The Shadow Project bh-5

by Scott Mariani

  Ben looked at her and admired her strength. Not just hers. ‘Your husband’s a hero,’ he said. It sounded strange to hear the words coming from his own mouth. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

  ‘Your name has been left out of it,’ she told him. ‘This is a family matter. Although I suppose you are family now, in a way.’

  He thanked her. Just at that moment, the female doctor who’d talked to Ben earlier came striding up the corridor. The first piece of news was good. Ruth was fine. There had been no complications, no major damage. Her arm would be in a sling for a few weeks but would heal perfectly.

  ‘My husband?’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that Herr Steiner suffered a minor stroke on the operating table,’ the doctor replied gravely. ‘We’re doing everything we can. He’s in intensive care right now.’

  ‘When can I see him?’

  ‘Not yet. But soon. Please try not to worry.’ The doctor smiled and tried to look reassuring, then turned and hurried away.

  Silvia Steiner fell back into her chair. Ben crouched beside her. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Pray for him.’

  ‘I will. And you look after yourself, Silvia.’ She looked at him tearfully. ‘You’re going?’ He nodded.

  She gripped his arm. ‘You go. Finish this.’

  ‘I need to get into Maximilian’s safe. Do you have the combination?’

  She shook her head. ‘But Heinrich does. You tell him that I said to provide you with anything you need. Anything. He won’t give you any trouble.’

  Before she’d even finished saying it, Ben was heading for the exit.

  ‘You take care,’ she called after him, but he wasn’t listening.

  The Steiner residence was a hive of police and forensic teams. The media were already at the gates, and pretty soon they’d be swarming all over Heinrich Dorenkamp for a statement about the tragedy that had seen Otto Steiner, heir to one of Europe’s biggest fortunes, fall to a horrible death. The newspapers and TV would be full of it that night and probably for the next week, until a fresh disaster came along to turn everyone’s heads the other way.

  Silvia had been right. Dorenkamp didn’t even try to resist Ben’s request to see inside the safe. Five minutes after walking into the foyer, Ben was sitting alone at the billionaire’s Louis XIV desk, reading a sixty-page bound sheaf of waxy, yellowed papers that few eyes had seen since 1945. Each faded page was headed with a Nazi imperial eagle perched on a wreathed swastika, and the official seal of the SS.

  Ruth wouldn’t have been disappointed. The documents had it all. Detailed diagrams and cutaway drawings of the mysterious Bell, showing all its bizarre internal workings. Column after column of technical data whose meaning Ben couldn’t even begin to decipher. Grainy photographs of what looked like some kind of enormous underground factory, a maze of tunnels and galleries, shafts and chambers, together with comprehensive plans of its layout. Everything he could have asked for was right here.

  As well as some things that he didn’t need to know, but found himself reading with a chill in his spine. Buried near the back, yellowed and faded with age, was a written military order dated 1944, and Ben’s German was good enough to work out what it was. It was an order sanctioning the building of the secret facility under the supervision of the Kammlerstab, the general’s own personal staff. This hadn’t just been some disused munitions factory that Kammler had commandeered for his own use. The whole mammoth construction development had been undertaken for the single purpose of housing his special weapons project and keeping it a deadly secret from the outside world.

  Two names were signed at the foot of the page. The upper scrawl belonged to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS.

  Underneath it was an ugly, spiky flourish of a signature. The ultimate sanction. The mark of Adolf Hitler himself.

  The next few pages were a detailed report on the construction of the secret facility, showing plans of the temporary railway that had carried trainload after trainload of forced labourers from the concentration camps to work on the project. Among the figures in the right margin were statistics of the number who had died, from exhaustion or disease, or from electrocution or drowning or tunnel cave-in, during the build. Tens of thousands of them, their unspeakable suffering reduced to an anonymous typed entry in a report, and all just so that Hans Kammler could keep his machine hidden from Allied Intelligence. The place had been a death camp in its own right.

  Ben had read enough. He put the papers down on the desk. Reached for Steiner’s phone and called Jeff at Le Val.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Jeff asked.

  ‘Plenty. I’ll explain when I see you. Is Brooke still there?’

  ‘She’s back in London,’ Jeff said. ‘Left this morning.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘She’s worried about you. Listen, someone called Sabrina phoned, asking about Adam and Rory.’

  ‘That’s what I’m phoning you for, Jeff. I need your help.’

  ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ Jeff said.

  ‘I’m asking. Get over to the airport PDQ. I’m sending a private jet to collect you. You can’t miss it. It’s got the name Steiner written on the side in great big letters. I’ll be waiting for you in Bern, and I’ll brief you in the air.’

  If Jeff was surprised, he didn’t react. Or maybe nothing Ben did surprised him any more. ‘Do I need to bring anything?’

  ‘Just yourself,’ Ben said. ‘And as much tactical raid gear from the armoury room as you can stuff into two big holdalls.’

  ‘Sounds like fun. Where are we going?’

  Ben picked up the sheaf of documents, flipped a couple of pages and looked again at the faded map that had been drawn by SS General Hans Kammler sixty-five years earlier.

  ‘We’re going to Hungary,’ he said. ‘To a hidden Nazi base inside a mountain.’

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  The luxury interior of a private jet seemed like a strange place to unzip two big eighty-litre NATO-issue grey canvas holdalls containing a small armoury of light weapons and munitions, survival gear, woodland-camouflage combat clothing, gloves and boots. The equipment spilled out over the plush carpet and Ben ran through it all. Jeff had chosen well. He nodded. ‘Perfect.’

  By the time the jet had reached its ceiling altitude and was speeding eastwards towards Budapest, Ben was filling Jeff in on everything. Their destination was the largest mountain range in Europe: the Carpathians. Kárpátok in Hungarian, a rugged rocky arc that stretched for hundreds of miles beyond its borders through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Romania and Serbia. It was in the western Carpathians, buried in a desolate spot in the north-eastern corner of Hungary near the border with Slovakia, that General Kammler had built his secret facility sixty-five years ago. There it had remained, untouched, unexplored, virtually unknown. Now it was time to bust it wide open.

  There was no telling what they were going to meet there. Otto Steiner might have hired a team of ten, or there could be a hundred armed mercenaries there holding the O’Connors. That was something to worry about when they got there.

  It wasn’t long after Ben had finished briefing Jeff that the fast jet touched down on a specially-reserved runway at Budapest Ferihegy International Airport. Steiner’s influence had a lengthy reach, and Heinrich Dorenkamp wasn’t slack in obeying the orders he’d been given. Ben and Jeff carried the two holdalls to a private room where a sober official handed over the keys to a Porsche Cayenne Turbo 4×4.

  The high-speed non-stop bullet train from Budapest to the remote city of Miskolc took one hour and forty-five minutes. Ben meant to beat that time, and the big 4.8-litre car was the tool for the job. They carved eastwards across the country with their cargo on the seats behind them. Dusk was settling and the full moon was on the rise over the plains and forests as they bypassed Miskolc and began the winding journey upwards through the foothills of the towering mountains, stopping every so often to che
ck the copy of Kammler’s map. Upwards and upwards through dense woodland, the road carried them far away from any town or village until it had narrowed to a track. The Porsche was as good off-road as it was on tarmac, and they were jolted from side to side as Ben hammered it over the rutted ground, the powerful headlights picking out every rock and pothole.

  Jeff pointed through the windscreen. ‘There. The old railway.’ Through the overgrown grass and brambles it was still possible to see where the earth had been banked to make way for the tracks ferrying the trainloads of death camp prisoners to their new home – for many of them, the journey to their grave. The rails themselves were long gone, hastily removed by the SS Building and Works Division in the closing months of the war before their presence could draw the eye of Allied aerial reconnaissance scouts. It had been many, many years since organised transport had come this way.

  But someone else had been here, and recently. As the way became narrower and wilder through the tunnel of the trees, the Porsche’s headlights threw pools of shadow into tyre tracks in the dirt. It looked as though a number of vehicles had used the route, four-wheel-drives and maybe a car with a wide wheelbase or some kind of van.

  Ben eyed the map spread out on the dashboard. Kammler’s drawings had been every bit as precise as could be expected from a man who was not only a trained engineer but a megalomaniac and a ruthless perfectionist. Everything was right. The co-ordinates were dead on. There was no question that the ominous black shape they could now see looming up ahead through the gaps in the trees, its rocky crags reflecting the light of the full moon, was Kammler’s mountain. They were close.

  Ben killed the lights, driving by moonlight. After another couple of minutes he swung a right off the track and bumped the car through the undergrowth until it was masked by foliage. He and Jeff got out, pulled out the holdalls. Waited for their vision to acclimatise to the dark, then started preparing for the task ahead. They didn’t speak as they went through the old routine that had once been their whole way of life, pulling on the woodland camouflage clothing, lacing up their boots, re-checking and dividing up the weapons. The armament was simple but effective: two silenced Heckler & Koch MP5 machine carbines, two Browning pistols and two slim, double-edged, black-bladed killing knives in leg sheaths. In addition to that, Ben carried a cut-down Ithaca combat shotgun across his back while Jeff slung a stubby grenade launcher round his shoulder.

  Aside from the weaponry and ammunition in their packs, they each had a coil of slim, lightweight but very strong rope, which they slung diagonally around their bodies. Sub-vocal radio mikes and earpieces allowed them to communicate across a distance in the softest of whispers. The final piece of equipment for each of them was the ex-military Gen 3 zoomable night-vision goggles that attached to a head harness. Capable of operating in virtual zero-light conditions, the goggles turned the world a grainy, surreal sea-green.

  The two men set off, moving like ghosts in single file. They made their way cautiously along the track, scanning far and wide ahead of them as they walked. The ground was rising steadily upwards, the wild forest slowly thinning out as they approached higher ground and the base of the mountain.

  Ben couldn’t stop thinking about what they were going to find there. Were Adam and Rory O’Connor still even alive? He battled his doubts away to the back of his mind and walked on. His goggles illuminated the way ahead in an eerie glow. He could sense Jeff’s presence behind him, but the only sound he could hear was the beating of his own heart and the gentle sigh of the mountain breeze through the branches.

  The crack of a twig and a rustle of foliage at two o’clock. Ben froze, raised his MP5.

  The bear’s eyes glowed like green torches in Ben’s goggles as it stopped in the middle of the path and turned to look at them. Then it ambled on unhurriedly, its shaggy coat rippling as it walked. It slipped into the trees on the other side of the track and disappeared.

  ‘Shit,’ Jeff’s whisper chuckled in Ben’s ear.

  They kept moving. The ground was sloping ever upwards and the gaps in the trees were getting wider. The mountain towered overhead.

  Ben operated the zoom facility on his goggles, and the magnification of the grainy image in his eyepieces expanded from xl to x10. He slowly, carefully scanned the terrain. Nature could do so much in sixty-five years to alter a landscape. The ravages of the weather, landslides, vegetation growth. It was hard to associate the crisp lines of Kammler’s technical drawings with the rugged landscape in front of them.

  But then he did a double-take, and held his breath as he zoomed in closer. Yes, there it was. Carefully blended with the tangle of overgrown bushes and brambles, visible only to someone who was looking for it, a thick sprawl of military camouflage netting veiled a rocky alcove right at the base of the mountain about sixty yards up ahead. He stared at it a moment longer, then zoomed the goggles back down to xl magnification.

  The question was, what was behind it? If it corresponded to the drawings, it was the twenty-foot-high steel doorway carved into the mountain by Hitler’s slave army a lifetime earlier.

  More tyre tracks were visible in the decayed leaf matter underfoot as they crept closer to the hidden entrance. Ben kneeled and put his hand to the ground. Fresh mud, the tread marks clearly imprinted. Someone had been here within the last twenty-four hours.

  Jeff’s voice rasped in Ben’s earpiece. ‘Whatever you do, don’t move.’ Ben froze, then turned his head very slowly to see Jeff pointing to a spot an inch from the toecap of his boot.

  The tripwire was barely visible in the dirt, just a short section of it raised up enough to catch on an unsuspecting intruder’s foot. It was almost certainly wired to a silent alarm somewhere inside the facility. Someone was definitely in there, and they didn’t want to be found.

  It took them almost half an hour to cover the last few yards, checking every inch of ground as they moved. Then, breathless with tension, they finally reached the camo netting. And carefully, very carefully, peeled back its edge.

  Ben nodded in satisfaction. Sixty-five years’ worth of brambles and moss and ivy had been recently clipped away to reveal the tall steel doors, exactly as in the drawings but now craggy and pitted with corrosion. He ran a gloved finger down their central edge and saw where some of the rust had flaked away from being opened. Moving his hand across to one of the massive hinges, he found it sticky with fresh grease.

  But even if they’d been able to open them, going brazenly in through the front doors to face an unknown force of opposition wasn’t an option Ben wanted to consider. When he’d studied Kammler’s plans back in Switzerland, he’d spotted another way in that he liked a lot better. With just one reservation – one he didn’t want to think about.

  He stepped carefully away from the entrance. Now that he had his bearings, he had a pretty good idea of where to look. About two hundred feet up the mountainside and about three hundred feet to the left, the goggles on maximum zoom picked out what looked like the mouth of a rusted-out old oil drum protruding from the rocks, partially obscured by a shrub. He signalled to Jeff to follow him.

  When they reached the oil drum, Ben saw he’d been right. It was the mouth of a chimney, six feet wide, and from Kammler’s drawing he knew that its shaft drilled straight down about two hundred feet through solid rock to a chamber below. It had been hard to tell from the faded handwritten labels on the drawing what the purpose of the chamber was. He said nothing to Jeff as he unslung the rope coil from his shoulder and secured one end to a big rock. He tested the knot, then dropped the other end of the rope down the shaft. Jeff did the same as Ben climbed over the lip of the chimney and lowered himself down slowly fist under fist, clasping the rope between his boots to control his descent. He swayed from side to side as he went down, touching the metal sides of the vertical tunnel. Everything was a uniform green in his eyepieces, but he knew that if he flipped them up he’d be in total blackness. He glanced up, and saw Jeff’s boots overhead as he slid down after him.

&nb
sp; It was a long way down through the claustrophobic space, and after a couple of minutes Ben’s arms were screaming. He worried about running out of rope and finding himself dangling helplessly over an unknown drop. But the rope kept coming, and after another thirty seconds he knew he was getting near the bottom from the indescribable stench that was rising up to meet him.

  ‘Something stinks pretty bad down here,’ Jeff’s voice said in his ear.

  It was a combination of every bad smell in the world. Burnt animal grease and decaying matter left to fester in water that was beyond stagnant. Putrefaction and filth of a kind that Ben didn’t even want to imagine. Just as the smell was as bad as he thought it could get, it got worse. Moments later his feet splashed down into something that felt like mud. Cold liquid squelched thickly up around his legs and into his boots. He swallowed, fighting the bile that wanted to well up in his throat.

  He let go of the rope and let his arms dangle by his sides to let the muscles recover. He was standing in what appeared to be a square stone-built chamber about thirty feet across. The squelchy soup was up to his knees. He looked down. It didn’t seem like mud, but it was thick and cloying.

  Then he looked up. And saw the rats. Hundreds of them, scuttling along the edge of the stonework above the surface. Dropping down and swimming through the filth, their long tails wriggling behind them.

  Jeff landed beside him, rubbing his hands. His face was contorted in disgust behind the goggles. ‘What the fuck is this place?’

  Ben didn’t reply. He raised one foot with a sucking sound and started trying to wade towards the nearest wall. Embedded in the stone, steel rungs led up to the iron grate of a hatchway ten feet or so above their heads. He prayed it would be open.