Ghost Flight

13

‘I… I half expected… I always feared…’ Great Uncle Joe gasped, gesturing towards the sink for some water.

Jaeger hurried to fetch some.

The old man took it in a hand that was trembling, and drank, spilling half of it across the kitchen table. When his eyes met Jaeger’s again, all life seemed to have been sucked out of them. He glanced around the room, almost as if the place was haunted; as if he was trying to remember where he was, to anchor himself in the here and now, the present.

‘Where in the name of God did you get it?’ he whispered, gesturing at the image on the phone. ‘No, no – don’t answer! I dreaded that this day might come. But I’d never imagined it would come through you, my boy, and after all you have suffered…’

His eyes drifted to some distant corner of the room.

Jaeger didn’t know quite what to say. The last thing he’d ever wanted was to cause this dear old man any discomfort; any distress. What right did Jaeger have to do so in the twilight of Joe’s years?

Great Uncle Joe shook himself out of his reverie. ‘My boy, you’d best come into the study. I’d not like Ethel to overhear any of… well, of this. In spite of her forays into the snow, she’s not as robust as she once was. We none of us are.’

He levered himself to his feet, gesturing at the glass. ‘Can you manage my water?’

He turned towards his study, and as he led the way, he appeared as Jaeger had never seen him before. He was stooped – almost bent double – as if he had all the world’s troubles piled upon his shoulders.

Great Uncle Joe sighed deeply, the sound like a dry wind rustling through the mountains. ‘You know, we thought we could go with our secrets to the grave. Your grandfather. Me. The others. Honourable men; men who knew – who understood – the code. Soldiers all – who knew what was expected of us.’

They’d locked themselves away in his study, whereupon Great Uncle Joe had asked to know everything – every minute detail; every happening – that had led up to the present moment. Once Jaeger had finished talking the old man had remained quiet, entombed in his thoughts.

When finally he had broken his silence, it was almost as if he was holding a conversation with himself, or with others in the room – the ghosts of those who had long passed away.

‘We thought – we had hoped – the evil was gone,’ he whispered. ‘That we could each go to our final resting place with our souls at peace, our consciences clear. We imagined that we had done enough, all those years ago.’

They were sitting in a pair of worn and comfy leather armchairs half facing each other, the walls around them hung with mementoes of the war. Black and white photos of Great Uncle Joe in uniform; tattered flags; iconic insignia; his commando fighting knife; his battered beige beret.

There were only a few exceptions to the war theme. Joe and Ethel had never had any children. Jaeger, Ruth and Luke – they had been the adopted family. A few photos – mostly of Jaeger and his family holidaying at the cabin – cluttered the desk, along with a distinctive-looking book, one that seemed so out of place amongst the war memorabilia.

It was a second copy of the Voynich manuscript, seemingly identical to the one that lay in Grandfather Ted’s war chest.

‘And then this boy comes here, this precious boy,’ Great Uncle Joe continued, ‘with… with that. Ein Reichsadler!’ The last words were spat out with vehemence, as the old man’s gaze fixed upon Jaeger’s phone. ‘That damn cursed damnation! From what the boy says, it seems as if the evil has returned… In which case, am I empowered to break the silence?’

He let the question hang in the air. The thickly insulated walls of the cabin tended to deaden any sound, yet still the room seemed to resonate with a dark warning.

‘Uncle Joe, I haven’t come to pry—’ Jaeger began, but the old man held up a hand for silence.

With a visible effort he seemed to drag his focus back to the present. ‘My boy, I don’t think I can tell you everything,’ he murmured. ‘Your grandfather, for one, would never have countenanced it. Not unless the circumstances were utterly desperate. But you deserve to know something. Ask me questions. You must have come here with questions. Ask, and I will see what I can tell.’

Jaeger nodded. ‘What did you and Grandpa do during the war? I did ask when he was alive, but he never volunteered much. What did you do that meant he ended up with documents like that,’ he gestured at the phone, ‘in his possession?’

‘To understand what we did in the war you must first understand what we were up against,’ Great Uncle Joe began quietly. ‘Too many years have passed; too much has been forgotten. Hitler’s message was simple, and it was terrifying.

‘Remember Hitler’s slogan: Denn heute gehort uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt. Today Germany belongs to us: tomorrow, the entire world. The One Thousand Year Reich was to be truly a global empire. It was to follow the model of the Roman Empire, with Berlin renamed Germania and serving as the capital of the entire world.

‘Hitler argued that the Germans were the Aryan master race, the Übermensch. They would employ Rassenhygiene – racial hygiene – to cleanse Germany of the Untermensch – the subhumans – after which they would be invincible. The Untermensch were to be exploited, enslaved and killed off with impunity. Eight, ten, twelve million – no one knows for sure how many were exterminated.

‘We tend to think of it as the Jews only,’ Great Uncle Joe continued. ‘It was not: it was anyone who was not of the master race. Mischlings – half Jews or mixed race. Homosexuals; communists; intellectuals; non-whites – and that included Poles, Russians, southern Europeans, Asians… The Einsatzgruppen – the SS death squads – set about exterminating them all.

‘And then there were the Lebensunwertes Leben – the “life unworthy of life” – the disabled and the mentally ill. Under Aktion T4, the Nazis began to kill them, too. Imagine it! The disabled. Killing off the most vulnerable in society. And you know the means they employed to do so – they collected the Lebensunwertes Leben in a special bus upon some excuse or other, and drove them around the city pumping in exhaust fumes as they gazed out of the windows.’

The old man glanced at Jaeger, a haunted look etched across his features. ‘Your grandfather and I, we saw so very much of it with our own eyes.’

He took a sip of his water. Made a visible effort to collect himself. ‘But it wasn’t just about extermination. Above the gates of the concentration camps they displayed a slogan: Arbeit macht frei – work makes you free. Well, of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Hitler’s Reich was a Zwangswirtschaft – a forced-labour economy. In the Untermensch he had a vast army of slave labourers, and they were worked to death in their millions.

‘And you know the worst of it?’ he whispered. ‘It worked. In Hitler’s terms at least, the plan worked. The results spoke for themselves. Extraordinary rocketry; cutting-edge guided missiles; cruise missiles; super-advanced aeronautics; jet-powered flying wings; stealth submarines; unheard-of chemical and biological weapons; night-vision equipment – in almost every field the Germans scored a string of firsts. They were light years ahead of us.

‘Hitler had an absolutely fanatical belief in technology,’ he continued. ‘Remember – with the V-2 they were the first to put a rocket into space; not the Russians, as is commonly believed today. Hitler truly thought that technology would win them the war. And trust me – bar the nuclear race, which we won more by dint of luck than design – by 1945 it almost had done.

‘Take the XXI stealth submarine. It was decades ahead of its time. By as late as the seventies we were still trying to copy and equal its design. With three hundred XXI U-boats, they could have thrown a stranglehold around Britain and forced us into surrender. By the end of the war, Hitler had a fleet of a hundred and sixty ready to prowl the seas.

‘Or take the V-7 rocket. It made the V-2 look like a child’s toy. It had a range of three thousand miles, and weaponised with one of their secret nerve agents – sarin or tabun – it could drop death from the skies on all our major cities.

‘Trust me, William, they came that close – if not to winning the war, to achieving their Tausendjahriges Reich, then at least to forcing the Allies to sue for peace. And if we had done, it would have meant that Hitler – Nazism; this ultimate evil – would have survived. For that was all he and his core group of fanatics cared about – safeguarding their Drittes Reich, to rule for a thousand years. They came that close…’

The old man sighed wearily. ‘And in so many ways it was our job – your grandfather’s and mine – to try to put a stop to them.’