There was a DNA reader on the desktop, and he wiped it down with a cloth doused in methylated spirits. Then he powered it up.
In the corner of the cabin stood a small bar refrigerator from which he withdrew a sealed specimen jar. There were many more like it in there. He carefully unscrewed the lid and, using an eyedropper, extracted a few mils of the precious liquid. Then he squeezed a drop or two of the capitaine's blood onto the sensor. Carefully, but without showing too much concern.
After all, he still had plenty left in the fridge.
Le Roux wondered how the Gestapo were doing, trying to get the rest of the Dessaix's crew to cooperate.
Not very well, he imagined.
Apart from the six original crewmen still on this ship, and another twelve who were helping the Germans with the missile facility at Dozenac, the entire complement of the Dessaix had proved themselves to be quite fatally stupid and shortsighted.
13
The special-purposes camp lay a few kilometers away from the I. G. Farben Monovitz facilties, but Brasch fancied that he could still smell the scent of depravity that blanketed the place. Some nights he imagined that the three main camps and thirty-nine subcamps gave off a poisonous mist, a concentrated essence of the suffering and evil that took place here. It was invisible, but you could smell it as it sank into the pores of your skin, and eventually into your soul.
Nothing he had witnessed on the Russian Front had prepared him for it. Even Himmler seemed more subdued than usual when they were forced to attend one of Hess's demonstrations. Everybody knew the Reichsfuhrer was squeamish. He had vomited the first time he'd personally witnessed an execution, and that had been a good clean head shot: the Reich's version of merciful release.
Today Brasch kept the contempt from his face as he watched Himmler dab at his lips with a perfumed handkerchief while the subjects were led in.
"Oh, my," Skorzeny roared in mock amusement. "They are only stick men. I'm a good shot, Herr Reichsfuhrer, but I cannot promise to hit them for you first time. If they turn sideways, they will disappear!"
Himmler allowed a wan but dutiful grin at the large man's brutal jokes. Brasch suspected he'd rather not be there.
They were in a long subterranean bunker. The sweating cinder blocks receded at least two hundred meters away from them to a thick revetment of sandbags, in front of which stood three scarred wooden poles. The prisoners were actually much less skeletal than most of their fellow inmates. They were Sonderkommando, or Kapos, selected prisoners who acted as guards and enforcers in the death camp at Birkenau. They received special privileges: extra rations, the pick of the females, and so on. But eventually they, like all the others, went into the ovens.
These three, however, were to complete their service to the Reich as experimental subjects. Over their gray striped camp uniform each wore a bulky vest of a slightly differing size. The project director, whose name Brasch had forgotten, spoke excitedly of the leaps in development they'd achieved since being given access to a calculating machine and a trained operator.
"What we have now are three options," he enthused. "Each is a trade-off, in its own way, Herr Reichsfuhrer. More protection still means greater bulk and weight, unfortunately, but the Farben engineers have made great strides the last two months. The material samples you delivered us have proved invaluable in answering a number of…"
Brasch was hardly listening. He was focused on the three men being tied to the poles at the other end of the bunker. Not one of them was struggling. He fancied he saw one of them sob, but that was about the extent of their reaction. As a man who had spent the better part of the last three years involved in mortal combat, often against the most overwhelming odds, he found it depressing that these men could go to their doom so meekly. Even more depressing, however, was the path his life had taken to deliver him to this place as a witness to their deaths. Since he'd arrived at Monovitz, the black wolf of his depression was stalking him again. He felt again as he had during the battles at Belgorod, like a bug about to be crushed under the tracks of a tiger tank.
"A good rifle, this Garand, yes?" Skorzeny said, interrupting his train of thought. The giant Nazi was turning a captured weapon over in his hands. "Better than the Tommy's Lee Enfield piece of shit. Semiautomatic, gas actuated. A good tool, although I do not like the way it makes so much noise when the clip ejects. That will get a few cowboys killed, I think."
"It may not be in use for much longer," said Brasch in a flat monotone. "I believe they may be moving in the direction of an assault rifle."
Himmler took the hankie away from his thin lips. "Don't be so glum, Herr Colonel. The SD tells me that is not yet a foregone conclusion. There is open disagreement in America over whether to retool for mass production of that weapon. At least outside of the Californian Zone."
"So Kolhammer is going to build these Russian guns for his mud people, then?" Skorzeny said. "I hear they are a good weapon, too. But in the hands of half-castes and fairies, what would it matter?"
"The bullet would kill you just as dead, no matter who fired it," Brasch replied. "I lost many comrades to rounds fired by untrained Untermenschen in Russia, Herr Colonel."
"Well, let's see if we can do something about that," bellowed the SS man, refusing to be cast out of his usual high spirits. "You are ready for us now?" he asked the research director.
The civilian checked with an aide, who confirmed that the prisoners were firmly secured. A horn blared harshly, and behind them a red lightbulb shut off while a green one lit up.
"We are ready for the test," he confirmed.
Brasch screwed in a pair of earplugs and hardened his heart to what was about to happen. He had personally killed dozens of men, some of them in hand-to-hand combat, but he had never murdered anybody in cold blood. And he was about to become complicit in three murders at once. It made him sick.
Skorzeny looked to Himmler, who had just finished fitting his own earplugs. The Reichsfuhrer nodded, and Skorzeny hefted the American rifle as smoothly as if he'd been practicing since childhood. He sighted down the barrel and squeezed off three shots. All three prisoners jumped. Skorzeny then picked up a British Lee Enfield 303 rifle and performed the same action, this time taking a little longer, as he was forced to work the bolt after each shot.
Again, the prisoners jumped, but their heads whipped back in a way that told Brasch they were already dead or unconscious.
Skorzeny was much less impressed with the English weapon. "Pah! You could not get great accuracy with this. The chamber is too loose, and the two-part stock and these rear-locking lugs on the bolt are all very poor design… And now for my old friend."
He scooped up a K98 Mauser and squeezed off three shots from the bolt-action weapon with as little thought as he would give to scratching his nose. Three dark puffs indicated where the 7.92 mm rounds hit.
"Shall we?" asked the director.
"They don't look very well, Herr Director," Himmler said as the small group made its way down the firing range. "Are you sure these vests are bulletproof?"
"Not as such, Herr Reichsfuhrer," the man said quickly. "The vests will stop a small-caliber handgun round, and all manner of shrapnel and flak, but we are not using what the Allies call nanotube technology. What we have done is to synthesize a lightweight but very strong polymer from alternating monomers of para-phenylenediamine and terephthalic acid. The resulting aromatic amide alternates benzene rings and amide groups. In a planar sheet structure, which is like a silk protein and-"