INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1)

by W. A. Harbinson

  ‘You poor man,’ Kryzystina crooned in his ear, reaching down for his penis. ‘Let me arouse you sexually, therefore emotionally, and thus ruin your health.’

  Ernst slapped her hand away. He was grinning, but felt uneasy. There were times when you couldn’t help wondering just how right or wrong Wilson was.

  ‘What’s so strange,’ he said, hoping to talk out his troubled thoughts, ‘is that this particular obsession has also been dragged into his work – as everything is with him, sooner or later. It’s as if he’s treating even his own life as material for research. And so the state of his health and the possibilities of longevity, while important to him on a personal level, are more important for what they can add to his envisaged Super Race. Which is why some of those sent to the camps will have a fate worse than death.’

  ‘What fate?’

  Realizing that he had already said more than he should, Ernst shook his head and said, ‘Nothing. Forget it.’

  He lit a cigarette – he had started smoking only recently – and realized that he could not forget it. Indeed, who could forget the hideous ‘anthropological’ experiments already being conducted, with Wilson’s sly encouragement and at Himmler’s command, in the surgeries and operating theatres of certain concentration camps, as well as in secret SS laboratories located all over Germany?

  Even now Ernst was haunted by the memory of the infamous Crystal Night of thirteen months ago, when, in a fit of perversity or perhaps overwhelming frustration, he’d driven Wilson through Berlin’s violent, blazing streets to a Nazi hospital on the outskirts of the city. There, in the laboratory, he’d shown him the contorted limbs, frozen anguish, and, in some cases, dismembered heads of those who had died on the operating table in some of his requested experiments. Wilson had remained unmoved, insisting that science was all that mattered. He wanted the secret of immortality, or at least longevity, and would do anything, no matter how cruel, to uncover it.

  And he had insisted that he was not a monster, but just a man with a mission.

  What kind of man?

  Already depressed, Ernst suddenly felt crushed by fear, so he stubbed his cigarette out, rolled onto Kryzystina, and tried to lose himself in her body, where nothing could reach him.

  Ernst snapped to attention in the office of his superior officer, Major Riedel, gave the Nazi salute, and said, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Riedel returned the salute with a weary wave of his hand, told Ernst to stand at ease, and gazed up from his desk in a thoughtful, searching manner.

  Ernst's former friend, the sadistic Lieutenant Franck Ritter, was standing at the other end of the desk, wearing his black SS uniform and trying hard not to smile.

  Major Riedel waved his hand again, this time indicating the many photographs pinned up on the wall behind him.

  ‘You’ve seen these photos before, Captain?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst replied.

  ‘Then you know what they are, do you not?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst said, getting the distinct feeling that he was in trouble, but unable to guess why. ‘They’re photographs of Polish resistance fighters being hunted by the Gestapo. The SS also have orders to keep a watch out for them or anyone suspected of knowing or harbouring them.’

  ‘Correct.’ Major Riedel glanced at Ritter, then stood up and planted his finger on one of the photographs. ‘Do you know this man, Captain Stoll?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Can you see him properly from where you’re standing?’

  ‘No, sir, but I don’t know anyone on that list.’

  ‘Please step forward and check the photograph properly.’

  Ernst did as he was told, walking around the far side of the desk and glaring at Ritter. He then stood beside Riedel to study the photograph up close. He saw a handsome young Pole with sensitive features and unusually bright, fearless eyes. When he had studied the young man’s face, he shook his head and said, ‘No, sir, I don’t know him.’ Then he marched back around the desk and stood stiffly in front of it.

  He noticed Ritter's thin smile. Major Riedel nodded and glanced at Ritter, then sat in the chair behind his desk, where he clasped his hands under his chin and pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  ‘The man is Andrzej Pialowicz,’ he said. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst said, growing more confused and nervous. ‘It’s the name of a leading Polish resistance fighter, presently on a Gestapo and SS death list.’

  ‘Correct again, Captain. I’m glad to note that you are, at least, reading the directives being sent out from this office.’

  Ernst did not reply, as there was no reply to give. He simply glanced at Ritter and noticed his triumphant smirk.

  ‘Andrzej Pialowicz is indeed the most wanted man in Cracow. In compiling a dossier on his activities prior to the fall of Poland, we discovered that among his many other female conquests was a Jewish woman living right here in Cracow. Rather than arrest this woman, we placed her under surveillance in the hope that she would eventually lead us to Pialowicz – which she did. She was observed leading him out of the Wawel Cathedral – reportedly where he had been hiding – and then driving him away in her car. Since it was our belief that Pialowicz was being taken to rejoin the other members of his resistance group, and since the over-zealous oberleutnant in charge of the squad of SS troops took this as his opportunity to catch the whole gang, he did not arrest Pialowicz or his mistress, but instead followed them at a discreet distance with two other SS men, in an ordinary Polish car with Cracow number plates. The drive ended at a warehouse in an industrial area south of the city. Pialowicz entered the warehouse alone and his girlfriend turned her car around and headed back to the city. Deliberately letting the woman go, since he knew where she lived, the over-zealous young oberleutnant called up for support, then led an inept assault on the warehouse. In the ensuing fracas, some resistance men and SS troops were killed, but Pialowicz managed to elude us again and has not been seen since.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Ernst began, ‘but I’m not sure – ‘

  ‘Why we called you here?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Major Riedel smiled bleakly, then sighed as if in despair. Naturally, Captain Stoll, as we were keeping a watch on Pialowicz’s girlfriend, we saw everyone entering or leaving the building in which she resided

  – and to our surprise, Captain, one of the most frequent visitors was you. Pialowicz’s girlfriend, as you will have gathered by now, is also your mistress, Kryzystina Kosilewski.’

  Ernst turned cold with shock, then felt himself burning. He glanced at the floor, but felt nauseated, so looked up again.

  ‘Do you wish to deny it, Captain Stoll?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good,’ Major Riedel said, ‘since although we were aware that you are in charge of that building and therefore have good reason for going there, we were intrigued by both the frequency and lateness of your visits. We therefore took the liberty of checking with the other, now mostly German, residents. Lieutenant Ritter, here, was in charge of that particular task and can confirm that according to her neighbours, Frau Kosilewski was opening her door to you on a regular basis and that when you visited, you stayed there for a long time, indeed often all night. You were also observed taking her parcels of groceries and other contraband items. Do you wish to deny this?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Ernst said, wanting to die, but rescued by a hot wave of hatred when he saw Ritter’s thin smile.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Major Riedel said, unclasping his hands and sitting back in his chair, looking more weary than outraged. ‘You do know, of course, that it’s an offence for a German soldier, much less an SS officer, to knowingly fraternize with a Jew.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was Jewish, sir. In fact, she categorically denied it the first time I met her.’

  ‘But you knew she was Polish.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did.’

  ‘Lucky for you, Captain, you’re an exceptional officer with p
articularly close ties to our beloved Reichsführer. Otherwise I would have you shot for this.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Lucky for you, also, that stripping you of your rank would necessitate a lengthy and potentially embarrassing report to our beloved Reichsführer, which could rebound unpleasantly on me personally.’

  Unable to break the ensuing silence, Ernst heard his own heartbeat, resounding like a gong in his head, tolling his doom. He glanced sideways at Ritter and again saw his triumphant smirk.

  ‘As you will have guessed,’ Riedel said wearily, ‘we will now be arresting your mistress, the Jew bitch Kosilewski.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst said, feeling as if his face had been slapped, his stomach kicked by a heavy boot.

  ‘I would like to punish you by having you personally make the arrest, Captain, but since that could make matters more complicated than they are, I will instead insist that you accompany Lieutenant Ritter to your whore’s house and stay by the van while the lieutenant and his men drag her out. If nothing else, I want you to see that, Captain Stoll. Do you understand why?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst said, already feeling the awful humiliation that the major wanted him to suffer.

  ‘Good. Now get out.’

  Shocked and shaking, feeling alternatively hot and cold, Ernst, after saluting, followed the gloating Ritter out of the office, then along the gloomy corridor of the building, down a flight of stairs, then out into the freezing, windblown courtyard, where a small, black, windowless van, used for collecting suspects, was parked. While two armed SS soldiers climbed into the rear, Ernst sat up front beside Ritter and the driver, shaking even more with humiliation and dread as the van started off and headed through the narrow streets of Cracow in the afternoon’s darkening light.

  ‘What will happen to her?’ he asked of Ritter.

  ‘She’s all mine,’ Ritter replied with a leer. ‘I’ve been given twentyfour hours to make her talk, but I won’t need that long.’ His leer widened lasciviously over blackened teeth. ‘She’ll give me everything I want soon enough.’

  Ernst closed his eyes, knowing exactly what Ritter meant. He shivered with revulsion and the shame he had thought was long dead in him, then protected himself from it with a rage at what Kryzystina had done to him. The whore. The Jewish whore. He opened his eyes again, saw the charcoal light of late afternoon, and sat up straight when the van braked to a halt in front of her house.

  ‘Can’t I watch from in here?’ he asked pathetically.

  ‘No,’ Ritter said, grinning again. ‘You have to come out and formally identify her.’

  ‘You already know who she is.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Ritter said. ‘The point is that you formally identify her. That's your punishment, sir.’

  Ernst nodded and climbed out, determined to hide any weakness from Ritter; also determined to let his rage against Kryzystina protect him from sentiment as the lieutenant and the two soldiers entered the building with theatrical urgency. They came back out soon enough, this time with Kryzystina, who was sobbing and protesting in vain as the two soldiers dragged her across the pavement and Ritter, bawling something that included ‘Jew bitch whore!’ slapped repeatedly at the back of her head. Then he grabbed her by the hair and jerked her head back to let Ernst get a look at her. Already her face was bruised and her dark eyes tearful. She saw Ernst and gasped.

  ‘Yes,’ Ernst said. ‘his is the woman Kosilewski... This is the woman I know.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Kryzystina exclaimed in disbelief.

  The soldiers dragged her away from Ernst and threw her into the van, then climbed in behind her and slammed the doors shut. Ernst followed Ritter into the front and turned away from his gloating grin, but was forced to listen to Kryzystina sobbing in the back. The journey seemed interminable, all the way back to the grim, guarded entrance to the SS headquarters and basement cellars where, he knew, Kryzystina would be tortured and interrogated by Ritter.

  He tried to walk away then, but Ritter called him back.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, forcing Ernst to turn around and see Kryzystina, no longer sobbing, but with pale, tear-streaked cheeks, staring at him with fierce hatred and condemnation from between the two soldiers. ‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to your Jewish whore?’

  Ernst could not reply, but he didn’t turn away. The soldiers dragged Kryzystina toward the entrance. She suddenly howled like a wild animal, and only when Ritter had kicked her into the building did Ernst make his escape.

  Kryzystina did not talk in twenty-four hours – nor in twenty-four days. Three weeks later, she was, according to a frustrated Ritter, still in her basement cell, a bloody mess but unbroken, and waiting for the train that would take her to the living hell of Auschwitz.

  During that time, Ernst managed to recover from his humiliation and shame by remembering Kryzystina only with hatred. He accepted that he had made a fool of himself, fought back tears when he learned that the German army had entered Paris, and threw himself more devotedly into his task of finding suitable candidates for forced labour in the underground factories, or a worse fate in the concentration camps.

  In doing this, he paid penance for his sins and regained his lost pride.

  Because Kryzystina was one of those earmarked for the camps, there was no way of avoiding her at the station; nor, by this time, would he have attempted to do so if he could. Indeed, when he saw her bruised and scarred face in that hopeless queue of the damned, a cloud of steam blowing across brown eyes darkened even more by weeks of torture, he felt neither surprised nor shocked, only a quiver of suppressed rage. Then, on a perverse whim, he had an SS guard with a snarling dog drag her out of the queue, to be placed before him.

  When she recognized him, her eyes brightened with the enduring strength of contempt, and her lips, which had been shivering with despair, formed a line of defiance.

  ‘You’re a terrible mess, Frau Kosilewski,’ Ernst said sardonically, ‘and where you’re going, the treatment will be even worse than what you’ve already had. Would you like me to help you?’

  ‘What’s the price?’ she replied.

  Ernst pointed at the queue forming at the far side of the platform and said, ‘The people in that queue have been selected to live, while these poor wretches’ – he indicated the queue she had just left – ‘have been selected for death. Tell me where your boyfriend, Andrzej Pialowicz, is hiding and I’ll let you leave this queue and join that one over there.’

  She stared at him with disbelieving eyes, too shocked to speak.

  ‘This queue or that one,’ Ernst said. ‘Life or death, Kryzystina. Now, where’s Andrzej Pialowicz?’

  She spat in his face.

  Ernst didn’t have time to react before the SS guard stepped forward, struck Kryzystina with his bullwhip, then hurled her back through the snarling dogs, into the queue heading to certain death.

  Kryzystina didn’t look back at Ernst to see him wiping her spittle from his forehead. Instead, she stared straight ahead, as if he had never existed. She didn’t even look back when she was herded into the carriage, dissolved behind a cloud of steam, and then became just another nameless face in a mosaic of the damned.

  Then Ernst crossed the platform and boarded the other train: the one taking those destined to work in the underground factories in support of his Reichsf

  ü hrer’s Projekt Saucer.

  That train, when it moved out of Cracow, took him back to Berlin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Nostradamus,’ Himmler said, sipping effetely at his tea, ‘foretold the conquest of France by Germany. Did you know that, Herr Wilson?’ ‘No,’ Wilson said. He had not known and did not wish to know, any more than he wanted to be reminded that Adolf Hitler based many of his most vital decisions on the advice of his Swiss astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft; or that Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goring, ran his war with the aid of rainmakers and teams of clairvoyants; or that his deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had
recently flown to England without permission in an insane attempt to establish peace with Britain, kept a pet lion, believed in astrology, and was known to have dabbled seriously in the occult; or that Himmler himself, now sipping his tea so sedately, was as mad as a hatter.

  The world is being conquered by a gang of lunatics, dope addicts, sadists, occultists, and degenerates, Wilson thought, and I'm forced to use the scum.

  ‘I believe that Nostradamus,’ Himmler droned on, ‘also prophesied the conquest of the West by a race of Aryans at approximately this time. Did you know that, Herr Wilson?’

  ‘No,’ Wilson said, though he knew what Himmler was driving at. Since he and the Reichsführer had last met, the German forces had overrun Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. They indeed seemed unstoppable, and the fall of the West had seemed guaranteed. However, Hitler had then become obsessed with his mystical notion of Lebesraum – German expansionism and space – and was now preparing to invade Russia, even against the protests of his own generals. It was a two-front war that had defeated Germany in 1918 and would, Wilson reasoned, do so again – which is exactly why so many of Hitler’s finest officers had protested the planned invasion in the first place. Yet even now, as he and Himmler were having their chat over tea, fighter planes, bombers, Panzer tanks, and three million foot soldiers were massing along a 930-mile front, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, prepared to advance into Russia and certain doom.

  The beginning of the end is in sight, Wilson thought, which means that my time is running out, my situation becoming more tricky. I must be more careful now. ‘You are an admirably concise conversationalist, Herr Wilson,’ Himmler said, his eyes, magnified by the pince-nez, as dead as his smile. '“Yes" and "no". A curt nod of the head. A distinct lack of verbal elaboration. No more said than is absolutely necessary. A man of few words.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Reichsf ührer.’

  ‘You have no need to be. Clearly it’s in your nature. I think you’re a man who trusts in his own nature and devoutly follows his chosen path.’