Free Black Sun Reich by Trey Garrison

outside at the insistence of the bartender.
    Dr. Kurt von Deitel left his meeting with Lysander and immediately sought a decent schnapps. He needed one after he’d delivered his report, straight from the intelligence masters at the Abwehr. The work of delivering his report was unlike any previous debriefing the doctor had undergone.
    Now, granted, he wasn’t exactly a veteran in the world of espionage. In fact, this was only his second task since his recruitment by the Abwehr back when he was a third year medical student. But Deitel, a newly graduated medical doctor and the scion of a significant house of Prussian nobility in Königsberg, was exactly what the Abwehr’s spymaster, Commodore Wilhelm Canaris, needed.
    The Abwehr was officially the counterintelligence arm of the traditional German military, but Canaris—a traditional German naval officer—had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the Nazi regime. Over time, he’d secretly undertaken a dangerous strategy of undermining Hitler’s government and the SS intelligence branch. He viewed the New Order as a dishonorable cult of common thugs and criminals in designer uniforms. Canaris maintained his agency’s appearance as an effective, loyal source of human intelligence for the Führer, while doing everything he could to scuttle the ship of state.
    It was a dangerous game. One mistake and Canaris and his confederates would end up in a concentration camp. Or serving in the Russian Dead Zone, which was the same as a death sentence only slower.
    The information Deitel now brought to the Freehold for Canaris was so unprecedented—so fantastic—that Canaris needed Deitel’s medical background to explain, well, the inexplicable, to his counterparts in the Freehold.
    Deitel remembered how, after initially reviewing the materials and watching the grainy black and white photos and moving picture films in his Rio apartment, he vomited like a first year medical student. That’s when he realized it was no longer an abstraction—the New Order was a threat to every man, woman, and child in Germany and throughout the world. It had to be stopped.
    The doctor hadn’t expected the Driskill’s hotel bar to have schnapps at all, much less a wide and decent selection, along with several German beers of respectable pedigree. It shouldn’t have surprised him. For starters, the hotel was magnificent. Built just four decades ago as the showplace of a cattle baron, the Driskill was an internationally renowned landmark of Texas hospitality. Located in the heart of downtown Austin, it was surrounded by the gin mills, music halls, and saloons of Sixth Street. They formed an ongoing street party where country music, ragtime, bluegrass, and jazz blended in the streets as freely as the people. Bourbon Street West, it was called.
    So of course they’d have good schnapps on that point alone.
    And from his recent briefings he knew there was a second reason. The Freehold had lots of German immigrants.
    Texas was founded in 1835 as a republic, then reformed in 1876 into a Freehold. Most of the initial settlers were German and Scot-Irish immigrants from the old “United States,” as it was called then. The Freehold had since grown a good deal beyond its initial boundaries—almost exclusively by land purchase, not conflict.
    The Freehold of the twentieth century stretched from Phoenix in the west to New Orleans in the east, and from the Red River in the north to Cabo San Lucas and the Yucatan peninsula in the south. The settlers of Scot-Irish and German descent were now part of a melting pot of Latin American, French, Spanish, Chinese, Indian, and Caribbean newcomers—a great contrast to many of the other North American nations.
    In many of the states of the CSA there were still segregation laws—legalized racial separation—for the fifteen percent of the population comprised of colored people. In the Union States,