Purity Pursuit: A Gripping Crime Thriller (Private Detective Heinrich Muller Crime Thriller Book 1)

by Robert Brown

“You know how to use one of these?”

  “I was two years in the army.”

  “I love a woman in uniform.”

  “Shut up,” she said, popping out the cylinder to check the number of rounds. Like a pro, Mikolaj had only put five rounds in so that the hammer rested on an empty chamber. A wise precaution in case the gun got struck.

  Five rounds for her, eleven for me. That’s too damn few.

  Heinrich turned to Mikolaj.

  “Lead the way.”

  They passed through the woods, skirting the open field the Germans had scooped out of the earth all those years ago. The night was quiet, the moonlight filtering dimly through the partial canopy of early spring. Mikolaj went in front while Heinrich covered him a few steps behind. Gabriela took up the rear, looking all around them for any nasty surprises while Heinrich kept an eye on their prisoner.

  After a few hundred meters, the field disappeared to their left, replaced with woodland. All the trees here looked younger.

  “Can you do something for me?” Heinrich whispered to Gabriela.

  “Now’s not the time, and the answer later is still no.”

  “Jesus Christ, we’re past that. I mean can you do something for Jan?”

  “That little shit?”

  “Look, he’s had a bad childhood, and he just got a major wake-up call. He can be turned around. I don’t live here so I can’t really help him, but maybe you can. Is there any way to get him out of a rough home life and back on the right track?”

  Gabriela thought for a moment and nodded. “A friend of mine runs a halfway house for troubled youth in Warsaw. I can try to get him in there. They give work training and drug counseling and get kids out of gangs and far right groups.”

  “Perfect. Thanks.” Heinrich sighed with relief.

  “His parents will have to give permission.”

  “They will.”

  “They might not want—”

  “They will.”

  Gabriela gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “I thought you weren’t interested,” Heinrich said.

  “That was for being a good man when you pretend to be a bad one.”

  “I can be a good man all the time if that will get me anywhere.”

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  Heinrich sighed. “Of course you do.”

  “It was his car I was driving the other day. That’s why I didn’t bring it.”

  At least you didn’t bring him.

  They quietened down, treading carefully on the forest floor but unable to avoid rustling the occasional leaf and snapping a twig or two. Heinrich peered through the murk, worried that at any moment one of Mikolaj’s friends might leap out of the shadows and fill them full of lead.

  Mikolaj stopped and pointed.

  Now that they weren’t hearing the sound of their own footsteps, the faint sound of picks and shovels came to their ears. Heinrich couldn’t see any lights.

  “Let me go,” Mikolaj whispered. “I’ve given you what you want.”

  “Not a chance,” Heinrich whispered back.

  “They’ll kill me.”

  “You shout or try to run and I’ll kill you.”

  They moved forward again, slower this time, taking care with every footstep. Heinrich winced as Mikolaj snapped a twig off a tree he passed. Had that been deliberate?

  After another few meters, Mikolaj thudded his foot against a fallen log.

  Heinrich grabbed him by the collar and glared at him. The neo-Nazi shrugged, feigning innocence.

  Heinrich cocked an ear. The sound of working had stopped. He heard voices.

  After a minute the picks and shovels started to work again.

  What to do with Mikolaj? The asshole was bound to make more noise as they approached, but he couldn’t let him go. As soon as he got out of sight he’d holler to his buddies. And Heinrich couldn’t do what he really wanted to do, which was to shoot him.

  Holding him by the collar, he pressed the muzzle of the 9mm automatic against the back of his head. Hopefully that would be enough to dissuade him from making any more noise.

  It wasn’t.

  It was like the guy found every dry leaf, every twig in the whole goddam forest. But it wasn’t like Heinrich and Gabriela were moving like ninjas either.

  A light glimmered up ahead. It looked strange, like a thin slit. Had Mikolaj’s friends found a bunker and were inside? That would be great, trying to fight a bunch of people in a bunker.

  But no, as they got closer he could see it was a cloth or tarpaulin of some kind that had been set up as a screen to hide the light by which they worked. A thin slice of light shone between the ground and the bottom of the cloth.

  The sound of the picks and shovels continued. Heinrich’s muscles eased a bit. The noise the treasure hunters made had masked the sound of his none-too-stealthy approach.

  A moment later he discovered that was only what they wanted him to think.

  Muzzles flared to their left and right. Mikolaj grunted and fell back on Heinrich, who ducked and let him fall.

  Heinrich fired at the gunman to his left. He heard Gabriela firing too.

  The gunmen stopped firing. The light behind the tarpaulin went out.

  Heinrich and Gabriela hunkered behind separate trees.

  Silence. Mikolaj let out a little gasp, choked, and fell quiet.

  A light winked on to their left. Heinrich fired at it. The light, a large flashlight, rolled to the right and stopped, illuminating their position.

  Gunshots came from their left, right, and in front now.

  Bullets thudded into trees and winged past his ear. Nearby he heard Gabriela cry out.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Heinrich kept firing. He saw a shadow fall to his left. The guy who had thrown the flashlight, but that left at least three more gunmen honing in on his position.

  Bullets smacked into the tree he hid behind and kicked up dirt all around. He spared a glance at Gabriela, who was holding her hip.

  A second later she got back in the fight. A Nazi in front of them screamed and Heinrich saw a shadow fall. The gunfire from the other side slackened a bit, and Heinrich dared to expose himself enough to take careful aim at the flashlight.

  He took it out on his second shot.

  The woods grew dark and silent once more.

  He tensed as to his right he heard the sound of a magazine being snapped into place. No shots came.

  But they would come, and how long could he and Gabriela resist? Gabriela had fired at least twice, probably more. Heinrich had no idea how many times he had fired. At least four or five.

  He heard the rustle of leaves to his front and a little to the right. He fired, not seeing anything.

  Damn it, don’t get panicky and waste ammunition.

  “We need to move,” Gabriela whispered so softly he almost didn’t catch it.

  They shifted to the right and got behind another pair of trees. Remarkably, no one fired. Unlike Heinrich, the Nazis didn’t fire panic shots into the shadows, even though they probably had ammo to burn.

  A groan and a plea for help came from up ahead. The guy Gabriela hit? Probably.

  A shadow moved in that direction. Gabriela fired at it. All fell silent once again.

  Then Heinrich hit on an idea.

  Getting all the way behind the trunk of the tree, he unbuttoned his coat. Tucking his head inside and making it the coat into a tent that covered his head and lower body, he pulled out his phone. He kept one eye closed so the glare wouldn’t leave him completely night blind.

  He could hear the rustling of movement over in the Nazi’s position. Were they going for their friend, or coming for them? He didn’t even know how many remained.

  He set his alarm for a minute from now, put the brightness on max, and clicked the button to make the screen go off.

  Then he tossed it in the direction of the Nazis, praying it wouldn’t hit a tree or land face down.

  His phone landed on the forest floor
with a soft thud. A shot flared out of the darkness to the right. Heinrich held his fire.

  The silent seconds drew out to an agonizing length. He closed the eye that he had looked at the phone with, a rectangular afterimage distracting his vision.

  His phone lit up, letting out a long buzz. Three figures appeared in its glow, one just a couple of steps to the left of the phone, another behind the phone and almost lost in the shadows, and the third a little to the right.

  Heinrich shot the one who was hardest to see. He went down on the first shot. The one to the right buckled as Gabriela got him in the leg, then jerked as her second shot blew the top half of his head away.

  The guy on the left fired, his bullet snipping off a branch just above Heinrich. It fell on his head, causing Heinrich to miss his next shot.

  The remaining neo-Nazi fired twice more, forcing Heinrich behind the tree. Gabriel fired at him and cursed as all she got from her revolver was a disappointing click.

  Heinrich ducked around the other side of the tree and fired just as the neo-Nazi was coming out of cover. He saw the man shift his aim, zeroing in on him.

  Heinrich managed to get his shot off half a second before him.

  The bullet took the guy in the side of the neck. He spun, fired, and fell to the ground clutching his wound. The light from the phone gleamed off the blood spurting through the man’s fingers.

  Heinrich bolted to the left and circled around on the neo-Nazi’s position. He approached them with care, only to find them all down. All but two were unconscious or dead. Piotr writhed with a gut shot that would take a long time to kill him and keep him in agony until then, and a man he didn’t recognize was trying to crawl away with a bullet through his thigh. Heinrich put a bullet through his hand to keep him where he was.

  Gabriela pressed a handkerchief to her wounded hip. The bullet had only grazed her, but it looked like it hurt. She unbuttoned her jeans and Heinrich was treated to a brief look at her panties. She stuck the handkerchief inside and buttoned her jeans up again.

  Clever, Heinrich thought. The pressure of her pants will put pressure on her wound.

  After she finished, she went around collecting guns. She looked pale but did not tremble. She passed Heinrich another 9mm automatic and took one for herself after checking both magazines and tossed the others into the woods.

  “We should call the police,” she said.

  “Let’s check out the area first. There might be more of them prowling around.”

  He retrieved his phone, turned it off, and once again the forest grew dark.

  Leaving the wounded neo-Nazis to fend for themselves, they made a slow circuit of the surrounding woods and found nothing. After that they moved to where they had seen them digging. Heinrich and Gabriela approached as quietly as they could from opposite angles. The treasure hunters had been coolheaded enough to leave a couple of people digging as a decoy while the others planned a trap. If any still survived, they could be planning a similar trick.

  The moonlight was just enough to spot the tarpaulin stretched between two metal bars stuck into the earth about ten feet apart. It stood on the side of a steep slope. Heinrich studied the terrain in the weak light, not daring to turn on his phone for light.

  Suddenly a flashlight shone on right them. Heinrich threw himself on the ground, rolled, and aimed at the light’s source.

  “Wait! It’s me!” Jan shouted.

  “Turn that fucking thing off!” Heinrich shouted. Gabriela shouted at the same time in Polish, no doubt the same thing he had said.

  Jan switched off the light.

  “Give me that,” Heinrich said, snatching it away.

  “I heard shots, and I thought you were in trouble.”

  “Quiet, the both of you,” Gabriela whispered.

  They crept behind the tarpaulin and found the treasure hunters had dug several feet into the slope. Picks and shovels lay scattered on the ground, and a wheelbarrow stood next to a heap of spoil a little way off. A plastic cooler stood next to a pile of overcoats.

  A little up-slope and to the left stood a large stone outcropping. A landmark? Otherwise he couldn’t see how they would know this was the right spot in this featureless forest.

  Again they searched around the woods together, moving out a hundred meters in each direction and saw no one. One of the wounded neo-Nazis cried for help. They ignored him.

  When they came back to the work-site, Jan went up to the excavated ground.

  “Maybe they were digging in the wrong place,” he said, kicking the churned up earth.

  “Maybe,” Heinrich said, looking at the outcropping half hidden in the dark.

  “We should go,” Gabriela said. She checked her phone. “No reception. We’ll have to drive into town.”

  “All right,” Heinrich said.

  “You mean there’s no treasure train?” Jan asked, obviously disappointed. He trudged a little up-slope to the top edge of where they had excavated. “This sucks. They have been telling those stories for—”

  The earth fell away and Jan disappeared.

  “Jan!” Heinrich cried, rushing to the spot. A black hole had appeared in the earth. He heard coughing and sputtering within.

  “Fuck,” Jan said, then appeared in a pool of light as he turned on the flashlight feature of his phone. His eyes widened. “Whoa.”

  Heinrich grabbed a flashlight lying nearby and he and Gabriela scrambled down the hole, more dirt collapsing into it from their weight. From the light of Jan’s phone they could see a large concrete vaulted ceiling and a dark tunnel heading into the hill. A few feet ahead, train tracks began, leading into the darkness.

  “No way,” Heinrich said.

  “We’re rich!” Jan cried.

  “Shh.” Heinrich whispered. This place unnerved him.

  He turned on the flashlight and its powerful beam cut through the darkness. The tunnel continued into the hill for at least a hundred meters. A dark bulk blocked the tunnel at the edge of their vision.

  Quietly they advanced.

  The tunnel wasn’t much wider than the train tracks, reminding Heinrich of the railway tunnels cutting through mountains in places like the Alps and Rockies. The air was stale and smelled of metal and grease. On their right they passed a panel of electric switches but otherwise the tunnel was featureless.

  Until they saw what stood at the end of it.

  It was the rear carriage of a train, armored and fitted with an artillery piece on a turret. On the sides were two smaller turrets with machine guns.

  Gabriela gripped him.

  “I can’t believe this,” she whispered.

  Heinrich was too stunned to reply. Even Jan had fallen silent for once.

  The train took up almost the entire space of the tunnel. Moving to one side, they could see four boxcars and at the front another armored carriage and an engine. Just beyond it the tunnel stopped.

  “This isn’t a network like the one below the castle,” Heinrich whispered. “The Nazis built it just for this train and hid it so well that a seventy-year search didn’t find it.”

  “I found it!” Jan said.

  “Shh,” Gabriela whispered. Heinrich glanced at her and saw she was just as freaked out by this place as he was.

  Jan clambered up onto the armored carriage and poked his phone through a thin slit in the steel plating.

  “There’s guns and boxes of bullets in there.”

  Jan stepped up to the door and wrenched on the handle. With a loud creak it opened.

  “I’m more interested in what’s in these,” Heinrich said, going to the first boxcar.

  Heinrich stepped up the bare metal rung leading to the boxcar door. Gripping the handle, he tugged on it. At first it resisted, but with a hard pull it screeched open.

  Heinrich stood at the open entrance to the boxcar. For a moment he didn’t have the courage to enter.

  With a deep breath, he shone the light inside.

  The interior was lined with metal shelving. Each
shelf was jammed with countless small wooden crates.

  Gabriela stepped into the car behind him and stared.

  Heinrich looked around and spotted a claw hammer and a few other tools lying at one end of the car. Sticking his pistol in his pocket, he grabbed the hammer.

  Gabriela screamed.

  Heinrich spun around.

  Hans.

  The neo-Nazi had grabbed Gabriela from behind and stuck a pistol to her head. Gabriela’s own gun fell to the floor with a thud.

  Heinrich froze.

  “Proceed, Herr Müller,” Hans said with a grin. “I am just as curious as you are.”

  “So you learned my name.”

  “There aren’t many hotels in the town center. It was easy enough to find you. Then I did an internet search on your name. A private detective? No doubt hired by that bitch Briggs to track down the death of her husband. But I found more. You are from good stock, Herr Müller. Why did you turn your back on your past?”

  “My grandfather was a war criminal. I wish I had never met him.”

  Heinrich tensed, not just at the situation but at his own words. Was it true? If it hadn’t been for Grandpa Otto, he would have ended up in prison or worse.

  But then came the public humiliation…

  He swallowed and forced out the words. “He did me as much bad as good. But that’s none of your goddam business. Let her go.”

  Hans shook her a bit. “Her? She’s been trouble for years now, her and her leftist friends. Once we have created a new order, there will be a camp for her and her kind. She can be part of the comfort battalion. Now open that crate.”

  Heinrich turned and put the claw end of the hammer between the lid and the side of the wooden crate that sat on the shelf in front of him. Nails squealed as he pried the lid off.

  He blinked.

  Inside was a tightly packed pile of file folders. He tipped the crate so the others could see.

  “What?” Hans cried. “Open another one.”

  Heinrich moved to the next crate. He pried it open and found the same thing.

  “Impossible! Let’s go to the next car,” Hans said.

  “Let her go!” Jan shouted.

  The teen stood outside the car, gripping an old MP 40 submachine gun.

  Hans laughed and didn’t even bother trying to cover himself with Gabriela.