~ Scratch Out ~

by

Harley L. Sachs

Uboti, East Algeria

Before he stepped aside, the projected image of the giant spider briefly overlapped the face of the Colonel, making it look like the insect was about to devour his head.

In the back row the man everyone called The Professor cringed at the illusion. He didn’t like spiders. But if anyone knew that the expert at smuggling bombs aboard aircraft was afraid of spiders, they might be amused, but they would keep it to themselves. The Professor had no sense of humor. Even a calculating and bloodthirsty terrorist is entitled to his phobias.

“The tarantula is powerful and formidable and has only one natural enemy,” the voice-over narrator said.

Standing aside, the Colonel in his desert camouflage uniform studied the audience in the private projection room. He liked to observe people when they didn’t know they were being watched. The wrong expression, a sideways glance, could expose a potential enemy in the inner circle, and his survival depended on excising anyone who doubted his purpose or questioned his authority.

“That enemy,” the narrator continued, “is a tiny wasp.”

“This was taken from American television,” the Colonel said. “I taped it from NOVA. Watch the wasp.”

On the screen the tarantula stood like a hairy, armored black elephant while a tiny wasp danced under its feet. “The tarantula could easily kill the wasp, but does not sense any danger. The wasp is weak. Its sting cannot penetrate the tarantula’s armor, except at the joint in the spider’s leg.”

While The Professor and the other men in the audience watched, the wasp danced and maneuvered until it was in position to thrust its sting between the plates that protected the tarantula’s leg. The spider, weakened by the poison, collapsed. “The wasp lays its eggs on the paralyzed tarantula, which then serves as host for the wasp’s young.”

One of the Colonel’s personal bodyguards stood at each entrance to the auditorium. One could not be too careful. Allies were not necessarily friends. Today’s ally might be tomorrow’s enemy. The Professor was watched closely. After the meeting it would be carefully noted who he spoke to and whether he had passed anyone anything.

“That’s enough,” the Colonel announced. The screen went dark and the lights came on. The Colonel stepped down onto the stage.

It was the same stage where he sometimes had belly dancers from Egypt to entertain his guests, the stage where his little daughter Fauzia had once performed. Fauzia would not dance again. She had been killed in the American air raid on the palace. The Colonel himself had picked her broken body out of the ruin of his tent on the palace grounds.

“The United States is that great spider,” the Colonel announced. “The great Satan. But weak as we are before the great military power of the American bully, we are the wasp. We will have our revenge. The United States has the military power and the armor to destroy our people, but we can penetrate its weakness and get our revenge. We can destroy America just as the wasp can kill the tarantula. Allah Achbar! God is great!

“We may be a weak and poor nation but we can destroy the United States for less than the cost of the two jet fighters and their brave pilots the Americans shot down over our territorial waters.

“I’m not talking about a publicity stunt. No bombings of civilian aircraft. No bombings of GI bars in Germany. And no public announcements afterwards claiming credit for our victory. This time we will be silent. And this time we will kill every American in the entire United States.”

One

Wuppertal, Germany

Herr Direktor A. Rudolf Schleuer of the IMAG Chemisches Fabrik in Wuppertal/Barmen did not use his first name. It was a political embarrassment. Like many Germans born in the 1930s, he had been given the name Adolf. His father, Alex Schleuer, had been an ardent supporter of the National Socialist party. It was not unusual then to name a baby after the Fuehrer. Alex Schleuer was in a home for aged veterans now, exchanging old war stories with the few who had wits and hearing enough to listen.

Alex Schleuer was a casualty of World War II. Many in his age group were cripples. Schleuer had lost a leg and the fingers of his right hand in an American air raid on a supply depot.

He was one of the few men in his neighborhood to come home. Most of those who had gone to Poland and on into Russia were killed or taken prisoner by the Russians. The few survivors were cynical and bitter. They felt their youth and vitality had been squandered in the name of the Fatherland and Greater Germany.

That wasn’t the attitude of Alex Schleuer, who still put on his Iron cross for his son Adolf’s visits. To Alex Schleuer, the Jewish communists had caused the war. He saw no contradictions in the idea that Jewish capitalists owned all the banks and were also communists. He interpreted all the television news through that personal, political filter.

The war was also the starting point for A. Rudy Schleuer’s personal politics. While his father was at the front, Rudy had been with his mother. They were evacuated from the Ruhr during the bombings to live on a farm. Life on the farm was idyllic, like the agrarian German paradise portrayed in the Heimat films. But after Germany surrendered, the Schleuers returned to a destroyed city.

Rudy Schleuer still remembered those times. He was ten in 1945, and had never forgotten the shock of returning from fields and woods of the farm to the ruins of Wuppertal. His school had been bombed. Hardly a building stood untouched. The streets were paths cleared between piles of rubble.

The Americans had done it. Destroyed the city, the neighborhood, torn families apart. Rudy Schleuer’s hatred was permanent. He would not be bought off with Hershey bars from friendly Midwestern GIs.

While Alex Schleuer was still able to work, in spite of an artificial leg and damaged hand, the network of old Nazis had rewarded him for helping in the evacuation of some of those branded as war criminals. It was a profitable game, working with old Gestapo men for the American CIC against the communists, whom the Americans feared. Alex Schleuer survived those hard, postwar days, on CIC payoffs and stolen GI. rations, even selling black market Camel cigarettes. Deception was a way of life.

But it was also bruderschaft, comradeship. Friends could do business publicly as good, German industrialists, secretly work for the naive Americans against the communists, and privately enjoy the political joke over a fine cognac.

It was that atmosphere Rudy Schleuer moved into naturally, acting the quiet host for his crippled father, refilling the cognac glasses, soaking up the stories and the political talk. It was only natural that he would inherit those connections when he finished his university training.

Hating the Americans didn’t prevent one from doing business with them and enjoying the fruits of the Marshall Plan. GAF might have been handed over to the Americans as war reparations, but there were plenty of opportunities. IMAG Chemisches Fabrik supplied a host of products: industrial cleaning agents sold wholesale to the American military and laundry supplies; the synthetic textile division provided camouflage netting for NATO forces, and the reinforced plastic material used for protective clothing in case of chemical warfare.

It was ironic that a company that did so much business with NATO also produced pinakolyl alcohol, used by the Iraqis in making the chemical weapon Soman. IMAG’s plastics found their way into gun stocks that could pass undetected through airport security x-rays, and they dealt in plastic explosives, small quantities of which found their way to the middle east. Business was business. It was basically no different from selling black market cigarettes after the war. The more discretion required, the higher the price.

Rudy Schleuer had only one child, a daughter, Sonja. To her, World War II was ancient history. They did not teach the Nazi point of view of the war in her school. Opa Alex in his wheel chair and iron cross was senile and living in a past. Sonja was a prosperous child of the Wirtschaftswunder without the old loyalties. Hers was not a world of pale men with bitter memories and haunted faces.

If he were a more philosophical man, Rudy Schleuer might consider Sonja’s rebellion an adolescent phase like those English punks who put on black leather, chains, and died their hair purple. But Sonja Schleuer was more politically dangerous than that, the kind of upper middle class German that fell into the infamous Bader Meinhof gang. She had gone to the Free University of Berlin and turned left. Had her family been more moderate, she might have sided with the Greens, the so-called environmentalists. She found the Greens naive and ill- informed. What IMAG did was worse than merely pollute the Wupper river and the Rhine it flowed into.

It was really not so astonishing, if you thought about it. A Nazi grandfather, a fascist father who hated the Americans, and a Marxist daughter who had followed her father’s lead and gone all the way to the other side. If you were against the Americans, who could you be for but the worst enemies of the Americans? As the Arabs say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

So Sonja Schleuer went her way, and Rudy Schleuer found a surrogate son in the form of Klaus Hitz.

Hitz had dated Sonja in her Gymnasium days, before she took her arbitur and went to Berlin. Schleuer regarded the boy with the same skepticism of any father who remembers the days when he had his own wild oats to sow. If this was a prospective son-in-law, Rudy Schleuer had better take a close look at Hitz. It had begun when he offered the young man a beer while Sonja finished making up her face.

Klaus seemed a decent fellow. Serious. Eager to see the world, the son of a doctor more interested in yachting than in his patients. Rudy Schleuer learned that Klaus had spent a year in the United States as a Rotary exchange student and had taken an American high school diploma. Rudy Schleuer liked him.

Schleuer did not know the story behind Klaus’s year abroad. That was a Hitz family secret. Klaus never discussed what went on at home. His father was an inveterate womanizer who fondled his patients. Doktor Hitz’s exterior charm and bedside manner hid a tyrant who never shared business finances with his wife, Ingrid. Though he spent lavishly on his boat he doled out housekeeping money to her as if she were an untrustworthy maid. When Ingrid Hitz caught her husband screwing a patient on the examination table, she got a divorce.

Young Klaus was then sixteen, that powerless dependent age of awareness without independence. His mother, with few job skills, went to Hamburg where she got an office job and lived in a shabby apartment. Klaus visited her at Christmas, slept on a couch some guest workers had discarded. He swore never to be poor.

Back in Wuppertal Klaus came home from Gymnasium one day to find his father’s latest mistress, Elsa, more interested in him. Bewildered, he put her off. In front of his father, she claimed Klaus had tried to molest her. The shock of the duplicity and betrayal left him speechless, unable to defend himself. His father, assuming other men behaved the way he did, believed Klaus was guilty. The year as a Rotary exchange student was arranged.

Carrying the memory of recent betrayal did not help him adjust to life as an exchange student in Michigan. He was an outsider, a foreigner, uneasy in relationships. To Klaus, Americans were open and friendly, but superficial and without discipline.

Some of that lack of discipline had rubbed off on Klaus Hitz. He returned for a final year at the Gymnasium. Elsa, the cause of his troubles, was gone, replaced by another woman, Ursula. Klaus avoided her. If intimacy made one vulnerable to betrayal, he would be aloof. Doktor Hitz interpreted his son’s aloofness as being secretive. Klaus must be hiding something. His father regarded him with suspicion, a potential competitor, not as a son. It was not a happy household. Though Klaus passed his arbitur, his grades were not high enough for him to get into the overcrowded German university program of his choice. Sonja Schleuer was off to Berlin, and he was left behind.

Klaus and Sonja had their friction with their parents in common. Like his father, Klaus was a materialist. He was determined not to be poor. Sonja, raised in a wealthy household, took money for granted. She was more interested in politics, and that caused their separation.

Taking a walk on the high hills overlooking Wuppertal and the Ruhr, Sonja saw the chimneys, the factories, and the smoke as a curse on the German landscape. Klaus saw factories as a sign of German prosperity. Chimneys meant jobs. Klaus had not walked her up to the seclusion of the woods to talk politics. He had tried to make love to Sonja, but she was too angry. Politics and sex did not mix.

When Klaus and Sonja broke up, the bond between Klaus and her father was strong enough for the stricken Klaus to ask his advice.

Rudy Schleuer was not too inquisitive about his daughter’s sex life. Klaus Hitz was not her first lover, he was certain, and she could do a lot worse than this promising son of a doctor. “She may come around some day,” Rudy suggested. “You are young yet. It’s too early for you to get so serious. Give it a rest. What will you do about your university training?”

Klaus explained that, with a Michigan High School diploma, he could apply to Michigan State University. His father, a doctor with many private patients, could afford it, at least for a year, the dollar being so weak. Perhaps later he could transfer to a German university. But Sonja...

“Don’t worry about it, my boy. You are going off to an American University and she’ll be in Berlin. Worlds apart. Believe me, if your relationship can survive on the basis of letters on paper when you are both surrounded by attractive people in the flesh, there is still hope. If not... chalk it up to experience. But whatever happens between you and Sonja, and right now I wouldn’t expect much, come see me when you are back in Germany. We do a lot of work with the Americans, and it’s useful to have people who speak the language like natives and know their way around. I may have a job for you.”

Just to test the boy, Schleuer called on Klaus Hitz at his home while he was packing to leave for the United States. Schleuer noticed that the young man’s wardrobe was, well, undistinguished. “You need some decent shoes, Klaus. If you want to be a success you have to dress for the part.” He had a small gift for a business associate in Detroit. Some special German sausage. U.S. customs forbade the importation of foreign meat products, so it was necessary to be discreet and not mention it on the customs forms. The sausage would be wrapped to look like something else. Could Klaus deliver it? If it was inconvenient to break the journey, the business associate could meet him at the Detroit Metro airport while he waited for the connecting flight to Lansing. It would be an opportunity to make a contact. It was always useful to have people one could turn to in an emergency.

Since keeping such contacts happy was a business expense, A. Rudy Schleuer would also pay Klaus a little something for the favor. How about two hundred marks?

“Not necessary,” Klaus protested. “I would be glad to help.”

“I insist. And to keep my accountants happy, I need you to sign the receipt. Just a formality, but you know how accountants are.”

Embarrassed and reluctant, Klaus Hitz took the two hundred marks and signed the receipt.

“Good!” Rudy Schleuer folded the paper carefully and put it in the inside pocket of his expensive suit. “Now you can buy yourself some nice shoes.”

He had agreed to smuggle a parcel of illegal merchandise into the United States and had accepted payment to do it. It was the first step in the recruitment of Klaus Hitz. One more little mission like that and he would be hooked.