By luck and family background, fate had given him the means to fulfill his Nazi fantasies.
Revenge against the Russians was the be-all and end-all of the Aryan’s existence. With growing anticipation, he had watched America shift toward the political right. To his mind, the war in Iraq was simply a war of revenge. America had far deadlier enemies in the nuclear states of North Korea and Iran than it did in the tinpot dictatorship of Iraq. With all its satellites and state-of-the-art spy technology, America must certainly have known that there were no weapons of mass destruction moving around that landscape of flat, visible sand. No, that war was perpetrated to fix the mistake of not having crushed Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and to wipe the smirk off that nose-thumbing
Untermensch
’s face.
Give America the means to disarm the Russians, and to exact revenge for Soviet anti-Americanism throughout the Cold War, and the hawks in the Pentagon today would pull the payback trigger in an instant.
It was to further his
own
desire for Götterdämmerung for Russia that the Aryan had sent the Pentagon a peek at the Streicherstab blueprints, with an offer to forward the mother lode in exchange for a billion dollars.
A billion dollars was a drop in the bucket to Uncle Sam, while no amount of money, no matter how big the pile, could ever compensate the Aryan for the post-war hell that he and his family had endured at the hands of a Soviet colonel.
All because of the line between.
But instead of welcoming him with open arms, what had been the Pentagon’s response?
They had tried to kill him!
He figured the hit men had traced him through Switzerland. He had used a dummy address to forward his extortion demand to U.S. authorities—a subterfuge that had worked so well for Fritz Streicher, the post-war paymaster, when he needed to contact Third Reich refugees—but the Pentagon must have leaned on the Swiss postmaster to find out the source of the package. When that was exposed as a post office in central British Columbia, someone must have linked the location to the 1947 Skunk Mine explosion.
Or had he been betrayed?
Only one person knew his Nazi secret.
* * *
The Aryan’s trips to Vancouver to find stand-ins for the psychodramas he acted out in the mine always involved the same ritual. First, he dropped off the soap-makings at the rendering plant. It thrilled him to think of all those pampered human pigs rubbing their porcine bodies with luxury soap made from
Untermenschen
fat. Then he passed a day or two at Fritz’s mansion, sleeping in the living quarters of the coach house and sneaking into Hitler’s bunker to fantasize about what it must have been like to be the spoiled
Über
-child of Fritz Streicher and his bleach-blonde wife. And finally, he would set out on another hunt for a boy’s town youth to pigstick back at the Skunk Mine, for that gave him his only temporary release from the horrors of his past in East Germany.
But no more.
Pentagon hit men would return to the mine to finish the job, so he knew he could never go back to the Phantom Valley Ranch. That’s why he had left the spooks a surprise up there, and why he had dropped off soap-makings harvested from one of the gunmen at the rendering plant earlier today. If the Americans were tailing him, he wanted them to know that one of their own had been converted into bars of human soap. That’s why he had talked up his link to the ranch at the reduction works.
This time, instead of coming to town to hunt for another victim, he had brought a victim down with him. The pigstuck hit man was stored in the tool box behind the cab. Might as well let the Pentagon think that he had a hostage squealing all their secrets—and use the body to confront his betrayer, if this was a turncoat’s game.
To make sure no one tracked the truck to the coach house—the last thing he needed was to have the ranch connected to the mansion—he had switched the license plate, then parked the vehicle at a beach where gardeners were pruning the trees. Having watched the lot for hours from woods bordering the shore, he felt it was safe to drive the truck up to the top of the bluff and—shrouded by this misty drizzle—along the shadowed driveway to the coach house garage, where he now alighted from the cab.
With a box and a book under one arm, the psycho crossed directly to the entrance to the subterranean tunnel. Swinging wide on oiled hinges, the door opened into a dank passage. He followed a flashlight beam into the heart of University Hill, his footsteps echoing as he walked, until he reached a steel door with a punch-coded lock. In went the code, and in went the Aryan.
A flick of the wall switch and Hitler’s bunker was flooded with murky light. Ahead of him ran what would have been the conference passage. The entrance to this bunker was by the door that had led up to the chancellery garden where the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were burned and buried. The first door to the right ushered the Aryan into the map room where the two had married.
He almost tripped over the bison head on the floor.
Another switch flicked and the map room jumped to life. Standing over the table, he took in its arrangement, then he sat down on the chair and shuffled items around. Along the far edge of the cluttered surface, he placed the oblong box that he had brought down from the mine; sheathed within was the bloody sword of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher. On top of that he piled the box that was already on the table, the case storing the general’s companion dagger, which had remained here at the UBC mansion.
In front of that, he displayed the two tattoos: the one he himself had skinned from Fritz Streicher’s heart and tanned into a circle, and the one from the skin of Hans Streicher that had bound his copy of
Mein Kampf.
The outline of the castle in Fritz’s tattoo had, after a little pictorial research about German medieval strongholds, lured him to Castle Werewolf, where the cross above the mantel in Hans’s tattoo had taken him to the hiding place.
Having read the newspaper clippings and the story of the Minotaur in the UBC book, the Aryan studied the layout of the labyrinth, just a mile or so from here.
Then he went out to the truck to drag in the corpse.
* * *
“The good Nazi,” Dane said, “is the general consciousness of our killer’s split identities. He’s no different from the millions of German civilians who embraced the Nazi Party before and during the war, but didn’t know about Nazi atrocities and weren’t involved in the killings. The evil Nazi is the half who embodies all of that, and he’s involved in his own ‘final solution’ vendetta using ‘subhuman’ stand-ins for the one responsible for his early sexual abuse. And that was all kept secret while the Stealth Killer preyed in boy’s town for far too many years.”
“So where do I come in?” Cort asked.
“It wasn’t just you. It was Special X too. But the threat began with the series of
Times
articles that you and Bess McQueen did on ‘disposable people.’ Bess’s piece on the boy’s town disappearances, especially, threatened to bring to light the Stealth Killer’s crimes.”
“Blame Bess,” said the reporter.
“Not so fast,” Dane countered. “Threatening the Stealth Killer also threatens the good Nazi, for even though they see themselves as separate people, they share the same haunt—the home where they live—when they do their switch. So if the Stealth Killer, the evil Nazi, screwed things up and led the cops to their door, he would also expose the secrets of the good Nazi.”
“Like Siamese twins,” said Cort.
“Right. They’re subconsciously joined. So it was self-preservation that turned the good Nazi into a killer as well. To distract attention from the missing boys, he killed someone who deserved to die in a spectacular fashion.”
“The Congo Man.”
“Which gave
you
a story.”
“So why did he carve the swastika?”
“To repatriate the Nazi symbol. He’s the good Nazi. The other guy is the evil Nazi. And if he needed reinforcement in that twisted thinking, he got it in spades when you wrote up his crime as a vigilante killing on a par with a Greek myth.”
“You’re saying that’s why he killed again?”
“No,” replied Dane. “By then, we had told the
Times
that Special X was after the Stealth Killer too. The good Nazi had ample motive to keep us looking his way. Through murder, his fate was in his own hands, and not the other Nazi’s. And when you and the
Times
kept writing him up as a Greek hero, ridding the earth of monsters who prey on innocent people, that meshed with his view of himself as an Aryan superman.”
“Why would both identities reintegrate now?”
“Because that’s what dissociated multiples do when they have no further need for the split-off identity. In psychological therapy, that’s the goal. Here, the good Nazi has become a killer too, so if the Swastika Killer can take over victimizing the stand-ins for whoever sexually abused him as a boy, what further need is there for the split-off evil Nazi?”
“It fits,” said Jackie, by way of punctuation.
Cort held out his wrists for handcuffs. “Does that mean I’m off to jail as a journalistic abettor?”
“No,” said Dane. “You’re embedded with us. Just like reporters on a modern battlefront.”
“Why?”
“Because that was our deal, and I like to keep my word. And when I ran it past the brass, they agreed. Find the Stealth Killer and—if my theory proves true—we’ll find the Swastika Killer as well. Still, there might be hostages from the boy’s town abductions. And if the evil Nazi is integrating into the good Nazi, you’re the one he’ll trust for hostage negotiations.”
“Another myth,” Jackie said as she parked the car in the lot of the RCMP runway.
“How so?” the reporter asked.
“You’re our Trojan Horse.”
* * *
Air Services had several aircraft warmed up on the Tarmac. The PC12 Pilatus, which would hold eight assault cops with their duffle bags of gear. A Twin Otter. A Eurocopter. And a LongRanger. Air Services had mount-ups like this one down to a science. Each ERT cop had been weighed with his weapons to “weight and balance” the aircraft. Before he let a passenger board his bird, each pilot asked, “Have you got your minimum specs?” to make sure that his part of the air cavalry “stayed within its envelope.”
Cort buckled in with a grin plastered on his face. If the gods were smiling, he would have the byline of the year. Not only would the cops take down his killer—the Swastika Killer—at the Cariboo ranch tonight, but in doing that, they would also take down Bess McQueen’s killer—the Stealth Killer—and he would royally scoop the queen bitch.
The plane took off.
* * *
As the Aryan dragged the dead weight of the Pentagon killer into Hitler’s bunker, the RCMP planes and helicopters droned northeast toward the Cariboo ranch, their engine noise muffled by the buffer of earth. Dropping the body onto the floor in front of the trio of waxworks that represented the ideal Aryan family, the East German returned to the map room for the hollowed-out bison head and the sail-sewing kit in the tool box beside it. Then he came back and knelt down by the corpse.
While the vacant eyes of the wax figures watched him work—the man in Hitler’s uniform, the woman in Eva’s black dress, the boy in his Hitlerjugend clothes—the Aryan fitted the Mounties’ bison head over the dead spook. With a big sail needle and threads of black cord, he began to sew the mutant monster together to mimic the myth of the Minotaur, half bull and half man.
The Cariboo
May 28, Now
With the gunning down of Mr. Clean in Sergeant Winter’s condo, the shit had hit the fan for the white world of the Pentagon. Fingerprints and photographs taken from and of the corpse—along with images of the high-tech gadgets seized by the cops—were being circulated among U.S. authorities by RCMP investigators hoping to identify the gunman on the floor. Uncle Sam’s black world rested upon plausible deniability, and now not only was Big Bad Bill’s Weird Shit Division being exposed to prying minds outside and inside the Pentagon, but there was a possibility—a
probability,
maybe—that Bill had fumbled the ball on the two blackest secrets of the Second World War.
Bill’s main concern, however, wasn’t Mr. Clean. It was the silence from Ajax and Lysol up at the Skunk Mine. “Bill, we found a saber box labeled ‘SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher,’” Ajax had phoned in. “There’s static in the mine. I’ll report once we’re out.” And since then, nothing.
Slowly, Bill had started to put the pieces together. The Pentagon had received a demand from Switzerland for one billion dollars in exchange for the secret of zero-point energy. The note was clipped to a sheaf of random photocopies that the extortionist claimed were notes and blueprints from a Nazi think-tank that General Patton’s Third Army had failed to find in Czechoslovakia. The true mailing address behind the Swiss front was in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, where the Weird Shit Division had covered up the Phantom Valley mine explosion of 1947. In that same valley, a Nazi punk was now raising pigs out front of the abandoned mine where Ajax had found Streicher’s sword.
Conclusion: That Nazi had the mother lode of Streicherstab papers, and the only way to seize them if Ajax and Lysol were dead was to send in a strike force.
Like Bill had done when the Stealth fighter crashed in 1986.
And like Hardware had done in 1947, when alien monsters had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico.
* * *
If you want a job done right, do it yourself.
That’s why Bill had scrambled a jet from Arlington up to Alaska, where he was met by a surgical strike team and a chopper with the authorization to pass through B.C. airspace in the black of night. Just your friendly hawkish neighbor flying a little hardware from state forty-nine to the lower forty-eight.
A report of mechanical problems was radioed to the Canucks as the chopper flew over the Phantom Valley Ranch, and permission to set down and check things out was granted. Bill would have preferred to have backup surveillance from his eyes in the sky, but storm clouds over the Cariboo had blinded the satellites. Still, he had stale-dated intel from Ajax and Lysol’s reconnoitering the night before, so he figured he knew the lay of the land.
“Let’s go!” Bill ordered.
The helicopter came swooping down out of the clouds like a bird of prey. It landed beside the ranch house, spraying needles of rain out as a starburst. The red team jumped down into the mud and hit the building hard, bursting in doors, front and back, to storm the Nazi’s home. Moments later, they rushed out and signed the all-clear, then sloshed past the pigpen to the mouth of the mine. With a sharp bang and a soggy flash of light, the portcullis was blown open by an explosive device. Gung ho, the Pentagon red team got swallowed into Skunk Mountain.
The pilot remained in the chopper as Bill splashed off toward the mine. The ranch was hauntingly dark. With night-vision lenses over his eyes so he could see, a communication plug in his ear so he could hear, and a pistol in his fist so he could kill, Bill lurked outside the yawning hole until he was summoned.
“Colonel, you gotta see this!”
Stepping into the tunnel, Bill recoiled from the stench. An X-shaped frame with swastika arms was the source, and upside down on it were the rotting remains of a gutted teen. Pressing on, Bill entered the ruins of what looked like a mad scientist’s lab. It had been torn asunder, as if Frankenstein’s monster had gone berserk. At a constricted hole in the facing wall, the soldier who had summoned Bill crooked his arm in a “come here” motion.
At first, Big Bad Bill didn’t recognize Ajax. All he saw was a body impaled to the concave rock by a rusted, barnacled anchor that would need three men just to lift it. One prong of the anchor was spiked through the skull, so the body hung from it like a limp rag doll. The stripped-off clothes lay jumbled on the ground amid shattered teeth and shards of bone. Like the youth on the X-shaped frame, the dangling man had been gutted, scooped out like a human canoe, the offal carried away. He’d been repeatedly branded with swastika marks, and among them Bill spotted Ajax’s military tattoo. The clothes on the floor were black world camouflage.
“Weird, huh?” the soldier said.
“Yeah,” Bill grunted.
“It would take Superman to hurl an anchor like that.”
This anchor
had
been hurled by a superman. A Nazi superman tapped into quantum mechanics. The force behind the hurling—of this, Bill had no doubt—was the Holy Grail of aerospace engineers: zero-point energy.
ZPE, thought Bill.
Germany was the place where quantum mechanics was born. Nazi physicists looked at gravity from a perspective unlike everyone else’s. They saw space as a plenum filled with energy, where particles flashed in and out of existence around their zero-point baselines. Even at the zero point of existence—a vacuum chilled to absolute zero, or -273.15°C—ZPE was present. From the atoms of our bodies to the outer limits of the cosmos, the quantum vacuum was a quantum sea full of quantum foam. Billions of fluctuations occurred every second from particles popping in and out of existence.
Zero-point energy could not be seen.
But it could be heard in the background hiss on a transistor radio.
Zero-point energy—the Nazis had grasped—was the pulse of the universe.
So what if gravity was a zero-point fluctuation force? That’s what the best brains of Nazi Germany had pondered in the two Streicherstab think-tanks in the climactic months of the Second World War. Because gravity, electromagnetism, and space-time are interrelated, could there not be an electromagnetic device that would mesh with those fluctuations in the zero-point energy field to cancel out the properties of gravity and inertia around a vehicle? In perturbing ZPE and distorting space-time, wouldn’t this device yield an anti-gravity effect, freeing the vehicle to levitate and—
zoom!
—take off?
The answer was yes.
As those Nazi scientists and the Weird Shit Division of the Pentagon knew only too well.
As did this enigmatic Nazi punk, judging from the weighty anchor that had been propelled across the lab to pin Ajax to the Skunk Mine’s rock.
So where was Lysol?
Big Bad Bill ventured deeper into the mine. He followed several trails of blood of different vintages down to a barrier blocking the shaft. Here, the rock floor was caked with pools of blood, but there were no bodies. Ahead of him, the mine had imploded, and millions of tons of rubble had crushed any secrets that were buried beyond. Bill knew the secrets behind nature’s cover-up, though, for they were the same ones that his predecessor had suppressed in the surface world.
Still, it was astounding to see the havoc wreaked by
die Glocke
as it had spun out of control, decades ago.
Zero-point energy had fractured and fused the rock into something from another dimension.
From hyperspace.
Bill retraced his steps to the subterranean lab, where he paused for a moment to assess two bloody uniforms hanging on a pair of coat stands at the entrance to the dead-end tunnel. One was the uniform of an SS storm trooper; affixed to the helmet was a miner’s headlamp. The other was the uniform of a colonel in the post-war Red Army, but there were no trousers to go with the jacket. The Russian’s helmet also included a lantern.
Role-playing? wondered Bill.
Only then did he notice the workbench in the middle of the ruined lab. It was as if a vortex of destruction had whirled around its four edges and not disturbed its surface. As he approached the bench, Bill saw why. Damn if the Nazi punk hadn’t left
him
a message.
Ringed around two sheets of paper like the circles on a bull’s-eye were the high-tech gadgets from Ajax’s kit and a jumble of unidentifiable metal objects. Somehow this weird scientist had transmuted the molecular composition of one material into that of another. An incredibly strong molybdenum rod, like those used in nuclear reactors, had been bent into an S-curve as if it was made of soft lead or tin. Bits of one metal were embedded into another. A length of steel had turned to lead at one end, as if an alchemist had been at work.
Bill’s gaze, however, was drawn to the center.
Stamped with a Nazi swastika and the ultra-secret warning of the Streicherstab were two blueprints. One depicted the circular exterior of
die Glocke.
Scrawled across that in blood were the English words “You fucked up!” The other blueprint was more alarming. On it was drawn a design for the
Flugkreisel,
its silhouette remarkably unlike that of the prototype that had crashed in New Mexico in 1947.
A single bloody word was smeared across the image.
The word was “Roswell.”
* * *
“Colonel! Something’s up!”
Bill caught the adrenaline surge in the voice of the guard stationed outside the blown-open gate to the mine. Pressing in his earplug to hear the sentry better, Bill barked into his helmet mike, “What’s going on out there?”
“Motion in the dark.”
Gotcha, punk, Bill thought as he snapped the general order. “Red team, out of the mine! Go! Go!
Go!
Our guy must have slipped away as the chopper came down.”
Single file and weapons at the ready, the strike force members dashed through the bowels of the mountain and out into the night, prepared to fan out in whatever direction the guard indicated. But no sooner had the last man exited than Bill found himself in a predicament that was going from bad to worse.
“Halt! Police! Drop your weapons!” a disembodied voice ordered from the dark.
One of the red team members spun around and opened up with an assault rifle in what he hoped was the right direction. In a flash, he was dropped by dual sniper shots. The rear of his helmet blew out as shrapnel.
“Halt! Police! You’re surrounded!”
Again, they got the yell.
And suddenly Bill and his team were caught in a pool of blinding light, about as naked as Gypsy Rose Lee in her burlesque routine. Every weapon in the blackness surrounding them had its sights lined up on one of Bill’s men.
Another soldier reacted.
Another soldier went down.
Bill’s mind kicked into overdrive to work out the permutations. It was a choice between fight, flight, or give up.
By elimination, flight was the viable option.
The pilot already had the rotors of the chopper turning. But before Bill could bark the “Get outta here!” order, something streaked across the darkness and leaped up through the open door into the cockpit. Cries of pain and the sounds of a struggle filled the wilderness quiet as the flyboy was dragged out through the far fuselage door. If Bill had bothered to study the myth of the Mounted Police, he’d have known full well that—like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his trusty mutt, King—they usually send in the dogs.
Flight was no longer an option.
Bill had more than enough guts to call for a last stand. He and his team would gladly go down swinging like the Texans at the Alamo. The only problem with going for that gold in this fucked-up situation—given the blueprints on the workbench back in the mine—was that Bill could take close to three hundred million Americans down with him.
“Don’t be a knob!” warned the voice from the darkness.
Not the most historic of battlecries, but that about summed up the
realpolitik
of Bill’s situation. So although it went against every fiber of his being, he reluctantly commanded his team to drop their weapons.
Bill was stunned by the number of shadows that emerged from the nightscape. He had way too few troops on the ground to cope with such an insurgency.
What a mess!
Within minutes, the Mounties reduced Bill’s chaos to order. From their hiding places, marksmen “covered off” the invaders with bright red laser spots. The red team members dropped to their knees, their hands high in the air. One by one, they were cuffed and searched by cops.
“Who’s in charge?” asked a mean-looking Mountie with the voice of prior commands.
“I am,” responded Bill.
Wrists secured behind his back, Bill was grabbed by Mr. Mean and his Native sidekick and hauled off to their commander.
“I’m Chief Superintendent DeClercq,” announced the cop who confronted Bill. “You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of one of my officers, terrorist offenses under the Criminal Code, and whatever we uncover in the Skunk Mine.”