The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (12 page)

THIS FILM CONSTITUTES TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED KINGDOM OF

GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AS DEFINED BY PARLIAMENT

IN THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT OF 1920. PUNISHMENT UP TO AND

INCLUDING EXECUTION MAY RESULT.

MILKWEED / GRACKLE

Well
, thought Will,
I’m in it now.

The room strobed dark and light so quickly that Will’s eyes ached in the effort to keep up. A parade of images flashed on the screen, sandwiched in moments of darkness. The dark frames were placeholders, he realized, representing the portions of film damaged by fire. After the reel spooled past the outermost layers where fire had done the most damage, the dark stretches grew shorter. But not enough to make viewing easy or comfortable.

Will struggled to absorb the surreal tableaux. A shirtless man hovering twenty feet above an orchard. Half a second of nothing but a brick wall, then a nude woman standing before it with no transition. A young man with pale eyes laying his hand on an anvil, the film shimmering, the metal sagging. Another man standing halfway inside a wall, like a ghost. A muscular fellow on a leash (a
leash
?) scowling at a mortar emplacement that imploded upon itself. The ghost man standing in front of a chattering machine gun. The leashed man scowling at an upside-down tank. A soldier throwing something at the anvil man, and a flash.

The subjects of the film wore belts with dark leads running up to their skulls. Each and every one of them. Repeated viewings didn’t make it any less horrifying.

They watched the film again. And again. And again.

Will was so wrapped up trying to assemble the images into a single story—trying to conceive of how von Westarp had achieved these unnatural results—that it wasn’t until the third viewing he noticed an obvious problem.

“There’s no sound,” he said, breaking the silence.

“Of course there’s no bleedin’ sound,” said Lorimer. “It’s a silent fucking filmstrip.”

“That’s a shame,” said Will. When Marsh asked him why, he
elaborated. “If we could
hear
those proceedings, it would be a great boon. Alas, that’s not an option.”

“So you do think this is supernatural?”

“Are you not watching the same film as I, Pip? Because I believe I just witnessed a flying man. A
flying man
. That is not natural.”

Stephenson said, “What are those things they wear? The belts, and the implants.”

Will shook his head. “Honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea. This is a form of the craft utterly unknown to me. But I’d like to know how it works.” It looked like magic without blood. Was that even possible?

Marsh looked at Stephenson, then back to Will. “You’ll do it, then? You’ll help us?”

“I am at your service,” said Will.

“Welcome to Milkweed,” said Stephenson.

9-10 May 1940

Ardennes Forest, Belgium

T
he Götterelektrongruppe sped through a moonlit forest in a six-wheeled Panzerspähwagen. Klaus rode in the back, along with a massive store of replacement batteries. The road swerved around hills and dipped through gullies. The armored scout car had minimal suspension; every bump in the road jostled the occupants as they sped along.

A two-hundred-meter-wide swath of old-growth forest and underbrush disappeared in their wake, flattened and incinerated in an orgy of willpower. On the left, impenetrable stands of beech and spruce disappeared behind the bulwark of blue fire racing alongside the truck. On the right, centuries-old oaks and sapling firs disintegrated as though ripped apart by a giant thresher.

The car was designed for a crew of five; they numbered six. Reinhardt and Kammler sat in front, crammed next to their driver. Buhler
huddled behind Kammler, in the gunner’s seat. His leg jounced up and down as he yanked on the imbecile’s leash. Gretel was in the rear, next to Klaus, where the radio operator normally sat. She sat with her head tipped back, eyes closed but looking ahead.

Reinhardt and Kammler drained their packs with wild, amphetamine-fueled abandon. Klaus relayed new batteries up front as his comrades swapped out the depleted packs. At first they had stopped every few kilometers to change the batteries. After a while they had found a rhythm, though, and now they moved like clockwork.

They were the tip of the spear. By morning, the three Panzerkorps of German Army Group A would barrel through the newly opened forest, circumventing the Maginot Line and tearing into France’s soft, undefended interior.

Their leaders called it Operation Sichelschnitt: the cut of the sickle.

The engine rumble made a contrabass counterpoint to the white noise
whoosh
of fire and imploding wood stock. Outside, the night smelled like the workshop of an overzealous carpenter, singed sawdust and pulped lumber. It stank inside the car. Kammler had crapped himself.

“Crush. Crush. Crush,” Buhler rasped. Hours of screaming, then chanting, the same mantra had given his voice the texture of sandpaper.

At some point during the night, they crossed from Belgium into France, though even with a map it was impossible to tell when or where.

Gretel sat up. She said, “Fortification, two minutes ahead. Sentries will hear us forty seconds from now.” Klaus shifted his weight as their driver, a combat driving specialist reassigned from the elite LSSAH unit of the Waffen-SS, applied the brakes. “Seventy seconds from now. Ninety.” The truck puttered to a stop. “The sentries will not hear us,” Gretel concluded.

She turned, smirking. “But Hauptsturmführer Buhler will fall in a thistle when he goes to piss in the woods.”

“Crazy bitch. You say that every time we stop. You’re trying to make me hold it all night.”

She shrugged.

Everyone climbed out. Buhler handed Kammler’s leash over to the
driver, who wrinkled his nose. The crackle of underbrush receded as Buhler strode off to relieve himself. Reinhardt leaned against the cab. He lifted a cigarette to his mouth with trembling hands. The amphetamines had him wound so tightly, he almost vibrated. Moonlight shone in the whites of his eyes. A tiny orange flame momentarily engulfed the tip of the cigarette. Klaus knew that the cigarette wouldn’t mask the taste in Reinhardt’s mouth.

The heavy fortifications—the
grands ouvrages
—of the Maginot Line didn’t extend through the Ardennes. The forest had long been considered impassable with heavy armor. And so it had been, until to night.

But the French had sprinkled smaller fortifications—
petits ouvrages
—through the portion of forest that extended across the border. These, too, had to be destroyed to ensure the flawless rollout of the Blitzkrieg. Klaus’s ability was useless for clearing timberland. But he had no equal for clearing fortifications.

Klaus hefted a pack from the overloaded car. He checked the contents. Thirty kilograms of PETN were sufficient to tear open the heaviest
ouvrage
like a tin can. But when detonated
inside
the steel-plated walls, it would turn the fort into a meat grinder.

Gretel joined him as he double-checked the gauge on his battery harness. She pointed. “That way. Follow the gully until you reach the clearing. You’ll find the fort in the crook between two hills.”

“How are you feeling?” Klaus asked. “Do you need a new battery yet?” She didn’t say anything.

Klaus had advocated a plan where Gretel stayed behind, away from the battlefront, relaying her directions via the Twins. But in order to plumb the next twelve hours and shepherd them safely to the other side, she first had to twine her future with their own. Or so she insisted.

Twined futures hadn’t helped Rudolf.

“Why don’t you stay with the truck? It’ll be safer than—”

She raised a hand, cutting him off. She cocked her head. A moment later the rustle of underbrush and a muffled “Damn it!” drifted out of the silent forest.

“Thistle,” she said. Klaus sighed.

A stream of invective preceded Buhler all the way back to the truck. “Crazy fucking mongrel whore,” it concluded.

They regrouped. Reinhardt crushed out his cigarette. Buhler took Kammler’s leash again. “Stay here,” he ordered the driver. The pale-faced zealot saluted.

They tromped off along the gully that Gretel had pointed out. Klaus led with his sister at his side. Behind them followed Reinhardt, Buhler, and Kammler. Runoff from recent spring rains splashed beneath their boots. They pushed through a thicket the hard way—Reinhardt and Kammler were too wound up on amphetamines to perform subtleties of Willenskräfte.

They crawled on their stomachs just under the lip of the ravine as the underbrush gave way to a tiny clearing. An
ouvrage
loomed before them in the shadows. It looked like an inverted breadbox pimpled along the top with retractable machine gun turrets.

Klaus adjusted the straps over his shoulders. He reached for the clasp on his battery harness.

“Wait,” Gretel whispered. “Let the sentries pass.”

She patted him on the side. He looked at her. Occasionally, when meeting her gaze, he saw something coiled up in her madness, steely and cold. But to night the moonlight stilled the depths behind her eyes. She smiled. A real smile, with even a hint of warmth.

Her hand lingered. “Go now, brother.”

Klaus took a deep breath and plugged in. The taste of copper flooded his mouth. He crested the streambed and headed for the fort. Nine inches of steel and concrete ghosted through his eyeballs, his bones, his thumping heart. The French fortifications presented as much resistance to Klaus as an open window presented the wind.

Smaller forts like this could house a few hundred fighting men, depending on the internal configuration. This one was shaped like a T. A subterranean garrison at the long end of the central tunnel probably held two hundred men or more. But it was the middle of the night, and most of the troops slept through Klaus’s silent infiltration. He entered at the top of the T, between the two gun turrets.

He set the first demolition charge at the mouth of the tunnel sloping down to the barracks. He set the timer for one minute before moving toward the far end of the fort.

The pair of yawning soldiers up in the turret didn’t notice him until they heard the
thump
as he dropped another bundle of explosives at their feet. This one Klaus set on a fifteen-second delay.

The gunners jumped down. At first they stared at him, bleary-eyed and confused. Comprehension slowly dawned as they took in his uniform.

“Intruder! Intruder!” One raised an alarm while the other tried to shoot Klaus. The bullets passed through him and pinged off the wall.

Klaus ignored them. He returned the way he had come, and was just passing the tunnel entrance when an explosion ripped through the turret behind him. The concussion reverberated throughout the building. The quickest soldiers came up from the garrison just in time to meet the shock wave from the shaped charge that Klaus had planted. Smoke filled the passageways.

Klaus dropped the rest of his ordnance under the second turret before exiting through the wall. The third blast shook the earth as he rematerialized outside.

Gasping fresh air into his lungs, he called the all clear.

Reinhardt, Buhler, and Kammler came charging up.

“I said, all clear. What’s going on?”

Reinhardt said, “Gretel said you needed help.”

“What?”

“Said you screwed up. Again.”

“I did no such thing. Look! It’s done.” Plumes of oily smoke roiled out of the view slots in the turrets at either end of the casemate.

When they returned to their hiding spot in the streambed, it was empty.

Klaus looked around. “Where’s my sister?”

“Must be waiting back at the truck.”

But Gretel wasn’t there. Only the driver, who jumped to attention upon their return. Buhler flew into a rage.

Oh, Gretel, what have you done
? She’d run away, and now she was alone in what would soon be a war zone.