Cronley saw White’s teenage bodyguards more or less stumble out of the castle and come to rest where they could keep an eye on General White.
“If it makes you feel any better,” White said, “the first time I smelled that—and what I smelled then wasn’t as bad as this—I was hors de combat for six hours.”
“Where was that, sir?” Dickinson asked.
“Peenemünde, the German rocket labs. We knew what had been going on there, so we were in a race with the Russians to get there first. The Germans sent SS-Generalmajor Wilhelm Burgdorf—one of the two bastards Super Spook is looking for—to blow up the place and otherwise make sure that whoever got there first, us or the Reds, would find nothing of value.”
“But we did, right?” McKenna said.
“Peenemünde was enormous. There was no way Burgdorf could blow up the whole thing. So he blew up and burned what he could, and then he massacred the slave laborers who had been working there so they couldn’t tell us or the Reds what they had seen.”
“Massacred, sir?” Dickenson said. “How?”
“He didn’t have enough time to shoot all of them—there were hundreds, not counting those who had died from being worked to death—so what he did was bulldoze mass graves, usher the workers into the graves, and, after a perfunctory attempt to shoot them, had the bulldozers bury everybody—dead, or still breathing, or sometimes not even wounded—men, women, and children.
“That’s when I smelled this for the first time”—he gestured back toward the castle—“when I opened those mass graves . . . It’s a smell that sticks with you a long time. I suspect forever.”
He paused and then went on. “So how can we get rid of enough of the stink, Dickinson, and how soon, so that we can have a look in the hole and see what’s down there?”
“Exhaust fans are the obvious answer, General,” Lomax weakly answered for Dickinson, then suddenly got to his feet and ran twenty feet before bending at the waist and suffering another attack of nausea.
“Where do we get exhaust fans?” White went on.
“The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives people, sir,” Dickinson said. “They use them to blow air into caves and tunnels and mines where the Krauts stored stolen artwork.”
“Do you know for sure where there are such fans?”
“Yes, sir. But I don’t know how Monuments is going to like our wanting to take them over.”
White nodded. “Can the engineers settle such a dispute or am I going to have to send a couple of Constabulary troops with you?”
Lomax walked back to where they sat by the truck. “We can handle it, General.”
“Once you get the fans, how long will it take?”
“I’d run them at least twenty-four hours, sir. But there’s always a chance that they could clear it faster.”
“Start looking for them,” White ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Super Spook, where’s your Nazimobile?”
“It’s here, sir, outside by the moat.”
“We’re going to ride into Nuremberg with the windshield folded down and see if that’ll help in getting the smell out of our nostrils.”
“Yes, sir. Why are we going to Nuremberg?”
“To pay our respects to Mr. Justice Jackson.”
“Stupid question,” Cronley said.
“Yes, it was.”
“General, can I hitch a ride with you?” Father McKenna asked.
“You have business with Justice Jackson?”