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 Untersturmfuhrer? 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
September 7, Present Day
N o, Jake, I have not heard of Vril. Unless that’s the new cleanser that cleans the bathroom so you don’t have to.” Rominy was smart, but she didn’t spend her pretty little brain cells worrying about Nazi power sources. At least, not until now.
“It’s a fictional name, a kind of code for what German theosophists hoped might be out there somewhere.”
“German what?”
“Just guys who provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of National Socialism, the creed of Hitler’s party. It did have a philosophy, you know.”
“You bet. Blow up the world.”
“In the 1930s many highly educated people took race and evolutionary theories quite seriously. After Darwin, it seemed self-evident that if you wanted to improve the human species-if you wanted it to evolve-then you bred the best with the best. People do exactly that every day. They want to mate with the prettiest or the smartest or the strongest or the richest. The Nazis simply thought you could apply that common sense to the group.”
“Master race? Aryan supermen? Sore point for Jews?”
“And Vril.”
“Did I miss that Oprah episode?” She glanced out the window. The view over the Pacific looked exactly as it had hours ago. God, it was a long way to China.
“It sounds goofy, like looking for a way to turn lead into gold, or the legend of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. Yet for thousands of years humans believed in a much more spiritual world than we do, in which gods or ghosts manifested themselves. Then along came science, everything opposed to science was labeled superstitious heresy, and ideas of exotic power sources like Vril were dismissed. Until modern physics came along.”