Santa Fe Heat: Volume Three of the New Mexico Trilogy

By Gloria H. Giroux

The 1980s were a miasma of new thoughts, fashions, music, and ideas and for many people a respite from the turbulent ’70s. The city of Santa Fe is bursting with the new veneer. Even so, there are dark clouds roiling over the city and its inhabitants, stoking fires that will consume the innocent as well as the guilty.
The next generation of the Grayhawk clan and their close relatives and friends has begun to make its mark, many choosing the professions of their parents or friends. Although their development is generally positive, the plague of the decade has infiltrated their lives and changed the course of many.
Besides the personal impacts of life, the clan finds themselves battling evil on two fronts. One antagonist is executing vengeance on people who have wrought inhuman savagery on the world, seeking true “eye for an eye” justice. The other seeks a much more personal vengeance directed at Memphis Grayhawk and his family and lurks in the background until the time is ready to strike.
The passion and determination of all factions heats up until it bursts into a roaring conflagration. Will it consume only the unremorseful perpetrators, or will the flames of hatred burn everything in sight, leaving only ash and destruction?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663221797

Gloria H. Giroux

Gloria H. Giroux was born in North Adams, MA. Raised in Hartford, CT, she graduated from Bulkeley High School, the University of Connecticut and the Computer Processing Institute subsequently embarking on a double career of IT and writing. The author of nineteen fiction novels, Keene Retribution is homage to a special place in her life in New England. She currently lives in Arizona where she is working on her next book.

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Copyright © 2021 Gloria H. Giroux.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-2180-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2178-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2179-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021909688

iUniverse rev. date: 05/17/2021

Contents

Author’s Foreword

Returning Characters

Cast Of New Characters

Cast Of Additional Characters

Prologue

Book One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Book Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Book Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Author’s Foreword

By the author

Fireheart: Volume One of the Chay Trilogy

Whitefire: Volume Two of the Chay Trilogy

Firesoul: Volume Three of the Chay Trilogy

Bloodfire: Prequel to the Chay Trilogy

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Copper Snake, Volume One of the San Francisco Trilogy

Voices of Angels, Volume Two of the San Francisco Trilogy

Out of the Ash, Volume Three of the San Francisco Trilogy

Bloodline in Chiaroscuro, Prequel to the San Francisco Trilogy

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Saguaro, Volume One of the Arizona Trilogy

Crucifixion Thorn, Volume Two of the Arizona Trilogy

Devil Cholla, Volume Three of the Arizona Trilogy

Ironwood, Sequel to the Arizona Trilogy

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Santa Fe Blood, Volume One of the New Mexico Trilogy

Santa Fe Bones, Volume Two of the New Mexico Trilogy

Santa Fe Heat, Volume Three of the New Mexico Trilogy

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MAP OF THE UNITED STATES

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MAP OF EUROPE

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MAP OF NEW MEXICO

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MAP OF SANTA FE

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All photographs including cover shot courtesy of author Gloria H. Giroux

Maps and Special Images by Shutterstock

Author’s Foreword

134.1°F.

That is arguably the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. It occurred on Thursday, July 10, 1913 at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley, California. Some scientists have challenged this number, stating that it may have been artificially high due to a sandstorm that caused superheated surface materials to register that number. Some historians and meteorologists hold to the veracity of that number, but others believe that the real highest temperature occurred at 129.2°F on June 20, 2013 in Death Valley and on July 21, 2016 in Mitribah, Kuwait. In either case, it was hot.

In New Mexico, the hottest temperature ever recorded was 122°F on July 27, 1994 in Lakewood, a tiny community in the southwestern part of the state, sixteen miles from Carlsbad. A short month before that, on June 29, 1994, Lake Havasu City, Arizona recorded its highest temperature at 128°F. In contrast the hottest temperature ever recorded in nearby Colorado was a paltry 114°F on July 1, 1933 at Las Animas.

These temperatures, however, pale in comparison to the heat generated by natural phenomena such as fire, flowing lava, the earth’s core, and the stars and suns. Earth’s sun is the star at the center of our solar system. Its approximate age is 4.6 billion years. A nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma it is one hundred and nine times the diameter of Earth, its mass 330,000 times of the Earth’s mass, and its composition 75% hydrogen. At the sun’s core gravitational attraction produces immense pressure and temperature, which can reach more than twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit. At its surface, also called the photosphere, the temperature is only a mild six thousand degrees.

In comparison the Earth’s core sizzles at 7,952°F to about 10,800°F. The core is comprised of two layers: the outer core, which borders the mantle, and the inner core. The boundary separating these regions is called the Bullen discontinuity. Earth spits out its heat through volcanic lava, which when the fiery molten blob edges out of the volcano reaches temperatures up to 2,200°F. If a person were to fall into that lava he would combust into flames and die. He might survive a fall into cooler lava of, say, 1,000°F; there would be significant charring of flesh that even if he survived he’d live with terrible scars forever.

In 79 AD Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy erupted, spewing a high column of hot ash and pumice and then over a period of two days disgorging a rapidly moving, dense lava flow ranging from 570–680°F that eventually destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Hot ash turned hundreds of citizens into what resembled stone sculptures, some, because of the high heat, who died in a fraction of a second. The contorted postures of bodies as if frozen in suspended action were not the effects of long agony, but of the cadaveric spasm, a consequence of heat shock on corpses. The heat was so intense that organs and blood were vaporized, and at least one victim’s brain was vitrified by the temperature; i.e., turned to glass.

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Non-star, non-lava, non-lightning-strike fire is another matter entirely. Created by nature or man, the heat depends on the circumstances. The Hiroshima bomb (nicknamed Little Boy) developed by the Manhattan Project exploded on August 6, 1945 at a height of 1,870 feet above ground for maximum effect. The bomb’s explosive force then shot directly down to earth below (ground zero), spread swiftly out to surrounding hills, and then rebounded back into the city. At an energy release of thirteen kilotons of TNT the bomb resulted in a surface temperature of 10,830°F. A fiery holocaust of utter devastation turned a city of 350,000 into an ashen pit of horror with the final death toll settling between 90,000 to 146,000; 80,000 were killed instantly. The radius of total destruction was about one mile with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles.

Three days later a second bomb (nicknamed Fat Man) was dropped on Nagasaki with a release of a surface temperature of 7,200°F. The bomb itself was more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, but the geography of hills and valleys where the bomb actually hit mitigated the casualties. The final death toll ranged from 39,000 to 80,000 in a similar one-mile radius of the strike.

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Nagasaki, August 9, 1945

Famous fires and bombs have ranged in temperature and destructiveness over the decades. The Great Chicago Fire occurred on the same day as the Great Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin, October 8, 1871. The fire killed more than two hundred fifty people and left 100,000 homeless. Legend says the fire occurred after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lamp, setting a barn and the whole city on fire. There’s no proof the cow started the fire. The fire caused an estimated $200 million in damages. In 2021 dollars, that’s over $5 billion.

The destruction of San Francisco in 1906 was not the direct result of the earthquake itself but rather of the fires started with broken gas lines and other combustible materials.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 was an inferno that took the lives of one hundred forty-six people, mostly women workers.

On November 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub, which had its walls and ceilings covered in paper palm tree decorations, caught fire when someone lit a match. The nightclub was filled with more than twice its capacity, killing four hundred ninety-two people. The building didn’t have a fire sprinkler system and the primary exit was a revolving door.

On July 6, 1944 Hartford, Connecticut’s historical fire took place during a Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus performance. A side wall of a tent caught fire and collapsed; more than one hundred of the one hundred sixty-eight people killed were under the age of fifteen. Overcrowding and an inadequate number of exits made escaping difficult.

The Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas went up in flames on April 19, 1993, killing dozens of adults and children. In retaliation the soulless Timothy McVeigh unleashed a bomb of immense power and released heat two years later to the day on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The fires caused by the deliberate ramming of the Twin Towers by hijacked passenger planes on September 11, 2001 rose to a burn temperature of around 1,800°F. Steel girders can sustain their stability up to 2,800°F. They didn’t melt under the temperatures of the burning jet fuel but rather lost enough strength and were softened, eventually bringing down the towers. There was no respite from the sprinkler system whose water pipes had been damaged by the collisions and were unable to function on the floors where the heat burned the hottest. The horror of burning alive caused many people to choose death by throwing themselves out of the building to a quick death as they hit the pavement over a thousand feet below.

The deliberate incineration of corpses, known as cremation, requires 1,400°F-1,800°F to reduce a full-grown body to complete ashes. Lesser temperatures will also reduce flesh and most bones to ashes, but teeth and other human particles may survive.

There are tens of thousands of quotes over the centuries, indeed, the millennia, relating to fire, heat, and anything resplendent with a warmth of a million suns in reality or in the soul.

The thing with heat is, no matter how cold you are, no matter how much you need warmth, it always, eventually, becomes too much.

Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword

"The month of August had turned into a griddle

where the days just lay there and sizzled."

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

"A growing heat, like a million blazing suns all focused

on me, lit my insides. It felt like I was being cooked in the

Gabriella Roast Cooker, me spinning around-and-around

to heat my flesh evenly. For some reason I was having

trouble comprehending the sudden change in my revolving

world as I swelled with a horrible, billowing fire."

Laura Kreitzer, Abyss

"People change more frequently than the seasons do and

still we blame the sun for bringing in the heat."

Shweta Tale

"Sometimes it is good to fly close to the flame, see

and experience the heat, but then fly away again,

to survive, more wise in the art of heat."

Robert Black

"More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit

than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot

to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at

ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is

itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes

a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing - a word, a

look, a sound, the drop of a hair and - irritable murder. Irritable

murder, there’s a pretty and terrifying phrase for you."

Ray Bradbury, The October Country

"Beyond the canopy of my embrace, you shall

feel the blistering heat of the Desert."

Harry Fulgencio

"I believe someone made a grievous mistake when summer was

created; no novitiate or god in their right mind would make a

season akin to hell on purpose. Someone should be fired."

Michelle Franklin

"There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to

warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke."

Vincent van Gogh

"Come on baby, light my fire

Come on baby, light my fire

Try to set the night on fire …"

The Doors, Light My Fire

"Love is Fire. But whether it’s gonna warm your heart

or burn your house down you can never tell."

Jason Jordan

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

Plutarch

Physical heat aside, the concept of heat also applies to existential concepts.

Heat of passion.

Dying of the heat.

Catching heat.

Dead Heat.

Packing heat.

Turn up the heat.

Taking heat.

In heat.

The heat (i.e., police).

If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.

And, perhaps the most dangerous of all, heat of anger … that often takes too long to cool down, and sometimes not at all …

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Returning Characters

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Cast of New Characters

Cast of Additional Characters¹

PROLOGUE

Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

Karl Bischoff was born on August 9, 1897 in Neuhemsbach near Kaiserslautern, Germany, around one hundred miles from the Luxembourg border. In 1917 during World War I he joined the Luftwaffe. In 1935 he obtained a job at the Luftwaffe Construction Bureau. During the early years of World War II, he was involved in the building of air bases in France. In this position he met SS-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler, who was responsible for the SS-Amt II (Building), which later became Amtsgruppe C of the WVHA, which was the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Kammler was impressed with Bischoff and offered him an opportunity. He was to work hand in hand with architect Fritz Ertl.

That opportunity would have horrific consequences. However, one needs to go back a few years to the beginning of his place in history.

In 1918 Germany lost World War I (or, as it was called at the time, the Great War). Badly. The consequences for the defeated country were extremely severe. However, the war itself was a devastating experience that changed the face and fate of Europe and ultimately the world.

On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb-Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, 1914. Serbia’s reply failed to satisfy the Austrians, and the two moved towards war.

A network of interlocking alliances enlarged the crisis from a two-country issue in the Balkans to one involving most of Europe. By July 1914, the great powers of Europe were divided into two coalitions: the Triple Entente, consisting of France, Russia, and Britain; and the Triple Alliance consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Triple Alliance was only defensive in nature, allowing Italy to stay out of the war until April 1915, when it joined the Allied Powers after its relations with Austria-Hungary deteriorated. Russia backed Serbia and approved partial mobilization after Austria-Hungary shelled the Serbian capital of Belgrade on July 28th. On July 30th full Russian mobilization was announced and on the following day, Austria-Hungary and Germany did the same, while Germany demanded Russia demobilize within twelve hours. When Russia failed to comply, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1st in support of Austria-Hungary, the latter following suit on August 6th; France ordered full mobilization in support of Russia on August 2nd.

The Great War lasted from July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918. The fighting was brutal and vicious. Countries joined both sides; countries were invaded; and intracountry revolutions took advantage of the chaos and carnage to redefine their own borders. The 1917 February Revolution in Russia replaced the Tsarist autocracy (Czar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, and their children were slaughtered by guns, ending their familial line) with the Provisional Government. However, continuing discontent with the cost of the war led to the October Revolution, the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic, and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by the new government in March 1918, ending Russia’s involvement in the war.

Despite the fact that Germany now controlled much of eastern Europe and transferred large numbers of combat troops to the Western Front, ultimately their effort was a failure. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on November 9, 1918, and Germany signed an armistice on November 11th, ending the war. Britain, France, the United States, and Italy imposed significant punishments at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Germany was forbidden to engage an internal military force of more than 100,000 soldiers, and its air force was banned. Its submarine force was abolished. Germany was assigned virtually full blame for the war and forced to surrender some of its territories. Germany was forbidden from joining the new League of Nations. Perhaps the most devastating blow of the treaties was the financial reparations Germany was assessed to account for the damage that the war had caused in terms of victims, buildings, livestock and other physical decimations. The amount assessed? One hundred thirty-two billion goldmarks in 1919 currency, or, in current dollars, thirty-three billion dollars.

Germany saw itself as unjustly judged and punished. As the country tried to rebuild groups sprung up to agitate for a return to former glory and throw off the bonds of the countries and leaders that oppressed them.

The most virulent yet charismatic voice to emerge from the swarm was Adolf Hitler. He rose from a failed artist to an injured Great War soldier to a proponent for throwing off the hateful bonds thrust on his adopted country (Hitler was born in Austria). Failing once in a coup to seize power he spent months in prison where he wrote his manifesto, Mein Kampf. When he was released, he resumed leadership of the new Nazi (National Socialist) Party whose power and growth were nurtured through hate, lies, and deflection.

Hitler and his inner circle used terror, intimidation, murder and execution to keep dissidents in line. The Nazi regime employed professionals to keep up with the removal of those who opposed them. One such man was Johann Reichhart. Born into a family of knackers and executioners, his family business went back eight generations. After serving in the German Army during the Great War, in April 1924 Reichhart took over the office of state judicial executioner in the Free State of Bavaria from his uncle Franz Xaver Reichhart. For each execution, Reichhart was paid 150 goldmarks plus ten marks for daily expenses and given a third-class railway ticket. For executions in the Palatinate (Pfalz), he was dispatched by express train. Reichhart wasn’t a hangman—he executed his charges by guillotine including a portable one he traveled with in the event that the location had none.

Executions decreased during 1924-1928, and Reichhart executed only twenty-three people (only one in 1928), and he had difficulty making a living for his family. However, in June 1933 he signed a contract with the Bavarian Ministry of Justice and went to work for the growing Nazi Party. He was paid a fixed, high salary and made a great deal of money as he traveled back and forth removing the Nazis’ opponents. He even developed a new methodology that would accelerate the time it took to execute a person down to three or four seconds after the head was positioned. His eventual head count during the Nazi era was 2,951 people, 250 of them women. He also executed siblings Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl in 1943, the most famous members of the resistance group White Rose. Reichhart stated that Sophie was the bravest woman he’d ever seen as she walked to her death. Her last words were, Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go ... What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

Reichhart was given the nickname of the Head Hunter. Hitler was pleased with his acuity and efficiency.

Hitler, however, was not pleased with the opposition to the rapidity of the growth of his party and his country. Firing squads, hanging, beheading, garroting, and disappearances were all well and good but could not satisfy his need for volume and efficiency. He needed to set his people’s focus on a target that would rally them to his side and decimate the insidious evil that crept through his country like lascivious vines. He chose the Jews. The Jews were cheaters, liars, murderers, and sought to pollute the perfection of the Aryan race while they raped the finances of decent German people. The Jews were the cause of all of Germany’s troubles. The Jews were a filthy race and needed to be removed from decent German society; preferably, world society. Vandalisms and assaults dotted the country and grew in intensity.

On the 9th and 10th of November 1938, a systematic, vicious pogrom of bloodthirsty aggression towards Jews was carried out by the Nazis. The event became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, named due to the massive shards of broken glass lying in the streets after stores, temples, and homes were attacked by the anti-Semitic maniacs. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers wielded with rabid hatred. Over one thousand synagogues were burned (ninety-five in Vienna alone) and over seven thousand Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged. Loot stolen in those two days alone probably added up into the millions with paintings, jewelry, artifacts, and anything else of value that wasn’t nailed down.

The assault on Germany’s Jews was supposedly instigated by the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris, and whose parents had just been kicked out of Germany where they’d lived since 1911. Clearly, that was just an excuse that the barbarians of the Third Reich needed to unleash their simmering hatred.

That expression of barbarism and inhumanity was only the beginning of Hitler’s ultimate goal. He wanted to eradicate all Jews. All of them.

He wanted a Final Solution.

No matter how efficient and quickly men like Reichhart could expedite their tasks they couldn’t begin to come close to what he needed. He turned to other men and other methods.

The concentration camp system arose in the months following Hitler’s ascension to German Chancellor in order to suppress tens of thousands of Nazi opponents in Germany. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was simply the pretense for mass arrests; the Reichstag Fire Decree eliminated the right to personal freedom enshrined in the Weimar Constitution. The first camp was established in Nohra, Thuringia on March 3, 1933 in a school. Nohra was the first but by the end of 1933 seventy camps had been established and held tens of thousands of prisoners. Eighty percent of prisoners were Communists and ten percent Social Democrats; the remaining ten percent were affiliated with a different party, were trade union activists, or had no connection to a political party. The camps were effective punishments and deterrents.

The infamous concentration camp, Dachau, was built in 1933 and was used as a model for others built that year. Following the Night of Long Knives in 1934, the concentration camps were run exclusively by the SS via the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. In all the Nazis established some thousand camps of all sizes and prisoner designations. Many of the smaller camps, or subcamps, were set up near factories to provide forced labor.

The most notorious concentration camps, however, were used for Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Arbeitsdorf, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Herzogenbusch, Hinzert, Kaiserwald, Kauen, Kraków-Płaszów, Majdanek, Mauthausen–Gusen, Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, Niederhagen, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Vaivara, and Warsaw were the main camps used to torture, brutalize, and eliminate the Jews. Over six million Jews died as well as untold thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, priests, and anyone else that fell under the wide umbrella of undesirables.

It wasn’t feasible to shoot, behead, or hang so many people so another method had to be implemented that would be quick, be efficient, be lethal, and, most importantly, be able to handle volume.

As early as 1939 the Nazis began experimenting with poison gas by using it during their state-sanctioned Euthanasia Program to remove hospital patients with physical and mental disabilities. These Germans were considered unworthy of life. From that jumping off point it was easy to expand the concept as well as the targets. Six gassing installations were established: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. Pure, chemically manufactured carbon monoxide gas was the method of extinguishing undesirables. By 1941 the Nazis had added mobile gas vans to their arsenal; gas vans were hermetically sealed trucks with engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment. In that year, 1941, Hitler’s SS determined that gassing was the ultimate Final Solution. They realized that they needed stationary gassing stations; vans would simply not address the volume issue.

Enter Karl Bischoff. SS-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler, impressed with Bischoff, offered him that life-changing opportunity. He was to work hand in hand with architect Fritz Ertl.

In October 1941 Bischoff arrived in Auschwitz, where he became chief of the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and the Police Auschwitz in Upper Silesia. His charge was to implement the planned enlargement of the concentration camp by the creation of a POW camp, which itself later became part of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. With an enormous budget of twenty million Reichsmarks, he and his team designed and actualized the giant Birkenau camp, the four big crematoria, the technically complicated central sauna, the new reception building in the Stammlager and hundreds of other buildings. The barracks, unlike those in other concentration camps which housed 550 prisoners per building, were designed to house 744 prisoners each. The barracks were designed not so much to house people as to brutalize them into nothingness.

The mental and physical deterioration was not the main goal of the Nazis, however. Hitler and his cronies wanted to truly eradicate Jewish human beings from the face of the earth. Gassing them into oblivion was only one component. It was the key component, and experimentation with various gassing methods went along until the ultimate gas was found to be the most efficient and used universally.

In 1942, systematic mass killing in stationary gas chambers began in Poland at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. These gas chambers used carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel engines. As victims were unloaded from cattle cars, they were told that they had to be disinfected in showers. The Nazi and Ukrainian guards sometimes shouted at and beat the victims, who were ordered to enter the showers with raised arms to allow as many people as possible to fit into the gas chambers. The tighter the gas chambers were packed, the faster the victims suffocated. After they were killed, Sonderkommandos (Jewish prisoners) dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Outside of the gas chambers were immense piles of eyeglasses and shoes.

At the Auschwitz camp in Poland, the Nazis conducted experiments with Zyklon B (previously used for fumigation) by gassing some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 ill prisoners in September 1941. Zyklon B pellets converted to lethal gas when exposed to air. This proved to be the gas of choice for mass murder at Auschwitz and then at the other concentration camps. At the height of the deportations/mass murder of Jews between 1943 and 1944, the gas chambers took the lives of six thousand prisoners per day. Bischoff was proud to relay the success of his plans to his superiors in Berlin. In 1944, Bischoff was awarded the War Merit Cross, 1st class.

His success naturally included the building of large new crematoria. Gas chambers were pointless unless the dead bodies of the victims could also be eradicated. Mass graves were untenable, although some were used. Some corpses were burned as much as an accelerant could work in the outdoors. Some corpses had their skin harvested to make book covers and lampshades.

That was where the crematoria came in.

Cremation reduces the body to its basic elements through a process that exposes it to open flames, intense heat and evaporation. This is done in a specially designed furnace called a cremation chamber or retort. Many crematories require a container for the body such as a casket appropriate for cremation or a rigid cardboard container. The Nazis, however, employed no caskets or cardboard.

Cremated remains are commonly referred to as ashes; however, in reality, they consist primarily of bone fragments. It is important to recognize that the cremated remains of the body are commingled with any remains of the container as well as any other incidental by-products of the incineration. Cremation produces three to nine pounds of remains, depending on the size of the body and the process used by the crematory.

The Nazis built large crematoria to contain the anticipated volume. One company hired to build these chambers of fire death was Topf & Sons. Originally a brewery the company branched out into crematories. The product they developed and sold throughout Europe, was lauded as the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology. The result would be an odorless, smokeless, dispatch of human bodies, which were burned solely in super-heated air.

The company’s work in the concentration camps did not live up to the originally promised process. One or more company employees stood with watches in front of the gas chambers of Auschwitz timing the death and incineration of thousands of victims in order to perfect a more efficient killing technique. Bodies were shoveled one on top of another in a macabre simulation of a flesh and bone woodpile. In this single chamber they were burned directly in the flames, no box encapsulating the dead, naked bodies, the temperature of the fire reaching at least 1400°F.

To maximize efficiency the Sonderkommandos were instructed to combine the bodies of fat people, skeletal Muselmänner, and children. This was done to burn the most bodies in the least amount of time. They put the bodies in the ovens continuously. The result was very high efficiency; very little fuel was needed to keep the process going for hours or days. The stench of burning flesh that rose in dark clouds from the chimneys saturated the clothes and lungs of most of the residents and soldiers of the camps. The consistent smell intermingled with the rotted stink of the thousands of unwashed prisoners for whom hygiene was a long-gone concept.

The ashes were unidentifiable and intermingled. Non-Jewish victims’ families were allowed to claim their remains in the urns provided by the company. In reality, mixed ashes, sawdust and general dust were shoveled indiscriminately into each urn, which was then stamped with a false identity number.

Depending on the volume and heat not all bones burned completely. These remnants were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill on uneven ground and in marshes. Jews, apparently, could help to sustain the Fatherland, but not in their human form.

The human form when subjected to intense fire reacts through both soft and hard tissue.

The fire roasts the skin, exploding blisters of ravaged flesh that pop and crackle and split as the fire works its way down to the layers of human below. The epidermis consists of five layers through which the hellish energy races: the Basal Cell layer, the Squamous Cell layer, the Stratum Granulosum, the Stratum Lucidum, and the Stratum Corneum. The destruction continues down through the dermis, the organs, the blood vessels, and the bones.

The fire causes the soft tissue to contract, which causes the skin to tear and the fat and muscles to shrink.

The internal organs will also shrink.

The muscles contract due to burning and this causes the joints to flex.

The skeleton does not burn in a uniform way. Some bones will burn at a higher intensity than others due to factors such as body fat distribution, and proximity to the heat source. Naturally, the bodies on top of the corpse pile will burn before those underneath do.

The bones burn in four stages: dehydration, decomposition, inversion, and fusion. Bones on fire can display any combination of the four stages on the same bone.

What begins as living flesh, blood, hair, and bones becomes charred then becomes ashes and fragments.

Logistical techniques were used to accelerate the process. A former Sonderkommando named Henryk Tauber was interviewed after the war and gave gruesome details as to the cremation process at Birkenau.

The procedure was to put the first body with the feet towards the muffle, back down and face up. Then a second body was placed on top, again face up, but head towards the muffle . . . We had to work fast, for the bodies put in first soon started to burn, and their arms and legs rose up. If we were slow, it was difficult to charge the second part of bodies . . .

We burned the bodies of children with those of adults. First we put in two adults, then as many children as the muffle could contain. It was sometimes as many as five or six. We used this procedure so that the bodies of children would not be placed directly on the grid bars, which were relatively far apart. In this way we prevented the children from falling through into the ash bin. Women’s bodies burned much better and more quickly than those of men. For this reason, when a charge was burning badly, we would introduce a woman’s body to accelerate the combustion.

Filip Müller, also a Sonderkommando that cremated bodies, told a similar story.

The bodies were sorted according to their combustibility: for the bodies of the well-nourished were to help burn the emaciated. Under the direction of the Kapos, the bearers began sorting the dead into four stacks. The largest consisted mainly of strong men, the next in size were women, then came children, and lastly a stack of dead Mussulmans, emaciated and nothing but skin and bones. This technique was called ‘express work,’ a designation thought up by the Kommandoführers and originating from experiments carried out in crematorium 5 in the autumn of 1943. The purpose of these experiments was to find a way of saving coke [coal] . . . Thus, the bodies of two Mussulmans were cremated together with those of two children or the bodies of two well-nourished men together with that of an emaciated woman, each load consisting of three, or sometimes, four bodies.

The Nazis became stunningly adept at reducing the bodies of their victims to ash and fragments, banishing them from the face of the earth but not from the collective memory of history.

No one who survived the horror of Nazi concentration camps would ever forget the smell, the pain, the starvation, the brutality, and the utter reduction of them from human beings to in most instances when rescued, walking flesh tightly pulled over visible skeletons.

No one.

Some of the survivors thought that the victims of the gas chambers and the crematoria were the lucky ones for they were dead and gone, and those others had a lifetime of memories to relive over and over again.

In an interesting footnote guillotine executioner Johann Reichhart transferred his talents to the winners of World War II. After VE Day he was arrested by the U.S. Army and spent a week in Stadelheim Prison for denazification. Subsequently, he was employed by the U.S. Office of Military Government until the end of May 1946 to assist in executing one hundred fifty-six Nazi war criminals on the gallows at Landsberg am Lech. He went on to help execute convicted Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremburg.

In May 1947, Reichhart was imprisoned again and put on trial in Munich. In December 1948 he was sentenced to two years in a labor camp and confiscation of half of his considerable assets. Reichhart was subsequently released. Reichhart’s notoriety plummeted him into the depths of despair. His marriage failed. His son, Hans, dispirited by his father’s history, committed suicide in 1950. Impoverished and despised, Reichhart lived on a small military pension from the First World War. He died on April 26, 1972, at a hospital in Dorfen, at the age of 78.

Karl Bischoff never paid for his collusion in the worst mass murders of human history. He stayed in the shadows after the war and relocated to Bremen, where he died in 1950. His crimes came to light but he was never held accountable for his transgressions. Many Nazis weren’t; they slunk away under new identities or in new locations and lived out their lives. Over the years many were hunted down by people determined to exact justice and vengeance. Some hunts were successful; some weren’t.

Some are still ongoing.

Some will never end.

Some shouldn’t.

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A crematorium chamber at Auschwitz

BOOK ONE

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In New Mexico, he always awoke a young man, not until he arose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry ‘To-day, to-day,’ like a child’s.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

CHAPTER ONE

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August 6, 1985, Hiroshima, Japan

Move out of the way, spaz, Mariko Griffin demanded as she waved her arm to tell her annoying kid brother that she wanted him as far from her camera shot as possible. There was a space in the crowd of people giving her an excellent view of the A-Bomb Dome across the Motoyasu River. If she positioned her shot just right she could capture both the historical building as well as the sign in Japanese on this side of the river showing the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall as it stood before that fateful day exactly forty years earlier. She and her family would make their way over the bridge so that they could inspect it from every angle and she could take as many black-and-white shots as she wanted.

Don’t call your brother names, Yuki admonished as she wiped the sweat from her brow. Despite the wide straw hat that she wore the sun on this sultry day easily brought perspiration and discomfort. She was wearing flat leather sandals and a light, flouncy white sun dress with perky yellow daisies whose hem caressed her calves. Her mother was wearing a nearly identical outfit but her father, husband, and son were in crisp jeans and button-down white shirts; all three were wearing red I Love Japan baseball caps with the national flag on the back, although in the style of today’s youth Zenjiro was wearing his backwards.

The extended family was enjoying a long-planned tour of Japan. Nick ensured that they were able to travel to Hiroshima for the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the world’s first Atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Nick and Yuki wanted their kids to see the maternal part of their heritage. Her parents had waited a long time to make the journey to see the city where many of their distant relatives had perished. They’d already spent a week in Tokyo, then made the five-hundred-mile, four-hour train journey between the Japanese capital and the city that was burned into history, literally.

Percy had gifted the family with books on Japan, Hiroshima, and World War II, which came in very handy during the fifteen-hour flight from Albuquerque to San Francisco to Tokyo. Mariko and Zenjiro salivated over the books while their parents and grandparents napped; mostly—Mariko occasionally eyed the cute teenage Japanese boy two rows in front of her. Occasionally, he eyed her back with a killer smile and a thread of giddiness ran thorough her slender, woman-awakening body.

Nick woke up a few times and once he decided to read up on the country of his wife’s family origin. Yuki Okuma Griffin’s family had been residents of San Francisco for three generations. Her great-great-grandfather had emigrated to the United States from Hiroshima, Japan and settled in San Francisco where he married and began the American branch of the family. His siblings, cousins, and other extended family members remained in Hiroshima and its neighboring cities of Hatsukaichi, Etajima, and Kure.

Yuki’s brother, Akiro, was born in San Francisco on an infamous date—December 7, 1941. Over the next few months their lives changed drastically. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a schoolteacher of American History. Within three weeks of the attack on Pearl Harbor his father lost three-quarters of his clients, all white. His mother was fired from the position she had held for four years. Their house was covered with red paint saying, Die, Nips!!! Their dog was shot. Mrs. Okuma was refused service from the nearby grocery store where she and the owners had smiled at and talked to one another for years. By January all of his father’s clients withdrew and the elder Okuma had to close his business. He told his wife and infant son that they’d get through this, that people would calm down and recognize them as legitimate Americans and stem the initial hatred.

Within months Akiro and his parents were ripped from their home and relocated to one of the government’s internment camps in Santa Fe where they remained until after the war ended. Yuki was born in the Santa Fe Detention Camp in 1944. She was eighteen months old when the war ended, and the family was released shortly before 1946. There was nothing to return to in San Francisco although many of their fellow internees did go back to their places of origin. Some had found themselves deported to Japan.

Mr. Okuma liked the landscape and weather of the state and made a few friends amongst the guards and civilian workers that came and went from the camp. With help from the priest and some of the parishioners of the Our Queen of Redeemers Catholic Church the Okumas were able to settle in a small, adobe house where the once-proud lawyer became a landscaper, and a very good one. His wife tried to find a teaching position but couldn’t so she became his partner. They made a decent living and banked every cent they could to put their children through college.

Nick met Yuki through her brother as he worked part-time at the Warrior Spirit Investigations firm where he soon became a junior partner. Her parents weren’t thrilled when she brought home a white guy for their approval, but over the years as they courted, became engaged, married, and became parents the Okumas had thawed and loved Nick as a second son. Ditto Sand Hazelwood, the blond-haired, blue-eyed life partner of their son, Akiro.

Nick leaned back in his first-class airline seat and thought about his life. This year he turned forty. He remembered the times of his youth, the 1960s, when the mantra was never trust anyone over thirty. He had run away from his hometown in Rhode Island when his family was brutally murdered, and even changed his name. At first he was a suspect, but then they let him go and he booked out of town. It wasn’t until years later when an unknown brother turned up. Percy was his parents’ firstborn but was given up for adoption when he was a baby because he was a dwarf. He was adopted at age five by a kindly older couple named McBean. Afterwards Sean and Adelind Burkhardt had four more children; Nick, born Ranulf Brenner Burkhardt, was ten years younger than his unknown older brother.

When Percy, born Henry Andrew Burkhardt, was around thirty he finally tracked down his biological background and found Nick in jail in Santa Fe on a murder charged for which he was later exonerated. After some false starts they became genuine brothers. Percy was instrumental in finding the true killer of their birth family, and many of the ghosts of the past were put to rest. Still, like for the once-interned Okumas who had lost everything but each other, those ghosts made occasional guest appearances.

He glanced over at his sleeping wife whose face was utterly peaceful. He craned his neck to look behind him and saw that his in-laws were sleeping, too. He picked up the nonfiction book by famous author John Toland and flipped it open to the halfway point where he had last left off. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 was an exhaustive exploration of the once-enemy country, the war, and the aftermath. Toland had won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for the book, and Nick could understand why. He’d read about his wife’s ancestral homeland over the years but never fully focused on the complex details. He figured that since he had suggested a trip to Japan on this the fortieth anniversary of the war’s logical end he should understand as much as possible so he wouldn’t feel or sound like a baboon when his children battered him with questions. Zenjiro’s inquisitive nature was rapacious, and Mariko was nearly up to her brother’s curiosity level. Both Griffin offspring had their interest in Japan kickstarted in 1980 when the entire family sat in front of the TV rapturously watching the mini-series Shōgun with Dr. Kildare himself, Richard Chamberlain. Mariko was delighted that she shared her first name with Chamberlain’s love interest. She wasn’t too happy when the cinematic Mariko died at the end. Nick had just bought their very first VCR, an RCA top-loading model for $649, and the mini-series was the first thing they recorded. The kids had watched the show several times already.

He studied the chapter on Hiroshima, and he was fascinated by the history of the region and the city. He sensed that the author had not only an abiding love for the subjects about which he wrote, but in this case the country of the Rising Sun had a personal connection—his wife Toshiko was Japanese.

Hiroshima was established at the very end of the sixteenth century as a castle town, its previous version existing as a small fishing village since the twelfth century. As the decades passed it became a very important industrial town bolstered by the proximity of six rivers that led to Hiroshima Bay and an easy route to both the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan. It took three hundred years before the town was designated as a city. Hiroshima found itself a lynchpin for military operations and played a critical part in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two world wars. In World War II the city found itself as ground zero for a new method of conducting global war, and at a very history-making, savage cost.

The Second General Army and Chūgoku Regional Army was headquartered in Hiroshima, and the Army Marine Headquarters was located at Ujina port. The city also had large depots of military supplies and was a key center for shipping. The city was spared the constant fire bombings of Japan by American planes, until that fateful day in 1945.

The emperor Hirohito and his military officers absolutely refused to surrender unconditionally even though they were losing the war very badly. Truman and his top generals and advisors had reached a last-resort option to try to get Japan to surrender. There were plans in the works for an Allied invasion of the country, one that would no doubt cost the American troops dearly. Truman gave the go-ahead for that last resort.

Hiroshima was designated the primary target for Little Boy, the Atomic bomb that had been ready since the end of May. Should Hiroshima be unavailable due to weather or other circumstances, the alternate targets were Kokura and Nagasaki. In the wee hours of August 6, 1945, the 393rd Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, named after Captain Paul Tibbets’ mother and piloted by Tibbets, took off from North Field, Tinian (a small island in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands), about six hours’ flight time from Japan. Enola Gay was accompanied by two other B-29s: The Great Artiste, commanded by Major Charles Sweeney, which carried instrumentation, and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil, commanded by Captain George Marquardt, which served as the photography aircraft. There were four other B-29 aircraft accompanying the mission:

• Straight Flush, Weather reconnaissance (Hiroshima)

• Jabit III, Weather reconnaissance (Kokura)

• Full House, Weather reconnaissance (Nagasaki)

• Top Secret, Strike spare (did not complete the mission)

Hiroshima was enjoying a quiet Monday morning. Children were preparing for school, businesses were readying to open, and the city was awakening to another uneventful, beautiful day. The visibility was clear. The water in the rivers sparkled with clarity.

At 7:15 AM Straight Flush flew over the city generating an air raid alert. The aircraft sent a message to Enola Gay: Cloud cover less than 3/10th at all altitudes. Advice: bomb primary. The plane left the area and an all-clear was broadcasted to the city inhabitants.

8:15 AM Enola Gay flew over the city. Tibbets handed control over to his bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, whose target was the Aioi Bridge. Ferebee sent Little Boy on its mission of destruction. The bomb contained about one hundred forty-one pounds of uranium-235 and took 44.4 seconds to fall from the aircraft flying at about 31,000 feet to a detonation height of about 1,900 feet above the city. Enola Gay traveled 11.5 miles before it felt the shock waves from the blast.

Crosswinds caused the bomb to miss the target by around 800 feet and detonate directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic. It released the equivalent energy of 16 kilotons of TNT. The radius of total destruction was about one mile, with a resulting hellish firestorm across 4.4 square miles.

It was estimated that between 70,000 and 80,000 people died almost immediately from the blast and firestorms. Some people were turned into fragile charred remains; some were utterly vaporized with no sign that they had ever existed; some people survived but were so badly burned that their skin was hanging off their frames and they looked like they had been turned inside-out. Many of those that survived lived lives wracked by radiation poisoning, enduring hellish existences and painful, terrible deaths. A good part of the radiation came from the sky, the results of the bomb polluting the clouds and bringing down what was called black rain.

Japanese citizens and military personnel were not the only victims. Twelve American airmen were imprisoned at the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters, about 1,300 feet from the hypocenter of the blast. Most died instantly, although two were reported to have been executed by their captors. Two prisoners badly injured by the bombing were left next to the Aioi Bridge by the military police, where they were stoned to death by enraged people that had survived the blast. The Japanese attempted to attribute eight more prisoner-of-war deaths to the bomb, but this was a coverup—those men died as a result of medical experimentation at Kyushu University.

The city was leveled.

The devastation was beyond horrific.

President Truman called again for Japan’s surrender, warning them to expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

Japan refused to surrender.

Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the Atomic bomb Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, bringing more death, destruction, and firestorms.

The United States was already creating more bombs, one of which would be ready by August 19th and several by September and October. The Japanese War Council still refused to surrender unless four conditions were met—preservation of the Imperial institution, responsibility for their own disarmament, no occupation, and responsibility to conduct any war crime trials. The United States wanted unconditional surrender.

Despite opposition from his military generals Emperor Hirohito surrendered unconditionally on August 15th. On Sunday morning, September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay the Japanese government representatives boarded the newly commissioned ship USS Missouri. General Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff, signed the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters. Across the table from him were Lt. General Richard K. Sutherland and General Douglas MacArthur.

The Allied forces occupied Japan, and slowly but surely the reimagining of the country began. During the occupation very little of the details, films, and photographs of the event were released to the American people or the world. The details did reveal themselves eventually.

Hiroshima had suffered Little Boy and one would think that would be the extent of devastation now that the war ended. Such was not the case. Little more than a month afterward on September 17th the Makurazaki Typhoon struck, killing 3,000 people. More than half the bridges in the city were destroyed, along with heavy damage to roads and railroads, further devastating the city.

Hiroshima was rebuilt after the war, with help from the national government through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law passed in 1949 that provided financial assistance and land donations previously owned by the national government and used by the Imperial