by Paula Wynne
Aron laughed and clapped him on the back. ‘And this is why it’s you who gives the orders, little brother!’
John grinned in response and then shrugged. ‘One thing I can say: if it was Steffan Sommer who found this spot to hide the false bank notes, he knew what he was doing. That water is so deep and so blackened with fallen trees, no one can get anywhere near the bottom.’
‘So if there’s something more important than the money hidden here, what do you think it is?’
Now John shook his head. ‘Not just yet, Aron. To say what I hope would feel like tempting fate, and I don’t want to do that today.’
An hour later, the metal detector’s high-pitched beep rattled John’s nerves. Since the big find of 1959, there had been on-and-off bans on treasure hunting in the lake, with another temporary ban in place at the moment, so the area was deserted for a change. An ideal time to do their explorations.
If he had decoded the map correctly and got his triangulations right, then they were in the correct spot, but those were big ifs. He leaned against a tree chewing on the ends of his moustache, as Aron ran the machine over the ground. Every now and then, he slapped his well-wrapped biceps to punch in a bit of warmth.
Aron panned back and forth over a mound of earth and suddenly the detector shrieked. He carefully placed it into the long grass and dropped to his knees. ‘I got something.’
John and Rick joined him, digging through roots. Their gloved hands yanked up spiky brambles and fallen branches, revealing a trench riddled with fox holes. After a minute of clearing grass, caked in thick mud, across the forest floor, John whistled through his teeth.
A metal lid sat in a plinth of concrete below ground level. A secret door in the forest.
Aron grinned and leaned back, whooping up into the sky. He turned and thumped John’s back. ‘You were right! We found it!’
‘Not yet. Let’s see what’s inside first. We’ve found too many false alarms, so let’s be sure this time.’
They all tugged at the iron U-shaped handle sticking out of the metal lid. For a few minutes, they struggled but couldn’t open it.
‘Blast it,’ Rick said impatiently.
John’s hand patted the air as he gestured for Rick to stay calm.
‘That side’s loose,’ Aron grunted.
John swept his rubber glove around all the edges and tossed the last remaining dirt off the lid. One small edge of the lid had rusted and now it flaked away, leaving a tiny gap. He curled his fingers. Despite the thick insulation his fingers were frozen.
Aron leapt up and ran to John’s backpack. He unzipped it and grabbed a crowbar.
While Aron wrenched the crowbar under the metal lid, John glanced around, feeling as if Steffan Sommer’s ghost was watching him.
But nobody was in sight.
Two doves sat in the treetops pecking at each other’s feathered throats. The peace and tranquillity of the couple struck him, and an apparition of his marriage came to him. He had first loved Emily because of her beautiful Nordic looks. It had often occurred to him that he was similar to Hitler in that he understood the beauty of the Aryan people, but where they differed was that he could never understand what had driven the bastard to try and elevate them as a master race.
He thought of the equally perfect beauty Emily had birthed. Never could he understand how lucky he was that his little princess was so perfect in every way. So unlike him.
Now, looking at the doves made him realise that the marriage he had always known would not be good was completely empty. Emily did her thing, he did his. Perhaps that was his fault, or rather that of the demon that drove him to exact revenge on the Nazi phantom that haunted him.
Was it for what they did to his people? Or what The Wolf did to him…taking his only worldly possession, a child’s treasure?
Glancing at the doves one last time, John decided to change his marriage. To go home and at least try to love Emily. Maybe what he saw as her obsession with material wealth was simply because it was something she could hold on to and predict, unlike her husband. He would stop this madness, dashing across Europe at every sniff of Nazi treasure. Instead, he would dedicate his time and love to his wife and child.
‘Come on, help me,’ Aron panted, ‘it’s almost open!’
John and Rick stepped closer and helped Aron. After a few tugs, all on their knees and backs bent, the thick iron lid gave a series of tortured clangs as it jolted open.
They all stared down into a ventilation tunnel. Then, John rose to his feet and saluted the doves with a huge grin creasing his face.
Aron frowned at him. ‘What’s tickling you?’
John pointed at the treetops, ‘Those birds.’ He ducked his head inside and the darkness engulfed him.
‘Wait!’ Aron suddenly pulled him back.
39
If we drop this madness and stay home to give and receive love, will this bitter quest finally end? Could we ever be open to living in peace? Maybe we should try. Now is as good a time as any, because…if we don't end this war of revenge, it will end us.
‘What?’ John rasped. ‘Now isn’t the time to get cold feet on me, Aron.’
Lately, his brother had been more resistive to these trips and this endless pursuit of treasures. He wanted to settle down and have the time to find a wife. Even after all these years, Aron still found it hard talking to women. He would be happy when he heard John’s decision, that this trip would end their hunting days.
‘It’s my turn to go first,’ Aron pulled him back out of the hole.
‘Ah!’ John stepped aside and let Aron go ahead of him. Another of their agreements had been that they each take turns to be first, in case there was a booby trap. That was the fairest way.
Rick muttered, ‘I’ll watch the gear.’
The three men gave each other a curt nod.
Aron slid into the hole. Within seconds, only the thick rubber undersoles of his hiking boots were visible. ‘Come on,’ his muffled voice echoed down the ventilation pipe.
As John squeezed his head inside the hole and crawled forward, the smell of mould and damp immediately filled his nostrils. That didn’t deter him.
On hands and knees, John followed Aron and slithered on his stomach like a large lizard in search of prey.
After a long slide through the pipe, he dropped down into an empty chamber beside his brother. John raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Treading carefully, they moved to the other side of the chamber. In front, Aron splashed through puddles of rusty water that shone brown in the torchlight.
Scanning the walls, John almost tripped over the corroded metal valve which would have pumped air into the ventilation shafts. He bent down and squinted at it through the dim torchlight. Despite its years in the damp, the valve was still bright yellow. The colour of German industry.
‘It’s definitely Nazi. Look,’ he tapped his finger on a Reich symbol. The valve had a serial number dating back to 1943 printed on it. VW12b. ‘They built this so they could draw air in from outside. It works like an on and off switch to get fresh air into this place.’
Aron’s white teeth glinted above his torch as he flicked it around the room. ‘Probably to keep them alive if they escaped and hid in here.’
‘Disgusting place to hide,’ John muttered, ‘even if it was only to survive.’
Peculiar moulds and mosses grew up the red brick walls. Spider webs clothed the corners and hung like glistening silk underwear over the empty doorway.
The only sound was a constant drip of water leaking into the bunker. Dripping rain and water had always bothered John. At least ever since they hadn’t been given enough water to drink at the camp when hearing the rain fall outside on the roof was yet another form of torture. He wasn’t going to let that ride his nerves at this moment, though. Not now!
They trampled over some rock and debris, but the room still maintained its structure. A set of iron reinforcement bars stuck up out of the ground like gnarled fingers. Beside them, rusti
ng attachment cables hung loose.
The stale air, so long unventilated, seemed to crawl across his skin and caught in his nose. He strained his eyes to see in the dark, with only the dim warmth of their torchlight to guide them through the clammy, humid atmosphere.
For a moment, he was flung back to Terezín, where screams for help from the tortured prisoners ripped through the night. He shook off the thoughts.
As on many occasions in these abandoned war buildings, John had to forcibly quell his terror. In moments like this, he had to slow his panicked breathing by shutting down the memories. This was often done by biting his lips or even his tongue. The pain of the recollections was that severe.
An abrupt, high wind rumbled through the ventilation chute, like a train going through a tunnel.
When it abated equally suddenly, only their heavy breathing could be heard. John imagined it was ghosts, and had to keep checking behind him to stem their infiltration of his mind.
They picked their way through a squared hallway. He ran his gloved hand along the rough wall. No holes anywhere. Punching the wall, he declared, ‘Cement blocks, probably reinforced with steel. It’s odd that they have all these doorways like a submarine if they built it that way.’
‘Hm,’ croaked Aron, ‘maybe they planned to be able to close sections off. They certainly don’t help the air circulate, though.’
John almost twisted his ankle on a lump of broken concrete. He glanced up and saw where the concrete lump had fallen out.
‘Hang on, didn’t we pass that red paint mark on the wall a way back? Stay where you are.’
He ran back, retracing his steps, which left a hollow thump echoing around the bunker. He returned to the iron door, which had once been locked but was now so corroded that they had been able to pass through with nothing more than a hard shove. He carried on through the corridor beyond it, and within minutes was uttering a jubilant laugh as he appeared in front of Aron.
Aron flinched. ‘Hey!’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘You were behind me a minute ago.’
‘Exactly!’
John thumped the concrete wall. ‘ There’s a hidden vault behind these walls. Crafty bastards! These section doors aren’t part of the construction, they’re to stop you seeing that you’re walking in a circle! Go either way and you would come to an end at one or other side of that locked door and never know. It’s our good fortune that they made it badly and it rusted away. They built this bunker around a hidden room, and a big one at that.’
They both retraced their steps, shining their torches up and down the walls, examining every nook and cranny for any sign of a door or opening into the hidden room.
Nothing. Not even a ventilation shaft.
‘I can’t see how deep the concrete is, but it has to be hiding something behind it.’
Despite the dead iciness of the air, a flash of heat raced through him. They had come all this way and couldn’t get into the vault. He wanted to hammer through the concrete wall and see what treasure lay hidden. But these things had to be done slowly and carefully, so instead, he gritted his teeth, grinding the top against the bottom.
Grinning, Aron placed his ear up against the concrete vault, ‘If only we knew what was inside.’
John shook his head and balled his fists. ‘We’ll have to break a hole. We’ll fucking blast that wall to hell!’
Their breath swirled in the cold underground chamber.
John glanced sideways at Aron. ‘This whole structure is already hidden. Why would they go to such great lengths to hide another room inside it?’
For a moment they stood motionless and then, simultaneously, they grinned at each other and then threw their arms around each other.
Slapping each other’s backs and laughing.
At last this might be their ultimate revenge. And it would be sweet.
40
My boy, now my man, should never have broken the sacred code.…
John and Aron had prepared themselves for this day. The Nazis had had a paranoia about thieves. ‘It takes one to know one!’ as John had observed to his brother. In all their missions, one factor had always held true: the more valuable the treasure they sought, the more elaborate the disguises and traps protecting it.
What they hadn’t encountered before was a bunker hiding another one within it. John imagined it was like those Russian dolls that nested inside each other. Each getting smaller and smaller. The Nazis had built the outer structure to protect the inner. There would be more to it, though. And they had always anticipated that, like the Reich Chancellery and several other Nazi buildings, whatever was hidden at Lake Toplitz would have been flooded at the end of the war by the SS. Which was why they had lugged diving gear all this way with them.
John’s irritation at the featureless wall of the bunker had lasted only a few minutes. He hadn’t reached the top of his field by favouring petulance over ingenuity, and once he started thinking, the idea had come quickly. The Nazis had been able to predict a lot of things, but portable metal detectors that could do what a top-end one made thirty years after the end of the war was capable of hadn’t been one of them.
They found the doorway quickly, in only the fifth section of wall they checked. Knowing where to hammer and chisel away at the layer of concrete, it took little more than an hour to expose a rectangle of iron in the wall and the small indentation where its lock was hidden.
Rick had a number of useful specialities and one was locks. Whilst the two brothers shone their torches for him, Rick probed like a surgeon with his selection of wires and levers, until finally a reluctant click echoed around the bunker.
‘What now?’ John asked.
Rick pointed to the small loop of thick metal they’d exposed below the lock. ‘We pull!’ They attached a carabiner and a piece of rope from their climbing gear to the loop and pulled, first just John, and then all three of them. There was a sudden, sharp noise as some resistance broke. Another clang. And a clunk. Then, a whoosh as the trapped air hissed out of the doorway and the door ground open, shedding flakes of concrete. John poked his head into the shaft. The abrupt blast of mildew, algae and wet stone filled his nostrils. The echoes of dripping water floated up to him.
With a grimace, he bent over and stared down into the dark, cavernous depths. ‘Hah,’ he bellowed to Aron peering into the shaft beside him, ‘they thought flooding would stop us!’
‘Rick, go get the diving gear will you?’ Their torches worked underwater, and their tanks would give them at least an hour of searching time. If the Nazis had built a few inner chambers, who knew what they would encounter? He had no idea, but, as usual, they had come prepared for all eventualities.
John dug into one of the baggage rolls Rick dropped from the ventilation shaft and pulled out a wetsuit. Thankfully, money was no object and they had bought the best quality of all the gear they needed…and more, in case. He slid a diving mask around his neck and sucked on the mouthpiece of the slimline tank he’d hoisted onto his back.
Now he twisted his head and glanced at the two men at his side. ‘Together we’ve found the small and the medium stuff, but we always knew that the big one was out there somewhere. It’s taken years to find this exact location,’ he looked at each of them in turn. ‘Whatever happens down there, remember your oath.’
All three slapped hands high in the air and chanted, ‘This place will never be revealed to anyone else.’
John exhaled hard. ‘What’s hidden down there is anyone’s guess. Are you ready?’
They all stared at each other.
Aron huffed. ‘Let’s pray it’s safe down there.’
‘I don’t pray,’ John retorted.
‘My turn to go first!’ Rick was all kitted up.
Water rippled around him as he lowered himself into the hidden vault.
Next, John clambered down the metal ladder into the water. Its echo was closeted and peculiar in the narrow shaft and merged with the sound of the newly disturbed water lapping against the c
ement walls. Just before he slipped into the water, he thought he heard a sound carry in through the ventilation shaft from the outside world. The keening shriek of the falcon.
Another warning?
It was nerve-wracking enough, diving into the underwater vault not knowing where it went, without the bird of prey screeching.
But discovering an untouched hoard of the Nazis’ most priceless treasures would make everything worthwhile.
Aiming his torchlight ahead of him, John peered around. There was only the ladder and the narrow tube of the shaft, eerie in the pitch black. Even with the breather clamped in his mouth he could taste the mineral tang of the cold water, and a hint of some sort of organic decay, a foulness.
Now and then a yellowed spot danced above him as Aron’s torchlight above him circled through the water. With Rick leading the way, John could feel the vibrations of both his trusted companions as their hands and feet sought and gripped the rungs of the ladder.
Suddenly a warped sound came to him. His eyes peered up through the murky water to see Aron banging the ladder and waving his arm wildly to point in Rick’s direction. His eyes were wide, the whites showing all around the pupils, and he seemed to be trying to shout some warning.
Another distorted whump echoed through the dense water. John hurried down three more rungs of the ladder to its end and was suddenly aware of a large space around him. He swivelled his torch beam around to see that Rick had moved away from the ladder and was gripping a heavy bar that curved up the wall of what appeared to be a huge, round chamber they were in. As he swung his torch beam around he saw more and more bars, almost as if the whole room were enclosed in a huge metal cage.
John kicked furiously over to his friend. His pulse beat faster, hammering against his ribs. Rick’s eyes were closed but his teeth showed round his breather.
He’d thought for a second there was a problem, but it must just be excitement. This was it! This must be what The Wolf had been talking about. Treasures hidden so deep under the ground that the stupid fucking Nazis never expected anyone would be able to find it!