Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  Diplomatic telegrams awaited Raeder, protesting their progress and demanding a return to Calcutta. But the German Foreign Office was putting pressure on the English to leave the Germans alone and it sent its own telegrams, seeking to bog the debate down in an exchange of diplomatic notes. While consuls argued, Raeder bluffed his way past the British constabulary, hired a train of oxen, and pushed on toward the Sikkim capital of Gangtok.

  He knew how Asia worked. You butted your way, arrogant and impatient, or got nowhere. Now he marched up the hairpin turns of the riotously green Tista Valley with their animals, each ox plodding from four cases of equipment strapped to its back.

  Still the monsoon sluiced down.

  From every slope sprung a hundred white waterfalls, and in the gorges the rivers roared with chocolate fury. The Germans cut upward, first through birch and dark fir and then through whole forests of rhododendron, clouds of bright butterflies hovering over every puddle and wet leaf. The air was so thick with moisture that climbing was like rising from the bottom of a pool. They struggled through mud, crossed precarious log and vine-cable bridges, and drove their oxen along cliff ledges. The men were smeared with goo, lard of the earth. At the end of the day they’d stand under cataracts to sluice it off, roaring out beer hall anthems.

  The rain cooled as they climbed, a promising sign of progress.

  The British were fools to let them get this far, Raeder thought.

  The oxen, powerful but ungainly, were exchanged at Gangtok for nimbler mules, better adapted to the narrower trail ahead. It took twice as many animals to carry the cases. Mounted with brilliantly colored saddles and blankets, and tethered by yak-hair ropes, the cantankerous animals brayed in chorus to the ominous throbbing of the drums and long dungchen trumpets of the Gangtok monastery. Hooves clacked on the muddy route’s rocks. German boots splashed through brimming puddles. Higher and higher they climbed, whole hillsides seeming to peel away in the deluge. Sometimes they had to halt to build a new trail across a slide.

  At Dikchu, the Devil’s Water, the old rope bridge had fallen away. They winched a new one across its thundering chute, then hauled and whipped the balking animals across and up it toward the snowy crests above. The trail seemed evermore narrow, evermore wet, evermore slippery. When the rains paused it was foggy. At each stop they spent several minutes peeling leeches from each other, the odious creatures bloated with blood. Most clustered on calves and ankles, sucking greedily, but a few fell from overhanging limbs or ledges to feast on shoulder and neck.

  Only rarely did the Germans meet the occasional pilgrim or merchant. These stood aside on the precarious downslope while the Europeans pushed brusquely past, hugging the cliff.

  A wool caravan descending with wide, thick-haired yaks finally blocked their way. The horned animals filled the trail where it ran on the side of a precipitous gorge, leaving no room to pass. The wool drovers with their powerful beasts refused to yield to the Reich’s train, and yet trying to back the recalcitrant mules down to a wide spot, even if possible, risked losing the animals and their cargo into the precipice.

  Raeder pushed forward. He was wearing a pith helmet marked with the lightning runes of the SS and carried a birch switch in his left hand like a riding crop. As mule nosed with yak, the German confronted the Uygur leader. This man, a Turkic-speaking Muslim with a battered British Enfield—likely stolen from a murder victim, Raeder thought—bellowed in defiance and shook his weapon. He kept pointing down the mountain path, clearly insisting with his flinging arms that it was the Germans who must turn around. His men behind were squat, dark, and sullen.

  Neither spoke the other’s language.

  Raeder considered a moment, reached in his field jacket, and pulled out a Luger. Before anyone could react, he pointed the muzzle at the forehead of the leading Uygur yak and fired.

  The animal jerked, grunted, and then slowly leaned out from the edge of the cliff with a long sigh, its nostrils bubbling red. Its eyes rolled. Then it heavily and majestically toppled off. The yak fell free for a hundred feet and then bounced and skidded down a scree slope, skeins of wool exploding from its ruptured packs as rock flew like shrapnel. The beast churned up a tail of spray and mud.

  The Uygur chieftain stared at Raeder, openmouthed, forgetting the rifle he held in his hand. Raeder smiled. He liked shooting things.

  The German calmly stepped past the tribesman to the next animal and fired again and, even as that yak fell on its forelocks, pushed past its heaving flank to fire at a bellowing third. This time the shot went slightly wide, into the neck, but the shock was enough to send this animal into the gorge as well. As if following a lead, the second yak plunged the way of its fellows. The animals plummeted and slammed, cargo flying, as the Uygurs shouted and panicked. They’d encountered a madman!

  The other Germans hurriedly broke out their guns, readying for what they expected would be battle on a precipitous ledge.

  But the added firepower proved unnecessary. Raeder had a crazed glint to his eyes, his Luger smoking, and as he considered the next animal in line the chieftain ran past him and hastily ordered his own caravan to wheel and retreat.

  “Now, after them!” the German snapped.

  The mules were kicked and lashed forward, chasing the rumps of the lumbering yaks, until the latter came to a wider shelf and huddled next to a cliff. The Europeans pushed arrogantly past, jostling the Asians, the Uygurs looking at them with hatred. Their chieftain howled at Raeder’s back as the Nazi ascended, gesturing with his rifle, but he didn’t aim it. Raeder ignored him. And then the Nazis and their porters were around a bend and had the cliff to themselves, panting in the thin air.

  “My God, Raeder, are you insane?” Muller asked. “All we had ready was your pistol. What if the Uygurs had fought?”

  “Strike with surprise and you crush their will,” Raeder said, reloading the Luger. “We’re outnumbered a million to one, Julius, and have to act like we’re the superior. That much I’ve learned from the British.”

  “Are we going to fight our way into Tibet?”

  “We won’t have to,” the zoologist said, looking back. They could hear bells on the yaks as the surviving animals hurried down the trail. “Word of this will spread, and they’ll give us the respect we deserve.”

  Hans Diels stepped forward and clapped the Untersturmführer on the shoulder. “Now I know why Himmler picked you to lead us,” he said. “You understand how things are.”

  “And how they should be.”

  “Life is struggle,” Kranz agreed. “We need ruthlessness.”

  “Then be prepared to follow, my friends.”

  They surmounted the canyon and came out into alpine meadows full of purple gentians, blue poppies, and wild strawberries. Raeder ordered a rest while the others changed their caps for the more imposing SS pith helmets. Then they lashed red pennants with the Nazi swastika to the pommel of each mule. The men were nearing Tibet, and he wanted the diplomatic nature of their mission made clear.

  Ahead, clearing skies were dark as a lake. Peaks dazzled in the blinding clarity of pure air. Mountain snow was flawless. Buttresses of rock glittered in the sun. Behind them, the great Plain of Bengal was lost in cotton clouds.

  Heat gave way to nighttime cold, and the progress slowed still more as Muller used his magnetometer to measure the magnetic field of the earth. Anomalies, he said, might show the caverns of underground cities.

  Anomalies might reveal Shambhala.

  Kranz made measurements of the Tibetans and Bhutanese they’d hired. He pinched their heads with calipers and cast plaster masks of their faces, tubes jutting from nostrils to prevent suffocation. “No Jews here!” he announced. Since eyes were closed for the casting, the result made their masks look like those of dead men. Word of this torture spread, too, and soon Tibetans kept warily away from the anthropologist.

  “Are they Aryans?” Muller asked his colleague skeptically.

  “Maybe.”

  Eckells did double duty
by both documenting their progress on film and deploying the expedition’s aneroids to record atmospheric pressure. Raeder insisted on the scientific measurements, saying it would legitimize the expedition by contributing to German science. “We’ll win fame from the government and respect from the academies.”

  It was July 25, 1938, when a British lieutenant named Lionel Sopwith-Hastings, riding a lathered mule, finally caught up with the SS expedition and presented orders from the consulate in Gangtok to return to India immediately. The Germans were not, the orders read, to risk a diplomatic uproar by violating the border of Tibet.

  Sopwith-Hastings waited stiffly for response. He tried to muster the authority of a British imperial but at age twenty-two, with just a blond wisp on his upper lip and a frame so thin that he’d traded his military cap for that of a khampa, a fur herder, to stay warm, he was not a very intimidating presence. His pale blue eyes betrayed unhappiness at his mission, and he kept glancing at the Nazis, one by one, as if counting the odds over and over again. The Germans were brown, dirty, and bearded, with the lean athleticism that comes from years of exercise. They’d watched the Englishman approach from miles away, and arrayed on the rocks of their little encampment were three rifles, the submachine gun, boxes of cartridges, and Raeder’s Luger pistol.

  “But we do have permission,” Raeder said mildly.

  “Not according to the British consul,” the lieutenant said. He licked his lips. “I’m to escort you to Gangtok and from there to Darjeeling and Calcutta to present your case to the authorities.”

  “Ah, to present our case. We’ll get a fair hearing, then?”

  He colored. “This is the British Empire.”

  “Well.” The German stood. “You’ve displayed remarkable energy to catch up with us.”

  “You’re fast. I had to leave my police attachment and push ahead.” He gave a peek at the guns. “I can assure you they are still coming.”

  “Yes, but right now you are entirely alone.”

  “I met some Uygurs who were quite upset.”

  “They didn’t understand the rules of the road.”

  Sopwith-Hastings stood as tall as he could. “Are you going to obey the directive?” His eyes strayed to the guns again.

  “British pluck can only inspire Germany,” Raeder said. “We’ve extra mules, now that we’ve gone through some food, and two are lame. It will be efficient if you take them down for us.” He sat on a boulder and picked up the Luger, working the mechanism. There was a click as a bullet slid into the chamber. “Then it will be faster to follow.”

  Diels sat, too, picked up a Mauser, opened the bolt, and examined the weapon as if for dirt. “Perhaps you can also mark the way, where the trail is badly eroded,” Hans said. “I’ve no doubt those Uygur yaks have worsened it.”

  Sopwith-Hastings stood at attention, looking from one to the other. Then he gave a short nod. “Very well. On your honor.”

  “We’ll be on your heels unless the trail collapses,” Raeder assured. “There’s nothing up here, as you can see. It’s pointless to go on.” The little swastika pennants snapped in the wind.

  “I will await you in Gangtok.” The Brit saluted, wheeled, and went to fetch the lame mules.

  As soon as the lieutenant disappeared from view, Raeder ordered camp broken and a quick last push to the pass at Kangra La. As the others started this final climb, the German retrieved five pounds of high explosive from one of the trunks.

  “Come on, Muller. I’m tired of the English following us.”

  “Are you going to start a war?”

  “I’m going to make it impossible to have one.”

  They went downslope to a precipitous pitch above the winding trail and climbed a hundred yards above, setting the charge on a hump of fractured rock.

  “Kurt, I don’t know if this is wise,” Muller said. “This is a trade route, a lifeline. Do we have to destroy it? If word gets out, the natives could turn against us.”

  “I thought you liked to make things go boom, Julius.”

  “For science and research. Not vandalism.”

  “Reichsführer Himmler will be interested to hear you describe the necessary advancement of this expedition as vandalism.”

  “That British boy is no threat to us.”

  “That boy could bring men.” He began walking back, unreeling the fuse cord. “When Cortés reached Mexico, he burned his ships.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  “We can’t go home this way anyway. It will be through Persia or China or Russia.”

  Muller resignedly helped splice the wires to the detonator.

  “Now, twist the plunger,” Raeder ordered.

  “You do it.”

  “No. I want you to take a hand. I’m not the only National Socialist here.”

  Muller scowled but twisted. With a roar, a gout of rock flew outward and down, hammering the path and dislodging it. A rock avalanche thundered into the ravine. Stone and noise bounced in the fog.

  “Whoo!” Raeder hollered. His shout echoed away down the canyon.

  A hundred-yard section of the trail was gone. It would take weeks to carve a replacement.

  “Alas,” Raeder said. “It’s become impossible to follow the lieutenant.”

  Muller looked down at their destruction. “I had no idea, Kurt, that university zoologists were so single-minded.”

  “I learned some things in ’34 with Hood in Tibet,” Raeder replied.

  “Demolition?”

  “No. Not to give your enemies any chance at all.”

  Let the British try to follow them now.

  They traded the mules for yaks at a border village, reloaded their luggage on fewer animals, and trudged on. The trail’s surroundings were treeless now, brown where barren rock prevailed and green in watered swales. The Kangra La itself was a barren saddle marked with a cairn of stone and fluttering prayer flags.

  “Each flap of the flag sends a prayer to their gods,” Raeder told his companions.

  “What’s our prayer, Kurt?” asked Eckells.

  “Power.”

  They were at seventeen thousand feet. Around them, peaks shot ten thousand feet higher, draped with glaciers blue as fine diamonds. The sky was cobalt, the sun burned heatless. Wind whipped over the pass, snapping their clothes and pennants.

  “Tibet,” the German announced, pointing at a horizon of endless mountains. “This is what Cortés felt when he gazed on Tenochtitlán, or Moses at the Promised Land.”

  “Cortés had gold to entice him,” Kranz said.

  “Tibet has gold, too. Tons of it, in Buddhist temples. They are rich, and oddly weak.”

  “Ah, so that’s your secret motive, Kurt? We plunder? I’ve been wondering as we’ve panted.”

  “Of course not. Mere treasure hunting is a relic of history. In modern times, the gold comes from the real prize, scientific discovery.” He smiled. “But if we come away with gold as well, it will be just compensation, no?”

  “Power in this oxygen-starved, arid, medieval backwater?” Muller said skeptically, gazing at the emptiness.

  “The world’s greatest secret.” Raeder’s eyes shone, as if he might pry a revelation from the slopes of the mountains ahead. “We are looking for the force, my SS brethren, that animates the world.”

  11

  Hong Kong, China

  September 28, 1938

  Benjamin Grayson Hood traveled more miles in nine days than Raeder’s expedition had sailed and marched in nine weeks. Hood’s first three thousand miles were by train from New York to San Francisco by way of Chicago, aboard the gleaming California Zephyr. Then by seaplane more than eight thousand miles across the Pacific. The Martin 130 China Clipper flown by Pan American averaged an astonishing 163 mph, hopping to Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Guam, Manila, and Hong Kong. Each was an oasis of calm and safety, far removed from the aggression of the Japanese Empire in China.

  Hood’s ticket for this race against the Germans had cost a
staggering $1,600, or as much as two new cars. But then he’d had a private cabin with bunk, washstand, and the finest cuisine the airline could conjure. He relished the shrimp and steak while he could, and didn’t turn down the company of one Edith Warnecke, either. She was a pretty and bored thirty-five-year-old double divorcée traveling to meet her newest husband in Singapore. Edith smelled Hood’s money and pedigree; Hood, opportunity. She liked red wine, chocolate, and sex, and rode the American adventurer ragged three miles above the Pacific, moaning like another propeller.

  He was willing to oblige since the days ahead would be privation enough. And yet the amusement was oddly unsatisfying. Edith was an unhappy woman, looking for distraction. Ben realized (somewhat to his own surprise) that he was increasingly dissatisfied with distraction. Life should mean something, and not just society outings, specimen expeditions, and museum tolerance of his stooping to be a scientist. Sex should mean something, someday. After the Clipper skidded down on its pontoons into Hong Kong harbor, he stepped out on the dock, annoyed with his own conduct. Since the Tibet scandal he’d been embroiled in four years before, he’d been marking time. Now, he thought, his time had come.

  Mrs. Warnecke, sensing his mood, stalked off without a good-bye to drink by herself until the next flight to Singapore.

  What am I doing here? Hood said to himself as he watched the minuet of the junks traversing the harbor. It certainly wasn’t to fulfill some secret mission for Duncan Hale as errand boy for Uncle Sam. It was to complete what he’d long suspected was unfinished, his business with Kurt Raeder and Keyuri Lin.

  Astonishing that Raeder had dared return.

  Somewhere, in central Asia, was what he’d backed away from before: the test of being a man.

  Hood had arrived at the edge of chaos. One couldn’t tell that in Hong Kong itself, with its stately British warships, regal banks and ministries, and bustling streets where coolies pulled rickshaws at a steady trot and Chinese women of high fashion minced in narrow silk dresses slit just high enough, to the knee, to make maneuverability possible. Sampans choked the quay and liners gleamed like mammoth wedding cakes, their stacks pumping out energetic streams of smoke. All this played out against a beautiful backdrop of steep green hills as extravagant and improbable as an opera set.