by Tom DeLonge
“Sounds like a plan,” said Audrey.
A flock of pigeons ballooned into the air on their left, wings clapping. Timika, who disliked birds, winced and shielded her face, turning back the way they had come.
And that was how she saw them, Cook and the other man in their HSI uniforms, moving purposefully towards her, watching her, then breaking into a run as soon as they realized they’d been spotted.
“They’re coming,” Timika gasped. The one with the crew cut was reaching for his weapon.
“Go,” said Marvin, with none of his usual flapping indecisiveness. “Run!”
She met Audrey’s eyes, saw the fractional nod of agreement, and broke into a plunging dash along the path toward the subway station. Behind her, someone shouted, though she couldn’t catch the words. In front of her, a bicycle courier swerved and spilled onto the grass as she barged through. A woman with a baby carriage cursed her, and businessmen stared as if they’d never seen the like before, and then there was a pop and an almost instantaneous answering bang from a mailbox yards in front of her, a neat hole punching through the steel.
They were shooting at her.
A cry went up behind her, a rising wail of panicked horror. As she turned, she saw the path behind her clearing as people flung themselves to the ground.
For a second, she saw the gunman clearly. He was perhaps a hundred yards behind her, weapon raised and sighted. She saw the muzzle flash before she heard the report, heard the zip of the bullet through the air beside her head, and then saw the gunman crumple under Marvin’s inexpert sideswiping tackle.
The two men went down together. Timika started back towards them.
God! she thought. God! But then she saw Audrey screaming at her to go, and she began to run again, though now her legs felt like they were made of iron and concrete.
Oh God. Marvin.
The subway was behind her. She glanced back, heading south on University past the fancy furniture store, and when she could no longer see behind her, turned quickly onto Eleventh Street, forcing herself into a steady trot. She was wearing the wrong heels for running. Turn her ankle and she may as well go back and hand them the book …
Pace yourself.
Marvin wouldn’t be able to handle himself in a fight. The crowd would think he was attacking a policeman.
Keep going.
She should have just given them the damn book. What was it, anyway? Some crackpot’s scrapbook of made up history, designed to get his idiot name into the twitterverse. It was absurd.
There were no alleys to duck into. Desperation mounting, she risked a look back. The man who had called himself Cook had stopped and was looking her way, talking into a radio attached to the shoulder of his jacket. It meant there were more of them.
Timika scanned the street corner, fishing her phone from her pocket and unsteadily thumbing on her GPS. She was looking for a cop, but stopped herself. Any uniform in the area might be working with Cook. By now, back in the park, someone would have called 911. Legitimate police were surely on their way. Ironically, that meant the safest place to be might be back where she’d come from, if she could elude the impostors pursuing her. There was also her car, but it felt like it was parked a hundred miles away.
She made a hard right and stepped into the first store she saw. She thought it was a dry-cleaners, judging by the hanging, plastic-covered garments, but then she saw dressmaker’s manikins, a long counter with a built in yard stick, and racks holding bolts of fabric. An elderly Asian lady looked up from her sewing machine expectantly.
“You got a rear exit?” Timika asked.
The woman’s face tightened.
“You gonna buy something?”
“Kind of in a rush,” said Timika, checking the door behind her.
“What I look like?” asked the old woman grumpily. “Trying to make living here.”
Timika pulled her wallet from her coat without breaking stride, tore out a five and flung it on the counter as she sped by.
“To the back,” said the woman, eying the bill. “Right, then green door on left.”
Timika shouldered her way through the heaps of material and made it to the back just as the front door opened.
Cook.
She ducked around the corner and found the green door. It was bolted shut. Half cursing, half sobbing, she worked the rusty bolts back and dragged the door open. He would be on her in seconds.
“Hey!” called the old woman’s muffled voice from the front of the shop. “You buying something or what?”
Timika pushed out into a dim alley full of sour smelling trashcans. She reached for a fractured wooden crate and tried to jam it under the door handle like she’d seen people do in movies. She doubted it would delay her pursuer.
Pursuers. Plural. She had no idea where crew cut was, and there could be others.
As she started to run again, she told herself she should spend more time in the gym and less time eating pizza. The thought needled her, but it was the kind of needling that took her attention away from what might happen, and that was all to the good.
Knew you’d be running for your life today, did you? she demanded of herself. Saw this one coming? Yeah, that’s what I figured.
She took a few more staggering strides, gasping for air, and thought of Marvin, who had thrown his incompetent self at the gunman back in the park. A pulse of sadness coursed up through her chest, tightening around her heart. She couldn’t run much longer.
She heard the back door of the tailoring shop open behind her.
Timika made a left at the end of the alley, breathing hard. She didn’t know this block at all. She was scared, struck with the certainty that she couldn’t stay ahead of him much longer. He was strong, fast, and ruthless. She was none of those things. In the movie version of this moment, she would be waiting and ready, her concentration channeling unexpected combat skills gleaned from years of recreational Tae Kwan Do or some such shit, and she would dance her way out of danger with a quip and a grin.
But this was reality, and she was almost out of time.
9
JERZY
Wenceslas, Poland, December 1944
THE REGIMEN AT THE WENCESLAS MINE DID NOT change. We got up before dawn, straightened the straw of our beds for fear of beatings or the loss of our meager daily meal, and stood silent and motionless for an hour or more—whatever the weather—in front of the barracks. There, we were inspected and given our instructions for the day before being marched to our work sites. We worked until nightfall without breaks, without food, getting only a bowl of thin soup and a crust of bread before bed. You lost track of time, not just minutes or hours, but weeks, months.
Around us, workers dropped—Jews like us, but also Poles, Czechs and Russians. Sometimes they were still there the next day, frozen in the snow until we were allowed to bury them. But even as we fell, the great complex of tunnels and structures we built formed around and below us. Much of it was in use already. I saw great vaulted concrete hallways buzzing with white-coated scientists and civilian inspectors. The complex was like a great beast that needed constant feeding as it sprawled and expanded.
Ishmael and I lived in constant fear of being separated, and though our records showed we were brothers, we were careful not to talk where people might see us. Families were divided for spite and, I came to think later, to create a sense of isolation. People in a state of true despair are easier to control. I suspect many of the guards simply liked to see us reduced to the unthinking beasts they believed us to be. We worked hard, so that they would have no reason to separate us.
No one knew what we were building. Some said the mine was a test facility for great ballistic rockets and the jet aircraft the Nazis thought might yet turn the tide of the war. The secrecy under which we worked was fierce and uncompromising. Once, when a party of five men took a wrong turn in the warren of tunnels, an officer had them all shot on the spot because they had seen something they should not have seen. That was enough
. The corpse recovery detail sent in to take out the bodies took twice as long as usual because they were blindfolded and led by a kapo and guards who pulled them along using ropes.
But we heard stories. Strange vats of chemicals were trucked in. At times, the mine seemed to hum with a peculiar, throbbing energy. Workers in some parts of the facility spoke of a glowing violet light pulsing through the cracks in doorframes, and those who saw it complained of sudden, inexplicable nausea. Ben Aizinberg, a burly man who had once run his own slaughterhouse in Kraków, said that he saw two scientists arguing with a guard about returning to a particular chamber. His German wasn’t good, but he understood enough to learn the source of their terror.
“Die Glocke,” he said, in a hushed voice.
The Bell.
What this might be, we had no idea. A weapon, perhaps, or some new torture device. Just being near it made people sick. The German soldiers had learned they could not take their guard dogs close to the site, because the dogs would whine and cringe away, and lie huddled and whimpering for hours after. Some said it was a power source, others that it did not exist, and that it was just another story to keep us scared.
But we learned, at great expense, that it was not just a story. I will relate this part of my narrative carefully, but it is hard. Even now, my hand trembles as I try to recall precisely what happened that terrible day.
Ishmael and I were digging trenches for a concrete pouring when an officer came to speak to the guards. He was young and blond, like many of the SS who ran the camp, but I had not seen him before. The insignia on his collar had three pips and two strokes, so it looked a little like a domino. Our kapo that day was a man called Boritz, a mean, self-interested Pole who delighted in brutally lashing out at prisoners when his Nazi masters were watching. Though he was Jewish like us, he was well-fed and well-clothed, wearing, as a badge of pride, the green triangle insignia that identified him as a befristeten Vorbeugungshäftling kapo. Ishmael and I watched as he saluted the young officer and engaged him in conversation while the guards looked on. Then they started scrutinizing the workers, so we lowered our eyes to what we were doing and held our breath. It was never good to be noticed.
But noticed, we were. Ishmael and I were chosen, with five other men who were older than us but whose bodies had not yet yielded to the starvation diet and brutal workload. Without explanation, we were escorted by two guards with submachine guns and marched behind the blond officer, up through the main hall and then down a series of the great V-shaped tunnels we had spent the last few months casting. We did not speak, and at first, I could barely see for fear. It was not uncommon for prisoners to be publicly executed, merely to send a message to the rest, but the further we walked, the clearer it became that we were moving into areas of the mine we had not been before, areas where few prisoners were permitted to go. After we had been walking for a few minutes, the noise of the workforce fell away behind us, and our own footsteps echoed strangely in the concrete passageway. Twice, we saw officers and men in laboratory coats, but no more prisoners, and my fear soon mixed with something else, a strange and dreadful curiosity.
We passed through a series of guarded doors where the officer leading us showed papers. The duty soldiers looked us over carefully before blindfolding us and pushing us inside. The blindfolds were old, and the fabric of mine was almost rubbed through, such that although I was careful to fumble about and move at half speed, like the rest, I could see fairly well with one eye. I did not flinch when the guard waved his hands in front of my face. Once inside, I was careful not to turn my head to look around.
We were in a vast, concrete hangar. At one end, huddled around a console of some sort, were a pair of armed guards and men in lab coats, all under the watchful eye of a middle-aged man in a suit. He had a slanted smile of ironic amusement on his face. He wore a coat draped over his shoulders, and the collar of the coat was studded with SS insignia. I had never seen the rank badges before, and though he gave off the air of an office worker, the others kept a respectful distance. When his eyes fell on the blond officer, the latter clicked his heels together and saluted. Whoever this man was, he was important.
I heard the blond officer introduced as Hauptsturmführer Ungerleider. It was a name I would come to loathe.
The perimeter of the vast chamber was girded with access gantries and ductwork. At ground level, I saw glass-fronted offices facing the center, where I saw a strange metallic structure the size of a small shed but with a dome-shaped top and walls that flared out at the bottom. I recognized it at once from Aizinberg’s stories.
The Bell.
Pipes and tubing and cables laced it to the offices and to various tanks, or to bottles and vats placed on the floor, all cluttered with what looked like steam valves and electronic controls, but also coiled up into the great gray ceiling. I did not dare raise my eyes. We were led to a metal staircase and urged up.
I smelled fresh air. We were going above the surface. When we were all up and the steel trap door to the stairway clanged shut behind us, our blindfolds were removed and tucked into our waistbands. For a long moment, we stood bemused, blinking at the cold, pale sky and the strange concrete structure that loomed over us.
It was a great concrete ring, standing on eleven cement pillars, perhaps thirty-feet high, all painted turquoise and strung with heavy cable. I had never seen its like before, but it reminded me of pictures I had seen in a schoolbook of an ancient monument in England called Stonehenge. The barren earth beneath our feet was strangely charred in parts, bleached in others, and there was no trace of the weeds or the lichen that clung to all the other buildings at Wenceslas. Around the perimeter was a high fence topped with barbed wire and four watchtowers sprouting machine guns, the big 42s. Beyond the fence—and this was almost as strange—were only dense pine forests. No roads, no checkpoints or buildings of any kind. If there was a protective wall, it was far out of sight.
Drainage holes in the earth at the base of each pillar seemed to communicate with the chamber below. From each hole, a heavy cable emerged, its end marked with a pronged electrical connector. The kapo got his orders from the SS officer, and we were told to scale the columns, using ladders, and plug the cables into metal fittings that ran around the circle of concrete at the top.
It was grueling work. It took all seven of us to haul the first cable up from the chamber below—twelve meters of it, wrapped with wire and canvas tape like some monstrous tentacle. When we had it out, we lay sweating and panting in the snow until the kapo said we were taking too long and had to get on with the next one. We got back to our feet, formed a line and pulled the next cable up and out, huddled against each other’s bent shoulders so that we inhaled the stench of soiled clothes and unwashed bodies, straining to get each length out and extended, one after another.
Even with the menacing of the kapo and the guards, it took us two hours to get all eleven cables pulled through, and all the while, Ungerleider, the blond officer, watched, his face impassive. The next task was to position ladders and crawl up to the concrete rim of the henge, the cables looped around our shoulders. This was harder still, because only three of us would fit on the ladder, and the highest one had to manipulate the plug into the socket, which meant he could bear none of the cable’s weight. As the smallest, that job was given to me, but exhaustion and months of doing jobs designed for bigger, stronger men, finally took its toll. I was fitting the third cable into place when I lost my footing and fell from the ladder. If Ishmael had not broken my fall, I would have surely died on the concrete, but my brother caught me awkwardly and we both hit the ground together.
He took my full weight on his left arm. I heard it break distinctly. His left ankle crumpled beneath him and he winced, jaws clenched, tears in his eyes as we sprawled together, but to my garbled apologies, he said only, “Shh little brother. Say nothing. I will be fine.”
He wouldn’t, but we both knew there was no place in the camp for a Jew who could not work. When the guards
came over to get us roughly to our feet, he shrugged them off with a gesture that said he needed no assistance, but when he stumbled and I couldn’t keep him up, we were ordered to sit in the corner with the tools. We were blindfolded again and waited while the others finished the work.
I could still see through the worn and ragged scarf, and I was able to watch, without moving my head, as the rest of the team plugged in the final cable and climbed back down the ladder.
“I’m sorry, Ishmael,” I whispered. “I was just so tired. How is your arm?”
“Shhh …” my brother answered, “they’ll hear. Don’t worry about it. You think I’d let you fall? You looked like a wingless goose dropping out of the sky.”
I grinned at that, though I was worried about his arm. Then I realized that the others were being blindfolded. As the scarves were tied in place, Ungerleider spoke to the guards and moved away. The guards moved too, heading for the hatch leading down into the mine. The prisoners were left standing in the center, alone. Waiting.
“Ishmael,” I said. “Something is happening. Stand up.”
“I can’t. My ankle is swollen …”
“Get up! I can see …”
I hesitated, trying to make sense of the images. Ungerleider stood at the mouth of the great pipe-like access passage, watching as some of the soldiers went down, and then he was looking up to the machine gun towers. He nodded once, and then climbed into the shaft, dragging the hatch closed behind him.
I tore the blindfold from my head, threw it down and snatched at Ishmael’s.
“What are you doing?” he gasped. “They’ll kill us!”
But they were going to kill us anyway. The men in the towers were readying their weapons, training them down onto the circle below. We had, it seemed, seen too much.
But Ishmael resisted. For a second he glared at me, his eyes full of fear and exasperation, and then the strange quiet of the place registered, and he looked around to where the other prisoners, including the kapo now, also blindfolded, shifted uneasily, the six of them looking so small under the great, strange ring and pillars of concrete, like blind priests at some ancient temple.