Then Hiebermeyer had received a request from the most bizarre quarter imaginable. Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident genius, a man who had never seemed to acknowledge Hiebermeyer’s existence let alone shown the slightest interest in anything Egyptian, had sent him an email requesting an urgent scan of the Atlantis papyrus. At first Hiebermeyer had baulked, reluctant to remove the centrepiece of the Alexandria museum from its case, but then he had looked again at the multispectral scans done on the papyrus fragments from Herculaneum and relented, realizing that the imaging lab at Troy provided a ready facility for processing a new scan using technology that had been unavailable when the Atlantis papyrus had been discovered five years before. Lanowski had flown out to Turkey from the UK to be on board Seaquest II, and his email had come just before the ship had sailed from Troy for the Black Sea and Atlantis; a day later – yesterday morning – Jack himself had slipped away from the wreck excavation at Troy and followed in the helicopter. Before he had left, he had taken Hiebermeyer aside and told him of his plan to dive into the volcano. Whatever Lanowski’s reasons, resurrecting the papyrus that had started the search for Atlantis nearly six years ago meant that Hiebermeyer was part of that extraordinary project again, one that he was always privately pleased to think had begun not in the Black Sea or the Aegean but in Egypt: in the Egyptian desert with an Egyptian papyrus found in the wrapping of an Egyptian mummy.
He shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the bulky white suit half up his legs, remembering where he was. A little over an hour earlier, he had arrived by German military helicopter from Frankfurt, having flown in from Alexandria the night before. The sky had been overcast as the helicopter came in to land, with fog reducing visibility to less than two hundred metres. He had been taken from the helicopter by jeep to a large Portakabin that seemed to loom out of nowhere on the edge of the runway. As two German Bundeswehr military policemen escorted him to the entrance, he had seen a form behind the Portakabin like a grounded airship covered in camouflage netting. When he had been briefed about the bunker on the phone, he had been told about the pressurized tennis-court bubble that had been put over the excavation, sealing the outside world from any possible contamination. In the fog the place had seemed unreal, disconnected from any known points of reference, like an image in a dream.
He had to remind himself that six months before, only a handful of people still alive had known about the bunker: Hugh Frazer, a wartime British army officer; a nameless Jewish girl who had survived the adjacent concentration camp unable to speak, and who still lived in a care home near Auschwitz in Poland, the place where her parents had been gassed; and the EU commissioner and criminal mastermind Jean-Pierre Saumerre, whose grandfather – a Marseille gangster imprisoned by the Gestapo – had worked in the camp kitchens and escaped after liberation with knowledge of a secret Nazi bunker in the nearby forest, the place under excavation now. After the war, Hugh Frazer had become a classics teacher and had taught Jack and Maurice’s Cambridge professor, James Dillen. It was Dillen’s memory of something in the teacher’s possession years before that had led him and Jack’s daughter Rebecca to Frazer’s flat in Bristol late last summer; there Frazer had told them the full story of what he had experienced in the concentration camp on that terrible day of liberation in 1945, and the disappearance of his close friend Major Mayne and an American officer somewhere in the forest nearby while they were searching for hidden works of art stolen by the Nazis, shortly before the forest was destroyed by massive Allied aerial bombing.
Hiebermeyer had spoken to Dillen at length about Hugh Frazer the evening before at Troy, where Dillen and Jeremy Haverstock had been left to close down the excavation. Dillen had run through the events of last year, and their lead-up, to prepare Hiebermeyer for what he might find in the bunker. The spark had been a drawing he had seen as a schoolboy in Frazer’s room, a drawing he and Rebecca learned had been made by the Jewish girl in the camp and given to Mayne on that fateful day in 1945, a drawing of an extraordinary and terrifying shape she had seen in the bunker: a reverse golden swastika that might have been the ancient Trojan palladion. By chance, Frazer had recognized the image from his student days before the war digging at Mycenae in Greece. There he had been told by an elderly foreman of an artefact sounding remarkably similar that had been taken at night from the grave of Agamemnon by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia more than fifty years before, a treasure that had been concealed and that may have fallen into the hands of the Nazis in their search for ancient artefacts they associated with the revered warrior-kings of antiquity.
Yet the discovery last year of the existence of the bunker – and the possibility that it contained not only stolen works of art, but also the greatest lost antiquities of Troy – had also drawn in Saumerre, whose grandfather had seen enough to guess that the palladion was associated with another purpose of the bunker, its most dreadful secret. For years the grandfather and his son and grandson had waited, hoping that the NATO airbase built over the camp site after the war would be decommissioned so that they might search for the bunker. Saumerre’s conviction that the palladion itself lay in another secret Nazi storage site – deep in a flooded salt mine in Poland – had led him to kidnap Rebecca to force Jack and Costas to use their diving expertise to search for it. They had found only an empty container, but the outcome for Saumerre had been a showdown between his henchmen and Jack and Costas at Troy, where Rebecca had been rescued and Saumerre’s power to harm them further had been checked by Jack’s threat to expose his criminal empire, something Jack would only do once they were certain that Saumerre’s ability to hold others to ransom had been neutered. For decades Saumerre’s organization had been deeply involved in the search for hidden Nazi weapons, and there was no certainty what he might already have found. Hiebermeyer remembered what Jack had impressed on him in their final phone conversation yesterday, after he had spoken to Dillen: the only certainty was that Saumerre would now be watching this place with eagle eyes, and would be seeking any means possible to infiltrate the excavation to get his hands on what might lie inside.
The months since the bunker site had been discovered last year had seen a protracted process as Jack passed his knowledge to the British secret service, eventually leading to the site being opened up a week before by a specialist British army team under NATO authority. The situation, with Saumerre still in a position of power in Brussels, seemed extremely precarious to Hiebermeyer, who had never before been so closely involved in the present-day implications of one of Jack’s projects. Apart from an IMU geophysics team who had surveyed the airfield to determine where the camp lay, he was the first IMU representative at the bunker site. Yet his family home had been less than twenty kilometres away, and what had gone on here and in many other places like it during the Nazi period had shaped his own life and his passion for revealing the truth about the past, in this case with a personal family significance that had weighed on him over the last few days as the time for his visit had drawn nearer.
He pressed the icon to email the image of the papyrus to Lanowski, put the iPad on the trestle table in front of him and then fed his hands into the arms of the suit, pushing them through the wrist seals into the attached gloves and pressing his head through the neck seal, finishing by zipping up the front of the suit until it completely encased him. He was inside a tent at the back of the Portakabin that served as a kitting-up room for those entering the bunker, with suits like the one he had been struggling into hanging in a row along one side. He stretched his neck to left and right, feeling the discomfort of the rubber latex seal against his Adam’s apple. ‘It’s a little tight, but I suppose that’s necessary,’ he grumbled.
The British Royal Engineers sergeant who had helped him into the suit finished wiping off the chalk powder he had used to ease Hiebermeyer’s head through the neck seal, and then yanked the chest zip to make sure it was closed. He spoke with a strong Welsh accent. ‘It has to be that way, sir. This is the latest-generation chemical, biological
, radiological and nuclear suit. We used to call them NBC suits – nuclear, biological and chemical – but they added radiological because of the terrorist threat from dirty bombs. The CBRN suits are more like astronaut suits than the old NBC gear.’
‘What happens if I need to relieve myself?’
‘That’s why we asked you not to drink for two hours and to use the toilet just now. There’s a one-hour limit for each shift inside the bunker. If you feel claustrophobic, tell Major Penn and he’ll get you out. We’ve done a few of these old Nazi bunkers before, and they can be pretty grim. There’s a diaper with a urine bag if you need it.’
‘Sergeant Jones, I am not wearing a diaper,’ Hiebermeyer said firmly. ‘This suit is bad enough as it is.’
‘Okay.’ Jones slapped his back. ‘You’re good to go. I’ll do the helmet once Major Penn has briefed you.’ He handed Hiebermeyer his glasses, then picked up a towel from the table. ‘How bad’s your eyesight?’
‘Gets blurry beyond about two metres, but I don’t need them for reading.’
‘Then I recommend you don’t wear them inside. The helmets can get a little warm, and if you sweat from the face, spectacles can fog up. It’s a small glitch in the air circulation system we’re working on.’
‘There always seem to be glitches with equipment,’ Hiebermeyer grumbled. ‘My diver colleagues at IMU are forever burning the midnight oil in the engineering department trying to fix things.’ He stretched his neck again, grimacing. ‘Myself, I’m just an old-fashioned dirt archaeologist. All I need is a trowel, my desert boots, my trusty shorts and a decent hat.’
‘I’ve seen you on TV,’ Jones enthused. ‘I’ve watched you with my kids. They think you’re the star of the show. Those old khaki shorts flying at half-mast, somehow staying up? Pretty hard to forget, if you don’t mind me saying so. It was a programme about Atlantis, and you were in Egypt unwrapping a mummy to show how you’d revealed an ancient papyrus. There was an Egyptian woman with you, really good at explaining it all. I couldn’t work out which of you was in charge.’
‘That would be Aysha,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘In answer to your question, I was, but now she is. We got married about a year after that film, and now she’s six months pregnant.’
‘Congratulations. Your first?’
Hiebermeyer gave him a doleful look. ‘It wasn’t part of my plan.’
‘You’ll love it. It’ll change your life. I’ve got three, myself.’ He nodded towards a bag on the table. ‘Sure you don’t want to try the diaper? Could be good training.’
Hiebermeyer glared at him. ‘Don’t push your luck.’
The sergeant grinned, and then swivelled him towards a full-length mirror leaning against the side of the tent. ‘The final part of the drill is to do a complete visual inspection yourself. I’ve got to nip out, but Major Penn will be here soon. He’ll be pleased to see you to talk some history. We’ve got a European Union Health and Safety official here in an hour, due to go into the bunker with me on the next rotation. The man’s been before and I’ve watched Penn having to restrain himself while he was treated like a schoolboy. That’s what makes a good officer. I’d have been at the guy’s throat.’
Hiebermeyer took the proffered towel, wiped his face and the balding top of his head and put on his glasses. He had heated up already with the exertion of getting the suit on. He stared at the image of himself in the mirror. The suit looked similar to the new thermal-resistant diving oversuits that Costas had shown him at IMU headquarters a few months ago, the ones that Costas and Jack would have worn on their dive into the volcano today. He glanced up at the clock hanging on the tent wall. It was 12.30 p.m., one hour behind Turkey. They should have finished the dive by now, but he knew Jack would not want to hear from him until there was some news from this end. The excavation of a Second World War bunker was not like the other times, not like uncovering the mummy in Egypt or breaking into the lost Roman library in Herculaneum, when Jack would have felt just as Hiebermeyer did now about the return to Atlantis, itching to hear what they had found. This time it was as if the pall from those terrible days in 1945 were still here, something they all desperately hoped that the excavation of the bunker today would dispel.
Hiebermeyer had insisted on coming here in Jack’s place to evaluate any antiquities that might be among the looted treasures found inside. He had grown up with the legacy of Germany under the Nazis, and had used that to persuade Jack that he should be the one to go into the bunker. To Hiebermeyer’s eye as an archaeologist, every Nazi site revealed – every bunker, every sunken U-boat – added clarity to the events of that time; keeping the artefacts of the period visible was the best way of ensuring that people did not forget. He hoped fervently that the possibility that this place might contain a dark secret – something more than stolen art – would prove wrong, but they would not know for sure until every inch of the bunker had been exhumed. But his line with Jack had another purpose, something he had discussed with Costas. They had seen the effect on Jack six months earlier of searching for Heinrich Schliemann’s lost treasures from Troy, a search that had brought them face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust. The future of IMU operations depended on the charisma and driving force that came from the top, and both he and Costas had been concerned that Rebecca’s kidnapping and the events of her rescue – twenty-four hours that had propelled Jack from a desperate underwater fight in a mineshaft to the final showdown beneath Troy, where he and Costas had rescued Rebecca from Saumerre’s men – may have taken a toll on Jack that he had not fully acknowledged.
Hiebermeyer thought of Jack and Costas again, diving into the side of an underwater volcano. A brief shadow of doubt crossed his mind. He hoped that keeping Jack away from this place would not have the opposite effect, leading him to make reckless decisions, overcompensating as a way of dealing with an issue he could not confront head-on. But then Hiebermeyer hardly knew of a project where Jack and Costas had not stretched the envelope about as far as it would go. He thought back to when he and Jack had been at boarding school together, carving out the undiscovered treasures of the world between them, his on land and Jack’s underwater. Hiebermeyer had sworn he would never dive, and he had stuck to it. Like Jack, he had an almost superstitious belief in his own ability to ferret out archaeological finds, and part of that certainty involved sticking to a ritual. He had been down plenty of dark tunnels and squeezed into plenty of lost tombs in his time, but never wearing more than his trusty khakis. He had told Jack that the mere idea of diving equipment clouded his thinking. He held up his arms, flexing his fingers in the white gloves. This was the nearest he had ever got, and it was stretching his own envelope. He picked up the towel and wiped his forehead. And it was making him unpleasantly hot.
‘Dr Hiebermeyer? David Penn. Royal Engineers.’ A small, fit-looking man in his early thirties came into the room, wearing a camouflage smock with a major’s star on his epaulettes.
Hiebermeyer held out his gloved hand. ‘Maurice.’
Sergeant Jones returned and quickly went over to the CBRN suits on the racks, selecting one and checking it over. Penn took off his beret and boots and Jones helped him into the suit as he talked. ‘I understand that Jack Howard won’t be here?’
‘He’s diving, in the Black Sea. But he’s on standby to join us, depending on what we find. I’m planning to call him after I’ve seen inside.’
‘I spoke to him on the phone at length last week when my team arrived here. I understand you have a personal connection with this place?’
‘Not this place exactly, but my father’s family home was about twenty kilometres north-west of here. My grandfather was a merchant seaman and then a naval officer, a U-boat captain lost with his vessel in 1940, and my grandmother and father and his two younger sisters remained here for the rest of the war. In April 1945 they were among the civilians taken by British troops into Belsen to see the horrors there. My father was only nine years old but was very badly affected. They were made to stand
beside a truck while former SS guards loaded corpses. For the rest of his life my father couldn’t stand the smell of raw meat or rotting garbage. The British officer who conducted them into the camp said that what they were about to see was such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilized nations. He said it could only be restored when they had reared a new generation amongst whom it was impossible to find people prepared to commit such crimes. My father was a very responsible nine-year-old who saw himself as head of the family after his father had been killed, and he took those words to heart and interpreted them literally. He believed the officer was saying that he, a child, was forever guilty, because he had been born before the war. Even after my father had grown up and realized that the officer had not meant that, he told me that because he had spent his childhood and teenage years after the war believing in his own guilt, it would never escape him. He said that the only hope lay in my generation and beyond. So I grew up with this legacy too.’
Penn picked up a pointer and tapped a plan of the airfield pinned to the wall. ‘Then you’ll know that there was a labour camp here, an Arbeitslager, a satellite of Belsen. Its remains lie mostly under the northern end of the airfield. We’ve done one excavation there I’ll need to explain to you, but let’s leave that until we’ve been into the bunker. Did your father know anything about this place?’
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