“What I mean is you seem bookwise and range blind. Which, you being a doctor, isn’t surprising. You may not even know if you’re being made a patsy. Or, alternatewise, you have the perfect cover. Lysander can’t know until he runs you through the wringer. You savvy?”
What Rucker was saying, however clumsily, was plausible and prudent. But it was simply the case that he had a perfect cover. Still, he understood that his own assertion wouldn’t carry any weight.
“Ja. I understand.”
“Lysander will take your story to the society. They’ll mull it over and check your bona fides to make sure they’re, um, bona and fide.”
Deitel did a double take.
“I’m sorry, ‘society’?”
“ ’Course, if you are a patsy, you’re pretty well and proper boned. The Gestapo knows you’re willing to betray the New Order. Soon as you get back to the Fatherland,” Rucker mimed a throat being cut, “kaput.”
“I’m sorry, Herr Rucker, ‘society’?” Deitel asked again.
“Also, if that Gestapo stoolie tailing you wasn’t just a cutout to make your cover story seem plausible and you really are a Canaris man, then the Gestapo may already know you’re willing to betray the New Order, and soon as you get back, kaput.”
“Herr Rucker!” Deitel said. “ ‘Society’?”
Rucker did a double take and furrowed his brow. Then the light came on.
“Oh, that’s right. See, here’s the thing, we don’t have much in the way of an intelligence service like y’all do. It’s . . . how do I explain this? Sure, folks at our embassies gather information, and President Coolidge does have an agency that gathers all the newspapers and radio news from around the world so that Austin isn’t completely blind to the world. But there are some mighty strong prohibitions on Austin actively doing much else. It tends to lead to meddling.”
“You’re saying there is no national espionage and intelligence gathering agency?”
“Well, I mean . . . not like you’re saying. The world’s got monsters and we got to protect our own, they say. Knowing is half the fight. But it seems too important to most folks to turn something like that over to the government to handle on its own. And how do you keep government accountable when they start keeping secrets?”
They paused while Rucker fished out a cigar to chew on.
“But Austin does get information. It’s a long tradition that started with some of our more respectable academic societies and explorer clubs. One group would bring home maps or finds or news, and the other type of group would figure out what it all meant. It grew over the years with more and more companies going overseas to do business and more people traveling and exploring,” Rucker said. “Don’t look at me like that. That’s how the British still do it, I read.
“Anyway, there are probably five formal societies in the Freehold that keep an eye out on the world and provide information to Congress and the president on an informal, unofficial basis. That man you talked with, Lysander, he works for one of the oldest ones, the Prometheus Society. It grew out of the old Dallas Safari Club and the Freehold Geographic Society,” Rucker said, pausing on the sidewalk.
The look on Deitel’s face suggested his cognitive facilities had seized up like a radial engine pulling too many gees.
“I’m sorry, it’s the queerest thing, Herr Rucker, but I could have sworn I heard you just tell me that your people trust your nation’s security to hunt clubs and traveling salesmen, all of whom have competing agendas?”
Rucker smiled and nodded.
“Everyone’s got an agenda, Doctor. Fair to say if anyone of ’em peddled baloney, they wouldn’t be making any more sales, if you get my meaning. You live and die by reputation and repeat business in this part of the world. Plus they all keep an eye on one another.”
Deitel could scarcely fathom any of this, and what he could fathom appalled him. It had to be a ruse—a cover. He tried another approach as they turned down a side street.
“I’m sorry, but even if these associations and societies say they have the interest of your nation first, one’s definition of best interest may be radically different than another’s, nicht wahr?” he asked.
Rucker, to Deitel’s dismay, spit something on the ground. Mein Gott. He was a walking Western moving picture stereotype.
“Doc, aren’t you here on a mission from one of your state intelligence agencies? A mission that the other state intelligence agencies—especially the Gestapo—would put you against a wall and ventilate you for?”
Verdamndt!
“Let me see if this makes sense, Doctor. I once told this Russian I met before the war that there are no state bread stores in Texas. He asked me how I could count on getting bread without one.”
Another point.
“Assuming it’s all true,” Deitel continued, sounding more perturbed, “how does your government act on a threat that one of these societies discovers?”
“They don’t usually. They can’t unless it’s real dire and direct. In those other cases—well, Austin also ain’t got the power to tell a private citizen—or even a group of them meeting someplace with fancy leather chairs and books on the walls—that they can’t go do something outside our borders. You need to read between the lines there.”
“I’m sorry, but this doesn’t strike you as hypocritical?”
“Okay, look, I know you’re as nervous as a cat in a rocking chair factory being out here in what you were told is the Wild West and all, but you can’t keep starting every sentence with an apology.”
“I’m sor . . . Jawohl.”
“But to answer, I suppose that if, hypothetically, someone or some ‘social organization’ were to do something in Austin’s interest but without its sanction, then those people doing the acting would still be accountable for what they do. If they break some law in a foreign land, they’re not acting in the name of the Freehold and they have to take the consequences. And if they break Freehold laws, they’re held to account for it like anyone else. You can’t say that of Hoover’s FBI up north in the Union, or your own state police, them that operate above and beyond the law. Hypocritical? Maybe.”
It worried Deitel that there was some merit—hypocritical though it was—in what he was hearing.
“Not that it bothers me,” Rucker said. “I’m strictly nonpolitical.”
Deitel noticed there was something in Ricker’s voice that sounded at once haunted and resolute.
He also noticed there were fewer and fewer bars and the streets had grown darker. Foot traffic was almost nonexistent now.
“So what is this ‘big bad’ you’re bringing to our doorstep?” Rucker asked.
“I’m not certain I should . . .”
Rucker rolled his eyes. “Doc, you think it’s some grand coincidence it was my bird you chartered from Colombia? You think I’m here with you instead of out carousing because I like talking politics with shavetail Hun doctors? No offense, Hans.”
He’s doing that on purpose, Deitel thought.
“Kurt.”
“Right. So make with the story.”
Deitel considered: this man had been entrusted by Herr Benjamin and, by proxy, Commodore Canaris. He’d heard half the story, anyway.
“What do you know of the Damned Lands in our eastern provinces?”
“I’ve been back to Europe plenty since the war. Heard tell how most everything in eastern Poland most of the way to Moscow is a dead zone, like that forest that’s on your western border in the Rhineland, only worse. Everyone and everything wiped out, the land poisoned, like something out of the Old Testament. That the size of it?”
“Ja, only worse. It’s not that those areas are dead. It’s what is living there. Or more accurately arising there. Creatures out of nightmares, long thought blessedly extinct from the world. New monsters. Changed things. Worse than your chupacabras.”
Deitel kept craning his neck about, nervous and unused to speaking without fear. He kept his voice low.
�
��For several years Reich engineers have been working with the surviving remnant of Imperial Russia to reclaim the Damned Lands for eventual rehabilitation and resettlement. They’ve barely made a dent, and never venture farther than a kilometer into the interior. In their work at the edges, our scientists found that the diseases and poisons wrought by the war—the biological and chemical weapons—didn’t just kill. All of those toxins and bacteria and all of the carnage of the war seem to have given rise to . . . things . . . creatures . . . in some cases what may have been men . . . whose bodies and minds had been twisted and—is there an English for it? Morphed?
“Mutated?”
“Ja. Into creatures beyond our darkest imaginings.”
Rucker snorted. “Which is saying something, considering it’s German’s imagining.”
Deitel paused and scowled.
“What? Brothers Grimm is some spooky stuff, Doctor.”
“Ach. Meanwhile, the inner circle of the SS, the Black Sun, has been sending agents around the globe for years, searching for everything from Atlantis—”
“They’re looking in the wrong place on that one . . .”
“—from Atlantis to mythical and supernatural artifacts that they could turn into weapons,” Deitel said. “The creatures recovered from the Damned Lands provided SS scientists insight into how to create other monster men that they could use as soldiers. The nachtmenn was their most successful experiment so far. But they are transgenic creatures. Project Gefallener is something else entirely.”
“Nachtmenn. Ugh. I’ve seen one at a distance at the French eastern frontier. Painful to look at. Unnaturalness to them,” Rucker said.
Deitel, in guarded tones, explained how some new artifact or toxin—something, the details were either unknown or not being shared at any level—had been brought back from the Balkans and applied to the transgenic experiments.
Canaris, Deitel explained, was now convinced that Black Sun and SS scientists were trying to create an entire army of mindlessly loyal warriors. They wanted to make creatures that could not be stopped and could not be reasoned with. Killers immune to mercy; unholy things that would carry Hitler and Himmler’s vision to all corners of the earth.
Only, Canaris surmised, the Nazi masters were dealing with powers they could not control.
Rucker turned up the collar of his leather jacket despite the mild May evening weather. His rough edges reflected his West Texas ranch upbringing, which often served as a useful camouflage for a keen mind oriented toward engineering and science. Despite what the dime novels and movies would have people think, flying was less about reflex and instinct and more about precision and mathematics. So Rucker wasn’t given to superstitious nonsense. He liked things he could quantify.
On the other hand, he’d been around the block, as the flappers say. Since the war, he’d been to more remote corners than many geographers knew even existed, and he’d seen acres of strange. He knew there were things in this world that science couldn’t explain. He’d seen it with his own eyes in Asia and Africa and right here at home.
And he knew from other experiences that the Nazi occultists and their counterparts in the Union States wanted to tap those eldritch forces, whatever they were.
But was any of it true? Rucker didn’t like to think of himself as holding a grudge, but he didn’t trust Germans to this day. They were either at your feet or at your throat.
But the story just played a little too fantastic for him, and also, he just didn’t want to care either way because it was none of his business in the first place. Lysander was a bastard for continuing to pull him into these kinds of things.
“So this is the story you may full well have thrown your life in the Fatherland away for? Why?” Rucker asked.
Deitel hadn’t put it into words. It was just something he knew.
“Herr Kapitan, I love my nation. I believe in Deustchland über alles. In my veins flows the blood of Prussian nobility. But I am not a Nazi. I am a doctor. I didn’t choose for the Nazis to come to power in the Fatherland. And as proud as I am of my lineage, I didn’t choose to be a highborn son of Prussia. But I did choose to take an oath to save lives and do no harm. If the price of saving lives is that I never again see my beloved country, then I will pay it.”
Rucker cocked his head at the doctor as they walked.
“Is there a princess awakened by a kiss in your backstory?”
Ach. The Texan was infuriating. But there was no point protesting.
Deitel realized there was almost no one around.
“How much farther to this destination?” he asked.
“Two more blocks. Tell me something, Deiter—”
“Deitel. Dr. Kurt von Deitel.”
“—is this really worth your life? I mean, do you realize that this isn’t just some German version of whatever you call a fraternity prank?”
Deitel noticed from the corner of his eye that Rucker had casually unsnapped the strap to his holster. He felt the blood drain from his face and a coppery taste in his mouth, but he kept walking.
“Because it would be a shame to get killed without even being aware of how real this all is,” Rucker said. “Something like this, you could end up corpsefied and you wouldn’t even see it coming.”
They kept walking, but now they were staring right into one another’s eyes. Deitel didn’t even realize he was holding his breath, wondering at each step when—and why—Rucker was about to shoot him down right here on this dark side street. But he could see in Rucker’s cold, hardened expression that someone was about to die.
Then, somehow, Rucker’s face showed a change of expression so slight he couldn’t even describe it, but that told him not to turn around, to keep walking like everything was normal.
There was a clicking behind them. He saw a blur, heard steel sliding on leather while Rucker yelled “Down!” and then a gunshot went off next to his right ear. Then another. He saw a man in a black suit and fedora fall to the ground twenty feet behind them. A machine pistol clattered to the ground next to the body.
Rucker picked Deitel off the sidewalk by the neck of his coat.
“Run!”
A car screeched to a halt at the curb and four men jumped out, chasing the pilot and the doctor. At a glance over his shoulder Deitel saw black suits, broken noses, and heavy brows.
”Rucker, they found me.”
“Run, Deitel! Stay low. They’re not trying to kill us. Me, maybe, but not you. They’ll want you alive.”
That was worse than being shot in the back.
The two turned a corner and ran smack into another pair of SD men.
Deitel froze, while Rucker dove into the two men without a moment’s hesitation, swinging and brawling like a boxer. He’d knocked one down and had the other by the collar but dropped his pistol. In no time the four pursuing goons caught up. They took Rucker by sheer force of numbers. Not wanting to draw even more attention, the SD men holstered their weapons and went to work with their fists. They worked Rucker over like lumberjacks swinging at a stubborn redwood. But Rucker kept getting back up.
Deitel realized he was seeing something, no, two things, he hadn’t before—someone standing up to German agents, and someone standing up for him.
The moment was ruined when someone stuck a suppressed Walther 9mm pistol in his face. Deitel lowered his head.
That’s why he didn’t see the four newcomers until he heard one of them shout, “Hey, Fritzie” as they fell on the SD men. A full-on alley brawl erupted. The Germans weren’t accustomed to men who fought back and fought back well. The flurry of fists didn’t last long; the SD withdrew. As they retreated, the last SD man guarding Deitel turned his pistol at Rucker, who was struggling mightily to get to his feet with only mediocre success.
Everything slowed to a crawl.
Deitel saw a body throw itself in front of the pistol and heard its owner’s voice holler “Nein!” It was curiously like his voice. Then it came to him: it was his voice. He heard the suppres
sed German’s Walther PPK’s pop, then heard a deeper explosion like a cannon, followed by several more. The SD man’s chest seemed to cave in.
Deitel turned to see three of the newcomers and Rucker extending smoking pistols in the direction where the SD man lay, now well and truly ventilated.
“Damn, Kid, you walloped the hell out of that kraut,” Rucker said to one of the men with him when the roar of the shots died. It was a boy who couldn’t have been more than seventeen.
“Figured four to one wasn’t really fair for an old man like you,” Kid Boyington replied.
Another of the newcomers grabbed Deitel’s shoulder roughly and glared.
“So this kraut is with you, Fox?” the man asked Rucker. To Deitel, he sneered, “That it, Hans? You with Fox?”
Rucker pulled the man away from Deitel roughly.
“Yeah, Lindy, he’s with me. Mind your manners,” Rucker said. “Oh, and his name is Kurt. Dr. Kurt von Deitel. Don’t forget it.”
Rucker put a hand on Deitel’s shoulder and smiled through the blood dripping from his nose. “Thanks, Doc. Taking a bullet like that. Didn’t think you had the heuvos.”
Deitel smiled back.
Wait. What?
He looked down at his body and noticed the hole in his suit jacket just below the breast pocket. Gott! I’ve been shot! He must have been in shock since he didn’t feel it yet. Frantically he tore off his jacket, but there was no blood on his white shirt.
“Clean miss,” Rucker said, “but not for lack of you trying to catch the thing.”
Deitel felt his legs go and he sat straight down on the cool sidewalk. Now the adrenaline came, way too late.
“You know,” Rucker finally said, picking up his cowboy hat from the ground and easing it back on his head, “Here I thought you were just some anemic little fancy boy from the dandy side of Germany.”
“Um, thank you?” Deitel said, still processing what had just happened.
“But you got some big brass ones clanging down there, don’t you?” Rucker said, yanking Deitel to his feet. “C’mon. First round at Dutchy’s is on me.”
Deitel was still shaking from the adrenaline rush, staring off into the distance. He got his bearings and stood.
Black Sun Reich: The Spear of Destiny: Part One of Three Page 7
