by Gavin Scott
“I’m not sure, but someone has been here in the past few hours.”
“If he’s in there, you shouldn’t be,” said Sophie.
Forrester stood up. “I don’t think I’ve got much option,” he said.
“You’ve got the option of walking away,” said Sophie. “This man already tried to kill you once; he’s now got the perfect place to finish the job.”
“Well, forewarned is forearmed.”
“That’s ridiculous. If he’s waiting for you in there, what chance do you have?”
“I suppose I’ll find out when I meet him.”
Suddenly Sophie was overcome by anger. “That’s ridiculous!” she said. “For a rock?”
“Yes,” said Forrester. “For a rock.”
“Listen—”
“No, listen to me, Sophie. Please. The Minoans wrote. They wrote a lot. We have the tablets, we have the inscriptions. But we don’t know what any of them mean. The stone in this cave could be what allows us to read all of that.”
“I don’t care about what the Minoans wrote, or a damn piece of rock they wrote it on, Duncan,” said Sophie. “I care about you.”
Forrester took her hands in his. “What’s in there is part of who I am,” he said. “You tease me about living in the past; it’s true, I do, part of the time. It’s part of me. I’m a link in a chain going back a hundred thousand years, probably more. And if I have a purpose in life it’s to understand that past, to see how it shaped us, so we can look ahead and see where we’re going.
“You’re right about the war: most of it was just pointless killing and suffering. But the gods were good to me here: they gave me something that made it all worthwhile, for me anyway. I’m not going to throw that away because some crazed foreigner has a grudge.”
“I lost my husband to the war, Duncan,” said Sophie. “I don’t want to lose another.”
“You’re not going to lose me,” said Forrester. “Find a patch of shade, sit down and wait for me to come out. I promise you I’ll be back.”
And he turned sideways and slipped through the entrance to the cave.
8
MINOTAUR
There are an estimated four thousand caves in the four great limestone massifs that constitute the bony spine of Crete, which is one of the reasons the island has proved so productive of bandits, pirates, guerrillas and outlaws of all kinds: they have places to hide.
Forrester had reason to be grateful to these caves, and he remembered how often they had given him a sense of security during the long, tense months of his Cretan mission – but he had never liked them. He did not like the darkness, the narrowness, the sheer senselessness of their architecture. Man used them, but they had not been made by man. The erratic, irrational processes of the physical world had shaped them, and man had to adapt to them, not the other way around.
And before man, other creatures had made these places their home, and were sometimes still there. Blind snakes, slow-moving, endlessly scavenging insects, swarms of devil-faced bats.
Still, none of these thoughts had passed through his head as he had slid backwards into its darkness that first time, with Oberleutnant Kretzmer in hot pursuit. Then it had seemed like a sanctuary indeed: exactly what he needed. He had been tucked away in what he believed was the back of the cave about twenty feet from the entrance when he heard the rattle of their boots on the stones out in the gorge and the metallic clink of their equipment.
Kretzmer’s confident, authoritative voice echoed between the limestone walls of the gorge. “Schnell, schnell. Bauer, nehmen Sie Ihre Zug und die linke Seite der Schlucht ausfindig zu machen; Mullhaus, die rechte Seite.”
Forrester had crouched there in the darkness, waiting for the sound to die away down the gorge. It did not. He stayed there, not breathing, waiting for them to pass the pine tree that hid the entrance.
They did not pass it. Forrester heard the excited shout as the man called to his comrades.
But by the time the first German helmet appeared in the slot, he had already discovered that the cave did not end where he thought it did; that there was a narrow cleft behind him, hidden in the darkness. As the soldier entered, Forrester was already forcing himself backwards into the cleft, fighting the terror of being trapped there, and suddenly the cleft had become a sloping tunnel and he was sliding silently backwards into—
He had no idea. He still had no idea when he landed. He had no idea where he was even as he listened to the sound of jackboots crunching around the floor of the main cave above him. He sensed the space was spherical, or dome-shaped; he could feel a steeply curved wall against his back.
He knew there was something in front of him too, something about two or three feet high. He sensed it was in the centre of the chamber.
He knew too, in his bones, that this was a sacred place, that it had been a place of awe and terror for thousands of years, that men had come here to communicate with the divine – and they had left something behind them.
Something that stood in the centre of the chamber.
But he suspected he would never discover its nature: above his head, the soldiers searching the cave were coming closer, and soon, he knew, they would find the entrance to the shaft by which he had entered. And the grenade would be tossed down it, and if he was lucky he would be dead.
Then he heard again Kretzmer’s harsh voice outside in the gorge, shouting something urgently to the searchers.
He did not find out until much later that it had been Yanni who had saved him by deliberately showing his head above the top of the gorge, a hundred feet vertically above the searching Germans. Yanni had decided not to go westwards with the other andartes, but had doubled back on the slopes above them. He had known he could do this safely because it would take at least thirty minutes for Kretzmer’s men to get out of the gorge and scramble up to the skyline where he had shown himself.
But nothing had obliged him to do it. It had not been part of the plan. It was just Yanni. It was who he was.
In the distance there was the rattle of machine-gun fire, and more shouts from Kretzmer as Forrester heard the sound of the searchers’ boots retreating from the cave. But he was scarcely thinking about it, because by that time his fingers had felt their way over the object in the centre of the chamber, and he was beginning to understand what he had found.
It was a long time before he had dared strike a match to examine the rock, and by that time all sounds of activity outside had long ceased. By that time too his fingers were confidently tracing the shape of the incisions – and he knew exactly what they were.
There was the circle with four straight lines in the middle. The bird’s beak shape. The wheatsheaf. The heart split in two.
Linear B – it was all Linear B. The lost language of Minoan civilisation.
But that was on one side of the stone. As he traced the outlines on the other side his mouth went dry. When he finally struck the second match and saw it, he literally felt his heart leap within his chest.
Hieroglyphs.
He had found his Rosetta Stone.
The original Rosetta Stone had been discovered at Rashid in Egypt in 1799 by a soldier in Napoleon’s invading army. It had been carved two hundred years before the birth of Christ to proclaim a decree by Pharaoh Ptolemy V – and Ptolemy had ordered the decree written not just in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had remained a mystery since the end of the Egyptian empire, but also in ancient Greek. Once the ancient Greek text had been translated, hieroglyphs could finally be deciphered – and after two thousand years of mystification archaeologists finally had the key to Egyptian civilisation.
And now Forrester had found a stone that had not only the undecipherable writings of the Linear B script of the ancient Minoans – but texts in hieroglyphs, possibly even Egyptian hieroglyphs. If these texts were the same as what was written in Linear B, Forrester knew he had found the route to the heart of the labyrinth.
But there had been no time, of course, to find out whether t
hat was the case. He couldn’t stay here and he couldn’t take the stone with him. And any time now the Germans would give up their wild goose chase after Yanni and come back.
He had made the greatest discovery of his life and he had no option but to leave it, to inch his way back up the tunnel, crawl to the entrance, make sure the gorge was still free of his pursuers, and continue his escape.
With a heavy heart he did all these things, made his way safely, a week later, to the rendezvous with his fellow SOE operatives, and got out of Crete in the same launch that took Leigh Fermor, Billy Moss and General Kreipe to Alexandria.
But almost every night since then he had dreamt of the stone; he had moved heaven and earth in London to get the funds and permissions needed to come back to confirm its existence, and now he was here again, in the same cave. All he had to do was reach it.
Provided a crazed Dutchman did not kill him first.
Pressing himself into the cleft at the back of the cave wasn’t hard; wriggling himself into the tunnel that led down to the chamber was easy enough. But forcing himself to let gravity take hold and slide down into the blackness where anything might be awaiting him took all his mental strength.
The second his feet hit the floor he rolled and then slammed himself against the back wall, ranging the barrel of the Luger across the chamber.
Yanni had left the gun at the hotel reception desk the night after their reunion, wrapped up in a brown paper parcel tied with string; the parcel also contained a small cardboard box with a dozen bullets inside. Forrester remembered when they had taken them from the ammunition pouch of the German sentries before Yanni threw them over the cliff.
But he was not thinking of that now – nor of any danger to himself. He was staring down the beam of his flashlight at the centre of the cave, where the stone had been.
All that remained was a hole in the cave floor where it had been embedded.
“You bastard!” he said. “You goddamn ignorant bloody Hun.” He felt sick with grief and anger.
“Hun?” said a voice. “That is very old-fashioned.”
Forrester looked around him. The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere.
“Brandt, is that you?”
“There is no ‘Brandt’,” said the voice. Despite the echo created by the chamber, it had a creaky, almost metallic quality. “My name is Oberleutnant Hans Kretzmer.”
Forrester felt his stomach contract.
“The poor German fool you outwitted here in this very gorge.”
Forrester heard the words with a sickening sense of inevitability. Of course it was Kretzmer. At some subconscious level, he felt, he had known it all along.
“The poor German fool who is about to have his revenge.”
“You tried to catch me, Kretzmer. I escaped. Such things happen in war.”
“You shamed me. You prevented me from rescuing General Kreipe. And you ruined my life.”
Forrester decided to ignore the accusation. “So why have you moved the stone, Kretzmer?”
“You will understand in good time.”
“Where have you taken it?”
“Not far away. It’s perfectly safe. In fact, if you wish to see it again, there’s nothing to stop you doing so.”
Forrester’s eyes narrowed. And then he saw, low down in the chamber wall, the entrance to another chamber.
“You can see it, can’t you?” It was as if the German was watching him.
“Yes.”
“Would you like to come down and examine your beloved carving?”
Forrester knew there was no point in prevaricating.
“Yes,” he said. He aimed the torch down the drop: it was no more than six feet to the chamber below, and he could see one edge of the stone, leaning against one wall.
“I assume you are armed,” said the voice. “You must throw down your gun before you come. You have my word I will not shoot you if you do that.”
A beat, and then there was the distinctive sound of a gun rattling down the shaft and hitting the floor of the cave below. Forrester slid after it immediately, before Kretzmer could reach for it, and there was the man, staring straight at him.
For a moment, Forrester stopped breathing: the painted tin mask had been removed.
The face it had hidden truly was a thing of horror. It looked as if a great purple birthmark had been smeared across the flesh of one side – and then the face itself gouged out. The cheek was missing, and the shattered remains of jaw and teeth clearly visible through it. One eye was gone, and the red eye socket stared steadily at Forrester over the barrel of a pistol.
“Raise your hands, please, Captain. And don’t think of reaching down to retrieve your weapon. I promised I would not shoot you and I will not. Instead, you may examine the prize you have lost.” And he shone his torch across the cave.
The stone was propped up against the east wall of the cave about ten feet from Kretzmer, who was leaning casually against an outcrop of rock on the far side, giving him a commanding position. Something deep in Forrester’s mind told him there was another significance to this arrangement, but all that mattered to him at this moment was the stone.
It appeared to be intact. He moved towards it, consumed with the need to run his hands over it – and then, prompted by some instinct he did not understand, stopped, just feet away, in the centre of the cave.
“You understand how valuable this is, Kretzmer?” he said. “Not in monetary terms, but for scholarship.”
“I am perfectly familiar with the challenges of deciphering Linear B, Captain Forrester, and can clearly see how important this object could be to achieving that.”
Forrester looked over at the smashed face in surprise.
“Before the war, you see,” said Kretzmer, “I was not a mere soldier. I was a distinguished student at the University of Berlin. In the Department of Ancient History, no less. I worked hard to engineer my transfer to Crete and you can imagine my happiness when I first gazed on the throne room of Knossos, the pillared colonnades, the Hall of the Double Axes. I felt as if I was coming home. During my free time I explored the mountains, searching for just such objects as this. When I came back to the gorge after your escape, I found it.”
“Why didn’t you take it then?”
“I intended to. As soon as I had returned to Heraklion and gathered the necessary equipment. It would, as you can imagine, have made my name, assured me of a career after the war. But you smashed that dream, didn’t you?”
“Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I must have already been in Egypt by the time you came back.”
“But you had sealed my fate long before that. You had sealed it between checkpoints sixteen and twenty on the road to Chania.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was the officer in charge of the sector between those checkpoints.”
Suddenly, Forrester’s mouth was dry.
“Because of you I was blamed for my part in the disaster of General Kreipe’s kidnapping. My only chance of redeeming myself was to rescue the General. But you ensured that would not happen, did you not? You led me on a wild goose chase that ended here in the Acharius Gorge. So I think it is only fitting that the penalty should be imposed here, don’t you?”
“Penalty for what?”
“The penalty for having me transferred to the Eastern Front.”
Forrester said nothing. It was becoming clear at last.
“The Eastern Front was the price I paid for your amusing stunt with the General,” said Kretzmer. “Three weeks after you and your friends escaped with him, I was in Belarus.”
“Hardly my fault,” said Forrester. “What you should ask yourself is why the hell you invaded Russia in the first place.”
Kretzmer’s eye flashed with rage. “Because you cowards wouldn’t fight them!”
Forrester blinked. “What?”
“You still don’t realise! Bolshevism is the enemy,” spat Kretzmer. “The Führer knew that. You fools did no
t. Now they will destroy you, as they destroyed us. As they destroyed me.”
“Listen—” said Forrester.
“No, you listen, English,” said Kretzmer. “I want you to know about the place where you sent me. I want you to smell the stench of rotting bodies. I want you to hear the noise of the tanks as they crushed our men beneath their tracks and left them to die. You think we ever rested? No – there was a sniper on every rooftop. You think we could sleep at night after we had fought them all day? No – because it was night they liked the best. Their favourite weapon was a sharpened spade. You know the noise a spade makes when it bites into a man’s skull? I want you to imagine it, English. So we lay awake waiting. Night after night, week after week, month after month, never sleeping. Gradually going mad.
“You know where they got me in the end? In the ruins of the university. In the wreckage of a lecture room. Appropriate, no? They came at us with grenades. I was hit, and I was captured. You see the result before you. I hope you are proud of it.”
“Listen—”
But Kretzmer did not let Forrester finish. “There were two thousand wounded prisoners packed into the cellars. No light, no sanitation, just screams for help. Prayers, sometimes. Never answered. No bandages, no medicine, no clean water. I should have died, Forrester. I should have died as they operated on me, without anaesthetic of course, because there was none, but one thing kept me alive. It was the thought that one day I would find you, that I would take the stone, and I would have my revenge.”
“Revenge for your sufferings?” said Forrester. “Your sufferings? You’re alive, man. Sixty million people are dead. Count your blessings.”
But it was as if Kretzmer could not hear him. “It is ironic I would not have been able to track you down if it had not been for the help of your famous Empire Council for Archaeology. Once they had decided to fund your expedition, they announced it, and my path was set.”
“I’m very sorry about what happened to you,” said Forrester, “but holding me responsible is insane.”
“But you are responsible,” said Kretzmer. “And now you will pay.”
