The Blood Flag Read online

  “By the way. If you promise not to arrest anyone, or even pass anything on—do you?”

  “Go on.”

  “I think you need to see Brunnig in action. You need to know what we’re dealing with. We’re having a meeting tonight. 2:00 a.m. At our headquarters.”

  “And?”

  “And, I’m the one who set up the security for our place. Cameras, motion detectors, steel doors, everything. In the basement of a bar owned by one of our members. On the outskirts of town. Called The Traveller. We have an office, meeting room, all our weapons—legal of course—in safes, it’s our place. I record every meeting on video, and keep all the digital files in a safe deposit box. Nobody knows they exist. I’m telling you because I set it up for Internet access. You can watch the meeting live. I’ll give you the login info. Just you. No recording, and you can’t use any of it against any of us. Deal?”

  I wasn’t supposed to make a deal where I listened to admissions of felonies and promised to do nothing about it. “Deal.”

  He reached into the back pocket of his black jeans and handed me a three-by-five card. Then he turned and walked into the woods. I got in my car, turned on the power, and rolled the windows down. I turned the power off, sat there in the dark, listening. I waited to see if he had come by boat or by car. I strained for the sound of any engine but heard nothing. I looked at my watch and continued to wait. Five minutes passed, then ten. Nothing. It’s possible he’d walked so far that I couldn’t hear the boat when it started up. But it was so silent and the air was so still, I thought I’d be able to hear an engine start three quarters of a mile away. I heard nothing. He could have come by rowboat or canoe or kayak, but that seemed unlikely. He was probably standing in the woods watching me. He wasn’t leaving until I was gone.

  I started my car, backed carefully into a multi-point turn, and headed back down the road.

  * * *

  I hurried to my hotel room and got on the Wi-Fi. The meeting was in a half hour. I went to the numbered website that Jedediah had given me and entered the login username and password, both of which were a nonsensical sequence of numbers and letters. The screen was dark and there was no sound. I wondered if I was in the right place. And then at exactly 2:00 a.m. the images went live. I leaned toward the screen of my laptop to see as well as I could.

  Banners hung from the ceiling with the Confederate flag, but in the middle of the flag was a swastika; a combination of the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag. Off to another side were banners that had the classic Nazi insignia. Flags and banners were everywhere. A sea of red and black, and spot lighting. Music played in the background. Men stood shoulder to shoulder. I was shocked at the number of them. There was barely enough room in the large basement meeting room to hold them all. There had to be two hundred men. Many had shaved heads, in a classic skinhead look, but others had long hair like a biker gang. Many wore vests that said Southern Volk on the back, with their Confederate flag with a swastika in the middle. A few looked completely normal, like engineers or corporate IT workers.

  There was a hum of conversation, of energy and expectation. Suddenly the lights dimmed and I could hear the beginning of “Dixie.” It was slow and rhythmic. As it reached the chorus two men walked up onto the stage. Jedediah. And Brunnig. Then all the men started singing at exactly the same moment, “In Dixieland I’ll take my stand, to live and die in Dixie, away! Away! Away down south in Dixie! Away, away, away down south in Dixie!”

  Thunderous applause followed.

  I saw that there were other views I could click on. I hit the next one, and it was a close up view of the stage and microphone where Brunnig approached. I could see his eager face clearly. He looked like he was on the verge of instability. But I could also tell he was charismatic. The men were clearly drawn to him. He was tall and thin, and wore his clothes well. He looked more like a lawyer than some thuggish neo-Nazi. He wore a black sport coat with a Nazi armband on his right sleeve. He wore a dark red tie over his crisp white shirt. His hair was very short on the sides, but longer on top, combed back with gel. He had very dark eyes and perfect teeth.

  He stepped up to the microphone. “Sieg!” He thrust out his hand in the classic Nazi salute.

  “Heil!” they all responded, extending their hands in response.

  “Sieg!”

  “Heil!”

  “Sieg!”

  “Heil!”

  Applause. He basked in the energy, and waited. “The South shall rise again!”

  “The South shall rise again!” they shouted.

  “Men, in an amazing and bold daylight robbery in Atlanta, some very smart men stole Hitler’s items from the communist Russians’ display! Amazing! Courageous! Who could have done such a thing?”

  His comments were met with laughter and nods.

  “And somehow we came into possession of those items. Remarkable. But alas, it turns out that they are mere replicas.” They booed. “I know, I know. I too thought maybe the Russians were lying to cover their asses, and that we had the originals, and they were claiming their replicas were not the originals. But just today I’ve met with some smart people who I trust, who know what they’re doing, and they inspected these items. Turns out what we have are replicas. Not even old leather or material. Not even close to being sixty or seventy years old. So we ‘received’ things that will be of no help to us in getting to Germany.”

  The men shook their heads and looked around.

  Brunnig’s face darkened. “Nelson! Wylecki! Come forward!”

  The room was instantly silent. Two men walked toward the stage and stood in front of it. They looked at each other but said nothing.

  Brunnig hissed, “You were the men who were to scout this display. To make sure that the event would be successful. Yet you let them sneak fakes into the display without notifying us!” He stared at them. They said nothing.

  “You failed!” They still said nothing. “Failure is unacceptable!” he yelled. They visibly recoiled from his anger. “Security!” Brunnig demanded.

  Four enormous men ran from the back to the front and stood behind the two.

  “Take these two failures into the back room. Show them how we handle failure!”

  Two security men grabbed each of them and forced them down the hall to a room.

  Brunnig waited until they were gone. He smiled. “But don’t fret. Our man Jedediah,” he indicated to Jedediah, who stepped from the back of the stage to be next to Brunnig at the microphone, “assures me he has something up his sleeve. Won’t even tell me what it is. He doesn’t want me to get my hopes up by overselling. Says he wants to under-promise and over-deliver. A good business man!”

  The group cheered as Jedediah stood there nodding, unsmiling.

  “So if Jedediah comes through, we will still get to Germany and be part of the leadership of the new worldwide Nazi movement! This is our moment! This is when we go from regional to national to international! The two greatest symbols in history, the swastika and the Confederate flag, will take their rightful place in human history! At the front of the most powerful movement ever!

  “Now, we need to break into our operating groups. You all know what to do and where to go.”

  I sat back as the men dispersed into corners and other rooms to meet in their smaller groups. Jedediah and Brunnig spoke on the stage in a conversation too low for me to hear. I closed my laptop, sat back, and tried to catch my breath.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I had one other thing to do before we went to Argentina—visit the one person who would know the value of the flag. He’d know what a collector would pay for it, or what a neo-Nazi might pay for it, or, maybe even more important, what they might do to get it. I had asked around. Everybody led me to the same guy. A dealer of Nazi memorabilia. An odd loner, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I exchanged several emails with him and made an appointment to visit him. I didn’t
want to show up in a black government sedan, so I drove from D.C. to Tennessee in a borrowed pick-up. I wanted to spend some time with him, learn whatever he knew about the flag. Maybe he’d even heard some rumors about where the flag was.

  I’d been to Gatlinburg once before and remembered it as a beautiful but touristy town in the Smoky Mountains. It was in a gorge through which the Gatlinburg River ran. This time, I spent the night outside Gatlinburg in a nondescript motel called Daisy’s Inn. It was one of those white painted motels where you could pull your car up right in front of your door in the gravel parking lot. I was one of five cars in the lot when I got up in the morning and prepared the horrible coffee from the package in my room. I didn’t shave, didn’t take a shower, just pulled on my well-worn Leddy’s cowboy boots and started up the Chevy 1500. I drove to Gatlinburg from the east. Even though I was focused on the visit, I couldn’t help noticing how inviting and peaceful the drive was.

  I passed through Gatlinburg before the tourist spots had opened, except for the pancake houses and coffee shops. I followed my handheld GPS, which showed my destination five miles on the other side of town. I drove past gift shops and rafting companies until I finally broke out into the countryside. I slowed as I approached the points where the GPS said his house was, but saw nothing. No structures, no farm houses, no numbers, nothing. The gorge was fairly narrow, but as I rounded a turn it flattened out to the left and the steep hillside was farther away from the roadside. The GPS said I was a quarter of a mile away so I slowed almost to a crawl, straining to see anything that represented civilization off the road. I changed the scale on the GPS to eight hundred feet and waited until I was right on top of the destination. I saw a barely used dirt road to my left. I looked a little bit ahead and saw a wash bucket turned upside down with two stones holding a cardboard sign up that had his house number on it. This was it. I turned left onto the dirt road that had two tracks, one for each wheel, with grass in the middle. I followed it into what appeared to be an expanding valley. It was green and beautiful, and populated with trees that were far enough apart to allow grass to grow in between. The grass was low but not mowed; there were probably goats on the property. I followed the road around a curve and saw the house. It was set back from the road on the left and up the hill. It was a Craftsman-style house, white with olive accents, and was in perfect condition.

  The only vehicle near the house was a van parked in front. I looked around for any other signs of life but saw none. I turned off the rough dirt road and drove right up to the house. I parked next to the van. I listened for a moment, then got out of the truck. I walked up the wooden steps and onto the porch. Before I knocked, I looked down across the rest of the valley. It was the only house in sight. The road continued for a little bit, but then got even less open and more overgrown. My guess was he owned this entire valley, and probably took care of it by himself. What a gorgeous spot. I could see retiring to a place like this. The air was heavy with humidity but full of the smells of trees and greenery.

  As I approached the door I saw a dog lying on his bed on the porch. It was an old Australian Shepherd who was moderately interested in me, but not enough to get up. I knocked on the door and stepped back. After thirty seconds I heard someone walking inside the house. He opened the door behind the screen and then pushed the screen open. He stepped out onto the porch and extended his hand. “You must be Mr. Bradley.”

  “Yes. You must be Mr. Schuller.”

  “Absolutely correct. Nice to meet you. Call me Tom. And thanks for coming all the way out here.” Schuller had a smile on his face that was cordial but reserved. He was shorter than me, maybe five feet eight inches, and was light, maybe one fifty. He wore tight Levis and gray Asics running shoes. He wore a black polo shirt that was untucked and had the yellow shield with the black horse-head silhouette that represented the Army’s First Cavalry Division. He was tan and fit. He hadn’t shaved, and had his dark hair combed straight back. He was maybe fifty years old, and had very dark brown eyes.

  “Thanks for taking the time to meet with me. Your collection sounds amazing. I look forward to seeing it. You get many people out here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. One a week or so. Like I said, most of my business is online these days. But every once in a while I’ll get a serious collector who wants to come out and see things for himself. Seeing pictures is one thing, but seeing an item itself is a whole other thing. And if you’re going to spend a lot of money—and some of them spend a lot of money—they want to see it. So yeah, sometimes people come here. I like meeting them. It’s fun talking about what’s rare and what’s not. What’s collectible and what’s not.”

  He looked to his left where I looked for the first time. There was a door that was slightly oversized and led into a wall at the end of the porch on the opposite end from the Aussie. I had noticed when I pulled up to the house that there was a structure as big as a three-car garage to the right as you looked at the house. But what was noteworthy is that it sat on the same level as the porch, on steel supports, and was not accessible by cars. There were no windows and no garage doors. Now that we were on the porch, I could see that the door off the porch was the only thing that led into that structure. I nodded and looked at the door. “Is that where your collection is?”

  “Most of it. I’ve got other pieces of it in other buildings around the property. But nothing that isn’t at least represented here.”

  “This whole valley yours?”

  “Yeah, a hundred and twenty acres. It was really my father’s. He went off to World War II, and then came back and said he didn’t want anything else to do with war or the army or working for somebody else. So, he moved to Tennessee, got a job as a diesel mechanic for trucks, and saved every penny he earned. In the late fifties, he bought this land, which was on sale for the first time by some family, and gave everything he had then mortgaged the rest. He built the house with his own hands. My mother died in 1990 and he passed in 1995. I got the house and the land and everything he owned, free and clear. So I quit my job and moved here. Lived here ever since. Never married, no family. I don’t need much. Just enough to pay the electrical bill and help me keep my business going. But I make pretty good money from my business too, so I’m doing fine.”

  “Gorgeous place.”

  “Thanks. I take a lot of pride in it. I don’t really have much else to do, except take care of my business and my property.” He said, “You want to see what I have?”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Great. One thing. Can you stand right there for a second?” He took his iPhone out of his back pocket and took a picture of me. He checked it to see if it was okay, then texted it. “Won’t be a minute.”

  I felt my mouth going slightly dry. If he found out I was an FBI Special Agent this was going to be a short meeting and could have very bad implications.

  We stood there silently, awkwardly for one minute. Two. Three. “What’s going on?” I finally asked.

  “There we go,” he said smiling again. “You’re fine.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, I have some things in here that some people, mostly the ATF, don’t think are okay. So they might send someone out here to take a look, and shut me down. Let alone put me away. And I don’t want that, so I have a friend who knows if you’re that kind of someone.”

  “Inside the ATF?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good source,” I said chuckling. “And I got the thumbs up.”

  “Yes sir, you did. Come right over here.” He turned and walked to the end of the porch opposite the dog. Over his shoulder he said, “So, I didn’t really understand what your interest is in all of this.”

  “Sort of a collector, but only recently. I don’t really know much.”

  “You in it for the money?”

  “Not really, no. I’ll explain in a bit.”

  “Alright. ’Cause if you’re in it fo
r the money, there’s some good money here, but it’s not walk-away kind of money. I make a good living and it’s getting better, but it’s not the kind of money you can take to Wall Street to go own something.”

  He took keys out of his pocket and opened the door in front of him, which swung toward him. That surprised me until I saw the bars right behind that door. It was like a jail cell door. He took another key out and undid a bolt, and then a third key to open the lock on the jail door. The barred door swung in and he stepped into the room. As soon as he moved the barred door an alarm started its countdown. I heard him enter a long code—probably sixteen numbers—and the alarm stopped. He yelled out to me, “Come on in.”

  I stepped into the room and was shocked by the size. I could tell from the outside that it was a large building or room, but what I hadn’t appreciated was the depth. It went back into the hill three times as far as it went across. The room was immense and immaculate. The other thing I noticed immediately was the lighting. I had expected fluorescent lighting, but this was more like what you’d see in an art museum or high-end retail store. Small spots had up-lighting on the walls. It gave it a very classy feel and look.

  He said, “Want me to show you around?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He closed and locked the jail door behind us, which gave me pause. “Let’s start over here,” he said pointing to the right. There were display cases that stood on wooden legs and had glass covers like in a museum. Under the glass were numerous Nazi insignia and patches. “I think at some point or other I’ve had the insignia and patch of every German unit that ever existed, including Navy. Right now I’m kind of low on them, because people buy them so quickly. Probably because people like Nazi memorabilia but don’t want to buy the expensive stuff. These I usually sell for twenty to fifty bucks.”

  I leaned down toward the display cases and looked at the patches. There were SS badges, shoulder patches, collar insignia, and even a few iron crosses. “Are those hard to find?”