The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  ‘Meaning the possibility of intact bodies? Where the virus might still be found?’

  Stein pursed his lips. ‘The coffins were dug up but left unopened and quickly trucked away. The Jewish labourers were shot over the open graves. One man escaped among the tombs. The entire Gestapo in Paris were detailed to hunt for him. He remained on the run. He’s in quarantine in an isolation facility in England now.’

  Mayne was beginning to feel physically sick. ‘Do you think this place, where we are now, was where they brought the bodies?’

  ‘Something was going on here. Remember what I said. You don’t need much space. Cold storage for bodies, incubators, a basic microbiology lab. The kind of weapon we’re talking about is invisible to the human eye.’

  ‘And what Cameron told us. A place with a supply of healthy young people for experimentation.’

  Stein stared at Mayne. ‘All I can tell you for certain is this. Hitler had it planned from before the war. Either a thousand-year Reich, or nothing. Here we are, probably days from the end of the Reich. If Nazi scientists did manage to isolate the Spanish flu virus, to nurture it – maybe, Lord help us, to mutate it to a more virulent form – then someone will have been detailed to use it. Someone who might be here now, waiting. You’ve seen how fanatical the SS can be. There would be no morality to hold them back. Only the order of their Fuhrer, and that would be absolute. I saw the flu epidemic of 1918 with my own eyes. Whole wards full of young people drowning in pneumonia, screaming as their immune systems ate into their brains. It seemed like a world gone mad. Even H.G. Wells couldn’t have thought it up. And now, in this war, in this place, at Belsen, at Auschwitz, we’ve seen what war can do. There are no boundaries. With a virus like Spanish influenza deliberately infecting the world, with all the cold efficiency of Nazi planning, there will be no miracle this time, no recovery from horror and death.’

  Mayne shut his eyes for a moment. A world gone mad. He looked at Stein, started to speak, then stopped. He had had a terrible thought. The war in north-west Europe, the war since Normandy, had gone on far longer than anyone had thought it would. The Allies had mustered overwhelming forces. Yet there had been long periods of stalemate, of slow progress, of seeming vacillation as the armies lumbered forward. He could barely think it. Had it been deliberate? Had the generals been forced to stall by Allied intelligence, to allow intelligence agents to find this horror, this doomsday weapon, before the armies entered the homeland and Hitler issued the order? He stared at Stein. ‘You think the reverse swastika is the secret symbol?’

  ‘We think it’s an activation code. We captured a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer who was one of the few who knew of the plan, and he eventually talked. He only knew a little about it, but it was enough. We think the orders were sent out from the Fuhrerbunker at the British and American crossing of the Rhine, Operation Plunder, on the twenty-third of March. That was three weeks ago. There will probably be a redundancy, maybe two, three, four individuals converging on the place where the weapon is kept, if we’re right. Enough to ensure that one gets through.’

  ‘And then some kind of final code. A trigger.’

  ‘The word that Hitler is dead. Has committed suicide.’

  ‘What was the code called?’

  ‘The officer eventually told us. It was Das Agamemnon-Code.’

  ‘The Agamemnon Code,’ Mayne repeated. ‘My God. I knew it.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s that name. Agamemnon. I know where that symbol came from. It was a device, an ancient artefact. One of the most astonishing artefacts ever unearthed.’

  Stein paused. ‘From Mycenae. We know. We don’t know the details of how it was discovered. That’s irrelevant to us. But the man we interrogated told us it was from Mycenae, and secretly stored for decades in Schliemann’s home town of Nuebukow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Ahnenerbe officers found it when they went there under the express orders of Heinrich Himmler to look for Schliemann’s treasures. They loved everything to do with Troy because of the swastika imagery. Himmler had done his research. He thought the golden swastika was the palladion, the lost symbol of Troy. It was made of gold and meteoritic material, from an ancient meteorite that fell on Troy far back in prehistory. They took it in secret triumph to the SS fantasy-castle at Wewelsburg, where it stayed reverently locked away. It was going to be the centrepiece of the Fuhrermuseum at Linz, another Nazi fantasy. Where it is now is anybody’s guess. But somewhere on the way it got hijacked as the symbol of the final apocalyptic decree. The Agamemnon Code.’

  Mayne was silent for a moment. He spoke quietly. ‘Just one question. When was that Nazi interrogated? When did you know that the crossing of the Rhine would be the signal?’

  ‘Soon after the liberation of Paris. August 1944.’

  ‘ Christ. August 1944. So you’ve been searching for more than six months.’

  ‘As you have been. You didn’t know it, but you were too. You said it yourself in the jeep on the way in. Strategic intelligence. Look how many outfits there are operating ahead of our lines. Your unit, 30 AU. Mine, the MFAA. After Normandy, the whole of British Special Operations Executive redirected their efforts towards uncovering secrets. But hardly anyone knows the real reason. If all goes to plan, hardly anyone will ever know. It will go to their graves with them. With us. I happen to be one of those few. And I’m telling you because we’re so close to it here, closer than we’ve ever been. And the clock is ticking. Hitler can’t last much longer. What frightens me is that whoever it is might be frightened themselves into taking action now, in case they’re discovered. If I’m right about this place.’

  ‘Still a big if.’ Mayne leaned back. He had meant to ask, but could not. It would do no good to know. It was almost beyond contemplation. He thought of the terrible grind of the war since Normandy, all the friends he had lost, the killing he himself had done, then the dreadful camp, all of those deaths, the girl with the harp, what had happened to her in this forest. Was all of that a price that had been paid to get them, the two of them, by chance, to where they were now, this day? He shut the thought from his mind. He took a deep breath and knelt up, checking his watch. ‘Right. I think I need a breather from this place. From everything you’ve just been saying. Let’s get back. Lewes should be setting out from Corps HQ by now. Knowing him, he’ll be early. Doesn’t like to leave me alone. We can meet him at the camp gate.’

  There was a rustle in the foliage behind them. Mayne spun round, revolver at the ready. A man lurched out, dressed in the tattered blue-striped uniform of a camp inmate. His arms were up, hands open towards them. His head was roughly shaven and he was gaunt-faced, his eyes sunken. ‘ Juden. Juden,’ he said in a cracked voice, pointing at himself with one hand, gesturing desperately with the other at Mayne’s revolver. He pulled back his left sleeve and revealed a tattoo like the one the nurse had shown them on the child from Auschwitz, but raw, inflamed. Stein put his hand on Mayne’s arm and he slowly lowered the pistol. Stein waved at the man to calm down. ‘ Shalom aleichem,’ he said.

  ‘ Aleichem shalom,’ the man replied, looking pathetically grateful. Stein spoke urgently with him in Yiddish, asking short questions and the man answering rapidly, several times pointing to the structure behind them and then down the side of the building, where all Mayne could see was the buried concrete wall. Stein put his hand up to silence the man and turned to Mayne. ‘I think he’s genuine. He says he’s Hungarian Jewish.’

  ‘There were Hungarian fascists among the Waffen SS we captured at Cassino,’ Mayne murmured, his finger still on the trigger. ‘Not Jews, of course, but some of them knew Yiddish and could pass muster.’

  ‘He speaks the Hungarian dialect of Yiddish flawlessly. I know it, because my mother’s family were originally from the German borderland near Hungary.’

  Mayne pursed his lips. ‘So what’s his story?’

  ‘He says he was one of the final batch who were deported by the Nazis from Budapest to Auschwitz, late last year.
He was selected for something called the Zondercommando, Jewish assistants who cleared the bodies from the gas chambers and then burned them.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Why tell something like that if you’re spinning a tale?’

  ‘Because it makes the story more convincing. Go on.’

  Stein saw Mayne’s concern, and paused. ‘He said he was singled out with several others and brought here about three months ago. He said the Nazis were always bringing small batches of healthy young men to the camp. That’s exactly what Cameron told us. They were kept separate from the others, well fed, then brought into this building. None of them came out alive. The bodies were never sent to the camp crematorium but were buried in a deep lime-filled pit on the edge of the forest, by men in protective overalls and gas masks.’

  ‘He must have overheard us talking about the virus. That sounds like confirmation of experimentation on humans. Exactly what we might want to hear.’

  Stein looked uncertain. ‘He says he doesn’t speak English. Look at him. He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying. He says he and several others escaped into the forest five days ago. They’ve been hunting down and killing any of the former SS guards they’ve found hiding out here. That’s also what we heard was going on.’

  ‘Strange they didn’t get that woman, the Lagerfuherin. Her disguise wasn’t going to fool anyone.’

  ‘I mentioned that to him. Apparently she only fled into the forest yesterday, when the troops arrived. But this man and his comrades didn’t want to put themselves at any more risk. Once the camp was liberated, they just wanted to survive. They knew she’d be caught eventually, precisely because she made so little effort to disguise herself. He said that he and the others just wanted to wait for Allied soldiers like us to arrive so they could show the world this place. I told him the forest was due to be bombed, that it was time to leave. He got agitated. You saw that. Went very pale. He said we had to see what was inside the bunker then, immediately. They’ve got the keys. They took them off a dead SS man. He knows another way in.’

  ‘You mean where he was gesturing?’

  ‘Around the corner. Behind those fallen logs. Apparently, it’s where they used to take the bodies out.’

  Mayne took a deep breath. He felt a sudden jolt of pain in the old wound in his shoulder, cutting into him like a knife, but he kept steady and gestured with his revolver. ‘All right. We haven’t got time for more of this. We need to get back to Lewes. Tell him to show us the way. Quickly.’

  Stein spoke in Yiddish to the man, who put his hands down, nodded enthusiastically and scurried towards the corner of the concrete wall about five metres beyond the barred door. Mayne and Stein followed him around the corner, ducking beneath a jumble of logs and cut boughs that partly concealed a ramp leading down at a low angle along the side of the building, ending about three metres below the level of the surrounding forest. It was a loading bay, wide enough for a small lorry to back down. On the side of the building was a jumble of cut logs that Mayne guessed had been dropped there within the past few weeks to hide the entrance.

  The man began to shift the logs aside, working with ease. Mayne remembered his story. His strength seemed plausible. In the death camps, only the most proficient workers would have been kept alive, and this man’s job at Auschwitz had been to haul and stack bodies. Even so, his wiry frame concealed remarkable strength for one who had eaten little for weeks. Perhaps the adrenalin of the moment was what kept him going, if liberation was what he and his comrades had been waiting for. Mayne kept his revolver unholstered, but lowered it. The man pushed aside the final log to reveal a metal door, smaller than the other entrance. He straightened up, wiping his brow, then produced a key from the chain around his neck and inserted it in the padlock that hung from a massive metal latch across the door. The lock sprang open and he removed it, dropping it to the ground. He swung open the latch, pushing the door inwards, then reached inside and switched on a light, before turning and speaking quickly to Stein in Yiddish. Stein followed and gestured back to Mayne. ‘He says the place has its own generator, but after the Allied bombing of the hydroelectric power stations last year, they installed a couple of charged-up U-boat batteries for back-up. There’s enough electricity to keep the basic amenities going for years, decades. They needed it for dehumidifiers, apparently, and other equipment.’

  Mayne peered in. ‘I wonder what that equipment might have been,’ he murmured. ‘Dehumidifiers I can understand, though. It must get damp down here. A problem for storage.’ He followed Stein into a dimly lit corridor about ten metres long. At either end were glass-fronted booths, evidently security posts. He peered into the booth at the entrance. Everything still seemed in place, as if it had been hastily abandoned, the phone still on its receiver, and stationery and other paraphernalia neatly arranged. The man spoke in Yiddish again, and Stein looked back at Mayne. ‘Apparently it was only abandoned by the SS a few days ago, when they knew the camp was about to be surrendered. Our man says he and his comrades were waiting in the woods and ambushed the guards. This place was stocked up for a siege, and this is where he and his friend have been getting their food.’

  They reached the far end of the corridor. The booth contained an MG-42 machine gun on a tripod, its receiver still glistening with oil and a bullet belt slinking down to a cartridge box on the floor, like a coiled serpent. There was a clang and Mayne turned back in alarm, his revolver raised. The metal door had swung shut. The man spoke quickly to Stein, who put a hand on Mayne’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. He says the door’s on an angled pivot, and closed itself. The Nazis didn’t want anyone stumbling in here.’

  Mayne felt uneasy, confined. It was as if they had entered the underworld, and passed beyond a portal where return might be impossible. ‘All right. Let’s get this over and done with.’

  A locked door barred their way. The man produced another key and opened the padlock, and the door swung open. The interior was already lit, with bare bulbs hanging from wires strung high above. It was a cavernous chamber, with curved walls like a Nissen hut. The lattice of steel reinforcement rods in the concrete was clearly visible, evidently designed to withstand bomb blast. The shape reminded Mayne of the London underground station where he had sheltered during a German bombing raid early in the war. He looked around. It was packed with wooden shipping crates, pushed together like old coffins in a crypt, leaving a narrow passage ahead to another door at the far end. The man was already halfway down the passage, gesturing for them to follow. Mayne and Stein stood transfixed, staring at the crates.

  ‘Is this what I think it is?’ Mayne murmured.

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  Mayne holstered his revolver and unsheathed the commando knife he kept at the back of his webbing belt. He approached the nearest crate, then quickly prised up the lid and toppled it off. He sheathed the knife, and they both peered in at a mass of crumpled paper and straw packing material. He reached in and pulled out handfuls of the material, and they both gasped. ‘These are canvases, old paintings,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘ I knew it. Let me have a look at one,’ Stein said, reaching in and pulling out more of the packing material. ‘I just need to identify one painting. Just one old master. Then we can keep going.’

  Mayne carefully pulled out a framed painting, propped it on the crate and ripped open the protective paper that had been wrapped crudely around it, revealing the canvas beneath. Stein caught his breath again. ‘This is wonderful.’ He whipped on a pair of spectacles and took out a torch, shining it at the painting, the deep colours and imagery of the canvas reflected at them. ‘ Portrait of a Young Man, by Raphael,’ he murmured. ‘Stolen in 1941 from the Czawarky Museum in Krakow, Poland, on the personal orders of Goring.’ He took off his glasses and looked around. ‘That makes this place very important indeed. It could be an absolute treasure trove.’

  Mayne looked at the canvas, and shook his head in disbelief. He knew this paintin
g well. He had given a print of it to Hugh before the war, had hung it over the fireplace of his college sitting room in Oxford. They had shared a bottle of wine in front of it, then gone for a walk along the river Isis. It had been one of those perfect days. He looked down for a moment. He wondered how Hugh was now. He hadn’t looked at all well. He hoped he wasn’t with his SAS unit somewhere on the edge of this forest, looking for the Germans, waiting. He hoped they had taken him out of the line. The end of the war was so close now. Hugh must survive. Mayne found himself suddenly crying, weeping, here of all places, in this awful bunker. He wiped his eyes, and shuddered. Please God, let Hugh survive.

  The man shouted to them in Yiddish, his voice harsher now, agitated. Stein listened, then turned to Mayne. ‘He says this is only the beginning. He says there’s more, much more. He says we need to follow him to the end, to the door at the other side.’

  Stein stared hard for a moment into the eyes of the young man in the painting, shook his head, smiled broadly and then turned away. Mayne pulled the protective paper back over the painting, then followed him. A few steps on he saw another open crate, close to the wall. He squeezed quickly between the boxes to have a look. This crate had also been packed with straw. It was lit by a bare light bulb directly overhead. He leaned awkwardly over and put his fingers on the edge of the crate, pulling himself forward by the strength of his arms, careful not to twist his bad shoulder. He peered inside.

  He had found it.

  It was there, nestled in straw at the bottom of the crate, partially wrapped in a piece of old burlap, as if it had been brought here recently and hastily unpackaged, not part of the carefully packed collection around him. It was resting the way the old foreman of Schliemann’s had described it, in reverse. A swastika, symbol of unimaginable horror, but somehow different, speaking of a different world, one Mayne had stepped out of six long years ago. He heard the ringing again in his ears, but this time it was like a distant clash of arms, like the mighty contest that had once transported him to the age of heroes. For a moment he was back on the hillside overlooking Mycenae, wondering what had driven the king of kings to set it all in motion, to lead his army to Troy. Now he saw what Schliemann had seen. The most fantastic treasure ever found. And he remembered what the girl had drawn, the girl with the harp, sitting out there in that wasteland. So this was what she had seen too. They must have taken it out, paraded it around when they brought her here.