The Dark Place: A historical suspense thriller set in the murky world of fugitive war criminals, vengeful Nazi hunters and spies

by Damian Vargas

  ‘Not hungry?’ he said, nudging her out of her thoughts.

  She looked down at the barely touched meal that she had prepared over an hour ago. ‘No, I guess not.’

  He reached down to release the dog from its leash, and it lurched towards its water bowl in the kitchen and began noisily lapping up the liquid.

  ‘Long walk?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, three hours.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘To the end of the valley and back.’

  ‘To the old army compound? Past all those big, fancy houses?’

  He sat down at one of the wooden chairs and started to unlace his walking boots. ‘I didn’t really notice.’

  ‘No? There are usually a couple of Spanish soldiers sitting in a brick sentry post at the road junction. They’re hard to miss.’

  Blackman placed his boots together on the stone floor and swivelled in the chair to face her. ‘Señora Marrón said you were taking a keen interest in a private function in the village this afternoon.’

  ‘She said that?’

  Blackman’s eyes were fixed on hers. ‘Well, the word she used was “spying”, actually.’

  ‘That’s absurd’.

  ‘She came to me because she was concerned for you.’

  She pushed her chair back. ‘There’s nothing to be concerned about.’ She picked up her bowl of cold pasta and walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ Blackman asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ she replied, opening the refrigerator door to shield herself from his questioning stare. She placed the uneaten food inside and closed it, only to see him then standing just a yard away, his hands in his trouser pockets.

  ‘I’ve been thinking that…’ He cleared his throat, fixed his eyes on hers. ‘Maybe it’s time you moved on now’.

  ‘But we agreed I could stay here until the end of the year.’

  ‘We did, I know. But, and to be perfectly frank, I don’t think I need your services any longer.’ Blackman stared at her, unblinking.

  Johansson smiled and let her gaze wander to the open window, buying time to think. She shot the Englishman a quizzical look. ‘Well. I’ll take that as a compliment, of course. For a job well done.’

  ‘You have indeed done everything I asked of you, and I’m more than happy to pay you up until the end of the year as per our agreement.’

  ‘I would expect no less,’ she replied, taking a step towards him. ‘But I am afraid I simply cannot accept.’

  Blackman’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You need me, Harry Blackman.’ She stood in front of him now, her back straight, shoulders out and hands on her hips, their eyes locked. A battle of wills.

  ‘May I remind you, Miss—’

  ‘That this is your house? That you are my employer? You think I don’t know that?’

  ‘I think you would do well to remind yourself.’

  ‘And you could do with a dose of reality,’ she said.

  He crossed his arms. ‘And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?’

  She leaned forward. Not much. An inch at most, but just enough to puncture the boundary of separation she knew Blackman strove to maintain. With the cast-iron stove behind him and a brick column to his right, he would have to manhandle her if he wanted to break away.

  ‘Señora Marrón, and señor Gutiérrez really don’t like you. The lady who runs the grocery store? She doesn’t like you. The butcher? The man in the bakery store? The Postmaster? Do you think they like you, Harry Blackman? They do not.’

  ‘I did not come here to make friends,’ he said, his tone now raised. He took hold of her bicep in an effort to guide her away, but she pushed back, her body almost up against his. She was slender, but she was strong.

  ‘Why did you come here then?’ she said.

  He held his grip on her arm, glaring at her.

  ‘They all despise you because you are a cold and unpleasant man.’ She let her gaze drop to his lips, which were now open in amazement. ‘You act like you’re the only adult in the room. There’s no innocence about you, no joy.’ She lifted her gaze back to his, the tip of her tongue touching the underside of her front teeth. She saw his gaze drop to her lips, her neck, then to the top of her exposed chest. They were barely two inches apart. He grasped her shoulders, his lower jaw quivering in what could have been uncontrollable anger as easily as raw lust. Or both?

  His brown pupils locked onto hers once more. ‘You speak of…innocence? Let me tell you, innocence is the enemy of enlightenment. People today have no conception as to the reality of this world. How things get done. What people do to each other. If you are comfortable living in your ignorant bliss, then by all means stay there, and be…happy.’ He said “happy” with contempt, almost spitting the word forth, as if it could just as easily be substituted for “drunk”. Or “deluded”. ‘But I’ve seen the reality of this world, Miss Johansson,’ he continued. ‘I’ve seen what people do to other people, and I can assure you that innocence plays no part in such proceedings.’

  She pushed towards him, her face so close to his that she could taste his aftershave. ‘What have you seen? What has left you so cold and embittered? What was it you saw that was so goddamned awful that it sucks the life out of you even now, years later? Tell me!’ She peered into his eyes as they glanced away over her shoulder, to a thousand yards away. Further. To long-buried memories of terrible times and terrible places? And then they snapped back to her.

  ‘I have no desire to revisit the past. And certainly no desire to share it with a thirty-nine-year-old woman who approaches each day with the hubris of a child.’

  His hands still held her shoulders in a tight grip, but she felt his fingertips relaxing. Shifting. Exploring. They were both breathing hard. Liv’s heart was thumping in her chest. She thrust her forearms upwards and outwards, breaking his grip, placed her hands around his head, leaned forward, and locked her open mouth upon his. He resisted, but only for a moment. Their tongues as seething serpents, his left hand moved to the back of her head, his fingers running through her hair, his right hand to her cheek. The tips of his fingers glided along her jawline, her neck, her collarbone.

  ‘Not here,’ she said as she gripped his hand, then tugged him towards the staircase.

  The sex was forceful, desperate, carnal. They barely made it to Blackman’s bed, managing to remove only some of each other’s clothing. Blackman was like a ravenous animal released from captivity.

  When he was spent, he pulled out of her and rolled over to lie on his back. His chest rose and fell like that of a hound that had abandoned its pursuit of a faster and more nimbler jackrabbit. They lay still for several minutes, both replaying what they had just done, before she lifted herself up to sit at the side of the bed. Her nipples were sore from the attention of his fingernails, her collarbone and neck red from his teeth. She pulled up her blouse only to realise it was now shy of most of its buttons.

  She turned towards Blackman. ‘Why do you hate them so much?’ she said.

  He lay staring at the cherry timber beams of the ceiling above them.

  ‘Why do you hate the Germans?’

  ‘It was a war,’ he offered unconvincingly.

  ‘No, there’s more to it than that.’ She crept towards him, then kissed him again, her eyes peering deep into his. Her hand caressed his damp chest, moved down to his belly. ‘Tell me.’

  24

  The evil

  Nordhausen, central Germany.

  April 1945.

  Captain Harry Blackman cast his eyes across the terrible scene before him as he and the men of his special commando unit sat in their quartet of heavily armed Jeeps, their strained motors ticking in the cold evening air.

  The irregular unit, a mixed bag of battle-hardened commandos and SAS operators, had been formed to hunt down escaping senior Nazi officials, scientists and engineers. They had just arrived at the gates of Mittelwerk Dora, the concent
ration camp which had been liberated by American troops only a few hours earlier.

  Captain Blackman and his men had been briefed in detail about the camps - the Russians had already encountered several in the drive westwards across Poland, and reports had been smuggled out of the occupied countries for a few years now. The Englishman had believed that he was sufficiently steeled for the horrors that awaited him and his men, but at that moment - seeing one of the sites with his own eyes - Harry Blackman realised he had been wrong. So very wrong.

  The plumes of smoke had served as navigational beacons for the British unit for several miles as they approached from the south. The stench of burning flesh and rotting bodies had hit them as they had drawn close.

  Dozens of chalk-white and pale blue skeletal figures, their eyes buried deep in dark sockets, and draped in filthy, torn striped trousers and overshirts, stood with vacant stares as the American troops hurried to unload and distribute food and medical supplies from some recently arrived trucks. The soldiers were forced to navigate between the hundreds of emaciated corpses on the ground - prisoners for whom liberation had come too late; their limbs arched rigidly at impossible angles - as if in a state of perpetual torment.

  A squad of the GIs were standing guard over a group of a dozen or so uniformed German soldiers who had been ordered to collect the bodies of the dead and to load them onto a line of three flatbed lorries. The vehicles were already laden with hundreds of corpses.

  White smoke rose up into the cold evening air from the burnt remains of a dozen or so long wooden sheds.

  Blackman looked to his driver, Sergeant Gus Ferguson, whose horrified stare was locked on the trucks laden with the dead, and whose hands remained gripped to the jeep’s steering wheel. His comrade for nearly five years now, Ferguson had been where Blackman had been, seen what he had seen, and faced the same soul-wrenching situations that he had. His fellow soldier and close friend, born after the Great War amidst the tough slums of Glasgow - a man Blackman had seen kill dozens of Germans and Italians with no hint of remorse, had tears welling in his eyes at the sight before them.

  Blackman tapped the Scot on his shoulder. ‘The Yanks have got this, Gus. We’ve got a job to do.’

  Ferguson shook his head, wiped his eyes with his open palms. ‘I’m sorry, Harry. Of course.’ He clambered down from the jeep, reached for his Tommy gun and signalled to the men in the four jeeps to disembark. One by one they got out the khaki vehicles, the trepidation at what they were about to encounter clear on all of their faces.

  Blackman picked up his weapon, slung it over his shoulder and started towards an American lieutenant who had just emerged from the rear of one of the trucks. ‘Leftenant,’ he called, using the British pronunciation of the man’s rank. ‘Captain Blackman, British Commandos.’

  The American swung around, a clipboard in one hand and pen in the other, and gave the Englishman a surprised frown. ‘Schwimmer. US Army field logistics…’

  ‘I can see you are busy here, so I won’t hold you up. I have orders to locate the commandant of this establishment.’

  The American glared at Blackman, thumbed over his shoulder at the smoking remains of the prisoner’s sheds. ‘Establishment?’ he said, slowly repeating the Englishman’s choice of wording. ‘This weren’t no five-star hotel, Captain.’

  ‘The German prisoners,’ said Blackman, nodding towards the informal work crew that were collecting the dead. ‘Is that all of them?’

  The American shook his head, returning his gaze to the clipboard. ‘The MPs have a few junior officers locked up for interrogation, I think. I’m sorry, but I’ve got my hands full here.’

  ‘Where would I find the MPs and these prisoners?’

  The Lieutenant pointed towards the mouth of a camouflaged, concrete tunnel at the far side of the expansive complex. It was set into the grey rock face at the foot of the forested hill that rose above them. ‘They have them locked up inside the factory.’

  ‘Factory?’ said Gus Ferguson, who now stood at Blackman’s side.

  ‘Krauts called it Mittelwerk. They were building rockets and jet planes here,’ the American officer said, peering back at Blackman, eyes narrowing. ‘But maybe you boys knew that already?’

  Blackman ignored the question, signalled to the other British soldiers to follow, and started towards the tunnel.

  The American shouted after Blackman. ‘Those huts had prisoners in them when the Krauts set them on fire. The sick and invalids, mostly. They either got burned to death or the bastards shot them as they tried to climb out.’

  Sergeant Ferguson caught up with Blackman. ‘I think we should help them, Harry.’

  ‘We’ve got orders, Gus.’

  ‘I know, I know. But it dannae need all sixteen of us to talk to a few prisoners.’

  Blackman stopped to face his comrade. Ferguson nodded towards a group of half a dozen men and women huddled together, shivering next to a small fire. One of them, his head shaven and the striped rags hanging from his quivering frame, strained to lift his gaze up to meet Blackman’s. The Englishman felt certain that the man who looked up at him through wet, bloodshot eyes - a Pole, Czech or Russian perhaps - knew not if the British were there to help him, or to kill him. Likely, he no longer cared.

  ‘Okay. I’ll take Heath, Whitfield and Burroughs. You and the rest of the men see what you can do for these poor sods.’

  Ferguson nodded. ‘Right you are, Harry. Thank you.’

  ‘But Gus. If our man’s not here, we can’t stick around. You know that, right?’

  ‘I know, Harry. Orders, right?’

  Blackman nodded. ‘Orders.’ He beckoned at the three privates to follow him, turned, and strode towards the tunnel.

  The giant concrete structure under the hillside was cavernous and seemingly endless. Every available space was crammed with heavy industrial machinery, and row after row of part-fabricated aircraft and rocket parts. And everywhere he looked, Blackman saw the huddled bodies of the former prisoners. He was unable to distinguish those that were resting, from the dead. In one of the larger tunnels, they came across a massive crane. Its wheels ran along tracks at either side of the long space, its main body traversing the tunnel. They counted thirty bodies hanging from the structure by their necks with electrical cord. Their hands had been bound behind their backs, congealed blood and excrement puddling beneath them. The corpses had, by Blackman’s reckoning, been left suspended for several days. A week perhaps.

  It took twenty minutes to find the American MPs and their German captives, and a further ten minutes for Blackman to negotiate getting access to them - a task that involved invoking the name of a very senior US Army general, and the threat of a court martial for not assisting.

  ‘Fuck it,’ the senior MP muttered, finally. ‘They’re all in that room over there.’ He pointed to a steel door with two sentries in front of it. ‘Do what the hell you want with them.’

  ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Sergeant,’ Blackman said as he moved to the door. Before entering, he reached into the inner pocket of his battle smock and retrieved a bundle of small pieces of paper - photographs of people; German men and women in various military uniforms. He shuffled through them, found one and stared at it for several seconds - fixing the image in his head, then pushed the images back into his pocket and opened the door.

  Blackman arrived back an hour later to find sergeant Gus Ferguson in the middle of a heated argument involving several Americans. ‘What’s going on?’ he bellowed.

  The American answered. ‘One of your men killed one of the German prisoners.’ He pointed to a corpse a few yards away; a large man in the uniform of a Wehrmacht soldier. The man’s body lay face down in the mud. The side of his head had been caved in, the dead man’s blood pooling into the divots and footprints in the sodden earth. One of the camp prisoners stood over the dead German, wrapped in a fresh US Army blanket, staring at the dead body, his face devoid of emotion, his eyes weary and vacant.

  Blackman
peered at Ferguson who had his hands clamped around one of the other British soldier’s bicep. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was Morrison, here. He whacked the Jerry there on the head with his rifle.’

  Blackman glared at the younger man. ‘Morrison. Why? Did he come at you? Was he armed?’

  Private Morrison shook his head. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I just kinda lost my rag. All these poor sods laying in the dirt. And that…that sly cunt as he picked up one of the bodies. Laughing, like it was a fucking joke—’

  ‘We’ve got company,’ Ferguson said, directing Blackman’s attention towards a group of GIs who were running towards them from the direction of the tunnel.

  ‘This man is under arrest,’ said an American voice. Blackman glanced behind him to see Lieutenant Schwimmer, still holding his clipboard. The Englishman ignored him, glanced again at the approaching soldiers a hundred yards away.

  ‘Back in the jeeps, now,’ he commanded. He looked at private Morrison. ‘You too. At the double.’

  The American officer’s face turned an instant crimson. ‘That man just killed a prisoner in cold blood,’ he said, pointing at Morrison.

  Blackman thrust his hand forward and grabbed the American by the throat, slamming him against the side of a truck. ‘He killed a Kraut. One Kraut. Your lot should have lined them all up against a wall and shot them the moment you got here.’ He relaxed his grip of the American who dropped to the floor clutching his throat, gasping for air.

  Ferguson pulled up in one of the jeeps, the engine revving hard, and with two men - one of them private Morrison, in the back seats. Blackman climbed in and Ferguson pulled away, steering the vehicle through the open gate, accelerating to catch up to the other jeeps which were now speeding away along a gravel track that led into the forest.

  ‘I take it he wasn’t there?’ the Scotsman shouted over the noise of the strained engine and whining gearbox.