The Methuselah Project (15 page)

Evidently surprised by the offer, Werner uncrossed his arms and coughed. “
Nein
, Herr Doktor. You should continue. This is your laboratory.”

Kossler sighed. “A solution had to be found. The Führer decided it was time to take drastic measures.”

Roger felt his impatience reaching the boiling point. He rattled the barred door of his cell. “Come on, Kossler! Quit dragging it out, will you? This is torture. Just tell me what they’re doing, for Pete’s sake.”

Kossler repeated his sigh. “Farming, Captain Greene. The Führer issued orders to begin planting seeds on behalf of the Third Reich.”

“Farming?” What in blazes was that supposed to mean?

“It’s quite simple, really. The procedure first began in France, but is now common practice in all occupied territories. Our military units surround a town, and all females from age thirteen through forty are herded into a, shall we say, processing center. Soldiers then line up to receive female carriers and then impregnate them with Aryan seed. The troops then proceed to the next occupied town or village and repeat the process.

“A year later, mobile medical units return to collect the abundant harvest. Even as we speak, millions of children are growing up in National Socialist orphanages. Instead of attending traditional schools, they receive political indoctrination and begin training for the military. Even the females. I should think the oldest children must be about nine already, so they will soon be bearing arms for the Fatherland. Quite a rich boon to the military.”

If Roger had felt like vomiting before, the gut feeling resurged stronger than ever. He backed away in revulsion. “That’s the sickest, most disgusting, most demented thing I’ve ever heard! Only perverted Nazi minds could reduce innocent little girls to breeding stock. And then, treating their offspring like nothing more than brainless little puppets to throw into battle …”

Kossler shrugged. “For what it is worth, Captain, I agree. But what can I do? I’m just one tiny grain of sand on a vast seashore. Ironically only you and the secret inside your body give my own existence any meaning right now.”

Roger placed a hand over his stomach to quell the nausea. “Sorry I asked.”

Kossler half-turned and closed the notebook on his desk. “As long as you’ve interrupted me, I believe I’ll halt for lunch. What can I bring you, Captain Greene?”

“Nothing. I lost my appetite.”

“As you wish. Will you me join me, Werner?”

“
Ja
,” the assistant replied, slipping back into their native tongue.

Together the two white-coated scientists passed through the massive metal exit. As soon as it clanged shut behind them, Werner reached for Kossler’s forearm to stop him.

“Herr Doktor, why in heaven’s name did you fabricate such a complicated fairytale for Greene? Why not just tell him Hitler committed suicide years ago and that the war is over? And that twisted description of the children in the
Lebensborn
program. What purpose could you have for such a ridiculous farce?”

Kossler grinned as they mounted the steps. “The main reason is to keep the prisoner happy. He’s been here a long while, Werner, and unless you and I stumble upon an unexpected breakthrough, he’s likely to remain in that cell for a very long time to come.”

“You believe all of your convoluted nonsense made the prisoner
happy?
Didn’t you see his face?”

“Psychology, Werner. Think long term. At this moment, no, Captain Greene isn’t pleased at all. But by believing the Axis powers and the Allies are still at war, he has hope. Now he can ponder the wonders of American industrial ingenuity and hope his countrymen will develop new, long-range weapons to defeat the Nazis someday. Not anytime soon, though. No. To wage actual war across the Atlantic with the technology he remembers from 1943 would take much time. Possibly decades.”

“And if you were to tell him the war ended within two years of his capture?”

“Despondency. Complete, utter depression. What a crushing weight such knowledge would be on a man who has been imprisoned for nearly a decade—and with no end to captivity in sight. In normal prisons, criminals receive a specific release date, something to which they look forward. Not so with the good captain. As long as he believes battles are raging somewhere, anywhere, he has an understandable reason for remaining behind bars.

“At best, knowing he’s been held prisoner during peacetime would make him angry, aggressive, and dangerously violent. At worst, he might take his own life just to end his pitiful existence and to thwart our efforts. We can’t allow either to happen.”

Werner rubbed his chin. “We definitely need him alive. He’s our only source for blood and tissue samples.”

At the top of the steps, Werner pushed open the camouflage cover to the main level and allowed his superior to exit first. “Now we draw close to a question I’ve wondered about, but no one ever mentions. What if we are successful, Herr Doktor? What happens if we duplicate the original process by which Greene’s aging process was suspended? Will you simply tell him the whole history you concocted was a web of lies to keep him docile? Will you show him the door and say, ‘Good luck, Greene. Have a nice life’?”

Kossler burst into laughter. Once Werner had stepped clear, he swung shut the bookcase that concealed the bunker entrance. “
Nein, nein.
Of course not. That would be ludicrous. Inconceivable.”

“Then what will be done with Greene if we succeed?”

Kossler clasped his hands together into a single fist, as if success were already assured. “When we reach such a time, my dear Werner, Captain Greene will finally become expendable. He may safely be eliminated.”

S
UNDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
22, 1968

T
HE
K
OSSLER ESTATE
, G
ERMANY

R
oger allowed his eyes to remain closed. He didn’t need to see the dusty mantel clock that perpetually ticked off the hours from its shelf behind Kossler’s desk. During his twenty-five years of confinement, some inner timepiece had engaged, waking Roger at precisely six o’clock each morning. Ever since his first day in the underground bunker, he’d disciplined himself to perform morning calisthenics while waiting for breakfast. Lately, however, dredging enough willpower simply to rise from bed was becoming a struggle. He rolled onto his stomach and buried his bearded face in the pillow.
What a stinking, lousy, rotten, downright worthless way to spend a life.
He pounded a fist into the mattress.

Over the course of recent months, Roger’s mood had drooped deeper into depression. Whenever Kossler shared a tidbit concerning the war, Roger’s spirits would rise if Kossler’s news reported the American forces had achieved some victory, however slight. But when it became obvious he was still far from liberation, the leaden shroud of gloom would descend to smother him once more. The pilot who yearned for the heavens was inexorably suffocating beneath the concrete sky of his dungeon. For years his practice of “being free in his mind” had provided a release valve, a way to keep a grip on sanity by mentally revisiting every house, store, park, airport, and hangar he’d ever been inside. Yet even that strategy was wearing thinner than the threadbare Persian rug in his cell.

I’d give a million bucks for five minutes in a P-47. Even a crop duster. Just five minutes to soar above the clouds. To see the sky and feel real sunshine, not just a sunlamp under a concrete ceiling!

In response to Roger’s pleas, Kossler had cut photographs of sunsets, clouds, forests, rainbows, and even pictures of pretty girls from old magazines and allowed the prisoner to paste them onto the wall of his cell. Yet paper-and-ink images of the outside world were cheap, two-dimensional counterfeits. The sunlamp prevented Roger from rivaling the linen sheets for paleness, but it could never simulate the beauty of dawn, nor the reds, pinks, oranges, and purples of a glorious sunset.

Greene, you’re going to go stark raving mad if you don’t get out of here. Somehow or other, even if the guards gun you down, it would be worth seeing the sky one last time.

Kossler’s aging face materialized in his mind. Over time, he’d noticed how Otto Kossler had developed crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, wrinkles about the mouth. The doctor’s hair had gradually thinned as it developed gray streaks. Although Werner Neumann was just a few years older than Roger, his receding hairline and bags under his eyes evidenced time taking its toll on him, as well.

Not so with Roger. Each time he used the bathroom, he studied his face. Yeah, at first he’d dismissed all of Kossler’s talk about him being a “Methuselah man” as a bunch of bunk. But his reflection never showed the slightest sign of a wrinkle, not a single strand of gray. To his own eyes, he looked exactly as he had the day he’d crash-landed.

Almost like being in limbo. As if time in the outside world flows past without realizing I’m here, hidden deep underground.

Roger hadn’t lost any physical stamina, either. Since his main pastimes had become reading, daydreaming, and exercising, he had become more fit now than in freedom. He could crank out a hundred pushups without breaking a sweat, run in place for an hour without becoming winded. Fifty chin-ups on the water pipe that ran through the top of his cell? No problem.

He scowled. “What point is there in physical fitness when you’re cooped up like an animal?”

Once or twice a year, some sort of officials visited the laboratory-bunker to speak with Kossler and to eyeball the prisoner personally. Early on, such visitors had worn uniforms emblazoned with the lightning-bolt SS on their collar. For a long while, however, Kossler’s visitors had been showing up wearing civilian suits and ties even though they conducted themselves with military bearing.

On these occasions, Kossler would typically retrieve black-and-white photographs of the prisoner from a file cabinet and point out how his facial features had remained virtually unchanged since December 1943.

“You do not dye his hair? You have not performed cosmetic surgery?” some guests questioned in their native German.

Although Roger refused to speak to the visiting bigwigs, he now comprehended every German syllable. Kossler realized this, of course, and reminded his guests not to mention certain subjects in the American’s presence, particularly topics concerning the outside world.

Various visitors had reappeared multiple times over the decades. Roger reviewed their faces in his mind in case he should ever need to identify them after the war. Each time they had seemed duly impressed with Roger’s youthful complexion. Inevitably these officials—whoever they were—would shake Kossler’s hand and promise him their utmost support in his “vital scientific endeavor.”

I’m sick of it. Of this whole futile existence.
Wouldn’t he be better off dead than living a pointless, artificially prolonged life with zero purpose for him or his country?

Who knows? Maybe my best duty for the United States would be to file my spoon to a sharp edge and slit my wrists. If samples of my hair and blood ever do help Hitler to extend Nazi life spans, I could be considered a traitor for letting them use me.

Somehow, though, he could never summon the willpower to end his life. In part, he was unconvinced that Kossler would succeed in replicating Blomberg’s technique, which would make suicide the crowning irony of a futile existence. In addition, Roger clung to hope. If he could just hold on to his sanity one day at a time, perhaps some morning, some year, he might walk out of this scientific dungeon a free man once again. Sooner or later, American forces and the side of justice must crush Hitler and everything the lunatic was trying to accomplish. Mustn’t they?

He grunted at the scheme of slashing his wrists.
It might not even work. The skin and veins might heal too fast. To really knock myself off might take something with more oomph, like a grenade or a bayonet through the heart.

Even though he never attempted the act, the knowledge that he could try to end his life whenever he wished provided glum comfort. The Huns were holding most of the cards, but he had one ace tucked up his sleeve. If he decided to play it.