Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  “Supposedly, Shambhala,” she said. “Open to the chosen.”

  He frowned. Chosen reminded him of the tribal Jews, but also the SS, the master race. “Like men who brave this trail?”

  “It’s all legend, metaphor, and symbol. I can’t promise there’s anything on the other side.” She looked at the forbidding trail. “Maybe this is a natural fault. Maybe this used to be a road thirteen feet wide and the rest of it has caved into the river and it’s now impassable. Maybe the tale-tellers all stopped here without going on and invented everything we think we know.”

  “And maybe no one has dared this since ancient times.” His eye gleamed. “You wouldn’t be here, Keyuri, if you didn’t believe that yourself. You wouldn’t have tried to betray me to the British if you didn’t think there was something to find.”

  She blinked, looking into the canyon. “Do you believe in destiny, Kurt?”

  “You mean fate?”

  “Fate that you met me.”

  “Yes. Things happen for a reason. Opportunity comes for a reason.”

  Her eyes were solemn. “Pain happens for a reason?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Yes!”

  “I’m going into Shambhala with you. But never think I’m truly with you. This is for my country, not yours.”

  “Of course. Each of us has our loyalties. But destiny has brought us this far together.” He held her shoulders. “Let’s see where else she takes us.” Until I don’t need you anymore, he thought.

  The climbing rope was reeled in and a fresh piton driven above the ledge where they crowded. Kranz looked excited, Muller doubtful, Diels like a fatalistic infantryman resigned to making a charge. Eckells, who’d come up last because he’d insisted on bringing his cameras, was muttering Heil Hitler to summon Nazi courage. They squeezed like a single organism.

  Then Raeder went first, his face to the cliff, sidling sideways, his Mauser hunting rifle slung across his back. The cataract roared and sucked at the cliff face twenty feet below his boots. It was like mincing on a frozen pond. Rope spooled out behind him. At a hundred feet he drove in a second piton. When the rope was secured, the second German sidled forward. Each member of the party followed in turn, until they were strung like beads on a string.

  “Now, stay still and hold on while I advance,” he ordered them. Again he extended like a spider, fastening a line the others could follow. When the last German advanced, a slipknot let the first line come loose so it could be reeled in and used again. It was like the creep of a caterpillar.

  Raeder always went first, with nothing to hold on to. The leader takes the most risk.

  The canyon grew darker and colder as they penetrated.

  What if they ran out of pitons?

  Keyuri was shivering, but said nothing. She was sandwiched between Muller and Eckells and shuffled forward with them as her turn came.

  Hour followed hour. They’d no idea what the sun was doing; it was eternal shadow in this crack in the mountains. They crept a hundred feet at a time, Raeder refusing the offers of the others to pioneer the route.

  “I led us here, and I will lead us out,” he said. “The Fatherland calls us to courage, my friends.”

  Muller rolled his eyes. Diels shared a sly smile.

  After an eternity, the canyon seemed to be lightening. Raeder had Diels grip his pack while he leaned out over the rushing river to peer ahead. Then he gestured and was pulled back.

  “I see the canyon ending,” he said. “There’s a wider valley beyond, and distant snow. I think we’re coming to Shambhala, comrades.”

  “What does it look like, Kurt?”

  He winked. “Paradise.”

  All he had glimpsed was the white of ice. But his men began shuffling faster.

  They could see where the trail broadened at the end of the canyon, two hundred yards ahead, when the pitons at last ran out.

  “What if we need them for this Shambhala?” Muller asked moodily.

  “I’ll send you crawling back to get them,” Raeder snapped. Then, even though he couldn’t possibly know, “Don’t worry, we’re past the worst.” He addressed the others. “We’re almost there. From here we balance. You’ve seen me do it. We’re almost off this hellish path.”

  They’d made another thirty yards, legs trembling from the strain of mincing along the icy ledge, when there was the flicker of a shadow above. The others might have missed it, but Raeder’s senses were honed by the concentration required when hunting. His head jerked upward. A vulture?

  No, a plane! It flashed a moment in the narrow ribbon of sky above the canyon and then disappeared behind the other rim. An airplane here? The Tibetans had none. Was this some British trick?

  He could hear the craft circling. “God in heaven,” he muttered.

  “Not God, Kurt,” Keyuri said. “Benjamin Hood.”

  “What?” For just a second his practiced composure was gone. He looked back to where she clung on the canyon wall.

  “He’s pursuing you,” she said. “You’ve led him to what he’s looking for.”

  “You’re lying.”

  She looked at him evenly, and he knew she wasn’t.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I planned it. As did the Reting.”

  “Damn you!”

  She allowed herself a smile.

  The other Germans looked bewildered.

  “The American?” asked Diels. “In Tibet?”

  Raeder thought. “He can’t land ahead in the valley of Shambhala, or he’d be doing so already. We’d hear the drone of his motor. He’ll have to come in the same way we did. But we’re first, and ready for him.”

  “You’re going to shoot him?”

  “Stop him.”

  “But if he brings the British or Tibetan army . . .”

  “No one is bringing an army.” He glanced around the precipitous canyon. “You others, go around me. I’ll be last.”

  “Go around you?” protested Kranz. “We’ll fall off!” The river thundered below, steaming as if boiling.

  “I’ll jam my mitten into the crack here to brace myself. I’ll be like a root in this cliff. Hold on to my pack and squeeze by.” There was another flicker and a faint sound of engine noise. The biplane again. “Hurry!”

  One by one they crept around him, clutching his pack, trembling at the strain, and then continued sidling on the narrow trail, creeping toward where it widened to a shelf in what must be a valley. Muller, Kranz, Diels, Keyuri . . .

  Eckells was last.

  The Nazi cameraman was exhausted. The movie camera and tripod were awkward and unbalancing. He grabbed Raeder’s pack, began moving around, and hesitated, his limbs shaking from exhaustion. His gear was hauling him backward. A foot slipped, and he leaned out over the river.

  “Franz, don’t stop! Move, move!”

  Eckells began to flail.

  “Franz, you’re pulling me loose! We’ll go into the river!”

  The cameraman’s eyes widened as he panicked. He tried to make a sound, but nothing came out. All he could sense was the water below.

  “Franz, you’re peeling me off the cliff! Let go!”

  Eckells clung tighter. Raeder began to lose his own grip.

  So the Untersturmführer stomped on the cameraman’s instep, the pain causing Eckells to release his grip in surprise. His mouth formed an O of pain and shock.

  Then he was falling.

  There was a splash and Eckells was gone in an instant, a dark form flashing down the racing sluice of a river, sinking from the weight of his own pack. In less time than it took to drown he would reach the falls.

  And then it was as if their companion had never existed at all.

  Raeder slammed himself back into the protection of the cliff.

  The others froze, horror-struck. All were in front of their leader now, staring back.

  Raeder took a breath, cursing, and then ignored them. He slung off his pack, put it on the slippery ledge, and hauled out some explosive.
/>   “Kurt!” Muller yelled in alarm. “What are you doing?”

  The zoologist jammed dynamite into the crevice he’d just clung to. There was no way to wire a detonator. He fumbled for a lighter and lit a fuse. “Sending the American a message!” he called. “No army can follow!”

  “Kurt, no!”

  “Silence!” He began following the others, facing forward on the trail to make better speed, ignoring the torrent below as he tottered. The fuse was burning. “Go, go, if you don’t want us all to be blown off the cliff!”

  “But how are we going to get back?” Diels shouted.

  “By finding Shambhala and a new kind of power!” the German roared.

  “You’re a madman!” Muller cried.

  “And you’re dead if you don’t move!”

  Keyuri put her hand on Muller’s arm. “It’s all right,” she whispered.

  Muller stared at her. What did she mean?

  “Soon it will all be over.”

  She’s a witch, the geophysicist thought. We’re doomed.

  They crept on as fast as they dared, trying to put distance between them and the explosive.

  It went off like a clap of thunder, the shock wave nearly shaking them off. Rock blew out from their side of the canyon to crash against the other wall before falling into the river. Where the precipitous trail had been, where Eckells had fallen, there was now only a bite out of the rock.

  They had no more pitons, no means of ascending glaciers, no route home.

  The biplane passed by one more time, a flicker as it flew from rim to rim.

  Raeder laughed, lifting his arm in Nazi salute to the sky. “Try to follow me now, Hood!”

  His companions huddled. They had become Shambhalans.

  26

  Shambhala Valley, Tibet

  October 3, 1938

  If Kurt Raeder hadn’t set off his explosion, Benjamin Hood might never have confirmed the Nazis were there. Beth Calloway had shouted that their fuel was getting low, that they must turn back if they were ever to return to Lhasa. She wasn’t about to abandon her precious Corsair by having it run out of gas in this desolation. But then there was a flash and smoke from what almost seemed inside the earth, and the Americans realized they’d guessed right. The Germans must be inside a narrow canyon, trying to reach the valley beyond. And the Nazis had seen them and were destroying something in reaction, Hood bet. The race was to its final sprint.

  It was the end of a long, wearying day of flying from Lhasa.

  When he’d met Calloway and her plane outside the summer palace grounds in the Tibetan capital, Hood was honest. This was a woman he’d last seen when they were making love, and now she’d been asked to fly him off the edge of the map.

  “Do you know who we’re going after?” he asked. Not what, but who.

  “Your old lover and your old enemy.” She said it matter-of-factly. The Tibetans had been candid.

  “And this is okay with you?”

  “Shut up and crank the propeller.”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “So I double my fee. To buy more shoes.”

  “Beth, I didn’t expect to go after Keyuri again.”

  “But you hoped you would.”

  “She’s not what this is about.”

  “Yes she is.”

  “When we get back, we’ll sort all this out.”

  “If you get back. I’m flying this crate, and I’ll be judging which of the pair of you is lighter.” She smirked, menacingly.

  He hunted for the right words. “Your plane is the only chance to catch the Nazis.”

  “The only chance after giving them time to find what the Tibetans want them to find. Right? The Germans are playing the Tibetans, and the Tibetans are playing us, and you’re playing me. Everyone’s got a bet in this fiasco, Ben, so don’t worry about stamping out medals. Let’s just do what we have to.”

  “What’s your bet?”

  She shrugged. “That your nun is unlikely to be alive by the time we get to her. Or as sweet as you remember. Or available.”

  “But if she is?”

  “I’ll save as many of our hides as I can. It’s what I do.”

  They took off, the altitude forcing them to snake through passes instead of hopping over mountains to fly direct. The biplane followed the trace of dirt roads below, Hood watching for the Germans but finding only what he expected, herds of goats and caravans of yaks and oxen. The trade traffic thinned as they flew north and west of the city, and then nearly ended altogether. They followed the main trunk road that led west, a thread of connection in a vast plateau wilderness, the wind so biting that Hood almost wrapped his head like a mummy with the silk scarf Reting had provided in trade. Calloway had a khata of her own. The fabric hid her expression. Behind her flying goggles, he couldn’t see her eyes.

  “At some point they’ll have to turn for the Kunlun!” he shouted.

  “Watch for sign.”

  An hour later, he saw it. A lighter scrawl of dust on a tributary track suggested a place where dirt had been kicked up by more than animal hooves. He pointed and she banked, nodding at the line of tire tracks. They turned north. The biplane bucked in the cold air.

  A hundred miles on, a glint of metal confirmed they were on the Germans’ trail. It was the British motorcar, overturned, wheels up, slid down a hill. An accident? They circled twice, looking for bodies or survivors, but saw none.

  “I think it broke down!” Hood said over the roar of the engine.

  Beth nodded.

  They flew on.

  Three hours more and they came to an enormous crack in the crust of the earth. A huge canyon sat athwart the path, and the truck and trailer were beside it. A rope stretched across the chasm. Again, no sign of life.

  “Pray they left the gas,” Beth said.

  This landing spot was even rougher than the one with the shoot-out, but there were no bandits this time. No Germans, either. Nobody at all, just the sighing wind of an emptiness even the Tibetans didn’t want. Beth topped off her tank with the German spare fuel while Hood got more by siphoning the German truck dry. She put three canisters in the biplane’s storage compartment while he hid the rest behind a rock. If they survived, this was the only way they’d get back.

  Then they took off again, the engine throaty as they clawed over the precipitous canyon. It was getting late.

  There was a range of snowy hills they barely skimmed over, boot tracks in the snow, and then a barren basin. The Kunluns beyond were a frozen rampart that stretched as far as the eye could see. When they saw the river, Hood pointed and Beth nodded, following it. The waterfall was a white beacon miles away, and when they flew near, it seemed to be spurting from the cliff face. The canyon was a cleft too narrow to see into. Odd.

  They circled. Down at the base of the waterfall, Hood spotted abandoned bundles of equipment.

  “Go as high as you can! See if we can fly above the source of the river and get into the mountains!”

  They pivoted upward like a climbing bird. There was a snowy saddle at the top of the cliffs that led toward white haze. A jagged black line represented the rift in the rock below. As they passed over it, he got brief glimpses of racing gray water.

  Were the Germans somewhere in that chasm?

  Beth rapped him on the shoulder and pointed. Several miles east, at the outer base of the Kulun range, there was a wisp of smoke. They saw a tracery of wall there.

  Did someone live near the gate of Shambhala?

  Then they saw the flash of the explosion, deep in the crack of the river.

  “They’re here!” he shouted.

  “Where?” She peered over the side. The crevice was narrower in places than her wings.

  “They must be pushing through. See if we can fly over the saddle. It must be where they’re going.”

  “We’re already at our limit.”

  “Climb anyway.”

  Shaking her head, she aimed where he pointed. “Pray.”

  M
ountain piled upon mountain. They skimmed the snow. The engine was laboring in the thin air, wheels dipping toward a crash . . . and then the ground plunged abruptly away, sheer cliffs again, and they popped out over a hidden valley.

  Shambhala was like a well. The vale was shadowy, ringed by towering peaks with glaciers that fed the river. Yet at the bottom it also had an improbable wash of green, totally unexpected in October. Somehow the basin below must be warmer than the bitter norm.

  Beth dipped and circled, rotating around the curve of the mountain bowl. There was a party of people down there, hurrying through a jumble of old ruins.

  “Can you land?”

  “Where? Look at that mess.”

  “But the Germans must have blown the only way in.”

  “One of the ways, unless your Germans and your old girlfriend don’t plan on ever coming back.” She glanced around. Everywhere, mountains higher than their maximum altitude, her biplane a fly in a cup. Pass a few miles in either direction and you’d never suspect this secret hole was here.

  “Christ,” Hood cursed. “We can’t climb over those cliffs, either.”

  “There is another way, college boy, but you ain’t gonna like it.” She kept them rotating. The party below had disappeared.

  “What?”

  “Jump.”

  “I wish.” He looked down. If only he could step onto those snowy slopes, maybe he could pick his way down . . .

  “Wish granted.” She unbuckled straps, put the plane straight and level for a moment, half stood, and wiggled out of her parachute. “Tie the straps as tight as you can. When you fall, yank that cord there. You don’t have much room, and need time for the canopy to deploy. You’ll still land hard.”

  “I’ve never used a parachute!”

  “Neither have I.”

  Hood groaned. “There’s no alternative?”

  “This is what you get for chasing your Tibetan sweetheart. I’ll try landing back on the plain we crossed and check out that smoke. No house has only one door.”

  He closed his eyes. “Igloos do.”

  “So you’d better hope the Shambhalans weren’t Eskimo. Hurry up, we’re wasting gas! Pretty soon it might occur to Raeder to start shooting at you.”

  Hood lengthened the straps for his frame and awkwardly put the parachute on. It felt bulky and flimsy at the same time. “To think I was bored.”