by P. W. Child
NAZI GOLD
ORDER OF THE BLACK SUN - BOOK 5
PRESTON WILLIAM CHILD
Copyright © 2014 by Heiken Marketing
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Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Edited (USA) by Anna Drago
Other Books in This Series
Ice Station Wolfenstein - Order of the Black Sun - Book 1
Deep See One - Order of the Black Sun - Book 2
Black Sun Rising - Order of the Black Sun - Book 3
The Quest for Valhalla - Order of the Black Sun - Book 4
Chapt er 1 – The Untimely Caller
Nina woke to find herself in a pool of sweat.
The nightmare had been worse than all the others, but still it had maintained that same aura of mystery and that smell! That smell was so prevalent throughout all the dreams and she just could not pinpoint what it was. As far as she knew she could not remember ever smelling it in her woken state, yet it was familiar. She shook her head to get the horrid sensation from her mind and started carefully rolling over. These days she could never be certain of what she would encounter, slipping in and out of states of hallucination which sometimes granted her a look into places she would never have thought surrounded her. Nina wondered if this was what it was like to be psychic.
Of course her reluctant clairvoyance came courtesy of the poison still in her veins. It only gradually dispersed from the muscle tissue in her arm where the twisted ideas of villainous Nazi doctors had planted the slowly releasing poison several months ago. They had engineered the strain so well that conventional treatment did little more than leave a dent in the potency of the vile stuff. But thanks to an equally malicious concoction brewed from the blood of her nemesis, Nina’s body was able to combat it. Now it was a waiting game for it all to work its way out of her system, a time-consuming method fraught with unfortunate psychological plagues. It appeared the latest was the torment of nightmares. They were not brought forth predominantly from past experiences, but pressed more on Nina’s fears, her lifelong concerns.
Then again, some of them were just good old horrific dreams, filled with a sickening feeling of abandoned hope and pursuing evil at her heels. Nina swallowed hard. Her throat was cork dry and slightly swollen from the medication she was on, but that was quickly remedied with some milk and a cigarette. She had taken up the destructive habit again after her Viking ordeal which ended in the loss of too many good new friends. At least the friend she valued most above all still remained. She looked at the wall mounted picture of them posing with the bikers they had befriended while they searched for the famous Hall of the Slain, Valhalla the previous year.
“Sam,” she smiled as she eased herself out of bed and slipped on her heavy alpaca knit sweater that a correspondent friend in Chicago sent her for Christmas. It came a few weeks early, but she was not complaining. Scotland was entering a rather testing Christmas season and she would need all the insulation she could get, especially something as aesthetically pleasing as a soft black and white sweater that reminded her of white noise on a late night TV screen.
Nina strolled through the dark hallway to the kitchen on the other side of the second floor. It seemed she would now be a permanent occupant of Wrichtishousis, the manor on the estate of her missing boyfriend, David Purdue. His lust for adventure always led him into dangerous situations and the company of questionable people. Many people had warned the billionaire, including Nina herself, but his pursuits for the arcane things that so fascinated him drove him into perilous predicaments, one after the other. Finally he had ventured into something he could not, or would not, apparently, return safely from.
After numerous attempts at locating him, with the employment of the best detectives in her service, she had abandoned her search for him. He was Dave Purdue, ever prepared for any eventuality and capable of paying or talking himself out of just about any situation. Fiercely independent and fearless, she trusted the man did not want to be found and would return once he was good and ready. Every now and then the thought of his lifeless corpse being pecked at in some remote mountain range did cross her mind, but she found it almost ludicrous that such a thing could befall Purdue. Nevertheless, she stayed in his lavish home, enjoying the perks of being his partner.
It had been years since she heard his defiant chuckle when challenged by some academic or philanthropist at one of his beloved parties. Nina took the milk from the fridge and drank straight from the container; something she would preciously had frowned on in her refined nature. It was amazing how liberating the doors of death could be for the morals and etiquette of a sophisticated human being. She lit a cigarette and sat down in front of her computer with a handful of pills she had to take daily to maintain her health while the arsenic based substance gradually worked itself out. Nina ran her dainty wrist across her lips to wipe off the white moustache the milk left behind and sucked hard on her first fag for the day.
It was still dark, but she could not spend another moment in bed. Lately she woke literally an hour or two after going to sleep, so much so that she had become accustomed to insomnia as a natural body timer. Besides, it gave her more time to get things done. After her close call with death Nina came to realize that sleep, although a necessity for the body, was utterly insignificant to the curious mind and its need to be sated. She found that it was literally a waste of precious time. She logged in to a site, her large dark eyes darting here and there on the screen while the white luminance of it highlighted her beautiful features. In the white light her fair skin was even more in contrast to her long lashes and dark tresses, accentuating her high cheekbones with shadow play. Her pouty mouth moved under imperceptible words as she read the information on the screen, occasionally dragging the cigarette into a flare of orange coal and ash.
Suddenly the buzzer to her intercom shattered the silence of the early morning and she jumped, “Jesus!”
Nina extinguished her fag in the soil of the large potted plant next to her desk and dragged her feet lazily toward the device on the wall. It was Security.
“Dr Gould, so sorry to wake you,” the crackling voice said over the radio, “but there is someone here to see you.”
“This time of the morning? What the hell do they want?” she snapped. Before her first deep roast coffee of the day Nina was not the kindest soul to engage.
“The lady says it is urgent. She needs to see you before she leaves for an expedition in the Amazon, but she refuses to say anything else,” he replied. Nina rolled her eyes and raised one eyebrow in astonishment.
“Well, that is convenient, isn’t it? Does she have a name at all? Or is that a secret too?” the pretty historian spat in her cocky way that was so well known to all those who knew her and often found themselves victims of her sarcasm.
“She says her name is Professor Petra Kulich.”
“Don’t know her,” Nina mentioned in thought, “Tell her to leave her contact details and I’ll get back to her...”
A sharp female voice in a heavy accent shot through the speaker, “Doctor Gould, it is imperative that I speak to you...now!”
A scuffle could be heard over the intercom and Nina stood puzzled, listening to the scratchy chaos of the security guard reclaiming the device from the stranger. She ran her hand over the speaker, waiting for some response. Finally she heard the guard’s voice again.
“We will relay your message, Dr. Gould. If you don’t know her, we will take care of it,” he said firmly. Nina listened in on the other side of the line.
Vaguely she could make out that the woman was persistent and kept repeating that she had to see Nina. The guard reiterated that he would be happy to obtain her details so that Nina could contact her at a more convenient time, but the woman began to scream torrents in her own language, which sounded like Romanian, perhaps Czech or Moldovan to Nina. As she plodded back to her computer, the historian tried her best to remember anyone by that name who could possibly have met her previously, but the woman’s name was entirely unfamiliar to her. Maybe she had been referred to her? But by whom and what for? Nina regretted sending her away, because now she had a hundred questions seeping into her mind about the strange visitor at her gate. It would have been better if she had just let the woman in and satisfied her curiosity, but then again, Dr. Nina Gould had become a bit less trusting of those who move in academic circles of late. Most of her foes had titles like ‘doctor’ and ‘professor’ and unlike before, she now viewed them less as scholars and more as highly educated villains. After all, what was it worth having all that knowledge and not utilizing it to obtain treasures of the past and hidden gems of immeasurable value?
Nina raced back to the intercom and pressed the button to call Security.
“Yes, madam?”
“Is she still there? The woman who came to see me...” she asked hastily, hoping to see the visitor anyway and ascertain the purpose of her early morning rant at Nina’s home.
“I’m afraid not, Dr. Gould. She just left. She was pretty upset to be turned away, I must admit,” he explained.
“Did she leave her contact details?” Nina asked.
“No, madam. She refused to leave anything if she could not see you right away,” he replied in a subdued tone, well aware that Nina would not be happy about it. He was correct.
“Great! Did you even bother to take her plate number?” she asked in a raised voice that made the security guard deservedly nervous.
“N-no, I...I did not, Dr. Gould,” he stammered.
“The make and model of her vehicle?” Nina asked abruptly, knowing the answer by the sound of his previous tone of voice.
“It was a silver 4x4, a Ford, but that is all we could see,” he reported.
“What do you mean, ‘all you could see’?” Nina frowned, leaning against the wall as she tried to make sense of it.
“The vehicle did not come up to the gates, Dr. Gould. It parked well away from the premises and the woman walked up to us, so we could not see it too well from here,” he clarified with more confidence. Nina thought on it for a moment. She had no reason to yell at the guard now. His lack of information seemed to be well founded in this case. Nina cleared her throat and replied, “Oh. Alright then, we’ll just wait to see if she comes back. Thank you.”
Perplexed by the visitor earlier that morning, Nina stepped out from the steaming shower, flicking her wet hair back from the wrapping of the towel. Her shape in the mirror was obscured by the steam and it sent her reeling back to when she was in the throes of the deadly fever from the arsenic. Everything had been hazy like the shape in the mirror, moving and gesturing, yet she had been so disorientated by her condition that she had hardly been able to determine what had been human and what an apparition. Now she felt much the same. Still under the malicious spell of the poison she often found herself unable to tell the difference between people and shadows, yet her doctor insisted that it was not her physiological perception, but her psyche that was failing her.
She was due at the clinic at 10am for her check-up, one of several she had had to undergo in the past year or so to monitor her progress. On the previous occasion the laboratory detected the strange content of her blood which facilitated the regeneration of her cells unlike that of normal blood. But Nina played dumb. She could hardly tell them that she had received a blood transfusion with the blood of a violently twisted psychopath who had been genetically altered by Nazi doctors to enhance her natural self-healing. It sounded like something right out of a science fiction graphic novel, and she was certain they wouldn’t hesitate to throw her pretty little ass into a loony bin.
For now, she was grateful to be alive, and as long as this shit somehow got the poison out of her system, she was taking it easy, just coasting through each day.
Ch apter 2 – Lost in Nohra
The cries of the men echoed through the landscape, shouting orders and threats as they combed the wilderness. Dusk was fast approaching as they raced through the foliage and clawing branches that reached out over the small footpaths and the soles of their combat boots landed lightly in blunt thumps and crunching twigs. They knew the terrain very well, which was not a good thing for their human quarry, an intruder that fled the scene after they shot and killed four others. They pursued him relentlessly.
Miserable and lonely the sky stretched from one horizon to another above him, clear heavens void of any movement or life. No birds or clouds populated the pastel pink and blue overhead that hovered over the perilous woods below. With every descending hillock or sandy path the atmosphere chilled around his burning cheeks and chest as he ran for his life. In his right hand he clutched the evidence of their treachery and in his left he was still grasping a large broken brick. Breathing laboriously, their target wove from left to right through the meagre parts of the woods, hoping to evade them before the landscape opened up in a flat plain of weeds and rocks. Once a river, the dry bed was the border between their perimeter and the exposure of the national road where they could not follow.
His heart raced and his legs burned; the unsteady footing of his wet boots threatening injury with every leap over the uneven grass. Around him the cooling breeze rose as he neared open field and it stirred his hair. Sweat trickled into his eyes and blurred his vision, but he could not afford to stop. Then he heard something terrifying behind him and he listened closely to the barking to determine how far behind him they were.
“Dogs? Oh Christ, what’s next?” he panted desperately.
It occurred to Sam that he would have to change his plans, whether he wanted to or not. With those dogs on his tracks he would have no chance of making it across the open field toward the road. They would catch up to him in no time, so he had to veer right from his path, re-entering the cover of the low trees and the brush that carpeted the forest floor. He ran past the ruins of several old buildings from bygone eras, weakened by his fatigue. Sam was driven on only by his will to survive, because his body had run completely out of steam.
Now that he entered the deserted old village, barely more than a collection of concrete foundations and steel skeletons, he noticed how hungry he was. It was a totally inconvenient complaint of his body and he found it a nuisance as he navigated the lost lanes of the overgrown settlement.
Far off the dogs yelped, but the shouts had ceased. This was a cause for concern, because to Sam Cleave mercenaries were kind of like spiders - as long as he knew where they were, he knew where to flee to. But now that they were quiet there was no indication of their location. Gradually the forest grew darker, its shelter no solace for the investigative journalist. Not only would he have to worry about his chasers after dark, but the nocturnal cravings of the woodland animals. He had been to Germany before, but he hardly knew what kind of wildlife to fear out here. Sam decided to rest a while. As long as he was quiet he would be at some advantage.
He needed the rest in case he had to use the cover of night to brave the alien landscape to find salvation. There was no way he would spend the night here, sleeping. Not only was it unwise to continue on in morning light, but there was nothing that could convince him to sleep in one of the creepy ruins where many people no doubt must have died in past decades. Sam had never been superstitious, yet the past few years had swayed his opinion on the unseen forces of this world just a little - little enough for him to vehemently oppose a night out in a deserted village where God knows what was lurking once the place was draped in night.
Sam took shelter in what looked like an old shed. He sat down on a huge chunk of cement that had fallen from the crumbling side wall. Wincing in pain, he put the camera down next to him and wiggled his boot loose from his wet sock under which several blisters burned. First the one, then the other, he removed his boots and peeled the drenched socks from his wrinkled feet. Open blisters and the bright pink skin underneath greeted his eyes. Sam groaned as he removed his long sleeved shirt to dry his feet carefully. Under the shirt his vest was still relatively clean, save for the dusty sweat patches. Listening intently for any noise, he wrapped his feet in the shirt and gently dabbed them, clenching his teeth from the jolt of hell from the meeting of fabric on open tissue.
The dogs’ barking had moved away until the only sound left was the rustling of the branches under the breath of the evening wind. Above him the pink sky had turned to a sickly grey-blue and the first stars had emerged vaguely to announce the coming night to all unwelcome Scottish intruders who dared to stop running. Again his stomach growled and burned, this time undeniable to his attentions. Sam sighed and looked around for...well, he did not really know what he was hoping to see, but he was famished. He had made up his mind that he would never resort to eating rats or insects, no matter how hungry he got, so he supposed he would look for berries or something.