Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Twenty-One
1st April 1964
Mitte, Berlin
“That old goat seems to have had this all planned out” Kiki said, “Right down to the date of his funeral.”
Oberstaber Musongole just gave her a slight smile.
“The Lion of Africa was a wise man” Musongole replied.
If Kiki didn’t know any better, she might think that Musongole was making fun of her. Looking at the rooster that Musongole had acquired from somewhere that he was carrying, she was certain that General von Lettow-Vorbeck had been laughing his head off when he had all of this written into his will. The day after he had died, Kiki had received a call from the General’s Executor saying that the General had requested that Hauptmann Prinzessin Kristina Alexandra Yekaterina Tatiana von Preussen-Hohenzollern march with her father in his funeral procession with his family. It was rare that Kiki had ever heard anyone call her by her full name and title. The whole thing reminded her of Zella joking about how if you leave your dirty laundry to someone in your will, are they obligated to wash it? As it turned out, it was a welcome distraction from everything else that was going on.
The pallbearers, including the General’s surviving son Oberst Rüdiger von Lettow-Vorbeck, was waiting for the procession to start. The Marine Infantry and Heer were both represented among the pallbearers. During the Boxer Rebellion in China von Lettow-Vorbeck had commanded the unit that would one day become the 3nd Marine Infantry Division. They considered him one of their own and had drawn lots to determine who would be given the honor of carrying the General to his grave.
The plan was that they would proceed through the streets from the Reichstag where the General’s body had been laying in state, with the parade behind them was composed of the Fourth Foot Guard Regiment, portions of the 3nd MID, dozens of surviving Askari who had traveled from Africa at the invitation of the German Government and finally the Drum Corps. The streets were expected to be lined with the friends and former enemies that the General had made over the previous ninety-four years. Kiki realized that she should be so lucky.
The destination was a bit surprising. It had turned out that the General had a burial vault quietly built inside the Imperial War Museum under the floor of the Medical Service’s Hall. Kiki had thought that the feel of that hall was an accident, that of a secular chapel. It turned out that the General had known exactly what he was doing. It was a place of peace and healing, the perfect place to be at rest. He had already had the remains of the wife and son who had predeceased him intered there. Kiki hadn’t known that Hauptmann Arnd von Lettow-Vorbeck had existed until she had seen the marker installed in the Medical Service Hall a couple days earlier. He had been twenty-two years old when he had died fighting the Soviets. It made Kiki wonder what the real reason was for the General requesting her presence.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Musongole, acting as a representative of the General’s family handed Kiki’s father the rooster. It was a tradition among some African tribes for the family to give the Chief a rooster or hen to mark the start of the funeral. Kiki just didn’t know which ones. With that the whole production started.
Anchorage, Alaska
Climbing over a pile of wreckage and looking down the street, Bobby Thornton saw the buildings that were leaning in odd directions because the soil underneath them had seemed to have turned to liquid. The entire scene was surreal, and Bobby had lived here for his entire eighteen years and had never seen anything like it.
For years there had been talk of building a highway to connect the Territory of Alaska to the lower forty-eight but there had little motivation to do that and the tensions with the Canadian Government in recent years had resulted in delays. According to Bobby’s Great-Uncle John, it was a territorial pissing match. The boneheads in Washington DC and Ottawa needed to put their egos aside and get shit done.
What that meant was that the only reliable link to the outside world was the railroad or the seaport. One only needed to see what the earthquake had done to the railyard to see why that was a serious problem at that moment. Bobby had wondered why help was slow in coming from the sea, then he had heard about the tsunami that had messed up Valdez. Not many with a ship were willing to risk being close into shore if there was an aftershock that kicked up more waves like that. That was why aid was only trickling in after four days.
Walking through downtown, Bobby could see soldiers in green uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders standing on the street corners supposedly to prevent looting. While actual help had been slow to arrive, the 82nd Airborne had gotten here rather quickly. When Bobby had told Uncle John about it, he had just laughed. The US Army has always been good at getting to places where they could shoot people, he said, everything else they found challenging.
Keeping his head down, Bobby walked through downtown to Bootlegger’s Cove. A couple days before, he had managed to get a salmon that he had paid an exorbitant price for from a fishing boat that had docked at the pier. He had considered it fortunate that he along with Uncle John and his mother had eaten well. Today, Bobby was hoping that something would present itself. The trouble was that he didn’t have a whole lot of money left and after what had happened to the movie theater where he had worked, he doubted that he would see another paycheck for a good while.
Looking down the hill, Bobby saw a large white ship anchored out in Cook Inlet with a red cross painted on the side of it. Bobby was gleeful that it looked like help had arrived until he noticed the flag flying on the ship’s mast…