He ignored her and gingerly began climbing. After the first few feet he turned to look down at her. ‘Make your way to the centre room on the far side, but stick to the edges of the aisles and try to keep your feet of the floor. I’ll join you if I can.’
The piece he’d identified was about halfway up, maybe fifteen feet from the floor. Hardly daring to breathe, he slowly made his way towards it, knowing that every second was bringing their pursuers closer, but that to rush was to invite disaster. As he went, he pushed the slack of the rope into any gaps in the metal spoil, so it was close to invisible. The motor part was about twice the size of the smaller piece of machinery attached to the fishing nylon and it formed the key to a finely balanced heap, which in turn carried the weight of a massive engine of some kind. With trembling hands he laced the rope around it. Was it unstable enough? He reached out to make sure, but he knew that if he moved it even an inch it could bring the whole mountain of metal down and him with it. Reluctantly, he retreated, taking even more care where he put his feet.
He’d just reached the floor when she screamed, a scream so drenched in terror that it turned his heart to ice.
‘Sarah!’
He started to run through the twisted heaps of metal.
XXXIX
THE PONY-TAILED MAN stared from the enormous picture window of his suite in the corporation’s Manhattan headquarters and considered his next move. Normally he barely noticed the dramatic New York skyline, but today it inspired and moved him. The fact that he was the head of the Vril Society did not make him any less of an American. This country had lost its way, thanks to failed politicians who did not understand the new reality. In the decades since the Second World War, the United States had sought to extend its global influence by military and economic means, but in almost every instance it had failed. Korea had been the last just war, and the West had been fought to a stalemate, ground down by the sheer mass of its enemies. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were largely pointless conflicts, as he saw it, with little profit to be had either politically or diplomatically. The 9/11 attacks had shown how a great power could be rendered militarily impotent. In the wake of the Twin Towers, America had lashed out like a chained bear at her tormentors; the bear had the power to crush its attackers, but the chains of misguided liberalism denied her the chance to use that power to its full extent.
And now the world was moving towards a new phase, but they were still too blind to see it. Energy was the key. It had been the key since the first turn of a turbine during the Industrial Revolution way back in the eighteenth century. The Russians knew that, and Europe would soon be on its knees begging for a whiff of the natural gas reserves the Kremlin controlled. But the Russians would only hold the cards in the short term. He had a far broader vision. A true world leader who combined the best of German and American blood would create peace and prosperity. No government on earth would be able to ignore him when he could send them back to the Dark Ages with the flick of a switch.
But he couldn’t delude himself. He didn’t just need the Sun Stone to make his vision a reality. He needed it to survive. His analysts predicted that the global banking crisis was much worse than anyone, even the banks themselves, realized. The group of companies he had formed was hopelessly exposed. If one of them went under the effect would be like the bottom brick being removed from a wooden tower. The entire entity would collapse, bringing all the other nearby towers down with it. The result would be catastrophic.
Frederick said his men would soon have Saintclair and the girl, and with them the journal. But Frederick could not be allowed to lay his hands on the Sun Stone. Frederick was a very dangerous man: the true soul of the Vril, even if he did not yet know it. A fanatic who would take the stone and use it in some pointless mumbo-jumbo ritual at Wewelsburg.
The true power of the Sun Stone lay in its capacity to change the future, not alter the past.
In time, Frederick would have to be taken care of, but Frederick was not the only obstacle in his path. Somewhere out there other forces were at work. Sinister unseen forces who exhibited the same ruthlessness he was capable of himself. The Chinese certainly, though how much they knew of the Sun Stone’s true power he wasn’t sure. And who had killed their two agents? It was even possible some shadowy organization within his own government had become involved. If that were the case he might be forced to reconsider his long-term strategy. He had always intended to make a gift to his country of the military by-products generated by Brohm’s breakthrough. Now he could be forced to play that particular card a little earlier than he’d intended. Soldiers were such simple souls, give them a sniff of a new wonder weapon that would make a bigger bang than anything yet created and they would sit up and beg. But for the moment all that was of secondary importance.
He turned back to the desk, where the grinning silver skull from the casket returned his stare. Secret papers of any kind are a currency, even if they deal with events long past. Surprisingly often they produce the small seedlings from which large profits grow. One of the businesses that formed his many-tentacled corporation was that of producing newspapers. True, as an industry it was in danger of being steamrollered by the emerging technologies and was not the high-profit vehicle it had once been. Still, he enjoyed the prestige that ownership brought with it and the leverage his reporters gave him over small-minded individuals in government and the professions. From the start he had been amused by how artfully dishonest journalism could be; utterly unscrupulous, like espionage, but more cynical and with a little less pointless sacrifice. Through his publications he had created a network of informants among low-paid government archivists across Europe and the United States, retained to cherry-pick their files for papers that might be of interest. These men and women believed they were working for his newspapers and were grateful to accept a relative pittance for the fruits of their researches. Certain categories of papers, including those of curiosity value or which provided the possibility of exploitation, automatically made their way to his desk.
The documents from the records clerk in Cologne were only forwarded to him because of his well-known interest in technology, but he could still remember the dry feeling in his throat as he had read them for the first time. They dated from 1943 and included requisition orders for certain materials, tools and equipment that seemed to point to only one thing – and a name.
That was when he had launched the resources of the Vril Society on this hunt to discover Walter Brohm’s whereabouts and the location of his research materials. The first hint of progress had come with an investigation into Brohm’s background and the revelation that he had been a member of the 1937 Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. Most of the official papers had been destroyed, but enough evidence remained to reconstruct the route of the expedition and satellite images of the Changthang crater confirmed enough of what the Brohm papers hinted at to set his heart racing. It had taken six years to track down the casket and another three before he had the confidence to give the Menshikov operation the green light. In the meantime, his Vril contacts in the State department and the Bundestag were making efforts to discover Walter Brohm’s fate. The German authorities had traced a Red Cross document confirming Brohm’s incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp near Leipzig, where he had been placed in protective custody. His rank was given as private and, even more curiously, the paper had later been stamped ‘Unconfirmed’. There was no further evidence of Brohm’s existence in the camp system. Much later, the State department official found Brohm’s name in a list of potential prisoners who might be suitable for what would become Operation Paperclip, a secret OSS programme to recruit Nazi scientists and exfiltrate them to work for the American government. The next big breakthrough had come when some nuisance of a computer hacker had leaked dozens of archived Pentagon files on the internet, including a document marked ‘Highly Restricted’ which named Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. The military record showed that Team Edgar had been wiped out in an ambush in the Bavarian Alps on
8 May 1945, the day the war ended. On further investigation, it was found that two survivors from Team Dietrich, Captain Matthew Sinclair and Lieutenant Stanislaus Kozlowski, had been subsequently awarded the Military Cross for their actions on that date. Walter Brohm had never been heard of again.
The pony-tailed man’s investigators confirmed that Matthew Sinclair had left the Army and been ordained into the Anglican Church. Between 1949 and 1963 he had carried out missionary work in the African Congo, until, in an altercation that had made the front page of many newspapers, he had physically assaulted the mercenary commander of Katanga province, Colonel Michael Hoare, and been sentenced to death. When he returned to Britain all trace of him was lost.
Stanislaus Kozlowski, the only other member of Team Dietrich, had been traced to a home for the elderly in Rugby, Warwickshire. At first, he had been reluctant to talk about his military service, but eventually he was surprisingly forthcoming about his wartime experiences. Kozlowski’s insistence on telling his story to a wider audience had required his removal, but it was from transcripts of the Kozlowski interview that he had learned of the fate of Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. And of the journal that Team Dietrich’s commander had kept so assiduously in the final weeks of the war.
From that moment on, he had devoted every resource at his disposal to the discovery of Matthew Sinclair and his surviving relatives. How ridiculous that after all this time and effort and investment it came down to one man.
He picked up the telephone on his desk. ‘Get me Sumner.’
XL
JAMIE REACHED THE doorway where Sarah had disappeared. To his right, her torch lay on the floor, still gently rocking, the beam playing on the base of the far wall. He froze as he heard a gentle shuffling and raised his own torch to illuminate whatever had made the noise.
‘Oh, Christ!’
The silent scream in the tormented, eyeless face reflected the terror of her end, the jagged hole in her skull clear proof of the method they had used to snuff out her life. He reached forward to touch her shoulder.
‘Why did they do this?’ Sarah’s hushed voice came from the corner behind him. He almost cried out with relief as he caught her in the spotlight. Safe. Hunched into the angle of the wall, her body seemed smaller and more fragile, her eyes shone huge and liquid in the torchlight.
He turned back to the desiccated body dressed in the remains of a striped grey shift which lay slumped across the steel bench. In the torchlight her still perfect teeth shone like pearls in the ivory skull. Small and delicate. Like Sarah’s teeth. Leathery hands with long slim fingers that might have once played the piano stretched out towards him as if in welcome. He heard the shuffling again and a mouse peered cautiously from the eye socket of the skull where it had made its nest. The torch lifted and the beam took in dozens, no, hundreds, of other skeletal bodies. A sea of bones that stretched the length of the room.
They sat in ordered rows, chained to the benches where they had worked and where they had died, some slumped forward, others reaching up, their backs permanently arched in agony from the moment the bullets had struck. The disarticulated remains of still more lay in scattered heaps on the concrete floor below the point where they had hung lifeless for years until time and gravity combined to snap their sinews. He imagined the screams of terror, the shouts of defiance as the SS men had walked along the ranks with their pistols and machine guns barking, the blood staining the work bench thick. Was the woman closest to him the first or the last? Did she know her fate before she was chained to the cold steel bench? He looked at the face again. Oh, yes. She knew.
‘To defend the Great Secret. The Wonder of the World.’
‘This was Walter Brohm’s doing?’
‘Shhhh!’ He clicked off his torch and forced her back into the corner as the first flickering beams reached the main hall. A brusque voice issued whispered instructions. Jamie crouched low and risked a glance from the doorway. Through a gap in the mountains of metal he counted them. Six, at least, and the leader hadn’t been fooled by the tracks in the dust. Jamie had hoped to lead them all down the main aisle, but whoever was giving the orders had held them back and split them into three groups. Two to take the outer passages and one to go through the centre. Once the dispositions had been made they started forward, moving with deadly intent. A torch beam swept across his hiding place, forcing him to duck back.
He pushed his head against Sarah’s so that his mouth touched her ear. ‘Listen.’
Gustav had been irritated by the enforced delay while his men investigated the office which was of so much interest to Saintclair, but he couldn’t take the chance that the Englishman had found or left something there. The empty space in the dust on the wall was intriguing, but the only thing that mattered was the journal and it was only a question of time before he had it. The scream that had just echoed through the corridors proved it. There was no escape from the bunker, apart from the way they had come.
When they reached the main production hall, a hunter’s instinct told him this was where his prey had gone to ground. They always went to ground. Fear and hopelessness robbed them of their energy and their courage. But they could still be dangerous.
‘Muller and Krauss sweep the left, Schmidt and Ritter the right. Kempner and I will take the centre. This time we take no chances. If you see them, shoot to kill.’
Very slowly they worked their way forward. Gustav allowed Kempner to take the lead, while he provided cover with the MP5. In the torch beam he noted where the two sets of footsteps had turned into one. Did they really think him such a fool to be taken in by a cheap trick like that? Well, they would learn. Away to his left one of the torch beams deviated and he noted approvingly that Muller was searching some sort of side room. Yet the further they moved into the great mounds of twisted scrap, the more the scale of the place worked against his confidence. Should he have secured the bunker and waited until they could rig up some kind of generator? No, Frederick wanted results. It had to be now. It might cost him another man, but the price was worth paying.
One more step and it was as if World War Three had broken out. Gustav whipped the machine pistol round as two shots reverberated like cannon fire around the vast echo chamber of the concrete room. The shocked silence that followed was broken by a burst of almost hysterical laughter.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ he demanded.
Krauss appeared from another side room backlit by the wavering beam of a torch. ‘Just a bunch of soaps who were resettled during the war. Muller almost shit his pants.’
Gustav cursed beneath his breath. ‘The only corpses we are interested in are Saintclair and the girl.’
He gestured to Kempner to move on. That was when he saw the silken strand of the spider’s web tauten and bend against the knee of his partner’s combat trousers.
The two figures slumped at the end of the row of corpses slowly raised their heads. Jamie’s ears rang from the incredible noise of the shots in the confined space and Sarah’s hand shook as she reached for the comfort of his in the darkness. They had taken their places on the bench where two of the dismantled skeletons had fallen to the floor, frozen in position as the torch flicked from skull to skull and the panicked German began firing. Sarah had almost cried out as a bullet shattered the jaw of the dead man next to her and spattered her with teeth and shards of bone, but some deep-set instinct for survival kept her silent.
With the men gone, Jamie pulled her to her feet and retrieved the rucksacks and the bubble-wrapped painting from below the table. Together they crept back towards the door. The closest torches had moved on, but the pair in the centre were taking more care and Jamie could see the glow of another set on the far side of the biggest hill of metal. His heart told him they should make a break for it, but his brain said wait. Ten seconds passed that felt like an hour. They must have reached it by now. What if they’d seen the nylon? He squeezed Sarah’s hand as a signal to get ready.
* * *
For a fractio
n of a second after Kempner’s knee felt the first pressure of the fishing line, the nylon stretched, its natural elasticity brought into play by the force placed upon it. But before the German could react it pulled the smaller piece of machinery from its position and there was a clatter as it fell to the floor. Gustav stiffened at the sound, but when nothing happened he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he noticed the rope.
Twenty feet above them, the weight of the smaller piece of machinery pulled the larger engine part out of its position in the jumble of metal holding together the top of the pile. At first it was just the rattle of a single piece of metal bouncing down the side of the slope, but very quickly it turned into an avalanche. Within a second the fragile shelf holding the big engine disintegrated and the enormous piece of steel alloy toppled to join the wave of tons of twisted metal plunging towards the Germans. Kempner let out a shriek and began to run, but Gustav knew there was no escape. He threw himself sideways in a forlorn attempt to find safety.
Jamie waited until the clamour of the avalanche subsided and wobbling torches had converged on the centre of the room. Moving fast and low he and Sarah crawled silently to the doorway and into the corridor. Right or left? He had no way of knowing whether the direction they’d come would be guarded, but at least he could be certain it was a way out. He chose right.
Ten minutes later they reached the waterfall and for the first time in an hour he felt it was safe to breathe. They headed downstream towards Braunlage, keeping away from the marked trails, and crossed the river at a hiker’s bridge.
Sarah was uncharacteristically silent as they walked, but just before they reached the main road she stopped him.
‘I asked you a question back there, but we were interrupted before you gave me an answer. Why?’
He hesitated. ‘Walter Brohm couldn’t afford to leave anyone alive. These weren’t ordinary slave workers. They were the scientists and technicians who had helped create the Uranverein. When the Nazi nuclear project was wound down between nineteen forty-one and ’forty-two Hitler decided they weren’t needed any more.’ He remembered David’s words. That was the year they sent many of their best scientists to Auschwitz. ‘But Walter Brohm needed them, and he had them brought here. The SS ran the bureaucracy of death, it would have been simple enough to arrange. The knowledge their heads contained was as precious as any research file, perhaps more so. They may have been his slaves, but we know from the journal that Brohm wanted above all to be admired. He would have confided in them his plans and his hopes for the future. He would have wanted them to believe that they were part of that future.’
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