Weapons of choice

Kolhammer froze the slide show on a sepia-toned studio image of his great-uncle Hans and great-aunt Hilda. The photograph had been torn before being digitized long ago, and Kolhammer had asked the image bureau to leave the imperfection as it was. He liked it that way. Family photographs, he firmly believed, should be weathered and a little damaged by age and handling. It was proof of one generation handing on history to the next.

He stared at the portrait of Hans and Hilda, peering into the hollow space around their eyes. Knowing and yet not really understanding what misery and horror danced slowly in there. The photo had been taken in New York in 1952, but both were still draped in heavy European clothes. Kolhammer accepted that the long sleeves weren't simply an expression of emigre formality. He remembered spending many hours with his great-uncle as a boy. And he knew that under the heavy serge suit was a tattoo of which Hans was unspeakably ashamed. It had been burned there by a minor functionary of Heinrich Himmler's SS and it marked him as a survivor of the Final Solution.

Hans had kept it hidden for many years, but late in his life-just after a young Phillip Kolhammer had taken his commission in the U.S. Navy-a trembling, wasted Uncle Hans had left his nursing home and traveled across the continent to visit his nephew. The trip was unannounced. Hans simply up and left one day and there was hell and high interest to pay when he got back. He was struggling with the latter stages of Parkinson's by then, a foe that would claim him where the fuhrer's minions had failed.

Young Phillip was surprised, enchanted, and little concerned when the old guy turned up without warning. He hadn't taken his medication with any sort of regularity, and the cross-country road trip in a Greyhound bus had been awfully tough on his old bones. But Hans had waved that aside, seized his favorite nephew in a weak, shaky bear hug, and told him how proud he was to see a Kolhammer in the uniform of his liberators. After a few hours of drinking and bullshitting and of Marie fretting endlessly, Uncle Hans took Phillip aside. They had men's business to discuss, he told Marie, as he led her husband into a bedroom.

They stood in there, alone, and a terrible stillness came over his twitching face as he stripped his sleeves and bared his arm, pointing at the tattoo.

"You promise me now, nephew," he said. "Promise me that for as long as there is breath in your body and you wear the uniform of a free country, you promise me that you will never allow this evil a place in the world again."

Phillip Kolhammer had promised.

PART THREE

ALLIANCES

18

THE SARUWAGED RANGES, NEW GUINEA, 0445 HOURS, JUNE 1942

The last village lay a thousand feet below them. Amyen, a small, tight cluster of bark huts, was set among limestone lakes and gardens of sweet potato, which gradually gave onto forest at the foot of the ranges. It was unmarked on any maps, unknown to the colonial authorities in Port Moresby.

Warrant Officer Peter Ryan huddled in the mouth of the cave and peered out into the freezing mists. He knew that seven thousand feet below them lay the Wain and Naba country, and the flatlands of the Markham River. Were it not for the accursed mountain weather he'd probably be able to see Lae and Salamaua, where the Japs were already busy digging in.

It was another world down there, oppressively hot and humid, with thick, primordial jungle clinging to the edge of fast-flowing rivers. For Ryan, the dense, superheated air of the lowlands was reminiscent of a big Chinese laundry, or some other confined place where you'd find large quantities of boiling water. Up here, though, the conditions were practically arctic as they clumped together in the cramped limestone cave.

A thick, foul-smelling fug of body odors, and smoke, and human grease reached out for him from the dark recesses of the cave. The last of his native carriers were huddled together in there on sheets of beaten bark. He'd set out from Amyen with fifteen stout boys. The last four had gone down with a fever in the cave the previous night. Ryan knew he'd get no more work from them. His native sergeant, Kari, had offered to try and get the bearers to their feet, but Ryan told him not to bother. They were best left there, under the watch of Constable Dinkila, while the two of them made the last push up to the ridge.

"We'll move faster without them or the baggage," said Ryan.

"They won't be here when we get back, boss," Kari argued. "Then we won't need baggage. Just coffins."

Ryan essayed a weak smile at his friend.

"Needs must when the Devil drives, Sergeant. There's something quite odd going on up this mountain. And I'm Johnny-on-the-spot."