Read Online The Madagaskar Plan by Guy Saville - Free Book Online

happiest Hochburg ever knew. They lived simply, glutting in each other’s love, until the regret began to trickle into Eleanor and she looked back guiltily to the life she had discarded. This time it was Hochburg she abandoned, fleeing into the jungle to Burton and her death. That Eleanor met the same fate as his parents could only be a calling. A portent.
    “You must be very old,” said the boy. “The niggers are gone.”
    “Alas, not all.” Hochburg thought of the faces in the Schädelplatz. “What would you do if you saw one?”
    The boy pondered the question, then held up the two bloody pieces of snake.
    “Oberstgruppenführer!” The copilot beckoned to him. “We’re ready.”
    Hochburg drew his pistol and unlocked the clip. He freed a bullet and passed it through the chain-link fence. The boy dropped his snake and took it with red fingers.
    “Use it wisely, my child.”
    The Fw-189 lifted into the sky again. Two and a half thousand meters below, savannah drifted past: blots of jade and khaki like the camouflage pattern on an SS combat jacket. The sun beat through the glass cockpit. Sleep had been a snatched indulgence for Hochburg these past nights; drowsiness crept over him.
    “How long till we land?” he asked the copilot.
    “Another hour. Assuming we get through the British air defenses.”
    “Take control,” said Hochburg, relaxing his grip on the lever. “Wake me in twenty minutes.” He yawned, studding his eyes with tears, and let his head recline. Elisabethstadt filled his half-dreaming thoughts.
    Before the siege it had been the mining capital of Kongo, with its rows of prim bungalows, world-famous botanical garden, ice factories, and a railway hub that whisked Germans as far south as Cape Town or to the pleasures of Roscherhafen. As with other conquered cities, Hochburg had planned to rename it; to do so was part of the psychology of victory. It affirmed the Reich’s dominance as trenchantly as jackboots stamping the boulevards or the flutter of red, white, and black. For years he knew what to call it; he even had the approval of the Führer, who foolishly claimed to understand the Homeric allusion.
    Then Hochburg’s pen hesitated over the document that would have made it law. He looked at the city’s new name stamped on the thick, lion-colored paper of official documents. Above it was the eagle-and-swastika seal. He meant it as her memorial:
    Eleanorstadt
    Minutes passed. A drop of ink ran down the nib and splashed onto the paper. Hochburg laid down his fountain pen, folded the sheet in half, quarters, eighths; later he burned it. When the bureaucrats puzzled over the change, Hochburg fended them off: George VI won’t always be on the throne. In the years ahead, the British will be reassured to hear their monarch’s name so close to the border.
    He would offer Eleanor more than Elisabethstadt.
    The whole of his Afrika Reich would be her immortalization: every stone that was laid, every garrison, town, city; the ports, the white roads cutting through the jungle, the babel of a million copper threads connecting the continent. A mausoleum of such glory that her name need never be written on it. That’s why he’d been so impatient to invade Rhodesia: to consecrate more lands for her. Of course, they understood none of this in Germania. To the ministries on Wilhelmstrasse, Africa was a trove of mines and timber forests, its plantations existing solely to fill the bellies of the German hordes. But to Hochburg, Africa was a kingdom of temples. The only way of keeping Eleanor present. So long as his heart drummed, the British and their ragtag allies would never prosper.
    He would find a way to crush them yet.
    His dreams were marauding. From Elisabethstadt … to his lack of troop numbers … to General Ockener’s war without the weak souls of men , such an army will always be victorious  … to a vision of the entire continent ablaze … Then the soothing lap of waves and the river by