by Paula Wynne
It was like climbing in through the top of a huge birdcage. A network of bars ran at regular intervals up the sides of the giant circular cavern, and evenly spaced circular rungs connected the bars to each other. It was impressive in its precision and also its sheer scale. Also, though, there was something menacing about it.
In the centre of the floor was a peculiar dome that rose to half the height of a man above the floor. And around it hundreds or even thousands of crates, stacked neatly of course, because even if the war was lost, this was still Germany.
Some crates were tall and wide but also shallow, as if they contained some kind of panel. Steffan walked over to look more closely at one and, on what looked like an engraved plastic identification plate, read the word “Vermeer”. Its neighbour was labelled “Degas.” Paintings.
The other crates were mostly of a small, regular design, and from a quick scan of the plates Steffan could see they appeared to contain archives. Of what? The most closely guarded secrets of the Third Reich?
What all the crates had in common was that they were made of some kind of seamless resin and had rubber seals around their lids. Waterproofing, it had to be.
A briefcase lay on top of one stack of crates. High quality leather and without the protective covering that everything else in this chamber had. Without thinking, Steffan flicked the latches and they snapped open.
His eyebrows rose. Whoever had been given the task of checking and securing this area had done it poorly. Should he mention this to Willy?
As he thought this, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the strongest sensation that Rita was all around him, cloaking and embracing him. Although he had felt her presence before, it had never been as powerful as this. Even the air seemed to hum slightly, and he felt the warmth of her love course through him.
Just as quickly, she was fading again, like the bird flying to the horizon. His heart ached, wishing to follow her, but she whispered to him that he had yet good to do in this world, and that their union would come in its own time. With her last breath of presence, she seemed to turn his head back to the briefcase. Then she was gone, and he was back in the cold, brutal world the Nazis had built. With a sigh, he did what she had asked and raised the lid of the case.
Steffan lifted out a folded sheet of paper that lay on top of several folders of documents inside it. He opened one fold and then another. And another.
A map.
28
It was like some of the maps Steffan had drawn for Himmler. In minute detail, they had shown all the places he had marked out as possible strongholds.
Only this one had numbered codes beside each location. He turned the map over and saw the codes written on the back. Beside each number was a detailed description in tiny handwriting.
The blueprint for the Reich’s entire horde of treasure.
He found Lake Toplitz, but the description wasn’t one he had written. Perhaps Wilhelm was in charge of it? And that was why he was here: to oversee construction of whatever this huge cage was. To not only hide but to also keep safe against thieves the Reich’s most treasured possessions.
Suddenly a voice cried out, ‘Sommer! Are you alright? It did not kill you?!’
Steffan started and quickly folded the map into a small square. Without thinking, he tucked the map inside his trousers and covered it with his coat. He turned in time to see Hans Bletch, a young soldier whom he had met on the truck, scramble down the last rungs of the ladder and stare at him in shock.
‘What?’
‘You should not be in here. It is Wilhelm’s electromagnetic security system.’
‘What’s that?’ Wilhelm climbed down the shaft and strutted up to Bletch. ‘Do I hear my name being used in vain?’
Bletch suddenly seemed meek and mild in front of Wilhelm. ‘I was warning your cousin about the cage.’
Wilhelm flicked a finger to dismiss Bletch. ‘Your time would be better spent checking one last time that all is ready to set the trigger, than in idle chat. We must be out of here in five minutes. I shall be the one to tell my cousin about my technology achievements, not you!’
Bletch bowed curtly, clicked his boots together and hurried away, although not without one last, amazed glance back at Steffan.
‘So, cousin, you would like to know about all the excellent work that I have been doing all these years that you have been running around Europe without even a proud Nazi uniform covering your backside, ja?’
Steffan pretended to scratch his nose to hide his grin at Willy’s trumped-up attitude. Wilhelm was still as conceited as ever. To pacify his cousin and show his eternal respect for keeping him out of the firing line, he said, ‘Please tell me, Willy, I am always interested to be humbled by your cleverness.’
His cousin clapped him on the back. ‘We all have our ways of serving the Reich, Steffan. At this moment I am especially envious of your languages, especially that bastard English tongue, for I will be needing it very soon where I am headed. So, yes, even by my own high standards, I must say that what we have made here is revolutionary. It is the only one of its kind, although we were to use it on the lower floors of the Reich Chancellery and a number of other high-value underground facilities to stop the advancing enemy from learning our secrets. Alas, time ran out on us.’
‘But how does your cage work, Willy?’
‘In ways that the eye cannot see! This vault has eyes, though. Eyes which will see any intruder and show him how the Reich treats thieves.’
Steffan pointed upwards to indicate the underground concrete bunker that surrounded the vault. ‘There is even more than all this?’
‘Ja!’ Wilhelm bellowed. ‘Here we are keeping top security documents and technology archives. More important than mere gold, which in fact we cannot keep here because metals cause problems with the system. So this vault guards a number of prize cultural artefacts, but most important are the maps which show where all the Reich’s treasures are hidden. They must never fall into the hands of the enemy! We will return one day to get it all back when the Reich rises again!’
The sounds of bootsteps and someone on the metal ladder halted Wilhelm for a moment.
Steffan waited, the admiring gaze on his face showing his respect to Willy. He knew his cousin took that kind of thing to heart, even though it was secretly shameful on his part to show respect.
When they were alone again, Wilhelm’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. ‘I have been experimenting with energy fields. A human body is full of them, and they are vital to health and life. Any field, however, can be combined with its polar opposite to form an almost null-point of energy. At and near that point, energy is effectively drawn out of a person, and I tell you that you would not believe how it alters the human body and indeed the mind.’ He shrugged, ‘It incapacitates in mere minutes, and will eventually lead to death, a slow, agonising end. But from the moment of exposure, the intruder will be like a living dead person.’
As his cousin spoke Steffan watched his eyes and felt a crawling tingle of fear shiver down his spine. He had lost contact with his cousin, and now Steffan could see that Wilhelm was no longer the Willy he had once known and so admired. What had once been confidence was now an arrogance so total that it shrieked out its madness from every glance and gesture. It was not a trait that could co-exist with humanity. No, there was no trace of that remaining. Was this all because of what he had achieved working with Hans Kammler?
Without knowing what else to say, Steffan said, ‘I am sorry that I lack the scientific understanding to be able to discuss this with you and truly appreciate your work.’
‘Do not be, Steffan. This is all new. It is the fruit of dedicated Aryan minds which have been elevated and freed from the rabble of Jews and other inferior races. Just as our enemies had no answer to the Blitzkrieg, so Nazi technology ascends to new levels, both in our understanding of the forces of the universe and in our research on the human body. And Steffan, we can combine our learning to make a new generation of weapons. This
work owes much to the esteemed Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. Have you heard of him?’
Steffan shook his head.
‘Well, Mengele is a German Schutzstaffel officer and physician. He was in Auschwitz, but with Red Army troops sweeping through Poland, he was transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. I imagine he is now also on the run. He’d be wise to get himself lost in the vastness of America.’
‘I haven’t heard of him,’ Steffan hoped his reply would stop Wilhelm’s lecture, but it didn’t.
‘Mengele is renowned for the experiments he has performed on Auschwitz prisoners.’
Although he didn’t want to know the answer, Steffan found himself asking, ‘What kind of experiments?’
‘Some simple things like putting prisoners into pressure chambers, removal of organs and limbs or testing new, untried drugs. Interesting things too, like how castration works on men and women, injecting people with lethal germs to see their reactions, and how long it takes for people to be frozen to death.’
Steffan’s stomach rolled.
‘The tests I found intriguing were experimental surgeries performed without anaesthesia. Or injecting chemicals into children’s eyes in an attempt to change their eye colour. And, listen to this, he even did sex change operations.’
Steffan was horrified that his cousin, someone from his family, his own flesh and blood, could be impressed by investigative examinations that amounted to torture or were even lethal. ‘Don’t you find that disgusting, Willy?’
‘Steffan, I understand your reaction, but as the Master Race, we of the Reich cannot allow ourselves such weakness in these matters. For the progression of science and the protection of our own people, this work yields valuable understanding.’
Steffan watched his cousin lean on a stack of crates and light a cigarette, not offering him one, presumably because he remembered that Steffan had never adopted the habit.
Wilhelm blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Of course, we do not do it for fun. We make the decision to sacrifice these sub-humans, criminals and inferior races, for the greater glory of mankind. And Mengele was testing to see if these treatments can help patients. You see, what we can learn from these experiments on the Jews and suchlike works equally on true Germans. It is like planting a crop: to begin with, there is much work for no reward, but eventually a harvest will be reaped for the Master Race.’
The Master Race.
To Steffan, it sounded more like a cult than a philosophy. As Wilhelm talked of sub-humans, Steffan had a sudden realisation that he included Rita in that group. That could not be right! In no way did Steffan consider himself superior to her! And if not her, then what about every other Jew, Pole, Slovak, Negro?
Surely each person, regardless of race, had their human qualities in similar measure. And if all were equal, then there was only one way to view the kind of experiments Wilhelm recounted with such glee: a monstrosity.
He himself, back when they had captured that spy, had been used as propaganda to support the genetic superiority of the Aryan race. By Hitler, the Führer, the supreme leader and father of the Reich, whose features, ironically, weren’t especially Aryan.
Wilhelm interrupted Steffan’s thoughts by tut-tutting. ‘Valuable work, you see, because it’s the kind of operations you cannot perform on normal people, like you and me.’
Steffan balked. Normal people. Were they normal? To accept these atrocities and not fight back against the mad tyrant who ruled their country?
Utterly oblivious to his cousin’s train of thought, Wilhelm continued, his fervour building. ‘Mengele was doing shock treatment tests to see how the human brain works when subjected to electromagnetic waves.’
Steffan’s stomach was queasy with revulsion as he listened to the details of what this so-called doctor in Auschwitz had done.
Yet at the same time he was ashamed of himself. Why had he never had the courage to stand up for human rights? To stand up for good people like Rita’s family and the rest of her people. Long ago, he had convinced himself that making a stand would only get him killed.
Now, he wondered if preserving his own life was truly more important than fighting, partly for those who were being murdered, but also against something that he no longer had any doubt was evil.
If only he had made a stand when the war started. It was too late now.
29
Wilhelm broke Steffan out of his thoughts by thrusting his arm out to point at the device in the chamber. ‘So the large cage in the vault uses electromagnetic waves…and another secret technology device.’
‘Something you designed, Willy?’
Wilhelm’s chest puffed out. ‘Yes. All my design.’
‘How does it work?’
‘It is similar to the design of a Faraday cage, but far more intelligent.’
‘A Faraday cage?’
‘Yes. Named after an English scientist, Michael Faraday, who invented the concept in 1836. A Faraday shield is an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields. It’s formed by a continuous covering of conductive material.’
‘Do you mean that the electromagnetic rays stay inside the cage?’
‘Ja!’ Wilhelm continued, ‘Or, more accurately, the cage collects the rays and allows the system to re-use their power. This vault is protected by radiation, but at low doses that does little more than burn the skin in the short term. We are hiding all the secrets that will enable us to come back and recreate The Third Reich. Therefore, we needed something much stronger, more powerful.’
‘I see,’ Steffan murmured, but he really didn’t see or understand. He just wanted Willy to finish his explanation, so he could do as he suggested: get out of Germany.
‘That is what I have toiled over for many years. We tested and tested. In fact our old friend, Friedrich Wollner, did much of the experimentation. But the effects were never strong enough or fast enough. Always I had to increase the intensity of the rays and add other components that caused severe damage to the intruder.’
Bile rose into Steffan’s throat. He swallowed hard to send it back down.
Wilhelm caught his discomfort and sniggered, ‘You were always a soft one, weren’t you, cousin?’
He dropped his head, pretending shame, but hiding his disgust.
‘So,’ Wilhelm’s voice was now pumped up with ego, ‘incapacitation and cognitive changes are within the realm of possibility, but we wanted more than cooking the intruder. How to get the power for that, though? The answer, my answer, was combining nodes. If you fire a beam of radiation at someone it burns the skin, but that is no use. We had to get inside, to target the vulnerability of the internal organs and the brain. What I discovered, and Friedrich helped me verify, was that when two or more targeted beams of radiation are made to combine within the human body, it is possible to create massive damage in that exact spot, damage that will incapacitate or kill with the speed we need for this vault.’
Wilhelm laughed and waved his hand, for all the world like a dinner guest recounting his most amusing anecdote. ‘But to fill the whole chamber with these node summation points…hah! The energy required would be vast, and in all probability it would destroy the contents of the vault at the same time. This we do not want, ja?’
Wilhelm laughed again, and Steffan nodded obligingly.
‘After our little adventure with the spy I had the good fortune to become Dr. Konrad Zuse’s pupil. He studies machines he calls computers and says that within our lifetimes these will change the world beyond all recognition, because they provide artificial intelligence. And that is how I have solved the power problem here: I have harnessed that intelligence and made it a deadly weapon.’
‘Very clever,’ Steffan had no idea why those words came out of his mouth. As a child, he had always looked up to Willy and, without realising it, he had probably helped to boost his cousin’s inflated opinion of himself.
‘This dome in the centre of the floor behind you houses the computer. Built into the walls and the floor of
this chamber is a vast network of emitters and receivers. Every five seconds each emitter fires a miniscule burst of radiation and the receiver collects it. However’ Wilhelm held a finger in the air, a smug grin claiming one side of his face, ’it can happen that a receiver does not receive the expected amount of energy. Why? Because something has come between it and the emitter. An intruder! In just fractions of a second the computer calculates the location of the thief and fires a set of emitters at maximum force to combine nodes at the exact points of the internal organs and brain of the intruder. And as the enemy moves, he continues to be tracked and targeted, again and again, by the computer.’
Against his wishes, Steffan found himself impressed. This was truly ingenious. Wilhelm read it on his face and nodded.
‘The levels required for instant effect are really staggeringly high. We discovered this over a period of time with Wollner’s prisoners.’ Now Wilhelm snorted as if recalling fond memories. ‘Later on, we had to raise the levels further because it turned out Friedrich had been too fond of using young girls for his laboratory rats.’
Steffan kept his face blank, but not easily.
’In the original design the system could track and kill four separate intruders, but only small women. With the new power setting, it will kill two men and badly damage the third, although of course it will switch to new targets once its first victims have sunk completely to the floor.’
Steffan frowned. ‘But how long can this system stay active? Will it not run out of power?’
Wilhelm thumped his flat hand across Steffan’s shoulder blades. ‘Well done, cousin, I think you do actually understand the concept! Of course, identifying these problems is a lot easier than solving them, but this is what differentiates my solution. As for how long it will remain active, the answer is perhaps as much as a thousand years! The Faraday cage absorbs almost all the radiation that is not going into the thief, and returns the power to the source. Of course, it is not entirely efficient, but the same water pipe that will be used to flood this vault, an underground stream from high on the mountain that we found whilst excavating the cave, also drives a turbine that provides more energy than that used in the detection system, and so keeps the system charged. This recapture system is what allows such high levels of power to be used.’