Hunt for the Holy Grail

by Preston W Child

  “Shut up, Ted,” Miller scolded.

  He took a look at the picture in Olivia’s notebook and concluded that it was the same, bearing the crude way Olivia had done her work. Miller glanced at Peter Williams.

  “What do you think, Professor?”

  Peter had seen it too, the resemblance. But there was nothing in his repertoire of German artifacts that came to mind, for he surmised that this was a lock.

  “A lock needs a key,” he muttered.

  “You’re saying this is a lock?” Miller puzzled.

  “I believe it is.”

  Olivia said, “Yes it is.”

  She started back into her bag again. She had Kruger’s stuff in a waterproof paper bag. Keeping the box had been too cumbersome. She opened the bag. She looked at Peter.

  “If Kruger was planning a trip here someday, he definitely would have figured a way to open this vault. Hell, it’s a vault—”

  “And vaults keep secrets,” Peter cut in.

  “That’s right. I have unexplained objects from Kruger’s box here, maybe we could find something.”

  Olivia spread the objects on the floor. There in the middle of the clutter was the object shaped like a cross. Like the cross on the swastika.

  “Bingo!” exclaimed Peter.

  He took it and rushed to the wall. An expectant silence fell on the group, a holding of breaths. Peter tried the cross on but it didn’t fit. He turned it around, same thing. It just won’t fit.

  “Come on, man,” he grumbled, manipulating the cross in different permutations.

  “Give it up, Peter,” said Ted. “It ain’t gonna work, you can’t make it work if it won’t.”

  “Shut up, you son of a bitch!” Peter screamed at Ted.

  Spittle flew in the air. Peter glared at Ted, his chest heaved. The lines on his face deeper and his eyes shut. He gripped the star in a hand that was now a fist.

  Ted Cooper reeled on his foot. Even though he packed more pounds around his shoulders, and pound for pound, toe to toe, he’d probably knock Peter down. He recovered quick. Ted reverted to his contemptible self.

  “Oh there you go again,” he taunted. “See, this is why I’m here, Peter. To check your fickle spirit. You don’t have the guts for this. You are here because I wanted you to be, and because your alcoholic lady friend here happens to be half as smart as my grad students. So bring it on, I’ll break you down!”

  Olivia’s face was white wax. She felt her knees give under her. Peter looked at her and saw the folly of what he had just done. He had let the circumstances get the best of him. He looked at the star in his hands and then at the embarrassed faces in front of him.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” he murmured.

  Nicolai took the object from his hand and patted Peter on the shoulder with a smile.

  Frank Miller said, “Lets rest, folks. I think we need it.”

  —

  Olivia distracted herself with work. She knelt before the objects and started sorting them. She opened the notes from Kruger’s box that she read through over and over. Words that were both German and a little English. Terms and numbers jumped at her. In her emotional turmoil it was all a random combination.

  Yet, she was certain that there was a pattern to all the chaos. If only she could quiet the scream in her head, the words that Ted said, the ones the papers published, and the hardest of them all, John’s blood, half-blown face every time someone accused her of drinking.

  Finally she gave up and sat down hard. Peter came to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “It was my fault.”

  “No, not yours to bare. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have come here. I’m not ready—”

  “What’re you talking about? You can do this. You are one of the smartest women I have ever met.”

  Olivia glanced at him. Peter nodded.

  “You have practically brought us here, all of us. You can do this, Olivia. Come on, let me help.”

  Olivia sighed. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Numbers?”

  “No, not those,” she said. “Those are the coordinates. We have used up that lead.”

  Olivia looked up at the console by the vault. She had believed they needed some code for that console the moment she saw it. Not just the cross-shaped object.

  “The vault won’t open unless we put a code in that machine,” she pointed out, “and then the cross. Either way, we need both to work.”

  Peter nodded. The crew gathered around, brainstorming. Ted, a little reluctantly.

  “German royalty used double mechanisms on safes, so she’s right. It’s not just the cross, that’s why it didn’t fit,” Ted said.

  Olivia nodded.

  “So one of these numbers, there are four pages written on in Harald’s notebook. That is, four pages where he had made direct references to this place. And he numbers his book, with his own hand.” She flipped the pages in the small book. “This page, 4, then here again, pages 8, 9, 45, and the last one is odd, it says page 4 again. It should say 18.”

  She looked up at the group. “Harald is one crazy Nazi bastard, huh,” said Liam Murphy.

  “Not all Germans were Nazi,” Peter snapped.

  “We don’t know if Harald was one, I mean, we should never have found this place if he hadn’t kept these clues and the map,” Liam insisted.

  “Yes, and we don’t know why he left the clues.”

  Miller touched Peter’s arm. “Let's all calm down now. Peter, you and Ms. Olivia do your thing, figure this out. Meanwhile, me and Friedman will go back the way we came and see if there’s another way around this place. We need to find the labs.”

  Ted raised his hand. “Frank, I suggest we all stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s nothing out there, trust me.”

  Miller gave the man a dubious look. He turned to Friedman and nodded. The bodyguard withdrew from the room.

  “Right, I’ll stay.”

  —

  Olivia and Peter wrote out the numbers 8, 9, 45, 4. The group crouched on the floor and stared at these numbers, each one thinking his thoughts. Except Ted Cooper, who watched from where he stood. He frowned and came over.

  “Let me see this.” He picked the paper off the floor.

  His brows furrowed in thought. He turned to Peter Williams. At first, hesitant to talk with his colleague—mostly because Peter wouldn’t meet his gaze. Something contemptible came to his head and he was about to drop it when he caught Miller’s accusatory stare.

  “It’s a date,” he said.

  Peter looked at him then, “What’d you mean?”

  Ted Cooper explained, “It’s clear to me now. Reports differ, but the most acceptable of them is that the scientists left this place and surrendered to the Allies on 6 September, 1945, days before Wilhelm Keitel signed the Instrument of Surrender, right—"

  The crew grunted, nodded their understanding.

  “But we were wrong.” Ted waved the paper. “This says we were wrong all this time—”

  “But how’d you know that? Historians don’t even know Kruger, we can’t find him in any documents from that time,” Peter countered.

  “We could change that now. We are here now, and we just might find some documentation or a logbook with his name on it. You never know.”

  Ted showed the paper again.

  “You still don’t get it, Peter—8, 9, 45, 4, it’s a date. September 8, 1945, four guys, maybe including Kruger, left these labs behind and met the Allies—”

  “That agrees with other reports,” Frank Miller interjected. “Not all the guys here left at the same time. There was a revolt, and a subsequent clampdown. Now we may have an explanation for what appears to have been a fire outbreak here.”

  Once again their attention was drawn to the dismal walls, the bizarre order in the mess room. It was all falling into place.

  Ted Cooper gave the paperback to Peter Williams. Together they went to the console by the door. Still uncert
ain if their conjecture was accurate, on shaky feet, Peter started punching the numbers.

  Upon entering the last digit, the console's background screen lit up with a dull green light. The vault hissed around its edges. They heard a low, continuous droning as the vault came alive.

  Peter stumbled away from the console; he dropped the paper. The door stopped vibrating and now they heard it make a constant tone, like a counter.

  Peter turned to Ted. “What now, it’s not opening, man. It’s not—”

  “The cross!” Olivia yelled. “The cross! It needs the cross!”

  She sprinted forward with the object, jammed it into the niche, and this time the cross slipped in easily. It made a clicking sound as it fit in place. The vault started another round of vibrating. The hissing sound got louder, smoke emitted from the sides of the door.

  They heard clanking sounds, like metal fittings, working, grinding against each other, and dislodging. Then a final pop.

  The door opened. The crew jumped back in fear. Then forward again in jubilant exaltation, applauding their success.

  The passage beyond the door was brightly lit all around. White light shone from the ceiling, walls, and floor. Frank Miller pulled the metal door open wider; it swung easily on hinges that could just have been oiled.

  Immediately, Miller crossed the threshold. They heard a click and the door started swinging close.

  “Whoa, whoa, what’s happening now!?” Liam Murphy shouted.

  Itay Friedman was fast. As though he expected this to happen, he quickly reacted. Nicolai’s box of tools was opened on the floor. Friedman picked a huge wrench from it and hooked it in the door.

  It held and the door remained opened.

  Still in shock and doubtful, the crew watched the door.

  “Come on, guys. It’s okay now,” Miller encouraged from inside the white passage.

  Borodin took the next tentative steps and was inside. Then the rest started rushing through.

  “Everybody freeze!”

  They turned around and behind them were soldiers, guns pointed at them.

  5

  Admiral Anton Huebner was not a brave man. He was also a thinking man. The fleet would descend on the Antarctic if his ship went missing there. And if they found the troops he had sent ahead, his objective and the point of it all, will be lost. Besides, he had on his ship all the witnesses and proof against him.

  So he waited, in fact, in order to demonstrate his sanity. He moved out of the range of the Antarctic to meet up with the approaching scouting ships. It turned out that there wasn’t just one, but three of the other destroyers. And they were almost in range.

  He rushed up to his station and began dishing out orders.

  “New course!” he barked.

  “Sir?” his surprised exec asked.

  “You heard me, Vasquez. New course. We are meeting up with the scouts.” Huebner looked at his exec.

  The young lad got the message. His admiral would never abandon a mission, except if he had made provisions for backup. Whatever the admiral was up to, he had it under control.

  “New course…” Vasquez called the coordinates.

  —

  “Who the hell are you people?” a stunned Frank Miller blundered from behind the door.

  About fifteen guns were pointed at the crew. Grim faces and hands ready to pull the triggers.

  “This facility is now officially under the jurisdiction and authority of the Argentine government. Please step out of there now,” said the soldier taking the lead.

  He gave the sign with his hand, and his men started marching around the crew. They went into the vault and made those inside come out.

  “You can’t stop us, this place is not claimed yet—”

  “It is now,” said the soldier.

  “—we discovered it. We just want to look around, purely for research purposes.”

  Something in the soldier's eyes shifted. He made another gesture with his hands and his men relaxed, taking their aim off Miller’s expedition. The lead soldier pulled his mask down to reveal quite a young, childish face with a thin line of hair on his lip. Black eyes that would have been shy ones stared at the expedition crew.

  “What are you people?” He pointed.

  Miller turned to look at the faces of his crew, as if the question somehow changed what he knew. He chuckled.

  “We are scientists,” he said, “biologists, ice experts and historians.”

  Miller pointed at Olivia Newton. “And a journalist to help us organize our finds, for the books and conferences that would follow our discoveries.”

  Miller prayed silently that he was convincing enough. Some of what he said was true. If the soldier believed him, his dark Spanish eyes didn’t show. He sized up the crew. His eyes landed on Olivia’s face and something in them seemed to make him mellow.

  “What are those?” the soldier pointed at Nicolai’s boxes.

  “Tools, for research,” the Russian answered promptly.

  “Open them.”

  The soldier gestured two of his men to search the boxes. They did with practiced and professional motions, with the muzzle of their guns. Satisfied, they nodded at their superior.

  He tapped his gun, an M16. “Alright, you can stay for now, until my superiors say you can’t anymore. Anything you do will be under my supervision. My men will escort you around.”

  Miller nodded. “That’s fair.”

  Olivia watched Ted Cooper. He didn’t seem surprised by the armed intrusion.

  —

  They passed through the lighted way in the vault and found another room, a much bigger one. Four soldiers followed them, led by the major who ranked the detail.

  The room was lighted too. In the middle of it, there was a raised platform and on it there were the remains of what looked like a rocket. It was about thirteen feet long and almost a meter in width. Time had done little to change much in the room.

  On the walls there were various sorts of charts, diagrams, and schematics. An awed Anabia Nassif put on his reading glasses and gawked at the ones in the middle of the wall. There were molecular diagrams and charts on it.

  “This is not…” he mumbled. “This is confusing.”

  Miller went to him, quickly followed by a soldier. “What is?”

  “These charts, the diagrams,” he stammered. “They are microbial and human genomes altered in their rawest state, except—”

  Nassif turned around. He stumbled towards the platform where the rocket-like contraption was.

  “What is this thing, Miller, is this a rocket?” He pointed.

  A soldier grabbed him as he tried to get on the platform. Several other soldiers set up a barricade around the platform. The major said the platform, and the thing on it is “Out of bounds. You can look around elsewhere.”

  Nassif insisted at Miller, “But do you know what that is?”

  “An ICBM under construction,” Miller said. “Abandoned, unfinished.”

  “Exactly what I thought too, I just needed to be sure.” Nassif rushed back to the wall of diagrams. He pointed to one of them. “This is a formula for a nerve-destroying chemical substance.”

  This drew the attention of the whole crew. The soldiers observed the man’s tirade, unmoved.

  “I think that thing there, on the platform, they were going to make it carry these chemicals in tubes and detonate in the air. Millions would die upon inhalation.”

  Nassif snapped his finger. “Death in seconds.”

  Everyone turned to the ICBM. The major shifted on his feet, perhaps being in the way, and feeling now that he shared the attention with the machine of death behind him. He dismissed the scientists. “Okay, okay, go on, there’s other rooms, other places to check. Go.”

  Reluctantly, the expedition team moved through another doorway into a nearby laboratory. Anabia Nassif took the lead, followed by Miller and then Olivia who was on her Dictaphone again, dictating details concerning the rocket.

  Behin
d them they heard the major talking on a talkie. And then he was giving his men more orders.

  “Wow.” Nassif was standing before another chart. This one, like the charts in the rocket assembly room, was riddled with calculations and formulas.

  “What now?” Peter asked him.

  Olivia joined the small group clustering around Nassif now. After shrugging at each other, four of the soldiers, except one, moved closer to share in the amazing moment the crew was experiencing.

  Nassif spread his hand and shook his head. “Alas, we see we were wrong all along,” he declared, with some emotion. “Given more time, they could have killed us all. See this guys…this right here was a formula—that I think—is one example of the 'super soldier’ compound. We have only heard about it, now I see it.”

  With bright eyes, Frank Miller asked the biologist, “Would it have worked?”

  “Nope,” Nassif said emphatically. He pointed at a spot in the intricate lines on the board, of compounds and components. “That compound with the ETH, is a polymer. It was wrongly believed that it could bond with the human genome. But it didn’t.”

  Liam Murphy asked, “What did it do then?”

  “It mutated it, it morphed it into whatever it wants at every exposure. There was no single track for its pathway. It was indeed super, but not the kind of super that we want.”

  The crew stared in quiet respect for the biologist.

  They heard a crash and when they turned around. A test tube had fallen off a rack on a nearby table. On the white linoleum floor was the broken glass, and a small puddle of smoking, clear liquid.

  The soldier that had refused to join the discussion at the board was standing by the puddle, gazing at it dumbly. He looked up at his comrades and shrugged.

  Nassif stammered, “Oh God, get away from there, you!”

  He advanced on the soldier but Olivia pulled him back in time before the other soldiers used their gun butts on his face.

  “You need to get away from that thing, it may not be safe for you,” Nassif shouted.

  “Or us,” Olivia whispered.

  —