Blood of the Reich (37 page)

“But if we’ve got cyclotrons there’s no need for an old one, right?”

“Tibetan holy men have always been reputed to have magical or supernatural powers. What if those rumors have some basis in science? Our atom smashers are designed to break things apart. But this one, according to Nazi legend, was designed to put things together, to reassemble energy in a new way.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’m a science nerd, like I said.” He took her hands in his. “Rominy, have you ever heard of a secret power source called Vril?”

36

Shambhala, Tibet

October 4, 1938

T
he noise of the great machine was growing louder, a rising whine more powerful than any sound Hood had heard before. He advanced down the tunnel cautiously, grateful it was lit but also feeling exposed. At any moment he expected another German to appear at the tunnel horizon from the other end, maybe with a bizarre staff that would fry him like the electric chair. But nobody appeared.

They were waiting in ambush for him.

No, they were preoccupied.

The circle of pipes was several miles in extent, and it took him an hour of cautious walking to get from Shambhala’s “back door” to the machine room where he’d first caught up to Raeder. At the end of the pipeline tunnel he crouched and crept, the MP-38 ready, until he had most of the big cavern in view.

At the far end was a heap of rubble where the other entrance of the circular tunnel had been caved in by Hood’s thunder stick. The main hall was still littered with rock from the blasted ceiling. Bones were tossed about like confetti. And the horribly mutilated German who’d triggered Raeder’s wrath—or at least the wrath of the weirdly diabolical staff—still sat, half-disintegrated, against one wall. Raeder and the other surviving German were at the machine, a staff reinserted in its cradle. The weapon was pulsing amber, and presumably was being charged.

The two were arguing. Shambhala did not seem to induce harmony.

Hood stepped out, submachine gun in hand, and walked toward them. Raeder had another staff in his hand, the American saw. It, too, glowed.

“Let’s try this again,” Hood said. “Drop your weapons.”

The Germans turned, momentarily disconcerted but then regaining their poise. “Ah, you found that the tunnel doesn’t go anywhere,” Raeder replied. “Yes, now we’re back as we were. Except what did you do with Keyuri?”

“Your henchman shot her.”

“Ah, too bad. And you shot him?”

“Something like that.”

“It’s gotten a little crazy, has it not, Benjamin Hood? We have here, I suspect, something more valuable than the gold of El Dorado.” He shook his staff. “And instead of rejoicing we’re fighting. Why is that?”

“Because you want to give it to a bunch of book-burning Nazi lunatics.” Hood gestured with the muzzle of the machine gun. “You’re finished, Kurt.”

“Am I? Under whose authority?”

“The Tibetan government sent me here.”

“To get this power for themselves.”

“It’s their country, isn’t it? So I repeat: Hands
up
!”

“And what
proof
do you have that you work for anyone but yourself, Hood?”

“I have the machine gun.”

“What happened to the staff you already stole?”

“It went cold.”

“Keyuri is spiriting it away, that’s what I think. We still have a destiny, she and I. And I have something entirely different from your primitive gun. Reichsführer SS Himmler called it Vril, and it makes that toy in your hand as obsolete as a stone club. I have a weapon as quick as thought itself, and just as mobile. I think, therefore I destroy.” He lifted the staff slightly. “Imagine a tool that doesn’t hammer on reality but rearranges it. That’s what I feel when I hold it, Benjamin. I’ve gotten hold of the fabric of the universe itself.”

“Don’t make me pull the trigger.”

“Will you really shoot me down like one of your museum specimens?”

“Just like you fried your own man there, hurled against the wall.”

The other German looked at Raeder nervously.

Raeder ignored him. “Who really sent you? The Chinese? The Americans? What faith they have, dispatching you all by yourself!”

“We’re both scientists, Kurt. They sent me as a fellow scientist.”

“To steal discovery. Alas, I got here first.” And he raised the staff to point it.

So Hood fired.

The M-38 spat, the barrel climbing slightly as he fought to control the unfamiliar weapon. It stuttered like the guns in the gangster movies, shells flying like flung coins. Raeder should have been cut down.

Instead there was a blinding flash, a boom as loud as bells in the belfry of a cathedral, and the whine of angry hornets.

Hood’s bullets flew all around the room, anywhere but at Raeder, having been deflected by the force in his crystal staff. The American, meanwhile, was cuffed backward by power like hurricane wind, flying off his feet and skidding on his back against the pipes.

The sound of Raeder’s shot gonged off the walls before rolling away into a throaty rumble. The air crackled as if there’d been a bolt of lightning. It tasted like ozone. More rock rained down from the ceiling and bounced off the floor, the other German wincing.

“I’ve no idea how it works,” Raeder called, “or what it can really do. If it hadn’t had to deflect the energy of your bullets, I’d guess you’d be dead by now. So let’s just finish what I started and bring the curtain down.”

Hood scrambled for cover in the tunnel. Raeder aimed the weapon at the tunnel mouth. A thunderbolt flashed again and the cave quaked, the tunnel ceiling shattering and rock dropping down as Hood rolled under the pipes. It smashed onto the second entrance of the tunnel, burying it. Stray fragments bounced out across the floor of the main chamber and a cloud of dust shot out. The great machine itself seemed to shift gears and whine higher.

“Oh, I do enjoy that energy, even if it hurts. Hood? Have I killed you?”

“For God’s sake, Kurt, let’s
go
,” the other German urged.

“Silence, Hans. Do you realize that at this moment I’m the most powerful man in the world?”

Diels lifted his own staff. “No, you’re not. This one is charged, too. We both have Vril.”

“Then go make sure he’s finished. None of this slaughter would have happened without the interference of that damnable hack scientist and his nun. Keyuri Lin has my comrades’ blood on her hands.”

The German archaeologist walked warily into the cloud of dust. The Vril staff throbbed in his hand, casting light, but everything was obscured by the fog of the explosions. “I don’t see him,” Diels called.

“Escaped?”

“Buried, or trapped in the tunnel.”

“Then help me puzzle out this machine. It’s running higher and higher, and I’m worried it will race and break. With the tunnels sealed, we can work in peace.”

Diels turned. “We’ve buried the piping at both ends. Maybe it’s running too hot.”

“Then let’s try inserting another staff to absorb its power.”

“We don’t know what we’re doing, Kurt. We should walk away.”

“From godlike power?”

Then there was the bark of a heavy pistol and Diels’s forearm shattered. He screamed, clutched it, and dropped his staff.

A figure rose out of dust and rubble, emerging from a pocket under the pipes. Hood was gray with cave dust, rock scratches bleeding, the submachine gun ruined beneath the rocks. He hurled Beth Calloway’s now-empty revolver over Diels’s head at Raeder, who instinctively ducked instead of lifting his Vril staff.

Hood charged and dove for the other one. Diels grasped, too, screaming as the American rolled onto his injured arm.

Raeder couldn’t use his staff without incinerating them both.

Then the other German was knocked away, Hood rising to his knees, his captured staff swinging around.

Twin thunderbolts met.

The world went white. It was like a twin star exploding, two radiating coronas of energy. There was a shriek from Diels as its fury caught and dissolved the SS man, shredding him and throwing the spray of his body against the walls. What Hood and Raeder felt, encased in the energy of their own staffs, was far different. A pulse of dark energy punched through their bodies but lit them with a glow that was a transfiguration that infected every cell and corpuscle. Their air was sucked out, then punched back in. They were blind from the flash, and yet could feel the granular texture of time and space itself.

They saw a shimmer of force fields and fogs of particles, a part of the universe beyond normal human perception.

The machine was rising to a scream as it accelerated. In the cluster of pipes that led to the red glow below, something broke and steam shot upward in a geyser.

At last, Raeder ran. In fear.

Something was being unleashed he didn’t comprehend. He retreated up the ramp that led out of this underground city.

Hood wearily pursued, half staggering, since every nerve seemed on fire. The irradiation of staff energy was painful, exhilarating, numbing. His senses had been heightened, yet ached.

At the entry of the machine room where the great door had been knocked askew and the bones piled, he turned back and aimed his weapon at the machine. A jolt shot out and there was a bang, more pipes punched and broken, wire unspooling. The machine whined higher.

He didn’t want Nazis toying with this monstrosity again.

Then the American was running up the central ramp, following Raeder. There was an explosion ahead, and a rush of cool air.

When Hood got to the circular mandala door, he saw it had been blown to pieces. Raeder was somewhere beyond, on the surface of Shambhala.

Hood trotted out, his body not just tingling but almost sizzling, a boil of electrons alive with a strange new music. Was this what death felt like? Was he dead? But no, he could see his own flesh, but it had a weird, radioactive glow. He was translucent as amber.

Where was the mad
Untersturmführer
? It was night, the roof of the valley ablaze with stars, the snow glowing silver, the waterfalls iridescent lines of pearl. The entire valley was quivering from the tremors they’d unleashed. He could hear the rising shriek of the machine, far, far below.

How to stop this madness before it escaped into the world?

How to ambush Kurt Raeder before Raeder ambushed him?

And then he had an idea.

He ran down Shambhala’s main surface avenue, broken ruins rising to his left and right, the walls snaggletoothed and sad-looking. Had its inhabitants buried what was too terrible to have in the open? Had they fled when the energies they unleashed proved uncontrollable? Or had they made something they needed and simply returned to the stars?

Then there was a crack, like a thousand whips being swung at once, and light seared by him and boomed off a valley wall. The whole cauldron shook. Snow and ice broke off the surrounding glaciers and avalanched down, bringing rock with it.

Raeder had taken a shot at him.

Hood turned and swept his own staff back at the ruins, letting loose a rippling sheet of fire that played over the devastation and turned the uppermost ramparts into shrapnel. Thunder rolled and reverberated. It was a battle of demons. Then he turned and ran again, down the river that ran through Shambhala.

He was making for the narrow slit of a canyon where Raeder had dynamited the only path.

Sheer blocking cliffs rose in front of him a thousand feet high. In the night it looked as if the river disappeared into a cave, so dark was the canyon, but he knew the cleft was like a sword stroke in the edge of a shield. He waited as the noise of their Vril shots grumbled away, trying to hear Raeder over the rush of the river. Where was the German hiding? Then he turned toward the gorge and lifted his staff, summoning every ounce of his will into bringing down those canyon escarpments. He pointed and thought.

The universe seemed to flash into rebirth, light blazing. His arm snapped, broken, and the staff flew wide, sailing into darkness. He roared with pain. The rock walls that gripped the river fractured and leaned precipitously, but didn’t fall.

One more, but he didn’t have it. His staff had broken on the boulders by the river. All the light had gone out of the amber crystal. His arm was shattered, his hand once more gushing blood. Hood turned to face the valley. The ground was shuddering from earthquakes below, and there was grinding as the machine in the deeps kept accelerating into overdrive.

“I still have the machine gun, Kurt!” he yelled to give away his position by the damaged cliffs. It was his bravest lie. “I can still shoot you!”

And then the biggest corona of all pulsed out toward him, the earth shook like a shocked muscle, and the mountain shattered.

37

A Boeing 747, over the Pacific