Cauldron: Unstoppable Nazi Zombies in Outback Australia. Yep.

Author

1

Why would a soldier want to kill anybody?

(Dead of Night, 1974)

THE man on the ridge slipped his night vision goggles onto his forehead and said, ‘No question about it. You have to go down there and shoot them.’

His breath came out in vaporous puffs in the chill desert air, visible even in the vague wash of starlight falling over the ridge. Beside him, his companion lowered his rifle and pushed back the hood of his parka.

‘Are you sure?’ Kestrel asked. He nodded down at the campsite through his own breath. ‘What if they pack up and go in the morning?’

For a moment, Viper said nothing. He seemed to be considering the notion.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘They are looking for something. They are looking for us.’

Kestrel raised the rifle again, squinting through the thermal imaging scope at the heat signatures in the dead watercourse below. Through the scope, the bodies of the duo inside the tent glowed in the dark like a pair of cat’s eyes. No movement. They were asleep. By now, the engines of the bikes parked by the tent were stone cold.

He lowered the rifle once more, frowning. ‘Maybe we should wait until morning anyway.’

Viper shifted his elbows in the dirt. ‘No. We do it now. This is why we’re here.’

Kestrel nodded slowly. He knew why they were here.

Viper continued, ‘They have to be looking for us.’ He slipped the goggles off and waved them out at the empty desert. ‘Have a look out there. There’s nothing out here but us. These people are not ordinary campers. No way. We’re a hundred kilometres from anywhere. They have no good reason to be out here. There is nothing.’

Well, there is something, Kestrel thought with a shudder.

He took a deep breath and raised his weapon to his shoulder once more. ‘Okay. I can probably take them from here.’

‘No. We can’t afford mistakes. Go down there and use your pistol.’

Kestrel glanced sideways.

He still hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that he was now a bonafide bad guy, and one with his very own codename at that. The codenames had been assigned to them by the people who paid for their services: the ones who had tattooed him, secretly choppered him all the way out here, and insisted he remain in uniform at all times. Kestrel had no idea who those people were. In his opinion, they had given him a rubbish codename – okay, a kestrel was a kind of falcon but why they simply hadn’t called him Falcon was beyond him – but he’d never been in a position to argue about it.

Nor did he think he was in a position to argue with Viper about murdering two people in their sleep. His codename was not only way cooler, but also carried with it a certain sense of authority, as though whoever was paying the bills wanted everyone to know that, out here at least, Viper was the Big Kahuna.

On top of that, Kestrel had the feeling Viper had been out here for a very long time. Maybe too long. Kestrel himself had been here for two months but still knew nothing about the man positioned next to him on the ridge, except that something was a little off with the guy. Kestrel couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe it was the accent, which had an almost lyrical quality to it that reminded Kestrel of his gap year jaunt through South America. Maybe Viper was from South America. Kestrel had no way of knowing, and he wasn’t going to ask, though he could easily imagine Viper as a moody teenager slitting throats in some Buenos Aries back alley. He was that sort of guy, and Kestrel had no intention of getting on his bad side, that was for sure.

Lately, he had begun to wonder what might have happened to the man he had replaced. Had Viper cut his throat while he slept? Kestrel had no way of knowing that, either, but in recent days had started sleeping with the pistol under his pillow.

After a moment, he asked, ‘What do we do with the bodies? Their belongings?’

‘The storeroom is full. Bury everything. Even the bikes.’

Kestrel groaned. ‘That’ll take hours.’

Ignoring Kestrel’s protest, Viper said, ‘Go through everything first. Look for anything that might explain why they’re here. Maps. Laptops. Anything.’ Viper glanced over his shoulder. ‘If you find something, we’ll take it inside for now. The bodies too. They can go through the blast doors. Then we get on the satellite phone first thing in the morning.’

Now Kestrel threw a glance over his own shoulder. He didn’t enjoy opening the blast doors, which they did once a week as a matter of routine, just to see what they could see, which was usually nothing. They could hear, though, and what Kestrel heard sent chills up his spine like jolts of electricity.

Not for the first time, he found himself wondering if Viper actually knew what the hell was down there. Had he ever seen anything? Had he actually caught sight of whatever it was that shuffled around in the darkness beyond the doors? If Viper had been here as long as Kestrel suspected, it was more than likely.

There was something else, too, that sent anxious pangs through Kestrel’s gut every time they opened the doors, and that was the way the lights –

Kestrel snapped out of it.

‘Are you sure you want to open the doors?’ he asked.

Viper ran a hand over his chin. ‘We open them just enough to push the bodies through. We’ll do it together like we always do.’

An involuntary shudder coursed through Kestrel’s shoulders. He pointed down at the tent with his weapon.

‘What if someone comes looking for them? The police?’

Viper suddenly screwed up his face. ‘Did you just pass wind?’

Kestrel blinked. ‘Sorry, what?’

Viper’s eyes narrowed. ‘I heard something just now. It was you.’

Kestrel waved a hand. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘Well, I heard something,’ Viper said.

‘It was probably just a lizard or something,’ Kestrel insisted. ‘You know, scrabbling around on the rocks.’

Viper regarded Kestrel with cool menace. ‘I don’t think so. I can smell it now.’

Kestrel waved a hand again, only this time it was more an agitated flutter. ‘Look, you can’t smell anything, okay, because I didn’t do anything. And you didn’t answer my question.’ He pointed down at the tent. ‘What if somebody comes looking for them?’

Viper thought about it for a moment.

‘Then we shoot them too,’ he said.

2

… There’s something about your smile right now that reminds me of Jack the Ripper.

(Weird Woman, 1944)

‘NAZIS? Seriously?’

Ross Vittachi grinned and raised his beer. ‘I thought that might get your attention.’

Larry Kirby frowned, peering over Vittachi’s shoulder.

They were sitting in Larry’s preferred booth towards the back of O’Hanlon’s. From here, he could see everyone who came or went, and it was close enough to the bathroom if he needed someplace to hide from an old girlfriend in a hurry. That’s the trouble with Darwin, Larry thought; too small a town with nowhere near enough exits.

Larry scratched at the stubble on his chin. On the other side of the bar, his new girlfriend had some government spin doctor trapped against a wall under a painting of an anonymous lake. She jabbed a finger at his chest. Wine spilled from the glass in her other hand. The man’s head smacked against the bottom of the picture frame each time she jabbed him. After tonight, the poor guy would probably never set foot inside the joint again. O’Hanlon’s was a reporter’s pub, anyway. More fool him for daring to enter a nest of vipers in the first place.

‘Okay,’ Larry said, pointing across the room. ‘I’m guessing you have about three minutes before I have to go and rescue that guy from my new girlfriend.’

‘Another one?’ Vittachi twisted in his seat and pushed his glasses back up his nose. ‘Blue dress?’ he asked.

‘That’s her.’

‘Wow. She’s hot. How do you do that?’

‘I think it’s because I look like a young Harrison Ford.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Vittachi nodded across the room. ‘She’s shorter than Sharon,’ he noted.

‘Everybody’s shorter than Sharon,’ Larry said.

Turning back, Vittachi said, ‘We all thought Sharon was a man, you know.’

Larry waved a hand in annoyance. ‘Sharon was not a man. And she was five years ago. You lot need to move on.’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Vittachi said in surprise. ‘Has it really been that long since you ran away from her?’

‘I didn’t run away from her.’

‘Larry, you’re three thousand miles from home. If you’d decided to head south instead of north, you’d be in bloody Antarctica. You couldn’t get any further away.’

‘I’ve been here five years now, Ross. This is home. Move on.’

Vittachi grinned. ‘Moving on.’ He tilted his head back. ‘She a reporter too?’

‘That’s not moving on, but yes, she’s a reporter too.’

‘They’re getting younger.’

‘And we’re not, Ross. You now have two and a half minutes to explain to me why you flew all the way up here to talk to me about Nazis.’

‘What’s her name?’

Larry sighed. ‘Jazz – Jasmine, if you must know. Can you get back to the Nazis, please? And how long have you had a beard?’

‘Three years. It’s good, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve seen prettier ones.’

Vittachi laughed, sipped some beer, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, and reached into the leather briefcase by his feet. ‘Just so you know I’m not sure if I can do this story justice in three minutes. It’s complicated.’ He placed a bulging manila folder on the table.

‘Give it a shot anyway,’ Larry said.

Vittachi nodded, slapped one hand on the folder and began stroking his beard with the other. ‘Right. I’ll begin at the beginning. A month ago I received an email from a man who discovered his grandfather was a Nazi. He decided to drop me a line after reading my book.’

‘I read your book too,’ Larry lied. ‘It’s very good.’

‘Thank you, Larry. That means a lot coming from you.’ Vittachi lifted his beer.

Larry returned the salute with a smile. He had not read Vittachi’s book on Nazi war criminals in Australia – or any of his other books for that matter – purely out of spite. Ross Vittachi was an excellent writer who made okay money while Larry Kirby was an excellent writer stuck at a dying newspaper who made barely enough to cover rent and Friday night drinks. That, as far as Larry Kirby was concerned, sucked knobs big time.

‘You know,’ Vittachi continued, ‘it beggars belief that we simply allowed over 800 suspected war criminals to end their days peacefully in this country. We didn’t even try going after them. Thousands of these people may have fled to Australia after the war. We have no way of knowing one way or the other. And I’ll tell you what, shutting down the Special Investigations Unit back in the 90s was one of the biggest mistakes we ever made.’

Larry nodded. ‘I agree. So this kid found out his grandfather was one of them?’

‘The kid is in his sixties himself. Old man Nazi is dead now, of course. Died about twelve years ago. According to Peter Hartmann – that’s the grandkid – the guy was around 120 years old when he popped off.’

Larry raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s not a bad run.’

Vittachi nodded. ‘Too long a run for a Nazi, if you ask me. Anyway, Peter said he had a boxful of black and white photos of the old guy at what looked like camps and such. Had another box of documents as well. He asked me to verify that they were the real deal, so I told him to ship them to me.’

‘I take it they were the real deal.’

‘Oh, yeah. Turns out grandad’s real name was Max Fendler. He went by the name Otto Hartmann after the war. This guy was an SS officer, no less.’ Vittachi nodded down at his folder. ‘I haven’t been able to identify any of the locations from the photos yet. There’s no signage visible in a single photo, and there isn’t much in the documentation at all to tell us what Fendler did or where he did it. It’s mostly copies of speeches by Hitler and Goebbels and a bunch of other loons and some old handbooks, along with a copy of the SS loyalty oath.’

‘So … Peter, is it? So Peter found this stuff, what, twelve years after grandpa died? Where?’

Vittachi leaned over his folder. ‘In a storage unit. It’s kind of weird.’

Larry said, ‘Oh?’ He glanced over at Jazz. The spin doctor appeared to be trying to reason with her. There was little chance of that actually working. She jabbed him again.

‘Yeah,’ Vittachi said. ‘He started getting letters after the lease ran out two months ago, asking him to go clear it out. And get this. The boxes were the only things in there.’

Larry looked at him. ‘That’s not that strange. The guy obviously didn’t want anyone finding his little collection. Be a better hiding spot than under the floorboards of the family home.’

‘Well, sure, but according to their records, Max did a deal, a cash deal, to lease the unit for twenty years.’

Larry frowned. ‘Twenty years? And he paid cash for it?’

Vittachi nodded. ‘Yep. And it was the second time he’d done it. Turns out old Max, or Otto or whatever his name was, was rich. Had a little under four million in the bank when he died. No-one in the family had the slightest idea he had that kind of money.’

‘What did he do for a living? Here, I mean, not when he was a Nazi.’

‘Peter only knows that he worked in an office somewhere. He doesn’t actually know what he did. Anyone else who would know is long gone.’

Larry took a mouthful of beer and then said, ‘Okay. You found a rich, dead Nazi. Good work. But none of what you’ve said so far explains why you flew three thousand miles to tell me about it.’

‘This, Larry, is where it gets super interesting,’ Vittachi said. He opened his folder and began picking through photos. He selected one and slid it across the tabletop. ‘That’s him, on the left. SS-Sturmbannführer Max Fendler. That’s equivalent to the rank of major, so he was well up the food chain when these were taken. Date’s stamped on the back. August ’43.’

Larry picked up the photo. Tall, blonde and muscular, Fendler looked the perfect picture of carefree Aryan superiority. He posed smoking and grinning with two other officers outside an unremarkable wooden hut. They stood in a sea of churned-up mud. A mop standing in a bucket leaned against the hut door.

‘How do you know this is actually him?’ Larry asked. ‘This photo’s got to be seventy years old.’

‘Because he still looked exactly like that well into his 80s. Max Fendler was one healthy Nazi.’ Vittachi leaned forward to tap the photo. ‘It’s him. No doubt at all.’

Larry glanced over at Jazz again. Still going. The guy had started throwing his arms around now. This was going to end badly, and soon.

‘Forget your girlfriend,’ Vittachi said, waving another photo. ‘She looks like she can handle herself. I need you to pay attention.’

Larry threw up his hands. ‘Right. Sorry. Go for it.’

‘Now look at this photo.’ Vittachi passed it over.

Larry looked. Max Fendler stood in the middle of a dirt road in a forest before an impressive-looking, open-topped staff car. In his hands he held something that looked a little like a decorated cooking pot. The image was too grainy to make out much more, except that the pot looked heavy and appeared to be made of silver or gold. A dozen or so other SS officers crowded into the photo. They were grinning for the camera.

‘What’s he holding?’ Larry asked.

‘I’ll get to that in a minute,’ Vittachi said. ‘You see the guy with his back half-turned to the camera, watching them?’

Larry nodded. ‘Sure. You know who he is?’

Vittachi smiled. ‘I believe I do. The receding hairline. The little round glasses. That, my friend, is Heinrich Himmler. Mr Dark Arts in the flesh. It has to be.’

‘Uh huh,’ Larry said.

Now Vittachi frowned. ‘You know Himmler was into the occult, right? The guy had his own spooky castle and everything.’

‘Sure. I knew that,’ Larry said. ‘Although I’m probably not as well versed in SS history as I should be. So this guy, what? Hung out with Himmler?’

‘I think so but I can’t really be sure. Max Fendler is a bit of a mystery man. Like I said, there is next to nothing in any of the literature about him. As far as I could work out, he’s not once mentioned in any official Nazi records. The guy’s a ghost.’ Vittachi suddenly glanced around before leaning across the table as though he didn’t want anyone close by hearing what he might be about to say. ‘Here’s the thing, Larry. Have you ever heard of the Chiemsee cauldron?’

‘I’m sorry. The what?’

3

Lunar rays will never affect you and me, sir. We’re normal people.

(Dr X, 1932)

‘A DIVER found it at the bottom of Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria in 2001,’ Vittachi explained. ‘A cauldron made of pure gold. At first they thought the thing was 2,000 years old. The imagery on it is strikingly similar in style to that on another one, the Gudenstrup cauldron, which is 2,000 years old and probably Celtic in origin, although there’s still some debate about that.’

‘Okay,’ Larry said. He sipped beer. ‘With you so far.’

Vittachi ran a hand through his hair and then pushed his glasses back again. He was getting excited.

‘Naturally, the Bavarians saw dollar signs and had it analysed to see if it was as old as they thought it was. It wasn’t. Turned out to be a 20th-century job, possibly Nazi era. The best guess is that some fleeing Nazi threw it in the lake at the end of the war. Anyway, the Bavarians didn’t want to hang onto it, given its history, so they sold it to a private collector. As far as I know, he’s still got it.’

Larry nodded. ‘Okay. So the Nazis made a copy of some old cauldron?’

Vittachi shook his head. ‘Not exactly. The Chiemsee cauldron is a work of art in its own right. The evidence suggests it was commissioned by a Nazi party member close to Hitler, maybe as a gift. We know Adolf was right into collecting this sort of stuff. And get this. It was probably made by the same guy who made the Death’s Head rings for the SS.’

Larry glanced down at the photo of Max Fendler in the forest. He could see where this was going.

Vittachi went on, ‘A couple of years ago, someone found a bunch of Nazi documents in an attic in Germany with some other stuff that once belonged to Himmler. One of the documents was a shipping order listing 35 objects. One of those objects was a gold cauldron.’

Larry chuckled. ‘So Hitler re-gifted it to Himmler. What a shit.’

‘Possibly,’ Vittachi said with a wave. ‘However it happened, the cauldron ended up in Himmler’s hands.’

Larry picked up the photo.

‘And here it is,’ he said, ‘being shown off by Max Fendler in the middle of a forest as Himmler looks on.’

‘Well, no,’ Vittachi said.

Larry looked up. ‘No? What do you mean, no? This is it here, right?’

Vittachi leaned forward. ‘The dimensions are all wrong. The cauldron Max is holding is not the Chiemsee cauldron.’

Larry blinked. ‘Sorry, Ross. I don’t follow.’

Vittachi gestured at the photograph. ‘I had my researchers organize a forensic analysis of that picture. The Chiemsee cauldron has a diameter of 50 centimetres. The cauldron Max is holding is smaller. It’s only 45 centimetres or so in diameter. It’s exactly the same as the one from the lake except for the size.’

Larry blinked again. ‘Wait. You have researchers?’

Vittachi grinned and happily stroked his beard. ‘One of the perks of being mildly successful, Larry. I have a couple of lesbian biker chicks on retainer. They’re very good at it, too. Research that is, not being lesbians.’

Larry looked back down at the photo. ‘Okay. It’s not the same one. You’ll have to enlighten me further, Ross, because I have no idea where you’re going with this.’

Vittachi reached over to retrieve the photograph and held it up.

‘This photo,’ he said, ‘is the first evidence anyone has ever seen that there was more than one cauldron. Apart from you, me and a couple of lesbians, no-one, anywhere, has any idea this thing even exists.’

Larry slumped back into his seat. ‘Okay. So you’ve discovered another Nazi cooking pot. Well done.’

Vittachi clucked and put the photo down. ‘Let’s get back to Max for a moment. He flees to Australia after the war. He’s probably only got a suitcase. He’s probably broke. But,’ he paused for a moment, possibly for dramatic effect, ‘in short order he somehow becomes exceedingly rich.’

Larry suddenly straightened. ‘Okay, okay. I’ve got this. Max had the second cauldron, brought it with him and sold it off to some collector