retribution. His desire to watch her son burn—literally burn; to luxuriate in each crackling scream—quickened his blood more than ever. It was the itch of a phantom limb, beyond relief. Burton was dead: torpedoed and drowned off the coast of West Africa. Hochburg had issued the order himself. It was a decision he had come to lament.
As the war in Rhodesia had spread back across the border to Kongo, he spent his nights imagining Burton’s final seconds. The boy’s panic as the ship began to list and fill with flames; the dilemma of surrendering himself to the fire or waves. A man would always throw himself overboard: the virulence of the human organism demanded that it preserve itself, if only for a few minutes longer. Inevitably, Burton would breathe salt water: that was the moment Hochburg regretted.
He had been cheated of his final look into the boy’s eyes, its exchange of triumph and failure. Then Burton would descend into the darkness and oblivion, a release Hochburg had been denied. He knew who suffered the most: Hochburg lived with the pain of losing Eleanor every day.
A Leibwache entered carrying a canister that sloshed with fuel. Behind him, Zelman stumbled into the room. “They’ve reached the command center. We’ve only minutes to spare.”
“What happened to the radio operator?” asked Hochburg.
His deputy went to the portrait of the Führer and flicked the switch hidden in the frame, doing so with a familiarity that made Hochburg bristle. The painting swung open to reveal a secret chamber. In the ground was a trapdoor that led to an underground passage out of the Schädelplatz.
“I’m not slinking out of here,” said Hochburg, sheathing the knife.
“Oberstgruppenführer,” implored Zelman. “We must go now.” His voice was sucked into the passage.
Hochburg turned to the Leibwache with the petrol. “The books,” he said. It may have been too late to save the Schädelplatz, but his enemies would not make spoils of his precious volumes. He supervised the dousing of his library, then ordered Zelman to burn them; striking the match himself would be too heartbreaking.
He stepped to the veranda. Below, the square was empty except for his men creating a perimeter. Streaks of light blazed on the hallowed ground as the bombardment continued overhead. There was one final object he had to save.
The most prized thing of all.
* * *
Beneath his boots was an expanse of human crania. Twenty thousand nigger skulls, as Hochburg thrilled to tell visitors. This was the place that gave the Schädelplatz its name: the “square of skulls,” the ground cobbled with bone.
In the rosy dawn mist, he allowed himself to savor the square one final time. It was the fortress of his heart: a vast quadrangle, the perimeter covered by cloisters, with guard towers on each of the corners, from which soldiers were firing into the jungle beyond. The northern wall was obscured in scaffolding where they were repairing the damage wrought by Burton and his team of assassins the year before. Burton had been hired by a cabal of Rhodesian industrialists and British intelligence; when Burton failed, Hochburg used this attempt on his life to justify his attack on Rhodesia. Flanked by the Leibwachen, Hochburg ransacked the workmen’s equipment for a tool, then strode into the center of the square. Fenris bounded after him.
Hochburg raised the pickaxe above his head and brought it crashing down—once, twice—spitting mortar and chips of skull.
One of the guard towers vanished in a balloon of fire. There was a second blast and a section of the wall was punched wide open. A tank rumbled into the square; behind it came Belgian fighters, one of them carrying a banner of yellow stars against a peacock-blue background: the old flag of Belgian Congo and now a symbol of resistance. They wavered as they saw the ground.
“Where does a guerrilla army get a tank?” said Hochburg. It was an old British Crusader from the