by Iles, Greg
Hauer rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “I think some of the Arabs are already inside, but they won’t be able to breach those shields with light weapons. The main force is trying to drag their big gun across that bowl. Three hundred metres. Plus, our armoured car is blocking the door to the house. I’d say we have fifteen to twenty minutes before we have to fight.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said Stern. His voice softened as he spoke to General Steyn. “Jaap, the, damage from these weapons might be far less than you imagine. Dr Sabri, what are these bombs capable of?”
The young Libyan answered in a shaky voice. “I’ve only examined one of the weapons closely. It’s a forty-kiloton bomb. That’s a fairly low yield by today’s standards, though it’s twice the size of the Hiroshima bomb. If it were detonated as it was designed to be—in an air burst—the results would be catastrophic. But here … I would guess we’re about a hundred metres underground. The walls look like reinforced concrete—that’s good.” He frowned. “Such things are difficult to predict, but if only the one bomb exploded, the result could be similar to a medium-sized underground nuclear test. If, however, the other weapons detonated with the first—and if they are of the same approximate size—the explosion might blow upward and break through the surface. Where we are standing would be the epicentre of a large crater. As for the above-ground effects, estimating blast radius and such, my rough guess would be … perhaps five kilometres? The radiation is the real problem. But if the wind is right, the whole cloud might drift right out to sea.”
“Or it might drift south and kill everyone in Pretoria and Johannesburg!” General Steyn exploded.
Hans stepped tentatively forward. “You said you brought an armoured car with you. Is there some way we could sneak the bombs out of here?”
Hauer shook his head. “Even if we could fight our way up to the vehicle, we’d never get the bombs up to it. God only knows how much they weigh.”
“Sixteen hundred and fifty kilograms each,” Dr Sabri volunteered.
“There it is,” said Stern with a note of finality. “The bombs cannot be gotten safely away. That leaves only one option.”
“That’s ridiculous!” roared General Steyn. “All we have to do is find a way out of here ourselves! We can leave the bombs right where they are. As soon as we reach a phone, I can call Durban airbase. The air force can shoot these Arab pirates down before they even leave our airspace!”
This suggestion found immediate favour in the group. But while General Steyn expanded on his idea, Gadi Abrams eased slowly across the room to where Hans and Ilse stood listening. When the general finished speaking, Stern put his foot on the nearest bomb, laid an elbow across his knee, and leaned toward the South African.
General Steyn stared back with the tenacity of a bulldog. Behind him, his masked soldiers stood with their shotguns at the ready.
“Jaap,” Stern said softly. “I simply cannot allow these weapons to fall into Libyan hands. Not even for an hour. The risks are simply too great.”
General Steyn raised his right hand. The gesture had a distinctly military quality to it, and it brought an immediate response. Both South African commandos pointed their shotguns at Stern. Their futuristic garb gave them the look of hostile aliens, and their command over the group was total. Or almost total. At the moment they brought their guns to bear, Gadi swung the barrel of his assault rifle up from behind Ilse and fired from the hip.
Ilse screamed.
Gadi’s accuracy was startling. Fully aware that the South Africans wore body armour, he fired two consecutive bursts straight through the black gas masks, killing both men instantly.
General Steyn groped for the pistol at his belt. Gadi put one round through the general’s left shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him to the floor. Then he darted back into position behind Stern and pointed his carbine at the rest of the group.
Dr Sabri’s face had gone white. Smuts was grinning. Ilse was still screaming, but Stern shouted above her: “Everyone stay calm! He had no choice!”
“No choice?” Hans echoed in disbelief. “He murdered them!”
General Steyn struggled slowly to his feet, his face flushed with pain and outrage. Hauer had already relieved him of his pistol. “You will pay for this, Jonas,” he vowed. “Israel will pay! And you know South Africa can make it pay!”
“Yes,” Stern acknowledged. “The problem is, some of you were already planning to make us pay.”
“A few fanatics!” General Steyn spat. “You’ve gone too far!”
Stern spoke in a monotone. “We are talking about the survival of Israel, Jaap. If these weapons explode here in the Transvaal, it will be a disaster, to be sure. But if only one of these bombs were to explode over Israel, our tiny state would cease to exist, and the entire world might be sucked into the vortex of war. It’s a devil’s choice, but it’s that simple. Tragedy versus a worldwide holocaust.”
There was a high-pitched cackle from the far wall. “An excellent choice of words, Jew!” Even in his helpless position, Rudolf Hess wore an expression of triumph. “A holocaust is exactly what is going to happen! Just as the Führer planned! Even if you could persuade these cowards to allow you to detonate the weapons, you don’t have the knowledge to do it. I have won!”
Gadi Abrams pointed his R5 at Hess’s face.
“No, Gadi!” Stern cried. “God, I wanted so badly to take him back to Israel for trial! To see him forced to tell the world his vile story. To tell what he knows about the British.”
“I’ll tell you now,” Hess coughed. “You’ll all be dead within minutes, anyway. I might as well entertain you while we wait for Major Karami.”
“Shut up!” Stern snapped in German. “No one cares anymore!”
“Let him talk,” Hauer said. “If we’re going to die, I want to know why. I want to know what this Nazi bastard had planned for Germany.”
Hess smiled defiantly. “I think I’ll keep that to myself, Captain. But I will tell you about the British.”
Hans stepped forward. “Maybe there is another way out of here, Captain. Why don’t we search the lab?”
Pieter Smuts laughed dryly. “Sorry, Sergeant. One way in, one way out. That’s the best security there is. You’re going to die where you stand.”
“You’ll die before I do,” Hans shot back.
Ilse reached out and squeezed Hans’s arm. “I want to hear Hess’s story, Hans. I want to know why an innocent man rotted in Spandau all those years, and why the Allies kept silent about it. My grandfather came here to find those answers. He thought they were very important. I want to learn them, if I can.”
Hess signalled for Smuts to set him up straighter. The gesture silenced everyone in the room. In spite of the Libyan commandos who would soon hammer through the protective shields above, in spite of the incomprehensible danger that lay between them all like coals delivered up from hell, every person in the basement crowded silently around the old man propped against the steel wall.
“The Jew knows most of it already,” Hess rasped. “What he doesn’t know—what nobody knows—is what my part of the mission was. For so long the furore has focussed on my flight to Scotland. The simple truth is that my flight was only a small part of the plan.” Hess’s voice gained strength.
“Our goal was to replace the government of England. No one in England wanted another war, yet any idiot could see that Churchill would never make peace with the Führer. So, the answer was simple—get rid of Churchill. The Americans and the Soviet Union did the same thing many times after the war. Coup d’etat is the fashionable term, yes? The Führer was always years ahead of his time.”
Hess scratched at a wisp of beard on his chin. “It makes me laugh now, all that rot about how the valiant British saved the world from Hitler. Ha! There were dozens of powerful Englishmen ready to throw Churchill out and put a right-thinking man in Downing Street. And I don’t mean radicals. They were lords and ladies, members of Parliament, knights of the rea
lm. They understood that the only way to stop communism was to ally England with the Reich. So they tried it!
“They got word to the Führer that if Churchill and his gang could be got out, they had men ready to step in. If the king could be eliminated, they could fill his shoes also. Of course the Führer agreed immediately. While he made arrangements to have Churchill and the king liquidated, his English friends prepared to fill the coming power vacuum. Windsor was to take his younger brother’s place on the throne.”
Hess’s voice gained strength. “It was to happen on the tenth of May—the anniversary of our victorious attack on Western Europe. My mission was simple. The Englishmen behind the coup demanded absolute proof that the Führer would live up to his end of the bargain—that he would actually make peace with Britain, cease the terror bombing of London and so forth.” Hess’s eyes glazed with lost glory. “So the Führer asked Rudi—his faithful deputy and lifelong friend—to be his emissary to his British friends!”
“But why was your double sent?” Ilse asked.
Hess smiled cagily. “British Intelligence learned that I was planning to fly to Britain. They had informers everywhere. They expected me to land near Dungavel Castle—which was my original plan—but two weeks before my flight, Reinhard Heydrich discovered that MI-5 knew about the Dungavel meeting. Rather than cancel it, however, Heydrich simply changed the actual rendezvous to the beach opposite Holy Island.” Hess nodded admiringly. “It was Heydrich’s idea to send my double on to Dungavel. To act as if nothing had changed, you see! The double’s mission was to dupe MI-5 into believing they had captured me, but just enough for me to complete my real mission. It was never intended that he do what he did!”
“But you didn’t complete your mission,” Hauer pointed out. “Why not?”
Hess sighed. “Because by the time I jumped out of the plane over Holy Island, MI-5 had found out about that rendezvous as well. Another informer had betrayed us. When I landed—several hundred metres off target, by the way—I heard shooting. I quickly realized that something had gone wrong. When I moved closer to the firing, I saw that British agents had already stormed the rendezvous site, which consisted of a half-dozen autos parked on a shingle of beach. There was a gun battle between some MI-5 operatives and my contacts.”
Hess grimaced as if at some private pain. “It was there I received the wound that eventually took my eye. A stray bullet.” He shrugged. “My part of the mission had failed. I knew the name of a German agent who maintained a radio link to Occupied France from a nearby coastal village, and I made my way to his house on a stolen motorbike. The rest is unimportant.”
“But what of the plan to kill Churchill?” Ilse asked.
Hess looked tired now. “Ask the Jew.”
Stern cast Hess a disparaging look. “It actually might have worked,” he said, “but for a confused Englishman who came to his senses just in time to thwart the assassination. If my guess is right, the only man to escape from that part of the mission—a Russian named Zinoviev—fled to the same German agent Hess did.” Stern looked at Hess. “Isn’t that right? Isn’t that where the two of you met?”
Hess smiled distantly.
“Zinoviev never went back to Germany as his journal claimed, did he?”
Hess chuckled.
“And in spite of your eye wound,” Stern guessed, “the two of you escaped together to South America, and finally ended up here.” Stern’s eyes flashed as he looked at Hess. “Zinoviev tried to warn us, you know. In 1967. He must have realized by then how mad you were.”
Hess flung out a scarecrow-thin arm and sighed. “Zinoviev was weak! All he cared about in the end was his precious Mother Russia! Holy Russia. He was practically a religious fanatic by 1967. We found out about that warning, though, didn’t we, Pieter? And dear Vasili had to meet his maker a bit earlier than even he wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you return to Germany?” Hauer asked.
Hess looked genuinely sad. “I was confused. It was never even considered that things could turn out as badly as they had. You must understand: I had long accepted in my mind that by May eleventh I would have succeeded in my mission or I would be dead. Yet I had failed, and I was still alive. It seemed foolish to kill myself at that point. And stranger still, Churchill’s government had chosen to believe—publicly at least—that my double was, in fact, me.
“Day after day, hiding on the coast, I listened to reports of my capture while Zinoviev tended my eye. And then came the news from Germany—from the Führer himself—that I was mad. I had suggested he say that if the worst happened, but it was unnerving all the same! The pronouncement told me how things stood. The Führer had assumed that either I had committed suicide as planned or the British had indeed captured me. His only option was to discredit me publicly. It was the most difficult moment of his life, I am sure. Not only had he lost his most faithful friend, but he now faced the impossible situation we had sought to avoid in the first place! With the failure of my mission, war -on two fronts was inevitable.”
Hess took a deep breath. His face was pale and sweating. “Nine days later, I managed to get a message to the Führer. I told him what had happened, that I was alive, and asked for instructions.” Hess’s face steeled with resolve. “I mentioned nothing of my wound, and I offered to do what cowardice had not let me do on May tenth—take my own life.
“Hitler’s reply came two weeks later. First, he awarded both myself and Helmut the Grand Cross. As a foreign national, Zinoviev received only the Iron Cross. Then came my orders: I was to sail to Brazil, and there administer a massive network of assets and companies that the Führer had moved for safety to South America. The looming two-front war had sobered him. At this time he was still of sound mind, and he knew the chances for ultimate victory were problematical.
“The Führer was surrounded by traitors; Himmler plotted ceaselessly to take his place. Some of the Party’s top bankers had already fled Germany. Hitler wanted—he needed—someone he could trust outside the country, preparing a place for him should his position become untenable.” Hess’s face glowed with pride. “I was that man. When the time came, Zinoviev killed the agent who had hidden us, and he and I travelled to South America. Just as Alfred Horn had become Rudolf Hess to the world, I became Alfred Horn. Zinoviev served as my lieutenant and bodyguard until we emigrated to South Africa.” Hess looked up at Smuts. “And Pieter assumed that position after I arrived.”
“There’s one question you haven’t answered,” Stern said, recalling Professor Natterman and his obsession with the Hess mystery. “Was the Duke of Windsor really a traitor?”
Hess mopped his forehead. “Who knows? Windsor was a fool. He just wanted to be king again.”
“Yes, but did he knowingly conspire with the Nazis to regain the throne? That’s what I want to know.”
“It never came to the test!” Hess snapped. “Don’t you understand, Jew? It was a setup! A double-cross from the very beginning. They used us. Me, Windsor … even the Führer. British Intelligence discovered their own bloody traitors and played them back against us! They lured me to England, damn them. Of course Windsor conspired with us! But would he really have assumed the throne as Hitler’s vassal? Would he have stolen the throne from his murdered brother? No one will ever know!” Hess shook his head in desolation. “Lies … all lies. Letting us hope for peace with England until it was too late…”
Hess’s head swayed oddly on his neck. He seemed to have forgotten his audience. “Bormann,” he murmured. “Abandoning the Führer in his hour of need!”
Smuts tried to calm Hess, but the old Nazi slapped the Afrikaner across the face. “Bormann terrorized my family! My own wife! He tried to evict my Ilse from our house! Thank God Himmler stopped him!”
“My God,” Ilse murmured. “No wonder he had a fixation on me.”
Hess’s eye came clear again. “The swine paid for his impudence! In 1950 1 I saw him hanged with piano wire by members of the ODESSA! I have the film in my study!
I watch it often.”
“Enough!” Stern cried, stepping in front of Hess. “Everyone, stand back! The time has come to bring down the curtain on this farce. Dr Sabri, prepare the weapon for detonation.”
“Wait!” Hans cried, springing up to Stern. “Listen to me. To hell with Hess! To hell with the Nazis! I understand your love for Israel, but not everyone here is a Jew. I am German. General Steyn is South African. We want to live. Does that make us cowards? If it does, I’m a coward! Look at my wife. She’s pregnant, you understand? We want our child to live! What right have you to take that away from us?”
“The right of the greater good,” Stern said softly. “I’m sorry, Sergeant.”
“You’re sorry? Do you plan to murder everyone who doesn’t agree with you?” Hans pointed to the South Africans Gadi had shot. “How then are you different from the Nazis?”
Stern looked at Ilse. His face softened momentarily, but he quickly turned away. “Captain Hauer,” he said tersely, “do you believe I am wrong about what must be done here?”
With a strange sense of fatalism Hauer looked down at the dead South Africans. He looked at General Steyn, bleeding steadily from his shoulder and heaving for breath. He looked at Hans, his own son, his face flushed with passion for life, his innocent fervour mirrored in his wife’s beautiful eyes. He looked at Hess, cadaverous and grey, a living anachronism sitting aloof on the floor beneath his Afrikaner protector. And finally at Stern. Hauer had known the old Israeli less than a day, yet he felt closer to him than he did to many men he had known all his life. Stern is no fanatic, he thought. He’s a realist He’s seen enough of the world to know that giving fate one chance to beat you is one chance too many. Or perhaps he’s just my kind of fanatic.
Hauer didn’t want to die. But what choice was there? To fight their way out was impossible. With all eyes in the room turned to him, he stepped toward Hans and Ilse with a heavy heart. Yet before he could speak, an unfamiliar voice shouted from somewhere in the dark jungle of laboratory equipment behind them: “Hullo the house! Hullo! White flag and truce!”
