Order of the Black Sun Box Set 6

by Preston William Child

  “'The Place of No Happening,' the spot I told you about earlier,” he informed her. “Why do you think they built the weather station to the other side?” His jolly demeanor kept confusing the others into thinking he was jesting, but he insisted it to be true. “Nothing can happen on this piece of land.”

  “I just cannot get past how silly that sounds,” Nina repeated.

  “Come, I'll prove it to you,” he challenged.

  “Sure thing,” Nina joined in.

  “Excuse me, you two, but shouldn't we be using our last battery power on what we came here to find? You two can always come up here and debunk or confirm what you are disagreeing about,” Sam suggested. “For now we need to recover what the blueprint is holding.”

  “I agree with Sam,” Joanne threw in her lot, as if it mattered.

  “What blueprint?” Virgil asked.

  Nina sidled up next to him and showed him what looked like a floor plan, only this one started to the outside of the structure and continued in the direction of the barren patch where nothing supposedly happened. Virgil, a boat builder and part-time construction agent, figured out the diagram in a second.

  “Oh, this chamber is along a subterranean tunnel heading northward under the 'Place of No Happening.' The entry point would be the drainage duct that goes into the underground sewerage system,” he explained without a flinch.

  “Into the toilet?” Sam winced again.

  “No, well, yes, sort of. Um, the cleanout, and…” he sighed at the revelation that he was the only one who knew what he was talking about. “A pipe comes up to the ground surface on one side and runs to a main sewer line on the other side. In this case, I suppose that other side ran right into the water on the other side,” Virgil clarified. “This entry point on the blueprint points to the septic tank below the barrens out there. Do you guys have any idea if they have any tools around here?”

  “They have some gear at the wall base in the sleeping area,” Sam recounted from his earlier exploration. “What do you need?”

  “Anything that can dig a shallow grave,” Virgil said in an eerie voice that had Sam in stitches, but as the big man went to retrieve a shovel, Sam looked at the girls, “God, I hope he’s joking.”

  A few minutes later Virgil was hacking at the toilet floor to gain access to the septic tank, he stretched his back. Satisfied with the developments and eager to assist, he asked, “So what are we looking for down there?”

  “The Olympias Letter,” Nina mentioned plainly. “I have claustrophobia. I will not be joining you in another dark, confined space, Sam. I had my fill in the Vault last time.”

  “Vault?” Joanne asked.

  Nina waved it off. “Long story.”

  After Virgil employed his strength to wedge open the cleanout lids that had not been touched in over seventy years. They had been buried under ten inches of soil and iced over, acting as covers to a widened pipeline, larger than any standard drainage chute required by regulation. It was the clue they needed that this was not just architecture; it was an antique attempt at finding a hidden object of obscure value.

  With a look of abject misery on his face, Sam got ready to go down the pipeline that led to the septic tank. “I don't suppose the Place of No Happening stretched down into the ground either?”

  “Apparently not. That was probably why the Nazi's did not try to dig from the top soil. I wonder why they didn't finish what they started?” Nina mused, her arms folded, looking down over Sam.

  “Because what they started probably finished them,” Joanne told Nina.

  Sam gave her a long leer. “Thank you, Miss Earle. Thank you for that.”

  “Sure thing, hon,” Joanne answered, to Nina's delight.

  “Sam, we’re right there with you. Just holler if you run into any shit down there,” Nina tried to console, but ended up collapsing with Joanne in a fit of laughter. She hadn’t meant the pun. She hadn’t even seen it coming before she said it.

  “I would come with you, my friend, but I'll never fit in there,” Virgil tried to comfort Sam.

  “Thanks, Captain Hecklund,” Sam replied, trying to prepare himself for the horrid experience.

  Down into the dark he sank deeper and deeper, crawling by the faint white light in his right hand. In his coat he had tucked his handheld camera to procure footage should he discover anything of interest.

  “How do I get myself into these shitty situations?” he moaned in the solitary darkness where even the sound of the chilling winds would have soothed him here in the deathly silent sarcophagus of the historical assumption some Nazi had scribbled on a piece of paper. “Operation Olympias, for Christ's sake. It just reeks of trouble.”

  Only then did Sam realize all the puns going to waste on his preoccupation with the imminence of the septic tank. Had it been another time and someone else was doing the dirty work and he was not freezing his balls off, he may have found his accidental utterings as amusing as the women did. Not soon after starting, he saw a separate entrance, an exit from the chute he was leopard-crawling down. He stopped to light the way and scrutinize the next part.

  “Okay, found the big shit pit!” he howled out loud, hoping the others could hear him. Worming his way through the hole, the tunnel birthed him into an empty tank the size of an average spare room. Even though Sam did not want to see what he was standing in, he had to film it like the obsessive archivist he innately was. His handheld sounded its tone to announce that it was on. Sam used the best setting along with his dwindling flashlight beam to capture the place. “Looks like a tomb down here,” he noted to the rolling camera. “Like an underground mausoleum.”

  He proceeded to briefly capture the roof and walls, which were, as expected, filthy, muddy and dusty. Sam's weary legs waded through the frigid shallow water that covered the floor of the tank. “Please, let this be mud.” Carefully he withdrew the blueprint from his jacket, taking care not to drop it in the muck or tear it. It was, after all, in itself, a relic of the Second World War.

  From the diagram, and from what Virgil had explained, there was a square on the outside of the tank, a few meters on in the remainder of the tunnel leading to the sea front. With faded blue pen this particular unmarked square was reiterated several times, leaving it far darker than the rest of the drawing. Sam took a screen shot of it and paused his camera to continue on. When he reached the other side of the tank to enter the next chute, Sam tripped over what felt like roots under the water. Luckily the water was not deep enough to submerge him or his camera, and since he had safely slipped the blueprint back into his jacket pocket, it too was spared any damage.

  But what did upset Sam was what his flashlight revealed at the edge of the tank's exit, that which he had fallen over. “Jesus!” he screamed, falling backwards a few times before he could recover his posture and get his camera.

  “What is it?” he could hear Nina shouting down.

  “I-I will show...just wait, I'll show you when I get back up,” he answered with a stutter of shock. His finger kept missing the Record button until he stilled himself and tried again. After a shaky setting of the Zoom function, Sam successfully included all the ghastly bones into his frame. “Fucking hell,” he muttered as he moved closer, seeking the slippery floor with his feet this time as he gradually advanced. “Military uniforms,” he remarked as he closed in. “Guess who. Just as we thought. Foot soldiers of Himmler who died down here looking for the very goddamn thing I am looking for.” Sam captured the horror of the last moments of what looked to be four men.

  Their mouths were agape and their orders still in their hands. Two had gunshot wounds to the head, apparently self-inflicted. Disturbing evidence of cannibalism came out on some of the bones, where Sam discovered teeth marks. Upon the wall next to the third man were the words 'verfluchte Erde.' What gave Sam a chill was how well preserved the writing was. It was as if it had been written by one of those bony hands mere minutes ago. With the insinuation that the earth is cursed, written by a dead man
, Sam was beginning to feel genuine terror in his heart. Prompted to put aside the feeling of sinister fate approaching him, he thought to speak to the viewers he was recording all this for.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, what gives me a better chance of survival than these blokes? The fact that I am not a fascist does not seem to absolve me from the same fate, does it?” he huffed, exhausted and cold, not to mention quite shaken. Sam was thankful that he got past the bones, but it only escalated his fear of what was waiting in the dark.

  27

  The Fear of God

  Purdue was not aware that several days had elapsed since he’d been flung into the oubliette and forced to listen to the brutal murder of the man who’d kidnapped him. Between the pain and the starvation, he was uncertain where the true agony had been born, but after all the cries for help Purdue realized that the worst anguish came from the knowledge that he was wasting away where he would never be found.

  “You Scots are certainly a cold-blooded bunch,” he recalled Mother saying to him at some point during his ebb and flow of consciousness during the most recent hours of his incarceration. Her coarse voice had drifted through the air holes in his prison, so that she could better torment him while he suffered a slow death. “I have heard so many old legends of Scottish castles and their masters, Mr. Purdue; stories that were so perverted I could not help but feel…inspired…by their methods.”

  Purdue could not utter a sound that did not constitute wailing in pain or the effort of begging for food, therefore refraining from provoking the deranged old woman and coming to the receiving end of more malice. For days now he had witnessed, only by ear, the habits of the supreme matriarch of the Black Sun organization. She drank incessantly, so heavily, that he was amazed by her resilience, especially at her ripe age.

  What terrified and repulsed him the most was Mother's idea to drop the limp corpse of Jonathan Beck unceremoniously into the oubliette with Purdue. The night before, after he’d heard the cadaver's bones break under the velocity of his fall from the trapdoor, the malefic matriarch invited Purdue to feast on the corpse if he became too ravenous, or suffer his company and stench. She loved talking while she drank herself into an immobilizing inebriation Purdue construed as some false psychological attempt to drown her guilt for all the malevolent deeds she’d ordered and exercised.

  “I like, especially, how your lairds killed their own children over land,” she spoke with snide reprehension, draining the bottom of her fifth bourbon that Purdue knew of. “What left an impression on me, though, is the way in which the genetically inferior men of your breed locked their wives in towers to waste away from hunger for bearing daughters.” She let out an unearthly cackle of ridicule. “Mein Gott! What a bunch of barbaric idiots your ancestors were! Did they not consider that their seed determined the gender of their children, that they in themselves were responsible for the horrid female offspring they so loathed? Probably not. Even if they did, they would have overlooked their error on account of some masculine rule.”

  He could hear her pacing with those long, gracious legs, and follow her position by the sound of her baleful speech. “You know, Mr. Purdue, I am no feminist, but misogyny has always kindled hellfire in me. And to punish women for the deeds of men solely for their sex has cultivated a special hatred for those Jewish systems of oppression over women. That book that instills more evil than any, that book compiled by the Roman hypocrites, it only reiterates that the Führer was the true Messiah.”

  From there on Purdue's mind began to fade again. The pain had relinquished its power to that of hunger-born fatigue. Somewhere in his head he could hear Mother carry on. “This is why I’m leaving you in my oubliette, to wane like the wives of your ill-begotten forefathers and their pious villainy…”

  The lanky body of the trapped explorer, ex-Renatus of the Order of the Black Sun (by some work of trickery) and enemy of all Nazi sympathizers, rolled over next to one of the massive iron spikes on the floor. He was too weak to even acknowledge the threatening gangrene in his leg. After all, he was not going to make it to the amputation before his frail heart surrendered.

  Where he lay, curled up and delirious, Purdue pondered upon the type of pen he was snared in. Oubliette, he thought, searching his knowledge for the definition of the thing. 'French...oblier, right? Oublier is to…like, to…forget. It is to forget. How goddamn apt they…to forget…

  “I am…forgotten,” Purdue murmured before his eyes refused to open and his mind shut away reality.

  Maria and Sylvia drove from the train station in Dalmally, heading toward Oban. Sylvia had arranged with her husband, Dr. Lance Beach, to transfer the money as Maria had instructed. She could not even revel in her husband's elation at hearing her voice while the gun bruised the tender skin of her temple, but she hoped to soon be reunited with Lance. He wept with happiness when she first spoke to him, and even if Maria put that bullet in her head right now, Sylvia would die happy at having heard his affectionate voice.

  When Lance spoke to Maria, she agreed to deliver his wife in a public place to prevent her from being singled out in a deserted place she did not know.

  “What did he say?” Sylvia dared ask. “Where are we meeting him?”

  “We aren't. I will be a safe distance away while you will wait for your husband across the road from the basilica,” Maria said. “The second payment just came through. Maybe you were right, Mrs. Beach. Maybe he needs you more than I thought.” She gave Sylvia a suggestive look. “You must be good at something. You know?”

  “You're disgusting,” Sylvia mumbled.

  “Such hypocrites, you little faithful housewifeys,” Maria sneered. “Like you never get on your knees outside of church…” she scoffed and smiled wickedly, “…or perhaps you do, in church too.”

  Ignoring, with great moral toil, the onslaught of her kidnapper, Sylvia bit her tongue for the rest of the journey. She put her thoughts into a positive light, thinking only of Lance and her children and seeing them again.

  An hour later they had arrived in Oban, but Maria kept her leverage until the third transfer had transpired. She started the car on the top of the hill where she could look over the coastal town. From there she could see the roads leading up to her location. If she saw one single police unit approach, Sylvia would be done for. When the transaction was complete, Maria was a different person.

  “Okay, Sylvia. Off you go, honey. Nice doing business with you,” she smiled. “Go!”

  Sylvia did not take another second to ponder the possibility of deception. Without a goodbye or a final word of disdain she flew out of the car and ran down to the park where Lance was to pick her up twenty minutes later.

  Apprehensive, she waited under the lamp post where she was supposed to be. She was told not to speak to anyone, or engage acquaintances and friends. Sylvia was a rule-keeper. She always found that it was better to comply and be done with it. Across the road, two blocks up the hill at St. Columbanus' Church, Maria Winslet was climbing up the bell tower with her Remington 700 rifle, adamant to make sure Sylvia Beach would never remember her face and her name – ever.

  From the top of the tower she could see the pale sun dip its face into the sea and she hoped to drop Sylvia while the light was still right for an accurate shot. From a block to the left of her scope she noticed Dr. Beach's car slow down. That was her cue to change lives.

  Two black markers lined Sylvia's face, her unsuspecting, holier-than-thou goodness. It made for a pleasurable target as Maria placed her index finger on the trigger, careful not to fire off too soon on the sensitive rifle.

  Without warning a pair of large hands swept the long barrel upwards, claiming the rifle before Maria realized what was going on. In a split second she saw a tall, dark figure in front of her. He promptly shoved the butt of the rifle hard into her face, knocking her senseless. Maria fell at Father Harper's feet as he looked down at her and said gently, “Thou shalt not kill.”

  Dr. Beach picked up his shaken wife after
a heartwarming reunion. She sobbed like a baby in his arms and all he did was to kiss her crown and rock her from side to side. When she’d calmed somewhat Lance took a call that just came through on his cell. “Excuse me, darling.”

  Sylvia stayed close against him, not interested in his conversation, but craving the security of his protective presence. “Father Harper? Yes? I have her, mostly unscathed, thank the Lord. Of course. No, problem. The children are staying with my sister. Alright, we're on our way.”

  “What was that about?” she asked. “Father Harper?”

  “You are not going to believe this,” Dr. Beach smiled, amused. “He knocked the bejeezus out of Maria! He says we must meet him to find out where Dr. Gould is.”

  “Dr. Gould is fine. She is in Canada, relic hunting, which is why I was mistaken for her,” Sylvia explained, before gasping, “Oh my God, Lance! The man that took me, his name is Jonathan Beck. They kidnapped Dr. Gould's friend and were going to ransom him to someone who wants to kill him!”

  “Wait, what?” Lance asked.

  “True!” she shrieked in panic. “We have to save Nina's friend…I don't recall his name now…”

  “Easy! Easy, Sylla,” her husband calmed her. “Think. Okay? Slowly. Where did they take him?”

  “I have no idea,” she shrugged, looking distraught. “They did not discuss that loudly enough. But I know this guy was going to bring them millions because he was some famous explorer these client's of Beck's were looking for, specifically.”

  “Famous explorer friend of Nina Gould?” Lance asked. Being a long time resident of Oban and a medical professional, he knew much more about Oban's famous Dr. Gould than his wife did. “Sweetheart, is his name David Purdue, perhaps?”

  “That’s it! Purdue!” she exclaimed. “But Beck was supposed to come back days ago already, and Maria thinks he may be dead because, well, that’s how nefarious those clients of his are. That’s why she resorted to selling me for ransom.”