Black Order

by James Rollins

  She settled on a starboard bench, her guard moving in step with her.

  Jakob sat across from them and waved to the boat’s pilot to set out. “We must not be late.” He searched down the river. They were headed west, away from the eastern front, away from the rising sun.

  He checked his watch. By now, a German Junker Ju 52 transport plane should be waiting for them in an abandoned airfield ten kilometers away. It had been painted with a German Red Cross, camouflaging it as a medical transport, an added bit of insurance against assault.

  The boats circled out into the deeper channel, engines trebling up. The Russians could not stop them now. It was over.

  Motion drew his attention back to the far side of the boat.

  Tola leaned over the baby and delivered a soft kiss atop the boy’s wispy-haired pate. She lifted her face, meeting Jakob’s gaze. He saw no defiance or anger. Only determination.

  Jakob knew what she was about to do. “Don’t—”

  Too late.

  Shifting up, Tola leaned back over the low rail behind her and kicked off with her feet. With the baby clutched to her bosom, she flipped backward into the cold water.

  Her guard, startled by the sudden action, twisted and fired blindly into the water.

  Jakob lunged to his side and knocked his arm up. “You could hit the child.”

  Jakob leaned over the boat’s edge and searched the waters. The other men were on their feet. The boat rocked. All Jakob saw in the leaden waters was his own reflection. He motioned for the pilot to circle.

  Nothing.

  He watched for any telltale bubbles, but the laden boat’s wake churned the waters to obscurity. He pounded a fist on the rail.

  Like father…like daughter…

  Only a Mischlinge would take such a drastic action. He had seen it before: Jüdische mothers smothering their own children to spare them greater suffering. He had thought Tola was stronger than that. But in the end, perhaps she had no choice.

  He circled long enough to make sure. His men searched the banks on each side. She was gone. The whistling passage of a mortar overhead discouraged tarrying any longer.

  Jakob waved his men back into their seats. He pointed west, toward the waiting plane. They still had the crates and all the files. It was a setback, but one that could be overcome. Where there was one child, there could be another.

  “Go,” he ordered.

  The pair of boats set out again, engines winding up to a full throttle.

  Within moments, they had vanished into the smoky pall as Breslau burned.

  Tola heard the boats fade into the distance.

  She treaded water behind one of the thick stone pylons that supported the ancient cast-iron Cathedral Bridge. She kept one hand clenched over the baby’s mouth, suffocating him to silence, praying he gained enough air through his nose. But the child was weak.

  As was she.

  The bullet had pierced the side of her neck. Blood flowed thickly, staining the water crimson. Her vision narrowed. Still she fought to hold the baby above the water.

  Moments before, as she tumbled into the river, she had intended to drown herself and the baby. But as the cold struck her and her neck burned with fire, something tore through her resolve. She remembered the light glowing on the steeples. It was not her religion, not her heritage. But it was a reminder that there was light beyond the current darkness. Somewhere men did not savage their brothers. Mothers did not drown their babies.

  She had kicked deeper into the channel, allowing the current to push her toward the bridge. Underwater, she used her own air to keep the child alive, pinching his nose and exhaling her breath through his lips. Though she had planned for death, once the fight for life had ignited, it grew more fierce, a fire in her chest.

  The boy never had a name.

  No one should die without a name.

  She breathed into the child, shallow breaths, in and out as she kicked with the current, blind in the water. Only dumb luck brought her up against one of the stone pilings and offered a place to shelter.

  But now with the boats leaving, she could wait no longer.

  Blood pumped from her. She sensed it was only the cold keeping her alive. But the same cold was chilling the life from the frail child.

  She kicked for shore, a frantic thrashing, uncoordinated by weakness and numbness. She sank under the water, dragging the infant down with her.

  No.

  She struggled up, but the water was suddenly heavier, harder to fight.

  She refused to succumb.

  Then under her toes, slick rocks bumped against her boots. She cried out, forgetting she was still underwater, and gagged on the mouthful of river. She sank a bit more, then kicked one last time off the muddy rocks. Her head breeched, and her body flung itself toward shore.

  The bank rose steeply underfoot.

  On hand and knee, she scrabbled out of the water, clutching the baby to her throat. She reached the shoreline and fell facedown onto the rocky bank. She had no strength to move another limb. Her own blood bathed over the child. It took her last effort to focus on the baby.

  He was not moving. Not breathing.

  She closed her eyes and prayed as an eternal blackness swallowed her.

  Cry, damn you, cry…

  Father Varick was the first to hear the mewling.

  He and his brothers were sheltered in the wine cellar beneath Saints Peter and Paul Church. They had fled when the bombing of Breslau began last night. On their knees, they had prayed for their island to be spared. The church, built in the fifteenth century, had survived the ever-changing masters of the border city. They sought heavenly protection to survive once more.

  It was in such silent piety that the plaintive cries echoed to the monks.

  Father Varick stood, which took much effort for his old legs.

  “Where are you going?” Franz asked.

  “I hear my flock calling for me,” the father said. For the past two decades, he had fed scraps to the river cats and the occasional cur that frequented the riverside church.

  “Now is not the time,” another brother warned, fear ripe in his voice.

  Father Varick had lived too long to fear death with such youthful fervor. He crossed the cellar and bent to enter the short passage that ended at the river door. Coal used to be carted up the same passage and stored where now fine green bottles nestled in dust and oak.

  He reached the old coal door, lifted the bar, and undid the latch.

  Using a shoulder, he creaked it open.

  The sting of smoke struck him first—then the mewling drew his eyes down. “Mein Gott im Himmel…”

  A woman had collapsed steps from the door in the buttress wall that supported the channel church. She was not moving. He hurried to her side, dropping again to his knees, a new prayer on his lips.

  He reached to her neck and checked for a sign of life, but found only blood and ruin. She was soaked head to foot and as cold as the stones.

  Dead.

  Then the cry again…coming from her far side.

  He shifted to find a babe, half-buried under the woman, also bloody.

  Though blue from the cold and just as wet, the child still lived. He freed the infant from the body. His wet swaddling shed from him with their waterlogged weight.

  A boy.

  He quickly ran his hands over the tiny body and saw the blood was not the child’s.

  Only his mother’s.

  He glanced sadly down at the woman. So much death. He searched the far side of the river. The city burned, roiling smoke into the dawning sky. Gunfire continued. Had she swum across the channel? All to save her child?

  “Rest,” he whispered to the woman. “You have earned it.”

  Father Varick retreated to the coal door. He wiped the blood and water from the baby. The child’s hair was soft and thin, but plainly snowy white. He could be no more than a month old.

  With Varick’s ministrations, the boy’s cries grew stronger, his fac
e pinched with the effort, but he remained weak, limp limbed, and cold.

  “You cry, little one.”

  Responding to his voice, the boy opened his swollen eyes. Blue eyes greeted Varick. Brilliant and pure. Then again, most newborns had blue eyes. Still, Varick sensed that these eyes would keep their sky blue richness.

  He drew the boy closer for warmth. A bit of color caught his eye. Was ist das? He turned the boy’s foot. Upon the heel, someone had drawn a symbol.

  No, not drawn. He rubbed to be sure.

  Tattooed in crimson ink.

  He studied it. It looked like a crow’s foot.

  But Father Varick had spent a good portion of his youth in Finland. He recognized the symbol for what it truly was: one of the Norse runes. He had no idea which rune or what it meant. He shook his head. Who had done such foolishness?

  He glanced at the mother with a frown.

  No matter. The sins of the father were not the son’s to bear.

  He wiped away the last of the blood from the crown of the boy’s head and snugged the boy into his warm robe.

  “Poor Junge…such a hard welcome to this world.”

  FIRST

  1

  ROOF OF THE WORLD

  PRESENT DAY

  MAY 16, 6:34 A.M.

  HIMALAYAS

  EVEREST BASE CAMP, 17,600 FEET

  Death rode the winds.

  Taski, the lead Sherpa, pronounced this verdict with all the solemnity and certainty of his profession. The squat man barely reached five feet, even with his battered cowboy hat. But he carried himself as if he were taller than anyone on the mountain. His eyes, buried within squinted lids, studied the flapping line of prayer flags.

  Dr. Lisa Cummings centered the man in the frame of her Nikon D-100 and snapped a picture. While Taski served as the group’s guide, he was also Lisa’s psychometric test subject. A perfect candidate for her research.

  She had come to Nepal under a grant to study the physiologic effects of an oxygen-free ascent of Everest. Until 1978, no one had summited Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. The air was too thin. Even veteran mountaineers, aided by bottled oxygen, experienced extreme fatigue, impaired coordination, double vision, hallucinations. It was considered impossible to reach the summit of an eight-thousand-meter peak without a source of canned air.

  Then in 1978, two Tyrolean mountaineers achieved the impossible and reached the summit, relying solely on their own gasping lungs. In subsequent years, some sixty men and women followed in their footsteps, heralding a new goal of the climbing elite.

  She couldn’t ask for a better stress test for low-pressure atmospheres.

  Prior to coming here, Dr. Lisa Cummings had just completed a five-year grant on the effect of high-pressure systems on human physiological processes. To accomplish this, she had studied deep-sea divers while aboard a research ship, the Deep Fathom. Afterward, circumstances required her to move on…both with her professional life and personal. So she had accepted an NSF grant to perform antithetical research: to study the physiologic effects of low-pressure systems.

  Hence, this trip to the Roof of the World.

  Lisa repositioned for another shot of Taski Sherpa. Like many of his people, Taski had taken his ethnic group as his surname.

  The man stepped away from the flapping line of prayer flags, firmly nodded his head, and pointed a cigarette pinched between two fingers at the towering peak. “Bad day. Death ride deese winds,” he repeated, then replaced his cigarette and turned away. The matter settled.

  But not for the others in their group.

  Sounds of disappointment flowed through the climbing party. Faces stared at the cloudless blue skies overhead. The ten-man climbing team had been waiting nine days for a weather window to open. Before now, no one had argued against the good sense of not climbing during the past week’s storm. The weather had been stirred up by a cyclone spinning off the Bay of Bengal. Savage winds had pummeled the camp, reaching over a hundred miles per hour, kiting away one of the cook tents, knocking people over bodily, and been followed by spats of snowfall that abraded any exposed skin like coarse sandpaper.

  Then the morning had dawned as bright as their hopes. Sunlight glinted off the Khumbu glacier and icefall. Snowcapped Everest floated above them, surrounded by its serene sister peaks, a wedding party in white.

  Lisa had snapped a hundred shots, catching the changing light in all its shifting beauty. She now understood the local names for Everest: Chomolungma, or Goddess Mother of the World, in Chinese, and Sagarmatha, the Goddess of the Sky, in Nepalese.

  Floating among the clouds, the mountain was indeed a goddess of ice and cliff. And they had all come to worship her, to prove themselves worthy to kiss the sky. And it hadn’t come cheap. Sixty-five thousand dollars a head. At least that included camping equipment, porters, Sherpas, and of course all the yaks you could want. The lowing of a female yak echoed over the valley, one of the two dozen servicing their climbing team. The blisters of their red and yellow tents decorated the camp. Five other camps shared this rocky escarpment, all waiting for the storm gods to turn their back.

  But according to their lead Sherpa, that would not be today.

  “This is so much bull,” declared the manager of a Boston sporting goods company. Dressed in the latest down-duvet one-piece, he stood with his arms crossed beside his loaded pack. “Over six hundred dollars a day to sit on our asses. They’re bilking us. There’s not a cloud in the damn sky!”

  He spoke under his breath, as though trying to incite an uprising that he had no intention of leading himself.

  Lisa had seen the type before. Type A personality…A as in asshole. Upon hindsight, perhaps she shouldn’t have slept with him. She cringed at the memory. The rendezvous had been back in the States, after an organizational meeting at the Hyatt in Seattle, after one too many whiskey sours. Boston Bob had been just another port in a storm…not the first, probably not the last. But one thing was certain: this was one port she would not be dropping anchor in again.

  She suspected this reason more than any other for his continued belligerence.

  She turned away, willing her younger brother the strength to quell the unrest. Josh was a mountaineer with a decade of experience and had coordinated her inclusion in one of his escorted Everest ascents. He led mountaineering trips around the world at least twice a year.

  Josh Cummings held up a hand. Blond and lean like herself, he wore black jeans, tucked into the gaiters of his Millet One Sport boots, and a gray expedition-weight thermal shirt.

  He cleared his throat. “Taski has scaled Everest twelve times. He knows the mountain and its moods. If he says the weather is too unpredictable to move forward, then we spend another day acclimating and practicing skills. If anyone would like, I can also have a pair of guides lead a day trip to the rhododendron forest in the lower Khumbu valley.”

  A hand rose from the group. “What about a day trip to the Everest View Hotel? We’ve been camping in these damn tents for the past six days. I wouldn’t mind a hot bath.”

  Murmurs of agreement met this request.

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Josh warned. “The hotel is a full day’s trek away, and the rooms at the hotel have oxygen pumped into them, to stave off altitude sickness. It could weaken your current acclimation and delay any ascent.”

  “Like we’re not delayed enough already!” Boston Bob pressed.

  Josh ignored him. Lisa knew her younger brother would not be pressured to do something as stupid as risk an ascent against inclement weather. Though the skies were blue, she knew that could change in a matter of minutes. She had grown up on the sea, off the Catalina coast. As had Josh. One learned to read signs beyond the lack of clouds. Josh might not have developed a Sherpa’s eye to read the weather up at these heights, but he certainly knew to respect those who did.

  Lisa stared up at the plume of snow blowing off the tip of Everest’s peak. It marked the jet stream, known to gust over
two hundred miles an hour across the summit. The plume stretched impossibly long. Though the storm had blown itself out, the pressure pattern still wreaked havoc above eight thousand meters. The jet stream could blow a storm back over them at any moment.

  “We could at least make for Camp One,” Boston Bob persisted. “Bivouac there and see what the weather brings.”

  An irritating whine had entered the sports-store manager’s voice, trying to wheedle some concession. His face had reddened with frustration.

  Lisa could not fathom her prior attraction to the man.

  Before her brother could respond to the lout, a new noise intruded. A thump-thump like drums. All eyes swung to the east. Out of the glare of the rising sun, a black helicopter appeared. A hornet-shaped B-2 Squirrel A-Star Ecuriel. The rescue chopper had been designed to climb to these heights.

  A silence settled over the group.

  A week ago, just before the recent storm broke, an expedition had gone up on the Nepal side. Radio communication had put them up at Camp Two. Over twenty-one thousand feet in elevation.

  Lisa shaded her eyes. Had something gone wrong?

  She had visited the Himalayan Rescue Association’s health clinic down in Pheriche. It was the point of triage for all manner of illnesses that rolled down the mountainside to their doorstep: broken bones, pulmonary and cerebral edema, frostbite, heart conditions, dysentery, snow blindness, and all sorts of infections, including STDs. It seemed even chlamydia and gonorrhea were determined to summit Everest.

  But what had gone wrong now? There had been no Mayday on the radio’s emergency band. A helicopter could only reach a little above Base Camp due to the thin air up here. That meant rescues from air often required trekking down from the most severe heights. Above twenty-five thousand feet, the dead were simply left where they fell, turning the upper slopes of Everest into an icy graveyard of abandoned gear, empty oxygen containers, and frost-mummified corpses.