Chapter 21

He still thought the same thing, two hours later.

“This is just bloody amazing! I can’t believe you’ve managed to accomplish this much in so little time.”

“Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate that. Funny thing is, things are just getting started for Kansas. We’ll be doing the same thing up near Manhattan, on Fort Riley, building two more turbine plants and a larger chemical plant for the Ice-X.”

I saw Chuck glance at his watch. “Time to get Helen home, so she can go study?”

He nodded, and I added, “Sounds good. I need a few more Christmas presents. Any argument about me and the younger girls going to Wichita by ourselves? We may not be back until late.”

He shook his head. “Not from me. This is home for you. And they’re not the ones with the restricted license; that’s you.” Then he snorted. “Like any police officer in this state is going to mess with you. Go have fun.”

After we got back to the house, the four of us got into my truck, and I drove us all down to Wichita. I really did need some more presents for Christmas, but once we were there, it only took us a few minutes to go into the proper store and buy them. Then we got back into my truck and headed west, to Silver Lake road and the Cheney Reservoir, where Elroy and Harry had taken me fishing.

It was too cold and windy for fishing, which was perfect for me to park the truck in the woods and to quickly throw some brush up, hiding it. While I was doing that, the girls were changing into their uniforms.

“This is strange. It’s chilly enough outside, especially here by the lake, that I ought to have goose bumps all over me,” Eve said.

“Si, I agree. This is no more uncomfortable than if we were sitting in our bedroom.”

“So, what’s on the agenda?” Beth asked.

I finished hiding the truck, then put my own uniform on. “Training for the three of you. Dora, Eve, how long can you each hold your breath?”

“We haven’t done it in a swimming pool like you did with Liz, but I can do three hours and not feel a need to breathe now.” Dora nodded her agreement at what Eve said.

“Okay, I know you all can fly, and you’ve been working on your microscopic, telescopic, and see through vision, so those aren’t anything new. How about the lasers or flame?”

“Si. It was very hurtful the first time, giving me an incredible headache. But now, it is easy to use. Liz has been instructing us both physically and mentally, since she doesn’t need to talk to us.”

I nodded. “I’m going to give both of you the same instructions I gave Beth. If you feel ANYTHING wrong at all, let one of us know IMMEDIATELY. We’re going to be stretching the envelope for both of you. I don’t anticipate there being any issues, not with it having been nearly a month now, but this could be deadly. So, safety for each of you, is first and foremost.”

I think my little speech scared them a bit, which was good, because that’s what I wanted! The last thing I needed was for one of them to get hurt.

We checked for loose hair, especially with Dora. Then I showed them how to check for airplanes. After that, it was up and into the sky we went. We stayed together in close formation, stopping when we were a hundred miles up.

Everyone seemed fine so far. I headed northeast, the girls following me. I kicked my speed up. I knew Beth would have no issues with it. I was glad to see Dora and Eve keeping up. I kept speeding up, until finally after having been flying for half an hour, I slowed and stopped. I dropped down to only twenty five miles up.

“How are you all feeling? And I don’t mean in a sexual mood; I’m sure you’re both horny right now.”

“We’re fine, Cal. We know what happened to Liz, during your trip to Cancun. Spic and I have been talking about it while we’ve been flying. We’ll wait till we get home to jump your bones.”

I chuckled. “Good. We’re doing something tonight that I haven’t done for a while. One of the things I did during my trips to Wichita, besides learn how to make earrings, was to read the library there. We’re going to do a bit of treasure hunting tonight.”

Beth said, “We’re over Germany. Are we looking for hidden Nazi treasure?”

“Half right. Austria, and yes. There may not be anything to find. But this’ll let you all use your vision to look through things, as well as see how well you can hold your breath and operate in the dark, since with the seven hour time difference, it’s almost 11 at night here. Follow me.”

I led them down to a dark surface, beside a lake surrounded by incredibly steep mountain walls and forests. There were no lights other than from a small restaurant on one end of the lake. We set down at the southern side of the lake. It was almost grim and foreboding looking.

“Okay, this is Lake Toplitz. It’s just over a mile long, about three thousand feet wide, and is just over three hundred feet deep for most of it. The lake was used to test a variety of depth charges and torpedoes during World War II. And just to make it even more inhospitable, it changes from fresh to salt water about a hundred feet down. Just so you know, I had to search through four different encyclopedias and six different books on the area to find this stuff out.”

“What are we going to look for, then?” Beth asked.

“It’s already been documented that there were crates containing counterfeit money that got dumped here. We’re basically going to see if we can find anything else. With our vision, we’ll be able to see, not just in the dark, but also through the bottom of the lake. It’s bound to be covered in silt and logs. We’ll hold hands, with Beth on one end, me on the other. Just scan the bottom and if you see something, stop moving. That’ll let the rest of us know something is up. We can always surface if we need to talk ... well, I will, anyway.”

Beth nodded. “One last thing. I made a mistake with Cal, stressing myself. Don’t do it. We can always come back if we need to do so. It’s not a big deal. This is a way for us to mark off a site on the map where there might be treasure, and more importantly, a way for you to show Cal that you’re worthy of the trust he’s given us. He has to know that you’ll do what you can to be safe now, so that when we’re exploring Halley’s Comet, he can trust you then.”

I could tell that Dora and Eve were very somber at that moment. I also nodded to Beth, because she’d done an excellent job of putting my reasoning into words.

“When we get close to the bottom, I’ll go on down and see how deep the silt is. We’ll each look in a path about fifty feet wide, with the two of you slightly overlapping. That’ll get us around two hundred feet per pass, which means in about twenty passes, we’ll have covered the whole lake bottom. There’s going to be lots of metal and other junk down there. And we might find skeletons, too, so don’t be too shocked, okay?”

We slipped into the ice cold, murky water. The lake didn’t gently slope down, it went deep almost immediately. We maneuvered past some logs that were just floating about a hundred feet off the bottom. I could tell the water had changed from fresh to salt, and what appeared to be happening was the salt water buoyancy wasn’t letting the logs sink any further. About twenty feet off the bottom, I stopped, squeezing Eve’s hand so she’d know to stop, too.

The others instantly stopped. Beth was closest to the shore. I let go of Eve’s hand, holding my hand up for them to wait. They watched me all the way to the bottom, then sink into the muck. The layer of silt was a good fifteen feet thick before it hit the hard bottom, which was fine. I came back up to them, took Eve’s hand, and we started out.

The first pass we found some crates full of paper. They were counterfeit bank notes. We also saw a bunch of loose metal pieces, from various bombs. We got to the other end of the lake, I stayed in one spot, while they pivoted around me, and we headed back. About half way back, I felt Eve squeeze my hand. I stopped, turning my head. Dora saw something metal that was in one piece.

It was a good thing I didn’t need light to see, as dark as it was down here. It was definitely metal. I quickly went around it, so they could see what it was. No wonder it had confused her. It was the engine and one wing from a German sea plane. I went back up and took Eve’s hand. We barely made it another hundred feet before finding the rest of the airplane. More metal debris, including some complete machines, were now on the bottom. We got to the south end again, pivoted on Beth this time, and headed back.

We saw different parts of torpedoes on the bottom. It looked like they’d broken up instead of exploding. A couple of boats were also on the bottom. This time, Beth stopped because she’d seen something. I went over to check it out. It was a chest, only it was full of glass jars, each one easily capable of holding a couple of gallons of liquid. They were still sealed. I waved some of the muck from the chest. The label had been burnt into the wood, and was still visible. In big letters at the top, it read, ‘Giftgas!’, with a skull and crossbones under that, then in smaller letters, ‘Soman Nervengas!’ That wasn’t something I was expecting to find.

I motioned for them to wait, while I took the bottles to the surface and set them on the shore. That didn’t take long, then I rejoined the girls, taking hands again. We finished up that pass without finding anything else.

The next two passes we found four more chests full of bottles of nerve gas. I did the same with these, taking them to the shore. The two passes after that were over effectively the middle of the lake, and there was nothing on the bottom. I was paying attention to the way the girls were acting, and it seemed they were all good.

The next pass proved a bit different. At a narrowing in the lake, there was a large opening in one wall. That was intriguing, so we followed it. It ended in a large door, almost like a castle gate. It looked like at one time it was supposed to be waterproof, but it wasn’t any longer. With my vision, I could see the front end of a truck on the other side. I motioned for the girls to move back to the entrance of the hole, almost fifty feet back. Once they had done so, I carefully used my laser vision to cut the gate out of its mounting frame. Once I had it cut out, I carried it back out to the lake and set it on the bottom.

The girls rejoined me inside. At one time, this area was supposed to be dry; that much was quickly apparent. There were three trucks parked bumper to bumper in an excavated tunnel. There was a turn, then a large, underground room that was also flooded. We were still easily fifty feet below the surface of the lake here. Seven more trucks were parked in here.

Along one wall were huge piles of rotting wood with paper scraps. I realized that those must have been paintings at one time. There were about a hundred cardboard boxes that were totally saturated, with the contents inside ruined by decades of water exposure. Some of the markings were still readable. These had held banknotes. There was an exit from this large underground garage that ended in a pile of rubble. I used my vision to look. It went up on a slight grade, and was filled all the way to the limits of my sight; more than a hundred yards. We went back to the trucks and started looking inside them. They were all full of crates. I looked inside one, the girls nodding as well.

The crates inside the trucks were in pretty bad shape, after having been submerged in water for almost forty years. The salt water hadn’t done anything to the contents of those crates, though. After a couple minutes, we figured the best way to try to get them up to the surface was to just pick the trucks up, carefully, and take them to shore. That took all four of us almost half an hour, taking the first one out through the tunnel and to the surface, then coming back for more.

“Well, now what do we do?”

“Damned if I know, Beth. I actually didn’t expect to find anything, much less thirty metric tons of gold. The nerve gas is easy. We’ll use our heat to vaporize it, so it can’t harm anyone. But I’m not sure about thirty-three US tons of gold.”

In the last one we found, there actually was a cargo manifest that, while the typewriter ink was long gone, the impressions on the paper were still legible to me, under the right vision. Thirty thousand one kilogram gold bars and 250 kilograms of gems, to finance the rebuilding of the Reich.

I looked at that again, then went over to one of the trucks. “Oh, good grief.” In the cab area of each truck, there was a locked metal box where the passenger seat would have been, welded to the floor. Each box measured about two and a half feet square, and right at two feet tall, with a little over fifty-five pounds of gems in each box. These were of various sizes, colors, and stones. They’d been in bags, but those had rotted through over the decades. I recognized four different types of rubies, a couple of colors of sapphires, different colors of diamonds, natural pearls, and various shades of emeralds.

Dora shook her head. “There are hundreds of millions worth of gems here. What do we do with it all?”

I frowned. “The problem with this is simple. It’s Nazi gold. They stole it, then melted it down into these bars. It’s fungible, meaning there’s no way to tell one gold from another. And this is going to sound horrendous, but no way to know if any of these bars were made from the melted wedding rings or the gold teeth of dead Jews.”

“Oh, God, that is horrible to consider,” Eve said.

“At the end of World War II, the United States Army found a mine with over eight thousand bars of gold in it. They took it to their zone, and then basically kept it. The Vatican did the same with millions of dollars of gold that Germany had deposited with them in exchange for currency and other favors. These aren’t pieces of art that can be traced back to the owners. For better or worse, this is basically just like what I brought home from Victorio Peak. Lost treasure, with no way of ever recovering it.”

“So, not to repeat myself, but what do we do with it all?”

“Tear the trucks apart. We’ll use our vision to weld the frame pieces together for strength. There’s thirty thousand bars of gold. Sixteen of them would make a four inch by four inch cube. Nine wide, sixteen long, just over two thousand bars. We can make something with the frames just over three feet wide, five feet long. That gives us stacks not quite five feet tall. Slap some side pieces on so it can’t shift, then put the boxes with the gems in them inside as well. Throw the rest of the pieces of the trucks back into the lake.”

The four of us spent the next ten minutes tearing trucks apart, with me cutting and melting the steel of the frames to weld together a reinforced frame from the twenty main frame sections. We used our speed to stack the gold like we were stacking school books, then I put the side pieces on, welding them into place. It was easy for me to put the boxes of gems in, with another piece of steel I welded to hold them in place.

We tidied the area of the truck pieces. It had started snowing, pretty heavily. Beth stopped me. “You’re right. You need to leave some evidence of what you destroyed here, so they’ll understand.”

I nodded. I took the chests with the nerve gas half a mile away, but still along the shore. I emptied the chests, stacking the bottles up, while leaving the chests far enough away they wouldn’t catch fire. Three thousand degrees for about five minutes was enough to melt the glass bottles and totally vaporize and destroy all the nerve gas. It was also bright enough, since it was on shore, that I knew the people in the restaurant had to have seen it. I took one of the pieces of wood crates and burned into it, “You’re welcome. This pile of molten glass was 120 gallons of nerve gas. End the Fighting. Destroy the bad drugs. Live in peace. PS. There’s no Nazi gold at the bottom of the lake, just a wrecked seaplane and lots of counterfeit British banknotes.”

I ran back to the girls, picked up the crate, and took off straight up. I was slowed down only slightly. That it wasn’t aerodynamic didn’t bother me in the least; not like it had with the container. Since there was no rocket launch to be detected, I knew the only way for us to be detected was by a skin track radar. We stopped over the Atlantic Ocean on the way back, so I could drop down into the atmosphere enough that the girls could hear me.

“We’re going to be sneaky about this. When we get over home, I want Beth and Eve to go to Vance and watch the radar tower. Dora will be with me. That radar can actually see reflections bouncing off of metal objects. You two will time the radar, based upon the rotations. When it’s just past where we are, let Dora know, and she’ll let me know. I’ll drop from fifty miles up super-fast. At most, we should only appear as a single blip on the radar. Then you two fly over home, to help us.”

Everyone understood. I stopped, holding the gold. I was just glad we’d told Chuck that we’d be out late; it was already almost midnight. Dora looked in the distance, then she started giggling.

“What’s wrong, Adorable Dora?”

“Nothing. Take your time setting it down. Vance is shut down; the control tower is empty and the radar is turned off.”

“Oh. Fine.” I went down to the ground. The other two joined us within a minute. We put our regular clothes back on.

“Now, here comes the fun part. I guess I’m finally going to use that tarp I have. Beth, Dora. Get into the bed of the truck, lay on your stomachs, and you can use your hands to keep yourself centered in the bed, but don’t put any weight at all onto the truck itself.”

Dora frowned. “I don’t get it.”

“This is a Ford F-150, with a step-side bed. That means it’s a half-ton pickup, so it can carry about 1,000 pounds. Total. We have more than 60,000 pounds of gold and steel in this contraption.”

“Wow, I feel stupid about now. I’m sorry about that, Cal.”

“Actually, don’t worry too much about it, not right now. Beth, grab the truck. I’ll take the gold. We’ll just go up to a hundred feet up, fly over to Williams, just south of Illinois, THEN do that. Less chance of a mess up, since it’s only a couple of miles at that point.”

We did just that. With it being my truck, and obviously me driving, the guards on duty didn’t even slow me down or check that the girls were in the cab. I do know they gave each other a couple of looks at the lump in the back under the tarp. I pulled into the garage.

Using our speed, we unloaded the gold as quickly almost as quickly as we’d loaded it. We had materials left over from the wind turbine, so I welded a crate together out of steel for the gems. We put some foam in it, then dumped all of the boxes into that crate.

Dora and Eve were finally starting to look tired. I sent them in to bed. The other four came out then.

“Fuck...”

“You haven’t done that in a while. What’s with the language, Margie?”

“I saw the numbers on your spreadsheet, Cal. I’ve never been in the bank vault. I could hear the girls talking about the pile of gold, but ... damn!”

“That’d do it. There’s only a third of billion in gold sitting here, anyway,” I said.

Helen shook her head. “I’m sorry, did I hear you right?”

“At the current market price, which has gone down since the last ‘delivery’ I received, this is just over three hundred thirty five million in gold. And I don’t even want to get into how much there is in gems. I’ll let you girls sort those out tomorrow.” I pointed to the metal box.

Helen frowned. “There’s a taint to all of this. I don’t sense anyone, but something about all of this feels ... wrong ... to me.”

“I figured it would.” I picked up one of the bars off the top, flipping it over. The eagle with the wreath containing the swastika, with the words ‘DEUTSCHE REICHSBANK’ under that, then ‘1 KILO FEINGOLD’, 999.9 and some stamped numbers at the bottom told the story.

“Double fuck...”

I swiveled my head. That had come from Jennifer’s mouth.

“Needless to say, my plan to see how far along that Dora and Eve are in their skills met with ... quite unexpected fruition. I just hope that Harry has more than that one pound weight mold now, because I’ve got a lot of melting to do.”

“We can’t keep this,” Marcia said. “My god, Cal! My last name is Kaufman! I’m not practicing, but it’s a Jewish name! My parents were! That’s my ethnic heritage. Uncle Leonard is Jewish!” She looked like she was about ready to cry.

“When did I say we were going to keep it?”

She stopped, her face snapping up like she’d been slapped.

“All I said was that I have a lot of melting to do. This was completely unrecoverable. I’m sure you heard me tell the girls it’s like the treasure from Victorio Peak. Helen is right, though, there’s a taint to all of this. But we need these gems sorted. We’ll sell them off, a few pounds at a time. Same with the gold. We don’t need the money for ourselves, or for our future. We’ve plenty, and we’re earning more. But the Messenger from Above and his apprentices do need money, to be able to help people. As in, think about what would happen if he dropped off a thousand kilograms of gold and a pallet full of cash in Jerusalem. Or at the Israeli embassy in Washington or Moscow, either one.”

Now she was crying, ashamed of her reaction and how she’d yelled at me.

I took her in my arms. “Don’t worry, my love. That’s the problem with this gold, with any gold. It’s fungible, so once it’s melted, there’s no way to know where it came from. But this? There’s too much money involved here to actually let a government deal with it. Last time we sold gems, we had about twenty pounds, and got eighty million dollars. There’s five hundred forty pounds here. Maybe more than two billion dollars’ worth of gems.”

“Jesus Christ! There’s no way you can give that to any government and expect them to act responsibly with it,” Margie said.

“This isn’t like artwork that was recovered after the war. That was easy to check the provenance on, to see who it belonged to originally. This? Nope. And the reason I want to melt it all tomorrow is also simple. Right now each bar is worth about twelve thousand dollars, for the gold content alone. But what’s ON each bar makes them both worth much more, and at the same time much less,” I said, shrugging. “Depending upon who had them, of course. To those fuckwads in Florida, this would be priceless as it is, as proof of their supremacy. To the Jews, it’s blood money.”

Helen sadly nodded. “I had to read a book for one of my classes, a new one that just came out a couple years ago. ‘Schindler’s Ark’ is the title. What happened then was worse than anything that has ever happened to my people, even as shitty as we’ve been treated.”

Marcia moved away from me, then went over to the pile of gold bars. She hesitantly reached out, like she was afraid of it. Then she touched one of them, again like she thought it would bite her. She picked one of them up.

“It’s cold, almost freezing.”

“Yeah, sorry, but this has spent the last few decades sitting on the bottom of a lake, and when we flew back, at fifty miles up, it’s still pretty cold. It’s really only been in the air here for an hour or so,” I explained.

She sighed. “I thought maybe I would feel something else. Some of the evil that went into the making of this. Some of the thoughts of where it came from. That’s normally your job, you and now Helen.” Her eyes were focused on something else.

“I know I had two uncles go into those camps that never came back out. I don’t know how many of my cousins there lived. Dad ... Dad said that we could never let that happen again, to anyone. That was why he was so proud of the job Uncle Izzy did in his movies. Not a blood uncle, but a family type uncle, sort of like Uncle Leonard.” More tears started down her cheeks.

“I wanted to pick this up and actually feel the hatred for Jews that had to have gone into it. I wanted to feel their anger, so I could push it back at them. You know I love you, I love all of you.” She closed her eyes. “Right now, I’m glad I don’t have your powers. This brought up something raw inside me, something I didn’t even know was there.”

She opened her eyes again. “I think if I had your powers, right now, the way I feel, I’d go hunt every single one of those motherfuckers that survived and burn them like they did my family.”

She let the bar loose, so that it fell to the floor, thudding on the cement, then waved her hand at the pile of Nazi gold and the gems. “This ... this is a drop in the bucket, for all the blood that was shed, all the lives that were ended. Use it. Make it work, for all the people of the world, so they never forget what happened.”

“Marcia...” She looked me in the eye. “It’ll never happen again. Not so long as I have breath in my lungs.” I realized what I’d said. “Well, maybe not that, since I don’t need to breathe, but...”

That caused her eyes to open wide, then she started laughing. The rest of the ladies joined in. The stress pretty much went away then that had held us all incredibly tense. I picked the loose block up and set it on top of the pile.

“Cal ... can you just come to bed and hold me tonight? I’m feeling ... very small ... right now.”

“Of course, Marcia. We all will.”

I set my mental alarm so I would get up fairly early in the morning. I felt Marcia snuggle up beside me, feeling and holding me like I was the rock keeping her from being swept away by flood waters. In my ear, I heard her whisper, “Wake me in the morning, before you melt any of it.”

“I will, Dear.”

She sighed in relief, then closed her eyes.

I knew that with today being busy, that Harry would be up early. I dialed his number right at 7 in the morning.

“This is Harry.”

“Hey, Harry, Cal. I take it I didn’t wake you.”

“We’ve both got too much to do. Emily’s getting ready for work, so she can get half a day in. I’ve got a bunch of things to finish up, so we can get ready for the initial run next week. Christmas in the middle of the week doesn’t help this year. So, what do you need?”

“I don’t remember seeing them in our garage, and I didn’t dig through the barn. Did you ever get a couple of molds so I can melt some gold into something other than wheel weights?”

He chuckled. “You wouldn’t have seen them in your garage or the barn. They’re stored in the bus barn. I got you three of them. Need me to bring one over?”

“Actually, I need all three. How big are they?”

“Standard four hundred troy ounce bars. I’ve got a pallet jack over there. I’ll meet you out there in ... five minutes okay?”

“See you then.”

I went back into the bedroom, where the girls were just starting to stir. It took me a couple of seconds to get dressed. “Marcia, you might consider wearing ... a swimsuit, or something light. It’s going to get hot for you in the garage.”

She nodded.

I went out front and over to the front door of Harry and Emily’s home. I spent a minute petting Jethro before Harry came out.

“Sorry, Cal, I didn’t even think of moving these into your garage, mostly because I didn’t think we’d need them. But I got them cheap, and didn’t know what might come up.”

“I understand.”

We got all three of them situated on the pallet jack, then pumped up so it was rolling. “One nice thing about having this driveway, at least we can do this,” I said, pulling the pallet jack over.

I opened one of the doors, then once it was down, picked the three molds up and carried them over to the other side. Harry was with me.

“Holy FUCK! I figured you’d found some more treasure or something while training Dora and Eve, but ... how much is here?”

“Thirty metric, thirty-three US, tons. There were ten trucks, all the Opel Blitz 3.6s, the three ton variant.”

Harry frowned. “That’s the German Wehrmacht version of our five ton. What’d you do, find hidden Nazi gold or something?”

I handed him one of the bars.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

I shook my head. “I’m guessing this is something that I can’t really appreciate just from reading about it, is it? That’s been almost everyone’s response to seeing these. Marcia got incredibly angry with me, even.”

“I don’t blame her. I know her name is going to change to Lewis in a few days, but she’s still a Kaufman. I don’t think you can truly appreciate the horror of what we found out had happened in those camps.”

“That’s a problem for me, Harry. I understand that there were around eight million Jews that Hitler had killed, trying to exterminate them as a people. It took him years to do it. I’ve got him beat by killing more than ten million Chinese, and I did it in a few seconds. Does that make me worse or better than Adolf Hitler?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it.

“I mean, what was he trying to do? Conquer the world. What, effectively, am I trying to do? Conquer the world. I admit that our methods are a little different. Hitler wanted to create a master race, that would be genetically superior to everyone else. I’m already there. If my children continue to breed true, by default we’ll be superior to everyone else on the planet, until eventually we supplant everyone else. Won’t happen overnight. Won’t happen for centuries, or even millennia. But that’s the future.”