The Madagaskar Plan (6 page)

The first of the inflatables ran ashore. Boots hit mud, then slipped on a slope of oil.

Hochburg reached for the flare gun. The Belgians’ expressions were a jumble of relief and suspicion that they were landing unopposed. He let the insurgents struggle halfway up the bank, their trousers weighed down with sludge, before he fired the flare. At his sign, the entire shore exploded in flames. The shore, the steps leading to the embankment, even the river itself, with its film of gasoline.

Hochburg stood mesmerized, the skin on his bald scalp wrinkling with the heat. The fire towered over Stanleystadt; it had a holy, shimmering quality. And as he watched it burn, a notion seized hold of Hochburg’s mind.

If only he had the means to engulf the whole city. The whole of Kongo.

*   *   *

Hochburg’s jeep weaved through the streets, the driver spinning the wheel to avoid piles of rubble. Hardly a window had survived anywhere in the city. Chains of tattered lanterns festooned the buildings; serpents of tinsel, now clogged with brick dust, were coiled around lampposts. The battle of Stanleystadt had begun with a surprise bombardment the night before Christmas, or Julfest, as Nazi Party ideologues insisted it be called.

He returned to SS headquarters on Eiskeller Strasse and was met by Zelman. Even in the gritty smoke, his deputy’s eyes remained unblinking. Sometimes Hochburg wanted to snap his fingers in front of them or find Zelman’s wife and have her shot while he was forced to watch—anything to elicit a bat of the eyelid.

“Are my generals still here?” demanded Hochburg as they strode into the vestibule.

The space was dominated by von Kursell’s portrait of Himmler: twenty-eight square meters of oil on canvas. The Reichsführer’s face was askew and peppered with shrapnel, as if he were suffering from shingles. Despite the Reichsführer’s eyes being in every public building, Hochburg ran Kongo with limited interference from Germania. So long as boats brimming with minerals, timber, cotton, and green bananas continued to flow to the Reich, Hochburg administered the colony as he saw fit, even if that meant war. To extend the borders of Kongo farther into southern Africa was Germany’s right, he told Himmler. Its destiny.

Zelman handed Hochburg a damp towel. “The generals are waiting in the conference room.”

“No tactical withdrawal to the bunker then?” he replied, mopping his neck.

A weak smile. “If you recall, Oberstgruppenführer, you locked them in.”

The lift wasn’t working. Hochburg bounded up the staircase, past bandaged soldiers slumped on the steps.

Zelman continued his update: “Insurgent units have surrounded the entire city. Every district reports heavy shelling. All roads out are blocked.”

“And elsewhere?”

“Elisabethstadt says the siege is worsening. By the hour. They can’t hold on much longer.”

“What about the Reichsführer? Have you made contact yet?”

“We’ve opened a line to Wewelsburg, but communications are proving problematic.” Wewelsburg: Himmler’s castle in Westphalia, the spiritual headquarters of the SS. “We’re still trying to connect.”

“I want to know as soon as you have his office on the phone,” said Hochburg.

He continued his rapid ascent, with Zelman struggling to keep up. Occasionally the building shuddered. On the seventh floor he stormed into the conference room. The blast curtains were drawn, leaving the room in a murky light. Most of the generals were huddled together over a map. Shaking heads, murmuring. They straightened their backs as he entered. In the corner was a decorated fir tree that no one had bothered to remove; beneath it lay Fenris, dozing with one eye half open.

“I hope you put my absence to good use,” said Hochburg, taking his place at the head of the table. He gestured for everyone to sit. “What plans for the counterattack?”

Nobody replied.

Hochburg scanned the faces in front of him. The air-conditioning had stopped working. They all glistened, the collars of their uniforms wet. Outside: the relentless beat of artillery.

It was General Ockener who finally spoke for the group. He had a hewn face and thinning white hair atop a beach-resort tan. “Hochburg, we feel this is unacceptable.” He spoke with the measured tone of a man who wanted to scream. “To leave us in here with no refreshment, nowhere to relieve ourselves—”

Hochburg smelled urine. “It would appear that one of you can’t control his functions.”

“You locked the door,” shrieked a voice from the other end of the table. “This is the biggest target in the city. We could have been killed.”

“If I hadn’t, you would have fled. What example is that?”

“I will be reporting this matter to the Führer.”

Hochburg was on his feet. “Then you can also tell him this.”

He wrenched open the blast curtains, flooding the room with furious light. The city was pockmarked with columns of smoke. Otraco was obscured behind a convulsing orange barrier that followed the bend in the river.

Hochburg gave an exultant sweep of his arms. “Guard!” A sentry appeared. “The Brigadeführer here”—he pointed to the end of the table—“wishes to leave. Escort him outside. To the street.”

“I am a general in the Waffen-SS. I will not be treated like—”

“You can leave through the door—or the window. I don’t care which.”

When he was gone, Hochburg flopped into his chair and rotated it toward Ockener. “You were saying, Herr General.”

Ockener had been decorated at the Battle of Smolensk before chasing mass graves and medals across the Russian steppe; later he transferred to Africa and earned the nickname “Der Schnitter.” The reaper.

“Your fire won’t burn forever, Oberstgruppenführer. Meantime, the enemy’s guns can strike anywhere.”

“How did the dregs of Belgium’s army come to surround an entire city?”

“Their ranks have been swollen by the Free French
*
and blacks who escaped deportation.” Ockener was playing with a bauble taken from the tree. “We don’t have enough soldiers to contain them. Too many were sent to Elisabethstadt. On your orders.”

To relieve the siege of Elisabethstadt, Hochburg had sent contingents from the north of Kongo to the south. When they proved insufficient, he commandeered troops from Kamerun, Aquatoriana, and Madagaskar until the governors of these colonies complained that their own security situations were threatened. The Afrika Korps in Angola, whose commanding officer was mysteriously lost and whose soldiers were caught up in their own siege, was unable to offer support.

Ockener put down the bauble and glanced at the other generals. Hochburg noted their tacit nods.

“The position is clear, Herr Oberstgruppenführer.” A pause. “We cannot continue to fight.”

From the streets below came shell bursts of German artillery. To Hochburg they sounded like the heartbeat of a dying lion: inconceivable, dwindling, full of fury.

He leaned back in his chair till the leather cracked. “There was a time, not long ago, when the Waffen-SS was feared,” he said. “Now I have generals like you.”

“Give me a BK44 and a sack of grenades, and I’ll gladly fill the drains of this city. The problem is the ranks.”

“How dare you say that while you sit here. They are true white men.”

“Half our numbers are ethnics. The rest, the pure Germans, too many of them don’t want to fight.”

“Nonsense.”

“You promised them a swift victory.”

“It’s been four months. You’re telling me that’s all it’s taken to blunt their spirits?”

“They are a generation of conquerors. They have never known attrition, or the possibility of losing.”

“We fought for a year to take central Africa,” retorted Hochburg.

“A mopping-up operation,” said Ockener, “of colonies whose European masters had been defeated. It was also a decade ago. All the fighting was a decade ago.”

“Meaning?”

“The ethnics are here because the alternative is herding goats in Ostland. The Germans just want a plantation, an obedient wife, and enough workers so they don’t have to get off their arses.”

“It’s the same in the East,” muttered someone.

The Soviet Union had been defeated in 1943, with Moscow razed to the ground and scattered with meadow seed. Despite that, a guerrilla war churned like a meat grinder on the shifting eastern fringe of the Reich. An intractable conflict stretching from the Ural Mountains deep into Siberia that the Russians couldn’t win and the Germans were weary of. But Africa, Hochburg believed, Africa was different. It wasn’t a battle of political ideology; the clash of races was as stark as the midday sun and the dead of night.

“Perhaps one day,” continued Ockener, “we will have the means to wage war without men. Such an army will always be victorious. Until then, we’ve grown soft on peace.”

“The British, yes,” said Hochburg. “Mired in imperial weakness. But not us.”

“The same British whose grip around Elisabethstadt we’ve been unable to loosen? Who are supplying the Belgians with tanks and artillery? Their blood is up. You have underestimated them.”

“You sound almost admiring, General.”

“Then there’s the matter of civilians. While you were away on your riverbank ‘adventure,’ the Belgians took the water treatment plant.”

“And while they took it, you were in here. Or did a simple door lock flummox the cream of the Waffen command?”

“The sewage system is also damaged. In a few days, dysentery will be rife. Cholera will follow, typhoid.”

“What would you suggest then, Herr General?”

Ockener lowered his voice: “Surrender.”

“Those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live,”
replied Hochburg, citing the Führer’s book. He judged that the quote would be well known around the table.

“A cease-fire then. A truce.”

“No.”

“At least some form of negotiation.”

“No.”

An exasperated
Ach
. “Then a squadron of Heinkel bombers to flatten the city.”

Hochburg roared with laughter. “There’s hope yet.” He swiveled his chair to gaze out across the city. The wall of fire was beginning to ebb. “Every soldier is to fight,” he said. “Street to street. If they lack the guts for it, we shoot them where they stand.” He spun back. “It’s a matter of reasserting discipline. Punish the worst cowards and the rest will fall into place. If need be, we can start in this room.”

Hushed words flitted round the table.

“It is not my wish that the civilian population suffer,” continued Hochburg, “but it must also be mobilized. Give a rifle to every last man and woman. Remind the fair maidens of this city that these guerrillas, and the blacks among them, have the most base of needs, needs that will have been unmet in the jungle.”

“And the children?” said Ockener. He was toying with the bauble again.

“Teach them what milk bottles and petrol can do.”

“The civilians should be allowed to leave. They are German citizens.”

“Who have been indulged enough. Most have lives better than anything in Europe. In Germania all they’d get is forty-four square meters of living space. Here they have sixty. They enjoyed the abundance of conquest; now it’s time to endure for it.”

“They may not wish to die for sixteen meters—”

The door opened. Zelman slid in, unblinking as ever.

“I have the Reichsführer’s private office on the line.”

“This city will rise!” said Hochburg, reaching for the phone on the table. “That will be all, gentlemen.” Nobody moved. “Five minutes ago you were complaining about locks; now you won’t leave? Zelman, get them food and drink. They have long days ahead.”

As soon as Hochburg was alone he lifted the receiver and found some blossom in his throat. “Heinrich, it’s Walter. How are you?”

The connection crackled and fizzed. “This is Fegelein.” Hermann Fegelein: Himmler’s chief of staff.

“I want to speak to the Reichsführer.”

“He’s at lunch.”

“At lunch … Is he aware that the Schädelplatz was attacked?”

“Yes.”

“That it has been lost.”

“This he also knows,” said Fegelein.

“And he has no response?”

The line squeaked: sixty-five hundred kilometers of static.

“The Reichsführer has always approved of your methods, Hochburg. Your thoroughness, your grasp of the ‘biological’ issues. But your pagan square is far from his only concern. He’s preoccupied with the Jews again. In Madagaskar. Surely you know about this?”

“I’ve been preoccupied myself.”

“We may have another full-scale rebellion on the island. Poor Globus is struggling to maintain control. He blames you for everything.”

Globus: Odilo Globocnik, the SS governor of Madagaskar.

“That drunken satrap,” said Hochburg. “Is he still whining about the men I commandeered?”

“It was an entire brigade,” replied Fegelein. “He claims if they hadn’t been sent to Kongo—to ‘shore you up,’ as he tells the Reichsführer—the Jews would be in their place.”

“And as I like to tell Heinrich, half a million tons of copper was shipped from Kongo last year. What does Globus give the Reich? Fucking canned meat.”

“You miss the subtlety of the situation, Oberstgruppenführer. Globus keeps us Jew-free. That is worth a thousand years of minerals.”

“I wonder whether Germania will feel the same if Kongo is overrun by niggers.” His tone became emphatic: “I need more men. If not from Africa, then spare me a division from the East.”

“I doubt they’d make a difference now.”

Hochburg’s fingers tightened around the receiver. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve not heard?”

“No.”

“Unreliable things, telex machines,” said the chief of staff, and he went on to detail events. Even across thousands of kilometers of wire, the gloating was apparent in Fegelein’s voice. The SS was riven with jealousy and petty rivalries: between Europe and Africa, between one governor and his neighbor, all kept simmering by Himmler to make sure no one challenged his position.

Hochburg listened in silence, his throat thickening.

“I hope the Reichsführer enjoys his lunch,” he said when the conversation was at an end. He couldn’t bear the gilded dining room at Wewelsburg, nor the fleshy droop of Himmler’s lip as he chewed. He set down the receiver and listened to the funnel of his breath. A shell landed near the base of the building. The decorations on the Christmas tree tinkled, waking Fenris.