Bob Mayer
Omega Sanction
Chapter One
The top of the castle wall looked like black teeth against the night sky, the space between the stone blocks where the soldiers of old had kept watch for approaching enemies. The castle was set on a small hill with a commanding view of the surrounding terrain for many miles. It had been built five centuries ago and rebuilt and added to many times over the intervening years.
The castle, around which the small German town of Bad Kinzen had grown, held a dark reputation. The people in the town rarely spoke of it openly. The SS had garrisoned a battalion in the castle during World War II, appreciating the high ground and the numerous stone rooms they could use to hold prisoners. In those rooms many Resistance fighters shipped from France had met their screaming deaths. In the rooms above the dungeon, young women had suffered their own shameful fate at the hands of the all-powerful SS. It was a subject rarely talked about among the elders in town except in whispers and after too much beer. The young didn't know the details, but they picked up the emotional drift and the castle held its own dark place in their minds.
Before the war, the Kinzen family had controlled the castle for generations and there had been whispers even then about what went on behind the massive stone walls. The Kinzen family had held a recessive gene that had come out every couple of generations and led to madness and perversion. Unfortunately, there was little that could be done about the madness, as the Kinzens were the wealthiest and most powerful family this side of Stuttgart. Before the rise of modern law, the Kinzens had held sway over the town and practiced their depredations against the citizenry inside the walls of the castle.
Going back even before the Kinzens, the castle, built in the late 1400s, had seen more than its share of death as the religious wars washed back and forth across Germany. A Protestant enclave had sought shelter behind its walls and held out for two years before Catholic forces under the emperor had starved them into surrendering. As they walked out under a white flag, every Protestant man, woman and child had been thrown into the moat and kept down there by spearpoint until all were dead. It was said at the end there was a pile of bodies with the strongest on top, above the foul water, and the last man to die took over a week, standing on top of an island of festering bodies, forced to drink the foul water even as his belly burst from hunger.
Such was the history of Bad Kinzen Castle until the Americans took it over at the end of World War II. It served first as the headquarters for the local military governor, then, as the Germans gained self-rule, it became the headquarters for various U.S. Army units, the last being a Pershing missile battalion. There were numerous other American units stationed around the town of Bad Kinzen, as the headquarters for the Seventh Corps and U.S. Army Europe were just down the road in Stuttgart.
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the drawdown in forces, Bad Kinzen took its own share of cutbacks in American troops. The Pershing missile unit was withdrawn and the castle was empty once more. The Americans wanted to turn the castle over to the German government, but the debt-ridden federal government, still reeling from the negative economic attachment of East Germany, preferred the rent rather than the maintenance burden of the castle, so for the past eight years it had remained nominally rented to the Americans even though it was no longer utilized.
The castle had deteriorated over the years it was left abandoned. The massive stone wall surrounding it was still intact, as it had been for hundreds of years, but the buildings on the inside were dilapidated and falling apart. The moat, the death place of hundreds, was now dry, and the drawbridge had long ago been replaced by a permanent concrete bridge leading over the ditch. The road went through the wall and into the large open courtyard. A fence had been put across the bridge to prevent entry, but it had taken less than a week for a hole to be torn in it. The facilities engineers from Seventh Corps repaired the fence every few months, but by the end of the next weekend another hole always appeared.
Despite the removal of the Pershing unit, there were still Americans near Bad Kinzen. The Seventh Corps was headquartered at Stuttgart, although many of the soldiers were currently deployed on peacekeeping missions to Bosnia and the Belorussia. The castle, off limits to Germans because it was in American hands — and perhaps as much because of its dark past — was a draw to the teenage children of those American soldiers and it was they who tore holes in the fence as quickly as it was repaired.
Too young to drink legally, hassled by Military Police on post and German Polizie off, the American teenagers went to Bad Kinzen Castle, where MPs never visited and the Polizie were forbidden to go. The teenagers partied and hung close to each other, strangers in a distant land, with parents who were gone more often than they were home. They only had each other and they clung to that.
In a battered Camaro, two of those displaced youngsters were currently driving through the winding streets of Bad Kinzen, heading toward the hill on which the castle stood. Kirsten Welch was sixteen, a junior at the American high school in Stuttgart and she had been to Bad Kinzen Castle dozens of times in the past, the last four times with Tommy Pilchen, a senior at the same school. But she had never been there on a weeknight and just the two of them. Always before it had been the weekend and at least a dozen other dependent kids that had convoyed to the castle.
But Tommy had said tonight was special when he'd asked her to go during lunch break at school. Kirsten knew what that meant. Tommy's father was PCSing, army lingo for permanent change of station, back to the States in a week, and that meant Tommy would be gone soon.
They'd been going together for three months and things had progressed to the point where she had made sure that Tommy had condoms in his pocket before they left Pattonville Housing Area earlier in the evening.
It was late November and it got dark and cold early. Her contribution to the trip was several blankets piled in the back seat of the car. A six-pack of beer was on top of the blankets, another prerequisite Kirsten insisted upon.
They parked next to a construction site at the base of the hill on which the castle stood. Tommy threw the blankets over his shoulder and they walked the switchbacks up to the bridge. Tommy held the fence while Kirsten squeezed through.
They had spoken little on the ride down. Kirsten knew Tommy was thinking about going back to the States and she was thinking about how much she was going to miss him. Having been a military brat all her sixteen years, Kirsten knew it was the nature of things that friendships were brief, as each family moved every three or four years. But Tommy was more than a friendship. He was her first boyfriend, and considerable emotion and time had gone into this in the past three months. She'd given him a special part of herself and now he was going to be leaving with it.
They walked across the bridge, and Kirsten halted just before the tunnel through the outer wall. She didn't like Bad Kinzen. The tunnel opening looked like a gaping mouth to her, with two portals above it set like eyes in the black rock. The wind blew and she hugged Tommy closer to her.
"I wish my mom was working tonight," she said.
Then they could have used her house, as they had many times in the past. Her father was a squad leader in one of the infantry battalions and he had been gone now for three months to Bosnia-Herzegovina on the U.S.'s seemingly never-ending peacekeeping effort in the Balkans. Her mom worked in the housing area Burger King on a rotating shift, but tonight she was home, curled in front of the TV watching the Armed Forces Network and steadily drinking enough so that she could pass out in an empty bed. Her only comment to Kirsten on her way out was to be home before one.