by Paul Sussman
'Wasting our time,' panted Layla, her face bubbled with sweat despite the cold. 'No way we're going to get through. No way.'
Ben-Roi said nothing, just leant against the wall breathing heavily. Then, with a muttered 'Fuck it,' he snatched up one of the torches and started back along the shaft towards the dim, grey rectangle of the mine entrance. Layla lingered a moment, then moved forward and picked up the second torch. As she did so its beam wheeled momentarily across the floor, picking out what looked like a faint groove in the rock at her feet, no more than a few centimetres across and barely visible beneath the dust and dirt with which the floor was caked. She pointed the beam downwards, frowning, then dropped and, holding the torch with one hand, brushed at the ground with the other. More of the groove became visible, and other grooves as well. She brushed harder. They seemed to run in parallel lines, one set following the direction of the corridor from the entrance to the rock fall, the other curving off at the point where she was squatting and running directly into the wall between two of the wooden ceiling props.
'Look at this,' she called, still rubbing at the ground.
Ben-Roi had by now almost reached the mine entrance. He stopped and turned.
'There were rails in here,' she shouted. 'On the floor. They ran back into the mine. But then, just here, another set branched away.'
The Israeli hesitated, then came back down the shaft to where she was squatting, the light of his torch beam combining with hers to illuminate the parallel grooves arcing off from the main axis of the tunnel. He stared at them, then moved back and ran his torch over the area of wall into which the grooves disappeared. Layla did the same. Although it was grimy and uneven, now that they looked closely they could see that that particular section of rock was of a lighter hue than that of the rest of the shaft, and of a vaguely different texture as well. Ben-Roi went up to it, ran his hand over its surface, thudded a fist against it.
'It's concrete!' he hissed. 'There was an opening here. Someone's blocked it up, tried to make it look like the rest of the tunnel.'
'You think . . . ?'
He didn't reply, just thumped again, harder. Layla couldn't be sure, but she thought she caught a faint hollow sound. There was an old pick-axe head lying on the floor nearby and, picking it up, she slammed it against the wall. Again that hollow sound, louder now. They glanced at each other, then Ben-Roi grabbed the pick-head, handed her his torch and started hacking. One blow, two, three and a small crack opened up. He adjusted his position, gave himself more room to swing, resumed the attack. The crack widened and spread, ancillary cracks radiating outwards from it like the spokes of a wheel, the hollow sound growing louder with every blow until eventually a heavy flap of concrete sheared away and dropped to the floor, revealing a crude breeze block wall behind. On it, in white paint, were daubed the words MEIN EHRE . . .
'Heisst Treue,' whispered Layla, completing the legend, the last section of which was still lost beneath the concrete rendering. She looked across at Ben-Roi. 'The motto of the SS.'
'You sneaky bastard, Hoth,' he murmured. 'You sneaky Nazi bastard!'
He slapped a hand against the blocks to gauge how solid they were, then, using the point of the pick, started scraping around one of them, loosening the chunky globs of cement that held it in place. They came out easily, crumbling almost as soon as the pick-point scored into them, and within a minute he'd all but freed the block from its neighbours. He dropped the pick and kicked at the wall. The block trembled, but stayed in place. He kicked again, putting all his strength into the blow, and this time it dislodged, flying backwards and disappearing with a loud thud like a cork bursting from a bottle, leaving a dark, rectangular cavity. He took his torch back from Layla and, leaning forward, shone it into the hole.
'Oy vey!'
'What can you see?'
'Oy vey!'
'What?'
Ben-Roi stepped back, allowing Layla to take his place. She raised her own torch and, pressing her face to the cavity, peered through into the darkness beyond, the steam of her breath swirling and twisting in the light of the beam. Another tunnel ran away in front of her, narrower than the main shaft and at right angles to it. Lined up along its walls, looming briefly in the torchlight before receding into blackness again as she swayed the beam from side to side, were dozens upon dozens of boxes and crates, some wood, some metal, some big, some small, most, so far as she could make out, stamped with a swastika and the twin lightning-bolt insignia of the SS.
'God Almighty,' she whispered.
She took in the scene for thirty seconds, transfixed, then, uneasy suddenly at having her back to Ben-Roi, turned again. The Israeli was standing directly behind her, hand clasped around a rusty iron chisel that he must have picked up while she was peering through the cavity. For an instant she tensed, thinking he was about to attack her. But he simply handed her the chisel and, stooping, lifted the pick-head from the floor where he had dropped it.
'Let's get it down,' he said.
It took them fewer than five minutes to expand the cavity into a fully fledged opening. As soon as they'd punched a big enough hole they threw aside the tools and, Ben-Roi going first, clambered through into the tunnel beyond, the uneven rasp of their breathing seeming to fill the entire shaft as if they were standing inside some vast stone lung.
They played the torch beams back and forth, trying in vain to see how far the corridor extended, then stepped up to the nearest of the boxes and squatted in front of it. It was square, metal, with a hinged lid on which a skull-and-crossbones had been sprayed in black. Ben-Roi flicked the catches and opened it.
'Chara!' he growled. 'Shit!'
Inside, wrapped in a waxed paper like lumps of cheese, were two dozen blocks of plastic explosive. They gazed at them nervously, then moved to the next box along, this one wooden, oblong. There was a crowbar lying on top and, grabbing it, Ben-Roi sprung open the lid, brushing aside a layer of straw to reveal a nest of gleaming, wooden-stocked Mauser rifles. A compartment at the end of the crate was crammed with ammunition clips.
'It's an arsenal,' murmured Layla. 'It's a fucking arsenal.'
They lifted one of the rifles out and examined it – it seemed in perfect working order, unaffected after sixty years of being bricked up in the darkness of the mine – then laid it down again and started moving deeper into the tunnel, stopping every few metres to open up other crates and chests. Most contained weapons and demolition equipment. There were other things as well, however. One box was crammed with hundreds of Iron Crosses, another with bundles of neatly wrapped banknotes, another with dusty bottles of wine. A small flat crate leaning against the wall about twenty metres into the tunnel had a tag attached to it on which was scrawled '1 Vermeer, 1 Breughel (Altere), 2 Rembrandt'.
'God Almighty,' Layla kept murmuring to herself. 'God Almighty.'
For all that the collection was spectacular, they found no sign of the Menorah, so they just kept moving along the shaft, deeper and deeper into the mountain until eventually, after about fifty metres, they saw that ahead of them the tunnel seemed to widen out, its mouth filling with a blackness even more impenetrable than that which they had so far encountered. They slashed their torch beams back and forth trying to see what was going on, then continued, covering another twenty metres before the tunnel walls suddenly disappeared and they found themselves standing on a broad, flat ledge gazing out into emptiness.
'It's a cavern,' said Layla, whispering for some reason.
They moved forward to the front of the ledge where there was what appeared to be some sort of rudimentary elevator system giving access to the cavern floor below – just a rectangular wooden platform with a handrail at each end, running on two vertical tracks bolted into the rock face. They tested it with their feet, gingerly, making sure the wood wasn't rotten, then stepped onto it and shone their Maglites out into the void.
With everything swamped in darkness it was impossible to get a proper sense of the cavern's dimensions. Given that
their torch beams were already weakening by the time they hit the ceiling, however, and had been completely smothered before they were able to pick out the far wall, they could tell it was big. Very big. Below – ten, fifteen metres – they could make out more crates. A lot more crates.
'How much of this fucking stuff is there?' muttered Ben-Roi.
They wheeled the Maglites around for almost a minute, trying to piece together a picture of their surroundings, then started looking for a way to get the elevator working. There was a control box clamped to one of the handrails with a long loop of electrical cable dangling from its underside and a lever on its face. Ben-Roi pulled the lever. Nothing.
'No power,' he said.
He put down the crowbar he was still holding and leant over the rail, shining his torch down into the blackness, trying to locate the lift's electricity source. There were more cables coiled on the cavern floor, some snaking away among the crates, one – the thickest – running up the rock face beside the elevator. He traced it with his beam, following it up over the lip of the ledge, across the stone balcony and through a low doorway a few metres to the left of the tunnel opening. They went over to it and ducked into a small, rock-cut room where the cable fed into a large generator, a rusted crank mechanism dangling from its side like a withered arm.
'You think it still works?' asked Layla. 'After all this time?'
'Only one way to find out,' said Ben-Roi, handing her his Maglite.
He grasped the crank with both hands and yanked, turning it half a revolution. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing. He cricked his shoulders, squatted to give himself more leverage, and heaved. The generator let out a weak cough, its body shuddering slightly.
'Come on,' hissed Laya.
Ben-Roi jerked the handle again, and again, and again, each revolution producing a louder and more protracted splutter until eventually, on the ninth attempt, the machine suddenly roared into life, a brilliant, shocking explosion of light flooding the cavern behind them. They hurried back out onto the ledge.
'Oh fuck,' gasped Layla.
As they had already worked out, they were standing on a natural balcony at one end of a vast, hangar-like cave, thirty metres high, forty across, seventy long, its walls and ceiling striped with undulating bands of orange and grey rock. It was not the cavern itself which left them standing with mouths agape, however, but its contents, for if in the tunnel there had been dozens of crates and boxes, here – illuminated in the frosty glare of eight giant arc lamps – there were hundreds of them, line upon line, row upon row, stack upon stack, divided into neat blocks by a grid of narrow avenues that were themselves choked with a jumbled traffic of miscellaneous objects and clutter – statues, machine guns, paintings, oil drums, even a pair of old motorbikes. Suspended from the ceiling at the back of the cavern, covering almost its entire rear wall, was a huge flag – red, white and black with, at its centre, a crooked-armed swastika.
'Oh fuck,' repeated Layla.
They moved forward onto the elevator platform again, the generator thudding and growling behind them, their Maglites clasped redundantly in their hands.
'We're never going to find it,' she murmured. 'It's impossible. It'll take days, weeks.'
Ben-Roi said nothing, just ran his eyes back and forth around the cavern. Ten seconds passed, then he held out his torch, pointing.
'No it won't.'
Beneath them, running the length of the cavern from the elevator to the rear wall, was a broad central aisle, the only part of the floor that was reasonably clear of clutter. At its far end, standing alone directly beneath the Nazi flag as though it had deliberately been set apart, was a single large crate, square, about the height of a man.
'That's the one,' he said.
'Yes,' whispered Layla. 'Yes.'
They stared at it, then, picking up the crowbar again, Ben-Roi eased forward the elevator's control lever. There was a loud click, and with a tremble and a judder the wooden platform slowly began to descend, rumbling downwards with a rattle of machinery before jerking to a halt a few centimetres above the cavern floor. They stepped off and started walking, their feet falling soundlessly onto the flat stone, the stacks of crates rising like walls to either side of them, the cavern somehow feeling even more vast and imposing now that they were viewing it from ground level. About halfway along the growl of the generator momentarily faltered, plunging them into darkness for a few seconds before the motor recovered itself and the cavern once more flooded with icy light. They paused, waiting to see if it would happen again, then continued walking, the Nazi flag looming ever larger in front of them, the crate coming ever closer, until eventually they came to a halt a couple of metres in front of it, their breathing fast and uneven, their foreheads glistening with sweat. Ben-Roi held the crowbar out to Layla.
'Lady's privilege.'
She hesitated, noting how dilated his pupils had suddenly become, sensing that whatever he'd been plotting these last few days it was fast approaching its denouement. Then, taking the bar and laying aside her torch, she stepped up to the crate.
'The moment of truth,' she said, forcing a nervous smile across her face.
'Oh yes,' whispered Ben-Roi.
The crate's back left-hand corner was damaged, the wood cracked and splintered, and, going round to it, she worked the bar's head into the gap and began to prise off the lid. It was securely fixed and she had to fight to get it moving. Ben-Roi stood watching her.
'Galia,' he said after a moment.
'Sorry?'
'Her name was Galia.'
She pulled the bar out and moved it a little further along, yanking it down with all her weight.
'Whose name?'
'In my living room. The photograph. Of the woman. You asked who it was. Her name was Galia.'
She looked up at him. What the hell was he talking about?
'Right,' she said.
'My fiancée.'
'Right,' she repeated.
The lid was starting to come now, the nails whining and squeaking as one after the other they were torn from their housings. She moved round to the side of the crate and then the front so that her back was to Ben-Roi, yanking and heaving. Behind her the Israeli had begun flipping his torch from one hand to the other, eyes fixed on the back of her head.
'We were going to get married.'
There were only a couple of nails left now. Beneath the lid she could see a mass of yellow straw.
'Beside the Sea of Galilee,' he said. 'At sunrise. It's beautiful at that time of day.'
Layla threw a glance over her shoulder – why the fuck was he telling her this? – then turned back to the crate.
'What happened?' she asked. 'She ditch you?'
The torch came to rest in Ben-Roi's right hand.
'She got blown up.'
Layla's shoulders tensed.
'A week before the wedding. In Jerusalem. Hagar Square. Al-Mulatham.'
There was a loud shearing sound and the last of the nails gave, the lid levering backwards and dropping to the floor with a clatter. She barely noticed. Oh God, she thought, that's what this is all about. They killed his fucking fiancée. And now . . .
Behind her she could feel Ben-Roi stepping forward, raising a hand. With a furious, desperate burst of energy she swung, lashing out at him with the crowbar, trying to drive him away, protect herself. He was ready for her, ducking the blow and smashing her across the side of the face with the Maglite barrel, sending her sprawling to the floor.
'You have to believe me,' she choked, groggy, confused, feeling his knees pushing into the small of her back as he came down on top of her. 'I'm not . . .'
She felt her knapsack unzipping, his hand swirling around inside it, then his palm slapping beneath her chin and yanking her head back. He was snarling like an animal.
'I wear Manio, you murdering Arab bitch!' he spat. 'You understand? I wear Manio! Now, where the fuck is he? Tell me! Tell me or I'll break your fucking neck!'
In the en
d the climb up to the mine wasn't quite as bad as Khalifa had expected, although it was bad enough, particularly the last section when the cold really started to bite into his hands and feet. The fact that Ben-Roi and Layla had already forced a path through the drifted snow made the going easier than it would otherwise have been, however, and by stopping every hundred metres or so to light some of the paper he'd brought with him and frantically rubbing his hands over the transient conflagration of maps, fax sheets and log-book pages, he was able, if not exactly to stay warm at least to prevent himself freezing to death.
At the top, at the forest edge, he paused for a moment to get his bearings, the world silent apart from the lurch of his breath and the soft crackling of icy twigs, then moved towards the mine. As he did so, picking his way across the clearing, he became aware of another sound, a sort of vague throbbing grumble, so faint as to be barely audible, but growing stronger the further he went. By the time he reached the mine entrance it had resolved itself into the distant but unmistakable growl of a generator motor.