Eden's Gate

by David Hagberg

  Schaub shot Lane a look. “What time was that, Herr Kapitän?”

  “Three o’clock,” Gloria said from the doorway. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater, but she hadn’t fixed her hair and she wore no makeup.

  “I’m sorry, Herr Kapitän, but Mr. Browne was with me in the kitchen,” Sergeant Schaub said. “We couldn’t sleep so we were having a smoke and some schnapps. Talking about the mission.”

  “He’s a fucking liar,” Gloria shrieked.

  The animation suddenly drained from Speyer’s face. For a moment he looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But a kid capable of killing anyone who got in his way or challenged him. When he raised his head he was smiling with embarrassment. “Sorry about that.”

  “You bastards,” Gloria screamed, but then she realized that no one believed her, and she went back inside.

  “Your wife did come to my room last night to try to seduce me, but I sent her away,” Lane admitted. “That’s the second time she’s tried since Kalispell. Either keep her on a shorter leash, or the next time you send her to me I might not send her back.”

  “She said you hit her.”

  “I don’t hit women or children. Only men who deserve to be hit.”

  Speyer stared at Lane with hatred. “I don’t trust you.”

  “Well, I don’t trust you either,” Lane replied. “Nor do I particularly care for your brand of leadership. So if you want me to get out, I’ll go. But first I’ll take the five thousand you offered me. I didn’t come all this way for nothing. Besides, I figure that saving your life is worth at least that much.”

  Speyer looked at Schaub and Baumann and then stared at the whitecaps marching across the lake for a few seconds before turning back. “I’d rather you didn’t leave just yet,” he said. “As a matter of fact without you we’d have to abort this mission until I could find someone to take your place. In the meantime keeping the Russians in place would be difficult if not impossible.”

  “Ten percent,” Lane said.

  Baumann started to object, but Speyer held him off. “That could be as much as thirty million dollars.”

  Lane shrugged. “I figure that it’s worth it, don’t you? Ninety percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing.”

  Speyer nodded, a wry smile on his lips. “It’s a deal, Mr. Browne with an ‘e.’ Under the circumstances I don’t have much of a choice.”

  “No, you don’t,” Lane said.

  “What I want to know is what the hell is down there that’s so important,” Golanov asked.

  “I don’t know myself, but whatever it is, they want it badly enough to risk coming back to Germany and spending a lot of money,” Mironov replied.

  They were outside at the DF 1 truck, ready to head out. Golanov was driving and Cherny rode shotgun. Mironov would drive over to the chalet as soon as the filming began and the diver was down in the bunker. Speyer’s wife didn’t know what he looked like. To her he would be nothing other than one of the Russian team.

  “Just remember nobody makes a move until Browne is out of the bunker and has the package,” Mironov cautioned them. “I’ll be waiting at the chalet, but if you see an opportunity, take it. Save us all some trouble. But I want Browne for myself if at all possible.”

  “What if the caretaker gets suspicious, or if a tourist should wander by?”

  “Kill them,” Mironov said. “Dump their bodies in the bunker, and seal it up.”

  Lane had the equipment he needed piled just inside the garage door. He’d taped his Beretta to his chest, and then donned the dry suit. He thought about carrying another pistol in his equipment bag or somewhere else under his suit, but he decided against it. If he couldn’t defend himself with nine shots then he would be in enough trouble that reaching for another gun might well be impossible.

  Schaub came out to the garage with another cup of brandy-laced coffee. Lane took it and warmed his bare hands. It was colder here this morning than Washington, D.C., usually got in the winter.

  “They’ll be here in a minute or two, are you ready?” Schaub asked.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Lane replied. “Why did you lie for me about Gloria?”

  “Did you touch her?”

  Lane shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so,” Schaub said thoughtfully. He glanced back toward the house. “Helmut has told me about her. She’s bad news all the way. He should never have married her in the first place, let alone bring her here.” He shrugged. “But he is a jealous man, so he couldn’t leave her behind.”

  “What about you, Otto? Are you coming with us after we’re finished this morning?”

  “This is my home, so I’ll remain unless it becomes impossible for me.”

  “Why get involved in the first place? Just stay here this morning.”

  “I wish it were possible, Junge. But Helmut and I go back a long way together. I owe him.”

  “I see,” Lane said. “Stay out of sight, then. Maybe we can pull this off without killing anyone.”

  They loaded the dive equipment in the back of the truck, and Lane crawled inside with Speyer, Baumann, and Schaub. It was a big truck, but with all the equipment they were cramped for space. The Russians were in front. Golanov, who would play the role of narrator, wore a sport coat and a white turtleneck. Cherny would be the cameraman. He wore white coveralls with “DF 1” stenciled on the back.

  “Are we all set back there?” Golanov asked.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Speyer ordered.

  The drive down to the memorial took only a few minutes. When they turned onto the entry road Golanov headed directly over to the maintenance building, where he pulled up and parked.

  “The parking lot is empty,” he told them. “But keep your heads down until we can get the caretaker to the other side of the pavilion.”

  “Here he comes,” Cherny said.

  “Okay, you’ll be able to hear everything over the headset. When we tell him that it’ll only take an hour, that’s your signal to start. And that’s how long you’ll have to make the dive and get out.”

  As soon as Golanov and Cherny were out of the truck with their camera equipment, Lane assembled his diving gear and put it on. Schaub helped him, while Speyer listened on the headset and Baumann kept lookout.

  “They’re showing him the authorization for filming from the Federal Parks Bureau,” Speyer said. “Can you see them, Ernst?”

  Baumann rose up so that he could look over the back of the driver’s seat. “They’re inside the pavilion, looking toward the lake.”

  “He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do.” Speyer pressed the headset closer. “Stupid bastard.” He looked up. “Has anyone else shown up?”

  “Nein.”

  Speyer listened a little longer. “Is there any sign of the two maintenance men?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You may have to go out and kill the caretaker—” Speyer held up a hand. “Wait.”

  Lane lowered the chest zipper on his dry suit so that he could reach his pistol. He wasn’t going to allow them to kill the caretaker. He met Schaub’s eyes, but the sergeant said nothing, though it was obvious he knew what Lane meant to do.

  “Okay, that’s the signal,” Speyer said, grinning like a death’s head. “One hour. Do the lock, Ernst.”

  Baumann slid open the truck’s side door, which was only a couple of feet from the steel door into the maintenance shed. Using a pair of hydraulic shears, he cut the shackle, removed the lock and opened the door. There was just enough clearance for Lane to slip inside.

  It took a couple of moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but then Baumann and Schaub squeezed their way inside and switched on flashlights.

  A double-wide steel trapdoor was set into the concrete floor about twenty feet below the gallery they stood on. Metal stairs led to the lower level. There was nothing inside the shed; no equipment, no tools, no lights.

  They went down to the
base level. The trapdoor was secured by a padlock. While Schaub held a flashlight, Baumann cut and removed the padlock and swung the doors open to reveal the shaft into the bunker. The opening was ten feet on a side, water coming to within six inches of the top. There were no handholds, no ladders, nothing except the square of ominously black water.

  “It’s time, Junge, if you’ve got the stomach for it,” Schaub said.

  Lane had marked the locations of the bunker’s main intersections and primary lab on a plastic marker board. He made sure it was secure in a leg pocket, then held up a thumb. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “Try not to touch anything you don’t have to touch, and don’t brush up against the ceilings or walls,” Schaub cautioned.

  Lane nodded. Holding his mask in place with one hand, he switched on his dive light with the other and stepped off the concrete floor into the water. It immediately closed over his head like a coffin lid, and he began his long, slow fall to the bottom, three hundred feet down.

  It was working exactly as they had planned it, Mironov thought as he came around the bend in the road. The memorial was up ahead, and although he couldn’t see Golanov and Cherny with the caretaker, he could hear them talking over his headset as if they were actually making the stupid documentary.

  He carried an Austrian-made 9mm Glock 17 self-loading pistol with a nineteen-round box magazine in a shoulder holster. He felt in his jacket pocket for the extra magazine of ammunition, and inside his belt on his right side for his second gun, a small, reliable, 5.45mm Russian-made PSM.

  “How deep is the lake at this point?” Golanov’s voice came over Mironov’s headset.

  He slowed as he passed the driveway down to the memorial. He saw the DF 1 truck in front of the maintenance shed but there was no sign of Golanov, Cherny, and the caretaker, though he could hear them. They were allowing one hour for the dive, but they would not be expecting the reception they were going to get.

  After the first fifty feet Lane let a little gas into his buoyancy control vest to slow his rate of descent. As he dropped he spread his legs and looked down, shining the powerful beam of his halogen helmet light between his flippers. Shadows and dark, twisted shapes loomed all around him. Cables emerged from the side of the shaft at one point, dropped thirty or forty feet and then disappeared back into the shaft wall. A swastika was painted on the wall about halfway to the bottom, and directly beneath it was a skull and crossbones with the single word: VORSICHT! Danger! At another point his light flashed on the remains of a stairway, only four concrete steps remaining after nearly sixty years.

  For the most part the shaft had been scoured clean by the blast, and by the sudden uprush of water which carried every loose object before it: cables, elevator cars, stairs, equipment, rubble, bodies. Silt had settled on every surface so that his movement made the water above him opaque. Below him, however, the water was pitch-black everywhere except in the beam of his light, where it was crystal clear.

  His electronic depth gauge began beeping at 85 meters, which was about 280 feet. He let more air into his BC, and his rate of descent slowed to almost zero.

  Below him the floor of the shaft was twisted upward at a steep angle, as if the concrete slab the bunker was constructed on had been tilted. But as he slowly worked his way down, he began to realize that the side of the shaft itself had been undercut and had collapsed into the main tunnel, half burying an opening to the left.

  He jackknifed and followed the beam of his light to the base of the shaft where he directed it through the opening. This apparently was the main corridor that ran roughly east to west. He could make out a doorway and what appeared to be blown-out windows.

  There was some debris, but mostly the tunnel was clear. Nor was there any appreciable current.

  Lane backed up and took out the plastic card with his notes and sketches. The cold had already begun to seep into his bones, and he felt his strength being drawn off. But it was deceptively slow. Almost comforting.

  The rubble he hovered above covered what had been the final security checkpoint at the bottom of the elevator shaft and stairwell. The opening into the bunker had been secured by a steel door, much like those aboard a submarine. But that was gone now.

  He swam closer and once again shined his light into the main corridor, checking what he was seeing against his plastic dive card. His light wouldn’t penetrate twenty meters; more like three or four. But the corridor seemed to be unblocked and stable. The ceilings and walls were not bulging, and so far as he could see there were no other collapsed sections ahead.

  Replacing the dive card in his leg pocket, he eased his way through the opening and down into the corridor, a cloud of silt rising behind him, completely obliterating the opening.

  He hovered again for several seconds to make sure that the ceiling wasn’t going to fall in on him, and then swam to the first doorway. He shined his light inside what could have been a laboratory. All that was left now were several heavy workbenches bolted to the floor, some shelving along a wall, and a twisted pile of what might have been desks, file cabinets, and other things jammed into a corner.

  Back in the main corridor he almost lost his bearings because rising silt was so thick he could not see his hand in front of his face mask, nor would the beam of his flashlight penetrate more than an arm’s length.

  With his hand trailing along the wall he swam forward, coming out of the silted water all of a sudden as if a thick gauze curtain had been pulled away from his eyes.

  He passed two other doors, one of which opened into another scoured-out laboratory, and the other of which was closed. He didn’t bother trying to open it. Instead he continued to another open door which he figured was the right distance, about twenty meters from the shaft, to be Laboratory A.

  The steel door to this laboratory had been held in the open position by an iron bar jammed into the hinges from inside. Like the other labs, this one had been all but scoured clean of whatever equipment it had once held, except for several heavy workbenches and a very large two-door floor safe jammed into a corner.

  There were two chairs and a tangle of wire, wood, pieces of concrete, a big microscope, and some other piece of laboratory equipment in front of the safe. Lane carefully removed these things, setting them aside in a dense cloud of silt.

  He was so cold now that his joints were beginning to hurt, and he was getting sleepy. He raised his wrist to look at his dive watch. At first he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. According to the watch forty-eight minutes had already elapsed. Was that possible, he asked himself. He pulled his dive computer and gauges over and studied them for several long seconds. His oxy-helium mixture was more than half gone, confirming his watch. But it seemed as if he had been gone for only a few minutes.

  He shook his head to clear it, then waved the silt from the big combination lock, and cleared the mechanism by turning the knob three full turns to the right.

  He hovered for several seconds, his mind drawing a blank, until the first number popped into his head. He turned the dial to 58. The mechanism, apparently sealed from the water, still worked smoothly. He turned to 17, right back to 41, and finally left to 23, but when he tried the latch handles they wouldn’t budge.

  Lane hovered motionless again, staring drunkenly at the dial. After all these years they couldn’t expect the mechanism to still be in working order. Yet the dial was free and smooth.

  He reached to turn it back to zero to start over, but first he tried the latches again. This time they opened smoothly.

  A big bubble of air escaped from the safe, rising to the ceiling where it spread like quicksilver, brightly reflecting his light. A pair of inner doors, secured with a recessed latch, opened easily to his touch, and as he drew them open an even larger bubble of air escaped.

  The safe was empty except for a single black metal box, a nearly perfect cube about twenty inches on a side. There were handles left and right. A bead of metal, what might have been lead, ran completely aro
und the seam, sealing the container’s lid. Skull and crossbones decals were painted on each side of the box with the single German world for danger in bold red print: VORSICHT!

  In Lane’s befuddled state he stared at the box for perhaps as long as a minute. It rested in a compartment in the exact middle of the safe. The compartment was held in place by a series of springs, like shock absorbers. Whatever was sealed in the box had to be sensitive to vibration or else the Germans would not have gone to such lengths to protect it.

  If they were diamonds, Lane thought, they were unusually delicate stones.

  He slid the box out of its compartment and was immediately weighed down to his knees, the box sinking at once to the concrete floor, silt rising in thick clouds. The damned thing had to weigh at least one hundred pounds.

  Working almost completely by feel, Lane wrestled the box up to his chest where he braced it against the edge of the safe as he pushed the pressure button on his chest, dumping gas into his BC. He rose off his knees. The box was still as heavy as before, but he wasn’t being weighed down by it.

  He dumped a little more gas into his BC, turned and slowly made his way through the almost completely opaque water to where he thought the door was. He bumped into the wall, and he remained motionless for a second or two, until he gathered his wits enough to follow the wall to the left.

  Five feet later he came to the opening and swam out into the corridor where he stopped again. He had come down the shaft and through the opening. But which way had he turned after that? There were other laboratories, and he vaguely remembered that one of them had been sealed.

  He swiveled to the left and tried to peer through the silted water. He was very cold; his throat was dry and raw. Think. He swiveled to the right. He’d come stright down the main corridor and then turned … left into the laboratory. It meant that to get out he had to turn in the opposite direction. Right. But he was already facing right.