by Mark Donahue
“Jagr, please shoot Mr. Taylor in the left leg right above the knee.”
Without a second of hesitation, Jagr shot J.T. as directed, the silencer making the shot sound like a “whomp” rather than a “bang.”
“Ahhh… what the fuck are you doing, you crazy bastard?” J.T. fell to his right on the couch as blood seeped from the wound and through his fingers.
“Mr. Taylor, I really don’t believe you are taking our interest in the gold you sent Juan very seriously. But perhaps I am at fault here because I have not been specific enough. So to avoid any further misunderstanding and needless pain, please tell us where you got the gold to send to Juan.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking…”
“Dear me, Mr. Taylor, I fear my friend here has far more bullets than you have limbs. Jagr, please shoot Mr. Taylor in the right elbow.”
Jagr fired again, shattering J.T.’s elbow. “Oh my God…!! Stop it, stop it!!
“Mr. Taylor, the leg wound you have is one that will lead to major blood loss, and absent treatment, death will come in less than thirty minutes. The wound to your arm will not bleed as much, but is, as I am sure you will agree, far more painful. As will the next dozen nonlethal wounds you will be forced to endure if you don’t tell us what we ask of you.”
“Okay, okay, stop shooting.” Through gritted teeth, J.T. said, “This Chinese guy comes in here once a month. He told me he’d been a miner years ago and found a lot of gold over in California. He wanted me to fence it for him. That’s it.”
“Mr. Taylor, please don’t assume me a fool. A miner would have found ore, not refined gold ingots stamped with the names of countries on it.” Dr. Martin nodded at Jagr. “Please remove Mr. Taylor’s left ear.”
Too late, J.T moved his arm to protect his ear. The bullet severed his ear, and it landed in his lap. He passed out.
After several seconds, Jagr splashed water in J.T.’s face until he awakened in agony. “Ow, good God!!”
“My dear sir, I am afraid the next several bullets will remove any vestige of your manhood, although they will not unfortunately, be fatal.”
Gasping, J.T. said, “Look you fucking cocksucker, you’re gonna kill me one way or the other no matter what I tell you, so I ain’t telling you nothin’. So go ahead and shoot my dick off, I ain’t using it no more, I have a fucking brain tumor and I’ll be dead in six months anyway, so kiss my sweet black ass.”
“You are a brave and honorable man, Mr. Taylor. But unless you tell us who brings you the gold that you sell in Mexico, my assistant will make, at my direction, your final moments ones of unspeakable agony. We will also bring into your shop some of the children we saw outside and allow you to witness their equally painful deaths. All this because you will not cooperate with us.”
J.T. grimaced in pain and breathed heavily as he looked at Dr. Martin and then to Jagr. “Ah shit, I guess it don’t matter anymore. Give me some pain medicine and some water, and I’ll tell you an interesting story.”
Dr. Martin nodded to Jagr, who removed a vial and syringe from his coat pocket. He injected its contents into J.T.’s left arm. J.T. laid back on the couch and closed his eyes; his breathing became less labored and his pulsed slowed.
Jagr handed J.T a large bottle of Perrier he had retrieved from the refrigerator. J.T. unscrewed the cap and put the bottle to his lips. “That’s better,” he said right before he slammed the bottle into Jagr’s face, knocking him to the ground and breaking the green bottle. J.T. took the remaining neck of the bottle and cut his own throat from ear to ear. Blood erupted from his jugular vein and quickly covered his white shirt with a deep red hue. A smile came over his face. He gave Dr. Martin the finger seconds before he gave in to the darkness.
Chapter 56
Ben’s House—Phoenix
As promised, a week later Sam had a plan. It was detailed and predictably brilliant. The three men she submitted the plan to originally thought it was a stupid plan, fraught with danger and likely to fail. Sam politely told all three they could go screw themselves. She further suggested, in the kindest terms possible, that they could become part of her plan, or she would find three women to help her execute it.
Her sweet talking, Tom and Jon called them threats, worked. The men eventually bought into Sam’s plan because it was, after all, both detailed and brilliant. They just needed a little time to become smart enough to understand it. It took a bit more time for that to occur than Sam had hoped.
“Does the Gulfstream have the range to fly all the way to Europe?” Tom asked.
“It has a range of 7,000 miles and fully loaded with fuel can carry an additional 1800 pounds. Of course if we strip her down she can carry far more weight.”
“I don’t like to fly, Jon reminded everyone.
“Then maybe you can take a train to Germany,” Tom suggested.
Ignoring both men, Sam had a question for Jon. “Any luck in tracking down some people on your list as test cases for us?”
“Some. For better or worse, the Germans did take copious notes on just about everything they did. Some of the people on the list I worked on were from Poland and Hungary. I didn’t have much luck in tracking down any of those names. Our best bet will be to focus on families from Berlin or Hamburg. It appears that after the war, some of the people who survived the concentration camps went back to the cities they were from and tried to start over, Jon said.
“That makes sense,” Ben said.
“Yes, but many of those people who did go back were sole survivors of the camps, having lost entire families. If they were children, they ended up in orphanages or moved in with friends from the old neighborhoods, or in some situations, just lived on the streets. In any case, most changed their names, so it was hard to identify people and where they ended up,” Jon said.
“But you found some, right?” Sam asked.
“I think so. The ones I feel pretty confident about were those who immigrated to the United States right after the war. The record keeping was good, and it was easier to follow a name and family tree,” Jon said.
“Of those you found, are any still alive?” Tom asked.
Jon replied, “I found ten people that as of last year were still alive and well, living in the U.S.. Some were small children when they, along with their families, were sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, or Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald in Germany. Most of them are in their late seventies to mid-eighties at this point.”
“Tom, were you able to determine from those notebooks what their families had lost?” Sam asked.
“In some cases I found very detailed records of what was taken from their families and was able to use some present value and inflation analysis to come up with some numbers of what the Nazis took. In other cases, the details of what was taken was less clear, mainly because the Germans had no idea what some of the stuff they took was worth,” Tom explained.
“I think it would make sense to focus on the ten names Jon found living here in the U.S. before we begin going to Europe. That way we can beta test and fine-tune our tactics and see what works and what doesn’t,” Ben said. Tom, and Jon nodded in agreement.
“Okay then, I’ll continue to work on my list and see if I can get phone numbers and addresses for the ten I selected. Then we can decide next steps,” Jon said.
“Good,” Sam said. “But we do have that little issue of how we get a couple hundred tons of gold out of a mine that some neo-Nazis are watching on a regular basis, but I have some ideas.”
“Of course you do,” Tom said.
Ignoring the snide comment, Sam said, “Many of my ideas have come from this.” Sam held up the well-worn journal that Lucille had left with her and Ben at the library.
“What’s that?” Tom asked.
“It’s a story about two WWII heroes no one has ever heard of.”
Over the next four hours, Sam shared some of the details of Lester’s handwritten journal with Tom and Jon. She told them the incredible story she and Ben had already read. It included how Lester hid his truckload of gold in the desert and conveniently provided a map pointing out in detail where to find it.
“A World War I vet named Lester Jones and a young German soldier named Eric Schneider single-handedly stopped the Nazis from forming a Fourth Reich here in the U.S. It appears they killed over forty Nazis in and around the Jasper back in 1943. If they had not, who knows what this country and the rest of the world would be like today.”
“My God,” Tom said after reading Lester’s account of blowing up the trucks and cars in the cavern with a single rifle shot and how he was nearly trapped in the mine shaft after the Germans shot pineapple grenades up one of the shafts. “Do you think this stuff is actually true?”
“If not, Lester should have written scripts in his spare time because this could make a hell of a movie,” Jon said.
“After meeting with his wife several times now since she showed up at the library, I believe every word Lester wrote. As she said, ‘Lester weren’t no liar.’ She was also able to update us on some other information that we were dying to hear about,” Ben said.
“Hey Tom, remember when we found our gold bar…”
“I know what you’re thinking, but what are the chances that could have been Lester’s hand around that bar?” Tom asked
Ben answered. “There’s no way of knowing who was holding that ingot, but it’s a fact that where you guys found your bar was directly between Lester’s “bank” in the desert and the place he’d park his van at the rest stop. Besides, I’d like to think Lester was intentionally passing that gold on to you boys. Maybe he knew you were the right ones.”
After a steak dinner and some excellent merlot, the group discussed specifics of how they would remove the gold and secure it before some bald guys with Nazi tattoos beat them to it. “According to Lester’s journals, it took a dozen heavy-duty trucks to move the gold into the Jasper, then it took several men, some of whom fell to their deaths, ten hours to move it into the area behind that wall where we found it,” Sam pointed out.
“I see why they used so many trucks. Getting the gold onto a single truck that could navigate the access road would be impossible even today. No matter how we do it, it’s going to take several trips in and out of the Jasper to get the gold out of there,” Jon said.
Tom added, “There is no way we could haul that stuff out of there an ingot at a time. It would take months, and we’d have to fix the hole in the wall each time. Sooner or later the bad guys would be there when we were there.”
“Tom and Jon are right, Sam. Physically removing the gold is the easy part, but doing it and not being seen will be the challenge. I suspect that mine is being watched on a daily basis.”
“What if we let the bad guys find the gold?” Sam asked.
Chapter 57
Jasper Mine
Even though J.T. hadn’t provided the information requested, Dr. Martin had learned through his Mexican connections that gold ingots, like the ones that had been delivered to the Jasper in 1943, had been moved from Phoenix to Mexico.
What Dr. Martin didn’t know was exactly how many gold bars had originally been delivered to the Jasper in 1943. He knew the truck he had driven contained approximately 34,000 pounds or around 1700 ingots of gold. He assumed the other eleven trucks contained approximately the same amount but couldn’t be sure.
The biggest uncertainty was even if there had been 200 tons of gold, what had happened to it over seventy years? Had it been discovered, and through men like J.T., slowly distributed around the world? Or was the gold discovered in Mexico just a miniscule portion of the original gold stashed by Rolle, which remained hidden in the Jasper?
No longer waiting for the input or approval of his partners, Dr. Martin decided to act. He purchased sophisticated equipment to once and for all discover whether the gold was still inside the mine.
Dr. Martin and Jagr stood at the entrance to the Jasper and saw the flurry of activity, heard the clatter of jackhammers and the hum of other equipment as more than two dozen miners, scientists, and laborers attacked the Jasper and her secrets. Dr. Martin felt an expectation like when he was a boy awaiting St. Nick to arrive. He knew in his heart that his life-long wait was nearing an end that would, ironically, marshal in a new beginning. A beginning long overdue.
Temporary halogen lights exposed nearly every corner of the massive mine. Men with portable X-ray machines looked behind stone walls or into floors. Men dropped cameras down the pit and in doing so discovered six gold bars that they retrieved by dropping a man attached to a harness down into the abyss. Word of the ingot’s discovery heightened Dr. Martin’s hope and enthusiasm. If need be, he would send men deeper into the abyss or even find an outside access to the bottom of the pit, although such an enormous and highly visible engineering undertaking was not a step he wanted to consider…yet.
Chapter 58
Ben’s House—Phoenix
“What do you mean let them find the gold, are you crazy?” Jon asked.
“According to Lester’s notebook, none of the twenty Germans protecting the gold or the twenty-four guys who delivered it knew exactly how much gold was in the Jasper. And since it was delivered in 1943, no one has any idea how much of it has been removed from the mine over the years. All anyone knows for sure was some amount of gold was shipped from Germany in 1943 to the Jasper. Only Rolle, Becker, and eventually Lester and Eric, knew the exact amount of the gold, and they’re all dead.”
“Are you saying we should let them find some of the gold?”
“Kind of.” Sam explained…not really explaining. “I agree with Tom we can’t be opening and closing the wall a hundred times taking out small amounts of the gold or someone will be there on one of our trips, and they’ll discover the entire amount. So, I suggest we lure them away from the Jasper.”
“To where, with what?” Tom asked.
“Let’s head out to the Jasper, and I’ll fill you guys in on the plan. Showing will be easier than telling.”
On the surface, Sam’s preliminary plan made sense, although it would take days of planning and detailing before it could be executed. But the plan was shot to hell when the quartet was flagged down by an armed security guard who stood where a vehicle would normally make a tight left-hand turn down to the opening of the Jasper. Sam ignored the waving guard by rolling down her window and sweetly asking. “Is the mine closed? I used to party down there in college, and I wanted to show my friends how cool that mine is.”
“Sorry, miss, this is private property, and there’s a couple dozen guys down there doing core samples and all kinds of stuff.”
“Oh, darn. I wanted to just show my friends…”
“You’re gonna have to move on, Miss; some trucks will be arriving here any minute with more equipment.”
Sam smiled, rolled up her window, and continued to drive up the road past the Jasper.
“l’ll be damned,” Jon said. “They’ve found it.”
“We don’t know that,” Ben said. “Maybe they’re just bringing in more equipment to conduct a search.”
“Whether they find it now or find it later, it sounds like they’re real serious this time. It’s only a matter of time before they do,” Tom said.
“We have no choice then,” Sam said.
“What do you mean no choice?” Ben asked.
“We have to execute my plan now.”
“That’s nuts,” Tom said. “We’d need at least a week of planning to…”
“We don’t have a week,” Sam said. “We have today. Right now.”
“Before we try to pull off a half-baked plan, we need to know if the gold behind the wall has already been found,” Ben said.
“The only way we
can do that is to get into the mine and look at the wall. If it’s still there, so is the gold. If not, some neo-Nazis are really, really rich,” Jon said.
“Daddy, is our equipment still in the back?” Sam asked.
“Unless you took it out, it’s all in the rear storage area.”
“Remember what Lester wrote about gaining access to the Jasper by going down those shafts at the top of the mine? You know, where he shot those guards that first night?”
“You can’t be serious, Sam, that was almost seventy years ago, no telling what happened to those shafts since then,” Tom said.
Thirty minutes later, the group of four was standing on top of the Jasper. Tom and Jon carried the equipment from Ben’s Jeep. From below them the sound of pounding jackhammers and other assorted machinery wafted upward along with muffled men’s voices.
“According to Lester’s diary, this was the spot he fought his first battle with the Nazis,” Sam said.
“Look over here. This could be the shaft Lester went up and down that first night. It looks pretty narrow. He must have been a skinny guy,” Tom said.
“Look, this might be the access to the Jasper, but it’s way too dangerous for anyone to try and enter the mine using this shaft,” Ben said. “We have to find another way or come up with a better plan.”
“Daddy, there’s no time for a better plan. We have ropes, a harness, a radio phone, flashlights, and three strong men to hold onto my…”
“Not a chance Sam. If anybody goes down a shaft, it’ll be me,” Jon said.
“Jon, your leg’s still bothering you. You can barely walk on it. Daddy, let’s face it, you and Tom just won’t fit.”
“What do you expect to do if you can get into the Jasper? There could be fifty guys down there, probably armed like that guard we saw,” Jon noted.
“All I’m going to do is drop into that horizontal area Lester talked about that had the big wooden doors…”
“You mean the ones the Germans blew all to hell?”
