by Paul Sussman
'This town, Berder-whatever-it's-called. Where is it exactly?'
'Berchtesgaden,' corrected his deputy. 'Southern Germany. Near the border with Austria.'
There was a fractional pause, then Khalifa was on his feet sprinting back to his own office. The atlas was still open on his desk and, grabbing it, he began running his eyes back and forth over the page. It took him precisely five seconds to find what he wanted. Berchtesgaden. Fewer than twenty kilometres from Salzburg, which was the nearest airport. He snatched up the phone and punched a number into the keypad. Three rings, then Chief Hassani's voice echoed down the line.
'Sir? Khalifa. I need to request some travel expenses.'
A tinny, jabbering sound.
'A bit further than that, I'm afraid, sir.' He bit his lip. 'Austria.'
The jabbering suddenly became much louder.
BEN-GURION AIRPORT
By the time they'd picked up their passports, driven the sixty kilometres to the airport and made their way into the terminal building, their flight to Vienna was already boarding. Ben-Roi flashed his police ID to get them through the initial round of security checks in the departures hall – the first and only time Layla had managed to negotiate the latter without being subjected to minute and interminable questioning – and straight to the check-in desk. The second security control, at the entrance to the departures lounge, proved more difficult, one of the duty guards insisting on taking Layla aside into a private cubicle to search her, despite Ben-Roi's insistence that she was in his custody and posed no threat. By the time she'd been given the all-clear their flight was being called for the last time.
'Ghabee!' Layla hissed impatiently as her knapsack was handed back to her, its contents thoroughly rifled. 'Idiot!'
She hefted the bag over her shoulder and turned to go after Ben-Roi, who was already moving towards their departure gate. As she did so, back beyond the passport control booths, half-hidden behind a pillar, she caught sight of a tall, muscular figure who seemed to be staring directly at her. Their eyes met for the briefest of instants, then he stepped backwards and disappeared from view.
Outside, Avi Steiner crossed the car park and slipped into the back of a Volvo.
'They're boarding.'
Har-Zion nodded and, leaning forward, patted the driver on the shoulder. The car started up and they moved off, passing through a security gate at the far end of the terminal and out across the tarmac, driving past a row of cargo bays before pulling up beside a hangar in whose open doorway sat a black Cessna Citation Jet. Four other men – tall, honed, expressionless – were waiting for them beside the boarding stairs, each wearing a black yarmulke, each clutching a canvas holdall. Har-Zion and Steiner got out and, with a silent acknowledgement of each other's presence, the six of them disappeared into the jet, its door thunking closed behind them, its engines starting to whine and purr.
EGYPT
Khalifa had already missed the one daily direct flight from Egypt to Austria, so had to scramble round trying to put together an alternative itinerary to Salzburg via some other European capital. After almost an hour of phoning the best he'd managed to come up with was a tortuous route via Rome and Innsbruck which wouldn't get him to his destination till past midnight. By that point Ben-Roi would almost certainly have reached the mine, done whatever he was going to do there and left again, and he was just starting to think he was wasting his time, that there was no way he was going to catch the Israeli, when, with his very last call, he finally found what he needed: a tourist charter from Luxor direct to Munich, departing at 1.15 p.m. Munich was only 130 kilometres by road from Berchtesgaden, and although it wasn't the ideal solution it was the best he could do in the circumstances.
He just had time to call Zenab, tell her he was going on a short business trip – 'Nothing to worry about, I'll be back by this time tomorrow' – before charging off to the airport. So rushed was the whole thing that it was only when he was actually on board the plane and roaring down the runway that it occurred to him this would be the first time in his entire life he had ever been out of his native Egypt.
SALZBURG
They landed in Vienna at 3.30, and Salzburg an hour later, picking up their hire car and speeding south along the autobahn. Ben-Roi drove and Layla map-read, the Bavarian Alps closing in around them like a ring of shattered battlements, steep, tree-covered slopes leaping upwards to either side. Although their lower parts were free from snow, further up, at the level where the forests of birch, elm, ash and juniper gave way to tightly serried ranks of spruce and mountain pine, everything suddenly became swathed in misty white, and though nothing was actually said, they both gazed upwards in growing concern, fearful they had come all this way only for their intended destination to be inaccessible. There was nothing they could do about it at this stage, however, and they sped on in silence, turning off the autobahn after ten kilometres and picking up a looping A-road that ran direct to Berchtesgaden, a frothing river pacing them to their right, the damp tarmac rushing past beneath like a spooling tape.
Ben-Roi, Layla noticed, kept flicking glances into the rear-view mirror, even though the road behind was completely free of traffic.
MUNICH
Although his flight landed twenty minutes ahead of schedule, Khalifa lost all that time and more at passport control, where even with his Egyptian Police ID he struggled to persuade the official on duty – a large, sour-faced woman with bobbed hair and the most enormous breasts he'd ever seen – that he wasn't an illegal immigrant trying to sneak into the country to sponge off its social security system (the fact that he had an open-ended ticket and spoke no German didn't help things). By the time he had persuaded her, and then bought a map, picked up his Volkswagen Polo hire car and negotiated his way out of the airport and onto the eastbound autobahn, it was already early evening, the last breaths of daylight swiftly dissolving into the thick, uncertain haze of dusk.
Under other circumstances he would have taken things more gently, given himself time to absorb his new surroundings. The lush pastures; the rolling, wood-covered hills; the pretty villages with their onion-domed churches and neat, red-tiled houses – it was all so utterly alien to him, so completely different from the sun-baked desert vistas that constituted his own world. With Ben-Roi already well ahead of him, however, there was no time for such indulgences, nor was he in the mood for them. Rather, with barely a glance at his surroundings, he swung the car into the outermost and fastest of the autobahn's three lanes, pushed down the accelerator as far as it would go and roared on into the deepening twilight, oblivious to the flashing overhead signs declaring a speed restriction of 130km/h.
Only once during the ensuing journey did he allow this steely focus briefly to waver. He had swerved into a Dea service station to top up with petrol and buy some cigarettes and was about to climb back into the car when, on a grassy bank on the far side of the pumps, he noticed a small patch of snow, no larger than a child's blanket, a lingering remnant of what must originally have been a far more extensive covering. He had never seen snow before, not real snow, let alone touched it. Although he could hear the seconds ticking away inside his head, he couldn't resist trotting over and laying his hand on the patch's crusted icy surface, holding it there for a moment as if petting some unfamiliar animal before hurrying back to the car and screeching on his way again.
'Wait till I tell Zenab,' he thought to himself, palm still tingling. 'She'll never believe me. Snow! Allah-u-akhbar!'
BERCHTESGADEN
They stopped off at a small roadside hardware store about five kilometres short of Berchtesgaden to buy torches and winter clothes, then turned left off the main highway and started up into the hills. Although it was now dark, the sky above was clear, pricked here and there by the first evening stars and with a full, ice-coloured moon that bathed everything around them in a dull silvery luminescence, as though the landscape had been cast out of pewter. Here and there huddles of glinting lights marked isolated villages and farmsteads, wh
ile in the lowlands behind, pairs of headlamps inched their way through the darkness along the main Berchtesgaden–Salzburg highway. They encountered no other cars on the road they were on, however, and once they had passed through the village of Oberau, with its patchwork of red-and-green-roofed alpine houses, the dwelling lights dropped away as well, leaving the world silent and empty and still, devoid of all traces of humanity save for the road itself and, every kilometre or so, a large sign announcing they were following something called the Rossfeld-Hohen-Ringstrasse.
'You're sure this is the right way?' asked Ben-Roi, flicking the headlamps on to full beam.
Layla nodded, holding a finger to the map. 'It loops round underneath the Hoher Goll and then goes down again towards Berchtesgaden. According to Schlegel's book the path to the mine starts just past its highest point. We need to look out for some sort of ruined building.'
The Israeli grunted and, throwing yet another glance in the rear-view mirror, he dabbed the brakes, swerved the car through a tight bend and accelerated again, grit clattering off the wheels and bodywork, the headlamps punching deep holes in the enveloping gloom.
They were by this point well above the snow line, everything around them sunk beneath a pristine blanket of glinting white: snow on the ground, snow on the trees, snow banked up in sugary, metre-high walls to either side of them. The route itself remained clear, however, and they were able to continue upwards unimpeded, winding back and forth through a succession of ever tighter hairpins, higher and higher, the rearing, cliff-like face of the Hoher Goll looming ever more threateningly in front, until eventually they started to level out, the road running flat for a kilometre or so through thick pine forests before starting to drop down again. As it did so, ahead of them, at the apex of a long sweeping bend, the car's headlamps picked out a small ruined building sitting in a clearing to the left of the road, its crumbling stone walls clasped in a thick muffler of drifted snow. As they came up to it and slowed, Layla pointed to a small wooden sign at the roadside with a yellow arrow aiming upwards into the trees above.
'The Hoher Goll Trail,' she said.
They pulled over and got out. For a brief moment they stood there, taking in their surroundings, the silence enveloping them, ribbons of icy steam billowing from their mouths; then, without further ado, they pulled on their boots, coats and gloves, turned on the torches and started up into the forest, following what was in warmer weather presumably some sort of path or track, but was now just a glistening avenue of virgin snow curving gently upwards through the tightly massed ranks of pine trees.
For the first couple of hundred metres the going wasn't too difficult, the track rising gently, their feet sinking into the snow no deeper than the level of their ankles. Gradually, however, the gradient started to become harsher and the snow deeper, coming up first to their calves, then their knees, then, in places, their thighs, making progress slow, and cumbersome and exhausting. It was bitterly cold, and with tree-trunks crowding in all around they became increasingly disorientated, stopping ever more frequently to make sure they were still actually on the track, which refused to hold a straight line but rather twisted sharply back and forth as though deliberately trying to shake them off. Had it not been for the yellow arrow signs nailed at regular intervals to tree trunks along the route, and the fact that they knew that whatever else they did they needed to keep moving upwards, they would long since have lost all sense of where they were going.
Isaac Schlegel's book had reckoned it was a thirty-minute climb to the mine. With conditions as they were it was almost an hour and a half before they finally felt the ground starting to flatten out beneath them and, as if emerging from a tunnel, staggered forward into a wide clearing at the foot of a rearing wall of black rock, their bodies from the waist down caked in a powdery crust of snow.
'Thank God,' panted Layla, gasping for air.
Beside her, Ben-Roi pulled his hip-flask from his pocket and, between coughs, took a series of long, deep swigs.
They gave themselves half a minute, then, both still fighting to catch their breath, they moved forward a couple of steps and raised their torches, playing the beams back and forth across the rock face in front of them until they had picked out the mine entrance – a dark rectangle across whose mouth thin slats of wood had been nailed to prevent anyone getting in. They exchanged a brief look, neither able to make out much of the other's features behind the veils of steam issuing from their mouths, then started forward across the clearing, weaving their way through mounds of snow-covered rock and slag until they had reached the mine.
Three not particularly hard kicks and a bit of tugging was enough to dismantle the flimsy barricade across its doorway, revealing a dank, forbidding corridor running backwards into the hillside, its ceiling supported at regular intervals by wooden props, its narrow confines choked with a blackness so thick Layla felt she could reach out and scoop up a great chunk of it into her hand. For a brief, distressing moment she found herself pitched into her recurring nightmare – the underground cell, the lurking animal, the same hideous, all-enveloping darkness – before she was snatched back to the present by the sound of Ben-Roi moving forward into the shaft. She went after him, the walls seeming to press in on her, her heart hammering, continuing for about ten metres before the Israeli suddenly stopped, his bulky frame blocking the entire corridor.
'Fuck!'
'What?'
'Fuck!'
She came up beside him, the beam of her torch combining with his to punch a bulging tube of light into the blackness ahead. Forty metres further on the shaft came to an abrupt end, blocked by a wall of massive tumbled rocks where the mine's roof had caved in.
'Fuck!' repeated Ben-Roi.
BERCHTESGADEN
Khalifa came into Berchtesgaden from the north, on the road from Bad Reichenhall, the Polo's interior by that point thick with cigarette smoke, its dashboard ashtray overflowing with a mass of crumpled butts. He pulled over in front of the town's train station to consult his map, then set off again, casting a brief, quizzical glance at a group of men walking down the opposite side of the street dressed in leather shorts – my God, in this weather! – before swinging right over the Berchtesgadener Ache river and heading upwards out of town into the mountains.
According to the map the Germans had faxed to Sariya, the Berg-Ulmewerk mine was accessed by some sort of path or track that led upwards from the Rossfeld-Hohen-Ringstrasse, the road he was now following. Precisely where that path started, however, or if it was marked in any way, wasn't made clear, either on the faxed map or the one he had bought at the airport, and the higher Khalifa climbed and the deeper the snow got and the thicker the pine forests, the more worried he became that unless he happened upon some large sign saying MINE THIS WAY, he was never going to be able to locate the damned thing.
He was actually starting to wonder if maybe he shouldn't turn round and head back to the nearest village, try to get more detailed directions, when, coming out of a bend at what seemed to be almost the road's highest point, his headlamps swung across the face of a ruined stone building huddled in a clearing to the right. Beyond it a car was pulled up at the roadside, with a trail of footprints churning an untidy wake up into the forest above. Ben-Roi. It had to be. He stopped, cut the engine and got out.
If he thought it had been cold down in the lowlands it was nothing to the bitter, icy atmosphere that now enveloped him, the raw mountain air seeming to shred away his clothes so that he felt as if he was standing stark naked inside a giant refrigerator. For a moment it quite literally knocked the breath out of him, as though he had been punched in the stomach, and even when he'd recovered himself sufficiently to get a cigarette in his mouth and light it, his teeth were chattering so much he struggled actually to draw any smoke.
He stomped up and down for a bit, forcing whatever warmth he could into his body, then, leaning back into the Polo and stuffing every bit of loose paper he could find into the pockets of his jacket – maps, car-hir
e paperwork, even the Volkswagen's log book – he slammed the door, locked it and set off up into the forest, his shoes crunching and squeaking in the snow, the pine trees closing around him like the bars of an enormous cage.
They managed to shift a couple of smaller rocks off the top of the ceiling fall, hoping against hope that it might just be a limited collapse and they would somehow be able to wriggle through into the shaft beyond. No chance. Behind the smaller rocks were bigger rocks, much bigger rocks, great jagged slabs of rock. It would have been a struggle to move them with ten people and proper lifting equipment. With just the two of them, and nothing to use but their bare hands, it was a lost cause. They worked at it for thirty minutes, their flashlights balanced precariously on an old tin bucket on the floor, then gave up.
