Trail of the Twisted Cros Read online

  UNDERGROUND

  MASSACRE!

  Hughes caught sight of the two hundred foot marker. Two hundred more feet and the acrid fumes were growing stronger.

  Then came the explosion.

  A small, muffled explosion followed by a powerful rumbling from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Lovebridge mine.

  Another explosion, far more powerful. Then another.

  The men trapped in the elevator were mad with fright. The young LaRaja thought fleetingly of his pregnant wife.

  The fire came next. Roaring out of some side shaft, rising insanely up the main shaft toward the elevator, flames seemingly angered by the temporary impasse of twenty-two shrieking men on a wooden elevator platform….

  Books by Buck Sanders

  T-MAN #1: A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  T-MAN #2: STAR OF EGYPT

  T-MAN #3: TRAIL OF THE TWISTED CROSS

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56619-3

  Contents

  UNDERGROUND MASSACRE!

  Books by Buck Sanders

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part One

  Chapter One

  DANBURY, Connecticut, 6 September

  Waves of the idle curious, the variously outraged, and the merely hustling had been gathered since noon in the huge, dusty parking lot outside the main gate of the penitentiary. The temperature was in the mid-nineties, the humidity level was something over eighty percent, and the chance of riot was as high as the early September sun.

  Ringing the lot was a brigade of beefy U.S. marshals and a back-up contingent of Connecticut state troopers. To a man, they worried that they might not be able to keep peace, once the sweltering crowd caught sight of the man they had come to either hail or curse—Johnny Lee Rogers.

  Sniffing about the litter-strewn asphalt pavement for bomb scents were a dozen leashed German shepherds, escorted by FBI agents dressed in mirrored sunglasses and three-piece Sears, Roebuck suits.

  Dark-skinned Cuban roughnecks—refugees brought up by the truckload from the slums of Manhattan and Union City, New Jersey—milled about one end of the parking lot, glowering at Anglos. When the television cameras approached, they stripped to the waist and chanted something in berserk Spanish.

  At the opposite end of the lot, a swarm of hot-eyed adolescents togged out in khakis, swastika armbands, crash helmets, and construction boots, hawked the latest issue of White Power. It was an extra, featuring a half-page photograph of the jut-jawed and Hollywood-handsome Johnny Lee Rogers manacled to a pair of Federal marshals, and a headline screamer which declared, “Spic Lies Sends Our Commander to Prison!”

  In between these warring groups, freelance true-believers of every hue inveighed a smorgasbord of bizarre causes: “Freedom for Rudolph Hess!”… “Civil Rights for Lesbians and Gays!”… “Don’t Be Half a Man, Join the Klan!”… “Brits Out of Ireland Now!”… “Abortion is Murder!”… “Lyndon LaRouche in ’84!”… “Impeach Ronald Reagan!”… “Hitler Was Right!”… “Is Al Haig Darth Vader?”

  A tiny band of kvetches from the Jewish Defense League attempted a sit-in by squatting cross-legged in the center of the lot and keening in Hebrew. They were generally ignored, which was lucky for them.

  All of it was picture-perfect for television, a swirling bazaar of throaty machismo and anarchy, good for at least a ninety-second videotape clip on the evening news. Everybody in TV Land, from the beer-can set on up to the White House court, had been enthralled for weeks with the nightly news of Johnny Lee Rogers’ trial. Everywhere, editors appreciated the excitement (read racial conflict) that a Rogers appearance guaranteed. He was the hottest thing in the media since the crazy days of the sixties.

  Johnny Lee Rogers was especially good for television. He was striking in appearance and very forceful, the self-styled Führer of the re-emergent American Nazi movement, possessed of a soft Southern molasses voice that carried a sly combination of virulent racism and respectability. Television knew he was an oddity, of course, a flash-in-the-pan huckster of the hard Right; television didn’t take him seriously. But Johnny Lee Rogers took television very seriously indeed. He had seen time and again how the likes of him could use the airwaves to weld fears and resentments born of hard times into a powerful following, even if the contemporary keepers of the airwaves could not.

  A solitary Danbury city cop, busy with a pad and pencil recording license-plate numbers for the department’s skimpy intelligence files, spotted his next-door neighbor in the crowd, a crew-cut prison guard who had shown up on his day off to take in the spectacle.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here with all these freakin hairbags, Lester,” the cop said, startling his neighbor. “You a closet Nazi, or do you cotton to those spies over there?”

  Lester grinned, surprised and gratified to see someone who appeared normal to his frame of reference. He scratched his head with the toothpick that had reposed in the corner of his mouth since the last bite of a gristly ham sandwich. The toothpick broke in half, and Lester dropped it.

  “Hell, Bob, I’m just here to see the goddam history, that’s all.”

  “Shit! You think that freakin little Nazi amounts to a diddley-turd? He’s nothin but some little redneck slimeball who learned to talk straight and walk on all fours. And hell, he’s prob’ly queer like all the rest of them Third Reich queens. Prob’ly so queer he squats to piss.”

  Bob chortled at his own joke as he scratched two more license plate numbers onto his crowded pad.

  “Yeah, well, there’s maybe somethin in what you say, Bob. I give you that, but you ever heard this guy talk? I mean, you ever really listen to what the guy has to say?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Well, there’s somethin to it, I’ll tell you that. I mean, lookit all around us. Men out of work we known all our lives, Bob. And who gets the only jobs open? These fuckin gooks and spies, that’s who, and you know it. The Jewboys own everything, and so they got no worries when it comes to the old paycheck, and their relatives ain’t worried none, either. The niggers are even smarter. They just collect their goddam welfare checks, and they don’t even work for it. Least the Jewboys work—”

  “It takes listenin to Johnny Lee Rogers to know that, does it, Lester?”

  “Well no, not exactly… I guess it takes somebody like him to make it all right to say what we all know, that’s all.”

  “What? Some blow-hole in a Hitler suit?”

  Lester shook his head.

  “Just listen to him, Bob. They’re prob’ly going to let him speak here, what with Dan Rather himself and Geraldo Rivera and Sam Donaldson and all them other network dudes all crawlin all over the place.”

  “Yeah?” Bob looked up from his pad. “Where’s Dan Rather?”

  Lester began pointing toward a scaffolding tower hastily erected by the CBS Television crew, but Bob’s attention, like that of eve
ryone else in the parking lot, was distracted by the blare of a sound truck rolling toward the police line.

  “Attention white men!”

  The sound truck boomed its message again:

  “Attention white men!”

  White, black, and brown faces were riveted on the sound truck.

  Three men in Nazi uniforms rode on the roof of the slow-moving truck, arms folded imperiously across their chests.

  “Attention white menl”

  Newspaper photographers made a beeline for the truck. Shutters clicked wildly, capturing the image of the three defiant Nazis poised over a roiling, emotionally charged mob of hate-filled friends and foes.

  The truck came to a stop, issued a final “Attention white men!”, and those who spoke English silenced. The Cubans began their chanting again, but failed to attract further camera attention, and eventually fell quiet. The Federal marshals and state troopers began sweating profusely.

  Atop the sound truck, which the photographers were duly noting contained helmeted brown-shirts inside, and which was decorated with huge swastikas on the side panels, the largest of the three men stepped forward and raised an electric bullhorn to address the crowd.

  “White men!” he screamed, in a voice tinged with a Bavarian accent of some other time. “We gather here today to witness a great injustice—”

  The crowd below him, thickly swelled by madly cheering young storm troopers, sent up a great roar of agreement. The television cameras caught it, unaware of the manipulation at play. Television coverage of news events had become so much a part of the news itself that no one on either side of the camera recognized cues anymore. When Lee Harvey Oswald was marched through the phalanx of television lights and cameras after his arrest, Jack Ruby had only to enter from stage right and it was a wrap; when John W. Hinckley Jr. squeezed off six shots from his .22-caliber pistol, he obligingly allowed the smoking barrel to linger in his outstretched hand for the benefit of a neat photographic segue to the Secret Service agent catching the last pellet in his gut instead of President Reagan.

  “—we gather here before the newspapers and the television cameras and the radio microphones so that the whole world will know of our solidarity!”

  Again, the speaker with the German accent had to pause for the yawping Nazi minions below. Those who chose instead to hoot and shake their fists were drowned out by the superior number of Nazi lungs. Photographers took the pause as an opportunity to engage in a bit of position combat, the better to record the ravings of the sound-truck speaker.

  “I am Karl-Heinz Hoffman!” the man on the truck shouted. “I am leader of West Germany’s Sporting Group of Defense… I stand before you today, here in America, to show my solidarity in the cause of Johnny Lee Rogers!”

  At the first sound of Rogers’ name, the dominant elements of the crowd went insane with applause and whistles. A chant began welling up… “Heil, Johnny! Heil, Johnny! Heil, Johnny!”

  As the din lessened somewhat, Bob asked Lester, “Who’s the freakin kraut?”

  Lester moved close to Bob’s ear and answered: “Runs a paramilitary outfit in Munich… calls it a sportsmen’s group, ‘cause Nazi outfits are outlawed over there, you know. Saw the guy once in the newspaper, walkin his pet puma on a lead, believe it or not.”

  Hoffman raised his hands, his mouth drawn tight and wolflike, then lowered them. It was a gesture commanding his followers to hush, which they did.

  “I want now to introduce two other great leaders of the white Christian world,” he said through the bullhorn. His companions, like him dressed in all their fascist finery, stepped forward to flank Hoffman.

  “Commander Bert Erikson of Antwerp, Belgium!”

  The trained crowd cheered again, lustily, as Hoffman raised high the mailed hand of Erikson, leader of a growing cult of black-shirted Flemish thugs who held increasingly violent demonstrations against immigrants in Antwerp and other large Belgian cities.

  Hoffman then held aloft the hand of the other man, an older Nazi, more obviously of Adolf’s generation than his compatriots on this day. The older Nazi wore a gleaming black mustache, cut in a Hitleresque little brush, and he carried a braided leather whip of the sort issued to officers of the Schutzstaffel.

  “Frederico Eschenroeder, mein friends!” Hoffman shouted. “From Brazil, and the Friends of April 20!”

  The mob erupted into chants now of “Heil, Hitler!” at the mention of the German Führer’s birth date. A newspaper photographer who had managed to scale the side of the sound truck was struck down by Eschenroeder’s whip. Two bloody lines were left on the hapless shutter-bug’s neck as he fell to the ground. Eschenroeder screamed at him, “Swine… filthy bastard!” his face frozen in uncontrolled contempt.

  The men of the Jewish Defense League had seen the lashing whip, and now they made their way through the tightly packed crowd, shouting, “Never again! Never again! Never again!” as they marched resolutely toward the Nazi sound truck. At least one of the television cameramen heard their advance over the cacophony of lurid tributes to Adolf Hitler, and he aimed his lens at the Jews.

  With lightning precision, a flying wedge of teenage brown-shirts descended upon the fiery-eyed Jews, overpowered them, and pummelled them to the ground, effectively blocking out any chance of a camera record by grouping around their prey and shielding from view the damage they would do, so quickly and so quietly.

  The Cuban demonstrators, too, had tried an advance, provoked by Eschenroeder’s little blitzkrieg, but, like the Jews, they had been held off by a spontaneous posse of young storm troopers.

  Eschenroeder stood now in triumph atop the sound truck, staring down at the photographer he had assaulted, his whip still menacing, should his victim be so doltish as to rise in defense. His Iron Cross gleamed on his chest. His lips were curled and snarling, and he looked not unlike a bull gorilla after some successful jungle battle, slapping his leathery chest in feral exultation. A proud portrait of Aryan supremacy, Eschenroeder thought himself, a visage of victory fully worthy of the benighted pages of Das Schwarze Korps, if the old putschist did say so himself.

  But Frederico Eschenroeder’s moment in the sun was nearly over, and the show of this day had to go on.

  Hoffman, bullhorn in hand, was now alerting foes and the faithful that the main event was finally at hand.

  “He is here!” Hoffman screamed. He pointed stiffly to the entry drive of the penitentiary, sealed off by a police line from the huge crowd, all straining for a look at the American Führer.

  As if connected, all eyes of this highly divergent crowd, human and camera, were pinned on a dark green station wagon that pulled up to a stop at the penitentiary check-in point. The bulky outlines of four men, including the driver, could be seen through heavily tinted, bulletproof windows.

  Shimmers of heat rose from the steel of the car, whose doors weren’t opening. Instead, it sat there, enclosed and secured, as members of the press were let systematically past the guard units protecting the occupants.

  The chanting started again… “Heil, Johnny! Heil, Johnny! Heil, Johnny!”… and that part of the mob which hated Johnny Lee Rogers went quite mad with howling and wailing.

  The man who had caused all the day’s intensities, who was now causing untold numbers of cracked ribs and blackened eyes as club-wielding policemen acted to keep a tenuous order, sat in the rear seat of the station wagon, nearly oblivious to the commotion and the heat outside.

  Rogers’ guards, a pair of Federal marshals seated on either side of him, had permitted him a comb and a small mirror to prepare for the gauntlet of photographers en route through the prison gate. Then, of course, he would have to be chained once again.

  Rogers worked the comb through his long, layered dark-blonde hair. He patted his temples with his fingers, and then combed this shorter length into wing-tips. He then fiddled with the knot of his silk necktie, and brushed the lapels of his navy blazer.

  “Ready, Johnny?” one of the marshals asked him.
His tone was neither respectful nor mocking. It was friendly, as if the marshals were escorting an unlucky fraternity brother to the slammer. Definitely an attitude on the part of the marshals that was quite substantially a departure from the norm.

  But it was so difficult not to like Johnny Lee Rogers—no matter his conviction for conspiring to murder the leader of a Cuban refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Somehow, this pleasant, seemingly guileless young man seated between the marshals was unconnected with such heinous goings-on.

  There he sat, combing his hair and making self-deprecating jokes about being a television creature…

  “Not quite ready, gents,” he said. “This may seem awful damn silly-ass to you guys, and it does to me, too—but you know, I got to look good for my people.” And with that, he fished a jar of Max Factor Ultra-Blush liquid makeup from the pocket of his blazer and blotted out the slight rash on his neck, covered the beard portion of his clean-shaven face, and filled in the large open pores of his nose and forehead.

  “… you don’t use this stuff, and you wind up looking like old Tricky Dick on the tube, you know,” Rogers said.

  The other marshal, sensing that it might be his last opportunity to dare a personal question of the young prisoner as the media flocked about the station wagon, turned quickly to Rogers and asked, “Johnny, how about it… tell us, did you do what they said?”

  Rogers issued a smile befitting the president of a Jaycee chapter somewhere in Indiana and then answered:

  “Gentlemen, I’m not going to tell you I’m pure as the driven snow, ‘cause I am not. I’m about as pure as the driven slush—”

  The marshals laughed heartily, and Rogers gave them another flashing grin.

  “But gentlemen, I want you particularly to know—you men who are entrusted with enforcement of our legal system—that whatever I’ve done, I’ve done in the simple interest of hard-working white men and women of this country.