Black Sun Reich (5 page)

Further, the Union States economy was still struggling with the postwar economic crisis, despite the centralization of their economic system. The same centralization had led to prosperity in the Reich, but not in the Union. The Yanks survived on foreign aid from Germany, which, Himmler conceded, did give the New Order leverage.

The frustrating aspect was the inexplicable—and surely unsustainable—growth of the Freehold's economy, now in its tenth year of expansion. That level of capital resources meant the Freehold could buy or build whatever was needed to defend their borders in short order. It could even pay for allies. Germany wasn't ready to take on multiple fronts, no matter what the Führer preached.

Himmler believed that time and Dr. Übel's special project would be the key to the western campaign to come. President Kennedy and his Progressive Party were simply useful tools to employ in the meanwhile.

Deep in his ruminations, Himmler barely noticed that the subject at the table had changed again. Now they were arguing simultaneously over civilian disarmament for the security of police and government officials in Reich provinces, and whether film standards and policies should fall under the party's ministry of propaganda or the SS bureau of mental hygiene.

Himmler glanced at Heydrich, a subtle instruction to call the table to order. For a full minute there was silence. The only sound was the Gestapo man's open-mouthed breathing and the ticking sounds from Colonel Uhrwerk.

The long silence was a rhetorical trick he'd learned from his master and the grand orator himself, Adolf Hitler.

Finally, Himmler spoke.

“Our concerns about the Americas are not necessarily as far in the future as Herr Drexler may imagine. In August of 1926, I directed Herman Wirth, head of the Ahnenerbe, to send agents to study prehistoric runes found carved into Neolithic structures in the Lower Balkan Mountains. This was based on early reports that suggested the runes could be Nordic in origin, proving the theory that the ancient Greek philosophers were originally of Aryan descent.

“The Ahnenerbe was tasked with trying to find anthropological and cultural evidence that the Aryan race had ruled the world throughout history. Agents sought evidence for such theories as the Aryan rule of Egypt and Greece, the Aryan Jesus, an Aryan race that lived in the hollow earth, and even the genesis of the Aryan race from the ruins of Atlantis.”

They found much more in their search of the ancient world. They found potential power and arcane forces that existed well outside mankind's realm, predating mankind's existence on the planet in a time when demons and gods saw earth not as a prize but a battleground. Consequently the Ahnenerbe's mission expanded: it was to seek out and acquire mystical artifacts imbued with the remnant magicks of gods and demons, and historic antiquities that could be used to harness the eldritch forces discarded across the earth from before man's rise, all for the benefit of the New Order.

“The Balkans expedition came after the research mission in Sardinia, and in association with concurrent missions in Nepal, Tibet, Tunisia, the Congo, and Port-au-Prince, and what we found there,” Himmler said. “So you understand the implications of our search, gentlemen. There is a possibility to acquire a power that would make our armies unstoppable.”

Himmler stood and walked about the table. Every member of the Black Sun—the rulers of the German world—sat even straighter. All except Uhrwerk, who never made any move not deliberate and purposeful. Himmler allowed for the colonel's idiosyncrasies.

“A team of our scholar-soldiers—lead by Franz Altheim and his wife—were sent to the Balkans. Only Herr Altheim returned. He returned with, hmmm, some
thing
from a Gypsy camp in the Wallachia region. It was most peculiar and more than we could have hoped for, though it will take refinement to properly employ its power,” Himmler said. “Regardless, it puts Dr. Übel's Project Gefallener back into play.”

A chorus of a half dozen gasps expectedly greeted the Reichsmarshal's news. A few of the civilian SS directors looked paler than usual. Even the Gestapo director was sweating. Most notably, Uhrwerk inclined his head inquisitively, but of course with no trace of emotional concern.

Himmler's patience for dissent had been well exhausted for the day, and the bombshell he dropped would keep the Black Sun busy for days to come.

Heydrich called the meeting to a close.

As the dozen of the inner circle and their aides rose to leave—there were no papers to gather, no notes or attaché cases, per Himmler's explicit demands—Himmler nodded to Heydrich.

“
Achtung
, gentlemen,” Heydrich said. “Colonel Uhrwerk and Herr Drexler, you are requested to accompany Reichsführer Himmler to Section 712 now for a briefing with Dr. Übel.”

It was not a request.

Heydrich then spoke into a phone. “Hilda, have Der Top of Form Schädel and Lieutenant Skorzeny meet Herr Himmler's party at security three for Section 712.”

U
hrwerk, Drexler, Himmler, and Heydrich were all members of the Thule Society and involved in planning Project Gefallener from the beginning. They made their way by elevator to the subterranean levels of the North Tower. At Security Checkpoint Three—the last before access to Section 712, which served as Dr. Übel's laboratory—there stood the two storm troopers and one
nachtmann
—a “night man,” as the anthropogenic beast was called. Transgenic creatures, they combined elements of human along with genetic material from great apes, wolves, and Yetis. It was the latest success from Dr. Übel's transgenic/alchemical experiments. Fully seven feet tall with thick, long arms and enormous plates of cartilage over its vulnerable points like a wild boar, the man-beast wore a specially designed black uniform not unlike the SS guards but accommodating its unnatural shape and size. The beast wore a Senf mask with an elongated snout and ridges along the brows.

Awaiting the four members of the Black Sun at the checkpoint stood two warriors of stark contrast.

Lieutenant Otto Skorzeny was a dashing, muscular young soldier who, despite the presence of senior officers and uniform directives to the contrary, had the sleeves of his black Waffen-SS tunic rolled up, his collar unbuttoned, and a cigarette in his mouth. His hair was a bit longer than regulation, his thin moustache in the style of western movie stars, and the scar on his cheek just one more unaffected but effective accent. The decorations on his tunic, however, showed he was no photographic model or moving picture actor—he was a blooded warrior whose unorthodox commando tactics had made him the darling of the new German military leadership. His planning and execution of a glider raid on the High Command during the Beer Hall Putsch had cut the head off the old German Army in the first hours of the revolution. Skorzeny stood at ease even as the guards and the
nachtmann
clicked their heels in salute.

That nonchalance was the only thing the other man had in common with Skorzeny. Tall and rail thin, the second man wore a breathing mask of an older design that connected to a clockwork device on his back. His Gestapo uniform was white, with a red-lined white cape to hide the clockwork device. The brass-rimmed mask covered his face but left the bald, scarred, sickly alabaster skin of his head uncovered. He was the officer known only as Der Top of Form.

Schädel. The Skull. He was Himmler's personal Hand, having spent the last five years in a bloody quest to find a Christian church relic, and leaving behind a trail of eviscerated victims from the Vatican to Vienna.

Everyone gave Der Schädel wide berth. Even Uhrwerk.

The guards opened the vault doors to the Deep Underground, the realm of Section 712. The smell was what hit first—bitter almond, antiseptic solution, copper, and what the human mind could only register as one thing: fear. The six plus the guard escorting them walked through twisting hallways with doors marked only by Roman numerals and internal bay windows opening onto the larger laboratory observation decks and operating theaters. The sound of machine works and steam releases crowded out the sound of gears grinding and the occasional muffled scream.

“Gentlemen,” Heydrich said, “our digs in Tanis appear to be quite promising, even if the artifacts are of Hebrew origins. But it was, as the Reichsführer stated, our effort in the Balkans that has allowed us to reactivate Project Gefallener.”

The initial directive of Franz Altheim's team had nothing to do with Nordic runes,” he explained. “It was to seek the factual sources behind the stories of Vlad Tepes, the immortal Romanian impaler, who was rumored to have possessed the relic. This led us to the discovery of a shard of the artifact, rumored to have been washed in the very blood of the man the Romans crucified.

“Though its origins are steeped in the Jewish-Christian desert/slave mythology, the properties of this artifact cannot be denied. We have seen its effect firsthand, and it is . . . more powerful and unpredictable than we could have imagined. Unfortunate, for the agent who was exposed to the shard.”

“Jesus was not Hebrew, of course,” Drexler stated. “He was from Galilee, where there had been a great deal of Assyrian influx. Jesus was descended of Aryan stock, and thus only Jewish in the religion he was raised in. Herr Grundman's research into—”

Himmler cut him off with a shake of the head. Even Himmler didn't subscribe to such clumsy revisionism, though he knew it necessary for the masses.

“Where is the lance?” Der Schädel asked in a tone that was more demand than question.

“I . . . our agents were not successful in recovering the artifact itself, just the shard of it,” Heydrich began. “Only one agent escaped from the team's encounter. A follow-up team lead by Lieutenant Skorzeny found . . .” He trailed off.

Skorzeny picked up for him. “What we found were six experienced and trained men who looked like rag dolls tossed around by a giant. Some of their bodies were sundered and scorched, others smashed like eggs on a rock. I've never seen anything like it.”

“Did the agent who escaped explain what happened?” Drexler asked.

Heydrich shook his head. “He was in no condition to tell anyone anything.”

“So what became of the artifact?” Uhrwerk asked.

“We believe it remains in the hands of a local Gypsy tribe. Passed between tribes,” Heydrich said, thrown off stride. “Given time, our usual agents could recover it. But we do not have the luxury of conducting a conventional and methodical search. We believe word of our Romanian expedition may have made its way to France, England, or the Freehold. We believe others will be seeking it now.”

“That is why you and Lieutenant Skorzeny are here, Schädel,” Himmler said.

Der Schädel inclined his head slightly.

“As you wish,” he said.

“You will each be assigned leads to follow that are most suited to your unique gifts,” Himmler said.

Heydrich continued: “While we do not have the artifact, we do have a sample of the, um, artifact's properties that was brought back by our agent as a result of his exposure to the shard.”

Himmler raised an eyebrow at Heydrich.

“Our
late
agent,” he corrected.

“A sample of the properties?” Skorzeny asked.

“Yes, Herr Lieutenant.”

The guard escort was under orders to take the Reichsmarshal's party to the observation deck for the primary operating theater, where Dr. Übel was working on the latest stage of Project Gefallener.

“Gentlemen,” Himmler said softly. “We stand on the brink of victory. We have created divisions of beasts borne of the hell of the Dead Lands. Useful, yes, but not enough to avenge what the world took from us in the Great War. But now everything is changing. We have it within our grasp to create legions of indestructible, unwavering soldiers to march across Europe and the rest of the world. I am speaking of no less than an army that will grow with every enemy it kills, and which can't be reasoned with, and which feels no weakness or pity. It is a black legion—a Death's Head Legion—that will reshape the world and ensure the rule of the Fatherland and the Aryan masters for a thousand times as long as the Führer's promise of a Thousand Year Reich. It will be a Reich of the Black Sun. And these will be the soldiers who bring about that dawn.”

The guard—a battle-hardened veteran and SS trooper—showed the group to the window, activated the drape mechanism, and left as quickly as possible.

When the drape opened, there were three gasps and the cigarette in Skorzeny's mouth dropped to the floor.

Drexler seem enraptured.

Himmler smiled.

Uhrwerk made no sound within his metal mask.

Behind the operating theater's glass partition the balding Dr. Übel looked up at the arrivals through thick, brass-rimmed goggles that made his eyes look like white ovals. His white lab coat and long rubber gloves were splattered with blood.

The thing on the table beside Übel—its brain exposed—looked like it had once been a man. But it was pale, stitched, and covered in angry, bleeding sores. Its jaw was more pronounced and its teeth looked like a canine's. Its open eyes were milky and red-rimmed. It sat up and strained against the leather bindings, letting out a howl. Its jaws snapped wildly.

Übel smiled at his guests despite the thing raging mere inches from him.

“Ah, good, gentlemen. You're here. This is the best part.”

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Driskill Hotel

Austin

Texas Freehold

T
he clock on the mantel said it was past 11:00
P.M.
, and yet on a Tuesday night the main—what did they call it here? Saloon? Bar?—in the Driskill Hotel was still rowdy and raucous. The activity hadn't abated at all over the past hour. Half a dozen card games had only picked up momentum. The jazz band was into its fourth set of the night, and half the room was dancing. Some apparently higher pedigreed ladies of the evening prowled, as did dealers of all sorts of diversions—coca leaves for chewing, the
marihuana
cigarettes he'd first seen in Rio, personal cards that granted access to underground opium dens. There had only been one fight, and they'd taken it outside at the insistence of the bartender.

Dr. Kurt von Deitel left his meeting with Lysander and immediately sought a decent schnapps. He needed one after he'd delivered his report, straight from the intelligence masters at the Abwehr. The work of delivering his report was unlike any previous debriefing the doctor had undergone.

Now, granted, he wasn't exactly a veteran in the world of espionage. In fact, this was only his second task since his recruitment by the Abwehr back when he was a third year medical student. But Deitel, a newly graduated medical doctor and the scion of a significant house of Prussian nobility in Königsberg, was exactly what the Abwehr's spymaster, Commodore Wilhelm Canaris, needed.

The Abwehr was officially the counterintelligence arm of the traditional German military, but Canaris—a traditional German naval officer—had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the Nazi regime. Over time, he'd secretly undertaken a dangerous strategy of undermining Hitler's government and the SS intelligence branch. He viewed the New Order as a dishonorable cult of common thugs and criminals in designer uniforms. Canaris maintained his agency's appearance as an effective, loyal source of human intelligence for the Führer, while doing everything he could to scuttle the ship of state.

It was a dangerous game. One mistake and Canaris and his confederates would end up in a concentration camp. Or serving in the Russian Dead Zone, which was the same as a death sentence only slower.

The information Deitel now brought to the Freehold for Canaris was so unprecedented—so fantastic—that Canaris needed Deitel's medical background to explain, well, the inexplicable, to his counterparts in the Freehold.

Deitel remembered how, after initially reviewing the materials and watching the grainy black and white photos and moving picture films in his Rio apartment, he vomited like a first year medical student. That's when he realized it was no longer an abstraction—the New Order was a threat to every man, woman, and child in Germany and throughout the world. It had to be stopped.

The doctor hadn't expected the Driskill's hotel bar to have schnapps at all, much less a wide and decent selection, along with several German beers of respectable pedigree. It shouldn't have surprised him. For starters, the hotel was magnificent. Built just four decades ago as the showplace of a cattle baron, the Driskill was an internationally renowned landmark of Texas hospitality. Located in the heart of downtown Austin, it was surrounded by the gin mills, music halls, and saloons of Sixth Street. They formed an ongoing street party where country music, ragtime, bluegrass, and jazz blended in the streets as freely as the people. Bourbon Street West, it was called.

So of course they'd have good schnapps on that point alone.

And from his recent briefings he knew there was a second reason. The Freehold had lots of German immigrants.

Texas was founded in 1835 as a republic, then reformed in 1876 into a Freehold. Most of the initial settlers were German and Scot-Irish immigrants from the old “United States,” as it was called then. The Freehold had since grown a good deal beyond its initial boundaries—almost exclusively by land purchase, not conflict.

The Freehold of the twentieth century stretched from Phoenix in the west to New Orleans in the east, and from the Red River in the north to Cabo San Lucas and the Yucatan peninsula in the south. The settlers of Scot-Irish and German descent were now part of a melting pot of Latin American, French, Spanish, Chinese, Indian, and Caribbean newcomers—a great contrast to many of the other North American nations.

In many of the states of the CSA there were still segregation laws—legalized racial separation—for the fifteen percent of the population comprised of colored people. In the Union States, discrimination was less overt though no less embraced, and bigotry was more directed at Jews, Eastern Europeans, and Orientals than at those of African or Caribbean origin.

But here in Texas, Rucker had explained on the flight, the Freeholders were more guided by the experience and example of the first Texas ranches, where the ongoing need for reliable, skilled ranch hands and later oil field roughnecks trumped traditional racial barriers. The subsequent close partnership with Brazil and France—the first true melting pots of the West—further shaped the Freehold's character. A voraciously trade driven people, Freeholders cared more about the color of money and gold than any other hue.

Of course, Deitel thought, by every axiom of conventional European wisdom and every tenet of the New Order, this freewheeling, decentralized, mongrelized society shouldn't have worked. It should be balkanized and chaotic. Ungovernable.

But Deitel wasn't sticking much with conventional wisdom anymore. After all he'd seen so far, and after his exhaustive time with Lysander Benjamin, he was having doubts about nearly everything he thought he knew.

He went over the extensive debriefing again. Benjamin had immediately taken the microfilm he'd brought and sent it off by way of a pneumatic tube. The man then listened to his report without comment. Then Benjamin asked him to repeat the story, and asked questions—sometimes pertinent, sometimes wholly irrelevant—after almost every statement he made. Then the man had chatted about his bursitis, about his days as an altar boy, wheat beers, and other irrelevancies. Benjamin never once spoke of his authority within the Texas government, nor of how this would be handled by the Freehold's intelligence services.

What was happening now? Deitel wondered.

He was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't notice Rucker slide onto the stool beside him.

“So, how you doing?” Rucker asked, as he signaled the bartender. “How'd that whole ‘end of the world' thing go?” He sounded amused and flippant

“Your Mr. Benjamin was . . . what is the English? Surprisingly nonchalant. Much like your tone,” Deitel said.

Rucker grinned. “I conjured as much. Don't take it all personal like. It's his job to vet you,” he said, handing the bartender a silver coin. “Finish that candy water. I'm taking you to a real bar. Saddle up and twenty-three skidoo.”

Some of that had to be English, Deitel thought.

Minutes later they were on Sixth Street. The pace Rucker set—Deitel idly wondered, was this a “mosey”?—carried them casually down the walkway. The cobblestone avenue was crowded still. Did these people go out carousing every night of the week?

He marveled at the seemingly endless variety of fashions and livery among the people. The women with their modern flapper bobs and some with softer long hairstyles. Some wore cloche hats. There seemed to be no single fashion that dominated. Women wore dresses and outfits that would have scandalized even the most urbane metropolitans in Germany for their daring and sex appeal.

Meanwhile, men wore everything from short jackets and lightweight sport coats to dungarees with shirtsleeves or light jumpers. He even saw some in gauchos with silk shirts—the influence of the Freehold's sister nation to the south, the Propriedad de Brazil. Fedoras and cowboy hats were the primary men's headgear, and he saw no formal suits—which would have been inappropriate to this climate anyway. Then there were the colors of the men's and women's clothing—not just blues and grays and brown and blacks so uniformly, and somberly, common in European fashion, but every color in the palette.

He also noticed at least two saloons with signs that were surprising and gauche. One said,
NO IRISH OR DOGS ALLOWED.
The other had the same message, about
RED INDIANS
.

“I thought you said there was no segregation here,” Deitel said, indicating the signs.

“There's not,” Rucker said. Then he saw what prompted the remark and sneered. “But there's also no law against being a jackass. It ain't right, but it's the owner's right.”

Deitel drank in the cityscape. High rises were lighted like it was a festival, and airships of all sizes and models sailed about the skies. He wondered at the maze of electric signs, neon signs, the billboards and Art Nouveau advertisements along the gaslight streets. They touted all manner of goods from all over the world. It bespoke the decadent indulgence that made this society soft.

At least that's what his Prussian schoolmasters said. On the other hand, advertising seemed a sign of prosperity. It wasn't so much that it was banned behind the Black Iron Curtain, just that there was little to advertise and not a lot in the way of disposable income.

Here, though, the merchants had to compete for all the disposable income these people had, which they spent on everything from French cigarettes to motorcycles imported from the Confederacy.

But what Deitel noticed as they “moseyed” along was what was missing from this place. It was something he hadn't realized he'd come to expect as the norm until he first arrived in Rio, where it, too, was missing. It was an all-pervasive, chronic sense of fear and anxiety. People here didn't walk at a hurried pace, eyes downcast. There were no police—secret or otherwise—checking papers. No watchtowers. People greeted one another on the street and they smiled. They did not march quietly and quickly to their destination. They strode. They meandered. They looked one another in the eye. They claimed their own space.

It took a second for Deitel to realize Rucker was speaking.

“I was saying, it was nothing personal. Lysander hears stories like yours more often than you'd reckon. Anytime someone wants you to do something you wouldn't normally do, they always bring up the end of the world or wave some other bloody shirt,” Rucker said. “Heard that back before the Great War your own folks were telling stories to the Union States about Frenchmen bayoneting babies or some damn thing. When someone waves the bloody shirt, you have to do your due diligence. Caveat emptor.”

Deitel nodded. That seemed reasonable.
“Ja.”

“Plus, there's plausibility. You don't exactly strike me as the intelligence type. No offense.”

“Vas?”
Deitel said with an insulted tone, not realizing he'd slipped into his native tongue.

“Intelli
gence
. Not intelli
gent
.”

“Herr Rucker, I resent the impli—”

“Oh, don't get your knockwurst in a knot, Wilhelm.”

“Kurt.”

“Right. It's just, from what I hear around the campfire, Himmler's been shoveling out more disinformation than Goebbels does horse apples every week on the radio. Planting stories all over. Who's to say he's not trying a different tack here, sending us someone who doesn't even know who's pulling the strings, or getting us looking at the left hand while the right hand is up to no good?”

This, too, was a reasonable surmise, Deitel thought, in the unreasonable and Byzantine world of spycraft.

“And that's why, Doc, I say you don't strike me as the intelligence type. There's no hardness to you.”

Deitel didn't argue.

“You're pale-ish.”

Well, yes.

“You have soft hands.”

Deitel looked at his hands.

“You're powerful fussy. You're—”

“Enough,” Deitel said. “I am aware of my appearance.”

“What I mean is you seem bookwise and range blind. Which, you being a doctor, isn't surprising. You may not even know if you're being made a patsy. Or, alternatewise, you have the perfect cover. Lysander can't know until he runs you through the wringer. You savvy?”

What Rucker was saying, however clumsily, was plausible and prudent. But it was simply the case that he had a perfect cover. Still, he understood that his own assertion wouldn't carry any weight.

“
Ja
. I understand.”

“Lysander will take your story to the society. They'll mull it over and check your bona fides to make sure they're, um, bona and fide.”

Deitel did a double take.

“I'm sorry, ‘society'?”

“ 'Course, if you are a patsy, you're pretty well and proper boned. The Gestapo knows you're willing to betray the New Order. Soon as you get back to the Fatherland,” Rucker mimed a throat being cut, “
kaput
.”

“I'm sorry, Herr Rucker, ‘society'?” Deitel asked again.

“Also, if that Gestapo stoolie tailing you wasn't just a cutout to make your cover story seem plausible and you really are a Canaris man, then the Gestapo may already know you're willing to betray the New Order, and soon as you get back,
kaput
.”

“Herr Rucker!” Deitel said. “ ‘Society'?”

Rucker did a double take and furrowed his brow. Then the light came on.

“Oh, that's right. See, here's the thing, we don't have much in the way of an intelligence service like y'all do. It's . . . how do I explain this? Sure, folks at our embassies gather information, and President Coolidge does have an agency that gathers all the newspapers and radio news from around the world so that Austin isn't completely blind to the world. But there are some mighty strong prohibitions on Austin actively doing much else. It tends to lead to meddling.”