Crucified Page 18

  Careening down a long hill, the car crashed into a tree, spilling out its occupants before it overturned in a ditch.

  His skull caved in, Rommel was thrown clear. Blackness engulfed him as the other Spitfire swooped down to strafe the car and pick off survivors.

  DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

  GERMANY, NOW

  They stood on the rim of the pit, gazing down at the Ace of Clubs as the clouds overhead slid sunlight and shadow along its fuselage.

  "Do you believe in God?" Wyatt asked.

  "Yes," Rutger replied. "I'm a practicing Catholic."

  "Oh?"

  "You sound surprised. 'God is dead. God remains dead.

  And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?' Is that what you expect from me?"

  "Nietzsche was German. And God-is-dead thinking is the mainstream for modern historians."

  "I'd rather allow for light beyond the darkness, wouldn't you? That shaft of hope that sneaks through the chinks in our armor can exorcise despair."

  "I wish I could believe," Wyatt said. "As Sir Thomas Browne put it, 'There's another man within me that's angry with me.'"

  Rutger shrugged. "We're all Jekyll and Hyde. I'm in a constant battle with faith and skepticism. I'm a doubting Thomas in an age of doubt. That's how I grapple with faith and disillusionment. But human nature isn't black and white. It's black and gray. I doubt myself. I doubt others. And sometimes, I doubt God. But it's my ultimate doubt about doubt that keeps me clinging to faith."

  "The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, colonial-ism, the wars ignited by religious hatred—all this fuels my skepticism. Our religious impulse is like our sex drive—primal, powerful, and potentially explosive. What turns me off religion is its insatiable appetite for violence."

  "Are you an atheist? Do you reject Christ?"

  "I accept Jesus—factual or fictional—as one of the pathfinders to faith," Wyatt said. "My big 'if' surrounds the existence of God. As long as that remains an 'if,' I'll compromise and call myself agnostic."

  "The death of God means the death of a meaningful cosmos.

  Ethical chaos—nihilism—lurks at the end of that dark road," Rutger warned. "So what brought on this discussion of metaphysics?"

  "I can't get the horrifying image of Mick Balsdon spiked on the Judas chair out of my mind. And now we have Lenny Jones with his face pulverized. The motive for both murders has to be related to the contents of the Judas package. It can't be decades-old atomic secrets. So it must be the biblical relics that Judas is supposed to have included in the package."

  "I agree," said Rutger.

  "Let's make use of your Catholic training. Are you up for a game of Devil's Advocate?"

  The devil's advocate was a canon lawyer appointed to argue against a person's candidacy for sainthood. His job was to take a skeptical view of the candidate's character, look for holes in the evidence, and argue that miracles attributed to the proposed saint were fraudulent. Wyatt's Devil's Advocate was a game for solving history's whodunits.

  "What's the question?" asked Rutger.

  "Who was Hitler's Judas?"

  Wyatt fetched a coin from his pocket.

  "Heads or tails?"

  "Tails," chose the German.

  The American flipped the coin.

  "Heads it is. Me first. You're the devil's advocate."

  He switched the coin for a notebook and tore out two pages, handing one to Rutger. Each man then wrote down the name of the traitor he thought was Judas.

  Rutger folded his sheet of paper, and Wyatt held his out.

  "Rommel," it read.

  "Chivalry," said Wyatt. "That's the key. Rommel called the war in North Africa what?"

  "Krieg ohne Hass," answered Rutger. "War without hate."

  Wyatt flipped to a page of jottings in his notebook and read aloud, '"We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.' That was Churchill's opinion of Rommel in 1942. After Rommel's death in 1944, Churchill said, 'He also deserves our respect, because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this, he paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy, there is little place for chivalry.'

  "Of all Hitler's generals, Rommel was the only adversary admired by those he fought. He wasn't a Nazi. He was nonpolitical. He ordered his soldiers to fight clean, and he treated prisoners well, reducing the rations of his own men so POWs could eat. He ignored several of Hitler's orders: to execute captives of the Jewish Brigade, to execute all commandos, and to stand fast at El Alamein and sacrifice his men in the process. Faced with certain defeat, Rommel ordered a retreat. General Paulus, on the other hand, followed the order at Stalingrad, and tore the guts out of the German army.

  "The phrase 'doing a Rommel' became the British soldiers' slang for having success at something. A British commander actually found it necessary to issue a memo saying, 'It would be most unfavorable for our soldiers to attribute supernatural powers to him.' Montgomery hung a framed portrait of the Desert Fox in his trailer. Even the hardest of hard-asses, General George 'Old Blood and Guts' Patton allegedly declared Rommel to be a 'magnificent bastard.'

  "So to my mind, the only German leader with the stature to negotiate an armistice with Churchill behind Hitler's back was Rommel," concluded Wyatt. "Over to you."

  This was the point where Rutger, the devil's advocate, was supposed to rush in swinging and knock the stuffing out of Wyatt's theory.

  Instead, he opened his paper and held it out.

  It read, "Rommel."

  "Why?" asked Wyatt.

  "Rommel returned from Africa disillusioned. He'd been fighting a gentlemen's war, but then he learned of the death camps, slave labor, the extermination of the Jews, and other atrocities. He asked Hitler to disband the Gestapo, redistribute members of the SS among the regular forces, and stop enlist-ing young boys. Hitler refused. That's when Rommel became convinced that Hitler's intransigence would result in the Fatherland's utter devastation.

  "By 1944, there were two plans to topple Hitler. A group in Berlin—the Berlinerldsung— was willing to use any means, including assassination, to get rid of Hitler. There's no credible evidence that Rommel fell in with the July Plotters, however.

  He feared that killing Hitler would turn him into a martyr.

  "The other group—the Westldsung—focused on the force preparing to meet Eisenhower's imminent invasion of France.

  Their aim—like you said—was to negotiate an armistice with Britain and America so that Germany could hurl everything it had at the dreaded Russians. To do that, they needed Rommel.

  They sent Dr. Karl Strolin, a soldier who had served with him in the First World War, to recruit him at his home in Herrlingen toward the end of February 1944."

  "A month before the Ace went down," said Wyatt.

  "The timeline works," said Rutger. "Rommel was perfectly placed for the western conspiracy. At his home, Rommel talked to Strolin for several hours about the fact that Germany couldn't win the war, even with the secret weapons mentioned in propaganda reports. At some point, Rommel acknowledged that it might be his 'duty' to come to the rescue of Germany."

  "Why do you think he did?"

  "The atomic bomb," said Rutger. "By 1944, Rommel's overwhelming fear was that Hitler would issue the same insane order for a suicidal last stand at the end of the war that he had at both El Alamein and Stalingrad. If he did, that might induce the Allies to use the atomic bomb on Germany."

  "So he launched a third plot against Hitler."

  "The Judas conspiracy."

  "A plot so secret we still don't know for sure who Judas was."

  "To the Nazis, Hitler was the savior of Germany. So whoever tried to betray him to Churchill in 1944 was equivalent to Judas. The Bible tells us that Judas was possessed by Satan, so the traitor who tr
ied to negotiate an armistice with Churchill was . .."

  "The devil's advocate," Wyatt said.

  Both players grinned.

  "From February on, Rommel was in a more extraordinary position than any general in history. On the one hand, he was the chosen defender of France against invasion. On the other hand, he was advancing a secret peace agreement with Churchill.

  Churchill respected him for the reasons you mention, and he was more pragmatic than America when it came to unconditional surrender. We know from his 'Iron Curtain' speech that he believed the Russians were a postwar threat. Here was a way to have the Germans hold the Soviets back. Hitler would be over-thrown in favor of Rommel, who was a hero on both sides of the conflict and was supported by the anti-Nazi Westldsung."

  Wyatt jumped in for the kill.

  "So Churchill sent Ack-Ack DuBoulay in the Ace of Clubs to hook up with Rommel. To show good faith, Rommel packaged up Heisenberg's file on Hitler's atomic bomb and prepared to smuggle it to Britain in a U-boat. That gamble wasn't as perilous as it seems, for America was way ahead in the bomb race. But actions have always spoken louder than words in my country, and it would have given Churchill the card he required to bring Washington on board. America's great Satan has always been godless Communism."

  "The sub must have been on its way to Churchill when the twist of fate occurred. By chance, a marauding fighter spied Rommel's car on the road, so down swooped David to strafe ii with machine-gun and cannon fire."

  Wyatt perked up.

  The game's afoot, he thought.

  This friendship was not without its one-upmanship The game of Devil's Advocate had elements of rivalry. The fun was trying to trap the other guy with the scope of your knowledge, and like most Europeans, Rutger felt those on his side of the pond had a broader view of history than the somewhat isolationist cowboys on the other side.

  Cowboys like me, thought Wyatt, who always loved a piss-ing contest.

  "David?" he prodded.

  "The myth-busters," Rutger teased. "They're not big enough for a swagger in their stride, so they pride themselves on being Davids to our Goliaths. A David got Rommel."

  "Wasn't the plane a P-47 Thunderbolt?"

  "So you Americans claimed. But every witness on the ground said it was a Spitfire. Finally, in 2004, David was officially credited with the strafing of Rommel. He joined the company of his countryman who shot down the Red Baron."

  "I thought that was Snoopy."

  "No, that was Roy Brown. But now the evidence seems to indicate that the Red Baron was shot from the ground."

  "Scratch one David, huh?"

  Think, Wyatt, think. The clue is "Not big enough for a swagger in their stride."

  "That leaves Charley Fox," offered the German.

  "Who got Rommel, right?"

  "Time's up," Rutger said. "Fox and Brown were . . ."

  Work the odds, Wyatt. Who trained the most war pilots?

  Who put Sweaty in the air before we joined the war?

  "Canadians," he snapped.

  "You lucky devil," Rutger conceded.

  "Double or nothing," Wyatt said. "Let's go for the Blue Max. The big question is, What happened to the sub?"

  SEA WOLVES

  SCOTLAND, I944

  "Los/" barked the skipper.

  Fire!

  The bow of the sub shot up with the sudden loss of torpedo weight. The Black Devil had the first practical "swim out"

  torpedo tubes. Contra-rotating propellers drove the "eel" forward at nine knots, and the bubble-free ejection left no surface wake. Since this was a test trip with tight rules of engagement, the torpedo was set to shoot straight and sink if it missed its target.

  "Scheisse!"

  Shit! swore the skipper. "Not even close!"

  No detonation jarred the U-boat or lit up the viewfinder of the periscope. The Old Man—his entire body arched forward with tension—grappled with the massive shaft as if it were a dancing bear. Having spotted the intruder in the Firth of Forth, a British destroyer was coming to attack. This wasn't how the delivery of the Judas package was supposed to occur, but necessity is the mother of invention. If only Stiirmer could have a look through the periscope at the Scottish waterway, or at least get a running commentary from the skipper.

  "The second tube," the Old Man snapped. "This time, get it right. Miss with our last eel and we won't jump off the devil's shovel."

  Translation: we're dead.

  "Skipper," yelled the radioman from below. "Another one coming portside!"

  Destroyers specialized in hunting and killing subs. Armed to the teeth with radar, sonar, guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and spigot mortars, these "tin cans" could zigzag in crazy doglegs and fill the depths with enough TNT to crumple Davy Jones's locker. In this game, a sub had two options: kill or dive out of the way.

  Two destroyers and one torpedo.

  Calculate the odds.

  The Black Devil was fitted with the best mechanical director angle computer. With his eyes glued to the periscope shaft, the skipper called out estimates of target range, target speed, target angle to the bow, and torpedo speed for Sturmer, the first watch officer, to feed into the computer. It calculated the firing angle and trajectory needed to hit the destroyer, and transmitted that information to the gyroscope aiming the torpedo. Everything having to do with firing the sub's torpedoes was controlled from the conning tower, and the computer kept adjusting the steering mechanism right up to the moment of ejection from the tube.

  Sturmer heard the computer purr as it performed.

  "Here's something to chew on," the captain growled at whatever he saw through the periscope. "Tube two . . ."

  A measured pause .. .

  "Fire!"

  Again, the Black Devil bucked from loss of weight. Down below, the chief engineer reacted, flooding the ballast tanks the moment the eel ejected to make sure the sudden buoyancy didn't force the boat to surface and turn it into a sitting duck.

  "Crash dive!" the Old Man ordered.

  The eel had an impact—not a magnetic influence—fuse. To detonate, the firing pin and whiskers required at least a glancing blow. But even if the torpedo scored a hit and took out one destroyer, there was no defense against the other sub killer, except to dive as fast as could be down, down, down to the depths of the sea.

  "Into the cellar," the skipper said as the periscope retracted.

  Rung by rung, they scrambled down from the conning tower, one man's boots chasing the other's grasp on the ladder.

  A jarring percussion rocked the boat.

  "A hit!" the men below rejoiced in unison.

  But the triumph was short lived.

  The Black Devil was in a steep plunge. The bilge water rushed forward beneath the floor plates. The sausages dangling overhead swung like pendulums. "All hands forward!" the Old Man ordered those standing by, and they charged toward the bow to add body weight.

  "Depth charges coming," warned the radioman.

  The hydrophones were picking up sonar pings. The noise was like a hammer hitting a tuning fork. The ship stalking them was pulsing out high frequencies and catching anything that bounced back from submerged objects like this submarine.

  Ping . . .

  Ping . . .

  Ping . . .

  Blechkoller was the term. "Tin-can neurosis." The numbing dread that seized submariners under depth-charge attack.

  Ping ...

  Ping . . .

  Booooom!

  Sound is five times louder in water than it is in the air.

  The force of the first charge slammed the sub like a sledgehammer. The boat vibrated violently from bow to stern. Crewmen not holding on to something were knocked off their feet.

  The first casualty of the shock wave was the Old Man. A metal surface caught the skipper under his chin, jerking back his head so sharply that his neck snapped.

  Booooom!

  The second blast snuffed the lights.

  Every sound was amplified in th
is dark kettledrum. Their sole protection from the sea was a sheet of steel, and the thud-thuds knocking them about were testing its stress resistance. Crockery smashed to pieces, and the floor plates jumped and clattered. Light bulbs popped from their sockets, and instruments shattered. Wood splintered while food cans flew like caged canaries. How much more jolting could the Black Devil take before it split at the seams?

  Before one of the hull welds cracked and the green sea poured in?

  With the skipper dead, Sturmer took command. Surrender the sub in the Firth of Forth and he could finish delivering the Judas package.

  The destroyer was racing up and down under full steam, a poacher fishing with bombs.

  The tension was nerve-shredding.

  Sturmer held his breath.

  White cones from flashlights cast circles on the dark. Oil-smeared faces twitched in the pools of light. One seaman chewed his lip. Another scrunched his eyes. Two, like turtles, hunched their heads down between their shoulders.

  Emergency lights came on and bathed the sub in electric blue. Drops of perspiration splashed into the bilge. The crew feared the next depth charge would nail the lid down forever.

  Every sailor's deepest fear is the cruel sea. Water strangles slowly in a drowning submarine. A trip to the bottom takes time.

  Will the water pressure compress the sub to a lump? Do corpses rot in the lower depths, or do fish gnaw flesh from the bones?

  A drum roll of explosions boomed on all sides. A double whammy beneath their feet punched the sub in the gut.

  "Leakage!" someone yelled.

  Jets of water spurted, drenching the sailors and filling the sub with dense blue clouds.

  "Blow the ballast tanks," Sturmer commanded. "All hands prepare to surface."

  Down here, men were wholly dependent on equipment.

  Batteries, in any sub, posed two perils: damaged cells could cause the loss of underwater power, and battery casings cracked by depth-charge jolts could spill their electrolytes into the bilge. Electrolysis of the sodium chloride in the brine would then produce—