The Madagaskar Plan (7 page)

Hochburg leapt up and grabbed the telephone.

Hurled it at the window.

It bounced off, the wire yo-yoing it back into the room. He threw it again, this time with such ferocity that the glass cracked. Outside, the burning river was reduced to billows of smoke.

“Come, dog,” he said and strode from the conference room.

The corridor was empty except for Zelman.

“I need a plane,” said Hochburg, heading to the stairs.

“Technically,” replied Zelman, “Stanleystadt is part of the no-fly zone.”

Hochburg stopped at the edge of the steps. He fixed his deputy with his black eyes till Zelman averted his gaze. “I expect it fueled and ready to leave in fifteen minutes.”

“At once, Oberstgruppenführer. What is your destination?”

“Elisabethstadt.” Hochburg began to descend. “I have a firing squad to arrange.”

CHAPTER FIVE

FROM STANLEYSTADT TO Elisabethstadt: fourteen hundred kilometers. Hochburg decided to pilot the plane himself, flicking away the concerns of Zelman and the ground crew: “How can a man rule the earth if he can’t command the heavens?” He had learned to fly when he was the governor of Muspel,
*
soaring alone over the dune seas.

The plane was a Focke-Wulf Fw-189, a twin-engine propeller aircraft, nicknamed “Le Chambranle” (the window frame) by the Belgians because of its fishbowl cockpit enclosed in bands of metal; its primary function was reconnaissance. Hochburg dismissed the captain, kept the copilot and dorsal gunner. Fenris squeezed behind his seat and bedded down. The Focke-Wulf lifted off into a mesh of ack-ack fire, broke through, then turned south into empty skies. Hochburg fixed his eyes on the sun; it was too distressing to look back.

Following the outbreak of war in central Africa, Prime Minister Halifax had requested an audience with Hitler. To his surprise, the Führer issued a statement detailing how there was no need to intensify hostilities after so many years of peace: “If we say we are fighting the British empire to the death, then obviously we shall drive even the last of them to arms against us.” He did not, however, leave his palace in Germania. Rumors bubbled: the Führer was ailing, had been incapacitated by a mystery illness; he refused to sign any document because he planned to pulverize Rhodesia from the sky. Some said that at sixty-three, now master of the world, he was simply bored with the diplomatic chase. Instead he sent Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of Reich security and, it appeared, also its highest negotiator. Heydrich met Halifax’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and a number of points were swiftly announced.

The conflict was deemed “local”: a colonial border dispute confined to Kongo and Northern Rhodesia. Renegade British elements had provoked it; they did not represent official government policy. There would be no escalation. No reinforcements were to be sent from Europe or any other African colonies with the exception of support personnel; Churchill quipped that the Waffen-SS had more cooks in it than any army in history. To protect economic infrastructure and, as a secondary concern, civilians, a no-fly zone was to be established between the first parallel north and the sixteenth south. In the meantime, Germania and London would work to a negotiated settlement. Both sides agreed that the war in Angola was a separate matter and that Portugal (a small European country with disproportionately large African colonies) should come to terms with the Reich immediately. Word of the Führer’s approval was passed on from his palace: for now, the Heydrich-Eden Pact was a mutually beneficial stalemate.

The Focke-Wulf stopped to refuel at Tarufa.

Hochburg left the aircraft and paced the landing strip to waken his legs and allow Fenris to drain his bladder. Dust rose from his boots. Deep in the cotton-growing region of Kongo, Tarufa was untouched by the war. A gaggle of boys had hurried to the perimeter fence when the plane touched down, hoping for some action. They quickly became bored and were now playing baseball, a craze that had spread through the colony from American prospectors working with the SS Oil Company; some fretted it would prove a greater threat than British tanks. One boy sat away from the others, his back to the fence. He appeared to be sawing something in his lap.

“You’re not joining your friends,” said Hochburg.

The boy made a show of being startled. He had the same unkempt black hair Hochburg had as a child. There was a familiar ravenous look in his eye, as if he wanted to consume the world.

“They hate me,” he replied, then added, “but I hate them more.”

“You’re in the JVA?” Jungvolk Afrika: the continent’s youth movement for boys between ten and fourteen.

“Everyone is; you have to be. I prefer being alone.”

“But you enjoy it?”

“It would be better if they allowed girls.”

A smile tightened Hochburg’s face. “And what is in your lap?”

“I killed it myself.” The boy lifted up a headless snake with yellow scales, the tail still twitching. Hochburg recognized it as a puff adder; its venom could kill a man in minutes.

“Does your mother know you hunt snakes?”

“She’s dead. So is Papa. Malaria.”

Hochburg wanted to comfort the child. “I lost my own parents when I was younger. My brothers, too.”

“Who looked after you?”

“Someone special. I was older than you, already in my twenties, and lucky to find her.”

“I live with my aunt now. She worries a lot.” The boy snorted as if blowing a fly from his nostril. “Did your parents get malaria, too?”

“No. They were killed.”

“How?”

“Butchered, by tribesmen.”

Hochburg had been the sole survivor of his family. Afterward, sick with grief and nightmares, he was taken in by Eleanor and her husband. They were missionaries who ran an orphanage in Togoland; Burton was eleven when he first arrived. Hochburg had sobbed in Eleanor’s arms and shared the horrors he’d witnessed; piece by piece, she made him whole again. Later they became lovers and eloped (Eleanor reveled in the romance of the word, perhaps because it obscured the reality of abandoning her husband and son). The two years they spent together were the happiest Hochburg ever knew. They lived simply, glutting in each other’s love, until the regret began to trickle into Eleanor and she looked back guiltily to the life she had discarded. This time it was Hochburg she abandoned, fleeing into the jungle to Burton and her death. That Eleanor met the same fate as his parents could only be a calling. A portent.

“You must be very old,” said the boy. “The niggers are gone.”

“Alas, not all.” Hochburg thought of the faces in the Schädelplatz. “What would you do if you saw one?”

The boy pondered the question, then held up the two bloody pieces of snake.

“Oberstgruppenführer!” The copilot beckoned to him. “We’re ready.”

Hochburg drew his pistol and unlocked the clip. He freed a bullet and passed it through the chain-link fence. The boy dropped his snake and took it with red fingers.

“Use it wisely, my child.”

The Fw-189 lifted into the sky again. Two and a half thousand meters below, savannah drifted past: blots of jade and khaki like the camouflage pattern on an SS combat jacket. The sun beat through the glass cockpit. Sleep had been a snatched indulgence for Hochburg these past nights; drowsiness crept over him.

“How long till we land?” he asked the copilot.

“Another hour. Assuming we get through the British air defenses.”

“Take control,” said Hochburg, relaxing his grip on the lever. “Wake me in twenty minutes.” He yawned, studding his eyes with tears, and let his head recline. Elisabethstadt filled his half-dreaming thoughts.

Before the siege it had been the mining capital of Kongo, with its rows of prim bungalows, world-famous botanical garden, ice factories, and a railway hub that whisked Germans as far south as Cape Town or to the pleasures of Roscherhafen. As with other conquered cities, Hochburg had planned to rename it; to do so was part of the psychology of victory. It affirmed the Reich’s dominance as trenchantly as jackboots stamping the boulevards or the flutter of red, white, and black. For years he knew what to call it; he even had the approval of the Führer, who foolishly claimed to understand the Homeric allusion.

Then Hochburg’s pen hesitated over the document that would have made it law. He looked at the city’s new name stamped on the thick, lion-colored paper of official documents. Above it was the eagle-and-swastika seal. He meant it as her memorial:

Eleanorstadt

Minutes passed. A drop of ink ran down the nib and splashed onto the paper. Hochburg laid down his fountain pen, folded the sheet in half, quarters, eighths; later he burned it. When the bureaucrats puzzled over the change, Hochburg fended them off:
George VI won’t always be on the throne. In the years ahead, the British will be reassured to hear their monarch’s name so close to the border.

He would offer Eleanor more than Elisabethstadt.

The whole of his Afrika Reich would be her immortalization: every stone that was laid, every garrison, town, city; the ports, the white roads cutting through the jungle, the babel of a million copper threads connecting the continent. A mausoleum of such glory that her name need never be written on it. That’s why he’d been so impatient to invade Rhodesia: to consecrate more lands for her. Of course, they understood none of this in Germania. To the ministries on Wilhelmstrasse, Africa was a trove of mines and timber forests, its plantations existing solely to fill the bellies of the German hordes. But to Hochburg, Africa was a kingdom of temples. The only way of keeping Eleanor present. So long as his heart drummed, the British and their ragtag allies would never prosper.

He would find a way to crush them yet.

His dreams were marauding. From Elisabethstadt … to his lack of troop numbers … to General Ockener’s war without the weak souls of men
, such an army will always be victorious
 … to a vision of the entire continent ablaze … Then the soothing lap of waves and the river by which he and Eleanor had lived together.

He was gliding with her in water as warm as amniotic fluid, below them a fathomless indigo black. A splash, a laugh … and they were lying naked next to each other in the mud, the sun filling their skin with light. He counted the freckles around her nose, which were as tiny as banana seeds. This was all he craved: this peace. If she hadn’t chosen Burton, if she hadn’t left Hochburg and been murdered, he would have watched the Nazis raise their edifice in Africa with indifference.

He took her hand, felt it so vividly: each silky finger, the creases of the palm. He traced his thumb along the life line till it came to an abrupt halt—

“Oberstgruppenführer!”

A roaring sound.

Hochburg dragged himself from the banks of the river. He rarely dreamed of her anymore and wished he could sink into the moment. His heart wrenched to let go of her hand …

“Oberstgruppenführer!” It was the gunner at the rear of the aircraft.

There was a flash of aluminum and olive-green paint.

“It’s a Meteor,” said the copilot. He strained in his harness to identify the plane in front. The cockpit bucked in the wake of its jet engines. “British markings. RAF.”

Fenris was yelping.

Hochburg reached behind to soothe the dog. “Are there any others?” he asked the gunner.

“Sky’s clear.”

The Meteor was banking, ready to circle round.

“We can’t outrun it,” said the copilot.

“It’s coming back!” shouted the gunner. “What should we do?”

The Meteor slowed till it was tailing them from above. A hundred meters of sky separated the two aircraft.

Hochburg shook off the last of his dream. “Is it armed?”

“Four guns.”

“No British planes should be up here.” Hochburg took hold of the controls and eased back on the speed. “We give it the air ahead,” he said to the gunner. “If it returns for another pass, blow it from the sky.”

“But, Oberstgruppenführer—”

“Or would you rather it be us?”

The Meteor overtook them. Banked sharply again.

“He’s coming around. Five hundred meters. No sign of engaging.”

“You have your orders.”

“Five hundred,” counted the gunner. “Four. Three…” He fired, blasting the British jet.

Hochburg’s seat rocked. The Meteor streaked over, blinding them with smoke. As it cleared, he watched the plane plummet toward the grasslands below. The cockpit vanished; seconds later, the white poppy of a parachute appeared.

Suddenly the air around them was electrified with bullets.

The copilot slammed the stick forward, sending them into a dive. The propellers screamed.

The gunner was yelling into his mouthpiece: “There’s another plane!”

A second Meteor whooshed overhead.

Hochburg caught a band of red and green on its fuselage: the Mozambique Air Force. Numbering twenty aircraft, it was considered more a vanity project than a threat, though recently Hochburg had seen intelligence reports that the British were training its pilots. So far Mozambique, Portugal’s other African colony, had stayed out of the war and not supported Angola.

The gunner pursued the Mozambican jet. Clipped its tail wing. Then it vanished from view as it arced back through the clouds for a second run at them.

The Focke-Wulf was level again, the movement so abrupt that Hochburg’s head bounced off the cockpit glass.

“Give me the controls,” he said to the copilot and forced them into a steep climb.

More tracer fire flickered past.

“We’ll stall,” said the copilot.

They were rising almost vertically now, the whole structure of the plane shuddering. The sky above was bleached of color.

“Is it in range?” Hochburg asked the gunner.

“He’s following. Four, five seconds to contact.”

“Get ready,” said Hochburg, straightening them out.

He drove the lever forward.

They dived—a lurching, bowel-flattening sensation—and in an instant were level with the belly of the Meteor. The
rat-tat-tat
of their cannon was louder than the rushing air.