajamas.
The attendant was quick to bring him a Blue Mountain coffee. He’d read it went for about $120.00 a pound, and he longed to taste it. But he didn’t dare. Not when Tarnhelm had a target on his forehead. So he stirred it with a spoon and ruefully thought about the life that awaited him when his money was gone and he was back to flying economy. If he lived that long. He was watching the coffee cool when the first of the board members arrived in the suite forward to his.
He figured the tall Norseman was Rikhardsson. The guy looked at him like the bloodthirsty pagan he was, all ice-blue stare and heartless beheading. His attendant took his carry-on and swished by in her Balmain-designed batik uniform. Stag had read that the Singapore Girl was required to have a certain waist-to-hip ratio. It was, of course, completely sexist and unacceptable, until you were watching them bend and stretch, their ass in your face. Then, for a man, it was heaven.
“Mr. Maguire? Henry Sadler. President of North American Operations.” A nondescript American shoved his hand in and pumped his. “Mr. Portier will be here shortly.”
Stag said nothing. From the shuffling and obsequious murmurs behind him, he figured the other board members were getting settled.
Portier arrived looking like Marie Antoinette being forced to tour the slums near the Paris sewers. He handed his alligator briefcase to his personal airline attendant—Stag thought her name was Nor—who took it and placed it elegantly under the bench in front of his seat. For one second, Portier met his eye across the aisle. It said, “I am going to eat your face off,” then he took a glass of Krug and settled back for takeoff.
The Airbus rose from the tarmac like a floating tanker, with hardly a bump. Once the captain lifted the seat belt sign, Stag figured he would get started. It wouldn’t take long.
He went to the first-class lounge at the front of the plane, nodding to Portier to follow. The rest of the board stood and sauntered in. Once the five of them settled in the hip, boxy, white leather lounge seats, Stag whipped out a manila folder and handed it to Portier. Portier opened it and examined the key, which, for the occasion, Stag had slipped in a new Ziploc bag.
“I can’t afford fancy Hermès briefcases … yet,” Stag added with drummed-up humility.
The men each took a long look at the folded silk strip through the Ziploc. The last one to examine it, Rikhardsson, placed it in the manila folder and handed it back to Stag.
Stag sat back. “I just read about Mr. Vanderloos. He seemed young for a stroke. I understand he’s in a permanent vegetative state. Very unfortunate. I would have liked for him to be here.” It was all he could do not to roll his eyes. He handed Portier an envelope that held his request. It was simple. Fifty million in the numbered account in the Zurich Cantonal Bank, half when they landed, the other half when they received the key. Swiss-numbered accounts weren’t what they used to be now that the Holocaust lawyers and US Homeland Security was onto them, but that didn’t bother Stag. Especially since there would be no one to complain.
Portier read his demands in stony sil
ence. He motioned for Rikhardsson to take the contents around to the other board members.
Then he said to Stag, “Mr. Maguire, what makes you think you’ll be able to get away with this?”
“Well, I figure at the rate your board is going, all I have to do is wait, and you’ll cannibalize yourselves.” Stag looked at the glass of sparkling spring water that Rikhardsson had just sipped from. It was clearly a nice safe glass of water. He took it from the cocktail table and chugged it down himself, much to Rikhardsson’s shock. “Besides, you’re here, aren’t you?”
He didn’t bother to wait around for an answer. Instead, he rose and gimped to his suite. Now all there was left to do was refuse all meals, get tucked into his double bed, and lie awake till they landed at Changi Airport. Without fearing for his life, it was just an endurance test. Like flying economy.
You’ve become quite secretive about the new weapon. You talk of the future, that one day there shall be a great bomb affixed to a rocket that will destroy an entire city in one blast. I don’t really believe it. Especially when you claim it will be but the size of a pineapple, but I listen with intent even as I look dreamy and distracted at my easel. You murmured the bomb is not yet launchable, but you boast it may be dropped from a plane. You drink as you speak to me of these things. Sometimes, I am not certain what your slurred words are saying. But I write it down as best I can on my white silk. I go to the paint store, and hand it over.
It is my little hammer, you see, knocking away at the bricks of the Thousand-Year-Reich.
Changi Airport was the most beautiful airport Stag had ever seen, from its celestial architecture to its ridiculous number of high-end shops. But walking through it to catch his flight to Bali, he noted the strange inefficiency of the Singaporeans. Everything was beautiful to the eye, but once you went to your gate, you couldn’t get a pedestrian bottle of water without walking a mile back to where the shops had been hubbed. And the internet, forget about it. To get the code, you had to go back through security. But, fuck, you could buy some Ferragamos in a heartbeat.
He passed briefly through the Singapore Airlines SilverKris lounge to send out an email. For the second meeting with Tarnhelm, he decided he needed a more appropriate accoutrement instead of a Ziploc bag. He emailed several photos and specifications to Wuhan, China, where he’d sourced a high-end fake leather goods operation. They were rushing through a “fine” alligator briefcase, just exactly like the one Portier owned. Only he wasn’t going to pay Hermès to make it.
He smiled, thinking how pissed off Portier was going to be seeing another Hermès briefcase like his own. For a moment, he even considered getting a fake Tourbillon Mars made in China and wearing it at their next meeting, just to get the guy’s goat.
Nah.
His work done, he thought about staying in the first-class lounge, but after his last flight, he was getting tired of staring at douchebags. And sometimes he just wanted to blend with the crowd. Now was such a time. Portier was sure to let him live a few more minutes till they made a deal.
Or not.
He settled into the plane that would take him to Denpasar. He was booked at the St. Regis under his name, but Dedman was at a small upscale hotel called Bali Orchid. He had a nice over-the-water palm-woven villa waiting for him there. He hoped he had enough time to enjoy it and get some research done
Portier took his own private plane back to Zurich. The rest of the board flew with him.
“Fifty million.” Zellner shook his head. “Tell me again why we don’t just shoot him out of the air—collateral damage aside?”
“He’s fucking with us,” Rikhardsson bit out from a blond leather couch.
“Yes,” Portier agreed. “But until we have that code, we cannot see him dead.” He was determined not to be driven by the rage of his white count. There was too much he still wanted to get done. It was time for ice in his veins as Rikhardsson had handsomely mastered.
The phone rang and he answered it.
The three other men, Sadler, Rikhardsson, and Zellner, all waited, stilled in anticipation.
“Are you sure? The photographs were clear?” Portier listened. Quietly he put down the phone.
“Well?” Sadler asked.
“Our photos sent back from our body cams were crystal clear. The key which Maguire presented us is real.” Portier again swallowed an unaccustomed rage. “The first line only, however. The rest is gibberish.”
“Jesus Christ,” Zellner burst out.
Portier wasted no time. “Maguire most definitely has the key to the diary. But what he showed us on the airplane was not THE key. It was a dupe meant to fool us into the action we’ve just taken. To see if he has it. To confirm it, then to pay him for the real one.”
Zellner ran his hand down his face.
“Let’s just get him to talk. Waterboard him. What are we wasting time for?” Rikhardsson demanded.
“No,” Sadler interjected. “We bring him in with force and the letters go out. Then the game is lost.”
“I have others on this.” Portier ended it there. “Let’s see what they can find.”
“Of course.” Rikhardsson fell into silence, unusual for him to be mute and impotent.
Sadler checked his phone. His private plane was waiting in Zurich. Until that bomb was found, he planned on spending as much time safely in the US as possible.
“We can always pay him,” Zellner muttered.
“Yes. Perhaps we will have to retrieve it that way. Nothing must be ruled out,” Portier said.
“Nothing?” Sadler asked, more derision in his voice than he meant to reveal.
Portier stared at him, and thought of those blood tests waiting for him back on his desk, and Sadler’s long trip back to his compound in Potomac, Maryland. “No. Nothing,” he added, realizing for the first time what a virtue patience really was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE MESSAGE HAD come via a numbers station off Wrangel Island between the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas. Numbers stations were uber old school, but still useful. It was hard to pin an espionage charge on someone who possessed nothing more sophisticated than an AM radio. iPhones and computers could be hacked, their IP addresses known. But numbers stations broadcasted a series of codes only one person in the world could decipher. In the black world of spying, there was technology that could get you killed, and then some that couldn’t. Numbers stations were like an old friend. A lonesome broadcasting tower sending random messages out into the ether. They were inefficient, but absolutely foolproof, and it was still the go-to practice when someone was in deep and needed to be in the loop. They carried ironclad deniability.
James Duffy, head of Nuclear Terrorism of NATO, looked down at the message that had just come in from his best agent.
Likely gun-type. Likely unstable. P has own plans.
A gun-type nuclear bomb was what was used in Hiroshima. It was inefficient and had long since been phased out for any military use in favor of implosion technology. The gun-type was counterintuitive to the layman because, instead of shooting a “bullet” of uranium into a uranium mass to cause the chain reaction, its explosives shot a larger hollow mass of uranium onto a smaller spike to create the effect. But it was simple, which was why it was most feared. A gun-type was the one kind of nuclear bomb that could be crudely fabricated by Daesh organizations like the Black Plague.
Thank God those organizations were fractured and unprofessional in the extreme, he thought. Their random attacks were horrific, but nothing like the numbers of casualties possible in a nuclear attack. Even a dirty bomb, though psychologically damaging, would leave behind cities to clean up and survive.
But an actual chain-reaction nuclear bomb? Unthinkable.
P has own plans.
That sentence made his breath catch. P stood for Luc Portier of Tarnhelm. Figuring there could be a portable nuclear device out there that Tarnhelm could market made Duffy’s stomach drop. Tarnhelm had self-preservation, but no conscience. If they had
a bomb, they’d sell it anywhere they were not. Which left a lot of territory for ISIL or the Black Plague or whoever had the funds to set one off.
Duffy sent out his own message. It would be relayed to the numbers station and would require his agent to listen to it at the mutually known time.
Neutralize situation all costs.
He rose from his desk and grabbed his raincoat. It was always raining in Brussels, he thought, hating the weather that blew in from the North Atlantic. The arm of NATO he headed had been stationed ironically right next to the airport in Zaventem, where the 2016 bombing occurred.
Now there was worse to come.
He shrugged into the Burberry and thought about putting more TWR agents in Zurich. TWR was the unofficial anti-terrorism arm of NATO, buried deep and unknown to even the participating countries that were not the top three. Among other things, the initials stood for There Was Resistance. The name was to honor those gone before. It also signified ongoing struggles, of which there were many in this world. TWR existed because of the undisputed fact that soon the world’s terrorist organizations were going to be in possession of a nuclear device. Whether it was a dirty bomb that spewed radioactive material with the blast, or a true nuclear device that created a chain reaction explosion, no one yet knew. But it was coming as surely as there would be resistance. And TWR would be there to provide resistance, if no one else could.
Duffy snatched his umbrella and cursed the foul weather again. The world was already at war with money, arms, and aggression. Did they have to fight the weather, too? From the cold rain pelting his window’s view of the cars on the E40, he figured the answer was yes.
Stag lay in a teak lounge chair beneath the thatch roof of his over-water villa. The sky was cloudless, the water a perfectly clear turquoise. It was jarring reading about wartime Berlin with such a vista. Still, he forged on. He’d spent all morning and most of the afternoon in Kuta, walking through alleys of addicts who were on shabu-shabu or pills of meth and caffeine called ya ba. Even the street children were high. Glue was cheaper than food. And the manufacturers refused to add the negligible expense of oil of mustard because it “reduced sales.”