Her voice faded into the background, babbling away, complete with her theatrics. Lockhart remembered that day. It was mid-December 1940 and he was so cold. He was hungry too, because the officer did not care about anything other than going to the place where Odin held council. His mother and the Obersturmführer had been gone for hours and he recalled how concerned he was for her life. And rightly so. As he sat in the passenger seat of the old automobile, the killer was navigating the sleet-covered road with, Hermann pointed to a burial mound his mother had shown him as a small boy when they were there for a tribute.
There was the Obersturmführer’s car, but nobody was there. The assassin told him to stay in the car because it had begun to snow. Hermann never forgot the dead blunt silence in that car while he waited for his mother to emerge from behind the mound.
The white blanket of snow fell like feathers from the cold sky and impaired his vision. Finally, two figures emerged. Hermann was delighted to see his mother unharmed and she walked alongside the killer. Hermann felt his tears come as he recalled that day, but he did not care. As his mother smiled and waved at him, the assassin pulled out his pistol and shot her in the back of the head. The old man pinched his eyes shut as the moment of the impact blossomed in front of his mind’s eye and a tear severed from his lids fell on his sherry glass.
The sight of his mother’s face bursting open in a mess of bloody bone and lumpy matter had haunted him for years and here it was once more revisiting him. It was an atrocious vision to see. He remembered how he felt when it happened — so lost, his loss and grief overwhelming any fear he was supposed to feel for the killer. As, the man lifted the barrel and pointed it towards the windshield, something drove Hermann to leap from the car and dash away in the falling curtain of snow. Shots rang and he could hear a bullet whistle near him, but he ran until his legs were like lead, his chest burning fiercely and his wispy gasps forming in front of his face. As he raced past the black protruding tree roots and charged over the sharp rocks that punished his shoe soles, Hermann’s sobbing resounded inside his head.
His ears were covered by the woolen flaps of his knitted hat and he only heard his own heartbeat and the sound of his weeping. It was as quiet as it was inside that car while he ran and in his awful loneliness the lack of exterior sound made him feel as if he was all alone in his own universe of pain and sadness. Surrounded by the white woods, he cried harder with every step forward. Then he heard it.
A horn sounded through the woods. He stopped, but his heart kept running. As Hermann listened for the origin of the sound, it came again. In the cold white oblivion of his flight, the haunting sound of a whispering horn permeated throughout the trees. The teenager had heard this sound before — at the tribute they attended when he was little. He knew what that sound meant. The Brotherhood.
They had trailed Frau Brozek on her trip as involuntary accomplice to the Obersturmführer and watched the tragedy unfurl before they could swoop down on the intruder who had kidnapped one of their league. Without hesitation, one of the women put an arrow through the killer’s eye and then they continued to collect the body of the murdered Obersturmführer. Both men were never seen again and the vehicle was found deserted a few miles down the road without fuel.
All this happened at the time when the British had invaded the neutral country of Ireland. German nationals still present on the island were all being rounded up to return to Germany. One of these was one Bruno Kress, a German researcher funded by the Ahnenerbe who found the boy anxious and terrified while out on an embankment nearby, speaking to a local shaman.
After a shocking account of the incident, the teenager fainted. Irritated by his story, Kress decided to lug the boy along with him under pretense that he was an orphan assisting Kress with his field work. Hermann was past the worst memory now and his eyes dried. He remembered how Kress was incarcerated on the Isle of Man and it was here that their paths separated. By some stroke of luck brought on in the wake of a spate of misfortunes, the unfortunate and bewildered Hermann Brozek was adopted by a British lecturer of Anthropology in Kent, Margaret Lockhart.
In 1955, Hermann heard that Kress had eventually published his Grammar of Icelandic in East Germany. Apparently, Kress later worked for the East German Staatssicherheit, but Lockhart never saw him again.
His mother’s involvement in The Brotherhood cost his sister her life back in Warsaw and for many years, Herman Lockhart felt unbridled guilt for her death. It was a terrible fate she suffered while he was off in the United Kingdom, growing up as a free citizen. His sister never even knew of The Brotherhood, or Ahnenerbe, or even the heritage of her bloodline, yet she died for it. An innocent dying alone, not knowing whether her mother and brother were ever coming back for her; it ripped his heart to shreds when he thought on it.
“Hermann!” Lita’s rasp slit his ears, “Are you listening?”
He nodded.
“So, since you have been there before you are the lucky drinker.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Why would you challenge me?” she asked, suddenly shifting into her intimidating self. In fact, she was taken aback by his indifferent reply.
“Look, since you know so much about me, is it not obvious that I would not want to revisit that place? Besides, when I was there, I saw nothing magical about it. It was a heap of snow covered dirt like a million others in the northern countries, for pity’s sake. There was no door, no temple, no great hall, and certainly no sign of any powerful presence. Nothing,” he explained, while he had to admit to himself that he truly did not know what was on the other side of the mound in that terrible place where he saw his mother die. There could very well have been an access tunnel, or some grand lock or key, perhaps a throne of rock and iron — he would not know.
Lita stared at him with a look of disbelief. She reckoned he still thought he had a choice. She guessed that he still did not figure out that he was not getting paid for Nina’s abduction unless he helps her locate Valhalla. She imagined that he did not realize that his life was now in peril if he dared disobey her order.
“My dearest, dearest Hermann,” she smiled and rose to her feet, abandoning the old document to the floor, “if you don’t take me to Valhalla, the Order of the Black Sun will learn of your treachery before you finish that sherry.”
Chapter 27
Gunnar finished his call a slight distance from Sam and Nina who were waiting outside the yacht club house. Sam looked at Nina, who was leaning against him. Her eyes were empty, although she did respond to his fingers on her brow with an almost inaudible sigh, blinking her eyes at his touch.
“Nina, what did they do? You have to tell us,” he said softly, doing his best not to apply even the mildest stress to her. It was imperative that they found out what happened to her while she was detained in the talons of the redhead, Swastika eyed witch.
Gunnar came over with a determined gait, a steely look, and something reminiscent of excitement in his face.
“Come, we have to get going. Lita is leaving her fortress in two hours. She is going on an expedition to find Valhalla and we have to get there before she does,” he rambled hastily as he flicked on his helmet and mounted his bike.
“Wait! Wait! What?” Sam protested, pointing at Nina behind her head with a puzzled expression.
“Don’t you worry about Dr. Gould. We’ll sort her out when we get to the Serpent Stone,” Gunnar replied as he sucked in the last of his cigarette and flicked the butt between his middle finger and his thumb.