The Isis Covenant by James Douglas Read Free Book Online Page B

as some historians had surmised, after the celebrated anti-aircraft, turned anti-tank gun of that calibre.
    Geistjaeger 88
operated in total secrecy and under the direct orders of Himmler himself, his instructions passed on by his closest aide, SS
Brigadeführer
Walter Schellenberg. The file revealed that the only reason anyone knew of its existence was the testimony of a man called Bodo Ritter. Jamie checked the name on the internet and his lips pursed in disappointment. It was inconvenient , but in the unlikely event that he could discover anything of value for Detective Danny Fisher, that was where he’d find it.
    After making the required phone call, he shrugged on his battered hiking jacket and took the short walk through the rain and down into the bowels of the local Tube station. While he waited for the next service to King’s Cross he stood with his back tight to the platform wall. Jamie Saintclair had already seen the underside of one Tube train and he didn’t intend to repeat the experience.
    With Detective Sergeant Shreeves’ warnings still sharp in his mind, he took care to find a spot at the end of the carriage with a good view of his fellow passengers: the usual cosmopolitan London mix of ages and classes, colours and shades, submissiveness and potential threat. His eye was drawn to a pair of young Asian men talking quietly by the doorway. They were the right age, and they had the watchful, restless look of career criminals or undercover policemen. He waited for them to make their move, every sinew tensed for the battle for survival that must come in the tight-packed confines of the carriage, but they got off at the next stop. That left an Italian-looking gentleman wearing an overcoat just long enough to hide a sawn-off shotgun, who had also joined the train at Kensington. Christ, he couldn’t live like this, spending every waking hour expecting a bullet or a knife. Better not to see it coming at all. To test the theory he sat back on a seat and closed his eyes, only to find himself watching repeat showings of as many variations of his own death as his subconscious could come up with. Maybe Shreeves was right and he should spend the winter on Bondi Beach?
    But he wasn’t going to Bondi Beach just yet. Instead, he bought a ticket for the 10.45 to Cambridge. It takes just under an hour to cover the fifty miles that separate London and the university city. As the suburbs gave way to intermittent flashes of open fields, he ran over what he had been able to discover of
Standartenführer
Bodo Ritter. The man had carved out a low-key career as an academic in the art department of an obscure south German university. And there he would almost certainly have stayed, but for the discontent with Germany’s economic ills that drew him to the increasingly popular National Socialist Workers’ Party and their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler.
    At some point in the early 1930s Bodo Ritter had been introduced to a charming Argentine-German called Richard Darré, a rising star in the Nazi party and the SS, and it was through Darré that he met Heinrich Himmler. One of Ritter’s main areas of research had been early Germanic folklore. In Himmler he had a ready audience for his theories, which, in turn, won him an invitation in 1935 to join the
SS-Ahnenerbe
, the organization’s Ancestral Heritage, Research and Teaching Society. Bodo’s later career would show him as a man with an eye for an opening, and he recognized his opportunity in Himmler’s fascination with the origins of the Germanic peoples. In a few years he had made himself indispensable and was appointed to the SD, the Reich security service; just another petty bureaucrat in Hitler’s industry of repression.
    ‘I hope you have a strong stomach.’ Chris, the young research assistant at the Imperial War Museum’s records facility at Duxford, placed a file on the wooden desk.
    Jamie gave a grim nod as he studied the tattered beige oblong containing who only