The Project

by Brian Falkner

  Still, it was with great relief that he finally felt the train begin to slow as it pulled into Berchtesgaden.

  39. CORKS

  The big wheels of the locomotive came to a final, shuddering halt, the metallic squeals and grinding of the carriage contrasting with the delicate tinkling of the chandelier in the compartment.

  They waited for the three men to leave before inching open the closet door.

  “What now?” Tommy asked. “Try and get clear of the station before he spots us? Or wait till he’s gone?”

  “I’m not sure,” Luke said. “We have to beat him back to the chamber, but we can’t risk being seen.”

  A moment later, the question was out of their hands. A low siren sounded somewhere near the station, a loud whining that grew even louder and higher in pitch.

  Luke peeked through the curtains to see the platform was in pandemonium, with people running in all directions. Some dropped their suitcases where they were standing; others ran with them, using them as battering rams to barge through the crowds.

  Tommy looked at Luke, and Luke looked back, both uncertain what to do.

  “Let’s go,” Luke said at last. “We can mingle with the crowds so Mueller doesn’t see us. If we can stay out of his way in the air-raid shelter, then we can try and beat him up the hill to Obersalzberg.”

  Luke peered out from the doorway before stepping down onto the platform. Mueller was nowhere to be seen.

  He scanned the faces in the crowd, all of them panicked and hurried, making for the exits as quickly as the crush of bodies would let them.

  No Mueller. No Mumbo or Jumbo. Time to go.

  “Stay frosty,” he said, then jumped down and waited for Tommy to land beside him before pushing into the thick of the crowd.

  A soldier at one of the exits was handing out something to the crowd. Some took it; some didn’t. As Luke approached, he saw the soldier was giving away corks from wine bottles. He took one, as did Tommy, but they must have looked confused, because the soldier mimed putting the cork between his teeth and said something in German.

  “You put it in your mouth,” Tommy told him as they emerged from the Bahnhof into the sunshine outside. “Between your teeth, for the percussion.”

  Luke guessed it acted a bit like a mouth guard.

  Outside, Luke looked up at the clear blue sky, expecting to find it darkened with the black shapes of bombers, but there were none.

  The soldiers manning the anti-aircraft gun were at their posts, searching the skies, but the gun was stationary.

  Perhaps it was a false alarm.

  Perhaps not.

  People abandoned cars in the middle of the road, leaving doors wide open as they ran for the shelters.

  As Luke and Tommy hurried along with the crowd, a motorcycle and sidecar swerved violently up to the footpath. The rider and his passenger jumped out and dashed along the road in front of them.

  The stream of people poured across the road, disappearing into a big stone building with a large sign on the front: LUFTSCHUTZBUNKER. That had to be the shelter.

  Luke and Tommy ran with the crowd, breathless, frightened, sweating despite the cold. Around them the siren filled the air, rising and falling in a horrible moaning sound. In the distance, Luke could see some dark dots that had to be aircraft.

  Tommy stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Danger close. Twelve o’clock,” he said in a low voice.

  Luke’s eyes left the sky and landed on the back of the head of the person in front of him.

  It was a man in uniform.

  An SS uniform.

  There was something about the build and the shape of the neck that made his spine shudder, and even before the man turned around, Luke knew who it was.

  Then he did turn around.

  Jumbo’s eyes widened, and he stopped dead.

  He shouted in German, and Luke saw Mueller and Mumbo stop and turn also.

  “Oh, crap!” Tommy said.

  Tommy and Luke turned and ran, ducking and weaving through the crowd.

  There was more shouting from behind them, and Luke looked back. Jumbo and Mumbo were using their bulk to barge people out of the way.

  Somehow they dodged through the flow of human traffic, and the first thing Luke saw as they emerged into the open was the motorcycle and sidecar parked haphazardly against the footpath.

  “Get in!” Luke yelled, leaping over the motorcycle frame.

  “Can you drive one of these things?” Tommy shouted over the scream of the siren, and jumped into the sidecar.

  “Let’s find out!” Luke shouted back. It couldn’t be too different from the quad bike he used to ride on the farm.

  He stood on the kick-starter, and the engine, still warm, revved and caught. He toed it into gear and let the clutch out. The bike jerked, jolted forward, and stalled.

  Jumbo and Mumbo were free of the crowd now and were running after them, pistols raised.

  Luke kicked the starter again, and the bike roared to life. He eased out the clutch, and the back wheel spun but then gripped, and the bike shot off.

  He twisted the handlebars around, and the bike slewed away from Jumbo and Mumbo. There were shots now, and he could hear a zinging noise as bullets punched holes in the air around them.

  Then they were moving down the main road of Berchtesgaden. Luke swerved the bike from side to side, hoping to spoil their aim, throwing Tommy around in the sidecar. Tommy gripped the sides with clawed hands and looked behind with terror in his eyes.

  The roads were still icy, and mounds of snow were piled up around telegraph poles and in snow hedges along the pavement where the plows had been at work that morning.

  Luke spun the bike around the corner toward Obersalzberg and glanced back to see a black open-top German army staff car pull out after them. Jumbo was driving, with Mumbo next to him and Mueller in the rear.

  Mumbo had acquired a machine gun, and he let off a long burst, which was terrifying, although the bullets came nowhere near them, his aim thrown off by the motion of the car.

  The sun was blotted out for a moment, and Luke glanced up to see not clouds but the long dark shape of airplane after airplane droning overhead.

  The anti-aircraft gun was shooting now, spitting fire into the sky, each recoil raising a cloud of dust around it.

  He expected bombs, but there were none, and that was when he realized with sheer and utter horror what their target was.

  The Allied bombers had no interest in Berchtesgaden, a sleepy little Bavarian alpine town.

  They were after the Nazi party stronghold, and perhaps Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, at Obersalzberg.

  Right where Luke and Tommy were headed.

  40. THE JAWS OF DEATH

  Luke slid the back wheel of the heavy motorbike around a corner, the bike skidding toward a snowdrift and a sheer drop beyond.

  The handlebars shuddered in his hands as he fought to control the machine, which behaved almost nothing like his quad bike back home.

  The car slid around the same tight corner, not far behind them, and Jumbo let loose another burst of wild machine-gun fire.

  Luke looked at Tommy to make sure he was okay and got a quick thumbs-up. He had his cork clenched firmly between his teeth. Luke had forgotten about his, so when they hit a straight stretch, he fished it out of his pocket and jammed it into his mouth.

  Lightning flashed ahead of them and thunder rumbled—only, Luke knew it was neither lightning nor thunder. A blast of air buffeted the bike.

  There were more explosions, closer now, massive fists of wind that knocked the bike around the road. He leaned low over the handlebars, urging the machine forward. The explosions were a continuous roar as tons of high explosives hit the mountainside over Obersalzberg.

  And they were heading into the heart of it.

  There was a flash on the mountainside above them, and a cloud of snow erupted above their heads. Huge splinters of wood, entire branches and pulverized tree trunks, flew through the air.
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  One massive chunk of wood landed on the road, and Luke swerved madly up onto the embankment to get around it, hoping it might create a roadblock for the staff car behind them. But when he looked back, it was still on their tail.

  Even more explosions, lifting whole trees up by their roots and spinning them into the air.

  The bike heaved and bucked, and he hung on grimly as snow and smoke filled the road. Any sharp corners ahead and they would be toast. Luke could see no more than ten feet in front of his face.

  The cloud cleared and he was staring at a paper-thin wooden barrier guarding the edge of a sheer drop. He yelled and twisted the handlebars, swinging the machine around. It slipped and skidded but turned, the sidecar scraping along the barrier, avoiding the cliff face by a few shavings of wood.

  The road straightened out into the center of Obersalzberg.

  It was smoother here, too, which made for easier going, but Luke realized suddenly that it also made it easier for Jumbo to aim.

  The zinging sound of bullets flying past his head was only slightly less terrifying than the enormous shattering crump of the explosions around them.

  “I thought he wanted you alive!” Tommy yelled.

  “Not anymore!” Luke yelled back.

  If they could beat Mueller back to the chamber, they could go through it and change the settings, trapping Mueller in the past.

  Mueller must have realized that, too.

  The guardhouse ahead was deserted. It did not seem to have been hit, but it was on fire, perhaps from hot shrapnel.

  He saw the Berghof, Hitler’s luxurious alpine mansion, take a direct hit, wood and stone spewing into the air in a horrifying volcano of masonry and smoke. Incredibly, he saw a toilet, completely intact, come flying up out of the eruption. It somersaulted end over end and disappeared somewhere in the woods behind the house.

  He glanced upward again and was shocked to see the planes still coming, wave after wave of them.

  The sky filled with swarms of small black insects, flying in jagged lines—only, they weren’t insects; they were bombs falling from the aircraft above.

  The mountains around them were dancing, and the god of thunder was clapping his hands and stamping his feet to keep time.

  It seemed incredible that anything or anyone would be able to survive the obliteration that was happening before their eyes. No sane person would keep going, but if Mueller caught them, it was the end of everything.

  Luke gunned the bike up the road that led to the now-ruined Berghof, and the Hotel zum Türken beyond that.

  They hit the corner on just two wheels, the sidecar lifting off the ground, and that was the position they were in when the bomb hit close by.

  The entire motorcycle was hauled from the ground by a huge, hot balloon of air and debris and was thrown sideways as if it were just a cheap plastic toy. Luke lost his grip on the handlebars and tumbled through the air, seeing the edge of the drainage ditch drift past in slow motion, then the far edge approach. Then nothing but blackness.

  He was conscious. He was alive. At least he thought he was. There wouldn’t be so much pain if he were dead.

  His ribs were on fire, and one of his legs was throbbing with stabbing spikes of pain that shot through his whole body.

  The ground beneath him was bucking and heaving, the ditch shaking like jelly as explosion after explosion pounded around him.

  He couldn’t breathe. His throat was blocked, and when he tried to suck in air, there was just a high-pitched croaking sound. His hand flew to his throat. Was his neck injured? His windpipe crushed?

  He managed a gasping, choking cough, and something shot into his mouth and his airway cleared.

  Luke sucked in a chestful of horrible, bitter air, filled with acrid smoke and cordite, but it tasted better than the purest mountain air. Then he spat the object out of his mouth and onto the ground. It was the cork. Or rather, half the cork.

  Tommy!

  Was he alive or dead?

  Luke forced himself to roll over onto his stomach and pressed upward with his arms.

  He could see the crushed shape of the motorcycle ahead and crawled toward it, ignoring the pain in his legs and ribs. He squeezed between the edge of the ditch and the bike and found Tommy, half in and half out of the sidecar. He’d somehow stayed in it as it was blasted off the road.

  Tommy’s face was covered in blood and mud, and his clothing was torn and blackened. Blood was flowing out of a wound on his scalp, and Luke feared he was dead, but as he touched Tommy’s leg, he opened his eyes.

  “Dude, you look awful,” Tommy said.

  There was another string of explosions, and although they sounded farther away, Luke pressed himself to the bottom of the ditch, realizing that it was probably this ditch that had saved their lives as the mountainside had been ripped apart around them.

  Then there was silence.

  Utter silence.

  The bombing had stopped.

  No birds chirped in the trees, and no wind whispered around the mountainside. Nothing dared disturb this eerie calmness.

  “I think it’s over,” Luke said. “Can you walk?”

  “Yes.” Tommy nodded. “But can you?”

  Luke looked down to see his right kneesock was no longer white but bright red. He pulled himself to his feet, using the remains of the bike for leverage, and carefully put weight on his leg.

  It hurt like hell, but it held his weight. It wasn’t broken at least.

  “I can walk,” Luke said, but Tommy wasn’t listening. He was looking back down the hillside toward the intersection and the road to Berchtesgaden.

  “But can you run?” Tommy asked.

  Luke followed his gaze and saw Mueller and Mumbo emerge through swirling clouds of smoke, automatic weapons in their arms.

  41. THE MOUTH OF HELL

  Tommy rolled up and out of the far side of the ditch and reached back down for Luke.

  “Run!” Luke shouted at him. “Get back to the bunker.”

  “Get a grip, dude,” Tommy said. He grabbed Luke’s arm and hauled him up out of the ditch.

  Mueller lifted his gun, and bullets smacked into the trunks of the trees behind them.

  “Come on!” Tommy yelled, putting one of Luke’s arms around his shoulders.

  As Luke ran, he thought it was amazing what the human body could do when there was a madman with a machine gun behind you.

  They staggered, stumbled, and lurched into the small forest behind them. When they had seen it that morning, it had been a proud stand of fir trees, tall with a fine head of snow. Now the snow was gone, shaken from the branches by the pounding of the explosions. So were many of the trees, grotesquely twisted and distorted into a maze of splintered wood.

  Smoke swirled through the small forest, making ghastly, ghostly shapes of the maimed trees. White smoke and dirty gray smoke intermingled in strange scything patterns.

  But there were no colors in this landscape; everything was burned black or ash white or smoky shades of gray.

  Mueller and Mumbo disappeared, but Luke knew they were not far away.

  “Not in a straight line,” Luke whispered.

  They zigzagged a random course through the forest, but always uphill, knowing that sooner or later that would take them to the hotel. As they moved, they listened for any sound that might help them locate Mueller and Mumbo, while at the same time trying to make as little sound themselves as possible.

  What about Jumbo? Luke wondered. Was he also somewhere in the misty smoke, hunting for them? Or was he lying injured in the remains of the car?

  The clouds of smoke, dust, and pulverized concrete drifted and swirled, sometimes smothering them in a thick blanket and other times clearing almost to nothing. The smoke crept into their nostrils and mouths, tasting like a spoonful of hot ash.

  A crumpled, twisted mess of timber and masonry appeared out of nowhere in one of the strange hollows in the clouds. Only the fancy terrace on the far side allowed him to recogniz
e it as the ruins of the Berghof. The fuming wreckage of Hitler’s holiday home was perhaps a symbol of what lay in store for his empire, his Third Reich.

  They skirted around a huge bomb crater rimmed with the splintered skeletons of trees, and emerged into a natural clearing.

  In the center, motionless, stood a fawn. It watched them approach, blinking, but didn’t run.

  As they passed it, Luke reached out a hand and ran it along the back of the creature, feeling the fine fur rub like velvet against his fingers. The fawn did not flinch.

  A burst of machine-gun fire sounded as they got to the trees at the far side of the clearing, Mueller or Mumbo shooting at shadows. Luke glanced back at the fawn, but it remained motionless, a statue. He watched it until it disappeared from sight.

  Tommy stopped suddenly and put a hand over Luke’s mouth.

  Mueller and Mumbo appeared from behind a crisscross of fallen trees in front of them, heading uphill.

  Mumbo started to turn, to look back at them, but just as he did, a cloud of smoke and dust grasped him in swirling gray fingers and he faded from sight, despite being only a few yards away.

  Luke and Tommy struck out at a right angle, trying to put distance between them. They were not far from the hotel now, and he strove to move faster, to be less of a burden to Tommy. Tommy was uncomplaining. Taking half of Luke’s weight, he strode forward tirelessly.

  They almost stumbled over Hitler’s toilet. It had landed upright, wedged between a tree and a fallen trunk. It was cracked but otherwise intact.

  The seat was up and Luke thought, a little insanely, that his mother would not approve of that. You might as well spray crap all around the room.

  They neared the top of the road, and still he could not see the hotel. Then he realized they were looking at it. Half of it, anyway. The other half was gone. Another direct hit.

  The Allies had pasted this area, obliterating the holiday resort of the hated Nazis, and he cheered them for it, even as he cursed them for it.

  They stumbled to the hotel and picked a way inside, over broken timber and furniture that had been tossed around the front room.