Carter said as he pressed on the accelerator. “The Germans would have expected their squad to overrun us back at the temple, since they had the element of surprise. Mining this road would have just as likely have caught their own, as us.”
“Life ain’t logical, Major,” Ferro said. The soldier sitting in the passenger seat, his hands clutching the grips of his .30-caliber machine gun, nodded his agreement with Ferro. He was new to the unit, a greenhorn replacement brought in from the paratrooper pool. Carter could not remember his name. Carter understood that no one wanted to die in the last days of a war—where’s the fairness in that?
Carter responded with determined words. “We don’t have time to stop.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The chalet had belonged to a Jew. When Krohn had showed up in 1937 and demanded the deed to the home, accusing the old man of getting the money for the summer home by betraying the Germans during the First World War, the Jew had shown him an Iron Cross and indignantly explained that he had earned it on the front, in the trenches, just as the Führer had. Krohn had smiled tightly, hiding his surprise that any Jews had fought during the war, and coldly insisted that he wanted the chalet.
Of course, laws had been followed. The Jew had signed the deed over for a cheque drawn on a Swiss bank for what amounted to a tenth of the true value of the chalet. The Jew then disappeared, using the money to flee the nation. Krohn would have arranged for the man’s arrest, but this was five years before the Final Solution began, and Krohn didn’t have time to complete the required paperwork.
Krohn moved into his new home as he supervised the construction of the temple, ensuring that only workmen of pure blood applied the best of their skills, building always in the traditional manner, using only hand tools invented thousands of years ago.
He loved his chalet, the wooden floors worn shiny by years of use, a grand fireplace in the center room that lit the room up magnificently on cold winter nights, reminding him of how he imagined Nordic warriors must have felt in their longhouses thousands of years ago. In fact, he had built a longhouse behind the chalet for his soldiers to live in, but for himself, he preferred the red bricks and iron stoves of his own chalet. As a realist, he recognized that his romantic views of the past had limits when it came to personal comfort.
As was his habit, to know the true and pure history of all things, he researched the history of his new home. He was not surprised to find that it had been built in 1843 by a pure-blooded German, a tax collector from Munich. It had stayed in his family for generations and only fell into the hands of the Jews in 1923, when inflation had destroyed the wealth of so many good Germans.
“Fritz, stand guard,” Krohn ordered as they drove up to the chalet. “Karl, bring the girl in the house.”
She didn’t struggle, but obediently followed, with Karl’s hand on her shoulder. Krohn appreciated that; he despised it when the girls struggled. Could they not see the honor that he had bestowed on them? In quieter moments, sitting in his library with the phonograph playing some Litz, schnapps in his hand, he admitted that the other sex bewildered him. They always seemed to act differently from what his scholarship told him to expect.
He had been married for three years, to a beautiful peasant girl with blonde hair, full breasts, and hips that promised healthy children, of the purest blood, not a hint of any flaws. What a miserable experience. She had refused to be obedient, ignored the Nazi doctrine that he had tried to teach her, and worst of all, failed to become pregnant. The doctors said that she should be fertile; he suspected that she had used some peasant poison to bind up her womb tightly, the kind that medieval witches used. There were many sources of ancient wisdom, not all of it good.
After he cast her out, sent her home to her parents, and arranged for a divorce, he had burned her possessions. A year later he found that he had missed one trunk of clothes and had never gotten around to destroying it. The passion to burn had ebbed.
Pulling the trunk out of a closet in the guest room, he flung it open. “Put some of these clothes on,” the colonel ordered.
She seemed to balk at his instructions, twisting her fingers around each other, glancing at him and back at Karl, who stood at the doorway, another of those sloppy grins on his face.
“Now, quickly!” Krohn barked. “He won’t touch you.”
Grabbing a large valise, Krohn left the bedroom and hurried to his library. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases covered two walls of the room, filled with books and stacks of papers. He paused, overcome with emotion, almost ready to weep. How could he leave all this, the result of twenty years of collecting, a treasure trove of the most obscure knowledge?
For a long moment he was paralyzed by indecision. The coming of the end of the war had moved from the abstract to the real the day before, when his platoon of guards had been ordered to Munich to help defend the city against the approaching Americans. General Kapp was a fool, like most of them, not a believer in how Odin could save the Reich, seeing only twenty-two more soldiers to add to his doomed effort to defend the city. Krohn obeyed, for obedience was the hallmark of a good officer, but he was relieved when he reached the city with his men to find the general’s headquarters in flames, having been hit by Jabos.
Where was the Luftwaffe? He had seen those wonderful new jet fighters, a testament to Aryan intelligence, able to fly so fast that the Allies could not shoot them down, but with many of their airfields overrun, and no more fuel, the Luftwaffe was finished. That fat man Goering was finished too. He had never been a true believer, always unwilling to render honor to the ancient gods.
Krohn had watched as General Kapp was carried out of his headquarters, still breathing, but with blood staining his face and a hole in his skull that showed gray matter chewed up by shrapnel. No need to remain in Munich any longer. Krohn turned the two trucks around and left town. Because the Americans ruled the skies, normally Krohn would only have traveled at night, but he sensed that everything was falling apart. Perhaps the Bavarian Redoubt plan would not even be implemented, where the best German units would find shelter in the forests and mountains, extending the war even with most of Germany overrun, until Churchill and Roosevelt came to their senses and realized that the Bolsheviks were the true enemy. No, not Roosevelt—that archfoe had died just two weeks ago. Now it was that man Truman, and who knew what his inner thoughts might be? How could a man from Missouri become president of the most powerful nation on Earth? The Americans made weak decisions because they were a decadent people; but in his more sober moments, Krohn acknowledged that the Americans knew how to churn out weapons at an insane rate. He had read a classified report from the Abwehr that estimated that the Americans would build over 100,000 airplanes in 1945 alone. Germany had started the war with only 3,000 airplanes of all types. The mind boggled at the number: 100,000. But it was not numbers of planes and tanks or men that won wars—those were just the tools. It was spirit, blood, and the gods that brought victory.
Odin had helped them win many victories, but not enough. Krohn knew that he was not to blame, but he wondered whether his brides to Odin would have carried the Reich beyond the mistakes and the lack of faith if he had understood the ancient ways better. He strongly believed that he could still save the Reich, even in defeat; he just needed time. What did he need from the library? Truly need, not just want?
He went to the safe. Sitting on four legs shaped like lion’s paws, the black beast weighed over five hundred kilograms. Spinning the dial, he opened it and looked at his choicest treasures. On top was a typewritten manuscript, a book that he had been writing and revising carefully for years. He had hoped to have it published in 1946 by Nordland Verlag of Berlin, the SS publishing house. An editor there had been quite enthusiastic. The manuscript went into the valise.
Next he grabbed three envelopes of
