by P. W. Child
“Mr. Purdue, I’m sure you can open this for us,” Bloem said.
“I doubt that,” Purdue replied. “I didn’t pack any nitroglycerine.”
“But you surely have some sort of genius technology in that bag of yours, as you normally do, to hasten your passage through all the places you always stick your nose in?” Bloem insisted, his tone clearly more antagonistic as his patience waned. “Do it for the sake of restricted time . . .” he told Purdue, and worded his next threat clearly, “do it for your sister.”
Agatha could well be dead already, Purdue thought, but he kept a straight face.
At once all five dogs began to look agitated, yelping and moaning as they stepped here and there.
“What is it, girls?” Wesley asked the animals, rushing to calm them.
The party looked around, but saw no danger. Perplexed, they watched the dogs grow exceedingly rowdy, barking into the air before starting to howl incessantly.
“Why are they doing that?” Nina asked.
Wesley shook his head, “They hear something we cannot. And whatever it is, it must be intense!”
Obviously the animals were extremely irritated by a subsonic pitch that the humans could not pick up on, because they started howling desperately, maniacally twirling and turning in their tracks. One by one the dogs began to retreat backward from the vault door. Wesley whistled in myriad variations, yet the dogs refused to obey. They turned and ran as if the devil was at them and quickly disappeared around the bend, away into the distance.
“Call me paranoid, but that is a sure sign that we are in trouble,” Nina remarked, while the others frantically scanned their surroundings.
Joost Bloem and the loyal Wesley both drew their sidearms from under their jackets.
“You brought guns?” Nina frowned in surprise. “Why bother with the dogs then?”
“Because getting torn up by feral animals would make your deaths accidental and unfortunate, my dear Dr. Gould. Untraceable. And shooting off in these acoustics would just be stupid,” Bloem explained matter of factly as he pulled back the hammer.
Chapter 32
Two Days Prior—Mönkh Saridag
“Location locked,” the hacker told Ludwig Bern.
They had been working day and night to devise a way to locate the stolen weapon the Brigade Apostate had been robbed of a over a week before. Being ex-members of the Black Sun, there was no man associated with the brigade who was not a master at his trade, therefore it was only logical that there would be several experts in information technology to help trace the whereabouts of the dangerous Longinus.
“Outstanding!” Bern exclaimed, turning to his two fellow commanders for approval.
One was Kent Bridges, ex-SAS and former third-level member of the Black Sun, in charge of munitions. The other was Otto Schmidt, who also held a third-level Black Sun membership before defecting to the Brigade Apostate, a professor of applied linguistics and a former fighter pilot from Vienna, Austria.
“Where is it at the moment?” Bridges asked.
The hacker raised an eyebrow, “The oddest place, actually. According to the fiberoptic tracers we synced with the hardware of the Longinus, it is currently . . . in . . . Wewelsburg castle.”
The three commanders exchanged confounded looks.
“This time of night? It is not even morning there yet, right Otto?” Bern asked.
“No, it is about 5 a.m., I think,” Otto replied.
“Wewelsburg Castle is not even open yet and there are certainly no transients or tourists allowed at night,” Bridges jested. “How the hell could it be there? Unless . . . the thief was currently breaking into Wewelsburg?”
The room quieted down as all within contemplated a reasonable explanation.
“Nevermind,” Bern spoke suddenly. “What is important is that we know where it is. I volunteer to travel to Germany to retrieve it. I shall take Alexandr Arichenkov with me. The man is an exceptional tracker and navigator.”
“Do that, Bern. Check in with us at every 11-hour interval, as always. And if you run into trouble, just alert us. We already have allies in every country in western Europe, should you need some reinforcement,” Bridges affirmed.
“Will do.”
“Are you sure you can trust the Russian?” Otto Schmidt asked under his breath.
“I believe I can, Otto. The man has given me no reason to presume otherwise. Besides, we still have men on point at his friends’ house, but I doubt it would ever come to that. Time is running out for the historian and the journalist to bring us Renata, though. That concerns me more than I care to admit, but, one thing at a time,” Bern assured the Austrian pilot.
“Agreed. Godspeed, Bern,” Bridges joined in.
“Thank you, Kent. We leave in an hour, Otto. Will you be ready?” Bern asked.
“Absolutely. Let’s get back that menace from whoever was dumb enough to lay their paws on it. My God, if they only knew what that thing is capable of!” Otto ranted.
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I have a feeling they know full well what it is capable of.”
~~~
Nina, Sam, and Purdue had no idea how long they had been in the tunnels. Even at the estimation of it being dawn, there was no way they would see daylight down here. Now they were held at gunpoint, having no idea what they were all in for while they stood in front of the giant heavy vault door.
“Mr. Purdue, if you will,” Joost Bloem nudged Purdue with his gun to open the vault with the portable blowtorch he used to cut away the gate in the sewer.
“Mr. Bloem, I don’t know you, but I am sure a man of your intellect knows that a door like this could not possibly be opened with a measly little tool like this,” Purdue argued, although he kept his tone reasonable.
“Please don’t patronize me, Dave,” Bloem turned colder, “because I am not referring to your tiny tool.”
Sam held in a scoff at the peculiar choice of words that would usually have him making some snide remark. Nina’s large dark eyes watched Sam. He could see that she was very upset at his apparent betrayal at not taking the vial of antidote she had given him, but he had his reasons for not trusting Purdue after what he had put them through in Bruges.
Purdue knew what Bloem was talking about. With a heavy demeanor he took out the pen-like spyglass and activated it, using the infrared to ascertain the thickness of the door. Then he laid his eye behind the small glass peephole while the rest of the group waited in anticipation, still hounded by the eerie circumstances that had the dogs barking madly well away from them.
Purdue set the second button under his finger without moving his eyes from the spyglass and a faint red dot appeared on the door’s bolt.
“Laser cutter,” Wesley smiled. “Very cool.”
“Please, do hurry, Mr. Purdue. And when you are done I shall relieve you of that wondrous implement,” Bloem said. “I could use such a prototype for my peers to clone.”
“And who might your peers be, Mr. Bloem?” Purdue asked while the beam sank into the solid steel with a yellow glow that rendered it weak on impact.
“The very same people you and your friends tried to outrun in Belgium the night you were to deliver Renata,” Bloem said, the sparks of the molten steel glimmering in his eyes like hellfire.
Nina held her breath and looked at Sam. Here they were back in the company of the council, the obscure judges of the Black Sun’s management, after Alexandr thwarted their planned relinquishing of the shamed leader, Renata, to be deposed by them.
If we were on a chess board now, we’d be fucked, Nina thought, hoping that Purdue knew where Renata was. Now he would have to deliver her to the council, instead of helping Nina and Sam surrender her to the Brigade Apostate. Either way, Sam and Nina were now in a compromising position that resulted in a lose-lose outcome.
“You hired Agatha to find the journal,” Sam said.
“Yes, but it was hardly what we were interested in. It was, as you say, the old bait and switch. I kn
ew if we hired her for such a venture, she would no doubt need her brother’s help to find the journal, when in fact Mr. Purdue was actually the relic we were seeking,” Bloem explained to Sam.
“And now that we are all here, we might as well see what you were hunting down here under Wewelsburg before we conclude our business,” Wesley added from behind Sam.
In the distance the dogs yelped and whined while the turbine hummed on. It gave Nina an overwhelming feeling of dread and hopelessness that matched the drab and morose location perfectly. She looked up at Joost Bloem and uncharacteristically she held her temper in check, “Is Agatha all right, Mr. Bloem? Is she still in your custody?”
“Yes, she is in our custody,” he replied with a quick glance to appease her, but his omission about Agatha’s welfare was an ominous portent. Nina looked at Purdue. His lips were pursed in apparent concentration, but as his ex-girlfriend she knew his body language—Purdue was distraught.
The door gave a deafening clank that echoed deep in the bowels of the maze, breaking for the first time the silence of decades that possessed the miserable atmosphere. They stood back as Purdue, Wesley, and Sam pushed the heavy loose door with short bursts of force. Finally it gave way and went crashing to the other side, whipping up years of dust and scattered yellowed paper. None of them dared enter first, though the musty chamber was lit by the same series of electrical wall lights as the tunnel.
“Come on, let’s see what’s inside,” Sam pressed, holding his camera at the ready. Bloem let go of Nina and stepped through with Purdue at the wrong end of his barrel. Nina waited for Sam to pass her, before she lightly gripped his arm, “What are you doing?” He could tell she was furious at him, but something in her eyes attested that she refused to believe Sam would deliberately bring the council to them.
“I’m here to record our discoveries, remember?” he said sharply. He waved the camera at her, but his eyes directed her to the digital display screen of it, where she could see that he was shooting stills of their captors. Should they need to blackmail the council or should any eventuality call for photographic evidence, Sam was taking as many shots of the men and their doings as long as he could pretend to treat the encounter as a common job.
Nina nodded, and she followed him into the stuffy chamber.
Tiles lined the floor and walls, while the ceiling hosted a dozen pairs of fluorescent tubes of stark white light, now reduced to flickering flashes inside their tainted plastic covers. The explorers forgot momentarily who they were, all marveling at the sight with equal admiration and awe.
“What is this place?” Wesley asked, as he lifted the cold, tarnished surgical instruments in an old kidney dish. Above him a decrepit operating light stood mute and dead, riddled by cobwebs of eras gathered between its extremes. The tiled floor had awful stains on it, some which looked like dried blood and others that resembled spillage from chemical containers that had eaten slightly into the floor.
“It looks like a research facility of sorts,” Purdue answered, having seen, and managed, his fare share of similar operations.
“Of what? Super soldiers? There are many signs of human experimentation here,” Nina noted as she winced at the slightly ajar fridge doors on the far wall. “Those are morgue refrigerators, some body bags stacked over there . . .”
“And ripped-up clothing,” Joost mentioned from where he stood, peeking over the edge of what looked like laundry hampers. “Oh Christ, the fabric smells like shit. And big pools of blood where the collars are. I think Dr. Gould is right—human experimentation, but I doubt they were done on Nazi troops. The clothing in here looks like what prisoners of concentration camps were wearing mostly.”
Nina’s eyes looked up in contemplation as she tried to recall what she knew about the concentration camps near Wewelsburg. Softly, her tone emotional and sympathetic, she shared what she did know about those who probably wore the torn bloody clothing.
“I know that prisoners were used as laborers for the construction of Wewelsburg. They could very well be the people Sam claimed to feel down here. They were brought in from Niederhagen, some others from Sachsenhausen, but all to make up a labor force to construct what was speculated to be more than just the castle. Now that we found all this, and the tunnels, it appears that the rumors were true,” she told her male companions.
Wesley and Sam both looked very uncomfortable about their surroundings. Wesley crossed his arms and rubbed the chill from his upper arms. Sam just resorted to his camera, taking more shots of the mildew and rust inside the morgue refrigerators.
“Looks like they were used for more than hard labor,” Purdue said. He pulled aside a lab coat that was hanging against the wall and found behind it, a thick crevice etched deep into the wall.
“Torch,” he ordered no-one in particular.
Wesley passed him a flashlight, and as Purdue shone it into the hole he choked on the stench of stagnant water and the rot of old bones decayed within it.
“Jesus! Look at this!” he coughed, and they congregated around the hole to find the remains of what looked like twenty people. He counted twenty skulls, but there could be more.
“There was an instance where a few Jews from Salzkotten were said to have been locked in the Wewelsburg dungeon in the late 1930s,” Nina speculated when she saw it. “But they reportedly made it to Buchenwald’s camp afterward. Reportedly. We always thought the dungeon referred to was the vault under the Obergruppenführersaal, but maybe it was this place!”
In all their amazement at what they found, the group neglected to notice that the incessant barking of the dogs had ceased instantly.
Chap ter 33
While Sam took pictures of the ghastly scene, Nina’s curiosity was piqued by another door, a common wooden variety with a window laid in on the upper part that was now too filthy to see through. Under the door she saw a streak of light from the same series of lights that lit the room they were in.
“Don’t even think of going in there,” Joost’s sudden words behind her shook her to a near heart attack. With her hand on her chest in shock, Nina gave Joost Bloem a look he often got from women—exasperation and repudiation. “Not without me as your bodyguard, that is,” he smiled. Nina could see that the Dutch council member knew he was attractive, all the more reason to reject his mild advances.
“I’m quite capable, thank you, meester,” she teased abruptly, and tried the handle of the door. It needed some encouragement, but it opened without too much effort, even with the rust and disuse.
This room looked completely different from the other, though. It was a bit more inviting than a medical death chamber, but still it retained that Nazi air of foreboding.
Well-stocked with antique books on all subjects ranging from archeology to the occult, from postmortem textbooks to Marxism and mythology, the chamber resembled an old library or office, given the large desk and high-back chair in the corner convergence of two bookshelves. The books and folders, even the papers lying about the place, were all of the same color thanks to the heavy dust deposits.
“Sam!” she called. “Sam! You have to get shots of this!”
“And what, pray tell, are you going to do with these photographs, Mr. Cleave?” Joost Bloem asked Sam when he snapped one from the door.
“Do what journalists do,” Sam said nonchalantly, “sell them to the highest bidder.”
Bloem uttered a disturbing laugh that denoted his disagreement with Sam clearly. He slapped his hand down on Sam’s shoulder, “And who said you’ll be getting out of here scot-free, lad?”
“Well, I live for the moment, Mr. Bloem, and I try not to let power-hungry pricks like you write my fate for me,” Sam smirked smugly. “I might even make a buck off a picture of your corpse.”
Without warning Bloem delivered a hefty jab to Sam’s face, throwing him backward and off his feet. As Sam fell against a steel cabinet his camera crashed to the floor, breaking into smithereens on impact.
“You are speaking to someone powerf
ul and dangerous who happens to have those Scottish gnads in a firm grip, laddie. Don’t you fucking forget that!” Joost thundered, as Nina ran to Sam’s aid.
“I don’t even know why I am helping you,” she said in a low tone as she wiped his bloody nose. “You got us into this shit, because you didn’t trust me. You would have trusted Trish, but I am not Trish, am I?”
Nina’s words caught Sam off guard. “Wait, what? It was your boyfriend I didn’t trust, Nina. After everything he dragged us through you still believe what he tells you, but I don’t. And what is this about Trish all of a sudden?”
“I found the memoirs, Sam,” Nina told him close to his ear as she pushed his head back to stop the bleeding. “I know I will never be her, but you have to let go.”
Sam’s jaw literally dropped. So that is what she meant back at the house! To let go of Trish, not her!
Purdue came in with Wesley’s gun perpetually at his back and the moment evaporated just like that.
“Nina, what do you know about this office? Is this in the records?” Purdue asked.
“Purdue, nobody even knows of this place. How would it be in any record?” she snapped.
Joost scrambled through some papers on the desk. “There are some apocryphal writings here!” he announced, looking fascinated. “Actual, ancient scriptures!”
Nina jumped up and joined him.
“You know, the basement of the west tower of Wewelsburg held a personal safe that Himmler had mounted there. Only he and the castle commander knew about it, but after the war its contents was removed and never found,” Nina lectured as she looked through the arcane documents only heard of in legend and ancient historical codices. “I bet you it was moved here. I would even go so far as to say . . .” she turned in all directions to scrutinize the age of the literature, “that this could very well have also been a vault. I mean, you saw the door we came through.”
