Order of the Black Sun Box Set 5

by Preston William Child

  “I can understand how you would come to this conclusion Mr. Holtzer, but right after Gabi's death Purdue went missing…”

  “Which is precisely the point. Would a killer not try to disappear to avoid getting caught?” Detlef interrupted him. Sam had to admit that the man had a valid reason to suspect Purdue of his wife's murder.

  “Alright, I tell you what,” Sam proposed diplomatically, “as soon as we locate…”

  “Sam! I cannot get this goddamn thing to give me all the words. Purdue's last two sentences say something about the Amber Room and the Red Army!” Nina shouted as she ran up the steps up to the Bel Etage.

  “That's Dr. Gould, right?” Detlef asked Sam. “I recognize her voice from the phone. Tell me, Mr. Cleave, what is her involvement with David Purdue?”

  “I am a colleague and friend. I advise him on historical matters during his expeditions, Mr. Holtzer,” she replied firmly to his query.

  “Good to meet you face to face, Dr. Gould,” Detlef smiled coolly. “Now tell me, Mr. Cleave, how is it that my wife was investigating something that sounds very much like the same subjects Dr. Gould was just talking about? And they both happen to know David Purdue, so why don't you tell me what I should be thinking?”

  Nina and Sam exchanged frowns. It seemed like their visitor had missing pieces to their own puzzle.

  “Mr. Holtzer, what subjects are you referring to?” Sam asked. “If you could help us figure this out, we are probably going to be able to find Purdue, and then I promise you can ask him anything you want.”

  “Without killing him, of course,” Nina added as she joined the two men on the velvet seats in the drawing room.

  “My wife was investigating the killings of the financiers and politicians in Berlin. But after her death, I found a room – a radio room, I think – and there I found articles about the assassinations and many documents on the Amber Room that was once given to Tsar Peter the Great by King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia,” Detlef relayed. “Gabi knew there was a connection between the two, but I need to speak to David Purdue to find out what it is.”

  “Well, there is a way you can talk to him, Mr. Holtzer,” Nina shrugged. “I think the information you need might be in his recent communication with us.”

  “So you do know where he is!” he snapped.

  “No, we only got this message, and we need to decipher all the words before we can go and rescue him from the people that abducted him,” Nina explained to the high-strung visitor. “If we can't decipher his message, I have no idea how to look for him.”

  “By the way, what was the rest of the message you did manage to decode?” Sam asked her inquisitively.

  She sighed, still baffled by the nonsensical wording. “It mentions ‘Army' and ‘Steppe', probably a mountain region? Then it says ‘search for Amber Room or die' and the only other thing I got was a bunch of punctuation marks and asterisks. I'm not sure if his machine is quite on point.”

  Detlef thought about the information. “Look at this,” he said suddenly, reaching into his jacket pocket. Sam assumed a defensive position, but the stranger only pulled out his cell phone. He flicked through the pictures and showed them the contents of the secret room. “One of my sources gave me coordinates to follow to find the people Gabi was threatening to expose. See those numbers? Put them in your machine and see what it does.”

  They went back in the room in the basement of the old mansion where Nina had been working with the Enigma machine. Detlef’s pictures were clear and close enough for them to discern each combination. For the next two hours, Nina entered the numbers one by one. Finally, she had a print-out of the words coinciding with the ciphers.

  “Now this is not Purdue's message; this one is based on the numbers from Gabi's maps,” Nina clarified before she read out the result. “First, it says ‘Black vs. Red in Kazakh Steppe', then ‘radiation cage' and the last two combinations ‘Mind control' and ‘ancient orgasm'.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “Ancient orgasm?”

  “Ugh! I misspoke. It's ‘ancient organism',” she stammered, much to Detlef and Sam's amusement. “So the 'Steppe' is mentioned by both Gabi and Purdue, and it is the only clue that happens to be a location.”

  Sam looked at Detlef. “So, you came all the way from Germany to find Gabi's murderer. How about a trip to the Kazakh Steppe?”

  18

  Purdue's feet still stung like hell. Every step he took felt like walking on nails, shooting up to his ankles. It made it virtually impossible for him to wear shoes, yet he knew he had to if he wanted to escape his prison. After Klaus had left the infirmary, Purdue had immediately pulled the IV out of his arm and started checked whether his legs were strong enough to carry his weight. At no point in time, he believed that they intended to nurse him for the next few days. He was expecting more torture to cripple his body and mind.

  With his affinity for technology, Purdue knew he could fiddle with their communication devices as well as whatever access control and security they employed. The Order of the Black Sun was a sovereign organization, utilizing only the best of everything to shield their interests, but Dave Purdue was a genius they could only fear. He was capable of perfecting any invention of their engineers without much effort.

  He sat up on the bed and then carefully slipped off the side to slowly put pressure on his sore soles. Wincing, Purdue tried to ignore the excruciating pain of the second-degree burns. He did not want to be discovered while he still couldn't walk or run, or he would be done for.

  While Klaus was instructing his men before leaving, their captive had already been limping through the vast maze of hallways and corridors, making a mental map to plan his escape. On the third floor, where he had been confined, he stalked along the north wall to find the end of the corridor, since he assumed there had to be a flight of stairs there. He was not at too surprised to see that the entire fortress was in fact round and that the external walls consisted of iron beams and truss members reinforced by enormous sheets of bolted-together steel.

  ‘It looks like a goddamn space ship,’ he thought to himself as he examined the architecture of the Kazakh Black Sun citadel. In the center, the building was empty, a huge space where mammoth machines or aircraft could be stored or constructed. All around it, the steel structure provided ten stories of offices, server stations, interrogation chambers, dining halls and accommodations, boardrooms, and laboratories. Purdue was in awe of the efficiency of the power supply and scientific infrastructure of the building, but he had to keep moving.

  He crept through the dark crawlspaces of out-of-commission furnaces and dusty workshops in search of an exit or at least any working communication apparatus he could use to call help. To his relief, he discovered an old air traffic control room that appeared to have been unused for decades.

  ‘Probably part of some Cold War launch stations,' he frowned as he surveyed the equipment in the rectangular room. Keeping his eye on the tinged old piece of mirror he had taken from an empty laboratory, he proceeded to hot-wire the only device he recognized. ‘Looks like an electronic version of a Morse Code transmitter,’ he guessed as he sank to his haunches to find the cable to connect to the socket in the wall. The machine was only for broadcasting number sequences, so he had to try and remember the training he had received long before his stint to Wolfenstein years ago.

  After getting the machine to work and directing its antennae toward what he reckoned was north, Purdue found a transmission device that worked like a telegraph machine, but could link up to geostationary telecommunications satellites with the correct codes. With this machine, he could convert phrases into their numerical equivalents and employ an Atbash cipher in conjunction with a mathematical coding system. ‘Binary would have been so much quicker,’ he seethed as the antiquated device kept losing his results due to short sporadic power outages from voltage fluctuations in the power lines.

  When Purdue finally produced adequate clues for Nina to solve on his Enigma machine at home, he
hacked into the old system to establish a link to the telecommunication feed. It was a stretch to attempt contacting a phone number this way, but he had to try. This was the only way he could get the number sequences to Nina with a transmission window of twenty seconds to her service provider, but surprisingly he succeeded.

  It did not take long before he heard Kemper's men running through the steel and concrete stronghold looking for him. His nerves were frayed, even though he had managed to make his emergency call. He knew it would realistically take days until they found him, so there were harrowing hours ahead for him. If they found him, Purdue feared his punishment would be of the kind he would never recover from.

  With his body still aching, he had nestled himself into a deserted sub-basement water basin behind locked iron doors covered with cobwebs and eaten by rust. It was plain to see that nobody had entered there in years, making it the perfect hideout for the injured fugitive.

  Purdue was hidden so well while waiting for his rescue, that he did not even notice that the citadel was under attack two days later. Nina had contacted Haim and Todd, Purdue's computer experts, to shut down the power grid in the surrounding area. She had given them with the coordinates Detlef had received from Milla after he had tuned into the numbers station. With this information, the two Scots wreaked havoc on the compound's electricity supply and main communication system and caused interferences on all devices such as laptops and cell phones within a radius of two miles around the Black Sun stronghold.

  Sam and Detlef breached the main entrance stealthily with a strategy they had prepared before flying into the Kazakh Steppe's desolate countryside by helicopter. They had secured the assistance of Purdue's Polish affiliate, PoleTech Air & Transit Services. While the men invaded the compound, Nina waited in the craft with the military-trained pilot, checking the vicinity with infrared imaging on the lookout for hostile movements.

  Detlef was armed with his Glock, two hunting knives, and one of his two expandable batons. The other one he had given to Sam. The journalist, in turn, had brought his own Makarov and four smoke grenades. They charged through the main entrance, expecting a hail of bullets in the dark, but instead tripped over several bodies scattered on the floor in the entryway.

  “What the hell is going on?” Sam whispered. “These people work here. Who would have killed them?”

  “From what I hear these Germans kill their own for the sake of promotion,” Detlef replied under his breath, aiming his torch at the dead men on the floor. “There are about twenty of them. Listen!”

  Sam stopped and listened. They could hear the chaos the blackout had caused on the other floors of the building. Carefully they stalked up the first flight of stairs. It was too dangerous to split up in a compound as big as this without knowledge of weaponry or numbers of its occupants. They carefully walked in single-file, guns at the ready, using their torches to light the way.

  “Let's hope they don't recognize us as intruders right away,” Sam remarked.

  Detlef smiled. “True. Let's just keep moving.”

  “Aye,” Sam said. They watched the bobbing lights of some occupants move race toward the generator room. “Oh shit! Detlef, they are going to power up the generator!”

  “Move! Move!” Detlef ordered his associate and grabbed him by the shirt. He dragged Sam with him to intercept the security men before they could reach the generator room. Following the flashlight orbs, Sam and Detlef cocked their weapons for the inevitable. As they ran, Detlef asked Sam, “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Aye, but never deliberately,” Sam answered.

  “Good, now you are going to have to – with extreme prejudice!” the big German declared. “No mercy. Or we will never make it out alive.”

  “Roger that!” Sam promised as they came face to face with the first four men not more than three feet from the door. The men didn't know that the two figures coming from the other direction were intruders until the first slug split open the first man's skull.

  Sam grimaced as he felt the hot splatter of brain matter and blood graze his face, but aimed at the second man in line and he squeezed the trigger without flinching, hitting him dead on. The slain man fell limply at Sam's feet, as he crouched to retrieve his sidearm. He aimed it at the oncoming men who had started firing at them, hitting two more. Detlef took down six men with perfect center-mass shots before following up on Sam's two targets with a slug to the skull each.

  “Nicely done, Sam,” the German smiled. “You smoke, right?”

  “I do, why?” Sam asked as he wiped the bloody mess from his face and ear. “Give me your lighter,” said his partner from the doorway. He tossed Detlef his Zippo before they entered the generator room and set the fuel tanks on fire. On their way out they disabled the engines with a few well-placed bullets.

  Purdue had heard the madness from his small shelter and made for the main entrance, but only because it was the only exit he knew of. Limping heavily with his hand braced against the wall to guide him in the darkness, Purdue slowly climbed the emergency stairs to the foyer of the ground floor.

  The doors were wide open, and in the sparse light that fell into the room, he carefully stepped over the bodies until he reached the welcoming breath of the warm, dry air of the desert landscape outside. Weeping with gratefulness and fear, Purdue ran toward the helicopter with his arms waving, hoping to God that it didn't belong to the enemy.

  Nina jumped out and came running toward him. “Purdue! Purdue! Are you okay? Come this way!” she cried as she approached him. Purdue looked up at the beautiful historian. She was shouting into her transmitter, telling Sam and Detlef that she had Purdue. When Purdue fell into her arms, he collapsed, dragging her down with him onto the sand.

  “I couldn't wait to feel your touch again, Nina,” he panted. “You came through.”

  “I always do,” she smiled and held her emaciated friend in her arms until the others arrived. They boarded the helicopter and took off in a westward direction where they had secured accommodation on the edge of the Aral Sea.

  19

  “We have to find the Amber Room, or else the Order will. It is of utmost importance that we find it before they do because this time they will topple the world's governments and instigate violence of genocidal proportions,” Purdue insisted.

  They were huddled around a fire in the backyard of a house that Sam had rented in the settlement of Aral. It was semi-furnished three-bedroom shack and did not possess half the amenities the group was used to in First World Countries. But it was inconspicuous and quaint, and they could rest there until Purdue felt better, at least. In the meantime, Sam had to keep a close eye on Detlef to make sure the widower did not lash out and kill the billionaire before sorting out the matter of Gabi's death first.

  “We will get on that as soon as you feel better, Purdue,” Sam said. “For now, we just lay low and rest.”

  Nina's hair hung in a braid from under her knitted beanie as she lit up another smoke. Purdue's warning, intended to be foreboding, did not strike her as much of a problem with the way she felt about the world lately. It was not so much the verbal exchange with the godlike entity in Sam's psyche that spurred her indifferent thoughts. She was just more aware of the repeating mistakes of mankind and the ever-present failure to maintain balance all over the world.

  Aral used to be a fishing port and harbor city before the mighty Aral Sea virtually dried up completely, leaving only a bare desert basin as legacy. It saddened Nina that so many beautiful bodies of water had dried up and vanished because of human infestation. Sometimes, when she felt particularly apathetic, she wondered if the world would not be better off without the human race killing everything in it, not excluding itself.

  Humans reminded her of toddlers left in charge of an anthill. They simply did not possess the wisdom or humility to realize that they were part of the world, not in charge of it. In arrogance and irresponsibility they bred like cockroaches without considering that instead of killing the planet to acc
ommodate their numbers and needs, they should have curbed their own population growth. Nina felt vexed that, as a collective, humans refused to see that producing smaller populations with higher intellectual faculty would yield a far more efficient world without destroying all beauty for their greed and reckless existence.

  Deep in thought Nina smoked her cigarette next to the fire. Thoughts and ideologies that she was not supposed to be entertaining entered her mind, where it was safe to harbor taboo subjects. She thought about the Nazi objectives and found that some of those superficially atrocious ideas were, in fact, feasible solutions to a lot of problems that had brought the world to its knees in the present age.

  Naturally, she abhorred genocide, cruelty, and oppression. But ultimately she agreed that to a degree eradicating weak genetic make-up and implementing birth control by sterilization after two children per family was not altogether monstrous. It would keep human numbers down, therefore preserve forest and agricultural land instead of constant deforestation for the construction of more human habitat.

  When she had looked at the land below during their flight to Aral, Nina had lamented all these things in her mind. The glorious landscapes, once full of life had shriveled and withered under the foot of man.

  No, she did not condone the acts of the Third Reich, but its proficiency and order were undeniable. ‘If only today there were people with such rigid discipline and singular aspiration wanting to change the world for the better,' she sighed as she finished the last of her butt. ‘Imagine a world in which someone like that didn't oppress people but stopped ruthless corporations. In which, instead of exterminating cultures, they would destroy media brainwashing, and we would all be better off. And there would be fucking lake to feed the people here now.'

  She flicked her cigarette butt into the fire. Her eyes caught Purdue's staring at her, but she pretended not to be fazed by his attention. Perhaps it was the dancing shadows of the fire that gave his gaunt face such a menacing look, but she did not like it.