Then he was sent to the therapist again. The man grinned at him. “Macurdy, your recovery’s been too damned complete. Headquarters says you need a limp, a good consistent limp, and I’m supposed to coach you on it. Along with your scars, it’ll help explain why you’re not in the German army.” He laughed, then spoke in a burlesque German accent: “You vill be a gout, patriotic Cherman poy vhat hass sacrificed his body for his Fuhrer, but can still vork on de docks.”
Along with his demolitions training, this led Macurdy to suspect he’d be sent to Germany as a saboteur, instead of training partisans.
He was wrong about that, too.
In late autumn he was sent to London, to OSS headquarters in Grosvenor Square. There he was promoted to warrant officer–a W-2–which paid much better than staff sergeant.
Then he was briefed. He’d been told that Von Lutzow would be his briefing officer, but Vonnie was in the south of France, in the maquis, working with French partisans. Besides, this was only a preliminary briefing, sketching out his mission.
What it oiled down to was that Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was very interested in the occult. And Himmler, who now ranked second only to der Fuhrer himself, commanded not only the Gestapo-the German secret police–but the Schutzstaffel–the elite guard. Within the SS he’d established a small de facto office called the Occult Bureau. At one point, the Gestapo had been ordered to investigate all reputed Aryan psychics, some of whom were then conscripted into the Bureau. . This was not a roundup of astrologers, as in Aktion Hess. It was on a much smaller scale, and not punitive.
The Occult Bureau had lost credibility with the Reichs Chancellery over the past several years, had even been reported cancelled. But what seemed to be an Occult Bureau project was housed in rural southern Bavaria, near a lake known as der Kiefersee. Not a lot was known about the project except its name: das Weutische Prajekt, and even that was mysterious, because in German there was no such name or word as Weut (phonetically, Voit). The OSS wanted to know what that project was-its mission and its methods-and Macurdy’s job was to find out.
In the neighborhood of the Kiefersee, local tradition held that in early centuries, on the night of the full moon, witches gathered on the crest of dem Hexenkamm-“The Witches’ Ridge”–to sacrifice, and hold orgies with demons. Among the local peasants, some still took those stories at least semiseriously. Some said that even today, in the vicinity of the ridge, dogs howled and cats refused to go out when the moon was full. The Occult Bureau project was housed in what was called locally Schloss Tannenberg–Tannenberg Castle–after the most prominent local hill. It wasn’t actually a castle, but a 19th century baronial manor, built on the site of an old ruin. And Schloss Tannenberg stood at the foot of derv Hexenkamm.
It occurred to Macurdy that the briefing officer might be pulling his leg, but the man kept talking. Supposedly a number of psychics were held at the schloss in some sort of training, and the rumor was that the trainers were foreigners, whic might be the source of the word Weutische. It was definite that an SS guard platoon was quartered there. It was from a local “party girl” agent, who’d drank and slept with some of the SS, that they’d learned most of what was known about the project. Which wasn’t much, if one allowed for the inevitable exaggerations of troops sporting with girls.
The project commander and his executive officer were subject matter specialists. Lt. Col. Karl Gustaf Richard Landgraf was a Prussian aristocrat, a decorated veteran of horse cavalry on the Eastern Front during World War One. During the 1920s and early ’30s, he’d published a journal of occult studies. His managing editor, a Wilhelm Kupfer, was now his XO.
Macurdy would be provided an identity, suitable papers, and a German wife; it hadn’t been determined yet who she’d be. And no, he wasn’t expected to actually marry her. He and his “wife” would then travel to Bavaria, where they were to get him recruited by the Weutische Project.