She hit the tunnel floor and cracked the back of her head on the hard-packed ground and the pain was negligible when measured against the agony radiating outward from her left hand. The fire raced from her knuckles in one direction to the tips of her fingers, which she could not feel, and in the other direction up her forearm all the way to her elbow.
“Quinn!” Gruber called, and scrambled down the pile, hitting the floor next to Tracie in a shower of dirt and pebbles and, in all likelihood, more spiders. “Quinn, are you hurt? What happened? How the hell did you pull me up like that, anyway?”
“I’m still not sleeping with you,” she mumbled, rolling from her side onto her back and then forcing herself to sit up.
“Jesus Christ, Quinn,” he said, ignoring her comment. He had yanked his flashlight from his waistband and now he shined the beam down at her injured hand, an expression of horror clouding his handsome face. “Your hand. What the hell did you do to your hand?”
She tried to smile and managed a wince. “I jammed it against the support beam to stop our momentum when you began falling back down the dirt pile. Unfortunately I couldn’t open my fist in time, so instead of my palm striking the timber, it was the back of my hand.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said again. “Why didn’t you let go?”
“Well, that wouldn’t have accomplished anything, would it? I’d still be injured and you would be stuck on the other side of the pile.”
“Jesus Christ.” It seemed to be all he could manage. “Look at your hand. You need medical attention.”
For the first time, Tracie allowed herself a glance at her injury. It was gruesome. Blood flowed heavily, her skin ripped and torn, and the chalky greyish-white of exposed knucklebones peeked through the skin flaps in several places.
“You see any doctors around here? Maybe an infirmary somewhere up inside that wreck of a Nazi ammo factory?”
“Of course not,” Gruber said, showing annoyance for the first time. “And that’s exactly why we need to get you out of here and to a hospital.”
“Agreed. And we’ll do that the minute we complete our mission.”
He stared at her, jaw hanging open. “Complete our mission? With you bleeding to death? You’re insane, do you know that?”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m not sleeping with you.”
He shook his head in disbelief, unsure of what to say or do.
She said, “I’m not going to bleed to death, Gruber. Get real. My hand’s been ripped open, it’s not like I severed my carotid artery. We’ll bandage it up and then you can drive me to the hospital after we get out of here.”
She had tried to keep the pain out of her voice but couldn’t quite manage it. It quivered and shook, and she could feel herself slipping into shock. The fire continued to rage in her hand, the knuckles a furnace, flames racing up her fingers and arm.
On the bright side, Gruber seemed to have given up on arguing. He shook his backpack off his shoulders and began rummaging through it for the few medical supplies they had packed before leaving their Wuppertal safe house. After a moment he lifted out an ace bandage and plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “The bandage isn’t even long enough.”
“We’ll make do. Just dump the alcohol over my hand and wrap it up.”
“This is going to hurt something awful.”
“Thanks for the warning. Get on with it.”
Gruber sighed heavily and unscrewed the plastic cap. Then he lifted it and said, “I’m sorry about this, Fiona.” In one motion, he poured the contents over Tracie’s hand even as she held it cradled against her chest.
The pain blasted into the stratosphere.
It doubled.
Tripled.
She wouldn’t have thought it could get any worse than it already was, but it did. The liquid seared and burned, it was gasoline poured over a campfire.
She screamed again, the sound of her anguish booming down the tunnel and echoing back to them. Her vision wavered, the two flickering flashlight beams fading to pinpricks in the dark tunnel as consciousness threatened to desert her. She panted. She lowered her head almost to the hard-packed ground, willing herself not to pass out.
Seconds ticked by that felt like hours, and then Tracie felt herself return—more or less—to the land of the living. The fire continued to blast through her hand, stinging and throbbing, the pain dwarfing even that of getting shot, something she had experienced more than once.
“Bandage it up,” she said weakly. “I’d do it myself, but wrapping one-handed would take time we don’t have. Phoenix is in disarray right now with the elimination of Adolph Hitler and his devil-spawn son, but once the organization’s remaining leaders recover enough to start thinking clearly, this will be the first place they come.”
Gruber nodded. He reached out and moved her arm gently away from the protection of her body. Then he reached under her hand and began straightening her fingers. The bones ground together and electric shocks blasted through the waves of fire already burning through her injury.
“No,” she gasped. “Leave the fingers bent. You’re going to do more damage if you try to straighten them. Just stop the bleeding and protect the area as much as possible. We’ll leave the real medical stuff to the professionals after we get out of here.”
Tracie’s flashlight had fallen to the ground when she tumbled down the dirt pile, and its beam illuminated Gruber’s face at a crazy angle. Most of his features were covered in shadow, but she could still clearly see the skepticism in his expression.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t even know if the bandage is long enough to effectively stop the bleeding. You really did a number on that hand.”
“Believe me, I’m not likely to forget that any time soon,” she said. “Just do the best you can. Sitting here talking about it isn’t getting us anywhere.”
Without another word, Gruber placed the rolled-up bandage under her palm and began paying it out, rolling it around her hand, over the fingers and knuckles and then under, over and under, again and again.
The pain had begun to recede, just a bit, but now the fiery agony returned, and Tracie felt her gorge rising, and she turned her head and vomited on the ground, splashing herself and Gruber with stomach acid and partially digested food.
Gruber never said a word. He continued to wind the bandage around her injury, over and over.
38
November 19, 1987
10:20 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
“Sorry about puking on you,” Tracie said weakly.
They sat side by side on the tunnel floor, propped up against the dirt pile they had just cleared at such a high cost. The Ace bandage had been long enough to fully cover the injury, but Gruber’s concerns about stopping the bleeding seemed well founded. Tracie could already see a dark maroon smudge beginning to soak through.
“No problem,” he answered. “I figured it was just your way of reinforcing your message to me.”
“What message is that?”
“That you’re not going to sleep with me.”
Tracie chuckled. It was the best she could manage at the moment; a full-fledged laugh was out of the question.
Her breathing had returned more or less to normal, though, and while the pain in her left hand was still there, throbbing and noxious, she knew it was as manageable as it was going to get. She simply had to wall it off, compartmentalize it, acknowledge it and then move past it. She had done exactly that before, many times, and she would do it again today.
“Let’s keep going,” she said, “before this tunnel collapses once and for all and we end up sleeping together down here permanently.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “The sooner we get this done and get out of here, the happier I’ll be, even if it bring me that much closer to getting my head chopped off back at Langley.
”
He looked over at Tracie. “I mean that figuratively, of course. Although you know Stallings pretty well. Maybe he’ll do it literally, too.”
She pushed herself to her feet, trying to ignore the pain in her hand and mostly succeeding. “Stallings is a teddy bear,” she said. “You just have to know how to handle him.”
“Teddy bear,” Gruber repeated. “From what I’ve heard, he’s more like a rabid, rampaging killer grizzly.”
“I suppose that characterization would work, too,” she said as she began trudging forward. She prayed there were no more hidden surprises waiting for them in the darkness, but doubted that prayer was going to be answered.
“How much farther do you think it could possibly be?” Gruber asked. “I mean, the Nazis buried the treasure underground in a secret location, probably known only to a select few. What would have been the advantage in hauling it farther down the tunnel than was necessary?”
It seemed a rhetorical question, since Tracie would have no way of knowing the answer any more than Gruber would. He was walking next to her with his head down, eyes on the tunnel floor. He looked exhausted and dispirited. The joking persona he had exhibited just seconds ago had disappeared.
“If I say I have a hunch that we’re getting close, would you believe me?”
“Not really.”
“Then look for yourself.” She rotated her flashlight toward him and waited for him to raise his eyes from the ground, then nodded toward the tunnel ahead. She aimed her light into the darkness and heard the sharp intake of breath as Gruber followed the beam.
An iron storage locker loomed in front of them, perhaps twenty feet farther down, barely visible in the weak light. The structure was massive. It virtually filled the tunnel. The sides of the container cleared the walls of the subterranean passageway by mere inches, and there was even less room than that between the top of the container and the ceiling support beams.
The structure had been painted black, and even though splotches of rust and corrosion had begun eating through the paint and into the iron, the dark paint job had rendered the storage container nearly invisible until they were almost on top of it.
Very visible, however, were two large red swastikas. They had been painted on the section facing Tracie and Gruber, one on either side of an oversized set of double doors.
“This is it,” Gruber whispered.
“Looks like it,” Tracie agreed, the pain in her injured hand momentarily forgotten as they stood side-by-side facing the relic.
“That thing is huge. How the hell did they get it down here?”
She shook her head. “Either they brought the materials in separately and then constructed the container underground, or maybe they dug a hole in the forest behind the munitions plant and lowered the container into the tunnel in one piece, then re-covered the hole.”
“Jesus Christ,” Gruber said, returning to what seemed to be his default expression when under extreme stress.
“Actually,” Tracie said, “that would answer your question about why the Nazis placed it so far from the tunnel entrance: they needed a location that was isolated in order to manage the excavation without anyone figuring out what was going on.”
“These were the Nazis under Adolph Hitler,” Gruber said. “They could simply have forbidden anyone to approach the area, and then guarded it with men under orders to shoot onlookers on sight. That would have done the trick.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what they did,” Tracie answered. “But we’re talking about an estimated three hundred million dollars’ worth of stolen loot. Even translated into 1940s dollars, it would have been a staggering amount of money. They wouldn’t have wanted to take any chances with it, and—I never thought I would say this about Nazis—I can understand their concern.”
“Let’s get in there and make sure it’s actually the Amber Room being stored inside, and not Adolph Hitler’s collection of Eva Braun lingerie or his Beatles record collection.”
“The Beatles didn’t come along until almost twenty years after the end of World War II.”
“You know what I mean,” Gruber said. He began approaching the double doors. “Let’s open this baby up so we can get the hell out of here and get you to a hospital.”
“Not so fast,” Tracie said.
“What are you talking about? We’re within minutes of completing our assignment, and you’re in the process of bleeding to death, and now you want to take it slow?”
“I told you already, I’m not going to bleed to death from a hand injury. And believe me, nobody in the world could want to get up and out of this moldering gravesite any more than I do. But the whole reason we’re here and not Aaron Stallings or the U.S. secretary of state or maybe even President Reagan himself is because the container is supposed to be booby-trapped, remember? And since Adolph Hitler Junior had both keys in his possession, on chains around his neck like they were the most important things in the world, I take the threat of explosives very seriously, and so should you.”
“Fine,” he said. He stopped walking and faced Tracie, who still hadn’t moved. “Then how do you want to approach this?”
“We should examine the exterior of the container as closely as we can. First we need to determine the location of the two locks that fit the funky skeleton keys. Then we should locate the explosives if possible, and see if there’s any way of bypassing them before we attempt to access the treasure. My fear is that after all this time, tampering in any way with that big hunk of iron—even with keys—will result in us blowing our own heads off.”
“Well, I can answer half of your first question already. Look.” He shined the beam of his flashlight straight at the container, where a cast iron plate had been welded to the narrow space between the closed double doors. The plate ran from the top of the container to bottom, and in the middle was a lock.
The lock was clearly designed to accept one of the two customized skeleton keys.
Gruber was much closer to the container than Tracie, and now she stepped forward to examine the lock. At first glance it appeared quite basic. But closer examination revealed small square cutouts added to the openings, and even in the dark and more than forty years after the container’s construction, Tracie could see the tiny copper threads that had been built into the squares.
Clearly the threads on the lock were designed to line up with the similar copper threads built into the keys. Presumably those connections, when matched, would nullify the explosive charges wired into or on the container. Using any key other than one of the specially crafted pair, or attempting to force the doors open or cut into them with a torch, would set off the charges.
It’s a terrifyingly simple design, Tracie thought, and a deadly one.
“Horrifying, isn’t it?” Gruber spoke quietly, seemingly reading her mind.
“It sure is. But I suppose we should have expected no less from the people who condemned six million human beings to death simply because they were different.”
Gruber nodded and remained silent.
Tracie said, “Okay, let’s think about this. We have the key that will allow us to bypass the explosives. Hopefully. But I doubt the Nazis manufactured two of these keys—and then kept them separated for forty years—simply because they wanted to have a spare hanging around just in case Hitler lost one. They made two keys as a failsafe, so no one could access the Amber Room without both.”
Gruber sighed. “Let’s start looking.”
He crouched in front of the door and began running his flashlight beam along the lower edge of the container, moving clockwise. When he reached the corner he moved up the right edge.
Two people searching the same area would be pointless, so Tracie moved away from the container and concentrated on the tunnel wall to her right. Finding the big storage locker had diverted her attention from the injury to her hand, and while the pain had never fully receded, it had faded into the background for a couple of blissful minutes.
Now it was b
ack with a vengeance, determined to remind her it wasn’t going anywhere.
She breathed deeply and blew the breath out and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. She began moving slowly away from the container in the direction from which they had just come, concerned that they may have passed the second lock without noticing it while in the process of working their way here. The Nazis could have placed the second lock anywhere, as its only function would be to render the explosives inert through the process of the two custom keys being inserted in their separate locks at the same time.
If her theory was correct, though, the entire operation would be dependent upon that precise synchronization of key insertion, which would mean the key holders would have to be in close proximity in order to coordinate their actions, or risk blowing themselves up through less-than-precise timing.
The second lock had to be right under their noses.
She turned and began examining the other wall, exasperated. Maybe her theory was all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t necessary for both keys to enter both locks at the same time. If that were the case, the second lock could be upstairs in the manager’s office.
It could be anywhere.
She cursed under her breath and then froze. Despite the intense pain still radiating through her left hand—and most of the arm as well—she smiled.
There it was.
39
November 19, 1987
10:45 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
The lock had been mounted on the tunnel wall directly across from Tracie’s location. It was nothing more complicated than a four-inch by four-inch iron box bolted onto the brick wall. The box had been painted the same matte black as the storage container, with a customized keyhole cut into the front that matched the one on the container exactly, right down to the tiny filaments fabricated into the odd little box cutouts on the keyhole.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 94