“Does your old friend Hood know all this?” asked Eckells. “Do we have to worry about the American?”
“He’s not my friend. He’s a playboy, looking for things to occupy his time in New York. Don’t worry about Hood.” There was an edge to Raeder’s voice, but the others had already taken note of his moodiness and temper. They knew better than to ask more.
“David-Neel saw monks levitate and move from place to place at supernatural speeds,” Hans Diels volunteered instead. “Roerich saw a mysterious oval spheroid speeding across the Asian skies in 1927. It was immense and instantly changed direction, but had no discernible power source.”
“Superior to any aircraft now in existence,” Raeder agreed. “We’re not traveling ten thousand miles for yak dung, my friends.”
They laughed.
“Some of the philosophers behind National Socialism have interpreted these legends and reports,” Raeder went on. “The American Madame Blavatsky, the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, the British medium Alice Bailey, Germany’s Thule Society-all have contributed. If you’ve paid attention in SS seminars, you know their theories of Atlantis, Hyperborea, and Thule. Theosophy, Ariosophy, and other new scientific disciplines have established the history of race conflict and the origins of us Aryans. This is the new German science.”
They nodded.
“Blavatsky herself posited three principles: that God’s instrument is an electrospiritual force that embodies the laws of nature, that creation is a cycle of destruction and rebirth, and that all is unified-the soul and the material, the tiny and the great. Manipulating this unity, she preached, is the secret of supernatural power. Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself studied her philosophy and incorporated its teachings into National Socialism. We sail with a rich philosophic tradition.”
“ Heil Hitler,” Eckells breathed quietly, like a prayer.
“Our ancestors from the north may have branched to Tibet. One of our tasks is to determine if this is true. Wilhelm here will search for racial evidence with his calipers.”
“Just so he doesn’t measure me,” Muller growled. He thought the head measuring was anthropologic nonsense. Julius had little use for the social sciences.
“Yes, don’t let him practice one of his plaster masks on you,” said Diels, who’d tried it. “It’s like being suffocated.”
“Such a discovery in itself would be enough to garner us all global fame,” Raeder went on. “It would reunify the Aryan and prove to skeptics that Germany’s racial theories are true. Julius will add to our understanding of the physics of the earth, and Hans its human history. Franz will bring back movie footage of ceremonies never witnessed by Western man.”
“If all goes well,” Eckells amended.
“But there’s more at stake here than that. We’ve all heard of the strange theories of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. A universe of the vast and the small, ruled by laws very different from what we perceive in everyday life. Some physicists think these ideas hint at strange and wicked new powers at the level of the atom.”
“But that’s Jewish science,” Kranz objected.
“Even a Jew might stumble on a truth. And we must never let the Jew have a monopoly on a new kind of power. We true Germans are far ahead of them, I think. Haushofer founded the Vril Society two decades ago to search for the power source that stories attribute to Shambhala.”
“What’s Vril?” Muller asked. “I don’t remember this from my physics texts.”
“A convenient name, taken from an old novel, of what the Reichsfuhrer thinks may be a very real power source. These ancients understood the natural world in ways we’ve forgotten, and found a way to tap fundamental energies far more powerful than gunpowder or gasoline. This power can be directed by the mind to build or destroy. It is power that may still exist in fabulous cities that, many writers and thinkers believe, lay hidden under the surface of the earth-cities that are the origin of the idea of hell, perhaps.”
Diels took a swig of schnapps. “You’re taking us to hell, Kurt?”
“Or heaven. Somewhere may be hidden the most fabulous city since the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. A new El Dorado! Not because of gold but because of power. The ignorant would call what travelers have sought ‘magic,’ but it’s in fact simply a spiritually higher mastery of science and the cosmos. It restores man from a plaything of physics, a victim, to its central mover. We become not pawns but kings. Not mortals but gods. We become not the product of creation, but its manipulator. Has not our Fuhrer demonstrated this kind of ‘magic’ already? Hitler is destined to be the true King of the World, and our mission is to help him. This is both a religious expedition, gentlemen, and a scientific one. We’re being sent to find, essentially, supernatural powers-powers that our Aryan ancestors once possessed and ruled with, but which have been lost for millennia.”
“But how were they lost?”
“We don’t know. Perhaps they were deliberately hidden, to await reemergence of a fit people like us of the Third Reich.” The first Reich was the heroic prehistoric world of Aryan god-men, the Germans knew. The second has been the chaos of history caused by the cursed philosophies of Jew and Christian. Now they were at the dawn of the third, the Reich of National Socialism. “We, gentlemen, are the apostles, the knights, the angels, who may bring the greatest secret in history back to the Fatherland. If we do, Germany conquers all, easily and completely. And then our species’ evolutionary destiny can truly begin, unpolluted by human vermin.”
“We’re going to steal this Vril from the monks of Tibet?” Muller tried to clarify.
“Not steal. Re-find. Tibetans are sunk in ignorance and poverty. They’ve forgotten their own genius. We’re going to plumb their legends to find if the legends of our ancestors are true, and learn where Vril is hidden. Tibet will be our new ally, on the flank of Russia, China, and British India alike.” He took his own swig. “Never has so small a group of men been given the possibility of achieving so much.”
“But how will we find what no one else has?”
“Reichsfuhrer Himmler has been researching these legends. He’s found maps that date from the Middle Ages and the time of Frederick Barbarossa. We’ll combine those clues with what the Tibetans know.”
“Barbarossa!”
“There’s evidence Barbarossa was interested in these mysteries himself. And belief that he may have left us a key.”
“What key?”
“I’ll reveal that to you when the time comes.”
“And if we fail?” asked Diels. “What if there’s no Shambhala and no Vril?”
Raeder looked at them seriously. “In that case, we might have to consider never returning to Germany. That is not a message the Reichsfuhrer cares to hear.”
9
The Skagit River Valley, United States
September 4, Present Day
North of Starbird Road, Interstate 5 dips toward the Skagit River Valley and paradise opens up. The peaks of islands in Washington’s inland sea hump on the northwest horizon: Fidalgo, Lummi, Cypress, and Orcas as green and precipitous as a child’s crayon drawings. To the northeast is the snowy volcanic cone of Mount Baker and the cutover foothills of the Cascade Range. Between is a plump platter of farmland, a onetime bay filled with sediment at the end of the last ice age. The result is some of the richest soil in the world. A hundred crops are grown there: tulips in spring, berries in early summer, and potatoes, corn, and grapes approaching harvest on this day.
The timelessness should have reassured Rominy: the gleam of glaciers, the meringue of clouds, and the orderly phalanx of ripened crops were reassuring. The overcast was breaking and the surface of the Skagit sparkled like sequins, while the valley’s overall palette was toned sepia by September’s golden glaze. She often came here on weekends, bicycling and kayaking to escape the tedium of her cubicle in Seattle. But now the beauty had a sense of menace. Was she really being pursued? Where was Jake Barrow taking her? The old pickup whined as the journalist kept it at seventy-five mph.