Swastika Page 12

  As von Braun spoke in a “proud papa” manner, the rocket lifted off, smoke whooshing down from its tail fins, then steadily climbed at a rate of 1,340 meters per second as it arced out over the Baltic Sea through a perfect autumn sky. It continued straight on its intended trajectory until all that was visible was a glowing dot at the end of its white exhaust contrail. High-altitude winds blew the jet stream into a zigzag of “frozen lightning” after the dot disappeared, its engine having cut out after fifty-eight seconds. However, the Doppler tone that represented the rocket’s velocity still whined from the projector’s loudspeaker. Just before the five-minute mark, it stopped.

  “Boom!” said von Braun.

  The führer was clapping his hands.

  “How high?” Hitler asked.

  “Eighty kilometers.”

  The V-2 had brushed along the edge of space at a soaring altitude of fifty miles.

  “How far?” Hitler asked.

  “One hundred and ninety kilometers.”

  The V-2 had smashed into the sea 120 miles away. World records for altitude and speed had been obliterated.

  “The spaceship is born,” von Braun said, beaming.

  A flick of the führer’s hand knocked that stupendous achievement aside.

  “How big a warhead will it carry?”

  “One ton.”

  “I want a ten-ton warhead.”

  The rocketeer blinked.

  “I want a production rate of two thousand missiles a month.”

  The rocketeer swallowed hard.

  “And I want a string of concrete bunkers built in Normandy so we can bombard the cities of southwest England and Wales.”

  “Führer,” one of his generals said, “your wants are impossible.”

  But so intoxicated was the Nazi despot with the power of the V-2 to wreak revenge upon Churchill and Bomber Harris that a weird, fanatical light flared up his eyes.

  “Launch! Launch! Launch!” Hitler cried, pounding his fist into his palm and teetering on the brink of a mad rage.

  “What I want,” he snarled, “is annihilation!”

  Before the end of that July, Wernher von Braun had received the prestigious academic title of professor—an accomplishment almost unheard of for such a young scientist. Hitler made a point of signing the document himself.

  Less than three weeks later, in the early morning hours of August 18, 1943, Bomber Harris’s intrepid “warriors of the night” began to drop their payloads on the V-2s at Peenemünde.

  Boom!

  * * *

  But now it was April 4, 1945, a year and a half after that raid had forced all rocket production underground. The construction of the factory by Work Camp Dora slaves had claimed six thousand lives in the first six months: three thousand men had died in the tunnels, and three thousand more—too exhausted to work—had been sent to Lublin-Maidenek and Bergen-Belsen for gassing and cremation. Of the sixty thousand slaves who were put to work in the tunnels, twenty thousand never made it out alive.

  Throughout that time, Wernher von Braun had come and gone from the Mittelwerk factory. His attendance was vital for quality control. On one of those occasions, the rocketeer had stood with Fritz on the very spot where the Hitler Youth stood now, and he’d gazed up at the clear night sky to proclaim, “One day, men will look back on what we created here and realize that this was the birth of everything to come.”

  On that same night, he had given the teen a copy of Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon.

  Tonight, however, the sky was anything but clear, for while the SS general and his sons had been away meeting Hitler in his bunker in Berlin, Bomber Harris had hit Nordhausen.

  The Reich was in ruins, and SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun knew it. So while Ernst Streicher was absent from the factory, the rocketeer had secretly launched his exit plan.

  Pigsticker

  The Cariboo, British Columbia

  May 25, Now

  “Gold!” was the shout that built the Cariboo. In the early 1800s, Indians from British Columbia traded chunks of gold at the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1858, when the company exchanged that gold for cash at the San Francisco mint, the rumor of untold riches north of the border lured mobs of luckless miners off their California claims. With dollar signs glinting in their El Dorado eyes, they ventured up the Fraser River by sternwheeler and pack mule, hoping to strike it rich in the Cariboo Mountains.

  “Eureka!”

  Today, the Aryan followed the same route up to the Skunk Mine. It was a nine-hour drive from the Cabaret Berlin to the old gold mine deep in the Cariboo Mountains. The passenger’s side had been vacant since the outskirts of Vancouver, when he had stopped in a deserted factory laneway to haul the youth out of the front seat and lug him around to the flatbed of the truck. Stripping the teen naked, the Aryan had dumped him—blindfolded, gagged, and hog-tied—into the large toolbox along the rear of the cab.

  For a hundred miles inland from Vancouver, the Fraser Valley stretched east to Hope. That leg of the journey had taken him through fertile farmland. Pre-dawn was smudging the Cascade peaks as he angled north, following the Fraser River Canyon past the raging fury of the Hell’s Gate gorge, then on up the old miners’ road north for 320 miles to Quesnel.

  The day was well under way when the Aryan drove out of the canyon into the vast rolling plateau of Cariboo country. Groves of aspen and lodgepole pine grew around sloughs and small, shallow lakes. The sun was toward high noon when the truck veered east, away from the river and along Lightning Creek, to snake through the Cariboo Mountains. From Quesnel to Barkerville, fifty-five miles of asphalt cut across the maze of streams that drained the surrounding peaks by gouging gullies and canyons down the cracked, wrinkled slopes.

  Here, the truck abandoned the highway for a rutted road, bumping off into the mountains along an uninviting rocky V. Red signs on the gravel shoulders blared: “No Trespassing! Washout! Open Shooting! You Have Been Warned!”

  Soon, the truck vanished in a haze of dust.

  * * *

  Miners had said that Billy Barker was crazy to stake his claim downstream from everyone else, but in August 1862, that old fool struck gold and pulled $600,000 out of the ground. In a blink, those same naysaying miners were digging near that claim, and by the end of the following year, the Cariboo Gold Rush had mined $4 million out of cracks in the granite and the sand and gravel of local mountains and creeks. In honor of the Cariboo’s most instantly famous man, the miners named the huddle of saloons, stores, and cabins that grew up around Billy Barker’s shaft after him. Within a year, Barkerville was the biggest town in the Canadian West, with ten thousand citizens panning, sluicing, and digging on staked claims. A day’s work was measured in pounds, not ounces, of gold. So many trees were cut to build houses, shops, and mine shafts that flash floods inundated the town with mud. Everything, wooden plank sidewalks included, had to be raised on posts.

  Far and wide, the Cariboo Wagon Road was known as the Eighth Wonder of the World. One hundred thousand drifters were drawn to Barkerville, a boom town in the wilderness where miners threw cash around as if there was no tomorrow. Card sharps took their money in sleazy gambling dens. Whisky flowed like water in smoky saloons. Hurdy-gurdy girls from San Francisco charged lonesome miners a dollar a dance in frilly can-can halls. And in those Wild West days before the Mounties, the law was Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, the Hanging Judge. In his black legal robes, he would try murder cases off the back of a horse. Sometimes rough justice was carried out on the limb of a hanging tree.

  The winter after he struck it rich, Billy Barker met a widow from Victoria. She tossed her curls and got her gold-digging claws into him, then set about spending his cash as fast as it came out of the ground. As soon as the gold was gone, so was she, and Billy’s last days were spent penniless in the Old Men’s Home. When he was buried in the ground from which his gold had come, it was in a pauper’s grave.

  And so it was with Barkerville. By the clo
se of the nineteenth century, fortune-seekers had answered the call from the North, and by 1898, the Klondike River was the place to be. As boom towns sprang up to serve the Yukon gold rush, Barkerville turned into a ghost town, and what were once thriving gold claims became Cariboo ranches.

  Ranches like the Phantom Valley Ranch, tucked miles away at the end of this rutted road that bounced the truck about as it descended the switchback that zigzagged down to the mountain flats.

  The pigs were already squealing as the truck braked to a halt at the mouth of the old gold mine.

  * * *

  What is it about the Cariboo that appeals to the Germanic mind? Are the mountains evocative of the Bavarian Alps? Are the thickets reminiscent of how the Black Forest used to feel? Is it the sense of Lebensraum in its wide-open spaces, the yearning for elbow room that drove the Nazis to invade Russia? Whatever it is, German accents are everywhere in the Cariboo today, and that made the Aryan just one among many. For him, the appeal of the Cariboo was basic: accommodation at the Phantom Valley Ranch was free, and any place on earth was a hell of a lot better than the East German pig farm on which he had suffered so much.

  Thinking about the pig farm made him tense.

  And there was only one way to exorcise that tension.

  Unsheathe the pigsticker.

  As the Aryan stepped out into the dust, the driver’s door squeaked, echoing the squeal of the ravenous pigs in the muddy sty. The pigpen, made from fencing cannibalized from the ranch’s disused horse corrals, stood halfway between the maw of the old gold mine and the decrepit ranch house.

  The pigs weren’t for pork, or for company.

  * * *

  The mine wasn’t a relic from the Cariboo Gold Rush of the 1860s. The gold came from a vein similar to the one that launched Barkerville, but it had stayed hidden until a single rock tumbling down the slope had bit a chunk out at the bottom to expose ore. The mine was dug in the 1920s and worked until just before the war, when both it and the mine buildings on this range were abandoned. In the aftermath of the war, the mine buildings were dismantled and hauled away. All that remained were the rundown ranch house and some decrepit outbuildings in the overgrown scrub of the valley.

  The crosshatched steel gate that sealed the mouth of the mine resembled the portcullis of a medieval castle. The barricade was now outfitted with a modern electronic lock. The Aryan punched in the release code from memory. The squeaking of the hinges brought more squealing from the pigs.

  A few feet inside the steel gate, he flicked a switch to power up a bank of generators. As light began to illuminate the cored-out throat of the mine, he walked to the butcher’s station along one rounded granite wall. Specks of gold still glinted in the rock behind a deer-skinning easel frame. The frame was fashioned in the usual X, but the four arms crooked at the tips to form a swastika. Carving instruments hung from hooks affixed to the rock, and an oblong box lay on the seven-foot-long chopping block.

  Opening the box, the Aryan gripped a sword by its hilt and scabbard and drew it from its sheath. The portepee around it was caked with blood. Discarding the scabbard, the Aryan swished the rapier about in the air like an Olympic fencer. Light glinted off the SS motto engraved into the steel blade. “Meine Ehre heisst Treue.”

  It felt good to grip the pigsticker in his vengeful fist.

  Among the butcher’s instruments hung a branding iron with a swastika-shaped head. Pigsticker in one hand, brand in the other, the Aryan moved deeper into the throat of the mine, until it heightened into a glittery cavern.

  The cavern resembled a mad scientist’s lab from a 1940s B movie. The workbench was spread with German-language blueprints, and a hodgepodge of electromagnetic gizmos had been cobbled together according to the dog-eared plans. Most of the equipment was military surplus or salvage from 1940s warships that had been scrapped in Vancouver’s harbor. The vault was crammed with devices worthy of Nikola Tesla, the electrical genius who discovered the rotating magnetic field.

  The Aryan wedged the swastika head of the branding iron into the spark-gap of one machine. A flick of a switch induced electric current to jump the gap, and the twist of a dial made the swastika brand glow red hot. Though he was dead tired and desperately in need of sleep, the Nazi knew that first he needed to exorcise his psychological demons, so he set the pigsticker down on the bench in the lab and returned to the truck.

  The Aryan used a handcart to remove the toolbox from the flatbed of the truck. Rolling it down a ramp that he’d hooked onto the tail, he wheeled the box and its human contents into the old gold mine, past the butcher’s station and through the quantum lab, pressing on into psychopathic shadows. Finally, at the border where light succumbed to darkness, the Nazi stopped pushing and levered the cart upright. As he swung open the lid of the toolbox, the hog-tied youth crumpled out onto the hard rock.

  Doubling back to the lab, the Aryan gathered his tools. He had to watch his footing. If he fell while weighed down with so many military props, he might sear himself with the red-hot brand of the iron.

  Even tied hand and foot, Yuri was twitching like the electrified leg of a galvanic frog. Ninety percent of crystal meth was artificial solvents. Not only did the drug kill brain cells, but the human body couldn’t break it down. So strong was the addiction and so severe the physical damage that detoxing took weeks or months, not days. Just hours into withdrawal, Yuri was a sweaty, jittering mess.

  The Internet does a brisk trade in Second World War militaria. All those vets with basement museums. The Soviet colonel’s uniform wasn’t the real thing, but it was a convincing replica, right down to the last insignia patch. First, the Aryan locked the steel helmet onto Yuri’s head, cinching the chinstrap tightly under his jaw. In the workshop, he had modified the Red Army helmet for the dark pit of the mine by soldering an unbreakable lamp to its crown. When he turned on the lamp to ensure it worked, the street kid’s shivering made the beam bounce about like a Second World War searchlight scanning the sky for bombers.

  Next, the Aryan clamped a scold’s bridle around Yuri’s chin. With the blindfold and gag still in place, the teen strained against the chinstrap in protest, and that allowed the Nazi to wedge the bit between his teeth.

  At the back of the helmet, the prongs of the bridle joined together to form a handle. A hook like those used by the Gestapo to hang traitors in Berlin was screwed into the granite wall at neck height. The Aryan hung the Soviet colonel’s tunic on the hook, then lifted up the street kid and hung him by the helmet handle. That done, the Nazi was able to fit the jacket around Yuri’s upper torso, for it had been slit where tied hands would get in the way. Velcro fasteners were sewn on to pinch the openings back together. The belt looped around the waist of the tunic had handcuffs attached.

  Snap! Snap! The cuffs locked around Yuri’s bound wrists.

  From his hips down, he was naked.

  It was fantasy time.

  * * *

  When the blindfold was torn from the youth’s eyes, he came face to face with the Third Reich incarnate. Yuri blinked against the blinding spotlight of the miner’s lamp that glared at him from the brow of a Nazi storm trooper’s helmet. “Oink, oink,” the Aryan grunted in the startled colonel’s face as he pulled him off the meat hook. His jelly legs buckling beneath him, Yuri collapsed to the rock floor. Only then did he realize that his feet were free of bonds.

  Ssssss!

  The smell of burned flesh assailed the Aryan’s nostrils as he applied the brand. When he pulled the iron back and tossed it aside, the mark of the swastika smoked black on white. Jerking, staggering, stumbling as he struggled to flee, Yuri scrambled away into the bowels of the mine. Dressed in the full blitzkrieg regalia of Hitler’s elite supermen, the Aryan squatted to arm himself with the pigsticker he’d dropped near his jackboot.

  The beam from the Nazi helmet zeroed in on the white buttocks of the Untermensch.

  In a pantomime of The Triumph of the Will, the Aryan goose-stepped in pursuit as he extended th
e blade of the pigsticker along the beam.

  Then he charged.

  Warrior of the Night

  North Vancouver

  Dane parked his car in front of the house that he had called home for all of his formative years and climbed out into the dusk with a bag of takeout Chinese food and a six-pack of Tsingtao beer. The house was out of whack with the others in the neighborhood. At one time, in the early twentieth century, it could be seen down on Marine Drive, the main drag of the North Shore waterfront. But with the rampant commercialization of that strip in the post-war years, Dane’s grandfather had decided to move up—literally. He’d cut the house off just below the subfloor and had it trucked up the hill on a flatbed to this spot. The other homes on the street had been built in the 1950s, so this throwback to Victoria’s reign stood out.

  The house was steep-roofed from side to side, with dormer peaks at the front. The house was white, the roof two-tone gray, and all the trim and the window shutters forest green. The corners of the yard out front were planted with towering firs and various deciduous trees. The only blemish was the “For Sale” sign.

  A half century in one family.

  Three generations.

  So much happiness and sorrow within these walls.

  Dane wondered who would buy it, this old house.

  And what their future would hold.

  The first thing Dane did upon entering the house was to check on Puss. During the long months of his granddad’s cancer slide, a stray cat had taken to entering if a door was left open, almost as if it knew that the old man was in need of its comfort. He was, so Dane had cut a porthole into the backdoor to enable Puss to come and go at will.