Hunt for the Lost Treasure (Order of the Black Sun Series Book 17)

by P. W. Child

  “Here, look,” Sam pointed out something. “Are we surprised?”

  It was a watermark at the base of the document depicting the dreaded sigil of the Order of the Black Sun.

  “What is that?” Joanne asked.

  “A secret occult organization within the Thule Society,” Nina explained to her friend. “It was attended by a handful of the elite of the Nazi Party, the High Command of the SS, and at the helm was Himmler, trying to bring to fruition some ludicrous prophecy that Hitler was the chosen vessel to bring forth the old gods – evil gods that would rule the world once more.”

  Frowning in fear, Joanne's voice trembled as she deliberately exhibited her repulsion, “Je-sus. That’s not twisted at all. How did the SS pull this off?”

  “The Order of the Black Sun was so secret, not all members of the Thule Society knew of it. Very exclusive, for very exclusive evil fucktards,” Nina delivered her concise lecture in a mock-professional manner to support her sarcasm.

  “What does it say, though, Dr. Gould?” Sam asked, reminding her that they were busy reading the document. “How is your German these days?”

  “Oh my God,” Nina gasped as she read through the parts that had not been eaten away or rusted. “I don't think Leslie stole this coin from the Nazi treasure they were loading here, guys.” She looked up from under her dark, unkempt fringe at her two companions. “According to this, there was another clandestine mission under the pretense of this Nazi stash. The stuff they loaded here was only Nazi plunders of art and treasure from Europe. This was just another place where the Nazis hid their stolen loot.”

  “So…Alexander the Great's medallion is bullshit?” Joanne moaned in utter disappointment.

  “No, no,” Nina smiled. “Listen to me. The coin and this document was what Yvetta had in her possession when she came to oversee the supposed transfer of the U-537 treasure. On her person she had Jo's coin and this document! That was why she went to such great lengths to hunt Leslie down after the girl stole her coin! She must have neglected to realize that Leslie's coat stayed behind, that it contained the document while the coin went with the thief, see?”

  Sam was filming the damaged decree. He chimed in, “So Yvetta was actually here to find what this blueprint is showing. She was here to find what this letter refers to as the Treasure of Alexander the Great?”

  “Aye. We are dealing with an operation that was actually two operations. One was loyal duty, the other was greed,” Nina grinned. “Are you guys ready to get rich? God knows we will need it after this little treasure hunt of ours.”

  “I am very ready, believe me. I’m wearing my best pair of cargos and they're already ripped,” Sam winked. Nina and Joanne smiled at him. “If we find this treasure we'll be richer than Purdue.”

  “That is almost true, y'know?” Nina agreed before she dropped her eyes once more to the words, forgotten by those who’d once written them. “This memorandum was issued by Karl Wolff, Obergruppenführer of the Waffen-SS. He states here that he is initiating Operation Olympias...”

  “Olympias was Alexander the Great's mother!” Joanne chipped in, glowing with intrigue.

  “What was Operation Olympias? Does it say?” Sam pressed.

  “It was an expedition Wolff would secretly facilitate, sending small missions out to parts of Greece, Turkey, and Egypt to find the treasure Alexander had hidden according to legend, after receiving a letter from his mother, Olympias, that revealed a devastating secret.” She frowned as she tried to string the existing sentences together where words lacked. Her right index finger nail trailed along the third line from the bottom. “Most of this is missing, but it speaks of this blueprint being the casket of the Olympias’ Letter.”

  “Yvetta lost the blueprint and the coin before she could study it. Her true mission to Canadian soil failed because of a young girl's interference. I'd be livid. Jesus, I'd be pissed! No wonder she put two slugs in Leslie's skull; probably sheer frustration!” Sam speculated.

  “Well, now that we know why,” Joanne announced, pointing at the blueprint, “we can get to the where. If we find the letter, it will direct us to the treasure Alexander chose to conceal, right?”

  “Correct,” Nina affirmed. “See? I told you, he would not hide just any treasure. The man owned everything he walked through. He had no reason to bury treasures.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Gould, is so valuable about this particular hoard that Alexander the Great did not wish it to be found?” Sam asked Nina, holding the camera steady.

  “Truthfully, it could be anything,” Nina replied, looking at the lens. She turned to Joanne. “What would you think, Miss Earle? As a history teacher and an admirer of the legendary warrior king, you should have a firm opinion as to what he would have found so special about gold and silver.”

  Joanne caught her breath when Sam pointed the camera at her.

  “I am no expert, certainly, but I think it would be something his other conquests, his collective treasures and estates could not give him. It has to be something more important, more substantial, than mere riches,” she explained. “But as to what exactly it is? I honestly have no idea.”

  “Nice,” Sam smiled as he switched off the camera. “Now for some…I don't want to say it…dirty work. Does the blueprint show the point of entry?”

  “Someone's coming!” Joanne shrieked and fell to her knees, pulling Nina and Sam down with her by grasping their sleeves.

  “Where?” Sam asked.

  She pointed over the bottom of the bare window to the darkness outside. Sam peeked for a few moments, showing no response.

  “Sam!” Nina whispered hard. “Is someone there?”

  He came back down, drawing his gun from his left boot. “I see two flashlights. They are moving slowly, but they are coming straight here. Do you have weapons?”

  “Oh God, not this again,” Joanne lamented, remembering Nina's insistence on blunt force protection the last time when they went looking for Leslie's empty grave.

  “I have a hunting knife,” Nina panted. “Joanne, take the gun in my bag.”

  “Excuse me?” the teacher started.

  “Take the fucking gun, Joanne,” Nina growled, shoving a Beretta into her friend's hand. “This is not an action-adventure fiction novel. This is real! We don't know who they are, but I am pretty sure anyone else who knows about this place is not here to ask us for directions. Do you understand?”

  Joanne looked pale, her expression one of careful adherence as she reluctantly took the weapon from Nina. Backs to the flaking wall the three of them waited for the two strangers to enter the ablution block. Sam was aiming straight for the doorway, looking calm and intent. Nina chewed her bottom lip and Joanne missed the annoying conversation of Mr. Spence at camp before she had to fear for her life.

  The approaching threat yielded no conversation. No voices could be heard to ascertain the nature of their visit in the middle of the night or why they were there. At least, if they had spoken to one another during their arduous journey to the derelict building, there would be some way to detect their accent, thus their origin and with it probably their purpose. Their hearts raced as they waited anxiously for the strangers to follow the growing beams of their flashlights. Sam's eye sharpened and he shut out the din of the frigid gales and creaking roof boards.

  At last a shadow appeared, then a part of the body that created it. It was a monstrous outline that did not enter before looking about across the near perimeter one more time.

  “Don't shoot yet, Sam,” Nina whispered. “Wait until he is inside.”

  “Aye, I know,” Sam nodded softly without tearing his eyes away from his target. Joanne was petrified, but to some measure she felt quite secure between the two seasoned relic hunters. Her untrained hands clutched the gun, but she had no intention of using it. Instead she pinched her eyes shut as the floorboards cracked under the entering weight and she heard Sam's hammer click.

  Chapter 26 – Verfluchte Erde

  The fi
rst enormous shadow crept over the doorway and stepped inside. It was then that they noticed it was only one man, holding two flashlights.

  “Oh my God! It is Virgil!” Joanne shrieked and jumped up to embrace the boat captain.

  “You guys were gone too long, so I got worried,” the Canadian relayed nonchalantly. “Also, the bay is extremely tempestuous and no fun to endure with only my radio as company.

  “My friend, you scared us half to death,” Sam exhaled with a puff. He holstered his gun back in his boot and patted Virgil on the arm. Nina sheathed her knife and grabbed her gun from Joanne.

  “What? What did I do?” Joanne asked her.

  Nina clipped a small lever in place and said casually, “The safety was off.”

  “Oh shit! I'm sorry,” Joanne gasped.

  “No worries,” Nina smiled, “I'm sure we could have figured out how to work Mr. Hecklund's boat.”

  Sam and Virgil chuckled at Nina's shocking sobering of her friend. After Virgil tore himself away from the grateful teacher and buried his hands in his sides and said, “It would have been better if Miss Jo had tried to shoot me a few paces from this building. At least there nothing would have happened!”

  He was joking, they thought, but he confirmed his statement by pointing out the toilet window.

  “No, really. Out from there to the marker on the rock hill it lies. All the way there and across about say, two hundred meters,” he reported.

  Nina thought she knew what he was referring to but she wanted to make sure. “What lies there?”

  “'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.