The Blood Flag Read online

  The

  Blood

  Flag

  Copyright © 2015 by James W. Huston

  Copyright © 2015 Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Sophie Chi

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-5046-6962-7

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.Downpour.com

  For Colleen

  The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

  —Jeremiah 17:9

  Prologue

  I turned our rented Mercedes down Kunibertistraße in Recklinghausen and scanned the dimly lit buildings for numbers. There was no moon, and no traffic. The deserted one-way street had barely enough room to pass a parked car. It ran through the historic center of the city, between buildings that were hundreds of years old. My teenage children were growing restless when something caught my eye. A large group of people huddled directly ahead of us in the darkness fifty yards away. I slowed almost to a stop and looked in my rear-view mirror. Others were behind us. They walked up the street toward our car. People swarmed around our car heading toward the others. They wore black hoods, some in long cloaks, like monks; they passed us on both sides, blocking any escape.

  Suddenly those in front of us were illuminated by fire. Torches. There were fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred or more carrying lit torches. We were the only car on the street. I put the Mercedes in reverse, waiting for a chance to slowly back out of whatever was developing. Michelle put her hand on my arm. “Look.”

  They started a slow ominous march. Their faces had caught her attention. They were pure white. Not skin white, mask white. White masks covered their faces with a small mouth forming not quite an “o” but not truly open. A look of menacing anonymity.

  They marched straight toward us with a long sign held by those in front. The lettering looked like Old English but was German. On they came. They spread across the street. Their torches threw over-sized shadows on the ancient buildings.

  They drew even with our car. My son leaned forward in the back seat to take a picture with his new digital camera I’d bought him for the trip. It was set to eliminate redeye, which resulted in a multi-flash picture of the front of the march.

  They stopped. One pointed at me. I hesitated. I put the car in park. They came at us in complete silence. One ran directly at our car. I moved my hand to the door to make sure they were locked. He ran up to our car with his torch and put his gloved hand on the back window where Christopher was sitting.

  “Dad,” Chris said in a shaky voice.

  “Don’t look at him.”

  The man put his masked face a few inches from Chris’s window and looked at all of us. He moved his hissing torch to the window and touched it against the glass. It blackened a spot on the glass. Two others moved toward our car.

  He dragged the burning end of his torch to my window and waited for me to look at him. I wouldn’t. He tapped the burning torch against my window, slowly. It was louder than I expected. I kept my hands on the steering wheel.

  He suddenly struck the butt of his torch loudly on my window. I still wouldn’t look at him, which angered him. He struck the window harder and harder with his torch, which threw sparks over the car. The window shattered. I covered my face with my arms as glass pieces covered my head. He punched the rest of the window in with his gloved fist and said something in a whisper in German. I didn’t understand what he wanted, and then he turned his fingers, like starting a car. I took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to him.

  “Kyle, no!” Michelle protested.

  “We have no choice,” I said.

  He pressed the button on the remote to unlock the car. I jumped as the locks flew up on the doors, and he grabbed Chris’s door and threw it open. “No way,” I said, as I opened my door to climb out. He slammed my door against me and held it closed. Another man ran over and held my door shut. Two others on the sidewalk held the doors of my wife and daughter.

  The first man opened Chris’s door again, leaned in and stuck out his hand. “Camera,” he said in English.

  “Dad?”

  “Give it to him!” Michelle responded.

  I turned to see what was happening. He stared at Chris with the torch almost in the car. Emily, sitting on the other side of Chris, was crying. She slumped down in her seat.

  Chris gave his camera to the man who took it and dropped it onto the pavement. He then stomped on it with his boot. He slammed Chris’s door closed, pressed the door lock button on the keys, then flung the keys on top of the building next to our car. He turned and joined the march. As he turned away, I saw the Nazi swastika armband over the sleeve of his long black cloak.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I grew up in a house with a Nazi flag hanging in the basement. It had been there since before I could walk, in my father’s den, a book-lined room with a dehumidifier running all summer. My father was an intellectual, a history professor at a large state university in the Midwest. But he had also been an army infantry officer in World War II. He went ashore at Normandy in July of 1944, and fought through the Battle of the Bulge to Germany and to the end of the war.

  One day it occurred to me to ask him where he’d gotten the flag. He said a sergeant in his battalion pulled it down from the city hall when they took a German town in the war. April 1, 1945. Recklinghausen, Germany.

  My father learned he had been selected to receive the Légion d’Honneur, the Legion of Honor, and they wanted him to come to France to receive the award and attend the anniversary of D-Day. I knew I had to go with him. Seeing him receive the award in the American cemetery on the cliffs of Normandy was humbling.

  World War II had been a constant presence in my youth, from watching the Combat TV series to war movies like Sink the Bismark, Patton, and The Dirty Dozen. They all helped confirm the story I knew, that it was the good guys against evil, and the good guys won. It was the perfect story that you could hear a hundred times, because you knew it would always turn out right. No matter what part of it you read about or examined, no matter how dark or twisted a particular part of the story was, no matter how haunting or scary, it all came out right in the end. And the present given to my generation from my father’s was the gift of defeating the evil of Nazism.

  After the celebration in Normandy, I took my family on a short driving tour of Europe, and the one place I insisted on seeing was Recklinghausen. I had to see where my father’s flag had come from.

  It was there we had encountered the neo-Nazis with their masks and torches. We went to a few other places in Germany, but I didn’t enjoy the trip after Recklinghausen. On the flight back, chasing the sun westward and never seeing darkness or sleeping, I had a lot of time to think. I thought about the flag in my father’s den flying over the city hall at Recklinghausen. I thought about the men who had defeated Nazism in the forties. And I thought again of my father.

  His division was made up mostly of Midwesterners from Kansas and Missouri, with a few others like him thrown in from Indiana. When my father got to France in July of 1944, the battle line in Normandy was a few miles inland. His division was sent to take a city in Normandy called St. Lô. It was a terrible, bloody battle; and there began the massive casualties that decimated his battalion. They fought the Germans ham
mer and tong. From village to village and town to town, across rivers all the way to the Elbe River and to the end of the war. Of all of the officers in his battalion who went ashore at Normandy and fought to the end of the war, he was the only one who wasn’t killed or wounded.

  But as I sat on the airplane on the way home, I was hit by the stark awareness that the poisonous philosophy that had grown to full bloom under Hitler’s Third Reich still lived. Some of its original advocates were still living, and now there were new advocates in Germany and elsewhere. I lay my head back on my seat and looked at my sleeping family.

  They were exhausted from the trip and the way it had ended. They hadn’t recovered, and truthfully neither had I. Unable to sleep, the images of those neo-Nazis in Recklinghausen haunted me. I decided to make some discrete inquiries when I went back to work at my job as a special agent of the FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ever since 9/11, I’d been tracking terrorists. Recently I’d been transferred to headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover building in D.C.; I was a fish out of water. The bureau had only recently started bringing special agents into headquarters and assigning us to various groups or taskforces. Until recently, and still primarily, those groups were populated with analysts. They didn’t know what to do with us. We weren’t assigned any specific roles, so we created our own jobs. But in doing my self-created job I’d seen how terrorists work, and how they measure their success by how dramatic and violent their actions are. And I longed to smash them.

  I booted up my computer in my windowless office where I could access intelligence files on various people who were intent on destroying America. While I waited to start analyzing all the intelligence that had come in in my absence, my mind drifted to Recklinghausen again.

  I had known there were neo-Nazi groups in various places. But I’d always thought they were part of the lunatic fringe. But now it was different. I started to take them seriously.

  I searched the Internet for Nazis known to be operating in Germany, as well as those elsewhere of the same mind but trying to avoid the stigma of “Nazism” by calling themselves skinheads or something else. I found articles about a march in Dresden. Ten thousand skinheads turned out to protest the anniversary of the allied fire-bombing of Dresden. The numbers had grown every year and now they topped ten thousand people. Neo-Nazis, skinheads, whatever they called themselves, were alive and well, and the racism and anti-Semitism and hate and poison that colored the river in which they stood was still a force. I found neo-Nazi groups in other countries, like the Golden Dawn in Greece, or the Bloed, Bodem, Eer en Trouw—Blood, Soil, Honor, and Loyalty—in Belgium.

  I got up to get more coffee. As I finished pouring, Alex Walsh came in. Her actual name was Alexandra, but everyone called her Alex. I worked closely with her in counterterrorism. She was a pistol. She livened up whatever room she was in. She was full of spunk and humor. She was in her thirties and had come to the FBI because of her degree in International Affairs and her fluent Arabic. She had her usual eager look as she reached for her cup. “Morning, Kyle.” She wore black slacks, a tan sweater with a large drooping neck, and shoes with two-inch heels. She kept her hair fairly short.

  “Morning. How’s it going?”

  “Excellent. How was your trip?”

  I paused for a minute. “The ceremony was unbelievable. Absolutely spectacular. I got to meet Tom Hanks—you get that picture I sent?”

  “I thought it was a joke.”

  “That was right after the ceremony in a garden just behind Les Invalides. Talked to him for quite a while. Nicest guy you can imagine.”

  “Why was he there?”

  “Bunch of his guys from Band of Brothers got the Legion of Honor along with my father. The real guys, not the actors.”

  “That’s just unbelievable. Was he proud?”

  “My dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. He bought a brand new army colonel’s uniform, which was his rank when he retired in the reserves. It fit him like a glove, and he looked like he was still on active duty. What a stud.”

  She stirred milk into her coffee. “I want to see more pictures when you have a chance.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How was the rest of your trip?”

  “Paris was great. And it was truly unbelievable to show my kids a couple of places where my father fought, like Belgium where the Battle of the Bulge was. Then we went to Germany. We ended up in a town called Recklinghausen.”

  “How was it?”

  “The city was great, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.”

  She stopped stirring and turned to look at my face. “What happened?”

  I told her the whole story.

  “Wow. You just don’t think things like that are still possible.”

  “Of course in my obsessive way I’ve been reading up on neo-Nazism ever since. That’s all I’ve done this morning.”

  She frowned. “You’re supposed to be tracing that cell in New York.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Have to. Refocus.”

  I shook my head as I started to leave the coffee room. “Can’t. I sat there in that American cemetery at Normandy, with thousands and thousands of dead Americans lying in the ground next to me, listening to President Obama talking about the sacrifices made to defeat Nazism. But it’s still alive. There’s unfinished business out there.”

  “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Maybe.”

  She studied me, clearly wondering whether I was going to be able to move on. “Well,” she said as an afterthought. “You could talk to Karl.”

  “Karl who?”

  “Matthews. Up on the sixth floor. Domestic terrorism. See if he has any thoughts.”

  “You know him?”

  “Met him a couple of times. He’s kind of odd—like that distinguishes him in this building—but he seems to know what he’s talking about.”

  I poured my coffee into the sink, put my mug in the cupboard, and said, “I think I’ll go see him right now.”

  * * *

  It took me a few minutes, but I finally found Karl. He had a fairly roomy but windowless office. His door was open. I knocked on it. He looked up from his desk. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, do you have a minute?”

  “What for?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about what you do.”

  He seemed annoyed, looked at his computer, looked back at the materials on his desk, looked at the clock, and finally said in a tone that sounded like capitulation, “I don’t get many visitors. What do you do?”

  I stepped inside his office and sat in the office chair across from him. “Counterterrorism.” I extended my hand. “Kyle Morrissey.”

  “Oh yeah. I’ve heard of you. The Top Gun guy. Tom Cruise.”

  “Well more like Goose, but yeah, that’s me.”

  “You’re the ones who get the visitors. I just sit up here reading about idiots.”

  “Oh I get to read a lot about idiots too.”

  “Yeah, but your idiots are international idiots, the targets in the continuing war on terror.”

  He had put his hands up to put quotations around the “continuing war on terror.” As if it didn’t really exist, or was imaginary, or was overblown. Not my feeling at all, but I didn’t want to start on that topic. “So, Alex Walsh told me that you keep track of neo-Nazis.”

  “Yup. Them and all the other self-appointed ethnic cleansers of our great country.”

  “Skinheads?”

  “Sure.”

  “Klan?”

  “Yeah, but they’re not much of a player right now. They’re sort of peripheral. Still out there, just not very engaged. The white sheet thing is sort of old news. But why do you care? You can read about most of
this online.”

  I nodded slowly, not sure how to broach the subject with him. “I just got back from Europe. After . . . well, I took my family on vacation to Germany. Something happened that really pissed me off.” I told him the whole story about the march. “What do you make of that?”

  He shrugged. “That surprises you? That there are still Nazis in Germany?”

  “Yeah. It did. I thought we defeated Nazism.”

  “We did, but we didn’t kill them all. The only ones who got put on trial were the ones who committed war crimes, and not even all of them, just the ones involved in the Holocaust, the really bad guys. And most of them only served a few years jail time and were released back into Germany. There were millions of others, some were true believers then and I’m sure still are. Doesn’t surprise me at all that there are still some guys out there.”

  “You think they’re mostly just old guys from World War II?”

  “Not at all. Those guys have continued to peddle their Kool-Aid. They’ll tell anybody who will listen that Germany has never been as organized and running as well as it did during Hitler’s years before the war. That’s what they claim to want to return to. Hitlerism without the war.”

  “Isn’t that illegal in Germany?”

  He chuckled and shook his head, “Sure, if they call themselves Nazis or start throwing around the swastika. They’re usually smart enough not to do that. They call themselves something else; but when they get into the room where no one is there other than those they’ve known for twenty years, then the real stuff comes out. No, they’re still there they’re still active. It’s real.”

  “The marchers wore swastikas.”

  “Pretty bold for Germany. That’s why they wore masks, no doubt.”

  I picked up the small blue stress ball that was sitting on his desk and began playing with it. It was from a local pizza restaurant and had their phone number on it. I squeezed it a few times as I thought about what he had said. I didn’t say anything.