Grudge: Operation Highjump Read online

  Two lights appeared on the horizon and he brought the binoculars to his eyes. They were still too far to see what type of boats the soldiers from Argus Base sent. He called below to tell the men that their mission was ending and they’d need to transfer the boxes to the boats. The order was repeated below and soon, the Führer’s head appeared at the hatch.

  “They are here?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mein Führer,” Otto replied nervously. “Those lights are the boats coming from Neuschwabenland.”

  “Good.” The Führer slapped him affectionately on the back. “You must carry out the rest of your mission, Oberleutnant.”

  “I will, Mein Führer.”

  The shorter man squinted at Otto. “You do know why you were chosen for this mission, don’t you?”

  “To be honest, no, Mein Führer.”

  Hitler waved his hand to encompass the boat. “This boat has had limited success in the war. Did you know that it has only sunk two ships?”

  Otto nodded. “Yes, I did. She’s been plagued by misfortune.”

  “Bah!” the Führer chopped the air. “That misfortune as you call it will be the crew’s safety net. They haven’t taken part in the sinking of many ships, so they will not be punished upon your surrender.”

  The young captain nodded once again, hiding his displeasure at the order to surrender. “You are correct, Mein Führer.”

  “Of course I am. You were also chosen specially for this mission. You’ve been in the U-boat force for how long?”

  “Six years, Mein Führer.”

  “Yes, that’s right. In six years, you’ve never sunk a boat while in a leadership position. That will serve you well when they try you in court. You can claim innocence, ignorant of the war’s ending, and you will be released shortly. Take a woman and remain faithful to our cause.”

  “Yes, Mein Führer.”

  “The key to making this believable is that every member of your original crew pleads ignorance and remains silent about the nature of this patrol.”

  The task is much easier since only eight of my original men remain, he thought wryly. “I will ensure that it is done, Mein Führer.”

  “Good. I knew you were the right man for this mission. I just wish that Skorzeny could have joined me. He is too highly placed and well-known to escape as easily as you. The Reich is a lesser place without his exploits of loyalty and daring. I have instructed him to make his way to Argentina after the war in Europe concludes, if at all possible.”

  Oberleutnant Wermuth turned his face away from the Führer and frowned. He’d heard of the so-called ‘Most Dangerous Man in Europe’. SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny had been the darling of the Reich for the entire war, most notably for leading the mission to rescue that fool, Mussolini, a couple of years ago. Then, the next year, Skorzeny had somehow managed to take control of the Wehrmacht during the tumultuous days after several high-ranking Wehrmacht officers attempt to assassinate the man standing beside him at the U-boat’s railing. The most influential—and disastrous as far as Wermuth was concerned—was Skorzeny’s plan to use English-speaking soldiers to infiltrate American lines during Operation Watch on the Rhine, what the Americans called The Battle of the Bulge. The Wehrmacht lost many good men that could have continued to defend the Fatherland during that operation.

  Good riddance,” Otto thought. Out loud, he said, “The loss of his expertise will be sorely missed.”

  The lights had gotten much closer and Wermuth could make out two large, flat-bottomed craft that had giant fans in the rear to propel them. They didn’t appear to be touching the water underneath; it was almost as if they rode on a cushion of air instead of their rubber hulls. What an odd contraption, he thought.

  Once the boats were beside the U-boat, they settled down onto the surface of the water and the sound of hidden fans underneath the skirting ceased. Men from the craft scurried across to secure lines and used their own gangplank instead of the U-boat’s to begin offloading the boxes.

  “Remember, Oberleutnant, you chose to ignore the order of surrender from Dönitz. You and your men continued the fight. It is of utmost importance that you not mention the Antarctic expedition—ever.”

  “Yes, Mein Führer.”

  Hitler clapped him on the back once again and then followed a man in a snow-white uniform wearing the rank of an SS-standartenführer. It was an odd sight compared to the normal, deep black fabric of the SS uniforms he was accustomed to.

  The Führer and the other three special passengers disembarked to one of the boats and the strange whirring noise resumed, raising the boat about a meter off the surface of the water. The large fan in back engaged and the hovering craft shot off across the sea toward the ice shelf.

  Unloading took the rest of the night and U-530 had to sacrifice one of her lifeboats because the remaining craft was full and could hold no more.

  By morning, U-530 was alone in the sea. Otto ordered her to slip back under the waters and she began the slow trip to South America. He’d been told to surrender in Uruguay, but he knew that if they did that they’d be executed in the public square immediately.

  Leutnant Otto Wermuth exercised his first and only act of rebellion against the Nazi party and the Führer’s orders. He directed his remaining crew to sail to Argentina instead of Uruguay. If everyone kept their mouths shut, the port of surrender wouldn’t matter.

  *****

  19 March 2020

  Fort Lauderdale, Florida

  Gabe woke to a cacophony of noise and for a moment he wondered whether it was the sound of the Heavenly Host welcoming him home, or the spawn of Hell delighting in the damnation of another soul.

  He thought he was dead, but realized he wasn’t as his mind focused and pain flooded through his body. Everything hurt, especially his head. He couldn’t open his eyes. I’m blind! he thought. No, that isn’t right, there’s something…

  He slapped weakly at his face. It was covered with some type of sticky, gritty substance that he wiped away and had to use his fingers to pry open his eyelids. Olivia lay a couple of feet from him, her red tank top lifted up high enough to be practically indecent.

  Hadn’t she been wearing a light-colored top? he wondered. The details were hard to remember and everything was still fuzzy.

  His vision swam in and out of focus as he tried to process what was happening. What he saw—or imagined he saw—was impossible. Small circular objects, each with a light on the top and bottom, zipped this way and that in the sky, firing rockets into the large beachfront hotels and using what sounded like machine guns to mow down fleeing people.

  “This can’t be happening,” he moaned, trying to sit up.

  “No! Stay down,” Olivia whispered hoarsely.

  He looked up at her face. Her eyes were wide in fear and the blonde hair was plastered wetly against her forehead. “They’re shooting…everyone who moves.”

  “Who?” he asked. He couldn’t remember much beyond seeing the stage explode and bodies flying through the air like rag dolls.

  Several single gunshots rang out nearby, then a string of automatic weapons fire answered farther away.

  “The grey men,” Olivia mumbled in response to his question.

  Gabe’s eyes focused on hers. They were glassy and she didn’t seem to be looking at him. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. He reached out to her and felt the wet sand between them. Blood. The sand had sucked most of it away, but there was still enough of it to make his hand red as he pulled it away.

  “Olivia… Are you okay?” he whispered once more.

  Harsh laghter and some type of gutteral, foreign language interrupted his attempts to check on her. Someone screamed and a gunshot rang out. It was close. Gabe was disoriented, but if he had to guess, the shooter was less than fifty yards away.

  The sound of approaching feet on sand confirmed his belief that they were close. He lay still and closed his his eyes, trying to appear dead. Through tiny slits in his eyelids, he
saw a line of men. It was difficult to tell for certain, but he believed they were advancing from the ocean.

  He could see them plainly in the light of the burning stage. They wore an older style of dark grey or possibly black military uniform and carried a mix of weaponry. Some of it looked like old World War Two rifles, while others seemed more exotic, much like an AK-47, but different somehow. The soldiers fired into the backs of anyone moving amongst the wreckage, making sport of their victims.

  In addition to the assortment of weapons, the invaders wore a mixture of modern and antique helmets. The older style kevlar helmet that the US Army had replaced with the narrower, lighter MICH during the war in Iraq was prevalent amongst the men. Sprinkled here and there were the coalscuttle steel helmets of the German Army in WWII.

  Gabe watched in horror as they stabbed bayonets into people nonchalantly, laughing and joking amongst themselves. A harsh voice cut through the air, coming from a speaker system somewhere overhead. The men quit joking and turned back toward the surf.

  In minutes, the grey men were gone and the flying machines above had disappeared. The sounds of the one-sided battle were replaced by moans of the dying and the cries of those unfortunate enough to be alive.

  He crawled over to where Olivia lay. Two fingers against her carotid artery told him what he already knew. She was gone, like so many others.

  Gabe thought about Kilgore and sat up cautiously. He was rewarded with a new stream of blood dripping from cuts somewhere above his hairline and tilted his head to the side to avoid getting it in his eyes again.

  He stared in shock and disbelief at the horror around him. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of bodies littered the beach where the main concert venue had been. Off to the west, the city burned. The beachfront hotels and few high-rise buildings that Fort Lauderdale possessed were engulfed in flames. Every one of them.

  How is that possible? The precision targeting by the grey men was unheard of on such a massive scale. Even the US Air Force wouldn’t have been able to do so much damage in such a short amount of time.

  He began to get dizzy, the wound to his head forcing him to lay back down. He’d have to wait to see if Kilgore was alright or else risk further injury to himself.

  In the distance, he heard sirens as the city’s first responders finally began to respond. It was only a matter of time before help came. They would be able to find his friend and treat Gabe’s injuries.

  Everything will be okay in just a little while, he told himself, avoiding Olivia’s blank stare. We’ll figure out who did this and make them pay.

  THREE

  17 October 1946

  Argus Base, East Antarctica

  Adolf Hitler limped beside Generalmajor Griese, Argus Base Chief Breeder, for an inspection of his army. It had been three and a half months since he’d last been in the nurseries, spending most of his time in recovery at Neuschwabenland Base. The Führer had suffered from a wicked attack of gout which started in the toes on his right foot and within weeks had spread almost to his knee.

  His doctors tried to tell him too much acid in his blood from the high concentration of meat in his diet caused the gout; he blamed the constant cold in the facility, their incompetence, and of course, the Americans. They were the reason that Deutschland had to be abandoned and a new army created.

  The new Deutsch Army would know from birth that the Americans were the reason they lived underground. The Americans were why their diets were so strict. The Americans were the reason they would be beaten and molded into the finest soldiers the world will ever know.

  He would have his revenge upon the Americans.

  “Tell me, Generalmajor, how is the program?” Hitler asked.

  “It goes better than expected, Mein Führer. Ninety-two percent of the stock has survived their first year of life and will be weaned by November. Of the bitches, a further fifty-seven percent are already pregnant with their second soldier and we anticipate the remainder will take once their offspring no longer suckle at their tits.”

  Hitler wiped the sweat of exhaustion from his brow with a handkerchief. He tried unsuccessfully to remember the amount of breeding stock he’d shipped to Argus over the years. The records at the camps were meticulously altered to record the death of thousands of women, most of them non-Slavic Poles and Scandinavians. They were transported in secret from Europe to their final destination in Argus Base to reconstitute the Wehrmacht.

  “Good. What are the numbers?”

  If Chief Breeder Griese was surprised that the Führer didn’t know what number ninety-two percent of the stock correlated to, then he didn’t let it show. “We have 81,305 remaining breeding stock—after the culling you ordered, Mein Führer.”

  They’d started with several thousand more women whose lineage was called into question. Those who had any hint of being Jewish, Roma or Slavic were killed and their bodies processed for meat to feed the remaining bitches. Generalmajor Griese had overseen the culling personally.

  There were 8,212 adult male soldiers, medical personnel and party members in Argus and the majority had fathered multiple children on the stock. Griese’s technicians kept track of all successful fertilizations and the parentage was meticulously recorded to avoid errors in the breeding program in successive generations.

  “The first year group of the New Reich contains 74,581 boys and girls—40,108 of those being male. We can reasonably expect between four and six year groups from the current stock before we are forced to reduce production for approximately ten years, fourteen being the optimal age to begin breeding the current generation.”

  The Führer was a man of concepts, not individual numbers. He had other men for that, men like the traitor, Hermann Goering. Goering had overseen the final planning and completion of Argus Base during his expedition to Antarctica in 1938 and later supervised the transport of the breeding stock and some of Europe’s greatest scientific minds to the base after they’d taken Poland.

  The war against the French and British—and later the Americans—never allowed Goering to return to Antarctica to observe what he’d created and the man served Germany with honor, even though the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to stop the Allied invasion. Only days before the Exodus from Europe, Goering had sent a telegram to Hitler asking permission to assume leadership of the Reich. It was treason and he’d stripped Goering of all titles, ordering his death and excluding him from the Exodus plan.

  Hitler learned through radio intercept that his onetime friend and confidant was condemned to hanging at the trials and had chosen an honorable death by committing suicide at Nuremberg just two days ago.

  “How long until my new army is ready, Generalmajor?” he asked, his head swimming with the numbers that the doctor had given him.

  “Given your directive that both males and females of the will be included in the army, we believe it will be ready in thirty-three decimal four years, with a strength of approximately 890,000.”

  Hitler stopped and stared daggers into Griese. “Thirty-three years? I’ll be…ninety years old before we are ready to strike. The Americans had eight million men in uniform by the end of the war!”

  Griese blubbered something about the human womb and the inability to speed up the growth process, but the Führer didn’t hear him. Instead, he saw his dreams of glorious conquest slip through his grasp once again. With less than a million soldiers, the New Deutsch Army would be annihilated in a matter of months.

  The realization that they hadn’t ordered the abduction and transport of more breeding stock hit him hard and he began screaming obscenities at the Chief Breeder. Hitler was not at fault for the shortcomings, it was that imbecile Griese.

  “Shoot him! Shoot him now!” he screamed to his guards, gesturing wildly toward the incompetent Generalmajor. He wouldn’t live to see the final retribution against the Americans because of an error in recordkeeping.

  The Führer’s protests stopped suddenly and he clutched his chest. What is happening? he thought, staring down a
t the pristine Nazi uniform he wore.

  “No. Not now,” he pleaded with his body. The scientists were years away from replicating the regeneration serum that the Aryan used. If only Dr. Morell had made the journey, he could help me.

  Hitler knew that he needed to calm down. He needed to get away from that moron who’d ruined his plans for revenge. His hand grasped at the railing in an attempt to stay upright, but the pain—the pain was too intense. A range of emotions passed through him as he sank slowly to his knees, chief among them was embarrassment; the men shouldn’t see him like this. Next was a sense of loss. He knew that he wouldn’t see the German Army march forth and destroy America, using the newly-designed flying discs to reduce their cities to ashes.

  Adolf Hitler’s chapter in this world was ending. He had come so close to accomplishing a feat that no one had ever done before. His dream of the Third German Reich, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains had been within his grasp—until the Americans entered the fray. They supplied the Soviets so they could fight a delaying battle until winter set in. They rallied in support of the British, sending fighter planes and pilots to thwart the Luftwaffe. They bolstered the British in Africa and took away his ability to use the Suez Canal. They stole Italy from him and broke through the Atlantic Wall to steal France as well.

  Hitler gasped, unable to speak as his mouth clamped tightly on his tongue. Warm, coppery fluid filled his mouth and even he could appreciate the irony that he’d bitten off the end of his tongue, much like many of the Jews did when they were gassed.

  The great Führer was reduced to nothing but a man in his final moments, pleading with the gods of science to allow his doctors to arrive in time. Unfortunately, no one came to his assistance and the world went dark.

  The men who’d risked everything to follow Hitler to the end of the Earth watched in horror as the man died in the breeding facility. Only a year had passed since they’d staged an elaborate hoax to rescue him from the closing pinchers of the Soviet and American armies, traversing first Europe and then the entire Atlantic Ocean to the secret facility buried in the ice and rock of Antarctica.