The League of Night and Fog Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE LEAGUE OF NIGHT AND FOG

  “Splendid, state-of-the-art in the action/adventure genre.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Morrell writes terrific action scenes.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “An ambitious, violent, and enthralling novel that has everything from hermits to killer priests, revenge to compassion, and innocent victims to psychopathic crminals. Recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Morrell … has here concocted a wildly Ludlumesque thriller … An exciting and entertaining adventure.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY DAVID MORRELL

  NOVELS

  First Blood (1972)

  Testament (1975)

  Last Reveille (1979)

  The Totem (1979)

  Blood Oath (1982)

  The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984)

  The Fraternity of the Stone (1985)

  Rambo (First Blood Part II) (1985)

  The League of Night and Fog (1987)

  Rambo III (1988)

  The Fifth Profession (1990)

  The Covenant of the Flame (1991)

  Assumed Identity (1993)

  Desperate Measures (1994)

  The Totem (Complete and Unaltered) (1994)

  Extreme Denial (1996)

  Double Image (1998)

  Burnt Sienna (2000)

  Long Lost (2002)

  The Protector (2003)

  Creepers (2005)

  Scavenger (2007)

  The Spy Who Came for Christmas (2008)

  The Shimmer (2009)

  SHORT FICTION

  The Hundred-Year Christmas (1983)

  Black Evening (1999)

  Nightscape (2004)

  ILLUSTRATED FICTION

  Captain America: The Chosen (2007)

  NONFICTION

  John Barth: An Introduction (1976)

  Fireflies: A Father’s Tale of Love and Loss (1988)

  American Fiction, American Myth (Essays by Philip Young)

  Edited by David Morrell and Sandra Spanier (2000)

  The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about

  Writing and Publishing (2008)

  To Paul Seydor

  a friend for all seasons

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: FOUR SHADES OF NIGHT

  The Night of the Long Knives

  The Night of Broken Glass

  The Night and Fog

  The Dark Night of the Soul

  BOOK ONE: SUMMONS

  Icicle

  The Return of the Warrior

  The Penitent

  BOOK TWO: COMPULSION

  Between an Anteater and a Dog

  “The Horror, the Horror”

  Church Militant

  BOOK THREE: PINCER MOVEMENT

  Death’s Head

  Shadow Game

  Eternal City

  BOOK FOUR: COLLISION COURSE

  Grave Images

  Nightmares Then and Now

  Unnatural Conjunction

  BOOK FIVE: IMPACT

  Medusa

  Black Jesuits

  Critical Mass

  DOSSIER: THE ABELARD SANCTION

  New evils require new remedies … new sanctions to defend and vindicate the eternal principles of right and wrong.

  —The Times (LONDON) ON THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

  PROLOGUE

  FOUR SHADES OF NIGHT

  THE NIGHT OF

  THE LONG KNIVES

  A phrase invented by the Nazis, the Night of the Long Knives, refers to the events on the night of June 30, 1934, in Austria and Germany. Hitler, having achieved the titles of chancellor and dictator, still needed to gain the remaining position that would give him absolute power over Germany—the presidency. Determined to remove all obstacles, he flew secretly to Munich where, accompanied by his personal bodyguards, he arrested his main rival and former friend, Ernst Röhm.

  Röhm, the chief of the so-called Brownshirts—a terrorist paramilitary unit of the Nazi party, officially known as Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers, SA for short—had sought to merge his four-hundred-thousand-member force with the German army and (so Hitler alleged) take over Germany. Hitler, anxious not to lose the support of the army, even more anxious to rid himself of competitors, executed Röhm and several ambitious Brownshirt officers.

  Not satisfied with half-measures, the Führer decided to eliminate other threats as well. While Röhm and his staff were being shot in Munich, Hitler’s close associates Himmler and Göring conducted a similar purge in Berlin. Among those executed were the former chancellor of Germany, unfriendly police and state officials, and dissident executives of the Nazi party. Hitler later claimed that seventy-seven traitors had been killed in order to prevent an overthrow of the German government. Survivors of the purge insisted that the actual number was over four hundred. A postwar trial in Munich raised the total even higher—beyond one thousand.

  The significance of the Night of the Long Knives is twofold. As a consequence of the terror that Hitler created, he did gain the final crucial title of president and, as absolute ruler of Germany, steered his nation toward the obscenities of the Second World War. Beyond that, his use of bodyguards in executing his rivals raised the group to a stature that equaled and eventually surpassed the power of Röhm’s paramilitary terrorists. In time, the guards numbered more than a million. Just as Röhm’s Brownshirts, Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers, were known as SA, so Hitler’s Blackshirts, Schutzstaffel or elite guard, were known by their unit’s initials. But unlike SA, initials remembered today by few, the initials of the Blackshirts remain synonymous with depravity. The hiss of a snake. The rasp of evil.

  SS.

  THE NIGHT OF

  BROKEN GLASS

  Also known as Kristallnacht or Crystal Night, the Night of Broken Glass refers to events on November 9, 1938, throughout Germany. Two days earlier, Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a minor diplomat at the German embassy in Paris, in retaliation for the deportation of Grynszpan’s family and 23,000 other Jews from Germany to Poland. Grynszpan’s intended target had been the German ambassador to Paris, but von Rath attempted to intervene and was shot instead. Ironically, von Rath had openly criticized Nazi anti-Semitic attitudes and was scheduled for disciplinary action by the Gestapo. No matter—a Jew had killed a German official, and Hitler took advantage of the incident. Publicly claiming that the assassination had prompted anti-Semitic riots throughout Germany, he privately gave orders for the as yet nonexistent riots to occur.

  These “spontaneous demonstrations” were organized by Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the SS. After Nazi mobs enthusiastically completed their work on the night of November 9, Heydrich was able to give a preliminary report to Hitler that 815 Jewish shops, 171 Jewish homes, and 119 synagogues had been set on fire or otherwise destroyed; twenty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps; thirty-six were killed, another thirty-six critically injured. These figures turned out to be drastically underestimated. So widespread was the destruction that everywhere streets were littered with fragments from shattered windows, hence the expression “the Night of Broken Glass.”

  Concluding his report, Heydrich recommended that

  the best course to follow would be for the insurance companies to settle the Jews’ claims in full and then to confiscate the money and return it to the insurers. My information is that claims for broken glass alone will amount to some five million marks… . As for the practical matter of cleaning up the destruction, this is being arranged by releasing Jews in gangs from the concentration camps and having them clean up the
ir own messes under supervision. The courts will impose upon them a fine of a billion marks, and this will be paid out of the proceeds of their confiscated property. Heil Hitler!

  The Night of Broken Glass represents the start of Germany’s undisguised state-directed pogrom against the Jews. Though many foreign governments—and even some executives within the Nazi party—objected to the atrocities committed on Kristallnacht, no one did anything to stop them or to ensure that they weren’t repeated and in much worse degree.

  THE NIGHT

  AND FOG

  The Nacht und Nebel Erlass or Night and Fog Decree, one of Hitler’s personal edicts, was issued on December 7, 1941, the same day Japan attacked America’s naval base at Pearl Harbor. Directed against “persons endangering German security” and specifically against members of resistance groups in German-occupied territories, it proposed that execution was not itself a sufficient deterrent against anti-German threats. Psychological as well as physical force was necessary. Thus, not all agitators would be killed upon discovery; many instead would be transported to an unknown location, their destiny never to be learned by outsiders. Friends and family members would forever be kept in suspense. As the edict stipulated, “The intimidating effect of these measures lies (a) in the disappearance without trace of the guilty person, (b) in the fact that no kind of information must be given about the person’s whereabouts and his fate.” Those tempted to participate in anti-German activity would fear that they, like their loved ones, would disappear within the night and fog.

  An example of how this decree was carried out occurred in 1942: the fate of the village of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi soldiers surrounded the village and shot every male within it, ten at a time. It took all day before the executions ended. The women of the village were transported to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, where they died from weakness or were gassed. But the children of the village, ninety of them, simply vanished into the night and fog. Relatives in other villages could not find a trace of them.

  THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

  1

  On January 20, 1942, six weeks after the Night and Fog Decree, Hitler ordered his senior SS officers to attend a special conference in Berlin for the purpose of organizing the Final Solution to what the Führer called “the Jewish question.” Anti-Semitic riots and laws, intended to force the Jews to leave German territory of their own accord, had been only partially successful—most Jews had been reluctant to leave their homes and businesses. Massive deportations too had been only partially successful—the process took too much time and was too expensive. But now the ultimate extension of Crystal Night was set in motion. Extermination.

  Mass executions by firing squad were uneconomical due to the cost of ammunition. A cheaper method, that of cramming victims into trucks and killing them with engine exhaust, was judged unsatisfactory because not enough victims could be asphyxiated at one time. But asphyxiation itself was not at fault. The problem was how to do it efficiently. In the spring of 1942, the death camps began.

  These were not the same as concentration camps, where huge numbers of people were squeezed together into squalid barracks from which they were marched each day to factories to work for the German war effort. As a consequence of brutal workloads, insufficient food, and unsanitary conditions, most occupants of the concentration camps did indeed die, but death was not the primary purpose for which prisoners had been sent to these work camps. Slavery was.

  The death camps, however, had no other function than to kill with the utmost speed and efficiency. There were killing centers at some concentration camps, Auschwitz and Maidanek for example, but the exclusive death camps numbered only four. All were situated in Poland: Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Treblinka.

  As Treblinka’s commandant, Franz Stangl, confessed,

  it was Dante’s Inferno. The smell was indescribable. The hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. All around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls—whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside—weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music.

  In the fifteen months of its existence, from July of 1942 to September of 1943, the camp at Treblinka exterminated one million Jews—a sixth of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust. When the camp was at its most efficient, twenty thousand people were killed each day, a statistic that becomes even more horrible when one realizes that all of these executions occurred in the morning. The rest of the day was devoted to disposing of the bodies by burning them in huge open pits. At night, the flames were allowed to die out, the nauseating smoke to drift away, so the next morning’s victims would not be alarmed by the unmistakable stench of incinerated corpses.

  2

  The victims tumbled from overcrowded cattle cars, relieved to be off the train that had brought them from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Some with whom they’d traveled had smothered or been crushed to death. The survivors tried not to look at the bodies. Instead they squinted at the painful but renewing sunlight, finally able to free their lungs of the poisonous fumes of vomit and excrement.

  Signs said TREBLINKA, CASHIER, AND TRANSFER HERE FOR EAST-BOUND TRAINS. Fear was offset by hope: this wasn’t a camp. The SS soldiers, with their twin lightning-bolt insignia, were to be expected—though another insignia, a death’s head on their caps, aroused apprehension. The clock on the station had hands that were painted on and didn’t move. Soldiers blurted commands to enter the railway station, to strip, to proceed to the showers. A shower would be welcome, but the victims wondered why such a luxury was being granted. A guard seemed to read their thoughts: “We can’t stand your filthy stench!”

  Herded into the station, they took off their clothes and surrendered their valuables. “To protect your keepsakes while you’re in the shower,” they were told. They were given haircuts, down to the scalp, and this too made them fearful. Guards burst into the station, lashing their victims with whips, chasing them out the back where naked they were urged along a path, which the SS had nicknamed “the Road to Heaven.” Other guards struck them with clubs. “Faster! Run faster!”

  The victims stumbled over fallen companions. At the end of the path, there was only one direction in which to go—to the right, up five concrete steps, through a huge open door. When the last of the group of five hundred had been squeezed inside the chamber, the door was slammed shut and locked. Instead of shower nozzles, there were vents. Outside, an engine roared. Exhaust filled the room. As the victims struggled not to inhale, they didn’t realize that they’d been chased so that their lungs would rebel against the attempt not to breathe. They didn’t realize that their clothes and valuables would help the Germans fight the war, that their hair would be stuffed inside military mattresses and pillows, that the gold fillings in their teeth would be extracted to pay for guns and ammunition. All they knew was that they couldn’t hold their breath any longer. They died standing up.

  3

  In the pit of brutality, the human spirit managed to triumph. During August of 1943, Jews who’d been forced to do work at Treblinka that even the SS and their Ukrainian assistants couldn’t endure—dragging corpses from the gas chambers, arranging them on railway ties in trenches, and setting fire to them—revolted. Using makeshift weapons, they killed their guards and raced toward the nearby forest. Many were strafed by machine guns, but others, possibly as many as fifty, reached the cover of the trees and escaped.

  The Nazis abandoned the camp. With the Russians approaching from the east and most of the Jews in Poland already exterminated, the SS hurriedly destroyed the evidence of their obscenities. Treblinka’s phony railway station, its Road to Heaven, its gas chambers and incineration pits were all plowed beneath the earth.

  A farmer and his cattle were positioned over them. But despite the flames that had charred one million corpses, the victims insisted on bearing witness even in death. The g
ases from so much decay made the earth heave five feet into the air. The gases dispersed. The earth settled—five feet below its former level. More gases heaved the earth. Again it sank. And rose again.

  The cattle fled. So did the farmer.

  BOOK ONE

  SUMMONS

  ICICLE

  1

  CARDINAL’S DISAPPEARANCE REMAINS A MYSTERY

  ROME, ITALY, February 28 (AP)—Vatican officials and Rome police remain baffled five days after the disappearance of Cardinal Krunoslav Pavelic, influential member of the Roman Catholic Church’s administration group, the Curia.

  Pavelic, seventy-two, was last seen by close associates after celebrating a private mass in the chapel of his Vatican living quarters Sunday evening. On Monday, he had been scheduled to give the keynote address to a widely publicized conference of Catholic bishops on the subject of the Church’s political relations with Eastern European communist regimes.

  Authorities at first suspected right-wing terrorists of abducting Cardinal Pavelic to protest a rumored softening of the Vatican’s attitude toward any communist regime willing to ease restrictions on Church activities. However, no extremist group has so far claimed responsibility for Pavelic’s disappearance.

  2

  St. Paul, Minnesota. March. For the second time that night, the cards Frank Miller held became a blur. Though red and black were distinct, he couldn’t tell the difference between a heart and a diamond or a spade and a club. Trying to subdue his concern, he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and massaged his aching forehead.