Death's Head Legion (10 page)

Rucker saw the two sitting together in a hotel lobby, drinking tea and discussing arcane Aryan beliefs, ancient Germanic runes, the ills of modern society, the decadence, and this exciting new leader of the National Socialist movement.

For once, Rucker saw, this was a mind he didn't want to manipulate. His drive—his passions—were pure and good. He, too, wanted the world cleansed of the filth infesting it. He, too, saw a better tomorrow where a handful of perfect, strong Aryan masters ruled a world without depravity. A world without guilt. A New Order for the world. He saw their collaboration. He saw himself giving to Himmler the symbol for his nascent SS, the Totenkampf—the Death's Head.

He swore a blood oath to Himmler. He saw himself in the underground laboratories in Wewelsburg. Dr. Übel explained that he could expand his powers tenfold by tapping into the electrochemical pulses of thought itself and amplifying the innate psychic energies. Human thought is nothing but a charge of energy passing between neurons in the brain, the doctor said. Why is it hard to imagine these energies could be amplified? he asked.

He explored psychokinesis, thought transference, clairvoyance, psychometry, and telepathy. The limits they had yet to define. His powers grew with every mind he took.

Rucker felt whatever was in his mind pull away, and he was released, though he still could not move his body.

“What the hell did you do to me?” he gasped. His muscles trembled and his soul ached from living through Der Schädel's life, seeing it with his eyes and feeling the perverse joy of his sadism.

Der Schädel turned and faced Rucker with that awful rigor mortis grin.

“I think you know,” he said.

“What are you?” Rucker asked as he fought for breath and tried to unsee what he had seen—what he had just lived through.

“I am the tool by which we will take this world and impose order at last,” Schädel said. “We will burn the impure, the mongrels, and the wicked from existence and memory.”

It was only then that Rucker realized that Der Schädel's mouth—what there was without the lips—did not move when he spoke. The voice was inside his own mind.

“Of course I'm speaking to your mind,” Der Schädel said inside his head. “I don't even speak English, and your German is pathetic. Now, let's learn about you. What delicious sins and guilt does your little mind harbor? Let me live them that I might truly know you.”

A bony white hand touched the top of Rucker's head. He felt dizzy, but that was all.

Again Rucker was a passenger in his own mind. Together they saw Rucker running away from home to join the Texas Volunteer Group, the recriminations of his father still echoing in his memory. He saw his mother crying.

“Oh, this is wonderful. Wonderful!”

Der Schädel removed his hand from Rucker's head.

“I know who you are and why you're here, Fox.”

Rucker sensed he was being allowed to speak.

“My friends call me Fox. You're not one,” he said.

Der Schädel shook his head in mockery.

“Ah, defiance. Impotent defiance. To be expected, I suppose. Look, the fact is, you have nothing to offer me. You know nothing about the spear and its power to raise the dead. You know nothing of the Reichführer's grand plan to march this army across the world, cleansing it of the stain of weakness and lesser beings, lesser races. You're just a soldier of fortune hired by merchants and pimps—colonial children who reject order for the illusion of freedom, but who are enslaved by their own greed. I have no use for you,” Der Schädel said. “However, you have a strong mind, and controlling such minds is how I grow my power.”

Again he delved into Rucker's mind. Rucker saw his father and mother looking down on him in stern disapproval. His mother had tears in her eyes. His father's face held nothing but disgust. His father, who emigrated to West Texas in the late 1800s after fighting the horrific Indian campaigns for the Northwest Alliance, who sought his own redemption, who had taught his son to respect all life and never to engage in that great government enterprise—war. His mother, who feared for his safety when he started flying at such a young age. He promised her he would be safe. He promised he would help people—be it crop dusting or speeding medicines and supplies to remote neighbor ranches on the West Texas plains.

And yet he'd gone against everything they stood for and everything he promised when he marched off to war at the age of sixteen. Oh, it was an all-volunteer organization with no relation to the Texas government—but his father said it was the next worst thing. His mother had been heartbroken.

It wasn't just the big regrets. It was the little things. Disappointing his parents and himself by spending an afternoon riding horses with a girl he fancied instead of taking care of his ailing dog. Selfishly taking for granted the generosity of his parents, forgetting to thank them for presents on his birthday, forgetting his parents' anniversary party. He saw himself lying to girls, as boys so often did, offering them ploys when they were offering their hearts.

He saw all the things he only knew years later that he should have done instead, the missed opportunities, the many times he thought only of himself and not others, as if the world existed for his purposes and no one else's.

Then there was the war.

He had mouthed the platitudes about defending liberty, about protecting their French brothers, about it being a defensive war—and it was. But that's not why he wanted to go.

It was about a sixteen-year-old boy craving adventure and action, and not caring about the consequences. He knew it and he knew his parents could see past his lies, too. But he wanted the glory and the honor that a just war promised the knights who answered the call to valor.

Then he saw real war. Men ripped to shreds by industrial killing devices. Friends mangled and burned alive in their cockpits. Entire towns burning. Mass executions. The lie of pilots fighting as “knights of the sky,” as if they were jousting honorably among the clouds, when in reality the goal was to slip behind the enemy plane and shoot him in the back before he even knew you were there.

He saw himself after the war, trying to find the names of the almost always faceless twenty-nine pilots he'd shot down, the twelve spotters, and the two airship crews. He saw the butcher's bill he'd written himself and carried for years.

And then there were the ones who weren't soldiers at all.

Yes, the Texas Volunteer Group had gone out of its way to enforce its own very specific rules of engagement—no mass bombings, no targets in civilian areas, no artillery outside battle zones—but inevitably it would happen. What the other militaries—no, strike that—what politicians called “collateral damage.”

It happened to him.

The attack on the train. British intelligence said it was a supply train carrying munitions to the front in France. His wing attacked it well behind the German lines, dropping incendiaries and emptying their guns into it. But it wasn't munitions. It was carrying refugees. As he flew his last pass over the burning wreckage of the train, he saw a woman running away, her dress on fire.

Oh God. Something cold and decaying gripped his heart and rent it asunder. Just like before. Only this time, in his mind's eye, his mother and father watched him make pass after pass at the train, dropping death onto the people—children and women and old men who never asked for this war.

He saw again his mother lying in her bed, wrapped in wool blankets against the chill that could never be warmed. He saw his father sitting vigil over her as cancer ate away at her bones. He saw her cursing his name—saying he was not her son. He saw his father turning his back. He saw his mother and father on the train. The people who had given him life and love. He saw himself shooting them. Dropping fire on them. Laughing about adventure as they burned alive. He saw their corpses pointing accusing fingers at him. Damning him.

A cold blast of air shook him only for a second. The outer hatch to the cargo bay was open. He stood before it. It welcomed him. It beckoned him. It would end the turmoil eating him up inside. It would wash away the guilt and the pain. He merely had to step through it. He merely . . . had to . . . wait . . . the guilt? He had to ask . . . why?

It was guilt by which Der Schädel had a hold on him. But it wasn't real. He'd never shot his parents. They were not on the train. He'd not been there when his mother passed. The more he forced his mind to relive his real memories and regrets, the more he was able to remember what had really followed. When he realized that, the grip on his mind loosened. Rucker realized then that he had a perfect, unbeatable weapon to use against all this guilt. He embraced the unconditional, undying love he knew his parents felt despite all the mistakes he had made. He saw his epiphany to not judge his child self by the standards of his adult self. He embraced the way he had dealt with the crippling remorse he felt after the war. The pocket of resistance in his heart and mind grew.

Rucker put hands on each side of the cargo bay door, ready to jump.

“I . . . I can't,” he said meekly.

Der Schädel was expecting some pushback. Admirable, but useless. He approached Rucker from behind, goading his mind. The pressure on Rucker's pocket of resistance grew, but it only hardened his resolve.

“Yes, Fox. You know your sins. You know your guilt,” Der Schädel whispered into his mind. He leaned over Rucker's shoulder. “Wash it away. Jump. Ju—”

Rucker put all of his energy, his strength, and his heart into a single explosion of movement. His elbow smashed into Der Schädel's face with a loud and enormously satisfying wet crunch.

“Shut up, freak show. It's my mind. Stay out.”

T
he
Graf von Götzen
was scheduled to make port in the coast city of Volos, on Greece's eastern coast, within an hour. The cool wind from the open outer hull door—some 10,000 feet above sea level—was a welcome breeze that blew away the stench of fear and despair.

Deitel was attending to Professor Renault, who despite his age and ordeal was none the worse for wear. Physically anyway. He'd be dealing with what Der Schädel had done to the professor's mind for a long time to come. Terah held Renault's hand.

The two Gestapo thugs were tied up, gagged, and nailed inside wooden cargo crates. Skorenzy was tied up but sitting in a chair, looking angry. Der Schädel, meanwhile, was on his knees, still reeling from the blow to the head he'd taken, as well as the hefty dose of scopolamine Deitel had administered to keep his mind out of focus.

Rucker sat on a crate. Sullen.

“I think Professor Renault is okay to move now,” Deitel said. “How are you?”

Rucker didn't meet the doctor's eye.

“I'll live.”

“How did you? I mean . . . what . . . did he . . . ?” Deitel stammered, not sure what he was asking.

Rucker wasn't upset by the doctor's usual prying. But he didn't feel like explaining to them what was rattling around in his head.

Der Schädel had gone after the heaviest burden Rucker had. When he went off to fly in the Great War, it went against everything his parents ever taught him and everything they ever valued. They'd given him everything good that he had in life, and he threw it all away like some spoiled child, telling them they didn't know what they were talking about.

“He went after my guilt,” he finally said. “My parents. The war. All that.”

Maybe the war was the right thing, but he knew he went for the wrong reasons. It hurt them. It broke their hearts. And of course, they were right. It was horrible and he had done things he could never make right.

He never got the chance to say anything again to his mother—she died while he was still in France.

Terah was now holding Rucker's hand. Deitel put a hand on his shoulder. Rucker looked at the doctor's hand with annoyance.

“Hand,” he said. The doctor pulled it away.

“He didn't count on something,” Rucker said. “It was something beyond his ken. Something I don't think he ever understood, even before he went crazier than an outhouse rat. Something he could never attain. It was the one weapon that was unbeatable. One he couldn't defend against.”

“And that is?” Terah asked.

“Forgiveness. Just that. Forgiveness and love,” Rucker said.

Terah and Deitel didn't understand.

But Rucker could see that Renault did. They'd shared the sadist's mental torture.

Rucker knew he hurt the ones who loved him most all those years ago. Every person does eventually. And he'd done terrible things in the war.

He squeezed Terah's hand.

For a long time he'd let all those things eat away at his soul. Then he finally realized he could either let those mistakes be a stone around his neck forever, or he could do the hard thing—keep on living. He was wrong, yes, but he was young and stupid and didn't know a thing about the world.

Life is nothing but endless choices, and sometimes a man chooses wrong. You try to learn from mistakes and make restitution when you wrong someone. But he'd come to understand that if you don't accept yourself and the reality of life, you'll pile up so much guilt you'll be buried in it.

“I realized I had to forgive myself or I might as well have laid down and died,” Rucker said. “I could never say ‘I love you' or ‘I'm sorry' and have it mean anything if I held the ‘I' in those phrases in contempt. I couldn't do right tomorrow if I never let go of the wrong I did yesterday.

“It's not perfect, but it's enough.”

Terah squeezed his hand. Again. Something unsaid passed between them.

“Look, enough of this jawing,” Rucker said. “We need to get these goons locked away so that when this ship lands we can get away clean.”

While Terah, Deitel, and Professor Renault waited and watched, Rucker took Skorzeny and Der Schädel by the arms and marched them toward an open crate near the cargo bay door. Deitel had injected Der Schädel with a healthy dose of scopalomine, and then added a second dose just to be sure. Der Schädel could not focus his powers.