Jack looked out of the other side of the canopy as the aircraft banked in the opposite direction, beginning a wide turn to bring it head-on with the runway. He spotted a camouflaged dome like a tennis-court bubble off the west side of the runway, with further camouflage netting covering what appeared to be a large Portakabin with several vehicles parked alongside. He took a deep breath. So that was it. ‘Is anyone else picking up our voices?’
‘The radio’s off-line. I was instructed to keep external chatter to a minimum by the intelligence officer when I was briefed on the phone about this landing. It was someone from the secret service, MI6. That’s when I knew this was big, and it’s why I haven’t plugged you for more.’
‘Okay. I’ll bring you into the picture. There was another outcome to that bombing raid. Where the north end of the base now lies was a small Arbeitslager, a labour camp. The Allied troops thought it was a satellite of Belsen, but we now know it had another purpose. By April 1945 it was overflowing with Jews who had survived the death march from Auschwitz. A small British force liberated the camp the day before the raid, and cleared out the last of the survivors just before the bombing began. It pretty well obliterated the camp, and the remains were then buried under the concrete and asphalt of the runways.’
‘Good God. A concentration camp here? I had no idea.’
‘In all the publicity about the death camps that so shocked the world in 1945, this one was never revealed. In this vicinity, the world only knew about Belsen.’
‘I take it the excavation site is under that camouflaged bubble?’ Paul asked. ‘But that must be a good two thousand metres from the northern perimeter of the base, well away from the location of the camp as you describe it.’
‘The bubble covers the site of an underground bunker that lay deep in the forest, linked to the camp only by a concealed track.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Jack paused. ‘When we were excavating at Troy last year, we were on the trail of treasures dug up by Heinrich Schliemann that found their way to Germany and may have been hidden by the Nazis. You remember my old classics tutor at Cambridge, James Dillen? Well, the guy who had taught Dillen Greek and Latin at school had been a wartime British army officer, and was one of the first soldiers into this camp. That was what led us to this place. He’d done some archaeology in Greece before the war, and saw something here he recognized. But after the war he was one of those people who put a lid on it. The camp must have been a horrific experience. He talked for the first time about it to Rebecca and James when they visited him in his flat in Bristol last year.’
‘Only last year? He must have been getting on a bit.’
Jack paused. ‘His name was Frazer. Captain Hugh Frazer. He’d bottled it up all those years, and I think it was a great relief to let it out. Afterwards we took him to Poland to see one of the survivors of the camp. It was very moving, but you can never talk about closure. That’s the hard truth of it. Hugh was already very ill, and he died six weeks ago.’
‘Sorry to hear it. He was with 11th Armoured?’
Jack paused. ‘30 Commando Assault Unit. A forward reconnaissance outfit.’
‘ Jesus, Jack. I know all about 30 AU. They were part of T-Force, searching for Nazi secret weapons. This isn’t just about stolen antiquities, is it? Take a look down there now. You don’t usually get guys in full CBRN suits at an archaeological site.’
Jack saw two figures in white chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear suits disappear into the camouflaged enclosure in front of the bubble. ‘All I can tell you is this. A lot of the Nazi propaganda about wonder-weapons was exactly that. As for the real stuff, some of the scientists located by T-Force were spirited away and re-emerged at the forefront of Cold War rocket and weapons technology, even in the technology of swept-wing aircraft design like the Tornado. That’s been common knowledge for decades. But some secrets remained. You were right to wonder about the hidden truth of those final months of the war. But you shouldn’t just have been concerned about history. You should have been terrified for the future.’
The Tornado levelled out at three hundred feet. ‘Okay, Jack. I’m switching to VHF airband, so everything we say is now being overheard. There’s a skeleton air-traffic-control crew in the tower. My orders are to land, power down, drop you off and fly out immediately. You copy?’
‘Copy that, Paul. And thanks for the ride. It’s been fantastic.’
The external intercom crackled. ‘NATO XJ4, this is RAF Tornado fiver niner kilo seeking clearing to land. Over.’
‘Fiver niner kilo, you are clear to land. Observe agreed protocol. Over.’
‘NATO XJ4, this is Tornado fiver niner kilo. Roger that. Over.’
Jack felt the landing gear lock and the increased air resistance as the Tornado angled upwards for its approach. A few moments later they touched down with a screech of rubber on asphalt, and the reverse thrusters roared into life. The aircraft came to a halt less than halfway down the runway. Paul increased the throttle, swung the Tornado round and taxied it back down to the start of the runway, then pulled it round again so it was poised for take-off. The camouflaged dome was about five hundred metres to their left, and Jack could see two figures beside a jeep with its lights on, watching them.
Paul powered the engine down and popped the canopy so that it rose above them. Jack took off his helmet and felt the cool breeze coming down the runway. He realized that he had been bathed in sweat, and he ruffled his hair. He unstrapped himself and clambered out of the cockpit and down the steps on the side of the fuselage, then hopped off and struggled out of the pressure suit. He climbed back up and put the suit on the rear seat, then clambered down again and jumped on to the tarmac. He gave the fuselage a pat, then stood back, looking at the sooty streak on the tail fin caused by the thrust reversers, and the light grey camouflage that showed the effect of months in the punishing conditions of Afghanistan. ‘She’s a fine old warhorse,’ he called up. ‘Let’s hope she finds a new master as good as the one she’s got now.’
Paul raised his arm in acknowledgement, then clamped his visor back down. Jack walked a few paces away, then turned round again. ‘Paul, I’ve been thinking. You flew helicopters once, didn’t you?’
Paul raised his visor again. ‘It’s what stalled my promotion for so long. Instead of going to staff college when I should have done, I jumped on an RAF vacancy at the Army Air Corps helicopter school, and then volunteered for an RAF placement scheme with the Royal Navy. I spent six months flying a Lynx helicopter off a frigate in the Caribbean on drugs interdiction. It probably ruined my chances of ever becoming Marshal of the Royal Air Force, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
Jack grinned. ‘Well, if you ever get bored at that desk in Whitehall, there’s a job for you at IMU. We’ve got an Embraer and three Lynxes, so there’s always plenty of flying. I want to expand our aerial survey capability, with the new technology for archaeological site detection now available.’ He paused. ‘But I’d be looking for more than that. Someone with your experience of command and control and your international contacts could be invaluable. We seem to get ourselves involved in some tricky situations these days, far more so than I envisaged when I founded IMU. Far more than I want. But it’s reality, and we need to beef up our security capability. Let me know if you’re interested.’
Paul eyed Jack. ‘Not just a charity job for a sad old fighter jock?’
Jack grinned. ‘Not a chance. You might even get to fly Maurice around Egypt again in a biplane.’
‘He still owes me for that little trip. He was going to take me to the Munich beer festival. Then he got distracted by some mummies.’
‘Sounds oddly like Maurice. I’ll remind him.’
‘I wouldn’t mind getting wet again either, you know. Only I’d be a little rusty.’
‘We’d soon get you up to speed. Rebecca will probably have her instructor rating by then and can fill you in on all the latest diving technology since
the 1980s.’
‘The good old days,’ Paul said, grinning. ‘None of this nonsense about mixed-gas diving and rebreathers. Just good old compressed air, and a wing and a prayer.’
‘A wing and a prayer,’ Jack repeated. ‘I’d forgotten it was you and Peter Howe who used to say that. The good old days indeed.’
‘I’ve got great memories of him. We’ve got to hold on to that.’
Jack paused. ‘His death has really hit me again, diving at Atlantis where it happened. That’s why the good old days are exactly that. Things happen, and you can’t go back.’
‘Jack, seriously. I’m worried about you. This place, this bunker. This wasn’t what you got into archaeology for. Remember what you said about my flying. It was my passion, and always will be. Your passion is archaeology and diving, what you’ve just been doing at Atlantis and Troy. That’s the kind of adrenalin you thrive on, what makes you tick. Keeping that going is exactly what Peter would have wanted. The greatest discoveries are yet to come. Don’t ever lose sight of that.’
He dropped his visor again, waved and lowered the canopy. Jack put his hands over his ears as the twin turbofans started up, and hurried off the tarmac to be away from the blast of the exhaust. The whine of the engines rose to a scream and the Tornado rolled down the runway, its jet exhaust distorting the air for the length of the airfield behind. It rose at a sharp angle just before the end of the runway, its twin afterburners roaring and crackling as it powered up into the sky and disappeared into the clouds.
Jack could still feel the vibrations as he turned to face the jeep that was now accelerating towards him. For a moment he relished the quiet, hearing only a whisper of wind on the grass, before it was disrupted by the jeep engine. He wondered what it had been like for those Allied soldiers who had come upon this place that day in April 1945. He remembered what Hugh Frazer had said, and he sniffed the air. The hint of sulphur on his body from the volcano had gone, overwhelmed by the smell of aviation fuel and jet exhaust that lingered in a layer of black smoke from the Tornado’s departure. Hugh had talked of the terrible smell that day in 1945, a stench of squalor and decay, and the smoke rising from piles of fetid clothing that had been taken from the inmates by the emergency medical staff to be burnt in pyres across the camp.
He stared along the line of empty concrete aircraft shelters and remembered pictures of Belsen, trying to imagine what the camp here had looked like, and then he looked at the camouflaged bubble over the bunker. This place was not just about the horrors of the Holocaust. It was about another crime that had been commited here, a terrible, calculated crime in the name of twisted science, a crime whose outcome might yet exact a terrible price from humanity. It had kept Jack awake at night in the six months since the bunker had been discovered, turning over in his mind his own role in the events now unfolding. And there had been another price in 1945. Two Allied officers had disappeared in the forest, one British and one American, the British officer a close friend of Hugh’s whose death had haunted him for the rest of his life. For Hugh this place had come to represent the unbridled horrors of war, just as the burnt ruins of Troy had seemed to speak the same message to Jack when he had left them the day before his return to Atlantis.
He watched the two figures park the jeep on the tarmac and walk towards him. He thought about what Paul had said. This place was a long way from the archaeology he loved. Yet all archaeology was ultimately about understanding the present, and about truths that often had a dark side. Atlantis was about the foundation of civilization, when people had first learned to exult in the possibilities of the human condition, yet also had understood what the hunger for power could make men do. Troy had been about the descent into the abyss of war. And this bunker was archaeology too, but a new kind of archaeology, the excavation of a past almost within his own lifetime, but a past whose truth could only be revealed by the tried and tested techniques of archaeology, bringing all the forensic skills of his profession to bear. It was his job now, his responsibility, as much as the revelations of Atlantis or Troy. He took a deep breath and walked forward to meet the two men.
11
Lower Saxony, Germany
F ive minutes after leaving the runway, Jack hopped out of the jeep at the site of the Nazi bunker. In front of him was the large Portakabin with barred windows, and behind it the polyester bubble covered with camouflage netting that rose over an area the size of a tennis court. He could see where the edges of the bubble had been sealed to the roof of the Portakabin and anchored into a freshly dug perimeter ditch filled with concrete around the site, isolating the bunker from the atmosphere outside; beyond the Portakabin was a parked flat-bed truck containing an air compressor to keep the bubble pressurized, large carbon-dioxide scrubbers and pumps to clean the air and a filtration system to extract anything toxic from the outflow. The door to the Portakabin was guarded by two Bundeswehr military policemen carrying Hechler amp; Koch G-36 assault rifles. Jack’s driver spoke in German into his phone, and then turned to him. ‘Dr Hiebermeyer has finished the decontamination process and will be with you in a moment. You are to wait here.’
Jack nodded in acknowledgement as the jeep drove off, and then turned back to the entrance just as the door opened and Hiebermeyer came out. He was wearing a spotless white shirt and pressed trousers, the first time Jack could remember since their schooldays not seeing him in dusty khaki excavation gear. His right wrist was bandaged and hanging in a sling. With his other arm he swept back his remaining strands of hair, still glistening from the shower, and pushed his little round glasses up his nose. Jack watched him close his eyes and breathe deeply a few times. His glasses had steamed up on leaving the Portakabin, and he took them off and cleaned them on his sleeve, then peered around and spotted Jack. His shoulders slumped with relief and he walked over, putting his hand on Jack’s arm. ‘I heard the jet take off. It’s really good to see you. I read your email update on the dive on my phone in the decontamination room. It’s like a sauna in there.’ He wiped his face with his hand. ‘Diving to Atlantis again. Pretty amazing stuff. Human sacrifice, you think?’
Jack pointed at the sling. ‘Your wrist?’
‘Just a sprain. It was slippery in there. Everything’s covered in a sticky decomposition product, kind of yellow-green.’ He rubbed his forehead with his sleeve, then pushed his glasses up again. Jack looked with concern at his pale face and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Are you okay, Maurice? You look whacked.’
Hiebermeyer exhaled slowly, looked down at the ground for a moment and then nodded. ‘ Ja,’ he said. ‘ Mein Gott.’ He looked at Jack again, his eyes lacking their usual exuberance, and then angled his head upwards and took a deep breath through his nose. ‘I can still smell it, Jack. That decomposition product. We were encased in CBRN suits inside the bunker, but as soon as I took mine off in the scrubbing room, the stench was overpowering. I’d already thrown up inside my suit in the bunker, and I’m afraid I did it again. Not impressive for the hardened Egyptologist used to rotting mummies, but Major Penn says it happens even to the toughest of his team.’
Jack pulled out a small bottle of water from his khaki trouser pocket. ‘Have something to drink.’
Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘Not yet. I couldn’t stomach it. Not until we get away from this place.’
‘It was that bad?’
‘I’ve been down some pretty unpleasant holes in my life, but nothing like that. Count yourself lucky you’re not going in there.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jack said abruptly. ‘I thought that was why I was here.’
‘Come with me. Let’s sit down.’ Hiebermeyer steered Jack past the guards to a seating area beneath some bushes about fifty metres away, a place set up for the excavation team to relax. They were alone and out of earshot of the guards. Hiebermeyer sat down heavily on a bench and put his head in his hands, then took a deep breath and pressed his hands together, staring back pensively at the bunker site. Jack sat down beside him, and Hiebermeyer turned to him. ‘I ha
ve to tell you about what we found in there. And about what we didn’t find.’
Jack suddenly felt a yawning sense of apprehension. What wasn’t there. This was what had kept him up at night over the past months. ‘Go on.’
‘First, the good news. The bunker’s full of antiquities and works of art. There was one open crate filled with paintings. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, for a start. It’s incredible, though the Raphael had been left exposed and is probably beyond recovery. And there are crates of archaeological treasures. It looks as if most of them are from Himmler’s collection at Wewelsburg Castle, the objects looted by the Ahnenerbe from around the world in the 1930s that I’d always dreamed of finding. The only crate we looked inside was already open, its lid prised off some time in those final days in 1945. Inside were carefully packaged boxes, all labelled. One of them had prehistoric symbols on it that I recognized from cave art, the kind of thing the Nazis would have interpreted as precursor Aryan runes. But many of them had been packaged more than fifty years before the war, evidently left unopened for some future occasion. I recognized Heinrich Schliemann’s handwriting, Jack. Schliemann’s. They must be the lost treasures from Troy that he hid away, possibly rediscovered by the Nazis somewhere in Germany or when they conquered Greece in 1941. I’d always wondered what lay beneath Schliemann’s house in Athens.’
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