CHAPTER
FORTY-SIX
SPARGO, CONVINCED HE had fallen into hell itself, coughed, choked and flailed his arms. If this was hell then it was an ice-cold, watery one. To him, if he had indeed fallen to his death, then he was condemned to spend eternity even more confused than he’d been when he was alive.
His torch was there, still lit, close by him on dry ground. There was no stope, no huge black void, just an optical illusion fostered by an expanse of flat water and a tired, fuzzy brain. He was, he realised, kneeling in shallow water. Still baffled he stood up, reached for his torch and shone it down. Feint patterns of light danced on the tunnel roof. What had seemed like a void was in reality dark water, its surface now alive with ripples that reflected and twisted the torch light.
Kilcreg mine was indeed flooded. Spargo had reached the water table, the natural level of water in the ground. The tunnel he was in sloped gently downwards. What he’d mistaken for the edge of a void was black water. In the distance, beyond the reach of his torch beam, the roof of the sloping tunnel met the water. In such poor light its flat surface resembled a huge, dark hole.
It didn’t matter to Spargo the water here was not deep. In his mind he saw it as deep as the mine itself, a bottomless maze of flooded passages, shafts and cavernous voids. Drowned workings where men once laboured. Things dreams are made of.
Soaked through, Spargo hurried back to the collapse. Taking his time was no longer an option, he had to get back to good air and then back to the surface. If Benares didn’t get him, hypothermia would.
Taking care to keep his wound safe he slid over the collapse. In the narrow, low tunnel beyond it he locked himself into a stooping walk and took small, fast steps, keeping count of them to lessen the tedium, crooking his fingers to help remember the hundreds. At close to five hundred he saw a pinpoint of light. On the way in it had helped him but now it was a hindrance. It dazzled him. Cast long shadows.
On his way in he’d passed refuges, shadows in the wall, places of safety slashed out of the rock, places for miners to crouch when the wagons passed by. To guide himself he reached out with his free hand as he walked, grazing one of the sidewalls with his fingertips. With his head down this helped him keep straight. Helped his balance.
For a while all went well. Then, when passing one of the shadows, his fingers didn’t connect and he stumbled sideways into thick mud. This space was more than a refuge, it had no back wall and its roof was high. Shining his torch he picked out a vein of white. Not ones for wasting good ore, when the miners came across it they mined it out, creating a winding, tight passage. Spargo twisted sideways. Squeezed awkwardly into it.
Unlike the main tunnel, this one did not slope; water dripping into it had not drained away and what looked to Spargo like a smooth concrete floor was in reality a sea of undisturbed slime that oozed over his feet. Steam rose from his clothing, filling the passage and obscuring his view.
Drives that follow veins often thin down to nothing. This one did not. It widened into a small, cave-like space. Its end had been panelled off with a timber planked wall with a door in the middle that was partly closed and which drooped from its hinges. Spargo waded closer. The bottom of the door had rotted. Its metal fittings had corroded into solid green bubbles of verdigris. A copper latch, Spargo realised. Also copper hinges.
In this place there was no iron or steel. Unlike other miners, the men that came here had no studs in their boots and carried nothing that could, accidentally, make sparks. Spargo knew these places. Knew he had found the mine’s explosives store.
Tottering under its weight he lifted the door aside. The room behind it was the size of a small garden shed. Its back walls had been hacked into rock and its floor was flat concrete, raised a few inches to be clear of the mud. His torch beam lit a wooden box, then another and another, whole stacks of them. He stopped breathing. If he’d had any control over his heartbeat he would have stopped that too.
One of the stacks leant against the back wall. The boxes, like others in the store, were rotten, their sides had broken away and their contents – paper-clad sticks of explosives, had spilled out. No longer solid, the sticks flopped obscenely down the front of the pile like tangles of intestines. A garden of delicate crystals grew on what little remained of their paper wrappers.
The clusters of bright yellow needles reminded Spargo of crystals Jez grew years ago from a science kit. Hers were safe. Those he now stared at could not be more deadly. To his right were more boxes that had once been cardboard, their contents a slumped, putty-like mass that exuded a syrupy glue. Here the crystals were dirty brown and quite different, they smothered the pile like fine fur.
Long ago the miners used black powder in the mine, gunpowder that broke the rock softly. If they had continued to use gunpowder then the explosives store Spargo stood in would now be harmless, its contents ruined by damp. The explosives that sat there now, deteriorated with age, were more sensitive and dangerous than they had ever been.
Spargo, still motionless, took stock: the yellow crystals were picric acid, which meant the explosive was probably TNT, a military explosive he knew little about. The brown fur was nitro-glycerine and the explosive it coated had been blasting gelatine. Strange, the way it rotted. Sweating, they called it. This lot had sweated for over fifty years.
Spargo knew that if he dropped his torch he wouldn’t hear it hit the floor, wouldn’t even hear the bang. He tightened his grip on it as he shone it at his feet. Saw he had planted his shoes on the resinous, brown ooze. His heart didn’t stop but it fluttered. He felt it.
It would be more fitting for him, he supposed, to be blown up in his father’s old mine than falling to his death from the cliffs – and infinitely more fitting than suffering the indignity and pain of Benares’ knife or garrotte.
Bizarrely he worked through figures. Blasting gelatine detonated at three miles per second – over six hundred thousand miles an hour – and not as the rolling ball of orange fire so beloved of special effects men but as an intense, silver-blue flash. He, Spargo, would suffer the fastest death known to man… though suffer was hardly the word. The brilliance of the flash would probably register in his brain and before any sound could reach his ears he would be vaporised, reduced to molecules in a brilliant gas cloud that roared into the bay like the world’s biggest cannon.
This was no time for panic. What he did next would determine his fate. Had his shoe not been stuck he would have walked slowly backwards. What was odd was he had stepped in the stuff and yet he was still there, though that didn’t mean he would still be there if he tried to step off it. Why hadn’t he triggered it?
The safest thing to do would be to take off his shoes. Still scared he might drop his torch he stuffed it into his deepest pocket. Then, in the dark, moving slowly and forgetting his wound, he crouched down. Pain stabbed at his side and he jerked upright, lost his balance, reached for the doorpost but missed it and hit something else. With gyrating arms he flung himself backwards, out of the room and into the mud. The door came with him. Fell flat on top of him. Except for the sound of his breathing there was silence. Irrationally and pointlessly he waited for the bang. With the heavy door on top of him he sank slowly into soft slime.
His torch still worked. Finally clear of the door he attempted, but again failed, to wipe its glass clean. There was just enough light to see his footprints in the resinous mass, footprints of thick, wet mud that had protected him, saved his life.
He aimed the torch at the thing he had stumbled against. It was large and rectangular and there were more of them, five or six, back in the shadows to one side of the doorway. That they were made of metal was obvious; their corrosion had added blues and greens to the grotto of colours.
Spargo tested the doorpost for firmness and then, taking hold of it with one hand, reached down to the concrete. What had once been a bronze sheet five millimetres thick was now no more than two; acid mine waters had taken their toll; the bottom edge of all of the boxes
had collapsed under their own weight to leave jagged, irregular holes. The hole in the nearest box was the shape of the African continent and, with heart pounding, Spargo bent back its ragged edges. Expecting to find rotted wood from a crate he eased his hand inside but could feel nothing. Puzzled, he knelt on the edge of the concrete and slipped the torch into the box. It was empty.
Bar had said his boxes were coated with rubber. These no longer were, though the dark sludge they stood in could well be the remains of it. Spargo turned his attention to the other boxes, pushing at corroded metal until it gave way. Though he couldn’t reach them all he knew they were empty. They had never contained wooden crates.
The nitro-glycerine headache hit Spargo suddenly, jabbing his brow like nails through his skull. Nitro fumes reach the brain quickly. Workers who make such explosives become immune, they keep their immunity when away from their work by secreting small balls of explosive in their pockets or handbags, touching them occasionally to keep headaches away.
No longer able to focus Spargo stepped back from the store, and squelching through mud he aimed for the exit. Every step he took, back to the adit and then up the slope to its entrance, jarred his brain.
It wasn’t long before he emerged high on the cliff face, bent double and slit-eyed. After three hours in torchlight the world looked pale pastel and the air like pure oxygen. He lay down on the ledge and took deep draughts of it. Felt it chill his lungs.
He didn’t know how long he’d lain on the ledge, only that he was weak, hurting all over and shivering with cold. A squint over the edge of his eagle’s lair revealed Benares, no longer pacing the seashore in his smart Spanish shoes but sitting on the beach in the shadow of a huge boulder. It was a spot that gave him a clear view of the overhang. Had he been awake he would have seen Spargo make a slow, painful and unnerving climb to the top of the cliff.
It would have been easy for Spargo to sneak up on Bar. The man was sleeping soundly in the passenger seat of the SUV. He sprang from sleep as Spargo, hardly able to stand, heaved himself into the drivers’ seat.
‘We had a deal,’ Spargo said. ‘I found the mine entrance, I went in, I found boxes about this big…’ He did the angler thing, holding his hands wide. In one hand he held a jagged, postcard-sized sheet of corroded metal and he thrust it at Bar. ‘I broke this off one of them, I’m guessing it was once bronze. All are empty, there are no wooden boxes inside, no rotted wood and no paintings. Even if there had been they would be ruined.’
Bar took the metal and turned it over. He stroked his chin and regarded Spargo thoughtfully.
‘Nothing, John Spargo?’
Spargo pressed himself against the back of the seat. Never in his life had he felt like this. He was in another body, another head. The pounding was still there, a regular beat behind his eyes.
‘There never were any wooden crates in the bronze boxes. They were empty when they were loaded on to Volker’s U-boat.’
Bar stayed thoughtful.
‘Is it possible the crates could have been removed from inside them? Perhaps by someone who worked on the mine?’
‘All I know is they are not there now.’
‘Come now, John Spargo, you are an engineer. Tell me what you think.’
Spargo sighed. ‘Our deal, Bar?’
‘I will honour it, John Spargo. You need have no fear.’
‘The boxes,’ he said, then paused and nursed his head. ‘All are badly corroded. I’m sure they have not been opened. I could only inspect one properly but I could see the bronze screws. The rubber coating has gone but there is a trace of it in the countersinks.’
‘What is a countersink?’
‘The screws are recessed into the surface of the lids. There is still black stuff covering the screw heads. If the boxes had been opened this would have been scraped off.’
‘Enough, John Spargo, spare me the technicalities. Do I have your word there are no paintings?’
‘You have my word.’
‘Then I believe you. If the bronze boxes are empty it means the crates were not placed inside them in Monowitz.’ He pondered this for a while and then started to laugh quietly, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘John Spargo, I have been outwitted!’
‘By Göring?’
‘God, no! Had the Reichsmarschall known of my plans I would not be here now. It can only have been my former colleagues.’
‘That means you were wrong about the painting. Perhaps your favourite lady was returned to the Louvre after the war.’
Bar chuckled. ‘By that I assume you mean the Leonardo? Who knows where that now is? But it is no longer my concern, John Spargo, I have no interest in it, it is no longer within my grasp. Nor is it within the grasp of the consortium and that gives me great pleasure. Now, enough of this. Where is Luis? What have you done to him? You have settled your score with him for hurting you?’
‘I’m sure he will turn up. Where is my daughter?’
‘The deal, John Spargo, yes. I have been told your daughter is coming to us, she is unharmed. When she arrives you will do one more thing for me, you will drive me to the airport.’
‘You and Benares?’
‘Luis can make his own arrangements.’
Bar looked Spargo up and down, looked at his clothes, his hands and his face. All were caked with dried mud. It was also in his hair, matting it down.
‘You look like a creature that crawled from a swamp,’ he said. ‘You will attract attention. Clean yourself up.’
Obeying without question Spargo took the car key, opened the door and climbed out. Using handfuls of heather he attempted to wipe himself down but it made little difference. Cold and wet he slid back into the driving seat, replaced the key in the ignition and started the engine. Gripping the wheel for support he turned it sharply and set off, slowly and carefully, back the way they had come. As they passed the abandoned track leading down to the plant yard Spargo noticed something ahead of them, in the far distance, coming towards them.
‘Car, up ahead! Is it Jez? Who is bringing her, Murphy?’
Bar leaned forwards, as if being one foot closer would help him see better. ‘I cannot see anything, my eyes are not good. I do not know who is bringing your daughter. Luis made the arrangements.’
‘You mean you arranged to bring her to me even before I did all this for you? Even before I went into that underground hell-hole?’
‘I did not know you would go into anywhere, John Spargo. I was expecting you to return and tell me you had found nothing.’
‘And you’d have been happy with that?’
Bar shrugged. ‘Happy is an inappropriate word. Let us say I would have accepted your word.’
Spargo stared ahead. ‘It’s a vehicle, a Land Rover. It’s the police, I can see its roof light.’
Bar sat bolt upright. ‘That track, the one we passed,’ he said, gesturing frantically. ‘Where does it lead?’
‘Down to Kilcreg, it went to the plant yard, it was a short cut up to the mine. It’s impassable, overgrown.’
‘Turn around! Drive down it!’
‘It’s impassable, damn it!’
‘Do it! Do it!’
CHAPTER
FORTY-SEVEN
ROTH SPENDS TIME on his bunk, seasick and subdued. He eventually emerges clean-shaven and heads for Theo’s cabin, passing the makeshift breakfast table on the way. Seated at the table are the boat’s junior officers, including Rydel, who is eating oatmeal, a thick creamy porridge that sticks to his spoon. All stand as Roth approaches, not out of respect but to give him space to pass.
Roth trips, stumbles and falls. Rydel’s plate flies up, turns in the air and lands on Roth’s back. Men drop their food and turn towards Roth, they help him up and start wiping him down. Mistaking their actions, Roth draws a small automatic pistol and swings it wildly. Rydel crumples silently to the deck plates. A bright slick of blood stains the chequered blanket on a nearby bunk.
‘Kapitän, you must come!’
&nbs
p; The shout is from Lange, his voice breaking. Men move fast. A first-aid box is passed hand to hand through the boat and the medic, a hydroplane man, elbows others aside. Roth is backing away, gripping the pistol, his finger inside the trigger guard. Theo arrives, ignores the gun and looks down at Rydel. Lange speaks.
‘The Sturmbannführer slipped and fell on Franz. He struck him with the barrel of his pistol.’
While Lange speaks he glances at Roth as if scared he’ll be next. Men rip paper from packets, pass wound dressings from hand to hand and then to the medic. Not only is the flesh split above Rydel’s ear from where the gun struck, there is a gash on his face from when he fell. Within minutes he looks like an Egyptian mummy, his head criss-crossed with bandages that secure thick lint pads. Theo stands clear and feels helpless.
‘How is he?’
‘Bad, Kapitän. Skull fracture, possibly. He bleeds from his ear.’
‘Can he be moved?’ His question is stupid. They have no choice, he is blocking the gangway. ‘Carry him aft, to the tube room. Just you and the medic, Chief.’
Lange nods. Roth backs away from the scene with his gun in his hand. Lange and the medic move Rydel the way they move dead men, Lange at his head with his hands under the man’s armpits, the medic between his legs with his hands under the man’s knees. Crew stand aside to let them pass.
When they have gone Theo addresses his men. If there is fear, he must kill it now.
‘You two, clean up this mess. The rest of you return to your posts, take your food with you.’
Roth has played into his hands. His mind skips though official procedures and then runs into fantasy. He will seal Roth’s cabin door, cut off his air supply. In a few hours he will be senseless and in a day or so he’ll be dead. Such thoughts trouble his head fleetingly. To do this kind of thing is not his way. The cabin will provide a good cell. The bulkhead that separates what should have been the forward torpedo room is twenty-millimetre thick steel, part of the boat’s pressure hull. Roth’s gun will be useless to him there. Unless, of course, he puts it to his own head.
The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park Page 50