Tummo Meditation
Yebisu massage center, Tibet Lane 7
"D-D-DID YOU SEE that g-g-g-guy by
the front door? He l-l-looked the spitting i-im-im... image of you. Don't you
th-th-think it's funny? D-d-did you borrow his ap-appearance?"
"Oh, Jean-Pierre, for Thor's sake," Pavel
said, setting aside his tea bowl. "Don't you have something better to do?
He looked like me, so what? Every human being has a lookalike. I've no idea who
my parents were; neither can I remember where I got his appearance from. Can a
man forget? But seeing as it's entered into the SS database... All right, all
right. Do shut up, will you? I need a break."
Obersturmführer Carpe promptly did as he'd been told.
The masseuse's fingertips pressed down on the veins of
Pavel's temples. A hot towel hugged his shoulders. A jasmine scent enveloped
his nostrils. He could hear his own breathing, calm and level. The Yebisu
massage parlor chain was the best in Moskau even though its employees weren't
at all Japanese but Chinese and Kalmuck trying hard to impersonate young
geishas.
The girl's touch became light and almost weightless.
Pavel began mouthing his favorite mantra that he'd memorized in the
special-training camp during his long internship in the Tibetan Tashilhunpo
Monastery.
His eyelids closed of their own accord. He could hear
the distant bubbling of a brook and the delicious singing of birds. The sounds
grew clearer. Stronger. More defined.
Pavel looked around him. He floated along a jungle
path amid palm trees of deep burgundy color entangled by masses of green
creepers. Parrots fluttered in the scarlet-red sky. Jets of hot steam escaped
geysers, enveloping the ground underfoot.
Funny how acidic my
subconscious is, Pavel thought. It's
probably the same with everyone prone to negativity.
Whenever he needed to have a think, he liked to go on
a meditation trip. His thoughts would roam in a strange world, dissolving in a
riot of color amidst orange birds and red grass. Sometimes he wondered if this
was what heaven looked like.
Tummo - which meant "the inner fire system"
in Tibetan - was a very special school of meditation. It indeed burned the
brain from the inside, heating it like coals. Experts didn't recommend doing it
often but only on special and very important occasions.
Now was exactly such a case.
Pavel walked up the orchid-entwined steps to the top
of a hill. A carved ivory throne awaited him there, surrounded by four red
drums. Pavel hit the drums one by one and began rocking in place, imbibing
their hum. As soon as the last echo died away, he took his place on the throne.
Immediately the vines entwined his bare feet; the sky overhead opened up, awash
with lightning.
Pavel stared hard in front of himself. Now. It was
coming.
He saw a penciled face. A delicate nose. Long hair.
The black dots of pupils. Olga Selina, a Viking TV presenter. She'd died two
months ago. Who would have thought: a celebrity, a University graduate, a TV
star with her own fan club - a guerrilla fighter? A leader of a Schwarzkopf
terrorist cell? Her group had attacked the cortege of Moskau's Oberkommandant
von Travinsky by ambushing it on Aryan Street. The terrorist attack of the year.
Armed with grenade launchers, the terrorists had set the front and rear cars on
fire while their snipers opened up on them from the roofs of the München
Shopping Center. The Oberkommandant had been the first to be killed, followed
by fifteen security staff and all eight of the attackers, eliminated by the
arriving Vogel helicopters. Four of the terrorists' bodies had never been
found: they'd been simply torn to shreds. They'd had to be identified using the
DNA tests provided by Gestapo researchers.
According to Jean-Pierre, all the top brass, the
Triumvirate included, had been in shock when they'd discovered that one of the
terrorists was a Viking TV star. Street cameras had registered the beginning of
the attack: Olga, in black leather, a Schmeisser slung over her shoulder,
snapping commands to the terrorists.
None of which was mentioned in the media, of course.
Celebrities suspected of having been in contact with guerrillas were sentenced
to a very special punishment: oblivion. The names of the actors, TV presenters
or singers who'd had the imprudence to commend the Forest Brotherhood on the
Shogunet network were forever expelled from the media.
This was death. No interviews, no talk show
appearances, nothing. Already a week later, the ostracized celebrity was
willing to star in the cheapest of porn simply to draw attention back to him or
herself. It didn't help. The punishment erased their names, dooming them to
oblivion - and no one was brave enough to challenge it.
Normally, such an ostracized actor or singer committed
suicide within three months. Some proved to be of sturdier stock, but none
lasted more than six months. Which was why Olga's disappearance hadn't really
surprised anyone - neither the audience nor her ex co-workers. She must have
done something, as simple as that.
The questioning of Kolychev - Olga's co-anchor -
hadn't turned anything up. He seemed to have been Olga's only friend and
clubmate. Apart from him, nothing: she had no family nor friends. They checked
Kolychev's phone but found no calls from her made after the attack.
The creepers had entwined Pavel's entire
body and closed in over his head. In places the vines had split, spewing out
acid-red petals.
The body of the TV presenter had never
been found. She, as well as three other terrorists, had been at the very
epicenter of the explosion. A bunch of bone fragments, tissue and some blood
had been the only material evidence available for DNA analysis.
But the unfortunate experiment that had
resulted in the mental incapacitation of the three Gestapo researchers had only
been conducted very recently. And at least one of the lunatics had recognized
Olga as a fiery angel - the fact that had cost him his sanity.
That could mean at least two things. Either the
afterworld indeed existed, revealing a winged fire-enveloped Olga to the
Gestapo researchers. Alternatively, she was the "trigger agent" that
the Triumvirate had ordered Pavel to locate. Olga Selina was the spitting image
of the fiery angel on the picture. He was almost sure of that.
But how was he supposed to find her if she was dead?
The sky crumbled, turning into knots of squirming
snakes. Geysers spat out jets of blood. The air thickened. Unseeing, Pavel
could sense panthers circling him, growling and swishing their tails.
She hadn't died. He could feel her
heart beat.
The body hadn't been found. Olga would rather
everybody considered her dead. Fingernails, bits of skin and the scraps of
bloodied clothing that had served as DNA material weren't really proof of
death.
But how had she managed to escape the city center
cordoned off by SS special forces? Camera footage had been thoroughly studied
but you couldn't really see that much: Aryan Street had been engulfed by smoke
and stone dust. The special forces had searched everything within a two-mile
diameter with a fine-tooth comb but found no one, neither dead nor wounded.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Blood seeped from under his
eyelids. The jungle came to life, each leaf wailing, a tornado swirling the
water into an enormous splattering twister. Words began typing in his head,
letter by Gothic letter imprinted on the typewriter ribbon,
The Ministry of
Public Education
München Shopping
Center
Oberkommandant's
Office
The Burgermeister's
Residence
That seemed to be it. On top of that, the Shopping
Center had been closed for renovation already a month. What else?
Oh yes, of course: the Temple of Odin. Neo
Scandinavian style: a fake cave, a copy of the Islandic Viking temple. Well,
well, well. According to Jean-Pierre's report, immediately after the terrorist
attack, the SS Zondercommando Kalinka
had searched all the adjacent buildings. They were all listed on a separate
sheet of paper, including their street numbers - those Gestapo bureaucrats
wouldn't have had it any other way.
There was only one building missing from the list. The
Temple of Odin. That's right. Who would come to a holy place with a search
warrant? That would defy reason. The priests of the cult of Asgard were the
cornerstones of the existing regime, just like television was. They had
enormous wages, houses, medals, SS ranks, the lot.
Which meant that no
one had checked the Temple.
And it was only fifty feet or so from the scene of the
attack. The smoke cover could possibly have allowed someone to rescue the
wounded girl and hide her on the Temple premises. The congregation's noticing
the bloody trail wasn't even a problem: sacrifices were frequent in Viking
temples, priests slaughtering rather large animals like sheep and goats. And
even if the search group had paid the Temple a visit, what then? "Guten
tag, Herr Priest, is everything all right?" - "Oh yes, sons of Odin,
all is well."
He had to go there, now. He needed to know whether
she'd been there.
The wailing in his ears stopped. The orange birds
exploded like toy balloons. The palm trees shrank, crumbling into flakes of
wheat cream. The throne melted into thin air.
Pavel opened his eyes.
He sprang to his feet, easing the masseuse girl aside.
The towel slid to the floor.
"Wake up," he shook Jean-Pierre. "We
need to get to the city center. Aryan Street."
They were walking through the door when Pavel saw the
Japanese man. He recognized him straight away: this was the same wrinkly old
boy who'd sat next to him on the flight in. He stood not far away, next to the
guard who, according to Jean-Pierre, was Pavel's lookalike.
The realization pierced Pavel's brain. He knew.
He's here for a
reason. He's come to get me.
Pavel stopped. He whipped out a Browning from his
pocket but failed to get a round off in time.
The thunder of an explosion ripped through the air.
Yellow flames seared Pavel's face.
Reichskommissariat Archives #1
File ZL8. Politicians
"... ON OCTOBER 20 1941 Wehrmacht troops entered Moskau. After two more months of fierce street
fighting they took control of the capital, including the Kremlin. The search
for Joseph Stalin garnered no results. According to the Main Security Office
report, he was behind the terrorist attack Vengeance '42 at the Nibelung square
that had wiped out the entire Reich elite. According to Abwehr's intel, later
Stalin used to hide in an underground bunker in Kuybyshev (now Führerburg) from
where he coordinated the Resistance's actions. After the taking of Führerburg,
he disappeared off the radar. The Ural and Siberian guerrilla groups still consider
Stalin their spiritual leader. Daniil, the patriarch of the Forest Church (the
sect that had united those of the Orthodox clergy who hadn't recognized
Russland's yielding to the battleaxes of the gods of Asgard) worked hard to
support the legend. According to it, Stalin had become a hermit living in the
thick of the Siberian taiga praying for victory. Between themselves, guerrilla
fighters call Stalin "the holy man" - he's a bit of a religious icon
for them.
His military
commander Klim Voroshilov escaped to Iran and went into hiding in
Kurd-controlled areas as "invited by Masoud Barzani". In 1948, he was
apprehended during a razzia by SS paratroopers but blew himself up with a
grenade during his arrest.
Russia's ex-Head of
State Mikhail Kalinin publicly denounced his old masters. He produced paperwork
proving his Aryan descent and got himself a job in the Reichskommissariat
Moskau. Later he worked for the Ministry of Finances under Walter Funk.
Having retreated
from Moskau, the Generals Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky formed the
"forest brigades" near Murmansk whose secret undergeound factories
produced everything they needed, including tanks and howitzers.
The Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill was captured during the taking of
London and imprisoned in the Tower in the same cell as Rudolf Hess had been.
Churchill committed suicide in 1949 by cutting his veins.
King George VI had
managed to escape to Canada on a submarine; from there, his trail was lost.
General Charles de Gaulle became the leader of the French resistance in Africa
and died in 1955 in the Madagascan jungle during a Luftwaffe air raid.
The Emperor
Hirohito, as tradition required, didn't leave his country during the entirety
of his rule; he even refused to visit the first Japanese nuclear test in 1948
on one of the Indonesian islands. Hirohito refused to grant Japanese
citizenship to the residents of the occupied territories. Which is why, unlike
the Japanese themselves with their white-bound passports, the Australians and
Alaskans have to make do with a temporary yellow ID card. Mixed marriages
between Japanese and Europeans are forbidden. A similar "racial
purity" law had been introduced in the Reich in 1935.
Now the Nippon koku
is ruled by Akihito who is indifferent to politics and spends his spare time
writing hokku. Both President Harry S. Truman and the US Commander in Chief
Dwight Eisenhower were tried by a Neuer York Tribunal and publicly hanged at
the Zeit Platz on December 11 1958. Both the Democratic and the Republican
parties had been banned as "loathsome samples of plutocracy in
politics". The remains of President Roosevelt had been exhumed and thrown
into the Hudson River to drum rolls.
Tens of thousands
of Americans died during pogroms (the so-called 'D.C. massacre') started by
Japanese released from relocation centers[i]. The Mikado's army didn't interfere,
announcing the slaughter to be their 'rightful revenge'. The pogromists burned
down the Capitol and the White House, causing many congressmen to choke to
death in the fire.
Chinese communists
have never stopped fighting the Nippon koku, their guerrilla units still going
strong in most of the country's provinces. Their leader Mao Tse-Tung made it
his goal to leave as many successors as he could, calling his project The Hydra
of a Billion Heads. By the time of his death from cancer in 1982 in the
rainforests of Yunnan Province, he'd had three hundred children from a hundred
young female guerrilla fighters. Other field commanders had adopted the same
system, supplying Chinese communists with plenty of new cadre.
Stalin's deputy
Nikita Khrushchev was arrested in Moskau in 1980. All that time, he'd been
hiding in his own apartment but no one had thought of looking for him there.
Permitted for
public release
Signed: Deputy
Reichskommissar Paul von Breuwitz
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