The Shadow Project bh-5

by Scott Mariani

  Something hit him softly between the shoulders. He heard a high-pitched squeaking in his ear, and instinctively reached over his shoulder. His gloved fingers closed on something soft and furry. He flung the rat away, saw it twist in midair, its jaws snapping. It landed with a splash. Then another was scuttling up his leg, biting at his clothes. He lashed out and felt its back break.

  They started wading quickly towards the edge, sloshing through the filth as fast as they dared without tripping and falling into it. Something nudged Ben’s knee. At first he thought it was another rat, but then he looked down and realised.

  There were things in the liquid. Things that had lain undisturbed for a long time had suddenly started floating to the surface as their feet churned up the sediment at the bottom.

  The human skull bobbed away from him, staring sightlessly up at him in the green vision of his goggles. It was scorched and blackened and rat-gnawed, missing its jawbone. A bullet had shattered everything above the left eye socket. The teeth were torn out.

  Then Ben felt something give way with a wet, brittle crunch under his boot. He stumbled. Another skull floated up, crushed and black and burnt. Then a section of rib cage, like the remains of an old boat. He kicked them away in disgust.

  It was what he’d feared from studying the plans of the facility, and now he saw that his suspicions had been right. The chamber was the crematorium for the slave workers who had perished building Kammler’s secret domain. The undiscovered mass grave of tens of thousands of nameless victims of the SS general’s brutality. They were standing on human remains. Stacks of charred bone. The piled ash of burnt flesh and clothing, mixed with rainwater seepage over the years to create a sickening mulch.

  They splashed through the horror. Ben’s fingers closed on the bottom rung of the ladder and he hauled himself up the wall, closely followed by Jeff. There were gagging sounds in his earpiece as he reached the hatch, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep from vomiting himself. He muttered a prayer, pushed his fingers through the iron grating and gave it a hard shove.

  It didn’t move. It was either rusted shut, or it was locked from the inside. They were shut in here with the dead.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Far away from where Ben and Jeff were trapped inside the crematorium chamber, separated by millions of tons of solid rock and a maze of tunnels and corridors, Adam O’Connor was on his hands and knees on the concrete floor of the vault, surrounded by dismantled electronic components, mechanical linkages, magnetic coils, bits of wire. A chaotic mess of spanners and screwdrivers and soldering irons and voltmeters lay scattered around him.

  He hated the machine almost as much as he hated the woman who’d tortured his son. All his rage, all his frustration at the situation he’d been plunged into against his will, were obsessively focused on it. His shirt stuck to him with sweat. Days of beard growth covered his jaw, and his eyes were stinging from lack of sleep. His trousers were worn through from kneeling on the rough concrete, his hands were lacerated from all the rusted bolts he’d had to slacken in the confined space of the machine, his fingers covered in burns from soldering the thousands of corroded connections he’d found. Any one of them could have accounted for the fact that, so far, he just simply could not get the fucking thing to work. Every time he found a new problem his heart would soar, thinking this is it; only to sink again when he fixed it and put everything back together again, hit the big red activation knob … and the machine still just sat there.

  Silent. Dead. Laughing at him. Just like it was now. Adam would have punched the loathsome thing, but his knuckles were too bruised and swollen from the hundreds of times he’d already done that.

  He turned round and looked at Pelham. Every hour that Adam spent down here working on the Bell, Pelham was right there with him. Except that while Adam toiled and sweated and chewed his lip in terror of what was going to happen if he failed, Pelham had taken to lounging in a big armchair he’d had brought down for him, coolly reading newspapers and magazines while sipping on a long drink.

  ‘This is hopeless,’ Adam croaked. ‘It’ll never work.’

  ‘You’ll keep trying,’ Pelham said without looking up. He flipped a page of the magazine he was reading. Took another sip of his drink.

  ‘This thing is scrap metal. And even if it didn’t have mice living in it, and every linkage wasn’t seized solid, and every damn wire wasn’t crusted up with corrosion, and the valves weren’t rotted away to nothing, I still couldn’t make it work.’

  Pelham put down the magazine. ‘We had an agreement, Adam. And frankly, your attitude is starting to wear out my patience.’

  Adam dropped the spanner he was clutching and staggered to his feet, racked with cramp. He advanced on Pelham, enraged by the man’s obtuseness. ‘Listen to me. I’m not fixing a broken boiler here. This thing isn’t like some household appliance that you just plug in. It’s the most arcane piece of scientific hardware I’ve ever seen, and you’re asking me to fix it with bits of crap from the local toolshop. I can’t work in these conditions. I need a lab. I need more people. I need proper equipment. Maybe if we could just break the whole thing down and analyse every component, we could—’

  ‘This is it,’ Pelham said, motioning at the room. ‘This is as good as it gets. Live with it.’

  ‘You don’t understand how complex this thing is,’ Adam shouted.

  ‘You’re supposed to be the expert,’ Pelham said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  Adam could feel his face turning crimson as his shouts reverberated around the inside of the vault. ‘And if I can’t get it to work, then you know what? You know whose fucking fault that’ll be? Not mine. Yours, asshole. Your fault, because if you fuckers hadn’t killed my colleagues, if Michio and Julia were here with me now, the three of us might have figured it out. The way things are, you can do what you want, but you’ll never see this thing working. Understand? It can’t be done. So why don’t you just pick up the phone and tell your employers, whoever the fuck they are, that it’s over? That’s it. And then you’re just going to have to let me and my son go back to our lives.’ By the end of the tirade his shouts had diminished to a sob. He couldn’t talk any more.

  There was silence in the vault. Adam steadied himself against the machine, panting.

  Pelham spoke softly. ‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Adam? Your nerves are ragged. You feel weak and confused and you don’t know how you can go on.’

  Adam’s head sagged. He screwed his eyes shut and felt dizzy. He was one breath away from bursting into tears. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘If I could just sleep a while. Please. Then I’ll keep trying. I promise. Forget what I said. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.’

  Pelham got up from his armchair, walked calmly over to Adam and put an arm benignly around his shoulders. ‘Can I tell you a story? I was a soldier once. Not your normal infantryman. We were something… special. Our selection training was very intense. You wouldn’t believe the things we had to do. Just when we thought we’d been tested to the absolute limit, they moved it to the next level.’ He smiled. ‘You can’t imagine what it feels like to be hunted like an animal, can you? Alone in the dark, running scared, no food except what you can catch with your bare hands, no shelter, no sleep for days on end. But that’s what they did to us. They were teaching us to stretch the limits of what we thought possible, and those days taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I learned that those extremes of fear, pain, fatigue were my friends, because they concentrated my mind. Made me find reserves of strength within myself that I’d never dreamed of. That’s how I kept going. I made it through.’ Adam stared wordlessly at him.

  ‘But not every man passed the test,’ Pelham went on. ‘Some were broken. They gave in. And you know what they said, those losers, as they were being carried off, crying like babies? “I’m tired.”’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is, I could let you go back to your cell right now, so that you could spend the next ten hours sleeping. But the
truth is, Adam, I don’t think it’s going to help you to give in like that. Deep down, I think you have the strength to keep going. You just need help to find it within yourself.’ He walked away from Adam and went over to the table beside his armchair. On it was a radio handset.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam said numbly.

  Pelham picked up the radio. ‘Irina, this is Pelham. Respond, over.’

  A pause, then a fizz of static. Reception was poor inside the mountain. But then Adam heard the woman’s voice reply and he felt his knees going weak.

  ‘Fetch the boy,’ Pelham told her. ‘Bring him down to the vault. You know what I’m saying. Over and out.’ He turned off the radio.

  ‘No,’ Adam said. ‘No, no. You don’t have to do this. I’ll—’ Pelham pointed at the machine. ‘You’ll make it work, believe me,’ he said. ‘When she’s cutting your son’s face off, five minutes from now right here in this room while you watch, I guarantee that’s going to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Let’s see how tired you are then.’

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  ‘Again. On three.’

  Dangling side by side from the filthy rungs of the ladder, Ben and Jeff kicked against the iron grate of the crematorium hatchway one more time. The dull clang resonated through the chamber.

  ‘I’m going to puke,’ Jeff mumbled.

  ‘Again,’ Ben said. They’d been trying for what seemed like forever, and he could only hope that nobody had heard the noise. They swung their weight back from the hatch, then lashed out in unison.

  This time, the clang of their boots on the iron grate was mixed with a screech as hinges rusted solid for over half a century gave way and the hatch moved. Not much, just an inch. But it moved, and Ben felt the relief scorch through his veins like whisky.

  ‘We’re nearly there. Once more.’

  The final kick sent the hatch crashing open.

  ‘You go first,’ Ben said, and Jeff wasted no time in clambering past him and crawling out of the hole. Ben followed. After a few feet he was able to stand, and looked around him through his night-vision goggles.

  They were in the rough-hewn stone anteroom from where the SS soldiers must have flung the bodies of the dead before sloshing gasoline over them and setting them alight. Maybe towards the very end, when the soldiers needed every drop of fuel to escape the approaching Soviet troops, they hadn’t bothered burning their victims at all, but just shot those still alive in the back of the head and turfed the corpses into the hole to rot.

  Ben thought about Don Jarrett, the Holocaust denier. Another trip to Bruges suddenly seemed like a very good idea.

  If he ever got out of this.

  Up three pitted stone steps and they were in a passageway. The air was dank and foul, but it felt like pure oxygen after the obscenity of the crematorium. The passage wound onwards. They unslung their weapons and flipped off their safeties as they came to an unmarked doorway. Ben counted one – two – three. A deep breath and they pushed through.

  The light hit them. Across the corridor in which they found themselves, cobwebbed lamps strung together by loose wires threw a dim, yellowish glow that was unbearably bright with their goggles. They flipped them up, blinking to adjust their vision.

  There was nobody about. They turned left and kept moving. They were on full battle-alert now, in that state of heightened awareness in which every muscle was tight, every nerve jangling and the mind racing with constant anticipation of what could be waiting around every corner. Life never felt more vivid than when death was just an instant away.

  A door opened up ahead. Voices. Two men. Ben and Jeff pressed themselves flat into a shadowy alcove in the wall. Footsteps approached, and as the voices grew louder Ben could hear the two men were speaking Croat.

  ‘I’m not gonna take much more shit from that bastard Pelham,’ one of them was complaining bitterly sotto voce, as though he thought Pelham might be listening.

  ‘Relax,’ the other one said in a more laconic tone. ‘Think of the money.’

  ‘No fucking amount of money is worth being stuck in this hole. I hate this place.’

  The men walked past where Ben and Jeff were hidden in the shadows, close enough to smell their body odour. The complaining one was stick-thin inside a rumpled leather jacket, with a facial twitch and long, greasy hair scraped back in a thin ponytail. The laconic-sounding one wore a khaki cold weather field shirt that looked like Russian military issue. His shaven head glistened in the lamplight.

  Ben glanced at Jeff. He peeled himself silently off the wall as his fingers moved down to the hilt of the killing knife that was strapped to his thigh and drew it out of its sheath. Jeff was right at his side as they crept noiselessly but quickly up behind the men. The bald guy was Ben’s. Ponytail belonged to Jeff.

  Then they struck. Hard and fast. Ben clamped his hand over the bald guy’s mouth and jerked his head back and stabbed the knife into his throat. In the movies, it zipped as easily through flesh as a hot knife through butter and left a clean, straight red line from ear to ear. In real life, to cut through the tough gristle and cartilage of a man’s windpipe you had to saw brutally. Close your mind to what you were doing and keep sawing like crazy through the horrific mess until the blood was spraying out over your hand and the air was hissing out of the guy’s lungs with that eerie gurgling sigh that you knew was going to haunt your dreams forever. Hold on tight until the victim’s death struggles diminished and you could wipe the bloody knife clean on his clothes and move on and hope you never had to do anything like that again. Till the next time.

  Ben and Jeff dragged the bodies into the shadows. They were in, and they were committed now. It was starting.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Irina Dragojević stood back from the cell door as she watched her tall companion turn the key in the lock. Pelham hadn’t said much on the radio, but he hadn’t needed to. She had a very clear idea of what he wanted, because they’d already discussed the contingency plans. They were very persuasive, but the truth was she had no interest whatsoever in the outcome. The slim knife in the sheath on her belt was whetted and honed past razor-sharpness. When she thought about what she was going to do with it, and how nobody was going to stop her this time, her breath caught. The feeling was almost sexual. It dulled the throbbing ache in her arm where the bullet had creased it that day in Ireland. It made her feel whole and serene.

  As she watched the cell door swing open, she heard that small, distant voice in her mind again.

  Why do you do the things you do, Irina? Why?

  There’d been a time, years ago, when she’d heard those voices often, and had been greatly troubled by them. But that had been before she’d come to see things clearly, to appreciate how beautifully simple it all was. The voice had no power any more. The power was all hers.

  The tall man stepped inside the boy’s cell. Irina went in behind him. She stopped. Narrowed her eyes as her colleague turned to stare at her in bewilderment.

  The cell was empty. Rory O’Connor was gone. Irina grabbed the radio.

  Ivan’s fingers were painfully tight around Rory’s wrist as he led him quickly through the stone corridors. The man had barely said a word since he’d come bursting into his cell two minutes before, seemingly in a desperate hurry to get him out of there.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Rory asked.

  ‘Somewhere safe,’ Ivan told him. ‘Things are beginning to happen.’ He was frowning as he kept an ear open for fresh activity on the crackling radio handset in his jacket pocket. ‘Come, we must go faster.’

  ‘They’ve come for me? The other agents?’

  Ivan nodded. Tugged on his wrist. ‘Move faster.’

  ‘Please, Ivan. Tell me what’s happening.’

  ‘Pelham sent Irina to fetch you, to hurt you again. I heard it on the radio. You are lucky. I was closer. I got there first.’

  Rory shuddered and felt the colour drain from his face. He looked at Ivan and realised he’d never felt such a bond with
anyone before. Except for one. ‘Where’s my dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Waiting for you on the outside,’ Ivan said. ‘Keep moving.’

  Rory gulped air. He was going to get out of here. He was going to see his father. It would soon be over.

  The radio fizzed into life. Through the spit and hiss of static, Rory listened to the exchange between the man called Pelham and the woman and his heart began to thump faster.

  ‘I want him found!’ Pelham yelled from the tinny speaker, and then the voices dissolved back into white noise.

  ‘I won’t let them find you,’ Ivan reassured him. ‘You are with me now. We are friends, no?’

  ‘Yes, Ivan.’

  They kept walking. Ivan was glancing furtively around him all the time, keeping an even tighter grip on Rory’s wrist as he led the boy down passages he’d never seen before. ‘Quickly,’ Ivan kept saying. ‘Quickly.’ They came to a flight of steps leading downwards into murky shadows. Ivan turned on a flashlight and lit the way ahead. Down and down through a shaft that was carved out of the rock. It was echoey, and Rory could hear the steady plop of dripping water.

  ‘Is this where we’re meeting the other agents?’ he asked breathlessly, and heard his voice reverberate off the walls.

  Ivan didn’t reply.

  Then the staircase ended abruptly, terminating in an unfinished cul de sac. In the torchlight, Rory could see the pickaxe marks that scarred the rock face. The floor was littered with debris and old tools that had lain there so long, they’d rusted away to almost nothing. It was as though whoever had been digging the tunnel out of the solid rock had just stopped working one day, put down their tools and gone. He wondered what had happened. But more than that, he wondered why Ivan had brought him here. He turned and frowned up at his friend.

  Ivan smiled in the beam of the flashlight. ‘We are safe down here,’ he said as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘It is just you and me now.’ Then he moved closer. His lips parted.