The Cariboo
May 28, Now
“But can I trust you?” Bill Hawke, Jr., asked.
“You don’t have a choice,” said DeClercq. “I swore a declaration under the Security of Information Act. It’s in your pocket. And you have my word. I’ll keep my word if you don’t try to lie to me. But be warned. When I came out of retirement to head up Special X, I was hard at work writing a history of the Second World War. And if there’s one thing a Mountie knows, it’s the smell of horseshit. So what’s your Nazi secret?”
“Overcast,” said Bill. “What does that mean to you?”
“It’s the operation in which the Pentagon spirited Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun from the ruins of the Third Reich to America at the close of the war.”
“Basically, we fucked the Russians.”
“That you did,” said DeClercq.
“But we had to do it under restrictive rules. Bleeding hearts in the White House and Congress tried to tie our hands.”
“That didn’t stop you.”
“We did what we had to do. The American eagle rules the world’s skies thanks to its beak and talons.”
To DeClercq’s way of thinking, warlords like Bill Hawke were to blame for the dirtiest cover-up in U.S. history. Hundreds of thousands of American patriots had died making a heroic stand against the tyranny of the Swastika. Before they were even cold in their graves, however, the Pentagon had hatched a plan to absorb Nazi scientists into military think-tanks in the United States. Von Braun flew to America in September 1945. Shortly thereafter, he was joined by the rocketeers on the list that he himself had drawn up at the time of his surrender.
Prisoners of peace.
That’s what they’d called themselves.
But it wasn’t the idea of using Nazi scientists to advance the development of U.S. missiles that disgusted DeClercq. It was the deception used to con the post-war world, paid for in the blood of honest men who had fought for truth and democracy. Many a time, he had made his own pacts with the devil—plea bargaining with criminals, for example, to catch more vicious predators—but in every case, the deal he’d made was scrutinized by those he served.
DeClercq abhorred liars.
Lying spread like cancer.
The cancer had begun in 1946. The Pentagon had yearned to recruit more former Nazis for the Cold War arms race that was just beginning. But U.S. immigration laws barred entry by former Nazi Party officials, so President Truman expanded Operation Overcast into Project Paperclip, a top-secret mission to bring in Nazis who were supposedly untainted by war crimes.
In April 1946, von Braun’s group test-fired their first reconstructed V-2 at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Once they had their Nazi wonder weapon, the Arlington warlords had no intention of laying it down, so they authorized Bill Hawke, Sr., and his cleaning crew to rid the immigration files of Hitler’s rocketeers of anything that might rile the sensibilities of Americans who truly believed in truth.
Red-lining, the Pentagon called it.
There was so much to red-line out of the Nazi rocketeers’ files. It was von Braun’s team—not Himmler’s SS—that had thought to use concentration camp labor to produce the V-2 at Peenemünde. Arthur Rudolph, the production manager, was the master of those slave workers. That’s how the V-2 group linked up with Ernst Streicher, the engineer behind Hitler’s final solution and the architect of twenty thousand slave deaths at Dora-Mittelbau.
With the switch to the underground factory in the tunnels north of Nordhausen, Rudolph became production director. Though based at Peenemünde, still the site for rocket testing, von Braun was a force at the Mittelwerk. There, at a crucial meeting in May 1944, he and Rudolph decided to enslave eighteen hundred more skilled French POWs to bolster the workforce. To accomplish that, von Braun went to Buchenwald and spoke to the commandant. All the while, Rudolph was passing on sabotage reports to Streicher’s SS. That was the problem confronting Hawke and his red-line spooks. Instead of taking orders, many of their not-so-nominal Nazi golden boys had been issuing them.
In the rewritten version of history, lies trumped the truth. The use of slave labor had been forced on “our Nazis” by Himmler’s SS. Von Braun’s arrest in March 1944 was a blessing. Hawke spun the real reason—Himmler’s desire to take control of von Braun’s V-2—into an anti-Nazi mythology about apolitical space enthusiasts who were forced to develop weaponry at the expense of their dreams of interstellar flight.
But a threat to that myth presented itself in 1947. The war crimes trial of those who’d headed up the rocket works at Dora-Mittelbau took place at Dachau. To protect the lies that ring-fenced his sanitized Nazis, Hawke rebuffed the prosecutors’ request to have von Braun appear as a witness. And when those prosecutors went hunting for Georg Rickhey, the general director at the Mittelwerk, they found he was doing research on underground factories for the U.S. Air Force at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Most of the men on trial went free.
Expediency over principle.
The unexpected explosion of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb in 1949 sent shock waves rattling through the Pentagon. The following year, von Braun and his rocketeers were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, to develop nuclear-tipped missiles to counter the Red threat. Anti-Communist sentiment slapped the last coat of whitewash onto the post-war conspiracy, and the truth about the Mittelwerk vanished into the black hole of the black world.
So impenetrable was the cover-up that by 1955, DeClercq—then a boy in a coonskin cap like Davy Crockett wore on the new medium of TV—could watch Wernher von Braun, his handsome face above the slide rule in his pocket, on a trio of popular Walt Disney shows: “Man in Space,” “Man and the Moon,” and later, “Mars and Beyond.” That same year saw the opening of Disneyland. There, DeClercq had tilted his head back in Tomorrowland to take in the sleek metal skin of the Moonliner, a needle-nosed rocket that soared higher than Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Designed for Disney by von Braun, that rocket was touted as the future of America’s space program.
That’s about as squeaky clean as you can get.
“Pearl Harbor of the Stars!” and “Red Conquest!” blared headlines across America on the morning of October 5, 1957. The Russian satellite Sputnik, developed from the V-2s left behind in East Germany, was orbiting the globe. When the Pentagon freaked and tried to launch its own Vanguard rocket, it exploded on takeoff and was christened “Stay-putnik” by the press. So von Braun got the go-ahead to give it a try, and on January 31, 1958, his Jupiter-C rocket—really a modified V-2—blasted off from Florida to put Explorer 1 in space.
By 1960, von Braun was the head of NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, a civilian agency that usurped the Pentagon’s role in the space race. With Arthur Rudolph as the project director, the whitewashed Nazi rocketeers helped create the mighty Saturn 5 booster, which put Americans on the moon in 1969. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
In the realm of science, von Braun was a genius. Every rocket that first shot into space off American and Russian launching pads had its origin in his brain. America loves its heroes—no matter what the truth behind the myth—and von Braun had become an American citizen in 1955.
Life
magazine crowned him one of the one hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century, and the Daughters of the American Revolution bestowed on him their Americanism Medal. Lionized, glorified, and showered with honors, SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun died of stomach cancer in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977.
Rudolph wasn’t as lucky.
His past caught up with him.
Between 1946 and the 1960s, the story of the underground rocket factory was written out of history. The Cold War and the arms race made sure of that. In the 1960s, the East Germans tried to blow the whistle on von Braun’s membership in the SS and his links to Dora-Mittelbau, but the American media wouldn’t touch that exposé with a ten-foot pole. By then, von Braun was an American god. That’s why they say you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. The Pentagon wanted to fool all of the people all of the time.
The first memoir by a Dora survivor was published in English in 1979, two years after the death of von Braun. Congress had just created a new Nazi-hunting agency, the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI. Rudolph was persuaded to renounce his U.S. citizenship and flee to Germany, in lieu of standing trial for war crimes at the Mittelwerk.
It was that background that had brought DeClercq and Bill Hawke, Jr., to this interview room, where they sat staring each other down with the tape recorder turned off, because official secrets don’t exist. If von Braun represented the depths to which Pentagon patriots would sink to hide un-Americanisms in the white world, how far, DeClercq wondered, would the spooks of the black world go to bury their own dirtiest secrets?
On the table between them lay the pair of blueprints from the bench in the Skunk Mine.
“Roswell,” said the Mountie. “Tell me the truth.”
* * *
“Do you know what a torsion field is?”
“No,” replied DeClercq.
Bill explained the quantum mechanics of zero-point energy. Space isn’t a vacuum; it’s a quantum foam, with nanoparticles popping in and out of existence billions of times a second on every conceivable frequency and in every possible direction. Those fluctuations generate a field of zero-point energy. “At the end of the Second World War,” Bill informed the Mountie, “the Nazis were hard at work on an electromagnetic device designed to tap into ZPE.”
He rapped the blueprint of
die Glocke.
“The Nazis called it the Bell.”
“Where did they build it?” asked DeClercq.
“In the Wenceslas Mine. In the Sudeten Mountains of what is now Poland but then was Nazi Germany.”
“How did the Bell work?”
“As you can see in the blueprint, it’s in the shape of a disk. That’s because anything that spins can create a torsion field. Vortexes—energy spirals—are what nature uses to funnel energy. Inside the Bell were two cylinders that spun in opposite directions. By whirling them at twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand rpm, the Nazis created an electromagnetic device that tapped into, drew energy from, and altered ZPE.”
“How did a spinning superconductor do that?”
“Spin polarization.”
“Draw me a simpler picture,” said DeClercq.
“Imagine a mixing bowl full of zero-point energy. Now imagine a whirling blender dipping into the contents of the bowl. The Bell was a Mixmaster that spun to generate a whirlpool of electromagnetism—a torsion field, in other words. And when Nazi scientists dipped the energy spiral of their man-made vortex into the mixing bowl of quantum foam, the ZPE reacted, meshed, or aligned with the Bell in such a way that it produced magical effects.”
“What sort of magic?”
“Basically, they were experimenting with the hidden properties of space-time. If you generate a torsion field of sufficient force, it’s possible to bend the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time around the generator.”
“The Bell was a time machine?”
“That became Hitler’s obsession during his last days in the Berlin bunker. He sank into madness before he put a bullet in his brain. Time, like gravity, is a variable of hyperspace. Hyperspace is best visualized as a fifth dimension where the binding mechanisms of the universe do their work. The Nazis knew that quantum particle fluctuations slow down when they are affected by a torsion field. If the Bell was able to slow time
within
its vortex to a thousandth of the speed at which time was advancing
outside
its influence, Hitler thought he would be able to save himself by switching bunkers to the Wenceslas Mine and living down there for a year. When he stepped out of his time machine twelve months later, he would see the apex of his thousand-year Reich.”
“How?” asked DeClercq. “A time machine can transport you to the future, but it can’t actually
change
the future. Why wouldn’t Hitler find himself in the Germany of 2945—a Germany that still would have lost the Second World War?”
Hawke shrugged. “Because that’s not what his horoscope foretold. He expected a miracle, like what happened with Frederick the Great.”
“Megalomania.”
“The guy was nuts,” said Hawke. “But with reason. The science is sound.”
“Gravity,” probed DeClercq. “Where does that fit in?”
“You caught that, huh?”
“It wasn’t hard,” said the Horseman, tapping the
Flugkreisel
blueprint on the table in front of him. “It’s staring us in the face.”
“Gravity, like time,” said Hawke, “is a variable of hyperspace. The Holy Grail of aeronautics is, and always has been, an
anti
-gravity device. Every aircraft in the skies today, from supersonic jets to the space shuttle, is the same as the Wright brothers’ biplane. All are powered gliders.
“But imagine if we could develop a craft that sucked—instead of pushed—its way through what’s up there. A device that not only negated the force of gravity, but also canceled out the sluggishness of inertia, an object’s innate resistance to acceleration. Such an aircraft would in effect have
negative
weight. And without inertia providing resistance, it would continue to gather speed all the way up to the speed of light. No more jet engines, rocket blasts, or nuclear power. No more propellant fuel of any kind. We’d be flying a machine that drew its power from the pulse of the universe, the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design. It would be the biggest transportation breakthrough since invention of the wheel!”
Having made up his mind to come clean with DeClercq—national security depended on this, and so did the black legacy of Hardware and son—Hawke was manic in his enthusiasm. He had the look of a zealot in his eyes. DeClercq had a question he was itching to pose, but now wasn’t the time to risk turning off the verbal tap.