“Will . . . will there be tacos?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Dutchy’s Brass Monkey
Austin
Texas Freehold
The beer was cold, the bluegrass trio was loud, and the logs in the brick oven were flaming. The sign outside read DUTCHY’S BRASS MONKEY, and there was in fact a brass monkey as the centerpiece of the bar.
There was also a real monkey. It smoked cigarettes.
A sign above the door said FLIARS ONLY, but they’d let Deitel in, and he was still wondering about the spelling. The walls of Dutchy’s tavern told the whole history of heavier-than-air aviation in pictures, old advertisements, and actual aeroplane parts. It ran from Glenn Curtiss’s first powered flight in 1901 to the transoceanic passenger planes of today. The ceiling fans were made from the early wooden propellers that were used until 1917. There was no place for lighter-than-air memorabilia. Most notably absent in the bar was anything relating to the history of airships, which rose to primacy in the late 1800s and even today were the dominant form of air transport for both people and goods.
Fliers weren’t fond of airship men and vice versa.
A wing from a 1910 civilian biplane—all wood frame and canvas—decorated the wall above the water closets. The tabletops were made from pieces of high-test aluminum composites salvaged from more modern planes. The alloy was the Brazilian discovery that changed airplane design and construction fundamentally, especially in the closing days of the Great War.
Pictures of individual pioneers in flight engineering and flight itself were cast about on the walls. Here Curtiss. There the Wright Brothers. On a shelf apropos of nothing was an old hand crank from the dawn of the biplane era. Of course, there were pictures of aerial squadrons from the wartime Texas Volunteer Group, set amid rather raucous graffiti that served as a memorial to downed fliers.
Deitel found two pictures of the 315th Mighty Fireflies. In the first there were ten men—including Rucker—posed in front of a Curtiss Hornet biplane. It was dated August 1917. The second showed eleven men posed in front of a Curtiss Dragonfly, one of the first combat monoplanes. It was dated February 1918. Only five of the men from the first picture were in the second; the survivors looked like they’d aged ten years.
Centered over the bar was an engraving on a stone slab. Even Deitel recognized it—the commandments for aerial combat as written by the very first man to master aerial combat, German ace Oswald Boelcke.
DICTA BOELCKE
1. Try to secure advantages before attacking. If possible keep the sun behind you.
2. Always carry through an attack when you started it.
3. Fire only at close range and only when your opponent is properly in your sights.
4. Always keep your eye on your opponent and never let yourself be deceived by ruses.
5. In any form of attack it is essential to assail your opponent from behind.
6. If your opponent dives on you, do not try to evade his onslaught but fly to meet him.
7. When over the enemy’s line, never forget your own line of retreat.
Deitel felt a little mauled and manhandled by all the hearty backslaps and the drinks they kept pushing into his hand. He’d asked for schnapps and got Tennessee whiskey. He’d asked for a lager and got Tennessee whiskey. The four men who’d come to his and Rucker’s rescue in the alley were all telling loud stories with bold and boisterous laughs. They all seemed to welcome him in their rough way—except the one they called Lindy, who still glared at him whenever their eyes met.
Claire Chennault was the oldest of the group, probably in his mid-thirties, so they all called him Pappy. All but the youngest of this group, the fifteen-year-old mascot they called Kid Boyington, had served together in France—Jim Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Lindy. They wore leather flight jackets over their civilian clothes, with patches that proclaimed 3RD TEXAS VOLUNTEER AIR GROUP—MIGHTY FIREFLIES.
Chennault’s booming voice cut right through the noise of the bar and the band’s volume.
“. . . when from nowhere this red Fokker triplane buzzes the aerodrome—we don’t know what happened to the spotters. Anyhow, it drops Rucker’s boots and cap. We all figured the bastard was the one what shot the Fox down,” he said, clapping Rucker on the shoulder. “So Lindy here, who just arrived over from Dallas, gets on the thirty-caliber machine gun, and as the kraut flew back over to dip his wings, he opened up on the Fokker, smoking him.
“Which wasn’t kosher,” Chennault added for Deitel and Boyington’s benefit. “But he was seventeen and a greenhorn.
“We’re all standing around shocked at what just happened. Captain Blackadder, our Royal Air Corps liaison, is cursing a blue streak at Lindy. And then when we hear this voice from overhead yelling, ‘Don’t shoot me, you miserable bastards!’ we look up and there’s Rucker floating down, a bottle of the Baron’s cognac in one hand, and the Baron’s Dachshund cradled in the other. In his socks and not much else.”
The whole table roared even though it was apparent they’d heard the story dozens of times.
“He taken Baron Richtofen’s favorite plane, his best hooch, and his dog,” Chennault said. They were all laughing so hard they were banging the table and wiping tears.
After another round of drinks and stories and, eventually, when the other fliers cleared off, Deitel finally had a chance to ask what the hell had happened in the alley.
“It was a Gestapo bag team,” Rucker explained. “They would have gunned me down and taken you away. It’s pretty clear now—whatever is going on with the information you brought us, the Gestapo and the SD know something. Just not sure what or how much.”
The prospect was frightening, but weighed against duty, was a small matter.
“How does an armed SD team get into Texas?” Deitel asked.
“Probably by way of the Union States. Brought in by members of the Texas Bundists,” Rucker said.
“You allow Nazis in your country?”
Rucker sighed. “Yeah, that’s the problem with people being free to be themselves—they’re free to be themselves. Still, it’s not like they get much traction with folks.”
“We said that in 1921.”
Rucker shook his head. “That’s the rub. Either you trust people’s better nature and maybe you get hoodwinked once in a while, or you go down the path of assuming everyone’s bad nature, which is what the goose-steppers want when you break it all down. And if we make laws to protect people’s freedom from what the goose-steppers want, then we just did their job for them.”
“Your system can’t last, you know, Herr Rucker.”
“Maybe not. But I’d rather crash a bird taking her up than nose her into the ground intentional. And you’d be surprised at how well she’s handled so far. I’m figuring not much beyond the propaganda gets heard about the Freehold in the Fatherland.”
The band took a break and they could speak in quieter tones.
“Why didn’t you shoot the second two SD men?” Deitel asked. “In the alley? Before you dropped your pistol.”
“I was wondering that myself. I reckon I was thinking if I could knock the second two out we might lose the other four. When this thing goes off, it pretty well announces to the world where you’re at.”
Rucker pulled out his pistol and offered it to Deitel, handle first. Deitel held it at first like it was a snake that might strike him. It looked like a melding of the old classic cowboy pistols and the newer, modern semiautomatics. Along the side Deitel read the inscription—COLT SELF-DEFENSE ENGINE MODEL 35. It was long, wooden-handled, and a combination of brushed steel and brass. Where a wheel would have been on an old revolver, there was a rectangular cartridge. The workings were beyond him, but there was visceral beauty he couldn’t deny even if, as a doctor, all guns offended him.
Carefully, he handed it back to Rucker, who twirled it on his finger and slid it effortlessly into its holster.
Deitel took another sip of his whiskey and then swept his arm over th
e group of fliers at the bar.
“Your comrades seem very welcoming. Except the one called Lucky Lindy. Who, I must add, seems very familiar.”
“Lindy? Yeah, he was in all the papers back in 1924. First solo flight across the Atlantic—New Orleans to Paris in the Spirit of San Antonio,” Rucker said. “A year later he got duped by Goebbels’s propaganda machine and was quoted saying some nice things about old Adolf. After that, when newspaperman Henry Mencken broke the story in the Times Herald about the concentration camps and the starvation in former Poland, Lindy’s stock dropped considerable, even though he was as appalled as anyone by what the Nazis are up to.”
Deitel recalled all the press the young aviator had received, even in Germany. And he remembered the man’s intemperate remarks praising the New Order in its early years.
“You and Herr Lindy both appear very young to have served in the war.”
“We were. Both of us were barely seventeen, and we lied about our age,” Rucker said. “They needed pilots bad.”
“ ’They’ as in your country, or ‘they’ as in the Texas mercenary company?”
“Now now, Doc. You know the Freehold sat the war out. This was strictly a private affair for those of us young, dumb, and unbridled enough to want to join in that organized slaughterhouse.”
“Ach. Texas and the Swiss. I’m sorry, I do not understand this rigid adherence to neutrality you so treasure.”
“Wars ain’t pretty. Most aren’t worth the fuss. Oh, maybe a few were, I don’t know. But even when they’re right, they don’t do much good for anyone. If someone tries to kill you, you have to try to kill ’em right back, as my grandpappy Mal used to say. But there’s no profit in it and you lose something even when you win . . .”
Deitel didn’t want to interrupt Rucker’s pause; he could tell the flier was trying to find the right words to something difficult.
“. . . Maybe we’re just still gun-shy from the reckoning we had a while back with all the blood spilled after the San Marcos Massacre in 1846.”
Seeing Deitel’s blank expression, Rucker added, “That’s when Bloody Santa Ana tried for the third time to take Texas. What his men did at San Marcos was an obscenity. Texans went a little blood crazy. Marched the whole Texas army down to Mexico City”—blank look—“you know it as Jefferson Ciudad now—and, well, it got awful.
“Mexico City was burned to the ground. A lot of people who never wanted anything more than to feed their families and go about their business died, just like had happened in San Marcos. Many Mexicans fled south. Many more chose to swear allegiance to the Republic of Texas. Too many died on both sides.”
He took another sip.
“The Union States and the Northwest Alliance had the sins of their Indian Wars. Texas has the sin of the Mexican War,” Rucker went on. “That kind of revenge-taking does something to your soul, whether you’re a man or country and whether you’re right or not.”
Deitel wasn’t entirely sure Rucker was speaking only of events from the nineteenth century.
“After the smoke cleared and people started thinking clear again, they realized they’d rung a bell that couldn’t be unrung. Best they could do was resolve not to do it again,” Rucker said. “I always figured that’s why they named the new city after Jefferson. That man always was the biggest champion of second chances North America ever saw. Said that’s what this continent was for.”
Despite his extensive and exclusive education, all of this was new to Deitel. The history of North America, its union, its divisions, its many nations today—all of that was barely touched on even in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but that was almost ninety years ago. Why is this neutrality instinct still so strong today?”
“I don’t know that I know,” Rucker said. “This country was founded by folks who just wanted to be left alone. If you want to be left alone, you gotta be willing to leave alone. Plus, it’s easier doing business with folks in other lands when your government hasn’t been mucking around with the locals. It’s easier to make money than it is to make war.”
Deitel shook his head, trying to hide his disgust at these people’s continued, crass focus on the material.
“Yet you and many of your countrymen—even if it was as a private militia—fought in the Great War.”
Rucker nodded slowly.
“Just because we don’t go colonizing and conquering don’t mean we’re pacifists. Hell, like as not any man or woman you see on the street from here to Cabo is carrying an equalizer,” he said. “Nothing sinful about using a gun in defense. It’s only when you pull it first.”
“So your free society requires that you walk around ready to kill all the time. It’s barbaric,” Deitel said.
Rucker ignored that.
The German and the Texan ordered another round.
“You are right when you say that we Germans do not really understand your culture,” Deiter said. “Your government—it is forbidden to meddle in religion and commerce. Your nation’s army, air corps, and navy are a tenth the size of most western countries. Your government enters no protection treaties, even with your beloved French. You have no national manifest and no colonial expansion beyond your endless business ventures, which seem to pop up all over the world and aren’t directed by anyone but their greedy capitalist owners.”
“And?” Rucker asked.
“To us—and forgive me if this sounds rude—this lack of direction is anarchy and self-indulgence. I don’t advocate anything like what the National Socialists represent, but a modern nation needs a proper modern state. From our perspective, a modern state cannot be administered efficiently without progressive central planning.”
Rucker rocked his head. “Who wants to be administered?” he finally said. “If a man can’t be trusted to run his own life, how is he supposed to run other folks’?”
Again Deitel was at loss. Part was his aversion to confrontation, part because he was sure that Rucker was baiting him.
The bartender told Rucker he had a phone call.
He was back in less than a minute.
“That was Lysander. You’ve been kicked upstairs. They want you in front of the Prometheus Society toot de suite,” Rucker said, pouring the last of his bourbon on the sawdust-covered floor.
Deitel thought they had to be—how did the English say it?—“having him on.” This couldn’t be the executive board of regents for the Prometheus Society, which was the Freehold’s virtual intelligence service.
He and Rucker had borrowed Chennault’s coupe and driven toward the wooden-domed Capitol building, and Deitel was sure now he’d be taken to the real ministers in charge.
At last.
Only they’d driven right past the Capitol and to a diner about a mile away, which was just closing. Inside, he found six people sitting on the stools, along with Lysander Benjamin.
The six couldn’t have varied more in age or background: Libby Rae Melvin, a thirty-year-old waitress; Don Ricardo de la Vega, a sixty-year-old Spanish cattle rancher; Ludwig von Mises, a middle-age Jewish professor of economics with a German accent; Howard Hughes, an oil magnate and aeronaut turned movie mogul in his early twenties; Fan Chi Sau, a Chinese shopkeeper who taught some sort of physical arts, and Manitou, an architect who hailed from the Apache tribe.
When Deitel pulled Lysander aside to express his disbelief that these people were the regents of the most influential study society in the Freehold, Lysander simply asked if the German thought judgment and wisdom were limited to certain vocations but not others.
These six, he explained, were chosen by other Prometheus members to make important decisions for the society precisely because they represented such a cross section of members, and because they demonstrated the highest commitment to their own ideals and the society’s values. The Prometheus Society had been founded to safeguard the very principles established in the Freehold’s constitution, because implicit in those principles was the b
elief that the government itself couldn’t be trusted to govern itself, and it needed those on the outside to do so. Further—and hence the name of the society—those who governed needed the wisdom and light of those who refused to govern. It boiled down to a truism: those who most want to govern are those who shouldn’t, and those who have no interest in governing their fellow men are the best ones for the job.
As to the venue? The six rarely had to assemble at all, and when they did they never met at the same place twice.
Lysander made his presentation.
“In the less than ten years since their defeat in the Great War, Germany is on the rise again,” he began. He clicked on a slide machine and an overhead projector, showing grainy black-and-white photos of German military parades, training exercises, and rallies.
“In addition to rearming Germany’s military machine in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, the Nazis have been pursuing all manner of unconventional weapons programs, including research into transgenics, rocket technology, and atomic fission.” As he spoke, the slides reflected various hastily taken photos of rocket experiments.
“Further, Hitler’s number two man, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and Black Sun, is obsessed with the occult, and he has sent agents around the world searching for historical objects of power. They have undertaken exploration into the paranormal sciences, including psychic manipulation, telepathy, and telekinesis.”
Slides showed spy photos of various Nazi archeological digs and expeditions in jungles, deserts, mountains, and ancient ruins from around the world.
“For years now,” Lysander went on, “their scientists have been on a quest to use genetic manipulation, modification, and mutation to create the perfect Aryan supersoldier—a warrior stronger, faster, and tougher than any man. Only, their experiments have resulted in mutations and monsters.”
Slides showed the hulking nachtmenn—night men in German—in their uniforms. It drew a gasp from at least one member of the Prometheus committee. Hulking, top-heavy bipedal beasts with squat legs and apelike arms, but the most disturbing aspect of the creature was its face. Tusks jutted from slavering jaws over small black, emotionless eyes. The lipless mouth seemed to open too wide. Next, he showed the demon-eyed wolf creatures known as wehr-wolves.
Black Sun Reich: The Spear of Destiny: Part One of Three Page 8
