The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  Mayne nodded. ‘Thirty-six hours, a little less.’

  ‘It shouldn’t affect your activities, but what you don’t know is that we may be moving the camp after all. The CO of the AA unit has been into Bremen and seen what a night raid by a thousand Lancaster bombers does. Obliterates everything, not necessarily very high-precision. The weather report’s changed too, could be nasty for a few days, so the bomber pathfinders will have their job cut out to pinpoint the western edge of the forest. It’s just too risky for us to stay here. In a way it’s a relief. The sooner this place is blotted out, the better. By tomorrow, typhus will have killed half the inmates still alive here now anyway. It seems callous, but we’re waiting before moving them, until those who are going to die do so, to free up the transport for those with some hope. They’ll be trucked to the field hospital being built at Belsen. The bodies left here will all be buried and the trench bulldozed by this evening, then we’ll torch the buildings. After that, the RAF can rain a thousand bombs on the place for my money. It’d be as if this place never existed.’

  ‘What about these people?’ Stein said, gesturing back. ‘I mean those who recover, physically?’

  Cameron started to say something, then stopped. He took a deep breath. His voice was quavering. ‘Yesterday, just after we arrived, one of the British officers gave his revolver to an inmate, to shoot one of the guards. The man immediately shot himself. He’d been talking about his little son, asking for him, a child taken from him at the Auschwitz railhead to be gassed. The man knew what had happened, he had seen it with his own eyes, but had been unable to comprehend it. That’s the true horror. The horror of what happens when they start to remember. It’s as if they wake up from a ghastly nightmare, but then realize it was real. I don’t know what good I’m doing here. If we nurse them back to physical health and they can’t live with it, how can that be right?’

  They watched as Cameron hurried away, his form framed by the pastel wasteland behind him, the sun’s rays diffused by the opaque miasma above. Then they turned towards the forest. They passed the bloated body of a German officer, his uniform torn open, his boots gone. He was Luftwaffe, air force, not SS. He must have been the officer who had shot at Hugh’s men. Mayne remembered what Cameron had said about SS guards having escaped into the woods, about marauding inmates searching for them, living wild. He undid the flap of his holster. Stein saw him do it, and removed his own Colt automatic pistol. He clicked out the magazine, checked that it was full, slammed it back in again and pulled back the slide, seeing that a round was chambered. Mayne watched him, saying nothing, and they both moved forward cautiously along the dirt track under the trees. The pines along the edge gave way to old-growth deciduous forest, with huge oaks forming a canopy that would have concealed the track from aerial reconnaissance. ‘The RAF photos show about three kilometres of dense wood in this direction,’ Stein murmured. ‘If the bunker’s concealed in the middle, we’re looking for something twenty minutes’ walk, maybe half an hour ahead.’

  ‘Are you comfortable with this?’ Mayne said. ‘We could wait for reinforcements.’

  ‘No. Now or never. I have a gut feeling about this. There could be more at stake here than lost treasures. Much more.’

  ‘And you should know we’re both here on the same ticket. My unit, 30 AU, are more than just a tactical recon outfit. I hadn’t heard about the interrogation of the Nazi official you mentioned, but my colonel at Corps HQ took me straight off our planned op and put me on this one as soon as that drawing appeared. That’s why we were rushed out here without the usual back-up. And our job isn’t just to prevent material falling into the hands of the wrong people. It’s to prevent this war ending the way Hitler wants it to. ’

  ‘Okay. We do this as a team. Clean slate from now on?’

  ‘Agreed.’ Mayne raised his revolver and edged forward. ‘Let’s do it.’

  12

  M ayne and Stein walked forward in an uneasy silence, one on either side of the bridleway, occasionally raising their arms high to avoid patches of stinging nettles. Mayne kept his revolver cocked and at the ready. Suddenly there was a commotion and a woman lurched out of the undergrowth in front of them. He aimed his revolver and kept it trained on her. She staggered about, and then stood a few yards away from them, swaying. Her hair had been tied back in a bun, but was dishevelled, and her face was scratched and bruised. She wore an overcoat, muddied but decent, and she was stout, well-fed. She was clearly not one of the inmates.

  She lurched closer, staring around as if she were being hunted, then peered hard at Mayne, looking at the unit flashes on his battledress, at the crown of his rank on his shoulder lapels. She had little piggy eyes. She smiled to herself, muttering feverishly. ‘You are Englisher, ja?’ She spoke with a heavy accent. Mayne nodded, keeping the pistol trained on her. She clapped her hands, her face beaming, and came closer, grabbing his arm. Her breath smelled like food, like meat, a foul smell in this place, obscene. He shook her off and pushed her roughly back. She came at him again. ‘English officer? Thank Gott you have come. You will rescue me from this filth, these Juden. I know what you English really think. You don’t believe me? Look. I am not one of them.’ She peered furtively around and then shrugged off the overcoat. Underneath she was wearing the tunic of the SS-Totenkopfverbande. She had been a camp guard. Mayne suddenly remembered. The Lagerfuhrerin, the hated camp leader. The one who had escaped into the forest. The one who had taken the girl. She thrust her lapels towards him, showing the death’s-head insignia, then stood back and held her hands out, as if to rest her case. She grinned insanely, gesturing at Stein as well. ‘ Ja? Ja? ’

  Mayne raised the Webley, aimed at her stomach and fired. She lurched backwards and then fell forward on her knees, a look of shock on her face. A gob of blood spurted out of her mouth and she made a terrible gurgling sound. He raised the revolver again and shot her in the head. She snapped back, her knees contorted. The bullet had blown the top of her head off, and fragments of bone and brain spattered the ground. Blood pumped out of the wound in a gush, and then stopped. She lay still, with one eye open and the other half shut. The sound of the shots had been a dull thud, not a crack, as if the trees and the weight of this place had dampened the report. Mayne broke open the revolver, extracted the two spent cartridges and replaced them with new ones he took from his webbing pouch. He snapped the revolver shut, then glanced at the body. ‘Funny. That’s the first blood I’ve seen in this place.’

  Stein stared hard at the corpse, then looked at Mayne. ‘I’m Jewish, you know.’

  ‘I guessed it. Your name.’

  They continued walking up the track. The trees were now bigger and the canopy denser, obscuring the sunlight. The thick scrub on either side of the track near the forest entrance gave way to large trees, their lower branches dead and leafless, allowing them to see into the gloom on either side. Regular rows of pines from an old plantation were bisected by the path. As they passed each row it was as if they were parting veil after veil, compressing the view ahead, making them look sideways down the tunnels between the trees where the perspective seemed clearer. It was a curious trick of the mind, disconcerting. There was no sign of any more people, but Mayne knew there were others out there. He wished he could hear better, wished his body was less damaged. In past wars he would have been dead by now, a warrior who had done his deeds on the battlefield and could die with honour. He felt as if he were on borrowed time, and those words, glory, honour, had a hollow ring to them, only meaningful in brief snatches of daydream when he remembered an innocent version of himself before the war, before he knew what Homer had really meant, what heroes really did.

  The image of the woman he had just shot flashed before him, grotesque, gushing blood. It meant nothing to him. He wondered whether like Homer he would be able to turn away from the fall of Troy, leave unsaid what no poet could describe. Perhaps this place, this horror, was beyond description, and would be blotted out in a paralysis of imagination that wo
uld follow this war, a war whose end seemed to recede the closer he thought he had got to it.

  ‘This must be it.’ Stein paused as the track came out on another roadway, with tyre tread marks clearly visible in the dried-up mud on either side. He took a compass out of his pocket and held it level. ‘This runs east-west, exactly where I thought a road might run into the forest from the far side.’ He pocketed the compass, and looked up at the trees. ‘Completely invisible from the air.’

  They turned right and followed the track as it curved round and headed west again. After about a hundred metres it began to drop in a slight gradient, cutting down into the forest floor. They carried on down until they came to an overhang created by giant tree trunks that had been deliberately laid across the track like roof beams, with enough space beneath them for a large lorry to back down. Mayne scanned the gloom ahead. ‘This must lead to an underground bunker, cleverly concealed. They had to remove some big trees to dig it out, but then they covered it again by transplanting trees over an area about two hundred yards square, beyond those beams. That’s what must have kept those Soviet prisoners busy. They’ve even cabled together the tops of some of the big trees surrounding the clearing to bend them inwards, to make it look like continuous forest from the air.’

  He held his revolver at the ready and they advanced cautiously under the beams. About ten metres ahead he could see the dull grey of a concrete wall, just as he had guessed. In the middle of the wall was the black face of a metal door, with two massive metal latches padlocked over it. Mayne reached the door and tried the padlocks, to no avail. He stood back, took a deep breath, then squatted down. ‘We can’t do anything here by ourselves. We need to wait for my sappers to come and blow these latches off.’

  Stein tried the locks. ‘What time is Lewes due back?’

  Mayne checked his watch. ‘Seventeen thirty hours in the camp. That’s almost three hours from now. We can either go back to the camp now, or leave going back for an hour so we don’t have to spend any more time than we need to in that place.’ He looked at Stein, and they both slumped back wordlessly against the metal door. Mayne took out his cigarettes, but then thought better of it. He craved the nicotine, but the smell was too close to the smell of burning in the camp. He wondered if he’d ever smoke again. He shoved the pack back into his battledress tunic, cracked open his revolver to check the chambers again, then stared at Stein. ‘This monuments and fine arts stuff. It’s really a front, isn’t it? You’ve pretty well implied as much. I never bought the idea that art was such a priority. I was there when we bombed the monastery at Cassino, remember? And look what we did to Dresden. This is total war. And anyway, I saw the way you handled that pistol. You’re not just an honorary soldier.’

  Stein was silent for a moment, then spoke quietly. ‘The MFAA is genuine. And we’re all experts, passionate about art. But you’re right. I did the full Special Operations Executive training course. We’re the kind of people they wanted. Academics, art historians, archaeologists, people with a keen eye, able to spot details, to find clues, accustomed to working in the field. But not laboratory scientists. They come later.’

  ‘Scientists?’

  Stein stared at him. ‘The war may nearly be over. This war. But this may only be the beginning. We know the Nazis were developing super-bombs, using nuclear fission. We’re pretty confident that most of the research was still on the drawing board, and the Allied bombing campaign has wiped out most of that. But there’s another threat, even more terrifying. Have you ever wondered why Hitler never used chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield? It wasn’t for any ethical reason. Look at what we’ve just seen, the camp. There were no ethics.’ Stein shook his head. ‘It’s because the Nazi research efforts were not going towards tactical weapons, but towards strategic ones. Not battlefield weapons, but weapons of mass destruction. Towards something even worse than that. Towards a doomsday weapon.’

  ‘ A doomsday weapon? What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘With the end so near, there might be a final fanatical edict. Remember what Hitler said at the Nuremberg rally in 1938? He said that either there would be a thousand-year Reich, or there would be no Germany. No Germany means no world. Hitler made a suicide pact with his own people. And if the time came, if his armies were truly close to annihilation, there had to be a way of unleashing Armageddon. We know from our interrogated Nazi official that the signal was the Allied crossing of the Rhine. That was when Hitler knew he could never win on the battlefield. A small number of men were activated to be ready to unleash hell, to wait for the time of Hitler’s choosing. We fear that time is nearly upon us.’

  Mayne tapped the steel door. ‘And you think this is it?’

  ‘We believe that stolen art caches, maybe in bunkers like this one, might have been a cover for research facilities. They would have been the most top-secret facilities of all, concealed with all the ingenuity the Nazis could muster, even from their own people. Nuclear weapons research needs a lot of space. For biological research, the kind of thing I’m talking about, you only need a small room and a school chemistry set.’

  Mayne suddenly had a cold feeling in his gut. ‘Good God. And a supply of human test subjects. Those people the Frenchman told Cameron about, trucked in here by the Nazis.’

  ‘That’s why the camp was also a plausible cover. Nobody was going to bat an eyelid if they saw truckloads of people go into camps like this but never come out again.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Mayne murmured. ‘Get the RAF raid cancelled? Corps HQ could get a reserve brigade up to this forest by nightfall. Mop up any SS still out here.’

  Stein shook his head. ‘This has to stay top secret. It’s not only Nazi fanatics we’re worried about. There are others, too.’

  Mayne paused. ‘The Soviets?’

  ‘Allied intelligence is riddled with spies, Communist sympathizers from before the war. A lot of them came out of Oxford and Cambridge. I took a chance with you. For all I know, you might be one of them.’

  Mayne snorted. ‘I was an idealist, but my fantasy world was three thousand years old, the world of Homer. You’re right, though. There were plenty of Communists among my school and university friends. And while we’re pointing fingers, several art historians I knew, even at the Courtauld.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. I could reel off some big names from the art world, really big names, now working in intelligence. Keeping these people in place, using them, has been part of the complex planning for the world after the war. Some of our discoveries of Nazi research have deliberately been leaked. And that’s where the background of the MFAA comes into play. We’re scholars, not generals or politicians. We want to do all we can to end this war, but our aim is not to find weapons that can be used against the Nazis. Our aim is preventing such weapons from ever being used. Here’s the take. Either everyone has them, or nobody does. If both sides in the new world have horror weapons, then nobody will use them, right? That’s the gamble. Our intelligence planners call it mutually assured destruction. If everything works according to plan, that’ll become the catchphrase of the new war ahead of us, a war of standoff. It’ll be the nearest we can get to recreating the detente in Europe during the decades after the defeat of Napoleon, before the Franco-Prussian War tipped the balance and set all this in train.’

  ‘So both the Allies and the Soviets will have nuclear technology,’ Mayne murmured, keeping his eyes on the woods.

  Stein nodded, waving his pistol. ‘But a biological weapon is another matter. All you need is a test tube. There may be many bit-players who could become terrifyingly dangerous in a fragmented world: resurgent fascist groups, or religious extremists like the Wahabists of the Middle East. A flashpoint may be a new Jewish homeland in Palestine. Our arrival may have saved those people in the camp today, but the fate of their children is what I’m talking about. The fate of all children.’

  Mayne checked his watch. He looked around, scanning the trees, cocking his good left ear up, lis
tening. He turned to Stein. ‘All right. So what exactly are we talking about?’

  ‘Tell me about 1918.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What happened.’

  ‘Well, the end of the Great War. The year I was born.’

  ‘And the year of the influenza epidemic.’

  ‘That too.’ Mayne paused. ‘That killed my mother, a few months after I was born.’ He stared at Stein, feeling an icy grip in his stomach. He stared again, then looked at the metal door. ‘ You’re not serious.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘They couldn’t have done that. It’d be suicidal.’

  Stein spoke urgently, under his breath. ‘I’m deadly serious. The Nazis could contemplate anything. Spanish influenza was the worst epidemic in human history. Allied scientists have been desperate to understand it. Here’s why it’s so terrifying. Normally, most flu deaths are among people with weaker immune systems: the elderly, children, those already ill. In 1918 it was different. Most of the victims were healthy young adults. I’m old enough to remember it. The scientists have made a breakthrough, and it’s terrifying. It looks as if the virus caused the body’s immune system to auto-destruct. The stronger the immune system, the more deadly the result. At the time, so many young adults were being killed in the war that the epidemic just seemed like an extension of that. But the Spanish flu infected at least a third of the world’s population. It probably killed fifty million people. Fifty million. That’s more than five times the number killed in action in the Great War.’

  Mayne swallowed hard. ‘And you think the Nazis have been experimenting with it?’

  ‘The alarm bell rang after we liberated Paris. By then, most of the French Jews had been deported to the camps, but there were still a few slave labourers left. One of them told US interrogators a bizarre story. In 1941, a small group of Jews had been detailed to join two SS doctors in a night visit to the Pere Lachaise cemetery, the largest in Paris. They dug up half a dozen graves. The doctors knew what they were looking for. The graves all contained people who had died in 1918. They were well-off people, all buried in lead-lined coffins.’