by Alex Archer
Annja shrugged.
The truth was that she had two different thoughts on that armband. On one hand was the possibility that, back in the day, the tribesmen had been influenced by the men who had come to the island to build Hitler’s headquarters. The Germans had worn the armbands and so now the leader of the tribesmen wore one, too. On the other hand, perhaps the tribesmen had slaughtered the Germans, who they saw as invaders of their land, and the current leader now wore the armband as a symbol of his ancestors’ power and prestige in conquering them.
In her view, it was fifty-fifty, either way.
Another few gulps of water, five minutes more of rest, then they were being pulled to their feet for what turned out to be the final leg of their journey.
They trudged upward for another hour until all of a sudden they broke free of the undergrowth and found themselves standing on a promontory high above the island, looking out over the open caldera of the extinct volcano that formed the center of the island.
The view was spectacular.
In practically every direction the blue-green waters of the open ocean stretched out to the horizon, reaffirming just how isolated this particular spot on the planet actually was. Directly ahead of them, the gaping mouth of the volcano stretched for nearly a mile. The far side was lower, so they could see where the jungle began again on the opposite slope and then ran downward all the way to the cliffs.
Annja was looking out over the ocean, enjoying the cool breeze that was a welcome change from the steaming heat of the jungle through which they’d just come, when all of the sudden Paul said in amazement, “Well, I’ll be…”
Annja looked at him, then followed his line of sight to where he was staring at a spot about a third of the way around the rim.
For a minute she didn’t see what it was that had surprised him so, but then it came into focus as she was able to separate the cold gray of the steel from the lighter gray of the stone.
Someone had bolted a primitive elevator to the inside of the caldera.
Chapter 28
Suddenly Annja understood.
Instead of spending the time and energy, never mind the expense, to excavate an entire underground network of tunnels and passages to serve as the final headquarters of the Third Reich, Hitler had ordered his men to make use of the existing passages and caves. Inside the cone of the volcano, a perfect place had been created thanks to lava eruptions hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.
The Nazi base was not above ground at all, but below, in the deep tunnels and chambers nature had already provided at the heart of the volcano!
Annja had to admit that it was a brilliant move.
The base would be all but invisible to everything but the most direct fly-over, and even then the pilot would have to have absolutely superior vision to make out anything moving along the inside slope of the caldera. Any smoke or steam generated by the work the crews were doing underground during the construction phase would have simply been dismissed as a natural by-product of a slumbering volcano. And if the Allies had found the location before the war ended, routing the Nazis out of it would have been akin to driving the Japanese out of the tunnels beneath Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, a task that had cost nearly 7,000 American and over 20,000 Japanese lives.
Just as on Iwo Jima, the pumice stone that formed the cone of the volcano would have been easy to dig through and, when mixed with water, formed a kind of natural cement that would have allowed the crews to create smooth walls, floors and ceilings inside their sanctuary.
If Hitler had ever made it this far, it would have taken years to roust him out, Annja realized. Thank heavens he hadn’t.
The leader led the way around the edge of the volcano and over to the elevator platforms. There were adjacent to each other, so one group could be going up while the other was going down. Each basket could hold three men comfortably, four in an emergency. Since one of the baskets was already on the ground below, Annja had plenty of time to watch how it operated before it was her turn to board.
Each elevator consisted of an iron basket attached to a steel cable that ran through a pulley system bolted to the inside of the caldera wall and to the control system inside the basket. Crank the handle counter-clockwise and the basket would descend as the cable slowly let itself out. Let go of the crank and the cable was automatically locked in place by a complicated system of interconnected gears. Turn the crank in the opposite direction and the elevator went back up again. A second cable system raised or lowered it from outside the basket, allowing it to be brought back up again without someone riding inside.
The one disadvantage was that it was slow—it took nearly twenty minutes for the basket to make the trip down and back up again—but Annja had no doubt that it had been expressly designed with this lack of speed in mind to make it even more difficult for an invading force to reach the men holed up there.
The man with the armband went down first, alone. When the basket came back up, Garin was escorted inside and two of the tribesmen descended with him. The process was repeated for Paul and then for Annja.
The descent went slowly, giving Annja plenty of time to study the controls in case she needed to make use of them later. It was clear to her that the system could be easily sabotaged; breaking off the gears would keep them from locking, at which point it would take remarkable strength to crank the basket all the way to the top or keep it from rushing down uncontrolled to the bottom.
They descended to a ledge about three-quarters of the way down the side of the caldera. A tunnel had been carved into the rock at that point and, after disembarking, Annja was led inside and down a series of connecting passageways, each one lit by what looked to be oil-burning lamps hung on the walls, to a closed set of double doors in front of which Garin, Paul and the rest of their captors were waiting.
One of the tribesmen cut her bonds. Garin and Paul were rubbing circulation back into their freed limbs. As she was being cut free she glanced at Garin, to see if he wanted to turn the tables on their captors, but he subtly shook his head. Let’s see how this plays out, his eyes seemed to say, and she nodded her agreement.
No sooner had she been cut free than the doors were pushed open and the group entered a wide audience chamber with a raised dais at the other end.
As they walked toward the dais, Annja looked around, trying to take it all in.
Two oversized Nazi banners, like those that hung on either side of the Olympic flame at the Summer Games in Berlin just before the start of World War II, decorated the walls on either side of the dais. They had to be thirty feet high, stretching completely from floor to ceiling. In front of them, fires burning in two gold braziers with eagle wings jutting from either side lit that end of the room, illuminating the man who sat on the dais lazily watching them approach.
He was old; that was the first thing she noticed about him. What was left of his hair was stark white and hung limply across his mostly pale scalp. His skin was wrinkled and marked by liver spots in quite a few places. But his eyes—his bright blue eyes—burned brilliantly and revealed the intelligence that still lingered within the man’s mind.
The black uniform he wore, nearly identical to the one she and the others had seen hanging in Hans Stuggart’s office back in Paris, looked as though it had been carefully tended for many years, but the silver Death’s Head insignia he wore on his collar tabs shone as bright as newly minted quarters.
Two native guards stood at the foot of the dais on either side, and it was no surprise to Annja to find that they, too, had armbands like that worn by their captor. Clearly it was a sign of status in this community, and it made sense that the men who had been chosen to guard their leader would have the honor, if you could call it that, of wearing it.
If she was honest, just the sight of it being used so openly made Annja retch. She wondered if the natives had any real concept of the depravities that the symbol stood for.
Lining either side of the room, from the entryway to the foot of
the dais, were more tribespeople. Most of them were men, but there was a fair number of women and children mingling in the crowd, as well.
They had been talking and chattering among themselves when the doors first opened, but as they got a closer look at the visitors they fell silent one by one. Soon the only sound in the room was the echo of the group’s footsteps as Annja and the others crossed the room to stop and stand in front of the dais.
Their captor bowed low, then launched into an explanation that was given in rapid-fire German with a Polynesian accent, a strange sound if Annja ever heard one. She couldn’t follow all of it, but from what she gathered, he was explaining how he had found them by the lagoon, taken them captive and brought them directly there.
When the guard finished, the old man in the SS uniform struggled to his feet. He took a few steps forward so that he was standing in front of his throne, then spoke in a voice that was surprisingly strong for so frail-looking a man.
“Who sent you to kill me?” he asked in German.
Annja’s mouth dropped open in surprise. It was perhaps the last thing on earth that she expected him to ask. Kill him? The very idea was preposterous. They didn’t even know who he was.
Annja did have her suspicions, though.
She glanced at Garin, whose German was far better than her own, but when he remained stubbornly silent she thought it best to at least say something. The man on the dais in the uniform of an SS colonel didn’t look as if he had a lot of patience, and it probably wouldn’t help their cause any if they angered him.
But before she could say anything at all, Paul suddenly pushed his way forward.
The guards in front of the throne stiffened, preparing to cut him down should he make a move for the throne, but Paul stopped just a few steps in front of Annja. She watched as he kept his gaze firmly on the man in front of him, snapped his heels together, and thrust out his hand in a perfectly executed Nazi salute.
“Seig Heil!” he shouted in a German accent that matched the colonel’s own.
Annja stared.
Their captor had to have been as surprised as she was, for it took him that long to react. He started forward, one ham fist raised, but the colonel held up a hand, stopping him.
He stared at Paul, who was still standing there, as stiff as a statue with his right arm extended at forty-five degrees in front of him, and then slowly nodded.
Paul brought his arm down but stood rigidly at attention.
I hope he knows what he’s doing, Annja thought. This is a dangerous game he’s playing.
But for Paul, this was far from a game, as Annja found out in the next few seconds.
“Speak,” the colonel told him.
Paul relaxed into parade rest and then bowed his head momentarily in a gesture of respect to the man standing in front of him.
Annja’s stomach suddenly twisted. What was going on here?
“Colonel,” Paul began, “I am SS Sturmbannfürher Paul Krugmann. My father was SS Oberführer Heinz Kahler, former commandant of the Flossenburg Prison Camp and later a member of our leader’s personal staff from the time he was at Wolfsschanze to the final days in the bunker in Berlin.”
The colonel backed up and sat down on his throne. “Go on.”
“After the war my father escaped to Spain and later emigrated to America where he changed our family name. What he did not lose, however, was his belief in our leader’s plan for the Reich, and he devoted his life to teaching me all he knew so that I might carry out the last order the Fürher issued to him before dismissing him from the bunker on April 28, 1945.”
Annja felt the blood drain from her face as she listened to what Paul was saying. She’d thought at first that he was creating an elaborate charade to try to get them out of the situation they found themselves in, but his words dripped with sincerity and had the unmistakable ring of truth to them. Paul had come here for one purpose and one purpose only—to have the conversation he was now having with the man in front of them.
The man Annja suspected was Colonel Schnell, the commander of the last headquarters built for Adolf Hitler and the legitimate heir to the Fourth Reich.
Chapter 29
To make things worse, Paul wasn’t yet finished.
“Our leader told my father of the base being constructed on Wolf Island and of the gold stored there. He was ordered to retrieve the gold and put it to use to rebuild the Party so that it could once again take its rightful place as the dominant political force in the Fatherland.
“But my father was injured during his escape to Spain and lost the use of his legs. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, he had to wait until I reached the proper age to carry on in his stead. He began to teach me about what to do once I recovered the gold, but the one thing he didn’t relay to me was the location of Wolf Island.
“Four years ago my father succumbed to an unexpected stroke, leaving him a mindless husk, the location of the gold forever lost in the quagmire that his mind had become. That was when I conceived my plan to get this woman to help me find it!”
When Paul turned and pointed at her, Annja’s world turned sideways and tipped over. She felt as if she was falling from a tremendous height and the fall went on and on and on as he laid the truth of his duplicity bare for all to see.
“Annja Creed is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on finding objects and artifacts believed to be lost forever in the sands of time. She was the one person in all the world who had a spitting chance at finding the aircraft containing the letter in which our leader passed on the location of this facility to his trusted confidante Martin Bormann. The one person with an ego big enough to believe that she could find that letter and break that code when others had been trying and failing for decades.”
Annja swallowed bile as she realized the import of what Paul was saying.
He was admitting that he’d led her on from the very start, that he had orchestrated this whole thing to get her to do his dirty work for him, that he had made sure that she wouldn’t think of calling it quits no matter how tough things got because…because he’d been the one who had kidnapped Doug in the first place!
Annja was in motion before she consciously thought about it, charging toward Paul with single-minded determination, her gaze locked on his smirking face as she reached into the otherwhere for her sword…
As she rushed past the leader of the tribesmen, she never saw him turn, never saw the fist that suddenly exploded against the side of her head, stunning her before she could get her sword to fully materialize.
She collapsed in a heap on the floor, fighting for consciousness, while her attacker kicked her several times in the ribs for good measure.
She could hear Paul still talking, could hear Garin’s roar of rage at the treatment she was being subjected to, but it was all distant, as if it were happening to someone far away. Even the pain from the blows barely registered as her pain-fogged mind tried to come to grips with the fact that her friend’s kidnapper had been right there all along.
Traveling with her.
Dining with her.
Sharing a bed with her.
She was barely aware of it as she vomited all over the floor.
When she came back to herself, Paul was still talking to Colonel Schnell. She lay where she was, not caring that she could smell the stink of her own vomit, and she listened to what he was saying, already planning what she was going to do about it.
“Even now, my men are waiting offshore with the equipment needed to remove the gold from this bunker and transport it, and you, back to the Fatherland, where our plans can at long last be put in motion.”
“Why should I go with you?” the colonel asked.
That comment stopped Paul in his tracks. “I’m sorry?”
“Why should I go with you?” Colonel Schnell repeated. “I am content here. I have my subjects, my kingdom, my gold. What do I need you for?”
Annja had known Paul long enough to recognize when he was thinking f
uriously.
Now was the time to interrupt.
“He’s lying, Colonel Schnell,” she called out, from her position on the floor. “Don’t listen to him.”
Paul turned and glared at her with such a hate-filled expression that she wondered how she had ever believed he cared for her.
She didn’t let it stop her though.
“He just wants the gold for himself. You are completely irrelevant to his plans.”
She was aware of Paul walking toward her, but she didn’t bother to look at him, keeping her attention on the colonel. He looked back and forth between her and Paul, and Annja knew that she had cast a little doubt in his mind. Now if she could widen that gulf…
She was so intent on the old Nazi on the throne that she didn’t see the younger one she’d come here with draw back his foot. Annja was caught completely by surprise as Paul’s booted foot sent her into oblivion.
* * *
WHEN ANNJA CAME back to consciousness, she found herself lying facedown on a cold stone floor. Her face throbbed painfully, and she knew the left side of it was badly swollen because she could barely open that eye.
She pushed herself upright and immediately regretted it as a wave of dizziness washed over her. She put her palms flat on the floor beside her and waited for it to pass.
“You might want to stay lying down with your face on the floor,” she heard Garin say. “The cold will help bring the swelling down.”
“That bad, huh?” she asked, as she turned her head to try to find him.
If the bars between them were any indication, she was sitting in a cell with Garin occupying the one next to her. Of Paul there was no sign.
“At a guess I’d say he cracked your cheekbone, maybe even the bone around your eye socket. It’s gonna hurt like a son of a gun for a while.”
Good, she thought. The pain would remind her of what a fool she’d been.
“Where are we?”
Garin shrugged. “In a cell on one of the lower levels. The complex is pretty large, from what I could see as they dragged us down here. It’s not surprising, since they’ve had more than seventy years to work on it.”