Watch on the Rhine lota-7 Page 5

  The startled recruits flinched, unmilitarily, but the rejuvenated SS cadre scattered loosely around them took no official notice. Then they heard music… and the singing…

  * * *

  Mühlenkampf, Brasche at his side, stood in warm black leathers under the same cone as the recruits though yet he remained apart from them by decades and even worlds. He suppressed a grin. Icy cold was his mien, as icy as the air.

  Face still a mask, he asked of Brasche, “Do you know why, my Hansi, the skinheads never really got anywhere, politically, in Germany?”

  Hans whispered back, “No, Herr Obergrüppenführer…”

  “Lieutenant General, Hansi. Lieutenant General,” corrected Mühlenkampf, gently yet with a sardonic grin he made no effort to keep from his face. “Our masters do not like the old ways.”

  “Zu befehl, Herr Generalleutnant,” answered Brasche, semiautomatically.

  Mühlenkampf’s grin remained, becoming, if anything, more scornful still.

  “The skinheads never got anywhere, Hansi,” continued the general, “because this is Germany and the assholes never learned to march in step…”

  * * *

  “… Marschiern im Geist, in unsern Reihen mit…”[15] sang the marching men, boots ringing on the ice and cobblestones. Even now the first veterans became visible to the neck-craning recruits as their serried ranks passed through the gates of the Kaserne. “Die strasse frei!…” The song was forbidden, of course. “Ganz Verboten.” But to men who had told Hitler and Himmler to go “fuck themselves” not once, but on countless occasions, what meant the strictures of a government weaker and in every way even more despised? “Die Fahne hoch! Die reihen fest geschlossen…”[16] began the song’s last, repeat, verse.

  In the ranks of the old SS sang one Helmut Krueger. How good it was to Krueger, how very good, to once again feel the blood of youth coursing in his veins. How good to march with his old comrades, to sing the old songs. How good it was to be what Krueger had never thought himself to be any other than, an unrepentant, anti-Semitic, Nazi of the old school.

  Krueger dreamed, daydreamed actually, of a broad-scale return of the old days. He imagined once more the cringing Jewish, Slavic and Gypsy whores opening their buttocks, legs and lips in fear of him. The power was an intoxicant. He saw, with half a mind’s eye, the cowards, suspended by their necks from lamp posts, kicking and gasping and choking out their last. Even the memory caused him to shiver slightly with delight. He heard the “Heils” coming from ten thousand throats and the sound was better than good. He remembered how grand he had felt at losing the self and joining such a godlike power. He saw the flaming towns and smiled. He heard the screams from the gas chambers and crematoria and shuddered with a nearly sexual joy.

  Krueger was sure that after decades of exile he was at last coming home.

  * * *

  Missing his home, Dieter Schultz, aged eighteen, along with the other recruits, shuffled nervously in the cold snow. One would have thought that the boys would never have heard the songs, this being Germany, rules being rules. And, indeed, know the songs they did not. Yet they recognized them.

  Dieter and the rest knew, absolutely knew, that that song, in particular, was against the law, against the rules. Soon the polizei would come and break up this had-to-be illegal gathering. Soon, minutes at most, these damned refugees-from-the-grave Nazis would all be arrested and shortly thereafter the reluctant recruits would be sent home to mama. They knew.

  * * *

  Mühlenkampf tapped his left boot toe unconsciously as the column of thousands of old-young veterans even now split to envelop the boys in their charge. The music and the song changed, the veterans singing in voices and tones designed to knock birds dead at a mile:

  “Unser Fahne flattert uns voran.

  Unser Fahne ist die neue Zeit.

  Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit.

  Ja, die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod.”[17]

  Mühlenkampf, suddenly conscious of the tapping boot, forced it to a stop. “Ah, I’ve always liked that one, I confess, Hansi. Why I remember…” yet the thought was lost, uncompleted.

  With a ruffle of drums and a flourish of horns the song ended. Still, the marching feet beat out a tattoo on the icy pavement: crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Sparks were struck by hobnails grating on bare stone. The sparks clustered about the men’s feet, adding a surreal air to the proceedings.

  Brasche stepped forward to the microphone. “Men of the SS Korps… halt.” The marching feet took one more step, then slammed to a simultaneous halt. “Links und rechts… Um.”[18] The enveloping pincers turned inward as though they were parts of a single, sentient, beast. “Generalleutnant Mühlenkampf sprache.”[19]

  Hans Brasche stepped back from the microphone, sharply, as the black-leather-clad Mühlenkampf walked forward.

  Mühlenkampf’s head twisted back and cocked proudly, arrogantly. “I speak first to my old comrades, who need no speeches. Well met, my friends, well met. We have shaken a world before, together. We shall shake several more worlds before we are done.”

  The proud head looked down its straight, aristocratic nose at the new recruits. “I speak next to those who are here to join us. Filth! You are nothing and less than nothing. Unfit, weak, malingering, decadent… Refuse of a society turned to garbage. Spoiled rotten little huddlers at apron strings.

  “You make me ill. You make your trainers, my cadre, ill. You are a disgrace to your species, a disgrace to your culture… a disgrace to our nation and traditions.”

  Mühlenkampf’s face creased with the smallest of smiles. “And yet we, we old fighters, have another tradition. We are, to paraphrase an English poet, charms ‘for making riflemen from mud.’

  “Regimental commanders, take charge of your regiments.”

  On cue, the band struck up Beethoven’s “Yorkische Marsch.” The icy field rang with crisp commands. Units faced and wheeled. Even the new recruits, smarting under a brief and contemptuous tongue lashing, could not help but be forced into step by the march’s heavy, ponderous refrain. As a long and twisting snake, the column marched out from under the tent of light to enter the world of darkness.

  As the last companies were disappearing into the dark, Brasche asked, “So you think this will work, Herr General?”

  Mühlenkampf snorted as if the very thought struck him as ridiculous. “This speech? Some lights? A little insulting language? A little showmanship? Do I think these will work? Hansi, spare me. Nothing ‘works’ in that sense. The easy transformation, like the nonsensically — impossibly — successful spontaneous mass uprising, are bugaboos of the left, of the liberals and of the Reds and the Greens.

  “Ah, but Hansi, they forget something, those Reds and Greens. Several things, really. Germany was no less decadent, divided and weak in the 1920s. I was there. I remember. Yet we shook the world in the ’40s. Why? Because transformations like that are as superficial and shallow as they are easy. Those boys down there are Germans, Hansi — lemmings, in other words.

  “Lemmings, they are, Hansi. Germans: mindless herd animals, at best.” The brief and indulgent smile was replaced in turn by a feral grin. Mühlenkampf slapped Brasche heartily on the shoulder, adding, “But they’d rather be in a pack than a herd, my friend… a pack of wolves.”

  Interlude

  The boarding hordes snarled and snapped at each other as their God Kings herded them from the lighters and down into the storage bowels of the still forming globe. From one or another of the confused and frightened normals crocodilian teeth lashed out whenever followers of a different Kessentai came in range. Sometimes the needle-sharp rows of teeth drew yellowish blood and scraps of reptilian flesh before their wielders were lashed back to passive obedience.

  Not for the first time, Ro’moloristen felt his own bile rise, his crest expand. Half of this was the result of dim, presentient memories of his own time in the breeding pens, a time of constant struggle and fear of being eaten alive by his siblings.
The other half was more pungent.

  The normals tended to lose control when upset or frightened. The crude loading and unloading, coupled with the strangeness of space flight, was more than sufficient to upset most of them and to actually frighten many, even as dull as they were. The result of that fear was a stench of carelessly dropped Posleen feces wafting up from the depths of the lighters to fill the air. In that section of the globe the loading of which it was the young God King’s task to supervise, the stench was overpowering to the extent of being sickening. Still, he thought, normals are so cute, so desirable. But they are so untidy.

  Somewhat less bothered by the stench they lived with daily, the cosslain — the superior normals — flanked the procession, keeping a modicum of order. Keeping order among the normals was half the reason for the flanking procession. The other half was to carry and load aboard ship individual weapons with which the normals could not be trusted entirely, aboard ship, given the stresses those normals were under.

  A Kenstain[20] appeared at Ro’moloristen’s shoulder.

  The God King gestured and a hologram of the globe appeared in midair. He gestured, again, with a claw and a section of the hologram, plus a route leading to that section, suddenly glowed brighter than the rest. “Guide this group down to here and get them into the stasis tanks,” he ordered.

  Athenalras held fiefs on nine worlds. The first, despite a major evacuation of the People, was already plunging itself into Orna’adar, the Posleen Ragnarok. This was the last to be loaded. From here the People would move to the new world, the one they called “Aradeen,” though the locals called it “Earth.”

  Chapter 3

  Bad Tolz, Germany, 31 January 2005

  Schultz is too clean, thought Krueger. In an exercise in mud crawling intended for little higher purpose than to accustom the boys to getting dirty — well, that and simple toughening to overcome their civilized sensibilities, the boy remained too clean.

  Krueger bent over and picked up a clod of half-frozen mud. This he smeared into Schultz’s face snarling, “You little pussy. You smelly little fur-hole filled with nothing. You are nothing so good as a Jew-bitch camp whore. At least she would have known her job.”

  Turning from Dieter to the rest of the platoon, standing in ranks, Krueger shouted, “The earth is your friend. Use it. Huddle up to it as if to your mother’s tit. Embrace it like the little sluts you used to waste your time with. Dig into it. Do not be like this ever-so-prissy little schoolboy, Schultz, afraid to get yourselves dirty. You can wash dirt away. Your own blood is a tougher stain. Dismissed.”

  Without another glance Krueger turned away from his charges and walked to the NCO barracks, briskly and erect.

  The platoon gathered about Schultz, standing there with his face dripping filth. No one said a word; they just stared. Schultz himself quivered with anger. By what right, by what right did this man who looked no older than did Dieter himself, treat him like dirt? And not merely today, but everyday, so it seemed to Schultz, Krueger — his platoon trainer, had some new heap of abuse for him.

  One of the boys, Rudi Harz, put a calming hand on Dieter’s shoulder. “Mein freund, my friend… Krueger is an asshole, a Nazi asshole to boot. But he is also a Nazi asshole who knows. And he sees something useful in you. Bear with it.”

  Around the two the others nodded somberly.

  Schultz, grateful for the touch and the concern, cocked his head and shrugged, adding his own nod. Harz was a good comrade. So were they all.

  “But that asshole, Krueger?” said Dieter, quietly. “He is a bad man, whatever he may know.”

  “Yes,” agreed Harz. “He is the worst. If I hear even one more tale of his rapes in the old concentration camps I will vomit. Even so, use him for what he is good for: which may include how to keep ourselves alive.”

  Silent, Schultz again nodded. Then to the rest he said, “Shall we march back then? Not crawl or amble? March back singing?”

  Amid a general assent, and a wink from Harz in Schultz’s direction, the boys formed into four ranks. “You march us back, Dieter… that’s right, Dieter… show that bastard Krueger that he can’t break us up.”

  Silently agreeing and taking a place on the left side of the platoon, Schultz gave the command, “Vorwaaaats… Marsch!”

  Up in the front rank, Harz began the song, “Vorwärts! Vorwärts! Schmettern die hellen fanfaren…”[21]

  At a distance, still walking away, Krueger smiled to himself and felt an enormous inner glee. He muttered, happily, “The old ways still work.”

  Over the Rhein River, 13 February 2005

  The steep banks of the river spoke to the Indowy with a voice hoary with age. He remembered; he remembered.

  “We have been to your planet before, long, long ago,” Rinteel said, seemingly to the chancellor. “It is a story of sadness.”

  “Really?” asked the chancellor. “Sad, how?”

  “The same way all blighted hopes are sad,” answered the Indowy, distantly.

  Off, too, in the distance, Rinteel saw a rocky hill. His mouth began to mime words in his own tongue. The chancellor had no clue what the words meant, yet something in the cadence touched a chord.

  “What is that you are saying?” the chancellor asked.

  The Indowy took a few moments, inexpressibly sad and weary moments, to answer. “It is a song of my people, an ancient song. It tells of an attempt at liberty from our oppressors, of an ancient stronghold, of trying to forge a weapon to defend those who might have become, in time, our deliverers.”

  The Indowy sighed and pointed from the helicopter window. “It tells the blood-drenched tale of that rock over there.”

  His interest piqued, the chancellor gave orders to the pilot, ignoring the scowls of his security detail. The helicopter veered sharply to the right. In the setting sun the rocky hill gleamed golden and beautiful.

  The helicopter touched down flawlessly, despite the heavy crosswind atop the hill. The Indowy, seemingly in a trance, spirit walking, dismounted first. He was followed by the chancellor and his guards.

  The helicopter had landed a scant three hundred meters from the summit. Over the steep and rocky ground the Indowy advanced, his chanting growing louder with each step. The Chancellor thought he could almost recognize some of the words: “Fafneen… Mineem… Albletoon… Anothungeen… Nibleen… Fostvol.”

  At last the Indowy, and the others, stood before a sheer rock wall. “It was my clan, mine and mine alone, which made this attempt. We paid for it, heavily.”

  “What attempt?” asked one of the BND guards.

  Rinteel half ignored the question. Instead, speaking distantly, he said, “We wanted to make a holy order, a group of warrior heroes, to man the defenses we would build here. We had thought that under the protection of Anothungeen, an insuperable defense for your planet, your people might grow to mightiness. We could not defend you. Yet we sought to give you the means to defend yourselves.”

  The humans of the group, swaying on the wind-swept slope, faced the unmarred cliff with boredom writ large upon their faces. And then the Indowy reached out a palm and uttered a phrase in a nonhuman tongue. A portion of the rock face disappeared, exposing a rough, archlike entrance. The humans, including the chancellor, gaped. Still in his half trance, Rinteel entered; in enclosed spaces the Indowy people were much less fearful than were the sons of Adam.

  From just past the arch Rinteel said, “This place was chosen because it was on the fringe of your then dominant civilization. Here we could, so we thought, develop the systems, Anothungeen and Fafneen, in peace. From here also we could, so we thought, distribute it secretly throughout your then-dominant civilization, the one you humans call ‘Roman.’ ”

  The Indowy’s chin sank upon his breast.

  The chancellor looked over and past the Indowy to cast his gaze upon a scene of ancient slaughter. Skull-less cadavers, dried and brittle, of humans and Indowy both, met his sight. The chancellor’s mind turned back to little piles
of gnawed bones in a place called “Fredericksburg.” “Mein Gott,” he said.

  “Only one of us, Albletoon, escaped the slaughter,” Rinteel translated as he recited. “A human mercenary, traitor to his race, led the assault. Siegfried, cursed be his name, betrayed the People. For greed… and the promised mate… he sold them out… and so fell the cause of liberty. The traitor Mineem led them through, foiled the gate, and compromised the safeguards. For foul gold, and fame, our hero Siegfried sold his soul.”

  So deep was the Indowy into his trance that the chancellor feared for him. He reached out a hand almost comradely.

  Rinteel shrugged off the comforting grip.

  “Let me make sure I understand,” the chancellor said. “Your people knew of us, and tried to save us, centuries ago?”

  “More than centuries, millennia.”

  “But you failed? It didn’t work?”

  “No,” answered Rinteel, with a sigh both sad and painful. “We forgot — it had been so long since we had known war. Only weapons of your own forging could save you. The Elves will sabotage anything we might give you. So, no, Herr Kanzler, no, it won’t work. It didn’t work.”

  Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant,

  Munich, Germany, 15 February 2005

  “Well, that didn’t work,” sighed Mueller.

  “Back to the drawing board,” agreed Prael, disgust dripping with every syllable.

  The object of that disgust, an enormous steel cylinder leaking heavy red hydraulic fluid as if from a ruptured heart, stood shattered within its testing cradle. The cylinder, intended to be one of ten that would absorb the recoil of the Tiger III’s twelve-inch gun, had proven deficient… and that in the most catastrophic way possible. Indeed, so catastrophic had the failure been that at least one of the testing crew within Prael’s vision was leaking red fluid nearly as rapidly as the cylinder. Instantaneous decapitation will do that.