Man with the Iron Heart by Mat Nastos

Author:Mat Nastos
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: Cohesion Press
Published: 2017-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

TRIUMPHANT RETURN

May 31, 1942. 7:00 PM, Prague Castle.

Hans Hagan, eyes tinged with the yellow more closely associated with animals than humans, watched as a veritable army of native Czech citizens and imported German military men worked with a forced efficiency to finish preparations for the evening’s festivities.

The last of the peasant-loaded boxcars had arrived from the tiny hamlet of Lidice earlier in the day – seven in total, each loaded to capacity with its bewildered and terrified peasantry. All those within were quickly and quietly vanished into the depths of the underground dungeons where Heinrich Himmler and the newly awakened Reinhard Heydrich awaited.

Construction soon began on an elaborate stage and celebration area located in the center of the eleven-hundred-year-old fortress that dominated the heart of the capital of the Bohemian-Moravian province.

Tall banners, set with the Nazi swastika on a blood-red field, were draped from nearly every open space on the high stone walls surrounding the large inner courtyard. Massive golden effigies of eagles and of Winged Victory herself were set to overlook a quartet of fire pits large enough to threaten the sun itself with their flaming hearts. Hidden speakers played the triumphant cords of Wagner’s operas, ready to throw the words of the reborn Heydrich to the awaiting ears of those he ruled even as they were broadcast over the airwaves.

Above it all, loomed the main stage, nearly twenty feet off the gravel-coated ground. The onyx and crimson podium from which the Nazis would address the crowd of Czechs recruited at gun-point , raised up like a devil’s horn amidst the chaos below, unaffected and aloof.

The event was to be a spectacle to end all spectacles, a tableau of the might and majesty of the Fatherland that would dwarf all save the grandest of the Führer’s pageants. It was to be a showcase of the unrelenting power of the Edda Society, and the foolishness of any who would dare to oppose it.

For Hans Hagan, exiled to the walls with his men, it was an exercise in frustration.

He was frustrated that as a warrior who acted as the fist of the Edda Society, he had been relegated to a common guard, idly walking the thin pathways that led from parapet to parapet while his hunter’s eyes searched for imagined enemies in the shadows of the streets below. Frustrated that the task of bringing the town of gypsy rebel-lovers in at gunpoint to power the machines that would help to awaken the black wolf, Garm, had been given to another. And frustrated that each of his requests to speak with his master, Heydrich, had been denied outright by the sniveling Austrian doctor, Karl Gebhart.

The physician, comfortable in his protection under the aegis of Heinrich Himmler himself, had given the assignment of bringing Lidice under control to a mere corporal in the SS – and a human one at that. The traitors were found to have been harboring the rebels and their pitiful English keepers who had committed the attempted assassination on Herr Heydrich.

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