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their number.
"Hello, Melody Travel? Yes, I'd like to book your Sound of Music Tour.
Yeah. The one that leaves next Thursday."
   «»   «»   «»  
At the German Consulate on Flower Street, Uda Kreise sat at her typewriter
carefully filling out a Trade and Commercial Development form. All requests for
information concerning German businesses were processed in the same way. The
person who had requested contact with a German firm was sent the appropriate
information. As a backup, the firm itself received a copy of the report so that they
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could contact the client themselves. A model of Teutonic efficiency, and the sort of
double-tracking system that had contributed to the "miracle" of the post-war
German economy.
It was odd, she thought, that the Los Angles Police Department would want
to do business with a German blood bank. Maybe the police were afraid of AIDS
and were looking for a supply of clean blood.
Carefully she typed in the name of the business contact: Captain John
Drummond, Los Angles Police Department. Then, removing the form from the
typewriter, she inserted an envelope and carefully typed the company name and
address:
EURO PLASMA TECHNIK
Bindler Strasse
Hamburg, DEUTSCHLAND.
Chapter 9
Vienna
The old Jew shuffled along the uneven sidewalk, the collar of his shabby
coat turned up against the light rain. From a vantage point in the shadows of the
building across the street, only his crisp white shirt-collar dimly visible, Wilhelm
Kluge watched intently as the old man stopped under the flickering street lamp to
catch his breath before climbing the stone steps to the front door of his apartment
block. Kluge smiled to himself in the darkness as he noted that the door to the
apartment house was unlocked. This would be easier than he possibly could have
hoped for.
As the door closed behind his prey, Kluge tried hard to imagine where he
might have seen the old Jew before. Probably at one of the camps, but he hadn't a
clue which one. Not that it mattered. He would have had no reason to remember
any of the concentration camp inmates with whom he came in contact, although
those who had survived the war would undoubtedly remember him.
Kluge licked his lips and waited, watching for a light to come on in the
correct window. His hunger gnawed at his consciousness, demanding to be fed.
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Within a week after the attack on the crusader castle, Kluge had known what
his hunger demanded. And he knew how to feed it.
It was simple. Shoot a prisoner in the neck or better still, cut his throat
and as he lay dying, just suck a mouthful or two from the wound. Kluge had to be
careful that he wasn't observed, but fortunately very few Germans wanted to know
what an SS officer was doing with prisoners that were marched out of the camps,
and his victims never survived to complain.
He had come to terms with his hunger fairly easily. At first it had demanded
blood on a constant daily basis, but then it seemed to become a part of him, rather
than trying to consume him, and Kluge had found that he needed to feed less often.
Before the arrival of spring, Kluge had found that he needed less than half a liter a
week to satisfy his craving. It need not even be human blood, though that was the
most satisfying.
Kluge stared at the building across the street. Although it was dark, and only
one street lamp was working, Kluge was able to see everything in sharp detail, even
deep into the shadows of the decaying brick building. The vision wasn't bright, but
it was clear, like a television with its contrast levels set too low, the brightness gone
from the picture. It had come upon him gradually, as his initial hunger evened out.
He remembered the first time he became aware of his keen powers of night vision .
. .
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His patrol moved quietly through the snow, trying to stay ahead of the
advancing Allied Army. Darkness had come early, and with it a light snowfall that
obscured vision and deadened sound. Kluge halted his men and pulled out his map,
carefully tracing his finger along the line of their march. As he studied the map in
near darkness, Scharführer Baumann stepped over to him and shined a flashlight
onto the map. The pool of pale yellow light hurt Kluge's eyes, causing him to squint
as if he were trying to read the map under the glare of a noonday sun.
"Turn off that light," he ordered. "Do you want to draw enemy fire?"
The Scharführer snapped off the torch, and in the enclosing darkness Kluge
realized for the first time that he could see as well at night as most of his men could
see on a rainy afternoon. Taking his bearings carefully, Kluge directed his men
north-west, heading them away from the approaching American troops.
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But despite their hard push to elude the Americans, General Patton's Third
Army raced ahead and outflanked them, and in less than a week Kluge and his men
found themselves cut off from the main German retreat. Moving only at night,
Kluge and his men managed to make it as far as the Czech-German border before
coming into contact with the enemy.
What fools! thought Kluge, as he watched a detachment of British Tommies
brewing tea beside a small stream. There were ten of them, and the way they were
clustered together, Kluge knew he could kill most of them with a single hand
grenade, and then rush in with his men and finish the rest. In 1941, he probably
would have done just that, but by early 1945, Kluge had become cautious. He knew
that, militarily, Germany was on the edge of total collapse, and if the Reich was to
salvage anything out of its defeat, it would be necessary that he, and others like
him, survived to carry on the struggle.
Kluge's men circled around the British soldiers while he and another [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]