William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

As soon as the lieutenant disappeared from view, Raeder ordered camp broken and a quick last push to the pass at Kangra La. As the others started this final climb, the German retrieved five pounds of high explosive from one of the trunks.

“Come on, Muller. I’m tired of the English following us.”

“Are you going to start a war?”

“I’m going to make it impossible to have one.”

They went downslope to a precipitous pitch above the winding trail and climbed a hundred yards above, setting the charge on a hump of fractured rock.

“Kurt, I don’t know if this is wise,” Muller said. “This is a trade route, a lifeline. Do we have to destroy it? If word gets out, the natives could turn against us.”

“I thought you liked to make things go boom, Julius.”

“For science and research. Not vandalism.”

“Reichsfuhrer Himmler will be interested to hear you describe the necessary advancement of this expedition as vandalism.”

“That British boy is no threat to us.”

“That boy could bring men.” He began walking back, unreeling the fuse cord. “When Cortes reached Mexico, he burned his ships.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“We can’t go home this way anyway. It will be through Persia or China or Russia.”

Muller resignedly helped splice the wires to the detonator.

“Now, twist the plunger,” Raeder ordered.

“You do it.”

“No. I want you to take a hand. I’m not the only National Socialist here.”

Muller scowled but twisted. With a roar, a gout of rock flew outward and down, hammering the path and dislodging it. A rock avalanche thundered into the ravine. Stone and noise bounced in the fog.

“Whoo!” Raeder hollered. His shout echoed away down the canyon.

A hundred-yard section of the trail was gone. It would take weeks to carve a replacement.

“Alas,” Raeder said. “It’s become impossible to follow the lieutenant.”

Muller looked down at their destruction. “I had no idea, Kurt, that university zoologists were so single-minded.”

“I learned some things in ’34 with Hood in Tibet,” Raeder replied.

“Demolition?”

“No. Not to give your enemies any chance at all.”

Let the British try to follow them now.

They traded the mules for yaks at a border village, reloaded their luggage on fewer animals, and trudged on. The trail’s surroundings were treeless now, brown where barren rock prevailed and green in watered swales. The Kangra La itself was a barren saddle marked with a cairn of stone and fluttering prayer flags.

“Each flap of the flag sends a prayer to their gods,” Raeder told his companions.

“What’s our prayer, Kurt?” asked Eckells.

“Power.”

They were at seventeen thousand feet. Around them, peaks shot ten thousand feet higher, draped with glaciers blue as fine diamonds. The sky was cobalt, the sun burned heatless. Wind whipped over the pass, snapping their clothes and pennants.

“Tibet,” the German announced, pointing at a horizon of endless mountains. “This is what Cortes felt when he gazed on Tenochtitlan, or Moses at the Promised Land.”

“Cortes had gold to entice him,” Kranz said.

“Tibet has gold, too. Tons of it, in Buddhist temples. They are rich, and oddly weak.”

“Ah, so that’s your secret motive, Kurt? We plunder? I’ve been wondering as we’ve panted.”

“Of course not. Mere treasure hunting is a relic of history. In modern times, the gold comes from the real prize, scientific discovery.” He smiled. “But if we come away with gold as well, it will be just compensation, no?”

“Power in this oxygen-starved, arid, medieval backwater?” Muller said skeptically, gazing at the emptiness.

“The world’s greatest secret.” Raeder’s eyes shone, as if he might pry a revelation from the slopes of the mountains ahead. “We are looking for the force, my SS brethren, that animates the world.”

Hong Kong, China

September 28, 1938

B enjamin Grayson Hood traveled more miles in nine days than Raeder’s expedition had sailed and marched in nine weeks. Hood’s first three thousand miles were by train from New York to San Francisco by way of Chicago, aboard the gleaming California Zephyr. Then by seaplane more than eight thousand miles across the Pacific. The Martin 130 China Clipper flown by Pan American averaged an astonishing 163 mph, hopping to Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Guam, Manila, and Hong Kong. Each was an oasis of calm and safety, far removed from the aggression of the Japanese Empire in China.

Hood’s ticket for this race against the Germans had cost a staggering $1,600, or as much as two new cars. But then he’d had a private cabin with bunk, washstand, and the finest cuisine the airline could conjure. He relished the shrimp and steak while he could, and didn’t turn down the company of one Edith Warnecke, either. She was a pretty and bored thirty-five-year-old double divorcee traveling to meet her newest husband in Singapore. Edith smelled Hood’s money and pedigree; Hood, opportunity. She liked red wine, chocolate, and sex, and rode the American adventurer ragged three miles above the Pacific, moaning like another propeller.

He was willing to oblige since the days ahead would be privation enough. And yet the amusement was oddly unsatisfying. Edith was an unhappy woman, looking for distraction. Ben realized (somewhat to his own surprise) that he was increasingly dissatisfied with distraction. Life should mean something, and not just society outings, specimen expeditions, and museum tolerance of his stooping to be a scientist. Sex should mean something, someday. After the Clipper skidded down on its pontoons into Hong Kong harbor, he stepped out on the dock, annoyed with his own conduct. Since the Tibet scandal he’d been embroiled in four years before, he’d been marking time. Now, he thought, his time had come.

Mrs. Warnecke, sensing his mood, stalked off without a good-bye to drink by herself until the next flight to Singapore.

What am I doing here? Hood said to himself as he watched the minuet of the junks traversing the harbor. It certainly wasn’t to fulfill some secret mission for Duncan Hale as errand boy for Uncle Sam. It was to complete what he’d long suspected was unfinished, his business with Kurt Raeder and Keyuri Lin.

Astonishing that Raeder had dared return.

Somewhere, in central Asia, was what he’d backed away from before: the test of being a man.

Hood had arrived at the edge of chaos. One couldn’t tell that in Hong Kong itself, with its stately British warships, regal banks and ministries, and bustling streets where coolies pulled rickshaws at a steady trot and Chinese women of high fashion minced in narrow silk dresses slit just high enough, to the knee, to make maneuverability possible. Sampans choked the quay and liners gleamed like mammoth wedding cakes, their stacks pumping out energetic streams of smoke. All this played out against a beautiful backdrop of steep green hills as extravagant and improbable as an opera set.

Beyond, however, was the mainland. Shanghai and Nanking had fallen to the Japanese the year before. Nipponese warplanes had sunk the American gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River in December, creating a diplomatic uproar. While the beleaguered Chinese army had won an impressive victory at Shantung this spring, now the Imperial Army was counterattacking toward Hankow. Their warplanes, rising sun on the wing, ranged like raptors. Munitions destined for Chiang Kai-shek were safely stacked on Hong Kong wharves under British protection. But once they were on railroads to the mainland, they ran a gauntlet of air raids.

The British trader Sir Arthur Readings explained all this when Hood called on him in the imperial oasis of Hong Kong called Happy Valley, site of the colony’s racetrack. Since British Intelligence had been alerted of Hood’s mission and agreed to help, Hood had been instructed by Duncan Hale to go to Readings for advice. Sir Arthur knew finance, good liquor, and China.