Blood of the Reich

10

Kangra La, Sikkim

July 28, 1938

K urt Raeder looked back from the Himalayas to a flat world gauzed with haze, the steel of India’s great rivers faint threads of orientation. The Germans had escaped the hot, damp hell of the British Raj and were climbing toward their goal, the heaven promised by old Tibetan texts that Himmler had sent along in a steel box: Shambhala, the lost kingdom that would violently redeem the world.

On Raeder’s neck, kept warm by his own body, was the vial that reputedly held the antique blood of Frederick Barbarossa.

The explorer found himself lightening as they climbed. For more than a month he and his four companions had felt trapped in British India as news from Europe grew more ominous. Traveling through Calcutta and the Himalayan province of Sikkim was the quickest way to Tibet, but it was getting harder for both sides to pretend England’s relations with Germany weren’t fraying. Meanwhile, the monsoon came in full force, rain pouring down. The humidity on the Bengal plain became suffocating. Snakes slithered from drowned burrows. Mosquitoes rose in clouds. His companions chafed and quarreled. The heat, the bugs, and the sheer bureaucratic sloth of a dying empire all weighed on them. England was in decline and Calcutta was crowded and chaotic. As Hitler tried to reunite a Germany brutally disenfranchised after the Great War, the old enemies grew jealous again, seeking to hem in the Teutons. So had the German Tibetan Expedition been corralled by the arrogant, frightened English! For that, Raeder held them in contempt.

Where, the officials in Calcutta had demanded of him, are your permits to travel to the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet? Of course there could be no permits, since there was no permitted travel, and there could be no permission until the Germans met personally with the three-year-old god-king’s regent in Lhasa. But they could not meet, because none but the British consul was permitted to travel there. The Germans stewed under the circular and self-serving reasoning of Whitehall and Calcutta.

What the British didn’t take into account was German will, coupled with advice from the kind of Englishman who’d first built the empire.

Before sailing from Genoa in allied Italy, Raeder had received a peculiar letter from Sir Thomas Pickford, the octogenarian Himalaya explorer and hero of the siege of Gyantse, where thousands of Tibetans who believed themselves invulnerable to bullets had been slaughtered by British firepower. Pickford had served on Francis Younghusband’s military expedition to Tibet in 1904 that forced it into reluctant relations with the British. Now, thirty-four years later, Pickford had corresponded with the young German he’d heard lecture in London. Rumor of Raeder’s impending SS expedition had circulated in academic circles, and Pickford had advice.

A few Englishmen understood what the Reich was trying to do, he explained, the racial spirit Germany was trying to revive. A few sympathized with the power of Hitler’s vision in this new, corrupt, decadent age called the twentieth century.

Don’t wait out the bureaucratic intrigues, the crusty Englishman wrote. My country is giving up its civilizing mission, but yours is seizing it. Germany is alone in displaying the character of our race. We are cousins, after all, and Tibet must not be allowed to exist in seclusion and hide its secrets. Take any opportunity and simply go, borders be damned.

If a German had written this to an Englishman, the Gestapo would have called it high treason. But the English, like the Americans, felt free to say anything to anyone. Curious idea.

I have seen the sun set on the Potala Palace with a radiance that speaks of God, the old Englishman wrote. I know there are things to seek in that land we can scarcely dream. If you want to see them, make your own way across the border as Younghusband did in 1904.

Now Raeder had.

In Calcutta, the Germans had first falsely announced their intention, given the diplomatic delay, of returning home. Then, in the dead of night, monsoon thundering and streets awash, they’d loaded their theodolites, chronometers, earth inductors, shortwave radios, anthropological calipers, cameras, movie film, guns, cases of schnapps, and boxes of cigarettes into the specially designed, rubber-sealed cargo cases crafted in Hamburg. They’d hired trucks to taxi them to the station and bribed their way onto the express train north, arriving at its terminus a night and day ahead of any pursuit. Mountains rose as enticing as a mirage.

Paying in Reich gold, the Germans swiftly bought two freight cars on the next conveyance, a popularly dubbed “toy train” with tracks just two feet apart that puffed its way, at twelve miles per hour, to the British hill station of Darjeeling and its warehouses of tea. This would elevate them to 7,000 feet. The Nazis were moving on this second leg of their escape by the time bemused authorities in Calcutta realized they were gone at all.

“It’s Jew gold we use,” Raeder told his companions. “Confiscated from the rats fleeing Berlin. So does Providence assist our mission.”

Up and up the locomotive crept, past banana plantations at first, and then through jungle so high that it arched over the tracks, the canopy shuddering in the downpours. The journey reeked of rotting orchids, foliage steaming.

Indian laborers rode an open freight car pushed by the bow of the train. When monsoon landslides blocked the track, they dutifully clambered out to clear them. Raeder, impatient and restless while the coolies dug, took his rifle into the jungle to look for tigers.

He saw not a living animal. The bamboo was still as death.

Tea plantations hove into view as they neared Darjeeling. There, between Nepal and Bhutan, they could see the beckoning crest of the Himalaya through breaks in the rushing clouds. The peaks were topped by snowy Mount Kanchenjunga, which at 28,000 feet was almost as lofty as Everest.

Diplomatic telegrams awaited Raeder, protesting their progress and demanding a return to Calcutta. But the German Foreign Office was putting pressure on the English to leave the Germans alone and it sent its own telegrams, seeking to bog the debate down in an exchange of diplomatic notes. While consuls argued, Raeder bluffed his way past the British constabulary, hired a train of oxen, and pushed on toward the Sikkim capital of Gangtok.

He knew how Asia worked. You butted your way, arrogant and impatient, or got nowhere. Now he marched up the hairpin turns of the riotously green Tista Valley with their animals, each ox plodding from four cases of equipment strapped to its back.

Still the monsoon sluiced down.

From every slope sprung a hundred white waterfalls, and in the gorges the rivers roared with chocolate fury. The Germans cut upward, first through birch and dark fir and then through whole forests of rhododendron, clouds of bright butterflies hovering over every puddle and wet leaf. The air was so thick with moisture that climbing was like rising from the bottom of a pool. They struggled through mud, crossed precarious log and vine-cable bridges, and drove their oxen along cliff ledges. The men were smeared with goo, lard of the earth. At the end of the day they’d stand under cataracts to sluice it off, roaring out beer hall anthems.

The rain cooled as they climbed, a promising sign of progress.

The British were fools to let them get this far, Raeder thought.

The oxen, powerful but ungainly, were exchanged at Gangtok for nimbler mules, better adapted to the narrower trail ahead. It took twice as many animals to carry the cases. Mounted with brilliantly colored saddles and blankets, and tethered by yak-hair ropes, the cantankerous animals brayed in chorus to the ominous throbbing of the drums and long dungchen trumpets of the Gangtok monastery. Hooves clacked on the muddy route’s rocks. German boots splashed through brimming puddles. Higher and higher they climbed, whole hillsides seeming to peel away in the deluge. Sometimes they had to halt to build a new trail across a slide.

At Dikchu, the Devil’s Water, the old rope bridge had fallen away. They winched a new one across its thundering chute, then hauled and whipped the balking animals across and up it toward the snowy crests above. The trail seemed evermore narrow, evermore wet, evermore slippery. When the rains paused it was foggy. At each stop they spent several minutes peeling leeches from each other, the odious creatures bloated with blood. Most clustered on calves and ankles, sucking greedily, but a few fell from overhanging limbs or ledges to feast on shoulder and neck.

Only rarely did the Germans meet the occasional pilgrim or merchant. These stood aside on the precarious downslope while the Europeans pushed brusquely past, hugging the cliff.

A wool caravan descending with wide, thick-haired yaks finally blocked their way. The horned animals filled the trail where it ran on the side of a precipitous gorge, leaving no room to pass. The wool drovers with their powerful beasts refused to yield to the Reich’s train, and yet trying to back the recalcitrant mules down to a wide spot, even if possible, risked losing the animals and their cargo into the precipice.

Raeder pushed forward. He was wearing a pith helmet marked with the lightning runes of the SS and carried a birch switch in his left hand like a riding crop. As mule nosed with yak, the German confronted the Uygur leader. This man, a Turkic-speaking Muslim with a battered British Enfield- likely stolen from a murder victim, Raeder thought-bellowed in defiance and shook his weapon. He kept pointing down the mountain path, clearly insisting with his flinging arms that it was the Germans who must turn around. His men behind were squat, dark, and sullen.

Neither spoke the other’s language.

Raeder considered a moment, reached in his field jacket, and pulled out a Luger. Before anyone could react, he pointed the muzzle at the forehead of the leading Uygur yak and fired.

The animal jerked, grunted, and then slowly leaned out from the edge of the cliff with a long sigh, its nostrils bubbling red. Its eyes rolled. Then it heavily and majestically toppled off. The yak fell free for a hundred feet and then bounced and skidded down a scree slope, skeins of wool exploding from its ruptured packs as rock flew like shrapnel. The beast churned up a tail of spray and mud.

The Uygur chieftain stared at Raeder, openmouthed, forgetting the rifle he held in his hand. Raeder smiled. He liked shooting things.

The German calmly stepped past the tribesman to the next animal and fired again and, even as that yak fell on its forelocks, pushed past its heaving flank to fire at a bellowing third. This time the shot went slightly wide, into the neck, but the shock was enough to send this animal into the gorge as well. As if following a lead, the second yak plunged the way of its fellows. The animals plummeted and slammed, cargo flying, as the Uygurs shouted and panicked. They’d encountered a madman!

The other Germans hurriedly broke out their guns, readying for what they expected would be battle on a precipitous ledge.

But the added firepower proved unnecessary. Raeder had a crazed glint to his eyes, his Luger smoking, and as he considered the next animal in line the chieftain ran past him and hastily ordered his own caravan to wheel and retreat.

“Now, after them!” the German snapped.

The mules were kicked and lashed forward, chasing the rumps of the lumbering yaks, until the latter came to a wider shelf and huddled next to a cliff. The Europeans pushed arrogantly past, jostling the Asians, the Uygurs looking at them with hatred. Their chieftain howled at Raeder’s back as the Nazi ascended, gesturing with his rifle, but he didn’t aim it. Raeder ignored him. And then the Nazis and their porters were around a bend and had the cliff to themselves, panting in the thin air.

“My God, Raeder, are you insane?” Muller asked. “All we had ready was your pistol. What if the Uygurs had fought?”

“Strike with surprise and you crush their will,” Raeder said, reloading the Luger. “We’re outnumbered a million to one, Julius, and have to act like we’re the superior. That much I’ve learned from the British.”

“Are we going to fight our way into Tibet?”

“We won’t have to,” the zoologist said, looking back. They could hear bells on the yaks as the surviving animals hurried down the trail. “Word of this will spread, and they’ll give us the respect we deserve.”

Hans Diels stepped forward and clapped the Untersturmfuhrer on the shoulder. “Now I know why Himmler picked you to lead us,” he said. “You understand how things are.”

“And how they should be.”

“Life is struggle,” Kranz agreed. “We need ruthlessness.”

“Then be prepared to follow, my friends.”

They surmounted the canyon and came out into alpine meadows full of purple gentians, blue poppies, and wild strawberries. Raeder ordered a rest while the others changed their caps for the more imposing SS pith helmets. Then they lashed red pennants with the Nazi swastika to the pommel of each mule. The men were nearing Tibet, and he wanted the diplomatic nature of their mission made clear.

Ahead, clearing skies were dark as a lake. Peaks dazzled in the blinding clarity of pure air. Mountain snow was flawless. Buttresses of rock glittered in the sun. Behind them, the great Plain of Bengal was lost in cotton clouds.

Heat gave way to nighttime cold, and the progress slowed still more as Muller used his magnetometer to measure the magnetic field of the earth. Anomalies, he said, might show the caverns of underground cities.

Anomalies might reveal Shambhala.

Kranz made measurements of the Tibetans and Bhutanese they’d hired. He pinched their heads with calipers and cast plaster masks of their faces, tubes jutting from nostrils to prevent suffocation. “No Jews here!” he announced. Since eyes were closed for the casting, the result made their masks look like those of dead men. Word of this torture spread, too, and soon Tibetans kept warily away from the anthropologist.

“Are they Aryans?” Muller asked his colleague skeptically.

“Maybe.”

Eckells did double duty by both documenting their progress on film and deploying the expedition’s aneroids to record atmospheric pressure. Raeder insisted on the scientific measurements, saying it would legitimize the expedition by contributing to German science. “We’ll win fame from the government and respect from the academies.”

It was July 25, 1938, when a British lieutenant named Lionel Sopwith-Hastings, riding a lathered mule, finally caught up with the SS expedition and presented orders from the consulate in Gangtok to return to India immediately. The Germans were not, the orders read, to risk a diplomatic uproar by violating the border of Tibet.

Sopwith-Hastings waited stiffly for response. He tried to muster the authority of a British imperial but at age twenty-two, with just a blond wisp on his upper lip and a frame so thin that he’d traded his military cap for that of a khampa, a fur herder, to stay warm, he was not a very intimidating presence. His pale blue eyes betrayed unhappiness at his mission, and he kept glancing at the Nazis, one by one, as if counting the odds over and over again. The Germans were brown, dirty, and bearded, with the lean athleticism that comes from years of exercise. They’d watched the Englishman approach from miles away, and arrayed on the rocks of their little encampment were three rifles, the submachine gun, boxes of cartridges, and Raeder’s Luger pistol.

“But we do have permission,” Raeder said mildly.

“Not according to the British consul,” the lieutenant said. He licked his lips. “I’m to escort you to Gangtok and from there to Darjeeling and Calcutta to present your case to the authorities.”

“Ah, to present our case. We’ll get a fair hearing, then?”

He colored. “This is the British Empire.”

“Well.” The German stood. “You’ve displayed remarkable energy to catch up with us.”

“You’re fast. I had to leave my police attachment and push ahead.” He gave a peek at the guns. “I can assure you they are still coming.”

“Yes, but right now you are entirely alone.”

“I met some Uygurs who were quite upset.”

“They didn’t understand the rules of the road.”

Sopwith-Hastings stood as tall as he could. “Are you going to obey the directive?” His eyes strayed to the guns again.

“British pluck can only inspire Germany,” Raeder said. “We’ve extra mules, now that we’ve gone through some food, and two are lame. It will be efficient if you take them down for us.” He sat on a boulder and picked up the Luger, working the mechanism. There was a click as a bullet slid into the chamber. “Then it will be faster to follow.”

Diels sat, too, picked up a Mauser, opened the bolt, and examined the weapon as if for dirt. “Perhaps you can also mark the way, where the trail is badly eroded,” Hans said. “I’ve no doubt those Uygur yaks have worsened it.”

Sopwith-Hastings stood at attention, looking from one to the other. Then he gave a short nod. “Very well. On your honor.”

“We’ll be on your heels unless the trail collapses,” Raeder assured. “There’s nothing up here, as you can see. It’s pointless to go on.” The little swastika pennants snapped in the wind.

“I will await you in Gangtok.” The Brit saluted, wheeled, and went to fetch the lame mules.

As soon as the lieutenant disappeared from view, Raeder ordered camp broken and a quick last push to the pass at Kangra La. As the others started this final climb, the German retrieved five pounds of high explosive from one of the trunks.

“Come on, Muller. I’m tired of the English following us.”

“Are you going to start a war?”

“I’m going to make it impossible to have one.”

They went downslope to a precipitous pitch above the winding trail and climbed a hundred yards above, setting the charge on a hump of fractured rock.

“Kurt, I don’t know if this is wise,” Muller said. “This is a trade route, a lifeline. Do we have to destroy it? If word gets out, the natives could turn against us.”

“I thought you liked to make things go boom, Julius.”

“For science and research. Not vandalism.”

“Reichsfuhrer Himmler will be interested to hear you describe the necessary advancement of this expedition as vandalism.”

“That British boy is no threat to us.”

“That boy could bring men.” He began walking back, unreeling the fuse cord. “When Cortes reached Mexico, he burned his ships.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“We can’t go home this way anyway. It will be through Persia or China or Russia.”

Muller resignedly helped splice the wires to the detonator.

“Now, twist the plunger,” Raeder ordered.

“You do it.”

“No. I want you to take a hand. I’m not the only National Socialist here.”

Muller scowled but twisted. With a roar, a gout of rock flew outward and down, hammering the path and dislodging it. A rock avalanche thundered into the ravine. Stone and noise bounced in the fog.

“Whoo!” Raeder hollered. His shout echoed away down the canyon.

A hundred-yard section of the trail was gone. It would take weeks to carve a replacement.

“Alas,” Raeder said. “It’s become impossible to follow the lieutenant.”

Muller looked down at their destruction. “I had no idea, Kurt, that university zoologists were so single-minded.”

“I learned some things in ’34 with Hood in Tibet,” Raeder replied.

“Demolition?”

“No. Not to give your enemies any chance at all.”

Let the British try to follow them now.

They traded the mules for yaks at a border village, reloaded their luggage on fewer animals, and trudged on. The trail’s surroundings were treeless now, brown where barren rock prevailed and green in watered swales. The Kangra La itself was a barren saddle marked with a cairn of stone and fluttering prayer flags.

“Each flap of the flag sends a prayer to their gods,” Raeder told his companions.

“What’s our prayer, Kurt?” asked Eckells.

“Power.”

They were at seventeen thousand feet. Around them, peaks shot ten thousand feet higher, draped with glaciers blue as fine diamonds. The sky was cobalt, the sun burned heatless. Wind whipped over the pass, snapping their clothes and pennants.

“Tibet,” the German announced, pointing at a horizon of endless mountains. “This is what Cortes felt when he gazed on Tenochtitlan, or Moses at the Promised Land.”

“Cortes had gold to entice him,” Kranz said.

“Tibet has gold, too. Tons of it, in Buddhist temples. They are rich, and oddly weak.”

“Ah, so that’s your secret motive, Kurt? We plunder? I’ve been wondering as we’ve panted.”

“Of course not. Mere treasure hunting is a relic of history. In modern times, the gold comes from the real prize, scientific discovery.” He smiled. “But if we come away with gold as well, it will be just compensation, no?”

“Power in this oxygen-starved, arid, medieval backwater?” Muller said skeptically, gazing at the emptiness.

“The world’s greatest secret.” Raeder’s eyes shone, as if he might pry a revelation from the slopes of the mountains ahead. “We are looking for the force, my SS brethren, that animates the world.”