Neither had created their base platform, they had simply co-opted the core from other factions’ platforms and added their own personal hatred. Hans didn’t hate. He simply wanted to be on the winning team which dominated the world. Killing never seemed to bother him. Then again, he had never had to kill a child or pregnant woman. Nobody told him to strap on explosives and obliterate a crowd. They told him whom they wanted dead and by when; the rest was up to him.
No, the spirit of glasnost, which caused Germany to be re-united again, had simply opened more doors for him than it had closed. His party had gotten stronger and had more sympathizers in power. Now he worked with Russians, Brits, and Americans spying for them in a quasi-common cause rather than spying on them for each other. This new game was a somewhat safer game, even if more deadly. Now, if he got nabbed by the other side, no fewer than two of those countries would deploy military forces to get him out of trouble. The story would be on CNN within an hour and citizens from civilized countries would be asking why the troops hadn’t deployed already. In the old days, if he got nabbed, he would die a slow agonizing death over the course of months, or years, and nobody would ever hear about it. Of course, captives seemed to have a life expectancy of hours if they were American.
September 11 had been a blunder of biblical proportions for bin Laden. Had he just crashed planes into the Pentagon and other U.S.-only structures, the rest of the world would have had only limited outcry. Taking out the Twin Towers pushed every industrialized country into the fight. Even China, a country which wasn’t the best friend of the U.S. And had been playing a cat and mouse game with a downed spy plane only weeks before, called the White House to tell the Americans its airspace was open for anything they needed to fly over. “Just be certain it is broadcasting an American IDC when it flies over and we will route traffic out of its way” was the phrase Hans had heard. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter. The magnitude of their airspace being open was large enough.
There were less visible changes brought about by September 11 as well. Influential members of Hans’ party had gotten funding and built an interrogation camp deep in the Bohemian Forest between Altglashutte and Schlattein. A few hills and woods over it built another camp of the older, more famous style. The location was chosen because of its seclusion and because they could fly people in via Nuremberg, then drive them secretly just over 100 miles to the camp. Some of the party elders must have felt nostalgic building a camp not far from another historical camp, Flossenburg. Had there not been scholars and tourists visiting what remained of the other camp, they probably would have simply re-opened that camp. At least they built it over 250 miles from Birkenau. Most of the world knows Birkenau by another name: Auschwitz.
***********************
You are reading a special promotional version of “Infinite Exposure” containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:
[…] <Previous Part Next Part> […]