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
Five 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 & 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 sti
cky 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 have 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.’
Jack’s heart was pounding. ‘The palladion?’
Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘It had been there, Jack. We found the impression of a swastika in the packing straw in one corner of that crate, a heavy object about two hand’s breadths across. But someone had taken it. There’s no sign of it elsewhere in the bunker. We already knew the palladion had been in that salt mine in Poland, right? Some time in the final months of the war it was brought here, and some time in the final hours before the forest was bombed it was taken away again.’
Jack closed his eyes, trying to contain his disappointment. The palladion, the most sacred object of the Trojans. He remembered his dive with Costas six months before in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow, and their desperate fight with three of Saumerre’s men at the place where the palladion had been hidden. What did the Nazis want with it? Who had given the order to move it here, to this bunker? Six months ago they had worked out that the reverse swastika of the palladion had been the symbol of the Agamemnon Code, a secret Nazi code activated near the end of the war that was somehow connected with the purpose of the bunker. He turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘You’re sure it wasn’t taken recently?’
‘Not a chance. The bunker was sealed in by tons of fallen trees and soil after the Allied bombing raid in April 1945. Nobody’s been in there since.’
‘So that’s the bad news?’
‘Not all of it, Jack.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
Hiebermeyer put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad Hugh Frazer isn’t with us any more. He’d lived his life since the war wondering what had gone on here, what had happened to his friend Major Mayne. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to break it to him. It was a terrible sight, Jack. It’ll stay with me always.’
‘You found him?’
‘And the American colonel, Stein. They’d both been shot at close range by a 9mm Walther P38. We know that because the pistol and the shell casings are still there. The pistol belonged to another body, with an SS tattoo on his arm. It looks as if he and Mayne were caught in a death embrace, with Mayne’s knife in his ribcage.’
Jack swallowed hard. ‘Where were the bodies?’
Hiebermeyer lowered his arm from Jack’s shoulder, stared at the ground and spoke quietly. ‘At the far end of the chamber with the crates was a sealed room, a laboratory. The American was found outside the doorway, Mayne and the SS man just inside. The door had swung to on its hinges afterwards, nearly but not quite shutting. What I saw inside, beyond those bodies, was a scene of even greater horror.’ He put his hand to his forehead, and paused. ‘There were badly adiposed bodies, Jack, naked and strapped into gurneys. They were partly preserved in their own body liquor. That’s where the awful yellow-green slime came from. Thank Christ the Egyptians mummified their bodies.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘The forensic anthropologist with the army team reckons they were being used as guinea pigs, as live victims for research. She thinks they were being dissected alive, to ensure that the Nazi scientists could extract living viruses and bacteria from their organs. Two of them looked as if they’d been abandoned halfway through. They’d died horribly, in agony. And they weren’t the only ones. You remember you authorized an IMU geophysics team to come over here last month and survey the site of the concentration camp? They thought there was nothing remarkable in the results, but then the forensics guy saw something unusual that has just been confirmed.’
Hiebermeyer took a crumpled sheet out of his pocket, his hand shaking slightly, and passed it to Jack. It was the printout of an archaeological resistivity survey. Jack smoothed it out and put it on his knees. He could identify buried foundations, visible in the contrast of black-and-white features that showed where walls had been. It looked like the survey of a Roman fort, with long barrack buildings and an organized layout of smaller huts. Hiebermeyer pointed to several hazy areas that obscured parts of the buildings. ‘That’s new-growth forest, trees that grew on the bombed-out site. But look here, at the top right-hand corner.’ He pointed to a long, rectilinear feature at least ten by thirty metres in area, like a wide section of boundary ditch. Jack looked up from the sheet to the bunker, traversing his eyes along the forest boundary beyond and trying to visualize the place before the airfield was constructed. Hiebermeyer pointed to a low line of bush to the north-west. ‘The team crawled around in the undergrowth and found a track about a kilometre long between the bunker and that ditch, with impressed tyre marks from large vehicles. Yesterday the forensics lady had a hunch about the ditch. She put a borehole down, and came up with lime, lots of it. They pulled back immediately and sealed off the site behind a guarded perimeter. She said she knew instantly what she was looking at. She’d worked on mass-burial sites from the Balkans wars of the 1990s and was sure the lime had been used to slake corpses, put down here in such quantities because the bodies were contaminated. We think the people on the gurneys
inside the bunker were only the last batch of victims, the ones left to die an awful death when the Nazi scientists abandoned this place as the Allied front line came closer in 1945. I can only imagine that Mayne and the American saw those bodies, probably the last thing they ever saw after they’d made their way into this place. But the normal procedure had clearly been to take the corpses from the bunker to the ditch. The forensics lady reckons it could hold five thousand bodies, stacked ten deep.’
‘Christ.’ Jack looked away. He had expected that they might find evidence of Mayne and Stein, the two Allied officers who had entered the camp soon after its liberation and then disappeared into the forest. From talking to Hugh Frazer, he knew that they were both part of the forward reconnaissance teams searching for Nazi secrets, ostensibly looking for hidden caches of art but really seeking any form of secret weapons research: anything the Nazis might use to devastating effect in their final defence of the Reich. Now he knew that what those two officers had seen would have been their ultimate nightmare, the worst-case scenario they would have been briefed that they might find. It was human experimentation, a terrible disease being perfected. Jack felt a cold shiver down his spine. A disease that may have been spirited out of the past, a past not ancient but within living memory, then refined for use once again, a disease that could take more lives than all those snuffed out in concentration camps like this one, more than were killed in the entire Nazi rampage of murder.
Hiebermeyer continued talking. ‘That chamber was like a sort of ghastly inner sanctum. A huge U-boat battery had been installed outside to provide electricity, and it was still working after all these years. Whoever constructed that place was taking no chances and had planned for this laboratory to survive the fall of the Third Reich. And I haven’t told you the full horror of the bodies on the gurneys. Two of them were different, old cadavers that had been disinterred from somewhere else, both of them partly dissected. The heads had been removed and were sitting there upright, embedded in body liquor and looking like those ancient plastered skulls of the Neolithic, only with stainless-steel forceps clamped to them like the ones the Ahnenerbe used to carry out craniological measurements when they went on their expeditions in search of Atlantis. One of them had a hole in it where the forensics lady thinks they extracted rotting brain tissue looking for something. Putting my hand in what came out of the bodies was what really did it for me, and that’s when I threw up.’
The Gods of Atlantis Page 22