The Twisted Cross (14 page)

He spent a few more minutes at the first tube, then coasted over to a second one that was anchored just 20 feet away. It was identical in every way, including its burning green light. He took a slew of photos of this cylinder too. Then he began the long, slow walk back to the point in the waterway where he could safely emerge.

The journey back was not enjoyable. Hunter's mind was too busy, reeling with, facts, projections, and outcomes, all of them bad. Before he dove down to find out, his best hope was that the Canal Nazis were simply storing radioactive fuel - fissionable materials to be used later in weapons-at the bottom of the waterway. But now Hunter knew that was just folly and that the worst case scenario was most likely the actual one. In fact, all the evidence pointed to just one, dire conclusion.

He was not looking forward to telling Jones and the others that the Panama Canal was sown with nuclear-tipped underwater mines . . .

Frankel wished he had never left Las Perlas island.

He had enjoyed his duty there too much. Intercepting ships seeking passage through the canal, having his troops scour each vessel for any gold -no matter how minute an amount, deciding, which ships could pass and which ones would be sunk. It had provided him with much discretionary power, not to mention the pick of the lot of any female slaves "liberated" from the ships.

But he had done his job too well . . .

One day he was sitting on the small island villa's porch, dousing himself with ice water and turning thumbs up or thumbs down on those vessels trying to make passage. The next day he was put in charge of a "gold reclamation project"

along the waterway itself.

True, he now had an entire 2000-man regiment at his beck and call and his new headquarters sat halfway up a tall hill where the cooling Pacific breezes took the edge off the usually murderous heat. There was no shortage of young wenches for him to use and discard at will, and he actually had access to a rather large wine stock liberated from The Twisted Cross command center in what was formerly known as Panama City.

But the work he commanded was, to his mind, almost counter-productive. An officer of undetermined rank - Strauberg was his name - was in charge of gold acquisition for the Cross. He was a repulsive, dirty little man who wielded great power not only within The Twisted Cross

command structure, but also within The Party, the elite overclass. Frankel knew that Strauberg had control of the far-flung gold expeditions up north in Mexico. It was Strauberg who did the final count on any and all gold taken as toll from the passing ships. It was Strauberg who decided how much gold the rulers of such pathetic kingdoms like Brasilia and Argentina would have to pay in tribute to The Cross. And it was even up to Strauberg to count out and weigh the gold fillings taken from doomed sailors on those ships The Twisted Cross decided to sink rather than let pass through the Canal.

But now Frankel, himself a Nazi zealot to the highest degree, believed that Strauberg had gone too far ...

As he looked out from his headquarters on the side of the hill down onto the mid-way point of the waterway, he once again had to laugh at the folly of Strauberg's latest scheme. Lined up along both sides of the Canal under the watchful eye of his heavily-armed troops were thousands of slaves - natives, Indians, captured seamen - wading in the shallows of the waterway, panning for gold.

The room deep inside the Pentagon was absolutely quiet save for the soft whirring of the video playback machine.

In stunned silence, the members of the United American Command Staff watched as scene after scene of Hunter's Panama Canal videotape played before the eyes. No one in DC had even dreamed of the extent of control the mysterious soldiers now had in Panama. The frightening display of conventional weaponry deployed along the Canal sobered even the more gung-ho members of the staff.

And Hunter's evidence, suggested by both the measurement devices and photos he'd taken underwater, that the Canal was now rife with nuclear-tipped mines seemed like a nightmare come true.

But worst of all were the armbands . . .

"Jesus, how could a Nazi organization of this size and power just spring up like this?" JT Toomey asked once the videotape had ended. "Practically right under our noses?"

"Were we so naive?" Ben Wa followed up. "We were spending too much time concentrating on The Circle and the Soviets and ignoring the other threats around us?"

"No . . ." General Jones said in an affirmative voice that cut through the brief soul-searching. "Had we not concentrated on the immediate threats on this continent, we wouldn't be here today, trying to figure out what to do about these guys in Panama."

"But JT makes a good point," the Canadian, Major Frost, said. "How could this fascist gang just suddenly appear? I mean, I hadn't heard the word 'Nazi'

uttered in years until Hawk told us about who shot Viktor in the desert . . ."

Hunter spoke up at this point. "My guess is that these guys just didn't suddenly appear," he said. "I'd bet they've been planning this for a while.

Gathering their resources, biding their time while we and the Soviets battled it out up here ..."

"Could be" Major Shane of the Football City Special Forces said. "But where could they have been doing all this, planning? And getting the money they would need to buy all that firepower?"

Hunter shrugged. "They could have been hatching this plot from just about anywhere," he said. "I mean, my money says they've been lying low down in South America. We'll all agree that our intelligence-gathering down there is practically nil. For all we know, this Twisted Cross organization might go all the way back to right after World War II. A lot of 'Nazis' got out of Europe before the end. And a hell of a lot of them went right" to South America. They have families, they teach their kids to goose-step. Boom! a whole new generation of the Master Race is born . . ." "The Rise of the Fourth Reich . .

." Frost said ruefully. "Exactly . . ." Hunter said. "Now, it's just a theory, but try on this scenario: The Big War breaks out and South America comes through without a scratch. Then the New Order is established. Yeah, the governments down there change around, and countries become kingdoms and so on.

But that kind of stuff was always going down in SA.

"Now in the past few years, we all know that it's easier in some places to buy an eighty-millimeter antiaircraft gun than it is to buy a loaf of bread.

These Nazis, who have been probably waiting for just such opportunity, sit back and watch us kill each other off. Meanwhile they're gathering money and military equipment on the side. Hell, the

guys in CATS are certain that these guys in The Party were arms dealers themselves! They never came to us with their catalogs, but I'll bet a bag of gold they went calling on The Circle . . ."

"Or the Mid-Aks," Ben Wa said. "Or the Family . . ."

"Right," Hunter confirmed. "All our enemies. By selling stuff to them, they were simply throwing more gasoline onto the fire and turning a profit to boot.

"Thus they get the money, they get the weapons and they virtually ensure themselves that between the Soviets and the criminal elements here on the continent, we'll kill each other off in a matter of a few years."

"But what is their point?" Toomey asked. "Sure, controlling the Canal is a big deal. I mean, they've got us by the cronies right now and they just can't seem to get enough gold. But is it an end in itself, or simply one means to an end?"

"I'm sure it's just a small part of the puzzle," Hunter replied. "That's how the Nazis work. Historically, they're the ultimate opportunists. Back in Germany before World War Two, they'd try to take over one little beer hall here, a neighborhood there. They use terror. They use psych-ops. It builds and builds, until it seems they're suddenly in total control. Overnight sensations. But really, they've been at the drawing board for a long time."

"Your reasoning makes sense," Jones spoke up. "But then why would they have killed Viktor? Obviously they were tracking him out in that desert . . ."

Hunter nodded. "Again, they simply took advantage of the situation," he said.

"I would say they killed Viktor simply because at that time, he was the biggest threat to their plans.

"Viktor had a massive army and was about to relate World War Three. If he had succeeded in invading and conquering the whole Mediterranean, then the Nazis would have had to crawl back into their holes and wait for many years for their next opportunity. So they efficiently nipped the problem in the bud. I just happened to be there at the time . . ."

Another silence descended on the room. It was Toomey who finally broke it. "So you think their ! ultimate goal is to ... well, take over the world?" he asked. [ "When hasn't it been?" Hunter answered. "From the day ;" they dropped little baby Adolph on his head, world domination has been their thing.

"The trouble is, this time, they have a shot at actually making it ..."

Mike Fitzgerald didn't attend the Canal Zone videotape meeting. He didn't have to -he had already seen the videotape many times over.

When Hunter reached Washington with the tape - following a harrowing

"parachute in reverse" aerial pick-up by one of the New York Hercs off the Mosquito coast - Fitz was the one on hand to meet him at the airport. Together they immediately split a much-needed bottle of scotch and previewed the startling footage over and over, taking notes of every last detail. Hunter's underwater still shots were to be given the same scrutiny - both men realizing it was in these photographs that the most potentially devastating threat lay.

So 12 hours later, while the Command Staff was meeting, Fitz was still analyzing the underwater pictures. Once the staff meeting broke up, Hunter immediately hoofed it over to the Irishman's intelligence section office which was located halfway around the other side of the enormous, reclaimed Pentagon building.

"No doubt about it," Fitz said, greeting Hunter with the depressing news. "My guys say those tubes are definitely underwater nuclear mines. They estimate each one packs about one-point-two kilotons of explosive power."

"Jesus," Hunter whistled. "That means just one or two of them could destroy the canal. Three at the most."

"Three would be more than sufficient," Fitzgerald said dryly.

"But I saw two of them no more than twenty feet from each other," Hunter told him. "And we saw them planting a bunch near the locks. And Pegg said he saw them laying them when he went through and that was some time ago."

Fitz could only shrug. "It's incredible overkill, I agree," he said. "They may have as many as fifty or even more bobbing around down there."

"Damn . . ." Hunter said in a whisper. "They're able to cut the whole Goddamn country of Panama in two . . ."

Fitz nodded his head in agreement. "If they wanted to, yes," he said. "But there may be a more practical reason for them putting so many mines in the canal. First, you have to consider that your problems in storing any kind of radioactive material are made a lot easier if you do it underwater."

"That's true," Hunter agreed. "Those bastards could lift one or two or a dozen of those firecrackers up at any time and lay them somewhere else."

Fitz lit up one of his trademark torpedo cigars. "Possible," he said. "But not quite that easy . . ."

By this time, Hunter had located a bottle from Fitz's private stock and was pouring out two stiff belts of whiskey.

"Can you explain that?" he asked the Irishman, grimacing as the first swig of whiskey went down.

"Well, it has to do with the design of the mines themselves," Fitz began.

"After putting your photos through every analyzing machine we have here, my boys concluded that these cylinders are not your usual contact-detonation mine

-thank God! Instead they appear to be on some kind of sequential timing system."

"You mean someone flips a switch and they all go off?" Hunter asked.

"That's possible," Fitz said. "But not all at once. More probably one at a time, depending on the sequence. But it seems like the Nazis have been forced to use a very impractical method to set them up. If some are so close together, one has to figure that when Mine 'A' detonates, it's going to destroy its nearby neighbor, Mine 'B', and so on. The effect will be same. The whole Goddamn Canal will be blown up -along with half the country. But, in a nutshell, it's not the correct way to deploy such as system."

Hunter took another gulp of whiskey and turned this latest information over in his mind.

"So are you suggesting we might have a clue here?" he asked.

Fitz nodded. "Maybe," he replied. "Let's consider a few things. I think it's safe to say that this system is not of the Nazis' own design. I'd say it was given to them -or more likely, they stole it -and they have deployed it in the only / way they know how. I mean, there are probably enough mines in the system to blockade the entire coastline of a major country. Christ, fifty remote control nuclear mines, dropped at the right places, could seal off the east coast of America with no problem . . ."

"The same goes for the Baltic coastline of the Soviet Union," Hunter added, stating the flip side of the equation.

Fitz managed a laugh. "I think you may be close to the original purpose of these weapons," he said, taking a long drag on his stogie and an even longer swig of his drink. "I'm betting that if we opened up one of those cans, we'd find a little metal plate that said: 'Made in the USA.' "

Another light went off inside Hunter's mind. They were zooming in on something.

"Okay, let's take it a step further," he said. "Let's say the system was made here. A top secret project, before the Big War. How many people in this country-be they a scientist or an engineer or whatever - could put together such a system? I'd think it would be a relatively difficult thing to do, no matter what defense contractor you were working for ..."

"I agree," Fitz said. "And the more difficult the system, the more likely that only a few people - maybe even just one or two - would know just exactly how every single component ticks."