The Sins of the Father
AN: This story takes place in the same continuity as 'Evolving Combat', and deals with some historically touchy subject matter. I've done my best to be accurate, honest and fair in my portrayal of German history.
Hans Grüber, auror on station at the small town of Nordhausen in central Germany felt he had one of the easiest jobs in the county. Nothing even happened in the rural area that made up his workspace, and most of his days he could just stay in his office at the town hall. Today, however, his peace was rudely disrupted by someone marching into his office. Grüber's first instinct was to turn around on his chair and ask the person if they had ever learned the subtle art of knocking, buy his words froze in his throat when he got a good look at the 'intruder'.
The man wore a black jumpsuit with shining black combat boots underneath. On his right hip was a wand–holster, in which a mate black battlewand (a 94 GP) rested, and his head was covered by a dark blue beret. His cold grey eyes held little patience for fools and his blonde hair had been cut extremely short giving him a dangerous look. But what really caused the Grüber to swallow his biting remark was the insignia in the man's uniform: a white shield with a golden German eagle clutching a wand, crested by golden oak leaves. It identified his visitor as part of the Magische Schutzgruppe-7, MSG-7 for short. They were the German equivalent of the British Special Magical Service or the North American Omega-units, and fell directly under the Abteilung der Unbekannten. Whenever the regular auror's were not up to a task, these elite forces were there to perform the impossible.
"Auror Grüber? I am Captain Schmidt, B-company, MSG-7. We have need of your local expertise."
Grüber nodded nervously. After all, it is not every day that a small-town law enforcement officer was asked to assist his county's special forces on some mysterious assignment.
"I'd be happy to help, of course. What can I do for you, Sir?"
"Grüber, you're an amateur speleologist, aren't you?" When the auror answered affirmative, Schmidt continued. "You see, the situation is like this. After a lead from our British colleagues, we identified a branch of Neo-Nazi's and Grindewald-supporters that seem to have taken an unhealthy interest in this region, revisiting places that should never exist again, should never have existed in the first place. I think you can feel where I'm going with this?"
Grüber thought for a moment, before he went deadly white. "they wouldn't…" he muttered to himself, then turned to the officer. "You want to investigate Mittelwerk?"
The Schmidt nodded. "Indeed. And since you are the local expert on the tunnels and mineshafts that criss-cross the mountain, We need you to guide us."
After a short drive to the Kohnstein, and procuring access to the nearby mines, Grüber led the fifteen members of MSG-7 through the cramped mineshafts. It wasn't easy, because each man was armed to the teeth and carried a lot of equipment, and as they travelled deeper the humidity increased as well. Grüber explained that only the pumps of the mine kept them from flooding, and that the section they were looking for was most likely warded to keep the water out. After almost an hour of crawling through the extensive mine complex, he stopped in front of a concrete wall.
"Here it is, behind this lies the magical section of Mittelwerk. You'll have to blow a hole yourself though, the muggle-repellent wards are still up, so they didn't dig through." He pointed at a few rusted metal stakes sticking visible through the wall. "Looks like you're in luck. If you cut through here you'll end up close to the ceiling."
Schmidt nodded, then ordered his engineer to melt a hole through the concrete. He turned to Grüber.
"Thank you, auror. Please wait behind the last bend, we'll be back in about two hours."
Grüber nodded. He didn't doubt for a second that this mission would be dangerous, and no matter how much he wanted a chance to explore the 'abandoned' bunker, he decided to let the professionals handle this. While he walked away, he heard the engineer call out he was through. One of Schmidt's men went down the hole first, his path only illuminated by the greenish light of the glow-sticks tossed in before him.
"you see anything?"
Smith whispered after a few seconds, but all that answered him was the sound of someone doing their best not to expel their lunch. Curious, Schmidt dropped himself through the hole, and suffered nearly the same reaction as the man that went before him. The badly-illuminated room looked like something out of a horror film. There were body parts all over the place, several carefully-extracted nervous systems floating in man-high tanks next to smaller ones containing nearly every organ in the human body. The laboratory was filled with all kinds of medical equipment, albeit horribly outdated by the looks of it.
The worst, however, was a partially dissected body was strapped to the operating table, silver and glass tubes sticking into him all over his body, his face frozen eternally in a look of excruciating agony. There must have been a stasis ward in place, because everything looked like it had only been days instead of decades the place was abandoned, and the smell was horrible. But most revealing was the clothing of the partially dissected man: Despite the caked blood the remains of blue-striped, coarse pyjamas could easily be identified, and everybody knew what that meant. A victim of Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, used for one sick experiment or the other.
One by one the men of MSG-7 made their way into the hospital from hell, and one by one the men were hit by the smell. The team's medic quickly checked the room to see if he could identify its purpose while the rest of the team tried to determine what to do next.
"Any Ideas what they were up to here, Claus?" Schmidt asked his medic.
"Some, none of them pleasant." Came the reply. "My best guess is that they were trying to deduce what makes a wizard different from a muggle, where our magic was actually coming from. I'm not sure what they were planning to do with it, but the fact that these experiments took place in a weapons factory…" He trailed off. "I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they'd do it here."
Any further theorising was interrupted when suddenly the structure reverberated with a piercing scram of pure agony, and all members of the team scrambled for their weapons. Someone else was alive in here!
"This way, quick." Schmidt directed his unit through the concrete corridors, some of them filled with mud and mould but all in all relatively clean. They closed in on the screams, sneaking past long-abandoned laboratories which held numerous appliances of indeterminable purpose adorned with Swastika's and eagles. Down the end of one of the tunnels they could clearly see the ward that kept the water out, a shimmering blue holding back a dark wall. Further and further into the sprawling complex they went. They were close enough now to hear two voices scream, one in agony and another in desperation. The screams came from behind a heavy steel door, not unlike the one they had used to exit from the first laboratory. Like the professionals they were five of them took up breaching positions, ready for the order, while the others secured the corridor. Schmidt himself took the position of element leader, while he softly ordered his team.
"On my mark, Stunners only, we're here for information. Ready, GO!"
The group of five soldiers was, as is usual in such situations, divided in two pairs, Blue and Red, with a fifth man as the element leader. They were set in a line, pressed to the wall on the hinge-side of the door while each man covered a part of the corridor. The moment Schmidt gave the order Blue one kicked in the door while Blue two fired a Concussus into the room. Only seconds after the spell had done it's disorienting work, the two Blues went in Following the Right-hand wall, firing stunners at anything that moved, while at the left-hand wall, the two Reds did the same. Schmidt came in last, and took position near the door.
"Clear!" shouted Blue one, less than a second later echoed by Red one. Schmidt's attention, however, was on the operating table in the centre of the room. A woman, he estimated her to be in her early forties, was tied down and had been cut open, much like the body they had found in the room they had used to gain entrance to the complex. Unlike that man, however, she was still slightly alive. Schmidt cursed, called for a medic and rushed to the victim's side.
"Easy madam, easy. We're here to help you. It'll be okay. Everything will be all right."
The woman turned to him, trying, but failing to speak out loud due to the hoarseness from screaming. Schmidt leaned in closer, trying to hear the words she could hardly say due to her failing breathing.
"Please, Please, sir … daughter … Save her… please…"
Schmidt was pulled away by his medic, who checked her pulse and breathing.
"I'm sorry sir, She's gone. There's nothing I can do now."
He gave a curt nod, righteous furry radiating off him. He looked over to the three prisoners in blood-stained labcoats, and if looks could have killed, they would have been reduced to ash in an instant.
"Guard them until I'm back. If they make any attempt to break out, kill them." He growled to his men, who nodded. He then turned to the rest of MSG-7 in the corridor. "There's another prisoner held somewhere in this complex, a female of undetermined age. We'll get her out of here. Alpha stays here to guard the prisoners, Bravo heads back the way we came, Charlie checks the rest of this corridor. If we've not found anything in ten minutes, we return here. Move out!"
But, as it turned out, they did not have to wait ten minutes. Only five minutes after giving the order, Schmidt received the message that Charlie had found a little girl, only ten years old. She was held in a makeshift prison, in an old freezer that had once been used to store the bases supplies. He send the team back up with the traumatized girl, then ordered one of his prisoners dragged to the storeroom. He had some pressing questions, and he wanted some answers, dammit!
As it turned out, the first two captives were disciplined enough to keep their mouths shut and refused to even acknowledge Schmidt's existence. The third, however, was much more talkative and, Smith decided, quite a nutcase. He kept on blabbering about the 'Great Works' done here during the war, how they would have obliterated the 'Enemies of Purity' if they'd only had more time, and that the 'Mudbloods had it coming'. Schmidt didn't even need to use force to get the man to talk.
"Well, Doctor, tell me what was going on here?" He asked his captive. That got the man going, almost as if he was happy to tell someone about the work he had done in secret.
"The scientists that worked here during the war discovered, in their greatness, a ritual-based curse based on transfiguration that uses magic to transfer matter into pure magical energy. The only problem was that the first thing the ritual usually claimed was the caster's life, and that, to make it truly powerful, it needed every drop of magical energy in a person."
Schmidt interrupted. "But why here, Why in a weapons plant?"
"I'll get to that in a moment, man-in-black. The project was called 'Odin's Wrath', and it's aim was to drain the magic from some, ahem… 'volunteers', equip V-2's with the magical warhead, and sent them to London. Or the mainland US, if they'd ever got that A-10 off the ground. Of course, hurdles had to be taken: How to drain and store one's magic, then release it in a controlled fashion? It was the brilliant Healer Meßinger who figured it out. He used the brains and nervous systems of the magical donors to coordinate the release, and even guide the missile so it would never miss its target!"
The voice of the man was cracking with glee, and Schmidt figured that if this man were to be brought to court, he would probably be declared criminally insane.
"So that was what you were doing? Continuing the work on 'Odin's wrath'?" He asked. The man started laughing, which somehow made the hairs at the back of his neck stand up. Something was definitely wrong here.
"Not just continuing, man-in-black, No, we've improved it! When we arrived, we found that the organic matter on the warheads in storage had degraded. You see, these things have a horrible shelf-life, It would be best to produce them, then send them off to the launch pad immediately. But Now, we have three of them, ready to be shipped to our Brothers in England! Odin's Wrath will come to the enemies of purity!"
Each word hit Schmidt like a hammer's stroke. Three? Three weapons that were the magical equivalent of Nukes? And in the hands of these terrorists? He knew had no choice. He had to strike fast to disable those weapons before they made it out of the mountain, but in order to guard these men, he would, again, need to leave some troops behind. He walked out of the interrogation room and gave some swift orders. Two men were to stay behind and guard the prisoners, while the rest of the men would continue on towards the weapons bunker, where the bombs waited for them. While the men prepared their weapons, he pulled his Medic apart for a little chat.
"Claus, That guy we captured kept talking about a healer called Meßinger, who apparently thought up this sick place. Now, I want the truth: Did. You. Know?"
When Medical sergeant Claus Meßinger heard the name, he recoiled as if he had been physically struck. His shoulders slummed and he dropped his head. He took a few moments to collect himself, and when he spoke, his voice was laced with shame.
"No sir, I didn't. All I know about my Great-Uncle is that he worked in several concentration camps, was captured when Dora-Mittelbau fell to the advancing allies, and was executed after the war for Crimes against Humanity. It's one of the reasons I chose to be a Healer, then joined MSG: To do penance for the 'sins of the father', taking the evil out of the world and helping the good to live. I never knew he was responsible for something this bad."
When he looked up, he saw his captain smiling apologetically at him.
"I'm sorry, Claus, but I had to ask. Now, let's go destroy this place. What could be a better way to make up for those crimes than if the Nephew of the one who did it were to be the one to raze it?"
With a renewed fire the remaining men made their way forwards, quickly stumbling on the main assembly line. Slipping from shadow to shadow, they swept through the rusted hulks of cranes, trucks and even some missiles themselves. Even though it was very clear these were not the missiles they were looking for –they were far to rusty- the men from MSG-7 still shoved detonators up the exhaust pipes. They would blow these when they were on the way out, forever disabling the fifty-year old weapons.
Deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain they went, creeping ever closer to their goal, until, at last, they saw the missiles. Each V-2 was painted in a drab olive colour, except for the tips, which were yellow with black bands around them. There were, like the mad doctor had told them, three of them. Two were already loaded on trailers, while the third was just being loaded onto one by a large ceiling-mounted crane. The area was crawling with people. Guards, scientists, workers, all moving around the underground cavern illuminated by arc lamps. Using hand signals, Schmidt relayed his plan to his soldiers. In response, four men broke away from the group and backtracked slightly, using a pair of ladders to ghost to the upper walkway, two of them armed with a LR. After he visually confirmed them to be in position, he counted to three before he signalled his two point men to launch a Concussus into the room. Even before the ringing in his ears had stopped, he burst into the room with the rest of the team hot on his heels.
"HALT! MSG-7, Drop your wands!" Schmidt shouted at the stunned people in the loading dock. They managed to drop half of the people, mostly scientists and workers, before the guards caught up, and opened fire, forcing Schmidt's team into cover. On the other end of the bay another group of guards came running towards the battle.
"Get to the trucks! Get the missiles out of here! Nothing else matters!" A voice shouted from the newly-arrived group with a distinct British accent. Not that that registered in Schmidt's brain. All he heard was someone trying to get the missiles out, and he wasn't going to let that happen on his watch. He knew he was taking a risky gamble, which could lead to the total destruction of the base, his team and the surrounding five miles of countryside if he were wrong. Still, the other option was even less desirable.
"Gold section, take down those missiles!" Schmidt yelled up towards the men on the walkway, who had until then been supressing any attempts to get to the trucks. When they got the order, both snipers turned their LR's to the two finished missiles, took careful aim and fired three piercing curses in rapid succession.
The plan had come from one of the snipers, who was a bit of a rocketry nut. Using one of the rusted hulks they had passed on the way to the loading area, he had shown his CO and fellow troopers the internal build of a V-2. He theorised that no one in his right mind would transport the missiles fully fuelled with both the alcohol-based fuel and the liquid oxygen used as an oxidiser. Therefore, a few well-placed shots at the main oxygen tank should be enough to –at least temporarily- disable the weapons. A puncture of the main LOx tank was, however, rather simple to fix, and would be only a minor inconvenience. To be absolutely sure the missiles wouldn't fly, the combustion chamber needed to be punctured, but there was a major caveat in doing so: slightly above the combustion chamber sat the HTP tank. HTP is a highly concentrated form of hydrogen peroxide, a very nasty substance. Extremely reactive with basically every other substance, you seriously don't want to be anywhere in the vicinity of a HTP spill. Especially if said spill had a slim chance of reaching the organic matter in the V2 warhead, detonating it. However, the sniper in question was confident that he would be able to avoid hitting the peroxide tank, and Schmidt trusted him. Besides, what other options did he have?
A second curse flew out and hit the rear of one of the rockets. Schmidt watched the hole closely for a moment, yet to his relief nothing happened. But while the sniper began to aim for the second missile, Schmidt spotted a pair of guards making a run for the truck on which it rested.
"Tango's, left, take them down!"
His men turned swiftly, and succeeded in eliminating one of the runners. The other, however, managed to find shelter in the cab of the truck. Only a second later, the roar of a starting diesel could be heard over the sound of combat. The truck began to back a few meters, undoubtedly to make the turn to the exit road easier, just as the sniper took the shot. Immediately after impact, steam began to escape from the entry hole.
"GAS, GAS, GAS!" Schmidt cried out, reaching for his own protective mask. He already felt his eyes stinging with the effects of the vapours that began to fill the air. He quickly put on his mask and jacked in the comms. On the other side of the bay, he could see some guards place bubblehead charms on their heads, while others began running for the exits
"This is leader. Confirm masks on."
One by one the teams reported their masks were on and they were ready to receive further orders. Before Schmidt could give any, the proverbial dam burst, literally. The underside of the V2 gave way, the metal fully reduced by the HTP. A torrent of the liquid rushed out, splashing in all directions. Some went in the cab, where the driver was still furiously trying to make his way out with his cargo, unaware of the spill behind him.
Seconds later, the truck came to an abrupt halt as the door was thrown open and the unfortunate driver tumbled out. He had horrible burns on most of his body, and his clothes were smouldering. He obviously tried to scream in pain, but hardly any sound came out: his lungs had been burned away by the caustic substance. Others had been harmed too, tough to a lesser degree. Several men were grasping for their throats, the blistered airways cutting of their supply of oxygen. Some of the men with bubblehead charms on tried to help, despite the decolouration of their skin, and the blisters which began to form. One of them, the leader, shouted to the men of the MSG.
"We surrender! We surrender! Just get us out of here!"
Half an hour later, back into the sunlight, Auror Grüber was being cleared by the medics of the HAZMAT-team of the German Bundeswehr. Several medical vehicles were using the old Launchpad as their base, most of them loaded with horribly disfigured soldiers. Helicopters landing on the far end delivered more men in the MSG uniform, and Grüber thought he also saw a few Unbekanten walking to the entrance. They would undoubtedly go through the base with a fine-toothed comb, and anything they would find would be classified so deep even the Mariana trench would be considered a small puddle. Suddenly, he saw a familiar face walking by.
"Captain Schmidt!" He called out to the man who had gotten him involved in this. "Seems like you found something down there."
The captain turned to him with a wry smile on his face.
"We may or may not have bumped into one or two things there, most of them unpleasant. That's all I can tell you though."
Grüber nodded, and pointed to the other end of the launch pad, where a helicopter with wounded was just taking off. "I'm not even sure I want to know what was going on down there, put thank you for stopping it, whatever it was."
They shook hands, and Grüber began to walk towards the aparation point, disguised as a portable toilet. Hopefully, this was the last time his district had to handle something like this, he thought. He preferred some rural peace and quiet.