GOLDEN REICH

by Mark Donahue

  “I suspect it was the men who stayed in America after the war. I believe those men formed a solemn pact to say nothing of the gold while quietly taking steps to find it.”

  “Like taking a lease on this place?” Lester asked.

  “Yes. At the same time, they systematically eliminated the men in Germany. After their deaths. the stories of lost gold would become a thing of legend and soon forgotten.”

  “You think those truck drivers who remained in this country ever found that gold?”

  “I don’t know. But I can give a better opinion after we go inside,” Eric said.

  “One more thing Eric, all twenty-four of those drivers saw you when they delivered the gold. Did anyone ever come lookin’ for you?”

  “I don’t know. My parents and two sisters died during the bombing of Dresden near the end of the war, and I had no other relatives that were living in Germany. So there was no one to contact. I changed my last name when I moved to Cincinnati, so there was no way to trace me. I assume they thought I had been killed like everyone else in the Jasper.”

  After several moments of silence, Lester asked, “You ready to go inside, Eric?”

  Eric nodded.

  When the men entered the Jasper, the smell hit them first, registering in their brains and sending both of them back in time. Fifty feet inside the cavern, Lester looked up and to his right and saw the black soot still visible on the south wall from the inferno he set off by shooting a hole in the truck’s gas tank.

  Eric looked to his left and saw the area near the old offices where Rolle shot his friend in the face.

  As they walked deeper into the mine, the wind began to gust, and a low moan encircled them. The beams of their flashlights caught beer cans, old newspapers, animal bones, and other debris. The floor of the mine began to slope as the old men carefully negotiated their way toward the pit that they could never, and would never, forget.

  Twenty feet from the gaping abyss, Lester said, “Ain’t nothin’ changed I can see.”

  “Look more closely, my friend.”

  Moving his flashlight from the floor to the ceiling and turning in a full circle, Lester could see no difference in the mine from what he remembered decades earlier. Then his flashlight caught something that had not been there in 1943.

  “That’s it, ain’t it?” Lester asked.

  Eric nodded.

  On the drive back to Phoenix, Eric said, “I too have often asked myself if it had all been a dream. And if it was real, how could I have been so foolish to have believed what they were telling us?”

  “You wuz just a kid, Eric. Besides, lots of people believed that man, but when you discovered the truth, you did something about it. That’s all that counts.”

  “You were very brave to have done what you did.”

  “I have bad dreams too. Figure I’ll be doin’ a stretch in Hades for my part. But if you and me hadn’t done what we done, the world might be a whole different place right now.”

  “Lester, you did what you had to do. We were fighting the same war that was being fought in Europe and the Pacific, only no one outside that mine knew it. You protected the world from those who would have tried to create the reality of a Fourth Reich. With the wealth that was brought from Germany to the Jasper, they would have had the resources to grow the evil we destroyed.”

  Nodding in silence, Lester looked at Eric with a sense of relief that his actions from so many years before that still made him wake up in cold sweats were justified. Hearing someone else articulate what he had always silently hoped was the truth lifted a burden that Lester had been carrying for decades.

  “You think the gold is still there?” Lester asked.

  “Yes. If the wall had not been there, then obviously the gold would have been gone. But the wall is still there, and there would have been no reason for someone to rebuild it after taking the gold.”

  “That makes sense, Eric. So what the hell are we gonna do about all that damn gold behind that wall?”

  “I am afraid that will be up to you, Lester. I am going to spend my remaining months with my family, but I wanted to find you, thank you, and share what I knew. Maybe it is best to let the gold stay where it is until a younger generation can deal with it. Obviously, it’s hiding place has stood the test of time so far.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Besides, I have enough to deal with in doing stuff with the gold I got in my bank out yonder.”

  After a long dinner of good food, drink, and overdue conversation, Eric and Lester took a stroll to walk off the apple cobbler. On their walk, a half dozen men passed Lester, smiled, and said hello. Eric noticed the warmth in their smiles. “Lester, why haven’t you let the people around here know what you’ve done for them? You’d be a hero, my friend.”

  “I done some things in my life I ain’t real proud of. Things that still keep me awake at night. Figure doin’ what I been doin’, quiet-like, is maybe a payback. Makin’ things right, sorta.”

  “I understand. And like you said before, it can be more fun to do things and just see how people react not knowing it was you who did them,” Eric said.

  “Yep.”

  After several more blocks, the men stopped in front of the shelter that Lester called home along with a couple hundred of his best friends, a block from Eric’s Buick.

  When the old men warmly shook hands, Eric said. “Goodbye, my friend. I will never forget you.”

  “I won’t forget you neither, Eric. You done real good and I’m proud you’re my friend.”

  The men from a WWII battle in 1943 embraced on a street corner in downtown Phoenix in 1979. After he watched Lester amble toward the shelter on a warm Arizona night, Eric got in his white Buick and drove back to Cincinnati where he died four months later.

  A rabbi delivered the eulogy.

  Chapter 47

  Jasper Mine—2014

  Hearing the shotgun blast, Ben, Tom, and Sam moved into the darkness of the cavern along the northern wall and headed for the prearranged spot near the tool bin they had slept in the night before.

  Without being asked, Jon told the others that he had seen four men walking down the path from the dirt road. When he fired his shotgun and made himself and Pax visible to them at the entrance to the cavern, they stopped, returned to their Benz, and drove away.

  “Well, it’s good they saw you and know you’re armed,” Ben said.

  “Could you get a good look at any of them?” Tom asked.

  “No, except they were all well-dressed and they were old guys.”

  “Nice to be so popular, isn’t?” Tom said sarcastically.

  For the next two hours, the team stayed in the tool bin, sipped some water, ate, and told Jon what they had seen in the pit.

  “I don’t think there is any more gold in this mine,” Tom said.

  “What about the bars you guys saw in the pit?” Jon asked.

  “I’m not saying there wasn’t gold in here at one time but…”

  “Not sure I agree, Tom,” Ben said. “We know there has been gold in this mine at some point because of what we saw in the pit. The question is, is there more? And if so, where?”

  “Daddy, this mine has been wide open for a hundred years, and we’ve looked all over this place and haven’t found anything, and I’ll bet a bunch of other people have looked too.”

  “I agree, but someone is concerned about us being in here, and the only reason I can think of why that’s the case is they believe the gold is in here, but they can’t find it either,” Ben said.

  “Do you guys think anyone would just chuck gold into the pit?” Jon asked.

  “Why would anyone just throw gold into a bottomless pit?” Sam answered.

  “Could you think of safer place to hide it?” Ben asked.

  “No…but if you can’t get to it, what good is a safe
place?” Tom reasoned.

  “Look, we can debate all this later, but I think after we do a final look-see, we need to wrap up this expedition today,” Ben said.

  “Why?” Tom asked.

  “This place doesn’t feel right. There are spirits in this cavern that speak of true evil.”

  “Evil spirits from a guy who went to Stanford? C’mon, Ben,” Jon said with a laugh.

  Ben turned to Jon and said deliberately, “Don’t let your whiteness discount the possibility that things you can’t see do exist.”

  “I was never very religious,” Tom volunteered.

  “I’m not talking about religion. What I’m talking about is real and tangible. You simply need to open up a part of yourself and learn to feel what’s around you. The silence will speak to you if you learn to listen.”

  “What are you hearing, Daddy?”

  “I know it’ll sound melodramatic to all of you, but there’s also a feeling of sadness in this mine. It’s real. I’ve felt it since I first walked in here. There’s a feeling of dread as well. The spirits of the dead are at war in this mine,” Ben said somberly.

  For nearly a minute, no one spoke as Ben’s words resonated in the silence. Finally, Tom rose to his feet and responded, “I think Ben’s right; let’s get out of here. We’ve looked in every nook and cranny of this place and haven’t found a thing except in that pit. And if gold is in there, then that damn pit can have it.”

  “Before we go, I want to conduct an experiment,” Ben said.

  Following the old man, the group walked to the back of the mine within twenty feet of the pit. With the howling wind as a now-familiar background, Ben picked up several golf ball-sized rocks lying on the right side of the pit. Moving back toward the group, he gave one of the rocks to Tom and pointed to the right side of the pit. “Throw this against that wall.”

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “I said throw that rock against that wall, and listen, all of you.”

  Tom threw, and they all listened. It sounded like a rock hitting rock.

  “Again.”

  It sounded the same.

  “Again”

  The same sound.

  Five more times Tom threw, and the sound was just like a rock hitting rock.

  Ben picked up several other rocks and had Jon throw them against the wall on the left side of the pit. The sound was the same as Tom’s throws.

  “Now, Sam, throw a rock at the wall behind the pit.”

  She only threw once. That’s all she had to throw for everyone to hear the difference. It was a hollow sound.

  For the next thirty minutes, the four of them threw more rocks, then listened, theorized, hoped, laughed, and finally decided that they had found a man-made wall behind the pit. Beyond that, they didn’t know what the hell to do about it. If they could get through the wall, what was behind it?

  “To break through that wall, we’re going to need some equipment, and we’re going to have make some noise. Then if we find anything, we’re going to have to figure out how the hell we get whatever might be in there out of this place with the boys from Deliverance and AARP nosing around,” Tom said.

  Jon suggested, “Maybe I should drive into town and get a U-Haul truck…”

  “Wait a second, guys.” Sam said. “If there is gold behind that wall, it has been in a real good hiding place for a long, long time. My suggestion is we make a hole in the wall small enough to see what’s behind it. If something is in there, we can patch it up and make it look like it’s looked all these years until we decide what to do.”

  “That may not be so easy,” Jon noted. “How do we get over the pit to put a hole in the wall to even look inside at whatever’s in there?”

  “If it was easy, it wouldn’t have been a good hiding place all these years,” Ben said.

  For the next two hours the group made suggestions, offered opinions, argued, speculated, planned, ditched it all, and started all over again. In the end, they decided they would go to town, get some four-by-sixes, and build a small wooden platform at the far right corner of the pit. Then one of them would walk onto the platform and use a hammer to put a small hole in the wall, look inside with a flashlight, and find out if they had hit the biggest lottery in the history of the world.

  It was a good plan, except they weren’t sure who might be watching their every move or who might walk in during their search. And if they did find anything, how would they get it out of the mine and where would they take it? Having no immediate answers to their own questions, they waited and did nothing for a week.

  Nothing, except assemble the platform in Ben’s garage and develop a plan that would allow them to enter the Jasper at midnight, put the platform in place, put a hole in the wall, look inside, and get the hell out of the mine as quickly as possible.

  On a late Sunday evening, the group entered the Jasper in Ben’s pickup and dropped Pax off at the front of the mine with orders to “stay and watch.” The big white, blue-eyed dog sat down and riveted his focus on the entrance of the mine and seemed to embrace the responsibility that had been thrust on him.

  Ben drove to within twenty feet of the pit. The group quickly unloaded a nine-foot by twelve-foot wooden platform, slid it over the edge of the pit and anchored it on an eighteen-inch ledge that was exposed under the back wall. They lay ten-50-pound sandbags on the edge of the platform that was placed on the mine floor to help stabilize it.

  It had been decided that Jon, because he was smaller than Tom and stronger than Ben, would be the one to walk onto the wooden plank, take a hammer, and punch a hole through the wall and see what, if anything, the wall hid. Sam had a different opinion.

  “I’m lighter than all you guys, and let’s face it, I’m in better shape. Whoever goes onto that plank needs to be light, strong, agile, and coordinated. Looking at you three, I just don’t see it.”

  Tom started to argue, but Ben stopped him. “Don’t even try, Tom. When she gets this way, it ain’t no use. Just like her mother.”

  By 1:00 a.m. the platform was in place over the right corner of the pit as planned, but there was a difference in the level of the mine floor and the level of the eighteen-inch ledge behind the pit. As a result, the platform was neither flat nor particularly stable despite the anchor provided by the sandbags.

  For further protection, two ropes were looped around Sam. One was tied to Tom, and the other tied to the bumper of Ben’s pickup.

  After the ropes were secure, Sam nonchalantly and with no ceremony walked out on the platform and made for the wall to begin her work. With a six-pound sledgehammer in one hand and a flashlight in the other, she began an assault on the wall.

  Initially making no headway, she increased the power of her blows until on the fifth whack of the hammer, she broke through what appeared to be solid rock but was in reality cement block painted with a half-dozen coats of flat black paint. Trying to keep the hole as small as possible, at first she couldn’t break through the other side of the block so she had to smash two more to give herself room to break completely through. After several more attempts, the head of the hammer finally broke through the other side of one block and then two more. Sam moved the pieces of block and dust away. She knelt and put her head through the hole and shone the flashlight through the twelve-inch opening.

  The guttural sound Sam made echoed through the mine. At the same time, she pulled her head and arm out of the hole and stumbled backward falling dangerously close to the edge of the makeshift wooden floor. The flashlight flew from her hand into the pit. Seeing her sudden movements, Tom pulled on the ropes that held Sam, and Jon ran onto the platform and helped her back to the mine floor.

  Kneeling next to Sam who was now sitting on the dirt floor, Ben gasped, “Honey, what in the world did you see?”

  “A man. There’s a man in there,” Sam whispered hoarsely.

 
Chapter 48

  Phoenix—1979

  The day after Eric left, Lester spent several hours in the library detailing their conversations and trip to the Jasper in his journal. Seeing Eric had profoundly affected Lester, mainly pointing out that he was getting old as hell, could die at any time, and then what would become of the gold? He also realized that aside from the men in the shelter, he had no family and was alone. He figured he would change all that starting at Maxine’s Diner.

  “At least you’re on time tonight,” Lucille said.

  “Just came to say I ain’t eatin’ here tomorrow night.”

  “And why not?”

  “Cuz, you and me are goin’ out for dinner tomorrow night, that’s why.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yep.”

  “I have to work tomorrow night, and besides you can’t afford to be takin’ anyone out to dinner.”

  “First of all, I decided I wanted to get into the diner business, so I bought this place today from Maxine’s boy.”

  “You crazy old man, what are talking about?”

  “I mean you’re workin’ for me now, and I’m orderin’ you to take off work tomorrow night. I want you all dressed up. We’re gonna have ourselves a time, girl.”

  Lucille looked up questioningly at her former boss behind the counter who gave her a thumbs-up and nodded.

  “Lester, that is very sweet, but I really don’t have anything to wear and…”

  Lester pulled out three hundred dollars and gave it to Lucille.

  “Here’s some cash. Get your hair and nails done, buy a new dress, some shoes, and some fancy perfume. I know where you live, and I’ll pick you up at six.”

  “Are you okay, Lester?” Lucille said with concern.

  “I’ll be just fine if you saved me some meatloaf.”

  The next night Lester pulled up in front of Lucille’s modest home in his ten-year-old van wearing a new blue suit at least two sizes too big, a new white shirt, and a wide red and white tie. He had shaved, and his freshly cut hair was slicked back and smelled of Clubman hair gel. He had also poured what seemed like half a bottle of Old Spice aftershave on every possible body surface. He looked real slick.