by P. W. Child
“Aye, when I researched Weather Station Kurt,” Nina said, gesturing at the structures in front of them, “I read that German submarine U-537 was en route to this location when a storm broke the hull right off the coast here. I bet they were sending more than a mock-weather station out here. History says the U-boat departed again after the weather station was erected, but word of mouth says it is still sunk in Martin Bay.”
“So this is…was…weather station Kurt?” Joanne asked. “Then it makes perfect sense that Leslie must have snagged the medallion here. I bet there are quite a bit more lost gold medallions around here between the submarine and these buildings. There has to be.”
“Okay, let's go and see what is inside,” Sam urged, tugging up his collar against the sting of the cold. When they rounded the right side structure they found that its door had been ripped off the hinges at some point. “Ah! Easy access,” Sam sighed, “although that usually spells trouble for us.” He leered back at the women in ominous jest.
Inside they found the entire cubicle barren, save for one or two loose switches jutting from the wall and a pulverized office chair. “This must have been the front for a transmission center, in case the Allied Forces discovered it,” Nina observed as their lights fluttered about the inside of the prefab box.
Nina was looking out the glass-less window frame. “Looks like the building next to us is bigger than this one. It is built out towards the other side, see?”
“That must have been the barracks, the place with the beds, whatever,” Joanne guessed. “I think we will be getting more out of that one. Unless this little room has a dungeon with secrets, I think we are done here.”
Sam chuckled at Joanne's manner. “Then let's go. You don't actually think this room has a dungeon, Dr. Gould?”
Nina was looking at the floor with considerable fancy, pondering, before she looked up at them and plainly said. “No, that would be silly.” Filled with some doubt as to the obviousness, Nina followed her two friends out of the small room. “Actually…”
“No way,” Sam uttered at the front of the line, as if he knew that she would have second thoughts about the absurdity.
“Look, if there was anything worth anything, I would not hide it in a residential stock house where other people shared my space. I would hide it in the most insignificant place,” she speculated, shrugging with a face that implored them to trust her instincts.
“I'm going to check out the place with the beds and lockers,” Sam announced. “You are welcome to follow your idea, but I am going there first. No use trudging about in one place for something that probably is not there while the other place has not even been investigated.”
With that Sam went on to the larger, neighboring structure while Nina climbed back up into the former office. The three-steps constructed of aluminum had been disassembled and chewed up by saline weather for ages. She found Joanne close at her heel. Looking astonished, but content, Nina asked Joanne, “Um, Jo? You are choosing to come with me instead of your crush? Wow, I’m flattered.”
“Oh shut up,” Joanne said as Nina pulled her up into the tiny place again. “You were right. He can be insufferable sometimes. Besides, I have to concur with you about that certain kind of logic for hiding things. Only thing is…”
“What?” Nina asked as she rubbed her hands together for some hopeless attempt at heat.
“What are we looking for?”
Nina had no idea how to explain the chance discoveries she had previously experienced just by accident. True, she did not know what she was looking for, but it did not matter because the decrepit weather station was empty enough to detect any object remotely worthy of treasure or ancient history. They were not exactly in the Palace of Versailles or the Taj Mahal right now. Anything in the line of what they were seeking would stand out here.
“Nina, shall we rip up the floor boards?” Joanne asked.
Nina smiled at Joanne's zest. “Honey, we don't have to go all Indiana Jones on this little outhouse. Just look around.”
Joanne's face contorted in a painful twist. “Nina!” she cried. “Nina!”
“Christ, what?” Nina shouted irately. “I am standing right here, for fuck's sake!”
Joanne stared into her friend's face, but not a word was uttered while her mind was computing whatever it was that just came to her. The teacher's eyes moved as she tried to mull around her intimation.
“I swear, Jo, if you don't tell me what you're on about I am going to slap you,” Nina threatened. It seemed to work, but not because of the historian's warning. Joanne had figured out what she thought was ludicrous, but worth mentioning.
“You know how you told me stories about how sometimes the dumbest stuff turned out to lead you guys somewhere?” she asked Nina.
“Aye?”
“Weather Station Kurt, was it an unmanned station or did the Germans have full-time staff manning it?” Joanne wanted to know.
“From the records the submarine crew and two scientists put the place up here, but other than that we don't know how many people stayed here. Wetter Funkgerät Land-26 was an automatic weather station, code-named 'Kurt' because of the scientist who brought it. Why is that important?” Nina inquired.
“You said 'outhouse.' They had to have bathrooms, right? Erich Bonn said that Johann and Yvetta caught Leslie crawling out of the toilet window,” Joanne recounted excitedly.
“Jo, I don't think I like where this is going,” Nina said plainly. Joanne just laughed when she realized that her friend knew what she was going to point to. “I really don't.”
Sam showed up outside the door, looking positively defeated. “Nothing there either. Even the lockers are empty.” He noticed that he had interrupted something and lifted his camera. “Shall I film this?”
The two girls smiled at one another. Keeping her gaze on Joanne, Nina told Sam, “I think you should, because it is going to be priceless footage, Sam.”
“That sounds sinister coming from the two of you,” he confessed reluctantly as he joined his two female companions on their way to the larger residential building. “Where are we going, then?”
When they reached the ruined ablution block of the sleep house used by the soldiers and staff throughout the years, Sam stopped in his tracks before they entered the open doorway. The ladies just sniggered and looked back at him. “You’re not serious,” he decided.
Nina pointed at her friend. “It was Jo's idea.”
“Hell no,” Sam protested.
“Oh come on, Sam,” Joanne said. “You have gone to great lengths to get a good story before. I am sure you've had to put up with a lot of shit before.”
Nina burst out laughing, her amusement echoing in the angry wind. Joanne could hardly finish her sentences too, especially at the expression on Sam's face. “We just have a mad hunch about where Leslie's coin could have surfaced, and besides, it has been over thirty years since anyone's been here.”
“What are you expecting to find?” he asked frantically.
“Something someone could not have hidden where anyone would want to look,” Joanne explained as she went ahead into the deserted ruin full of broken glass, cracked walls, and exposed electrical wires. Over shattered wooden beams that had broken from the ceiling, Joanne moved to the last toilet in the row to start her search.
“Let's just go. Your over-zealous friend has led us on a goose chase over a bloody coin,” Sam whined.
“You heard what Erich Bonn said. You know she is onto something,” Nina frowned at him.
“You know, you are rubbing off on her, Dr. Gould,” Sam whispered to Nina as they trailed the adventurous teacher.
“You should be so lucky,” Nina answered.
“Oh my God, guys!” Joanne hollered from the darkness ahead, her flashlight depicting a grotesque likeness of her crouched body against the whitewashed wall.
“Oh yeah, she is loose,” Sam affirmed.
“What did you get?” Nina called out.
“You will
not believe this!” Joanne muttered as she trampled about on the debris.
“You found the treasure of Alexander the Great in a toilet in Canada?” Sam mocked happily, getting a solid elbow punch from Nina. “Shall I roll on the camera?”
Joanne stepped out from the cubicle, holding a huge, furry, awful thing in her hand. It was as big as she was, swinging from side to side in the gust.
“Jesus!” Sam screamed as Nina cringed with him. “What the hell is that?”
Joanne looked ecstatic as she approached them with what looked like a five-foot-tall bear skin.
“I got it!” she smiled at Nina and Sam.
“What, rabies?” Sam mumbled.
Ignoring Sam's taunt, she shook the furry thing and grinned, “It’s Leslie's parka!”
Chapter 24 – Maria's Mayhem
Maria was beginning to get worried. She hadn’t heard back from Beck in over three days. He was supposed to let her know when he had received their fee from Karsten and then returned to pick her up. She wasn’t supposed to kill Mrs. Beach until he’d secured the money for Purdue's trade. That way they would have another hostage to work with if things went south for their plans.
It was beginning to be very taxing on Maria's frail emotional state to take care of a hostage for this long. There was a reason why she did the technological spying and left the people skills to her boyfriend – Maria had spent much of her life in rehab facilities and nuthouses for being a bit on the reckless side when it came to the security of other human beings.
When she was twelve she’d spent a few months in juvenile detention for killing the neighbor's cats and hanging them from nooses in her mother's yard. When she was seventeen she’d slit a man's throat with a beer bottle at a bike rally, but got away with no witnesses. She was an avid admirer of hardcore pornography and snuff films and resorted to cutting when she became really unhappy.
Now she had to babysit a living thing she felt nothing for – Mrs. Sylvia Beach – the woman who begged her for all sorts of favors from the other side of the door all day. It drove the anti-social Maria insane to listen to Sylvia's incessant imploring and weeping.
“My God, you are spoiled!” Maria roared from her chair in front of the monitors.
“I just need to go to the toilet, Maria,” Sylvia explained. “I won't be long.”
“Hold it. I'm on the phone,” Maria barked. In front of her the screens streamed Nina Gould's house in Oban, still revealing absolutely no movement since her man had grabbed Purdue almost a week before. In her hand she was holding her rigged cell phone, the one she used for scrambled communication with Beck, and what it revealed for the umpteenth time was just too much for her. By the tone it sounded she knew that the apparatus inside had been destroyed completely, otherwise it would have given her a Morse code signal that Beck was just offline or away from the device.
“Please, Maria!” Sylvia moaned.
“Piss in a cup, you annoying brat!” Maria sneered, feeling a terrible despair embrace her, a lonely sense of loss she could not describe.
It had been a long time since she’d received any feedback from him and it was time to do something about it. As usual, it was raining in Glasgow and even the pizza man was tardy with Maria's delivery. “Should have gone out to buy food myself,” she grunted. “Would have given me a goddamn break from this bitch, for one thing.”
The feisty Maria took the Glock Beck always left her for protection and jerked open Sylvia's door, finding the doctor's wife cowering on the stained sleeper couch, the only furniture in the room. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot when she peeked over her folded arms.
“Come on, then!” Maria snapped. “Take a leak and wipe your nose. Jesus. Clean yourself up a bit. We are going out.”
Terrified that this was the drive to her execution, Sylvia started sobbing hysterically.
“Please, no! I just want to go home! I won't tell a soul about this, Maria. Please, just let me see my children again!”
“You know, this is all probably very effective on weak-willed doctors and the like in that little village of yours,” Maria panted impatiently, rocketing toward her hostage and shoving the gun against her cheek, “but here in Glasgow that is called begging for pain. Now, you have exactly one minute to empty your bladder and compose yourself or I swear to God I am wasting you and throwing you in the Clyde, understand?”
Sylvia nodded, her face still in a horrible wince of despair. She got off the couch and Maria grabbed her by the arm to drag her along to the bathroom with the barrel of the Glock snugly nestled under Sylvia's bottom rib. “Hurry. Hoodie on.”
The road trip was ominous and balefully quiet between the two women. Sylvia was praying inside her head while remaining mute as the car raced north on the A82, just passing Balloch from a sign post they’d passed. Sylvia wanted to know where she was going to be executed, but she dared not ask. For the past hour she had managed not to provoke her unstable guardian and she hoped to keep things nice and smooth until she could break away. Maria was really good at ties, though. Unless Sylvia could find her way to a tool shed or building depot she had no chance of freeing herself from her restraints.
They still had a good two-hour trip ahead of them with the traffic and weather impairing their speed. Maria was eating the lukewarm pizza she’d had delivered at her home before they took off.
“Eat something,” Maria muttered through a mouthful of chicken mushroom pastry.
“No, thank you,” Sylvia answered as politely as she could.
“Eat!” Maria shouted. “I’m not having you ransomed if you look like shit.”
“Ransom?” Sylvia asked as her face lit up.
“Yes, you imbecile. I am going to trade you for a lot of money. Doctors are loaded, aren't they?” came Maria's rhetorical question.
“I'm going home?” Sylvia asked incredulously. Maria smiled. She was convinced that her abusive boyfriend was dead, and it presented her with new possibilities.
“Yes, you are going home…if he wants you,” Maria laughed. “By now he has gotten himself a new piece of jive and told your kids you ran away with the circus!”
“He will pay anything to get me back. My husband loves me.”
“Oh save it!” Maria hissed. “Stop deluding yourself. You are just a safe shield against any scrutiny. Your only value is as his front while he hustles behind your back. Wake the fuck up. They don't love us, they tolerate us and they are willing to lie to great lengths to keep us docile and compliant so that they can safely fuck around and look pious. If he wants you back, it will be for your children, sweetie. Only to raise them for him so that he has more free time on his hands for those adolescent patients he so loves to inject.”
“Lance is not like that!” Sylvia screamed furiously. “He will do anything to get me back. Just because you allow your boyfriend to treat you like shit, doesn't mean other women are as worthless to their husbands as you clearly are!”
Sylvia saw the blood spatter against her window before she even felt the blow Maria dealt her. It took her a moment to register what had happened, but then she felt the intense agony ensue in full force under her eye.
“That is called a pistol-whip, bitch! Keep talking!” Maria raged, barely keeping the car on the road in her fit of fury. But Sylvia would not talk anymore. She felt the swelling on her cheekbone well up under her right eye, already impairing her sight through that eye. Her nose was gushing, but she used her hoodie to pinch her nose and drain any blood that escaped.
When they reached the darkening roads of the late afternoon town of Dalmally, Maria pulled over into the village. She tossed the scrambled cell phone in Sylvia's lap. “Call your husband. Tell him to wire this to those three accounts.” She gave her a piece of paper with three bank account numbers in different countries. “They are untraceable and they belong to government officials who have nothing to do with this, so if I draw the funds and I get a trace from the National Crime Agency someone innocent will be implicated.”
&
nbsp; Sylvia hastily dialed her husband's number with trembling hands, her fingers erring four times before she got the right number punched in.
“Just remember to tell him; I know where you live,” Maria reminded her. “And Sylvia?”
“Yes, Maria?”
“Remember that I know where your children go to school, what they look like and what their names are,” Maria threatened so truthfully that Sylvia Beach started crying again. Maria was not done. “Tell him there is a gun to your head.”
“Oh, Maria, I am already causing him such duress just with this phone call. I hate lying to him to agitate him even more,” Sylvia said.
Maria pushed the Glock against Sylvia's head, silencing her in the clattering rain that pelted the car windows and roof off the railroad. She pulled back the hammer. “There. Now you're not lying.”
Chapter 25 – The Olympias Letter
Under the strong light of Sam's flashlight the three explorers stared at the barely legible document issued officially by what appeared through slants of printed ink as a high officer of the Waffen-SS, as per the insignia at the top of the ripped paper. Joanne had found it in Leslie's coat pocket, crumpled up carelessly as only a fleeing, terrified person would have done. Apparently she did not only steal a gold coin, but also came upon something of much worth to someone like Yvetta.
Soiled with decades of dust, wear, water damage and deterioration it was difficult to discern, but Nina was prepared for such an eventuality. After all, she did come all the way hoping to find historical items, and when she expected to locate such valuable trinkets she came prepared.
From her small canvas sling-strap satchel she pulled a magnifying glass. Both Sam and Joanne looked impressed with her deftness, but Nina merely raised an eyebrow and accepted their admiration. While the cold bit at their skins and tussled their hair, the three concentrated on deciphering the difficult message and the diagram that accompanied it.