‘OK, I’ll rephrase my question of yesterday. Did you pack your diving gear? Because it looks like you’re going to need it. We always knew this was a potential wild-goose chase, but at least there was a chance we’d find something. Now,’ she waved a despairing hand at the acres of grey water surrounded by pine trees, ‘now this. If they’ve sunk the painting in here we haven’t got a hope in hell of finding it. Not without a boat and a diving team.’
But Jamie only continued to gaze out across the rippling surface. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said distractedly.
‘You don’t think we should give up?’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll need my diving suit. Not even my swimming trunks.’
‘But you read Brohm’s words: Below the water you will find it. Well, there’s your water and if you want to find the Goddam thing you’ll have to find it yourself.’ She turned away and would have walked back towards the car, but Jamie put his hand gently on her arm.
‘You’re forgetting who we’re dealing with here. With Walter Brohm nothing is ever quite what it seems. This is a riddle within a riddle. No one in their right minds would hide a painting worth millions of pounds underwater. Gold, yes. Jewels, yes. But not something delicate, like an Old Master.
‘So we have to start with the premise that it’s not there, and ask ourselves what Walter actually was telling us. Think. He’s a scientist, a man very precise with his words. He would say Below the surface or Under the water, maybe even Below the water line, but never Below the water.’ He led her by the arm across to the opposite side of the road, where the Oder gorge cut through the trees as if it had been hacked out by a giant with a knife. ‘Unless he meant below the dam.’
‘Down there?’
‘Down there.’
* * *
‘What are we looking for?’
It was a question Jamie had been asking himself as he studied the map and tried to make it work with the shape formed by the four legs of the Black Sun symbol on the silk. They were sitting in the hired Toyota in a walkers’ car park, three miles downstream of the Oderteich, and it was only now that they’d begun to realize the true scale of the task facing them. He had never expected it to be easy, but, on paper, it had looked relatively straightforward, if strenuous and time-consuming. Find a track that would take them in to the general area pinpointed by the maps and then cover the ground until they discovered . . . what?
‘I don’t know. A sign, another symbol, a message painted on a rock. I don’t think we’re going to find the Raphael nailed to a tree. Walter Brohm says: ‘you must look beyond the veil’, which I suppose means whatever we’re looking for isn’t what it seems. But the diary says it exists and the map says it’s around here somewhere.’
‘That’s helpful,’ she said in a voice that reminded him of nails dragged across a school blackboard.
Somewhere. That was the problem. The forest around them would have been all but impenetrable except for the woodsmen’s tracks and walking trails carved into it. Low cloud the colour and consistency of guncotton added to the gloom, providing a thick mantle that brushed the treetops and wept a steady drizzle of misty rain that made it difficult to see more than fifty paces. Not that the visibility mattered. Even on a good day the view would have consisted of mile upon mile of grey-green spruce and the odd patch of bare granite. Somewhere behind them in the fog he could feel the great stubborn mass of the Brocken looming like a fox waiting to pounce. It wasn’t a nice feeling.
‘Well, whatever it is, we aren’t going to find it in here,’ Sarah said decisively. She zipped her black and green Gore-tex jacket to the neck and dragged the hood over her red-streaked hair. He followed suit and they got out of the car into the rain. The rucksacks were stowed in the boot and they checked the contents before setting out. They decided to start their search in the centre of the gorge, on the grounds that whoever had hidden the painting would have done so at one of the less accessible spots. ‘You’re sure you’ve got the compass? I have the feeling that once we get into this shit we’re going to need it.’
He showed her the perspex-encased dial and a pack of sandwiches wrapped in plastic. ‘We’ve enough food so we won’t starve to death until next Tuesday.’ He wiped the rain from his face. ‘I don’t think we’ll have to worry about dying of thirst.’
‘You don’t say.’
Their route took them along a forest track that led in the direction of the river. Five minutes after they set out, a white minibus drove into the car park and eight men in wet-weather gear jumped from the rear led by a man almost as broad as he was tall. Ensuring the minibus screened him from the road, Gustav took a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol from the floor of the bus, rotated the selector lever to ‘safe’ and pulled the cocking handle back to empty the chamber. Guns were the tools of his trade, but he thought the compact, matt-black Heckler had a rare dangerous beauty. This model, the SD1, had been developed for use by border guards during the Cold War and was fitted with a suppressor. It weighed less than three kilos and was small enough to be easily concealed. The stubby silencer added three inches to the length of the gun, but was remarkably effective, as he’d found when he’d topped four ragheads in a row outside Fayzabad. Stupid bastards stood around like dummies while he took them out one at a time. Frederick wouldn’t have been happy to see so much firepower, but Frederick wasn’t here. Gustav didn’t intend to take any chances with Saintclair and the girl. The purple bruise over his left eye was a throbbing mass of pain. These people were owed. He slung the weapon around his neck by its leather strap and zipped his jacket over it. The others were armed with pistols, the Sig Sauer 266, standard German police weapon. Gustav ordered them to gather round as he spread a large-scale map of the Braunlage area on a nearby picnic table. He didn’t like the look of this fucking jungle, but Frederick had sounded uncharacteristically alarmed when he heard the Englishman had visited the Oderteich and insisted they hit them at the first opportunity.
‘All right, you know my feelings about this.’ He ran his finger over the line of the Oder gorge. ‘It’s a shithole in there, but we have our orders. Ideally we take them before they descend into the gorge, but if that’s not possible we split into two teams as discussed. Like a game shoot; beaters to the north with Jurgen, the gun line to the south under Werner. I will direct from above using the tactical radio and flush them out if necessary. Ideally we want them alive, but the important thing is to recover what they have with them. Anybody fucks up and they’ll have me to deal with. Are we clear?’
‘What if they start shooting? They killed Arnim and shot Hans.’ It was Jurgen, the Hamburg bully boy who liked to think he was tough, but one of these days would find out different.
‘It won’t happen,’ Gustav said dismissively. ‘They’re amateurs. Arnim was a fluke.’
‘But if it does?’
Gustav thought about that. It was true that he owed them for Arnim and when it came right down to it, Frederick said the priority was to recover the journal.
‘If they fire on you, kill them. But I want that book.’
XXXI
8 MAY 1945. We were so close, I could see the snow-caps of Switzerland shimmering in the distance. They hit us just after dawn between Saulgau and some one-horse hamlet that wasn’t worth a name. A unit of half-starved SS stragglers and Hitler Youth holdouts who nobody had bothered to tell the war was over. I was in the second jeep, with the three Nazis in the back and Stan at the wheel. Commanding the first, Lieutenant Al Stewart had survived parachute drops in Sicily, Normandy and Holland, but like me he was worn out by war, the instincts that had brought him through half a dozen firefights and won him the Silver Star shaved wafer thin by a cocktail of exhaustion, constant fear and overwound tension. A month ago, even a week, he would have seen the little beech wood and sensed danger, but not today. The war was over, the sun was shining and I could hear his laughter blown back by the breeze from a hundred yards ahead. At least he died happy. The smoke trail of the panzerfaust came
streaking from his left front and I screamed a warning I knew was wasted breath. The rocket hit the jeep square on the engine block and flipped it on to its back, throwing three of the occupants clear and crushing Al’s body beneath its two thousand pounds of steel. Even as Stan swerved into the roadside and I threw myself into the ditch I consoled myself that my friend had almost certainly died in the explosion. But one of the occupants had survived because I could hear him screaming. I’d heard that scream before, from a man who had been crushed by a Tiger tank in a street in Arnhem, and I knew that, whoever it was, I’d be burying him before dusk. If I lived. At the moment, that was an open question. My mind was in combat mode now, that instinctive, three-dimensional calculating machine that takes you above the action and allows you to work out angles, fields of fire and dead ground without conscious thought. Our ambushers continued to pour fire into the stricken jeep and the bodies of the men who’d occupied it; at least one MG-42 and probably a Schmeisser machine pistol and a couple of rifles. Combat mode told me this was an opportunist attack, or I would already be dead, crushed beneath my own jeep or burned, eviscerated and riddled with bullets, in that overkill that war is so fond of. If they’d had time to set up a proper ambush they would have done it so that the panzerfaust hit the first jeep and the MG-42 took out the second simultaneously. The fact that they hadn’t meant they’d probably reached the edge of the woods just as the jeep arrived and someone had decided it was too good a chance to miss. Bad luck for Al, good luck for me. That was the way it went. They’d been so focused on their target that they didn’t even know we were here, but that couldn’t last for long.
I looked round, and found three pairs of eyes staring. Klosse was calculating the chances of jumping me and taking my M1 carbine. Strasser’s were wide with pure terror, but I knew that if Klosse moved the SD man would follow him. Walter Brohm was wearing a little half smile that asked me what I was going to do next.
‘Stan!’ I kept my voice low and the Pole looked back from where he had been covering the road. He nodded as I signalled him to move into the forest and towards our ambushers’ flank. He shot a last look at the three prisoners, grinned at me and was gone into the undergrowth.
‘Here.’ I tossed my pistol to Brohm. ‘If they move kill them.’ Then I followed Stan into the wood.
Why did I put my trust in Brohm, who was undoubtedly the least trustworthy of all? Because the one thing I could trust was his instinct for self-preservation. Walter Brohm had a destiny. He was not going to join some ragged band of fanatics whose fate was, at best, to end up in a prison camp, or more probably be hunted down and killed by the Allies. Walter Brohm had placed his faith in America. Now I was placing my faith, and my life, in the hands of Walter Brohm. Stan and I had operated as a team on and off for a year and now we moved sweetly and silently through the trees, taking it in turns to cover each other. We froze as a last burst from the machine gun brought the firing to a halt. I was gambling that the firepower I heard was evidence of their strength. The MG-42 required a crew of two, one to fire and one to load, three more for the small arms and the faust, add two just in case. Say seven. We began moving again and I motioned Stan right, towards the trees edging the road. I heard voices, at first quiet, then high-pitched shouting as they celebrated their victory. In my mind I could see what was happening and what was about to happen and I picked up the pace, taking the chance of being heard and arming a grenade as I moved forward at the crouch. Stan kept pace with me. Thirty yards ahead I could make out movement through the trees and I prayed they were concentrating on their front and not their flank. They would be relaxed now, in that state of post-combat euphoria when a man is at his most vulnerable. They would be hungry and focused on whatever treasures the jeep held. I slowed and dropped to a crawl among the leaf mulch and the dead branches and I sensed Stan mirroring my movements to the right. Then I felt him tense, stop, half-sensed, half-saw the hand signal. Three, no, four, moving into the road to investigate the jeep. Wait. He nodded, his eyes intense, but not frightened. Stan had been fighting Germans since 1939 when the world had been looking the other way as they raped his country. He was better than I was. Wait. Wait. I imagined one of the men at the burning jeep looking at the mangled bodies, kicking them, just to make sure, turning, seeing the second jeep by the ditch a hundred yards away. A shout. Fire! Stan’s controlled bursts raked the road at the same instant I threw my first grenade. The second was in the air as the first exploded and I heard screams as lumps of razor-edged shrapnel scorched the air between the trees, tearing flesh and smashing bone. I ignored the men in the road. They were Stan’s. I ran forward, screaming, though I wasn’t aware of it, and firing short bursts at the two soldiers by the machine gun and the two who had simply been waiting to share the spoils of the attack. Three of them were down, caught in the grenade blasts, but the fourth blazed away and I felt the hot breath of a passing bullet on my cheek and heard the unmistakable shoop . . . shoop . . . shoop of rounds passing over my head. Inexperienced. Firing too high. I took my time, aimed and he was punched back with two bullets in his chest and another in his throat. A second grey-clad figure struggled to his feet at the edge of my vision and I fired as I turned towards him, the burst folding him in half like a puppet with its strings cut. It was finished, but I was still flying, my mind ranging over the scene around me and the carbine kicking as I automatically fired into the prone figures lying by the wrecked machine gun. I’d learned the lesson the hard way a long time ago. A wounded man can kill you, a dead man can’t. As I stood in the disbelieving void of the aftermath, I registered single shots coming from the trees by the road and I willed my protesting body across the pine needles to take up a position a few yards from the Pole.
‘How many?’
‘Just the one, hiding behind the jeep.’
I replaced the half-empty clip in the carbine with a full one and he did the same. No point in prolonging this. It had to be done.
‘Three-second burst then we rush him. I’ll take right. You take left.’ On such arbitrary decisions your life hangs. Stan just nodded.
‘Go!’
I fired towards my side of the overturned jeep, leaping forward as the last bullet left the barrel. When I was halfway across the road I saw a muzzle flash a heartbeat before someone kicked me in the right shoulder and I went down hard on the gravel. I heard Stan continue firing and a high-pitched voice call out ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’, which is what Gerry says when he wants to give up. But Stan hadn’t heard from his family since the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and he knew what that meant. A single shot was followed by a sharp cry, then there was silence.
I didn’t feel any pain yet, only a numbness in my right side, but I knew the pain would come. I lifted my head to see Stan’s grinning face looking down at me. He was holding my carbine. The German’s bullet had smashed the wooden stock and the impact had knocked me off my feet, but otherwise I was unharmed. He held out a hand to help me up and we walked slowly back up the road . . . where Walter Brohm waited.
XXXII
THE SOFT HISS of the rain filtering through the trees was the only sound apart from the scuff of boots on gravel as Jamie and Sarah made their way along the unpaved loggers’ road. Jamie quickly discovered that walking with the hood of his jacket raised reduced his peripheral vision to zero and his auditory perception by about 75 per cent. Any follower could have been wearing steel-shod boots and whistling the Dam Busters theme tune and he still wouldn’t have known until it was too late. He lowered the hood. Now the misty rain worked its way inside his shirt collar and trickled down his back where it turned the waistband of his boxer shorts into a chilly, sodden trial. Sarah followed his example and the rain quickly plastered her hair tight to her head and face, making her look like an extra from a low-budget zombie movie.
She caught his glance. ‘Don’t say a single word.’
Spruce trees grew tight to the flanks of the path, but their ordered ranks and the lack of thick undergrowth gave Jamie increasing hope th
at conditions might not be too difficult once they were forced to leave the road. They’d been walking for twenty minutes when the track took a sharp turn to the south.
He stopped. ‘We need to be further west.’ He pointed away from the road, into the trees.
‘Let me see the map again,’ Sarah said. He handed it over and she studied it, grimacing. She sniffed. ‘You’re right, but it’s going to be a lot harder going.’
He shrugged. ‘We don’t have any choice. We’ll stick to the track for another hundred metres; with luck there’ll be a spur that goes in the right direction. If not, we take to the trees. It might not be as bad as you think.’
It was much worse. They discovered that the cultivated, evenly spaced plantations by the trackside quickly gave way to wild woodland where fallen branches and rotting vegetation created natural traps designed to break a leg or turn an ankle. Worse, these were covered by a mass of bracken and nettles, and vicious waist-high brambles created impenetrable nests of coiled, inch-thick tentacles that might as well have been made of razor wire. Every step became a lottery, each wrong move a five-minute delay while the hooked thorns were disengaged from clothing and flesh and a new route was found. Within minutes of leaving the path Jamie had forgotten about the rain because he was sweating so much he might have been sitting in a bath.
With each hundred yards they covered his respect for Sarah Grant increased. She accepted every setback without complaint, her eyes narrowed and her face a mask of determination. A bramble had cut across her forehead and a thin line of blood tinted the rain running down her nose pink, but, if she noticed, she ignored it. Eventually, they stopped for a breather and she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eyes.
‘Boy, you sure know how to show a girl a good time, Saintclair.’
He laughed and offered her a bottle of water. ‘Some champagne, madam? You’ll find that life’s always an adventure when you’re with me.’ She accepted it, took a deep drink and handed it back.
The Doomsday Testament Page 18
