The Bone Hunters

by Robert J. Mrazek

Even though it was early spring, the raw afternoon wind on the Kehlstein was gusting at forty miles an hour and the loud shrieks echoed through the dimly lit passageways like a succession of anguished moans.

  Nordgren had built a raging fire in the fireplace that dominated one wall of the conference room. It was still rimmed with the red marble and bronze tiles that had been a gift to Hitler from Mussolini. The flames barely warmed the room.

  “I alvays feel dese things inside me,” insisted Jurgen in his fractured English. “You haff no head in your brain.”

  The expedition leader, Dr. Alexandra “Lexy” Vaughan, moved to head off the confrontation between two key members of her six-person team.

  “Let’s go back over the tunnel data one more time,” said Lexy, gazing down at the snow-covered valley of Berchtesgaden below Hitler’s mountain redoubt before moving to the fireplace to warm herself.

  Roy Boulting, the Oxford-trained archaeologist who specialized in pre-Flatejarbok Norse manuscripts, brought over the five-foot-square architectural diagrams from the engineering company that had supervised construction of the Eagle’s Nest in 1937. Unrolling the design plan for the tunnel system that had been bored into the granite mountain, he spread it out across the end of the conference table.

  The first tunnel led from the roadway at the base of the mountain to the ornate elevator that had carried the Führer and his guests to the summit. Four hundred eighteen feet long, the tunnel was large enough for a man to stand erect for the long walk to the elevator.

  “I haff scanned every centimeter of the tunnel floor, side valls, and ceiling,” said Jurgen, “and dere is no air pocket or thing metallic.”

  “Maybe your pulsating detector doesn’t feel it inside,” said Nordgren.

  “You are clot,” said Jurgen.

  For the next three hours, they again examined the detailed construction plans, placing special emphasis on sections of the tunnel that housed electrical wiring, ventilation pipes, and exhaust filters, and then comparing them to Jurgen’s readings from his PI detector. Taking only an hour to eat a cold supper, the team worked until nearly midnight before Lexy decided they needed to rest for the night.

  They were three days into the search for a fourteenth-century calfskin parchment that had been stolen along with dozens of other rare Norse artifacts from the national museum in Trondheim after the Germans invaded Norway in 1940. Many in the Nazi hierarchy had admired all things Norse and held their race in reverential awe.

  The parchment contained firsthand accounts of the sagas of two Norse expeditions across Canada in 1362 and 1374. Lexy was convinced that the accounts would finally prove her thesis that the Norsemen had established settlements in Minnesota more than a hundred years before Columbus sighted Hispaniola in the Bahamas.

  Although she would never have revealed it to her expedition team, she actually agreed with Jurgen about the value of following one’s instincts in the discovery of new archaeological finds. She had used her own instinctual gift on numerous occasions, including the discovery of Leif Eriksson’s burial tomb off the coast of Maine.

  Unlike with Jurgen, her own inner light was telling her that the ancient Norse manuscript was in fact very close, buried with other archaeological treasures deep inside Hitler’s aerie.

  Time was running out to prove it. Six months earlier, the charitable trust that operated the Eagle’s Nest as a tour site had considered her request to search for the missing historical trove, reviewed her supporting evidence, and granted permission for the search during the same four-day window when other repair and maintenance requirements were already scheduled.

  It had been a long, circuitous journey that had brought her to the windswept Kehlsteinhaus. She had found the initial clues to the possible resting place of the Norse treasures in the postwar trial documents of a German Gestapo officer who had commanded the police unit that had stolen them in Trondheim. Upon receiving the death sentence after the war for murdering a hundred French hostages in 1944, he attempted to save his life by writing a letter to the trial judge offering to provide details to the location of important art treasures that had been secreted in the “Bavarian Redoubt,” the birthplace of Nazism and the place where Allied war commanders believed Hitler would make a last stand. He was hanged without revealing the information.

  Lexy’s search had eventually led her to a war diary she found in the Schutzstaffel (SS) archives captured by the U.S. Army in 1945. To her knowledge, the diary had never been cataloged by the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and no one else had ever seen or reviewed it.

  The diary had been kept by a Waffen SS officer named Kurt von Seitzler. In late 1944, he had commanded the security guard battalion at the Berghof, Adolph Hitler’s Bavarian retreat in Berchtesgaden. A number of entries in the diary had led her here.

  “We have only tomorrow to find our answer, if there is one,” said Lexy to the others as they broke up to go to their rooms. “Let’s gather back here first thing in the morning.”

  “May I join you?” whispered Jurgen as she picked up her transcript of the von Seitzler diary and headed back to her cot in the Eva Braun Room.

  “I need to study this,” she said as she went past. “And I must ask you to review your detection readings again before we meet in the morning.”

  When she realized he was following her, she turned to face him.

  “I vership you, Alexandra,” he whispered. “I drim of you. You are so beautiful.”

  Jurgen resembled a young Maximilian Schell, strikingly handsome and well aware of it. In her years in the field, Lexy had learned how to fend off unwanted advances from other archaeologists sharing her tent. It was something she had had to deal with since she was fifteen and had somehow been transformed from a skinny tomboy with close-cropped hair into a creature that caused the boys in school to stop in the hallways and stare slack-jawed at her when she passed by.

  The only two words below her photograph in the senior yearbook read THE TEN. One of her girlfriends had to explain to her what it meant. At Harvard, all her energy went into her course work and field trips.

  There had been only two serious romantic affairs in her life. The first had ended badly when the man she thought she loved stole her doctoral thesis. The second had been forged in a traumatic and dangerous set of events they had shared. She had fallen in love with him by the end, but even that relationship had given way to her dedication to her work. She still wasn’t sure she had handled it well. There were times she missed him terribly.

  After the team had assembled at the Eagle’s Nest, Jurgen had followed her around like a smitten puppy, waiting for the few chances to be alone with her and declare his undying love. If he hadn’t been the best interpreter of metal detection and side-scan radar in Europe, Lexy would have fired him after the second or third pass.

  “I vership you,” he repeated.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said, brushing past him again.

  Back in her room and burrowed into her sleeping bag, Lexy reviewed the diary entries one last time. Turning off the light, she fell asleep as the howling wind outside her window brought a flood of surrealistic images to her brain.

  In her tortured dreams, she saw the Braun sisters, Eva and Gretl, young and alive as they were before the war, seemingly carefree and happy as they cavorted in these same rooms, oblivious of the evil being perpetrated by the monster that was Hitler.

  She was up before dawn and sitting at the conference table when the others gathered with their coffee and strudel. Another raging fire barely staved off the bone-chilling cold.

  “We know that, according to von Seitzler’s diary, a pioneer regiment of combat engineers arrived in Berchtesgaden on October 6, 1944,” said Lexy, her breath condensing in the air, “and immediately began hauling drilling equipment up the Kehlstein road toward the Eagle’s Nest.”

  “What if they came to shore u
p the tunnels against bombing attacks?” asked Jurgen. “We know that Hitler hated the Eagle’s Nest. Why vud he vant to create the treasure vault here?”

  Lexy ignored his pleading look.

  “Von Seitzler personally witnessed the pioneer battalion removing several tons of crushed bedrock from inside the tunnel and removing it to their waiting trucks,” she said. “I know from his shorthand style that he believed they were creating a space to store something. And no, it probably wasn’t a decision made by Hitler. Martin Bormann supervised the construction of the Eagle’s Nest. He probably ordered construction of this hiding place as the end of the war drew nearer.”

  “And von Seitzler refers in one entry to a pallet of metal boxes that he observed near the entrance to the tunnel,” added Roy Boulter.

  “They could have held food rations,” insisted Jurgen.

  Looking down at the unfurled architectural design plan, Lexy pointed at the four-hundred-foot vertical elevator shaft that led from the base of the first tunnel to the Eagle’s Nest perched on top. “It’s possible that they crafted the hiding place in the vertical elevator shaft, not the tunnel leading to it.”

  “Another goose chase,” protested Jurgen. “Let’s return to Salzburg.”

  “It’s worth considering,” said Lexy, getting up from the conference table and leading the team through the Eva Braun Room to the elevator passage.

  The elevator car had not been altered since Hitler was a passenger. The machinery to operate it was original as well. All the appointments were intact, including its polished brass fittings and the Venetian mirrors mounted on the walls above the green leather seats.

  “Hitler was claustrophobic,” said Lexy. “Supposedly the mirrors gave him the illusion of more space.”

  “How are we going to get access to the shaft?” demanded Jurgen. “The steel walls of the car will interfere with my signals.”

  “I hate to agree with Jurgen,” said Nordgren, “but it would have been impossible to drill into the granite walls from the elevator without creating a huge mess. Look at the elevator car. It is original and still in pristine condition.”

  “In one of the construction files, I read something about a freight elevator,” said Lexy. “They could have bored into the granite wall from there.”

  “You’re right,” said Roy Boulting with mounting excitement in his voice. “I read last night that an open-walled freight elevator was originally attached underneath the Führer’s elevator. It was removed some time after the war.”

  “Can we rig a platform on the original mountings?” Lexy asked Tom Luciani, the logistics specialist for the expedition.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.

  Two hours later, a freight bed made of heavy oak planks had been cut to the needed dimensions and bolted to the original mountings of the freight elevator. Jurgen’s pulse induction detector had been mounted into position with clean access to the solid granite walls in the shaft. It weighed less than ten pounds and took up very little space, but there was still only room for him and Lexy.

  Tom Luciani had rigged a governor on the submarine motor that powered the elevator. It allowed a smooth, controlled descent at less than five feet per second. They planned to make four trips, two descents and two ascents, with Jurgen focusing his detector on a different wall each time. Lexy gave the go-ahead to Hurd in the elevator above and the freight bed began to slowly descend.

  Jurgen stayed too busy adjusting the discrimination settings on the monitor to pay unwanted attention to her. During the first descent, the LED indicators reflected no change in ground mineralization, meaning the area behind the wall was solid granite for a distance of at least one hundred feet. The detector was equipped with an external speaker so that both of them would hear any changes in the signal volume.

  “No change in signal strength,” he said with frustration at one point.

  When they reached the base of the shaft with no positive reading at any point, Jurgen adjusted his equipment to scan the second wall.

  “Begin your ascent,” called out Lexy to Luciani.

  They reached the top of the shaft about two minutes later with no pulsating alarm emitted from the detector.

  “I told you,” said Jurgen as he adjusted the detector to face the third wall.

  They were halfway to the bottom on the second descent when the detector began pinging out like a telephone busy signal before fading out again a few seconds later.

  “Stop and then slowly begin climbing again,” Lexy called out to Luciani.

  They had risen back about ten feet when the detector began pinging again. Luciani stopped the elevator when it reached its strongest setting. Lexy stepped close to the wall and began to closely examine it. Almost immediately she saw faint striations in the rock surface. They appeared to be straight lines.

  “We found something,” she called out to the rest of her team waiting in the elevator.

  Removing her Case bone-handled pocketknife from her coveralls, she opened the blade and inserted it into one of the striated edges. It sank in an inch. As she twisted it to one side, a small eruption of powdery shavings crumbled away from the edge. She caught some of them in her hand.

  “Concrete,” she said, grinning at Jurgen.

  Using a marking pen, she outlined the circumference of the striations and then had them return to the Eagle’s Nest. Tom Luciani assembled some basic digging tools and they were soon on their way back down, this time with Jurgen replaced on the freight bed by Luciani and Roy Boulting.

  Two sharp blows from a small pickax caved in a small section of concrete. Lexy saw that the concrete wall patch had a thickness of about four inches. Dampness had softened the concrete and Luciani expanded the opening to a hole about three feet in diameter using an iron bar. Beyond the opening, there was only blackness.

  “I’m going in,” said Lexy, turning on a high-intensity flashlight and positioning herself to climb through.

  Crawling inside, she tipped the flashlight upward to confirm there was enough space for her to stand up and then played the beam in a midlevel arc. The cache looked to be the size of a railroad car. It resembled her grandmother’s basement, cluttered, chaotic, and smelling of mold and mildew.

  One reason for it was only a few feet away. What at first appeared to be a small herd of woolly animals lying dead on the floor turned out to be a pile of fur coats, seemingly thrown in at the last minute before the cache was sealed.

  Beyond the furs were stacks of unframed canvases piled on crates of labeled medical supplies. She turned over one of the canvases and bathed it in light. It was an oil painting, a mother and child standing in a sun-splashed garden. She gently scraped away the light patina of dust in the bottom corner, revealing the painter’s signature. A. Renoir.

  She slowly worked her way through a six-foot-high corridor of hastily piled wooden crates that were labeled DEUTSCHE BANK. One of them had split open, revealing what looked like a bar of gold.

  There was no way for her to know yet if the Norse documents stolen from the Trondheim Museum were part of the treasure lode that had been hastily secreted in the stone cavern, but she felt confident they were.

  She was unable to escape a feeling of failure, a letdown she couldn’t explain at first. It was a feeling that she had uncovered a place of plunder, that she had exposed something morally corrupt, a reminder of the evil that was Nazism, and perhaps something that should have remained buried.

  Crawling back through the hole, she regained her place on the freight bed.

  “As soon as we are back on top, please call Dieter in the German Department of Interior,” she said. “It’s a looter’s paradise in there.”

  Exhausted, she made her way back to the Eva Braun Room. Closing the door, she began to remove her soiled clothes, desperate for a long, hot bath and a full glass of Calvados.

  “I vership you,
Alexandra,” came Jurgen’s voice from the shadows near the closet.

  He came up behind her, making a low noise like a barking seal. His hands began groping her breasts as he shoved her forward, using his strength to force her over the edge of Eva Braun’s dressing table.

  “Get off me,” she demanded.

  His face craned around to kiss her, his eyes looking crazed.

  She raised her right leg and stomped down on his instep with her boot heel. He let out a yelp of pain and released his grip.

  “Du Schlampe,” he hissed in German.

  “Yes, she’s a bitch,” came a deep, resonant voice behind them. “And du bist gefeuert.”

  Lexy turned to see the massive figure filling the doorway. He was smiling at her in a paternal way.

  “Barnaby,” she said.

  FOUR

  11 May

  Qiao Jia Bao Village

  Sichuan Basin, China

  Yu Wei watched from the kitchen window of her cottage as a lone mallard circled twice over the lake and slowly descended to the shallow, fetid water at the edge of the bank. As soon as it landed, the bird tried to clean itself from the polluted lake water before attempting to climb up to the grassy shoreline. That was when she saw it could not stand up on both legs.

  Seeing the bird was in distress, she slowly approached it, noticing immediately that one of its legs was either broken or badly sprained. Kneeling next to it, she began to sing the first verse to the Buddhist chant her mother had taught her as a little girl. Somehow it seemed to ease the bird’s fear and agitation. When it was completely relaxed, she picked it up and carried it back to her cottage.

  After creating a splint by shaving two small wooden stems from a block of soft wood, she carefully set the leg and fastened the stems in place with silk thread. She then entrusted the bird to Me Lei, the ten-year-old daughter of her closest neighbor, showing the girl where the mallard could rest its broken leg in the small spring behind her cottage.

  Wei returned to the job she had been doing, which was cleaning the sweet potatoes she had picked earlier that day from the acreage shared by all the farmers in the village. Her yams should have been plump and mature by now but instead were stunted and soft. The fibrous skin sloughed off as she tried to rinse them in the enamel tub.