White Shark (38 page)

"You can kill it, then," said Chase.
 
"That's a relief."

"No, it is a question."
 
There was a slight change in the tone of the
man's words, almost as if he were smiling.
 
"A good question:
 
can you
kill what is not really alive?"

Chase and Tall Man sat while the man gathered
strength, and after a moment's silence, began to speak.
 
At first, the words came in short bursts, but
gradually he developed a rhythm of inhaling and exhaling that allowed him to
express complete thoughts.

Chase closed his eyes — it was distracting to see the
tube touch the throat and withdraw, to watch the chest expand and contract —
and let the words wash over him and become pictures.

"My name is Jacob Franks," the man
said.
 
"I was born in
Munich
, and in the years
before the war I worked as an apprentice in my father's pharmacy.
 
We could have left, we were urged to leave,
but my father refused, he was a man with an unfortunate belief in the basic
decency of mankind.
 
He could not believe
the rumors about the Nazis' intentions for us Jews... until, one
night,
it was suddenly too late to get out.

"I last saw my parents and my two sisters as they
were led away from a cattle car on a siding near a town no one had ever heard
of.

"I was kept alive — I was young and strong and
healthy — and put to work as a laborer.
 
I could not know that what I was building were crematoria... essentially
I was digging my own grave.
 
My health
began to fail, of course, from malnutrition, and in hindsight it is clear that
I was only a few weeks or months away from being rendered into ashes, when one
day a new doctor arrived at the camp.
 
Because my papers indicated that I had some experience in pharmacology,
I was sent to work for him.

"His name was Ernst Kruger, and he was a protégé,
a friend, and later, a rival of Josef Mengele."
 
He paused.
 
"You know who Mengele was, I assume."

"Sure," Chase said.
 
"Who doesn't?"

"
I
don't," said Tall Man.

"They called Mengele the Angel of Death,"
Franks said.
 
"He was a doctor at
Auschwitz
; his joy came not from saving lives but from
taking them, and in the most hideous ways possible.
 
He enjoyed experimenting on prisoners,
torturing them for no other purpose than to see how much pain they could
endure, slicing open twins only to see how similar they really were, transplanting
eyes to see if they would function, freezing or boiling women and children
solely to see how long it took them to die.
 
He escaped at the end of the war and lived in
Paraguay
and
Brazil
."

"They never caught him?
"
Tall
Man asked.

"No.
 
He
drowned, or so they say, a few years ago off a beach in
Brazil
.
 
There is said to be forensic proof, but for
me, Mengele will never die.
 
The fact
that such a man could exist, that God would permit it, means that a little bit
of Mengele must exist in the darkest parts of each of us."

"And your doctor," Chase said, "this
Kruger... was he like Mengele?"

"He was vicious like Mengele," said Franks,
"and as brutal.
 
But Kruger was
smarter, and he had a stronger vision, warped as it was."

"Which was?"

"To usurp the power of God.
 
He truly
wanted to create a new species."

Tall Man said, "What the hell for?"

"To some extent, to see if it
could be done.
 
But then, as he did more and more work and
the impossible began to seem possible, as success followed success, word
reached high into the Nazi hierarchy.
 
Money, encouragement flowed back down to him.
 
Kruger's vision became true megalomania:
 
he decided to try to create a race of
amphibious warriors."

Tall Man began to say something, but Franks cut him
off.

"This was the nineteen-forties, remember.
 
There were no nuclear submarines with
infinite bottom time, scuba diving had barely been invented,
man
was still a stranger to the sea.
 
Imagine
a creature with the intelligence, the knowledge, the training and the brutality
of man, but combined with the capacities of an apex marine predator."

"Jesus," Chase said, "Nazi killer
whales."

"Not quite.
 
More versatile, even," said Franks.
 
"Whales must breathe; Kruger's creatures would not.
 
They would stay underwater indefinitely, dive
to a thousand feet, set explosives, spy on shipping.
 
His dream was for them to have the potential
for unlimited mayhem."

"Meaning he was nuts," Tall Man said.

"Not necessarily," Chase put in.
 
"I remember reading about a professor
from Duke who tried the same thing during the sixties.
 
He started with
mice,
got them to breathe liquids without drowning and found that liquid-breathing
eliminates the possibility of getting the bends.
 
One time he decompressed a mouse from thirty
atmospheres to surface pressure in three seconds, which would be like a diver
going from a thousand feet to the surface at seven hundred miles an hour.
 
The mouse survived.
 
He saw no reason the same thing couldn’t work
for humans.
 
He only stopped
experimenting because of a lack of need:
 
robots came on the scene, ROVs, submersibles; they could do a better job
in deep water, with no risk to people.
 
But he was convinced he could have created an amphibious human."

Franks nodded and said, "In theory, creating a
water-breathing human being should not be very difficult.
 
We come from water-breathers, after all;
fetuses survive on liquid, and in various stages of development they show
evidence of flippers and even gills.
 
And
we are all liquid-breathers already, in the sense that our lungs contain fluids
without which they couldn’t function."

"So you're saying Kruger succeeded?
"
Chase said.

"Almost," said Franks.
 
"If the war had gone on longer, he might
actually have done it.
 
What held him
back was the quality of his subjects; they were weak, sick, malnourished —
slaves.
 
Many developed infections from
the initial tracheotomy surgery, and because there were no antibiotics then,
they died.
 
Some failed to survive the
flooding of their lungs with saline solution and fluorocarbons.
 
But Kruger had an inexhaustible supply of
patients, so he pressed on."

"And then, from somewhere high in the chain of
command, perhaps Hitler
himself,
came a gift:
 
a perfect subject.
 
Heinrich Guenther was the Aryan physical
ideal, six and a half feet tall, muscled like a Greek statue.
 
He had won medals in the nineteen-thirty-six
Olympics in the shot put, the javelin and the hammer throw, and he became
something of a national hero.
 
He joined
the SS, secured a commission and, when the war came, seemed destined for a brilliant
future.
 
He was fearless and ruthless.
 
He was utterly without conscience.
 
He was a killer."

"He was also not quite sane, though that wasn't
evident at the time.
 
A solitary man, he
lived alone, and apparently he had been murdering people — prostitutes,
lowlifes for the most part — for years.
 
That only came out after he went berserk in a beer hall one night and
killed three people.
 
Today I suppose he
would be diagnosed as a sexual psychopath or a paranoid schizophrenic; in
nineteen forty-four he was labeled a homicidal maniac.
 
He was sentenced to be shot, and was about to
be, when someone decided that he could perform one last service for the
Reich.
 
They sent him down to us."

"You worked for the guy?
"
Chase
asked.

"Worked
on
him.
 
With Kruger.
 
For months.
 
He was treated like a tiger.
 
He was caged between surgeries, fed raw meat
and vitamin injections, anesthetized and programmed in ways that are
sophisticated even for today:
 
biofeedback, subliminal conditioning.
 
He was almost
finished,
Kruger had only one
last step to go, when the Allies closed in on the camp.
 
But Kruger was obsessed; he refused to
abandon the experiment.
 
He took Guenther
with him when he fled... like most of the Nazis who knew they would be branded
war criminals, Kruger had been given an escape route to South America."

"So we flooded Guenther one final time, packed
him in a bronze box full of concentrated fluorocarbons and enriched saline
solution and loaded him onto a truck.
 
Kruger left on
foot,
he headed north toward the
sea.
 
I never saw either of them again."

What about you?
"
Chase
asked.
 
"What happened when the
Allies arrived?"

"They freed me... they freed all of us."

"And that was that?"

"Why should it not be?"

"Because you hadn’t just survived," Chase
said.
 
"You'd worked side by side
with that monster while he killed people."

"Well..." said Franks, again with what
sounded like a weary smile, "...perhaps they thought I had suffered
enough."

He leaned forward in his wheelchair, and the glow from
the television monitor fell on his face.
 
He removed the sunglasses.
 
One of
his eyes was normal, but the other was a deep, egg-yolk yellow.
 
The he touched the tube to his throat, but
this time after he had inhaled he used his fingertips to pluck away the ascot
around his neck.

There were three diagonal slashes on either side of
Frank's neck, healed decades ago into ridged purple scars, and in the center of
his throat was a black and ragged hole that led down into his gullet.

"My God...
"
Chase
said.
 
"Are they... you've got...
gills?
"

"I was an early experiment... and a
failure," Franks said.
 
He replaced
the sunglasses.
 
"And I am the only
survivor.
 
My lungs were too weak to
absorb the fluorocarbons; over and over again, I drowned... to the brink of
death.
 
Kruger could have let me die, but
he didn't; he would raise me upside down on a chain hoist and let gravity drain
me,
then
restart my lungs with what passed in those
days for CPR.
 
He kept bringing me back
to life because, he said, he needed me."
 
Franks leaned back, out of the light.
 
"I never recovered fully, I never will.
 
But I don't want to meet God without one last
act of penance.
 
I want to kill this...
this ultimate abomination."

"If that's what it is," said Tall Man.

"It is
,
I'm certain of
it.
 
We know that Kruger never reached
South America
.
 
The
Nazi-hunters who tracked down Mengele and Eichmann and the others never found a
trace of him.
 
The U-boat he was
traveling on was listed as missing."

"How do you know he got on a U-boat?"

"There are records.
 
The Nazis were fanatics about keeping
records.
 
Kruger's work had a code name,
and it was mentioned in the archives as having been loaded aboard U-165.
 
The boat sank, or was sunk, I assume
somewhere in the mid-Atlantic."

"How could the thing travel across a couple
thousand miles of ocean bottom," Tall Man asked, "and survive all
this time?"

"Kruger had slowed Guenther's metabolism to the
edge of clinical death, a state way beyond hibernation.
 
The chemicals in his box could sustain such
basic life as there was, and his need for food would be nil, at least for a
very long time.
 
Eventually, like a bear
woken by hunger in the spring, his body would have demanded food, and I guess
he found something to eat."