body functions was ever an issue, and lack of clothes not only felt liberating but sometimes enabled them to work better. Mack, however, did at least usually put on an athletic supporter.
“Got to protect my most prized possession,” he laughed.
That night, Grace and Mack commenced having noisy and exuberant sex in the cabin while the other two sat outside and grinned.
When Grace emerged after the first time, her comments were succinct. “What’s the point of taking a Pacific cruise if you’re not going to get laid by the captain?”
Mack made no effort to get Amanda and Sandy into his bunk. He was content with Grace, and the others were fine with that. “He’s so withered,” Sandy giggled. “Even his wrinkles have wrinkles.”
And he’s a killer and likely a thief, Amanda thought.
They had a radio and they listened but did not transmit. The war was still raging, although Hawaii hadn’t been invaded. They caught broadcasts from the islands beginning to beg for food, and they knew they’d made the right decision. Now all they had to do was find California.
Wilhelm Braun looked admiringly at the U.S. passport that gave his name as William Brown. Braun had been the assistant military attache at the German embassy in Mexico City until Mexico declared war on Germany. Braun was a distant cousin of the cowlike blonde woman who, if rumors were correct, was Hitler’s mistress. Some were shocked at the thought that the beloved Fuehrer was anything but celibate in his total dedication to the Reich, but Braun didn’t care. If Hitler wanted to screw Wilhelm’s dumb and plump cousin, then let him. Apparently, she had been the Fuehrer’s mistress for six or seven years and, while the relationship was unknown to the average German, it was common knowledge to those in the Nazi hierarchy as well as the diplomatic corps, and, of course, the Braun family.
Braun had another passport that proclaimed his Swedish identity and gave his name as Olaf Swenson, and a third that said he was from Denmark and named Oosterbeck. Since Sweden was neutral and likely to remain so, it and the others were aces in the hole. Denmark had been conquered by the Germans and the world was sympathetic to her plight.
He shook his head. If he was going to pass muster north of the border, he’d damned well better get used to being either Swenson, Oosterbeck, or Brown. In either case he’d be a fifty-year-old mining engineer from Wisconsin who’d been working for the Mexican government. Claiming to be from Wisconsin was safe since he’d lived there for several years with an elderly aunt and uncle who’d died a few years earlier.
But first he had to get across the border with a truck full of very special and dangerous material.
He’d been in San Francisco doing nothing more sinister than taking a vacation and doing some shopping when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and war unexpectedly broke out. He’d quickly checked out of his hotel and driven to the border, where he crossed easily, and only a day before Germany declared war on the United States. The Americans were suddenly watching out for those entering their country, but blithely unconcerned about who left. Americans, he concluded, were stupid and had no concept of security.
Once back in the embassy, he’d tried to figure out ways to help Germany in her increasingly desperate struggle against England and Russia, and now the United States. Braun was neither a fool nor suicidal. He knew he now had little chance of getting back to Germany, and, if he stayed in Mexico, might even be interned for the duration of the war, or at best, forced to wait many months until exchange arrangements could be made. That he considered intolerable.
Even if he did somehow make it back to the Reich, he didn’t much feel like getting killed in the steppes of Russia as the initially dramatic and far-reaching German advances into the Soviet Union had become more like a bloody brawl between two equally matched titans. His age and the leg wound he’d endured in the last war and which caused him to limp in bad weather were no guarantee he wouldn’t be sent to an SS line division.
Although no one would say it out loud, there were those who thought that Germany had been badly bloodied and needed to focus on destroying Russia before the United States got over its lethargy and stupidity and began to fight for real. Braun had traveled extensively throughout America and seen firsthand her potential warmaking capabilities. He wondered if the leaders in Berlin had any concept of that, or had they recalled the fact that the United States had a population much larger than Germany’s, which was already dwarfed by that of the Soviet Union and the British Empire?
Yes, the Americans were decadent, corrupt, incompetent, and ruled by Jews, but they could cause great damage to the Nazi cause. He despised the Americans, but he did not underestimate them. Curiously, he understood that the Japanese admiral, Yamamoto, had also lived in the U.S.
German advances toward Moscow, Leningrad, and now Stalingrad had slowed. Russian winter had proven to be a shock and Braun was delighted to be in the warmth of Mexico instead of frozen Russia even though it was now summer outside of Moscow. Another terrible and murderous winter would come soon enough to Germany’s Eastern Front.
When it first became apparent that Mexico was going to declare war on Germany, Braun and a couple of others simply disappeared from the embassy and, using their several aliases, set up a bogus import-export business north of Mexico City in the industrial city of Monterrey.
While official Mexico declared war on Germany, the average Mexican cared little about a European conflict and many totally despised the United States for being the greedy gringos who’d stolen her northern provinces.
In the First World War, the Kaiser had tried to take advantage of those hatreds by inducing the Mexicans to invade the United States. A shame nothing had come of it, Braun thought, although it had been a primary cause of America’s declaration of war on Imperial Germany and had led to the shameful Treaty of Versailles. Even though the Mexicans were squat and ugly, nearly subhuman as the Jews, their hatred of the United States could be channeled to Germany’s advantage.
Braun held the SS rank of
He recognized the irony that he would be helping apelike little yellow subhumans defeat the Jewish- dominated United States. Well, he thought, one can’t always choose one’s enemies any more than one can choose their own relatives, like his fat cousin Eva. Sooner or later, the Jewish-controlled United States would fall into the gutter of history, and he would be a part of that glorious effort, whether he did it directly for Germany or indirectly in behalf of Japan. He would do anything to destroy America and the Jews. While he wanted no part of Russian weather, he did envy others in the SS who were wreaking bloody havoc among the Jews as they advanced.
A handful of other staffers were fluent enough in English to function in the U.S., but he rejected them for the time being, instead keeping them in Monterrey and Mexico City, literally watching the store and prepared to relay reports. Braun was concerned that their accents would cause suspicion at the border, while his very slight accent could be explained away as Midwestern, or Swedish, or Danish. He would go alone, at least initially. He liked that idea. The Americans at the border would not suspect a middle-aged and slightly overweight man who walked with a little limp and drove a truck filled with junk. If he later decided he needed more help, he would send for it.
He bought a decrepit junk-hauling truck, and, instead of junk, loaded it with weapons, ammunition, and dynamite bought with money provided by the German embassy before it was closed. In a couple of weeks at the most, he would cross the border even though he had no clear idea what he would do then. He did not think there would be a shortage of targets, however.
CHAPTER 6
