‘You mean from the Jews you murdered at Buchenwald and the other gas chambers,’ Sterling said bitterly.
Von Neumann smiled at him indulgently. ‘The treasure was trans-shipped to Spain under the aegis of the “Werewolf’ organization. It was intended as part of a salvage operation that would one day enable the Reich to counterattack the Allies. Spain was neutral, but it wasn’t safe because there were Allied agents everywhere, so we decided to shift it to West Africa, from where it could be flown to Brazil. This was operation Sonnenblume. The treasure was shipped across the Moroccan border in ten trucks, but on the third day it was seen by a British spotter aircraft. The aircraft shouldn’t have been flying in the area, which was officially neutral, but it was, and it put a squadron of British commandos on our tails. Of course they too were violating Spanish neutrality, but once they were after us there was no escape. They attacked at night under the cover of a sandstorm.
‘The crews were willing to surrender, but when they went forward with white flags, the commandos simply shot them down. I couldn’t understand this at the time, but I didn’t wait to find out why. We had camped near a deep well, and I saw it was my only hope. I jumped in. When I was finally pulled out by Arabs, two-and-a-half days later, the sandstorm was still blowing and there was no sign of the convoy or the British. Even the bodies had gone. I stayed with the Arabs until the storm blew out, then I was picked up by my chief in a light plane. We scoured the whole area, but the convoy had vanished without trace. Of course, it slowly dawned on us what had happened. The British commandos had hidden the treasure in the desert in order to come back for it later, and somehow disposed of the trucks. They had decided to keep the treasure for themselves.’
Sterling’s face was pale and drawn in the moonlight. ‘And this map?’ he stammered. ‘Craven’s map. This shows where the treasure is hidden?’
‘Of course.’
‘But I don’t understand. What did Craven have to do with it?’
Von Neumann gave a snort of derision. ‘Surely you must have realized,’ he said. ‘Major Craven was one of the leaders of the British commandos, and the only one to survive. We found out later he had massacred his own men in order that no one else would know the secret ...’
‘But wait a minute,’ Sterling said. ‘I heard that story, and there were two survivors.’
‘Originally yes, but one was badly wounded in the skirmish and didn’t make it back. So Craven ended the war with a secret worth millions of dollars. He was determined to come back to find it — that was undoubtedly the reason he got the job with the civilian company in Casablanca in the first place. We knew nothing about him or his crash in Rose of Cimarron, though, until Steppenwolf put us on to Corrigan. We tracked him for a long time, and finally caught up with him in London in February — as you well know, because you were there at the time. But another cell had been sent to deal with him and they got there before us. They didn’t find his map, so they tortured the information out of him. Corrigan knew nothing about Sonnenblume, but Craven had let him in on the fact that they were going to retrieve something valuable from the desert, and he wanted a piece of it for himself. After Rose crashed, he went back to her to find Craven’s map, but discovered that Taha here had taken it. That is why I say, if your son had simply left it with Craven’s body, all this could have been avoided.’
Sterling stared at him, and now there was cold fury in his eyes — the look that Churchill himself had seen several times and learned to respect. ‘All right,’ he spat. ‘I don’t give a tinker’s cuss for you or your shitty, pathetic “Werewolf”, or your ludicrous quest for bits of gold you and your schizophrenic cretins extracted from the teeth of poor defenceless Jews. You can stuff the whole lot up your backsides — you and your British commandos, too. There’s not one of you here — including you, Eric, especially you — who’s good enough to wipe my son’s arse. A child dumped in the desert, fourteen years old, and he survived and became more of a man than you damned Werewolves could dream of in your wildest fantasies. Now I want someone to explain what it had to do with him, and why the hell was he on that aeroplane?’
Von Neumann’s eyes had fired up a little, but he wasn’t going to get riled because of the insults of a man whose hands were tied, and who would be dead soon anyway.
‘For that, my dear fellow,’ he said languidly, ‘you would have to ask Major Ravin’ Craven. And he has been dead for seven years.’
11
The tribes called it Kidjat an-Nuhur, the Plateau of Rivers, though no water ran there, or had done in living memory. From far off it appeared like the rotten carcass of some unimaginably huge titan from the beginning of time, its skin scorched and withered by the desert’s fire, flaked and cracked into a billion facets. As Churchill halted the Jeep outside the gorge into the massif, Taha made the sign against the evil eye. The Kidja was the haunt of the most fearsome of all demons, lurking in its maze of sheer-sided channels, strange chamberlike bays and rock overhangs. In places, the walls were almost obliterated by the paintings and etchings of the Bafour, but here, as nowhere else he knew, the images were huge — creatures with men’s bodies and the heads of vultures and lizards, or with heads like opaque globes, or with stalk-necks and no heads at all. The very thought of them made Taha shiver.
The Jeep Churchill was driving carried Taha, Sterling and Von Neumann. Fahal had been left in the crater. Franz drove the wireless vehicle behind them, with Reuth the signaller, and the two cars were outridden by an escort of thirty armed Delim, led by Amir and mounted on magnificent camels. The prisoners were no longer tied. That morning, at first light, Von Neumann had taken Taha far enough across the floor of the Guelb crater to identify Rauda, his sons, and Belhaan, who were made to stand up and wave, but were too far away to communicate. Taha had viewed them with cold fury welling up inside him, but had said nothing. This was not the time for threats.
‘Now this is how it works,’ Von Neumann had told him. ‘My friend Wohrmann will remain here with one wireless, and Reuth will man the other in my wireless vehicle. I shall be in contact with him every half an hour. If for any reason I fail to contact him, Wohrmann and the Delim will start killing your people. If that is fully understood, I will remove your bindings.’
It had taken most of the morning to reach the Kidja, because they had been obliged to move at the pace of the camels. All the way, Von Neumann had checked their position as accurately as possible on the one-to-one-million scale Spanish map he carried, similar to the one Sterling had brought with him for crossing the Zrouft. The map had been compiled mostly from aerial surveys and was not very accurate. On the way, they had halted at Hassi al-Abyad, a deep well in the middle of a concave plain. Von Neumann had jumped out and inspected it excitedly, leaning over the parapet and letting a pebble fall into the shaft. ‘This is it,’ he announced grimly. ‘My prison. I spent almost three days in the bottom of this.’ He shuddered.
Churchill ambled up to him, a smouldering cigar hanging from his mouth. ‘So this is where it happened?’ he said. ‘The attack?’
Von Neumann’s eyes narrowed as he tried to recall landmarks on the almost featureless plain, dotted with bare acacias, nests of egg-shaped boulders, rock outcrops like the ground-down molars of giant sheep. ‘It was here,’ he growled. ‘The British commandos came by night under the cover of the sandstorm. We never even heard their engines.’
There was silence for a moment as Von Neumann remembered the screams of his men, the merciless thud of the British Brownings and Lewises audible even over the roar of the wind. He remembered jumping into the cab of one of the trucks, switching the headlights on, seeing that Jeep roaring out of the storm, spitting bullets. He remembered the face of the man behind the wheel, capless, a huge head like some kind of hero out of Wagner, long hair streaming wildly in the wind. A face he would never forget.
Churchill puffed the cigar and scanned the horizon. The sky was that familiar aniline blue, untainted by a single whiff of cloud. The air above the edge
of the plain wobbled slightly with the heat-haze. ‘Well,’ Von Neumann said, ‘so much for nostalgia. Let’s move.’
The Kidja had not been visible from the well, but within an hour it had leapt suddenly at them out of the heat-haze. Taha had told Churchill to halt when they first sighted it, and stood up in the back of the Jeep. ‘There,’ he told Von Neumann. ‘That is the place shown on Craven’s map. Your people are buried just before the gorge.’
Now, Taha showed Von Neumann the German graves, each marked by a cairn. Von Neumann had a couple of shovels brought from his Jeep and told Sterling to dig. Churchill helped him. The sand beneath the cairn was soft and in only a few moments the shovels uncovered mummified human bones, tightly wrapped in parcels of skin and shreds of sand-coloured cloth. Churchill’s powerful thrusts loosened a gaping skull with tufts of hair attached. The big man turned pale. The skull’s teeth were intact and one molar on each side had been replaced by a gold filling. There was a neat bullet hole drilled in the forehead, and the back of the cranium was missing where it had been blasted out by the round’s exit.
‘Looks like a forty-five-calibre dum-dum,’ Churchill said, swallowing hard to dissipate the nausea. ‘Tommy-gun job. Coup de grâce.’
‘Yes,’ Von Neumann said, rubbing his scar. ‘They left no wounded.’ He turned to Taha. ‘You exhumed all the corpses?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ Taha said, ‘only three. We counted the cairns and there were nineteen.’
Von Neumann took out Craven’s map, which snapped slightly in the breeze. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we have seen enough. Fill in the grave.’ He turned towards the grotesquely weathered facade of the plateau. ‘Now,’ he said, orienting the map. ‘Craven’s first clue is Grave one, five hundred and seventy yards, three hundred and forty degrees north by northwest, Rum Flask. That’s almost a kilometre into the plateau.’ He stood as near to the grave as possible and checked the prismatic compass hanging from a lanyard round his neck, adjusting the screw, aligning the phosphorescent marks, then setting a bearing of 340 degrees which directed him through the gorge. He kept the compass in his hand and called to Amir, who was standing by his camel. The Arab chief strolled up nonchalantly, his Garand slung over his shoulder, his hooded eyes flicking from Churchill to Taha and back again. ‘We shall leave the camels here,’ Von Neumann told him. ‘Half your men will remain to guard them and the other half will come with us.’
Amir made the sign for protection against the evil eye. ‘God protect us from the stoned Devil!’ he exclaimed. ‘That place is full of jinn.’
‘Very well,’ Von Neumann said. ‘But this will affect the number of rifles you are given.’
Amir gulped, turned briskly and began shouting orders to his men.
Von Neumann smiled and pointed to Taha. ‘You will walk in front with me,’ he said. ‘Mr Wolfgang, you will drive, and Mr Sterling will sit next to you. The wireless vehicle will follow, and the Delim will form an escort.’ He beamed at everyone, the excitement showing in his eyes. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
*
Not even Von Neumann had been expecting the tortuous labyrinth of channels and galleries that lay beyond the entrance-gorge, and he looked around at the weathered and eroded facades in something like panic. The Delim muttered superstitiously, staring wild-eyed and holding up their first and second fingers against the evil spirits that evidently abounded here. Sterling’s attention was captured by the rock itself, its incredible burls, warts and nubbles suggesting an army of demons frozen in the act of bursting out of it. It was sandstone, weathered by ancient rivers and by sand and wind, but the substance of the rock had once been the bed of an ocean that had lain here in the Cretaceous era — 300 million years ago. Contemplating such an expanse of geological time made Sterling gasp, and for a moment forget the deadly earnestness of the quest they were engaged in. He was brought out of his musing by a curse from Von Neumann. ‘This is a lie!’ the German snarled. ‘It is impossible to walk five hundred and seventy yards on this bearing. These channels are curved.’
‘Maybe he didn’t mean literally in a straight line,’ Sterling said. ‘Maybe just as near as dammit.’
Von Neumann grunted and followed the natural curve of the rock, keeping as near as possible to the bearing. After a few moments, the narrow corridor — only just wide enough to admit the Jeeps — opened out into a massive sandy-floored boulevard, with the sandstone pinnacles towering as high as skyscrapers about them.
‘This is it!’ Von Neumann said.
They proceeded much faster now, Von Neumann whispering out the number of paces to himself, until the canyon closed in tightly again. At the base of the rock, exactly where the bottleneck began, Taha’s keen eyes spotted a small cairn with shards of pottery interspersed with the rocks. He sprang forward and Von Neumann started, pulling a Luger from beneath his Arab shirt. ‘Stop right there!’ he bawled.
Taha froze, holding up a fragment of brown glazed pot with a tiny neck containing a dried cork.
Von Neumann put the Luger away and took the shard. ‘The rum flask,’ he said. Then he looked sharply at Taha. ‘You’ve been in here before?’ he snapped. ‘You found the treasure?’
Taha returned the gaze poker-faced. ‘The treasure is still where Craven left it,’ he said.
Suspicion slowly faded from Von Neumann’s eyes as he examined the pottery. Churchill jumped down from the Jeep and joined him, picking up more brown shards. ‘See!’ he said, pointing to some letters stamped on one of them. ‘SRD. Only the Long Range Desert boys got issued with rum in jars like this. They used to say SRD meant “Service Rum Diluted”, but it probably meant something else.’
Sterling got out of the Jeep and peered at the pottery. ‘Long Range Desert Group?’ he said. ‘Are you saying it was the LRDG who did this?’
‘Who else?’ Churchill said. ‘Craven was an LRDG officer, even if he did fly aircraft for them.’
‘But I can’t believe ...’
‘What?’ Churchill sneered. ‘Did you think our boys were all like Santa Claus? The blue-eyed boys with their ever-so-nice accents who always did the right thing? Think again, George. The Nazis weren’t the only ones capable of atrocities.’
Sterling glared at Churchill angrily. ‘I think I saw enough of the war to understand that,’ he said. ‘But Craven was a war hero.’
An expression of deep hatred wrinkled Churchill’s face for a second, then it was gone.
Von Neumann let go of the shard he was holding and it struck a stone, shattering into smaller pieces. Glancing again at the instructions on the map, he took a new bearing on his compass. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We are looking for “Wilkinson’s Arrow” now.’
The way led them down a side-wadi that grew increasingly narrow. In places large knobs of sandstone had detached themselves from the walls and lay strewn across the sandy floor. Finally the vehicles were forced to stop. Only twenty yards further on, Von Neumann spotted a slim-bladed knife with a knurled handle stuck in a log of dried wood. He tugged it out and examined it curiously. ‘Wilkinson’s arrow?’ he said. ‘What does it mean?’
Churchill grinned. ‘That’s a commando knife,’ he said. ‘Wilkinson Sword made them — they churned out about a quarter of a million between nineteen forty-one and nineteen forty-five, but only the first five hundred had the famous cross-swords logo. Actually they were rubbish: a knife’s no good if you can’t cut with it, and they were made for stabbing. Someone among the great and good thought we were still fighting the Wars of the Roses.’
Von Neumann examined the weapon with approval. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘it has something.’
He stuck it in his belt, then looked at his watch and walked back to the wireless truck. He leaned over the seat and told Reuth to tap out a message to Wohrmann back at the Guelb. He added the secret call sign that only he and Wohrmann knew, so that the wireless op would be certain it was him.
Von Neumann called Amir, who was skulking moodily behind the vehicle with his men, a
nd told him that the Jeeps would remain behind. ‘Tell your men to carry shovels,’ he said.
He rejoined the others rubbing his hands. ‘The last leg,’ he said. ‘We’re almost there.’
The third and final bearing led them up a narrow defile between walls that were painted with intricate and beautiful images of wild animals — elephants, ibex, antelopes, ostrich and giraffe, careening and leaping, with the unmistakable figures of humans and dogs pursuing them. Von Neumann had no time for the rock-paintings, though. He was almost panting with anticipation now. ‘They must have carried the gold over this last stretch,’ he told Churchill as they walked.
‘How the hell did they manage it?’ the big man asked.
‘The bullion was in ingots weighing about a kilo each,’ Von Neumann said. ‘There were twenty ingots to a package, padded and roped up in hessian sacks, so that one man could easily carry one package. There were over five hundred packages — ten thousand kilos ...’ Churchill whistled.
Von Neumann stopped suddenly. The narrow path curved down into a steep-sided inlet about ten yards across with a sandy floor and no apparent way out. ‘This has to be it!’ he gasped. ‘At last!’
There was a dead thorn tree on one side of the gorge, and Churchill spotted something out of place there. It was another knife, stuck in the trunk. This time the knife had a sabre-like hand-shield, which doubled as a knuckle-duster. Chuckling, Churchill brought it over to Von Neumann. ‘This is another kind of commando knife,’ he said. ‘Issued to Middle East commandos. It’s called a Fanny.’ He grinned and poked a thick finger through the hand-guard. ‘I don’t know why.’
Von Neumann didn’t get the joke, and wasn’t interested. He was already calling forward two of the Delim with shovels to start digging at the base of the thorn tree.
The rest of the tribesmen gathered round. Despite himself, Sterling was fascinated.
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