Damiri’s eyes shone with an unnatural intensity, but to Moertopo they looked utterly vacant. The maniac was already in Paradise.

“You should seize this opportunity to atone, Moertopo. Others have.”

Moertopo sniggered. It was only partly the hashish.

“So you’ve found a few converts, have you? Let me guess, they’d be the poorest, dumbest, sorriest sacks of shit in the whole crew. Who’d you turn? Those Surabayan peasants from the engine room, haven’t got enough sense to wash their hands after wiping their asses; or that rock ape from Kalimantan, the one who still thinks the CIA blew up his grandfather in New York?”

Damiri’s strained, almost constipated look caused Moertopo to burst out laughing in genuine mirth. He rolled in his bunk, clutching his sides and howling. “Go on, Damiri. Go off and martyr yourself,” he managed to gasp.

The born-again jihadi stalked out of his cabin as Moertopo subsided into a fit of giggles.

With his role in Japan drawing to an end, and a return to the Fatherland looming, Brasch knew he should be looking forward to seeing his wife and son, but a terrible wasting of the soul had taken hold of him again. It was even worse than the depression he’d suffered on returning from the front. He felt as if it would never lift. There was no mystery to the condition. The explanation lay in his hands, in a file called BELSEN.

Brasch had once believed he was fighting for Germany. Then, in Russia, he was simply fighting for his life. Now, after two weeks’ exposure to the Sutanto’s files, he was beginning to understand that he was fighting a losing battle for a monstrous cause that had nothing to do with the salvation of Germany at all. Germany, it transpired, would do very well without the Nazi Party. Under Hitler, however, it had become a charnel house and a byword for evil.

His back ached and his head pounded. As he lay in his bunk propping himself against the gentle motion of the ship, he came to the desolate conclusion that while he could fight for Germany, he could not fight for Belsen or Auschwitz or Treblinka. He had no real feeling for Jews, and was as happy to be rid of their presence as not. But this Final Solution, no civilized man could support such a bestial policy. Especially not a man whose own family might one day be touched by the Einsatzgruppen.

As a little deaf boy with a cleft palate, Brasch’s son Manfred was eminently suitable for disposal under something called the T4 program—the elimination of the physically and mentally undesirable.

The engineer’s stomach burned at the very idea. He didn’t bother to delude himself that his own status as a hero of the Reich would protect Manny forever. He had come to understand that Germany under the Nazis would inevitably eat its own young.