The Blood Flag

by James W. Huston

  I asked the obvious question, “What is that?”

  “Looks like a floor.”

  I looked at Eidhalt. “Graves have floors in Germany?” He shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

  Jedediah slammed his shovel into the aluminum again and again until he’d outlined a square with one side still attached. He bent the aluminum up and then back so the square was exposed as a hole. He looked up at me. “Toss me your flashlight.”

  He caught it and plunged the light into the hole. It wasn’t just a floor. There was empty space on the other side of the aluminum. Jedediah got down on his knees and put the light into the hole. He turned and looked up at us. “It’s an aluminum box the size of the whole grave area. And it’s full of ammo.”

  I asked, “Ammo? Bullets?”

  “Well ammo boxes, steel ammo boxes.”

  “Can you get one?”

  He nodded and turned back toward the hole. He lay down on the dirt and reached his arm in and pulled out one of his ammo boxes. It was nine inches tall, twelve inches long, and four inches wide, with a lid that opened lengthwise. He put the small flashlight into his mouth, pointed it at the ammo box, undid the clasp and opened it. He pointed the light into the box and we all saw it at once. Gold. Jedediah let the lid fall back away from the opening, put the flashlight into his left hand and reached into the box. He pulled out what appeared to be a solid gold coin, one of hundreds shining in the intense LED light.

  I said, “Is that box full of those coins?”

  Jedediah examined the coin, and nodded. “Nazi coins. Gold Nazi coins. Minted in,” he turned the coin over to the other side, “1944.”

  I asked, “Are they real?”

  Jedediah was apparently wondering the same thing himself. He felt the coin, pressed a fingernail into it, bit it, and said, “I don’t really know what a gold coin feels like. Feels a tiny bit softer than a U.S. silver dollar would, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know why somebody would bury a bunch of fake coins.”

  The other German said, “How many boxes are down there?”

  Jedediah put his head into the hole and shown the flashlight around again and counted. He came back out of the hole. “Hard to say for sure, but looks like maybe ten.”

  “Is there a floor underneath this aluminum that you just cut through?”

  Jedediah nodded, “Looks like a box. A big aluminum box. Nothing else in it except these ten ammo cans. My guess is they’re all full of these gold coins. But I can check them.”

  I nodded. “Open them all.”

  He did. Each box was full of the same gold coins. All apparently minted at the same time, never used for anything and stored away for sixty-five years.

  Jedediah stood up, took his shovel and slammed it down through the hole all the way through to the bottom of the aluminum box he had identified. The shovel tip penetrated the bottom layer of aluminum and then stopped. Thom looked up and said, “Looks like that’s it. Nothing but dirt on the other side of this aluminum bottom.”

  I said, “Hand the ammo boxes up to us.” Eidhalt’s man asked, “Why store them here?”

  Eidhalt said what I was thinking. “Because they knew the name of the first Nazi martyr. They knew somebody would come back some day.”

  Jedediah asked from inside the grave, “Why not a bank account?”

  I answered. “Bank accounts are traceable, and safe deposit boxes have keys. Whoever had the Blood Flag, had the future of the Nazi movement. And whoever buried this gold wanted to finance it.”

  Jedediah was skeptical. “How would they have known about DNA in the forties?”

  I said, “How do we know the gold was buried in the forties? We don’t. But whoever had the gold didn’t have the flag. He wanted them to go together. And maybe there is gold buried under every one of the martyrs’ graves that Hitler honored.”

  I looked around the graveyard then said to Eidhalt, “Since it was our idea to dig up Mr. Friedl, the gold is ours.”

  Eidhalt was instantly angry. “We are the future of the Nazi movement. I am the future. This entire unification movement is mine. The gold stays with the movement.”

  I looked at him intensely. “I am the movement in the United States. This is our gold.”

  He bristled. “This is on German soil, put here by Germans, for the future rise of the Nazi party. It was put there for me.”

  I knew this was the moment. I looked at him and said, “We both have important roles. I say we split it.”

  He was surprised by my sudden change of heart.

  I said, “Five boxes each. But we need to get it out of here tonight. We can’t leave anything here for somebody else to come and get. Once somebody sees this fresh dirt, they’re going to start digging.”

  His face lit up. “I accept. But these are heavy. How do we get them out of here?”

  “We’ll drive right into the cemetery and load the boxes into our cars. We’re going to have to move fast. Call me in the morning and let me know where you want us to bring the flag for the testing.”

  “I think we should keep the skulls, you have the flag.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “No way. We’re not letting these out of our sight.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “How do I know that you haven’t brought a phony flag with you and skeletons that you know will match? No. You keep the flag, we’ll keep the skulls, and we’ll meet at the lab and give them both things at the same time.”

  His position was actually smart. “I agree. Call Jedediah tomorrow and tell us where to meet.”

  He nodded. “If this is the Blood Flag, and if this matches, you will have invigorated Nazism like nothing else could have. This will be the very thing that we needed to unite all movements around the world.” He looked at me directly, “And I will need you as part of the international movement.”

  Jedediah jumped out of the grave. “I’ll get the car.”

  * * *

  As soon as we cleared the curb at the edge of the cemetery, I started driving around Munich randomly. After an hour, when I was sure we weren’t being followed I pulled off the road under some overhanging trees.

  We opened the trunk and took out the suitcase holding the Blood Flag. I gently removed it and laid it on the seat, and folded back the false bottom to the suitcase. I took out one of my two handguns that I’d placed there in its holster, and put it on my belt. I handed Jedediah the other one. He checked it and put it inside his waistband in the small of his back. As we drove on, randomly watching the traffic, I started calculating. Each ammo box weighed about fifty pounds. Assuming the gold was relatively pure, with sixteen ounces to a pound, that was eight hundred ounces of gold. At twelve hundred dollars per ounce that made nine hundred and sixty thousand per box. About a million dollars. Five million dollars for our five boxes.

  We headed out of Munich. Jedediah asked where we were going. I told him I wanted to end up in a random German town and stay in a nondescript hotel no one would ever think of. When we learned where we had to be later that morning, we’d be there. But no one was going to know where we had come from. I wasn’t even going to tell Alex or the BKA.

  Michelle’s voice was echoing in my head. This was where it started getting dangerous. Five million in gold and a flag people would kill for. Danger I’d brought on myself. All to prove a point, or prove something to myself, as she saw it. Unnecessarily.

  I stayed on two-lane German roads. After driving through the dark countryside for a half hour, we entered a town. By the time we pulled in it was two in the morning. All I needed was a light. I didn’t mind waking somebody up. It wasn’t a big town, maybe five or six thousand people. It was near the mountains so I hoped it had a tourist base, and at least a couple hotels. We looked for any signs of life and then I saw a hotel sign. It was lighted, although the building was dark. As we pulled up in front, I could see the glimmer of
a light in the lobby. I walked in and went to the reception desk, which had a bell on top. I rang it a couple of times and waited. I heard someone stirring in the back. A woman in her sixties came out through the door in her house slippers. The back of her hair was flat. She regarded me with skepticism. She said nothing.

  I said, “Do you speak English?”

  “A little.”

  “I’m here with five other colleagues. We are a geological team studying the mountains. I apologize for arriving so late, but we didn’t finish our work until recently. So if possible, I’d like six rooms. Do you have six rooms available?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Six? I see only you.”

  “One is out in the car with me, the other four are on their way.”

  “It’s one hundred euro per room. How many nights?”

  “One night. Then we’re back on the road.”

  “How are you paying?”

  “In cash, if that is alright.”

  She nodded. She turned and prepared six electronic keys. She put each of them in small envelopes and put the room numbers on them. She stopped. “Do the rooms need to be together?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  She nodded and finished preparing the keys. She handed them all to me and I handed her six hundred euros. I then took another one hundred euro bill and put it on top. “That’s for disturbing you. I’m sorry, again, for the late arrival.”

  She waved me off. “Check out time is eleven.”

  “We’ll be on the road long before then. I’ll leave the keys on the desk. We also have some boxes with valuable equipment that I’ll be taking up to our room; nothing too large but we need to have them with us. I can’t leave them in the car. So, we’ll be making a couple trips in the elevator, but we’ll try not to disturb you.”

  I went back out to the car and got Jedediah. I said, “I got six rooms.” He looked at me confused. “That oughta do it.”

  “If somebody finds out we’re here they’ll have a one in six chance of finding us. And if we hear a lot of ruckus, we’ll be ready.”

  “We’re staying in the same room?” He said as he opened the trunk and surveyed the ammo boxes.

  “Absolutely. Now that we’ve shown the flag we’ve set all kinds of forces in motion. Let’s get this stuff up to the room. From now on one of us will always be awake.”

  It took us several trips. The room I picked was on a middle floor. It was close to the elevator so we could hear if it opened on our floor.

  We closed and bolted the door. We put the ammo cans on the far side of the bed and the suitcase with the Blood Flag on top of the bed. Jedediah glanced at the door. “Think they’ll try anything tonight?”

  I sat down and started unlacing my boots. “They don’t know where we are. Alex and Florian will know where they are because of the GPS tracker we put in the skull bag. She’ll call us if she thinks they’re up to something. And while they may want us dead, they’re just now getting their feet under them. They may fear that we have duplicate flags, and maybe the one we showed them was a duplicate. Even if we have the real one, it doesn’t mean we’d show it to them first thing. What they know is that we’ll have to bring the real one to the DNA lab. That’s when he’d make a move.”

  “Think he will?”

  “Maybe. But even if we authenticate the real one, we could switch it any time with a fake.”

  Jedediah pondered the problem for a while. Then he asked, “How can he prevent it?”

  “Oh, he could try to attach something or mark it somehow. It’s hard to imagine anything that we couldn’t either remove or duplicate given enough time. So, I don’t know what he’ll propose. He may propose taking it with him. Which isn’t going to happen.”

  Jedediah lay down on the bed and put his arms up over his head on the pillow.

  I nodded. “I’ll wake you in two hours.”

  * * *

  Early in the morning, before the sun was up, I walked out of the hotel through a side door to buy some pastries and coffee and brought them back to the room. Jedediah looked as intense as I felt. Neither of us spoke. He wasn’t used to having the feeling that people were after him. I wasn’t either. I couldn’t really tell him it was all in his mind because it wasn’t.

  As we ate our pastries in silence Jedediah’s phone rang. I looked at the number. It was Eidhalt. I answered. “Yes?”

  “We have the lab. They can do it all today. We . . . encouraged them.”

  “Where and what time?”

  The address was in the center of Munich. “Nine o’clock. Can you be there?”

  I looked at my watch. It was 7:00 a.m. “Yes. See you there.” The line went dead.

  I gave Jedediah his phone. “Let’s go. I want to get there before they do.”

  “We taking the gold with us? ’Cause if we go into the lab someone will break into the car. You know that.”

  “You drive. I’ll call Florian on the way.”

  “We keeping these rooms?”

  “No, we’re out of here. Nothing traceable.”

  I pulled the car around to the front, while Jedediah carried the gold and the flag down to the car. As we headed toward Munich, I dialed Florian. He answered on the first ring. I told him the name of the lab. “We’re meeting at nine o’clock.”

  “It’s a good lab. They can do it.”

  “We need to give you the items we found for safe keeping. Tell us where to meet.”

  Florian gave us an address and we typed it into our nav system. We headed directly there and arrived fifteen minutes before eight. Alex was with Florian and Patrick and three other men. I said to Florian, “You have to give me your word that no one else will touch these. You have to keep them, and keep them safe. But I have to have your word that no one will even look at them. Otherwise, I’ll have to come up with another plan.”

  Florian nodded his head knowingly. “This is not a problem, we will take care of them and return them. The gold was quite unexpected.”

  We moved the ammo cans to his trunk and closed it. Alex tried to read my face. I gave her a knowing look that everything was fine. Patrick asked, “Can I take one piece of gold to have it checked out? See if it’s real gold and truly Nazi minted?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want anyone’s attention on any of this other than what we have already. Especially tied to the BKA.” I turned to Alex. “I’m beginning to think we should have let him have all the gold,” I said. “We don’t need to give him another reason to do something stupid.” I looked at my watch. “We’ve got to get to the lab.”

  Florian asked, “How will this happen? You will give the flag to the lab?”

  I nodded. “And I think we will wait there until they’re done with it.”

  “It’s a reputable lab. Unless they have somebody on the inside—a couple of people—I don’t think they could do anything with it. We’ll see if it matches.” We arrived at the lab intentionally late. I wanted them all there. Jedediah and I got out of the car with our weathered brown suitcase and walked in.

  Eidhalt was waiting. “All set?” I asked.

  “Yes. They are waiting for us.”

  Jedediah asked, “What did you tell them they were doing?”

  “I told them it was a family issue. That we represented some grandchildren who wanted to determine whether the flag you have is from their grandfather’s unit and the one on which he died. It’s simply a historic curiosity, and that he was buried in a family grave so we had to bring all four of the family members for testing.”

  I nodded, “Did they buy it?”

  A slight smile formed on his hard face. “They think it’s odd, but they say they can do the test. And we offered them five times the cost of the test to put us in the front of the line.”

  “Hope they’re quick. We’re not leaving the flag here.”

&
nbsp; It caught him by surprise. “They have a safe.”

  I shook my head. “Whatever can be put into a safe can be taken out. They can get whatever DNA they need off the flag, then we’ll be on our way.”

  “What if they need more?”

  “Then they don’t know what they’re doing and we’re at the wrong lab. If they can’t do it here, we’ll take it back to the States and get it authenticated.”

  “These skulls aren’t going anywhere,” he said firmly.

  “Then let’s do it. Do you know the people here?”

  “Just by reputation. I spoke with the head of the lab last night. I tracked him down to his house. They’re expecting us.”

  Eidhalt went to the receptionist desk and asked for Herr Bloch.

  While we waited for Bloch there were awkward periods of silence. I was imagining how many ways they could try and separate us from the flag.

  Eidhalt finally said to me, “Are you armed?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Curious. In case someone tries to take the flag.”

  “No one knows about the flag except you. Who would take it?”

  He shrugged and tried to look disinterested. “There are thieves all around. Crime has been increasing.”

  “Probably true. But if I were armed it would be illegal in Germany, right?”

  “That is true.”

  I saw the door open and a gentleman who was almost certainly Bloch walked toward us. He was of medium build with a shaved head and glasses. He wore a white lab coat and black soft-soled shoes.

  I said in a low voice to Eidhalt, “I may be armed, and my good friend may also be armed, and I may have several friends here with me from the United States who have an ability to look very German. Or maybe I should have friends with me. If the crime problem is so bad, I should have lots of friends with me who could help me in a time of crisis. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

  He looked at me with some alarm then turned to Bloch. They greeted each other in German and then he introduced us to Bloch as the one who had the flag Eidhalt wanted to buy for his clients, assuming it could be authenticated as having come from their grandfather’s unit. Bloch looked at Jedediah who stared at him with that serial killer stare that he had mastered. It gave people a cold chill.