The Shadow Project

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Don’t worry, Aunt Silvia. I’ll be fine. I’m just going to put one in my arm. Nothing too bad.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to spoil your golf swing,’ Ben said. He took another half-step forward.

  ‘Everyone will think mad Major Hope came back for revenge,’ Otto went on. ‘He couldn’t bear that he’d been sacked like that. You know what these Special Forces people are like. Maniacs. Psychopaths who live to kill. I heard the shots. Came running to see what was going on, and he shot me in the arm but I managed to get away to call the cops. Then he blew his own brains out before they could catch him.’

  ‘Leaving you the only heir to the Steiner billions,’ Ben said. ‘You really are a clever guy, the way you’ve thought this out.’

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ Otto said.

  ‘Really. I’m impressed.’ Keep him talking. Two more steps, and he could chance it. He didn’t care any more about taking a hit.

  But the chance never came. Ruth had been standing there, to Ben’s right and just behind, listening in dumb horror. She suddenly stepped forward and walked quickly towards Otto, holding out her hand. ‘That’s enough. Just stop, right now. Hear me? Give me the g—’

  The deafening report of the .380 filled the room. Ruth spun round from the impact of the bullet and fell to the floor.

  Silvia let out a screech of horror. Dorenkamp stood frozen for a fraction of a second and then dived under the table for cover.

  Otto backed away towards the window, his eyes bulging at what he’d done, clutching the gun with both hands.

  Ben gaped down at his sister’s prone body. Saw the quick spread of the blood through the material of her blouse.

  But before he could react, he heard a roar of fury. Maximilian Steiner had said nothing for a long time and hadn’t moved a muscle. Now he was on his feet. Kicking out his chair from behind him and charging around the side of the conference table at Otto.

  Otto fired from the hip. Steiner staggered and kept on coming, and Otto fired again. Blood flew, but the billionaire’s momentum couldn’t be stopped by a small-calibre bullet. He slammed bodily into his nephew. The little black pistol spun out of Otto’s grip and bounced across the floor as the two men crashed through the window with a splintering of glass and wood. Steiner drove Otto out onto the balcony. His fists were locked around his neck and he was shaking him violently, shoving him up against the white stone balustrade.

  Ben fell to his knees beside Ruth. She wasn’t moving. His hand was shaking uncontrollably as he felt for a pulse. Don’t-die-don’t-die-don’t-die. When he felt it his heart did a backflip. Silvia threw herself down on the other side of her daughter’s body and he had to push her out of the way as he feverishly checked to see where the bullet had hit. Ripped open the neck of her blouse and saw that the blood was welling up from a clean round hole in her shoulder. His fingers were slick with it as he felt for the damage. No bone fragments in the exit wound. The jacketed round had passed right through.

  Silvia was wailing. Ben shook her with his bloody hands. ‘Call an ambulance. Now.’ Then Ben was on his feet.

  Just in time to see Steiner throw Otto right over the stone balustrade.

  Ben reached the edge at the same moment that Otto’s cartwheeling body hit the glass dome of the conservatory that was directly below the conference room window. He crashed right through it. Right down into the ornamental fountain below.

  He never hit the water. His fall was abruptly halted by the bronze tines of Neptune’s trident. Impaled like a trout on a harpoon. The spikes pierced through his belly and ribs and jutted out through his back. Otto screamed and thrashed for a few seconds, and then his body fell limp. The water of the fountain was turning rapidly pink as Ben looked away.

  Maximilian Steiner lay collapsed on the balcony beside him and the blood began to spread across the stone floor.

  Ben ran back inside for Ruth.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  When the three ambulances shrieked out of the Steiner residence gates, Ben was riding with his sister, and he clutched her hand in his all the way to Bern. She drifted in and out of consciousness as the sedatives the paramedics had pumped into her took effect. Not long before they reached the hospital, her eyes fluttered open and she looked drowsily up at him from the stretcher.

  ‘This was all my fault,’ she murmured. ‘It was me who told him about it. None of these things would have happened if—’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ Ben said.

  The ambulances screeched into the emergency room bays. Paramedics threw open the doors and Ruth was rushed out and wheeled hurriedly down white-lit corridors towards the operating theatre with her drip bag swaying on its stand. Ben walked with the gurney as far as the hospital staff would let him. Steiner was up ahead, the blood soaking fast through the sheets that covered his body, tubes in his mouth and nose. Two doctors burst out of a double doorway at the end of the corridor, one male, one female, already prepped for theatre.

  ‘We’ll take it from here,’ the female doctor said, raising a hand to halt him. Ben stood back and watched as Steiner and Ruth were wheeled through the doors and out of sight.

  Then all he could do was pace anxiously up and down in the waiting room as people came and went around him. Every second of waiting seemed like a week. After forty minutes, Silvia Steiner arrived. Her eyes were puffy and red as she joined Ben in the waiting area and perched herself on the edge of one of the chairs.

  ‘Heinrich and I have just finished talking to the police,’ she said. Her voice was husky from crying and weak with emotion, but as she went on there was a note of fierceness that Ben hadn’t heard before. ‘I told them that our nephew was insane with jealousy because he thought he was being denied his proper inheritance. He took a gun and tried to kill his cousin, and he would have killed us all if Max hadn’t acted to defend us. Then there was a terrible accident and Otto fell off the balcony.’ She reached for a handkerchief, dabbed her eyes and composed herself. ‘That’s what I told them. And I made sure that Heinrich said the same. That will be our story. The whole story,’ she added.

  Ben looked at her and admired her strength. Not just hers. ‘Your husband’s a hero,’ he said. It sounded strange to hear the words coming from his own mouth. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

  ‘Your name has been left out of it,’ she told him. ‘This is a family matter. Although I suppose you are family now, in a way.’

  He thanked her. Just at that moment, the female doctor who’d talked to Ben earlier came striding up the corridor. The first piece of news was good. Ruth was fine. There had been no complications, no major damage. Her arm would be in a sling for a few weeks but would heal perfectly.

  ‘My husband?’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that Herr Steiner suffered a minor stroke on the operating table,’ the doctor replied gravely. ‘We’re doing everything we can. He’s in intensive care right now.’

  ‘When can I see him?’

  ‘Not yet. But soon. Please try not to worry.’ The doctor smiled and tried to look reassuring, then turned and hurried away.

  Silvia Steiner fell back into her chair. Ben crouched beside her. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Pray for him.’

  ‘I will. And you look after yourself, Silvia.’ She looked at him tearfully. ‘You’re going?’ He nodded.

  She gripped his arm. ‘You go. Finish this.’

  ‘I need to get into Maximilian’s safe. Do you have the combination?’

  She shook her head. ‘But Heinrich does. You tell him that I said to provide you with anything you need. Anything. He won’t give you any trouble.’

  Before she’d even finished saying it, Ben was heading for the exit.

  ‘You take care,’ she called after him, but he wasn’t listening.

  The Steiner residence was a hive of police and forensic teams. The media were already at the gates, and pretty soon they’d be swarming all over Heinrich Dorenkamp for a statement abo
ut the tragedy that had seen Otto Steiner, heir to one of Europe’s biggest fortunes, fall to a horrible death. The newspapers and TV would be full of it that night and probably for the next week, until a fresh disaster came along to turn everyone’s heads the other way.

  Silvia had been right. Dorenkamp didn’t even try to resist Ben’s request to see inside the safe. Five minutes after walking into the foyer, Ben was sitting alone at the billionaire’s Louis XIV desk, reading a sixty-page bound sheaf of waxy, yellowed papers that few eyes had seen since 1945. Each faded page was headed with a Nazi imperial eagle perched on a wreathed swastika, and the official seal of the SS.

  Ruth wouldn’t have been disappointed. The documents had it all. Detailed diagrams and cutaway drawings of the mysterious Bell, showing all its bizarre internal workings. Column after column of technical data whose meaning Ben couldn’t even begin to decipher. Grainy photographs of what looked like some kind of enormous underground factory, a maze of tunnels and galleries, shafts and chambers, together with comprehensive plans of its layout. Everything he could have asked for was right here.

  As well as some things that he didn’t need to know, but found himself reading with a chill in his spine. Buried near the back, yellowed and faded with age, was a written military order dated 1944, and Ben’s German was good enough to work out what it was. It was an order sanctioning the building of the secret facility under the supervision of the Kammlerstab, the general’s own personal staff. This hadn’t just been some disused munitions factory that Kammler had commandeered for his own use. The whole mammoth construction development had been undertaken for the single purpose of housing his special weapons project and keeping it a deadly secret from the outside world.

  Two names were signed at the foot of the page. The upper scrawl belonged to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS.

  Underneath it was an ugly, spiky flourish of a signature. The ultimate sanction. The mark of Adolf Hitler himself.

  The next few pages were a detailed report on the construction of the secret facility, showing plans of the temporary railway that had carried trainload after trainload of forced labourers from the concentration camps to work on the project. Among the figures in the right margin were statistics of the number who had died, from exhaustion or disease, or from electrocution or drowning or tunnel cave-in, during the build. Tens of thousands of them, their unspeakable suffering reduced to an anonymous typed entry in a report, and all just so that Hans Kammler could keep his machine hidden from Allied Intelligence. The place had been a death camp in its own right.

  Ben had read enough. He put the papers down on the desk. Reached for Steiner’s phone and called Jeff at Le Val.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Jeff asked.

  ‘Plenty. I’ll explain when I see you. Is Brooke still there?’

  ‘She’s back in London,’ Jeff said. ‘Left this morning.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘She’s worried about you. Listen, someone called Sabrina phoned, asking about Adam and Rory.’

  ‘That’s what I’m phoning you for, Jeff. I need your help.’

  ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ Jeff said.

  ‘I’m asking. Get over to the airport PDQ. I’m sending a private jet to collect you. You can’t miss it. It’s got the name Steiner written on the side in great big letters. I’ll be waiting for you in Bern, and I’ll brief you in the air.’

  If Jeff was surprised, he didn’t react. Or maybe nothing Ben did surprised him any more. ‘Do I need to bring anything?’

  ‘Just yourself,’ Ben said. ‘And as much tactical raid gear from the armoury room as you can stuff into two big holdalls.’

  ‘Sounds like fun. Where are we going?’

  Ben picked up the sheaf of documents, flipped a couple of pages and looked again at the faded map that had been drawn by SS General Hans Kammler sixty-five years earlier.

  ‘We’re going to Hungary,’ he said. ‘To a hidden Nazi base inside a mountain.’

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  The luxury interior of a private jet seemed like a strange place to unzip two big eighty-litre NATO-issue grey canvas holdalls containing a small armoury of light weapons and munitions, survival gear, woodland-camouflage combat clothing, gloves and boots. The equipment spilled out over the plush carpet and Ben ran through it all. Jeff had chosen well. He nodded. ‘Perfect.’

  By the time the jet had reached its ceiling altitude and was speeding eastwards towards Budapest, Ben was filling Jeff in on everything. Their destination was the largest mountain range in Europe: the Carpathians. Kárpátok in Hungarian, a rugged rocky arc that stretched for hundreds of miles beyond its borders through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Romania and Serbia. It was in the western Carpathians, buried in a desolate spot in the north-eastern corner of Hungary near the border with Slovakia, that General Kammler had built his secret facility sixty-five years ago. There it had remained, untouched, unexplored, virtually unknown. Now it was time to bust it wide open.

  There was no telling what they were going to meet there. Otto Steiner might have hired a team of ten, or there could be a hundred armed mercenaries there holding the O’Connors. That was something to worry about when they got there.

  It wasn’t long after Ben had finished briefing Jeff that the fast jet touched down on a specially-reserved runway at Budapest Ferihegy International Airport. Steiner’s influence had a lengthy reach, and Heinrich Dorenkamp wasn’t slack in obeying the orders he’d been given. Ben and Jeff carried the two holdalls to a private room where a sober official handed over the keys to a Porsche Cayenne Turbo 4×4.

  The high-speed non-stop bullet train from Budapest to the remote city of Miskolc took one hour and forty-five minutes. Ben meant to beat that time, and the big 4.8-litre car was the tool for the job. They carved eastwards across the country with their cargo on the seats behind them. Dusk was settling and the full moon was on the rise over the plains and forests as they bypassed Miskolc and began the winding journey upwards through the foothills of the towering mountains, stopping every so often to check the copy of Kammler’s map. Upwards and upwards through dense woodland, the road carried them far away from any town or village until it had narrowed to a track. The Porsche was as good off-road as it was on tarmac, and they were jolted from side to side as Ben hammered it over the rutted ground, the powerful headlights picking out every rock and pothole.

  Jeff pointed through the windscreen. ‘There. The old railway.’ Through the overgrown grass and brambles it was still possible to see where the earth had been banked to make way for the tracks ferrying the trainloads of death camp prisoners to their new home – for many of them, the journey to their grave. The rails themselves were long gone, hastily removed by the SS Building and Works Division in the closing months of the war before their presence could draw the eye of Allied aerial reconnaissance scouts. It had been many, many years since organised transport had come this way.

  But someone else had been here, and recently. As the way became narrower and wilder through the tunnel of the trees, the Porsche’s headlights threw pools of shadow into tyre tracks in the dirt. It looked as though a number of vehicles had used the route, four-wheel-drives and maybe a car with a wide wheelbase or some kind of van.

  Ben eyed the map spread out on the dashboard. Kammler’s drawings had been every bit as precise as could be expected from a man who was not only a trained engineer but a megalomaniac and a ruthless perfectionist. Everything was right. The co-ordinates were dead on. There was no question that the ominous black shape they could now see looming up ahead through the gaps in the trees, its rocky crags reflecting the light of the full moon, was Kammler’s mountain. They were close.

  Ben killed the lights, driving by moonlight. After another couple of minutes he swung a right off the track and bumped the car through the undergrowth until it was masked by foliage. He and Jeff got out, pulled out the holdalls. Waited for their vision to acclimatise to the dark, then started preparing f
or the task ahead. They didn’t speak as they went through the old routine that had once been their whole way of life, pulling on the woodland camouflage clothing, lacing up their boots, re-checking and dividing up the weapons. The armament was simple but effective: two silenced Heckler & Koch MP5 machine carbines, two Browning pistols and two slim, double-edged, black-bladed killing knives in leg sheaths. In addition to that, Ben carried a cut-down Ithaca combat shotgun across his back while Jeff slung a stubby grenade launcher round his shoulder.

  Aside from the weaponry and ammunition in their packs, they each had a coil of slim, lightweight but very strong rope, which they slung diagonally around their bodies. Sub-vocal radio mikes and earpieces allowed them to communicate across a distance in the softest of whispers. The final piece of equipment for each of them was the ex-military Gen 3 zoomable night-vision goggles that attached to a head harness. Capable of operating in virtual zero-light conditions, the goggles turned the world a grainy, surreal sea-green.

  The two men set off, moving like ghosts in single file. They made their way cautiously along the track, scanning far and wide ahead of them as they walked. The ground was rising steadily upwards, the wild forest slowly thinning out as they approached higher ground and the base of the mountain.

  Ben couldn’t stop thinking about what they were going to find there. Were Adam and Rory O’Connor still even alive? He battled his doubts away to the back of his mind and walked on. His goggles illuminated the way ahead in an eerie glow. He could sense Jeff’s presence behind him, but the only sound he could hear was the beating of his own heart and the gentle sigh of the mountain breeze through the branches.

  The crack of a twig and a rustle of foliage at two o’clock. Ben froze, raised his MP5.

  The bear’s eyes glowed like green torches in Ben’s goggles as it stopped in the middle of the path and turned to look at them. Then it ambled on unhurriedly, its shaggy coat rippling as it walked. It slipped into the trees on the other side of the track and disappeared.