Himmler jumped in fright and his secretary came rushing back in.

“It’s all right,” the SS chief said shakily. “It is just a recording on this unit.”

“Remarkable,” said the young man as he retreated again.

Steckel continued to speak on the screen.

“Reichsführer, I have taken the liberty of sending you this device because the wonders we have discovered out here must be seen to be believed. With the help of Major Brasch and our Japanese comrades, I have prepared a short presentation for you, outlining some of the major developments.”

Himmler propped the pad up against a framed picture of his mistress. It threatened to fall under its own weight. He carefully picked up his tea and sipped as a series of movies played over Steckel’s voice.

It was both amazing and infuriating. He felt certain there was a great deal he wasn’t being told. The color movies, which were astoundingly sophisticated, detailed weapons systems and technology that boggled the mind: missiles that could fly into space and spit dozens of insanely powerful warheads onto different cities, killing millions of people and destroying whole nations in the blink of an eye. Infantry uniforms with padded armor that could stop a round from a Mauser. Machines in the sky that could listen in on every telephone conversation or radio broadcast in the world, and sort them into the relevant and immaterial. Oh, what the Gestapo could do with that!

But nowhere in this litany of magic tricks was there an explanation of how an inferior race, from a country no one had ever heard of, could possibly develop such things. How could a mud race such as these Javanese peasants prosper in the very first century of the thousand-year Reich? Where did the führer appear in this fairy tale? This astounding contraption and Steckel’s tales of Untermensch from the future raised the obvious question.

What was the future for the Fatherland?

Even with such thoughts swirling in his mind, Himmler gave no outward indication of reacting at all. When the movie finished, he sat and thought for a few minutes before pulling half a dozen sheets of parchment from his desk drawer and inking a fountain pen.

In all of the Reich there were only two men the führer trusted completely. Heinrich Himmler and Otto Skorzeny.

It was time to send Skorzeny to the East.

But first, Himmler would need to talk to the Japanese ambassador.

Three hours later, Reichsführer Himmler and Lieutenant General Oshima Hiroshi met in the grand compound at the spiritual heart of the Waffen-SS. Lichterfelde had once been a school for military cadets, but the old butcher Sepp Dietrich had convinced Hitler that his personal army should have a headquarters befitting their elite status as supermen and praetorian guard to the führer himself.