Stormfuhrer (8 page)

She wouldn’t take what he had handed to her.  They fell to the floor near a heap of clothes.  She said something in a mumbling voice, and “What do you want?” came whispered into the helmet just a moment later.  And then, “What more can you take from me?”

Richard was startled.  “More?” . . .
Mehr
? spoke his character.  But he’d never even spoken to her before.  He looked around the room.  At that moment, she sprung towards the door and was out of the large, dark room in an instant.  He went looking for her and found that he was in a kind of makeshift kitchen.  Prisoners were shuffling about with sacks of potatoes, cabbages, onions.  She was nowhere amongst them. 

Richard spent some time wandering around this part of the camp looking for the girl.  Then, at nearly 10:00 PM, Richard heard something else, something outside the game.  It was his classroom door being tried, easy to hear in the echoing silence of the near-pitch black classroom.  He heard keys being tried in the door, one after another. 

Richard’s heart beat quickly.  He could certainly fain to have been working late and, having fallen asleep, thank heartily the maintenance worker or security guard that found him in his room for waking him up.

Richard bent to look past the thin black cloth that formed the door of his cardboard box and could see the shadow of someone falling across the classroom door’s narrow window.  After some moments, the figure paused and then departed.

Attendance among seniors that year had been steadily improving to something in the area of 99.2%, a tremendous gain over the expected 82% low of previous years.  Students were coming in to play the game before school, some at 6:15.  Others trickled in at 7:00.  Students would ask to come in on Saturdays and some just showed up, seeing his car in the parking lot, on these days as well, playing well into the afternoon as he did so.  Students would then be required to leave by 8:00 PM, sharing stories with each other or just walk out in silence.  Hayes’ frequency at his place of work left him having to create a tale about the unreliability of his little green truck, often breaking down and requiring him to leave it in the faculty parking lot overnight. 

Figuring the visitor of the night before was a student who somehow obtained, or tried to obtain, a copy of the room key—not a difficult thing to do, he mused, as nearly all teachers had master keys—Richard thought he might just ignore the fact, maybe even invite the guy in next time.  But he had the suspicion that this wasn’t the first time, or the last, that someone had attempted, and perhaps succeeded, in entering his room uninvited.  It clearly hadn’t been a janitor as they only cleaned during conference periods during school hours.  He knew the game’s addictive nature, and he also knew well that the odds were phenomenally against anyone he knew procuring the means of playing it outside his classroom, making the endeavor even more tempting.  Since he had developed his own browser for the game, specially made to hide the toolbar and the address of the site, he expected that the game could only be played in this room under his watchful gaze, and of course at his home computer.  He had, however, heard rumors of students playing it at home.

Fall 1939

The Dictator, named
Time Magazine’s
1938 “Man of the Year,” walked into the beer hall Bürgerbräukeller as cheers flooded the streets.  The cheers came from sidewalks, the windows of the surrounding homes perched above shops selling clothes and wine and tin kitchen implements.  Wine—and red flags.  It was November 8, 1939, and the anniversary of the famous 1923 “Putsch,” a small clash between his National Socialist demonstrators and with Weimar Republic soldiers and police that had started in that very beer hall and then moved out into the streets.  It had been a failed attempt at wresting control for the man who later won Germany without firing a shot, by simply creating fear in an enemy that didn’t exist, until all leaders of the German republic voted away every right a German had to question the policies of his own government, laying them all at the feet of this one man, who would protect them from the evils that threatened Germany both from within and from without.  The leader had always claimed this as a victorious day for Germany and had given a speech here every year since his rise to power.

A few thousand people were either already waiting in the hall or were outside watching for an opportunity to listen from the windows and doorways.  He was flanked by his
Leibgarde
or “Life Guard,” the
Leibstandarte
.  Its head, a robust man with a pronounced scar just above the left cheek, walked behind the dictator, backwards, with his back to the man, eyeing the crowd behind.  Two other men, men of the Leader’s inner circle, very well known to the people of Deutschland, walked just behind each of the dictator’s shoulders. 

A third man, good-looking, thin, dark hair, nervously paced in the street just behind the crowds.  His hands were in the pockets of his overcoat, one of them fingering a folded note.  He was a Swiss astrologer Karl Ernst Grafft.

The retinue entered the beer hall and made their way up to the dais where a podium awaited the now-famous speaker, failed artist turned dictator.  The edges of the room were filled; in each corner a tall, jacketed man stood, looking over most of the crowd.  The dictator was frowning; it was the dark before the dawn of one of his most hysterical speeches, and he had to bring himself into character.  It was also the twilight of one of his most daring decisions.  Plans were in their advanced stages, and a war-ready Berlin only awaited a word from the dictator.  Here, in the capital of Bavaria, the leader rose to the podium at the punctual German hour of 20.00, expecting to take the next train back to Berlin so as to be there by early morning.

Once the room was silenced with a seemingly indifferent look in several directions from the speaker, the tirade began.  He seemed to have little patience for introductions.  He began immediately to belittle the British.  Germany and the values of National Socialism required the end of this capitalist behemoth, even if it took five long years of war.  He belittled the French, took a few shots at the now subjugated Poles, and said almost nothing about his current political comrade, Stalin, except distantly to express his regret that communism and all communists won’t be so easily deterred from their infectious designs by a mere war. . . 

“
No.  They fight Germany from within, through her alliances, attacking her literature and her art.  The sources of communism and Jewishness are aligned in the servile attempt to unite weak men against the powers devised by Nature to end the weak and perpetuate the strong.  That power is the key to the survival of every species that has ever walked, crawled or flown across this world.  And those that attempted to move against it, that did not adapt to its immovable laws, became extinct.  The enemies of Germany act against that very nature, for they want laws that would fill the bellies of the undeserving by taking from the naturally strong and fertile, giving to the naturally weak and underdeveloped. 

“
We are the strong.  And they want to take from us.  The human race is a dying race if this is to continue.  If the strong of humanity die, humanity itself dies.  We, Germany, must be even more united than the enemies of National Socialism, but not like the communists, in their huddled, backward, herded mass, attempting to defeat the laws and principles of Natural Selection by giving 'to each according to his need.'

“
We together are far stronger, for we support what nature has dictated, that the strong adapt.  The strong survive.  We are that strength, and our sacred duty to this land and to our race, our breed, our species, is to allow nature’s law to flourish, and in fact to refine it to an even greater degree where the strong
must
destroy the weak so that humanity, and by humanity I mean the
best
of humanity, the
highest
of humanity, can grow and progress.”

The speech continued for about an hour with pronounced conceptual repetition, stirring up the emotions and feeding the nationalistic glory-lust of its listeners until the head of the dictator’s protective retinue, the robust man with the scar above his left cheek, handed the leader a piece of paper that had just been unfolded.  The leader stopped, knowing that such an action of passing such a note at such a moment would only be done if absolutely necessary.  He knew the man well enough to know to read the note quickly.  He knew his audience well enough to show no emotion, no matter what what was written there.

The scowling speaker glanced up at his head of security and saw nothing on the man’s face except a side nod towards the cellar entrance.  The dictator read the note, twice, and looked toward the entrance to the beer cellar where a dark-haired man was held between two SS officers.  The man being held was holding a yellow handkerchief to his face.  The letter had read

My Leader, there is a bomb ticking

in the pillar behind you. 

It will detonate at 21.20. 

You must leave NOW! 

Know me by the yellow cloth

at my face.  If this is a lie,

have me executed. 

The dictator looked back at the man at the entrance who nodded from behind the yellow cloth.  The dictator glanced calmly at his watch.  20.52.  He would cut his two hour speech to one hour, giving a summary over the next five or ten minutes, and then abruptly leave.  When finished, he took a very brief leave of his audience, saying and showing nothing regarding any threat to his life, and walked calmly toward the entrance of the beer cellar where he waved to the officers to take the man outside.  His protective retinue followed, nonplussed by the leader’s inclination to make abrupt changes in plans.

The man between the SS officers smiled and nodded at the leader who never gave him a further look.  After whispering something to the Leibstandarte chief, the dictator hopped into the back seat of a black car and a retinue of cars headed to Munich’s train station,
der
Hauptbahnhoff
.  Later, an explosion ripped through the beer hall, pulling down the entire balcony section, killing mostly restaurant staff.  The dictator saw the smoke from the blast from the back of the car and asked about the man with the yellow cloth over his face who had been taken into custody by the
Leibstandarte
.

Blood oozed from both nostrils.  The man’s beaten face had vertical and diagonal wounds that would surely become faint scars.  His arms were pulled behind him into a sling of rope and from these his body was suspended from a metal hook.  He screamed and played the part well, yet he never changed his story.  Why should he?  Farash didn’t feel a thing.

“
How did you know of the assassination attempt on our Leader?”  the German SS men asked the question again, and again, over and over.  He had been handed over to them the minute they arrived in Berlin.  The man suspended from the hook would pause, spit a quantity of blood, and tell them something else about the Leader that few people (or none) in the present time would actually know, hoping that it would give him some sort of credibility as a seer.  As a history buff, Farash had studied the second world war almost as deeply as he had pursued the culture of the Sumerians.  The little-known facts he could produce, however, were only making things worse.  “You know he only has one testicle.  That’s why
he
won’t submit to physical examinations.  He considers it a weakness.”  Two men behind him simultaneously beat at his elbows with truncheons, clearly taking the comment as an insult to the Fuhrer.  The interrogator sighed, shaking his head.  Unfortunately, he had orders to keep the man alive.

Karl Ernst Krafft was taken from the hook and led into a cell in an underground bunker beneath Berlin’s Gestapo headquarters.  The walls of the bunker dripped with frigid moisture.  His avatar could barely move at his commands yet shook uncontrollably.  Farash would simply have to wait for the character to heal.  He decided to let him sleep as he slept himself.  Besides the beatings, it had been tiring business to withstand 18 hours of the same boring sort of questioning—a weakness in the programming, no doubt, though Farash.  It really had been tedious.

It seemed impossible to convince the men in the interrogation cells to believe his story, that he was a Swiss astrologer who only had the Leader’s best interests in mind.  The “stars” had told him that an attempt on the Fuhrer’s life was to be made that day and at the time written in the note.  But the more statements he made that turned out to be accurate regarding the bombing, the more suspect he became in the plot to kill the dictator. 

The bomb-maker was found attempting to cross into Switzerland.  Farash, through Krafft, had not only given the man’s name and where he would cross but also the fact that detonators and bomb drawings would be found in his luggage.  This proved only that either Krafft was the greatest guesser ever to walk the planet, was really a man with significant extrasensory powers, or was a man intimately involved in the plot.  The bomb-maker, Johann Georg Elser, a cabinet-maker by trade and staunch protestant union man, was caught all exactly as Farash, through Krafft, had predicted, drawings, fuses, and all.

What saved Farash’s character, keeping the social studies teacher in the game, was the fact that Elser, under severe torture at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, admitted to nearly everything they already knew—and some things they didn't—except for ever having known or even having heard of Karl Ernst Krafft.  Elser was shipped to Dachau but kept in “good condition.”  The National Socialists would need him to “confess” for propaganda purposes to conspiring with British agents in attempting to assassinate the Leader—once the war was over.