Code of Combat

by Michael Asher

  The villa stood in silvered moonlight, a dark sprawl like a fallen mountain, under a velour sky swarming with stars. Lying in the trees, with Emilia and Ettore on either side, Caine could make out only a denser zone of darkness, a thicket of towers like ebony columns. They lay there for five minutes, listening with bated breath for the sound of voices, probing the darkness for any sign of movement. The silence was almost sinister: Caine’s senses told him the place was deserted, but there was a small voice of warning inside his skull.

  ‘I think they’ve gone,’ Ettore whispered in his ear. ‘I’d guess they were withdrawn to guard my transfer. I speak some German: I heard them talking. That officer Furetto shot – he was in charge of troops at the villa.

  ‘Kaltenbraun,’ Emilia said. ‘You’re right – he was the chief here.’ She paused. ‘Poor guy. He was a Kraut all right, but he stopped his men from touching me. Pity it had to be him who was killed.’

  ‘That’s war for you.’ Caine sighed. He realized that whatever reservations he might have, they’d have to take a gamble. He cupped a breath. ‘You’re not obliged to do this,’ he said. ‘You’re both civilians, and –’

  ‘– and I’m just a kid, and my sister’s a slip of a girl, is that it?’ Ettore cut in harshly.

  ‘Shhh!’ Caine hissed. ‘Not at all. I was your age when I joined the army: some of the best fighters I ever met were girls.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Emilia said, ‘I doubt if you’d find the Codex on your own.’

  Caine nodded in resignation. ‘Let’s go for it, then.’

  They moved around the dark maze of buildings, staying in the trees, jogging across open patches, till they came abreast of the chapel, a low, pitch-roofed stone structure that seemed to grow like a spur out of the dark cliff of the girdle-wall: it stood only twenty yards away, across the gravel drive. They watched and waited: nothing stirred.

  ‘All right,’ Caine whispered. ‘I’ll go in. You cover.’

  ‘No,’ Ettore said. ‘I’ll go in. You cover.’

  ‘That’s an order,’ Caine said. ‘Wait two minutes, then you come.’ Before Ettore could reply, he was up and moving silently across the drive, towards the chapel. It took only seconds to make the steps on the front portico: he crouched in the recess of the door, cradled his Tommy-gun, ranged the muzzle of his weapon across the chasm of darkness. He waited for the others, heard the crunch of their feet on the gravel, saw them come out of the shadows, saw the glint of their sub-machine guns amidst grey outlines. They squatted together by the door: Caine rose, pushed the wood tentatively: it creaked open. He stepped inside, shone Cope’s torch around the interior. It certainly wasn’t big as churches went – low ceiling, peeling stucco walls, solid-looking chairs in short rows either side of the aisle. At the far end, about fifteen paces from the door, standing on what appeared to be a Persian carpet, was an altar draped in white linen, decorated with a silver crucifix and candlesticks.

  Emilia and Ettore squeezed past him: carried torchlight on their backs, became giant batwings flitting across the ceiling and walls. They halted by the altar: Caine moved up beside them. ‘OK, so what do we do?’

  ‘We’ll have to shift the altar,’ Emilia said. ‘The trap door’s underneath.’

  The altar was marble, and it was heavy: Emilia and Ettore laid their Schmeissers on the nearest chairs: Caine slung his Tommy across his back. It took maximum effort from all three of them to drag it clear. Caine examined the exposed carpet with his torch, saw circular marks where the legs of the altar had compacted it over years. ‘Probably never been opened since your father hid the Codex here,’ he said.

  Emilia and Ettore rolled up the carpet, revealing a floor of white stone flags. In the very centre, directly below where the altar had stood, was a black rectangle about three feet square, flush with the rest of the floor. ‘That’s it,’ Ettore crowed. ‘All the times we used to come here when we were kids, and we never knew it existed.’

  ‘You remember the stories?’ Emilia said. ‘A secret cave hidden under the chapel, used by Mithras worshippers in Roman times? It was said that the Christians built the chiesetta right on top of it.’

  ‘Dad reckoned it was a myth,’ Ettore chuckled. ‘In any case, there were enough known secret passages to keep a kid going, without legends.’

  Emilia knelt down, ran her hand across the smooth black stone. ‘How do we open it, though? There’s no lock or handle – nothing.’

  ‘Shall I try shifting one of the candlesticks?’ Ettore smirked. ‘That’s what they do in the movies.’

  Caine knelt beside them. ‘These things usually work on a simple counterweight principle,’ he said, ‘with some kind of pressure mechanism.’

  He stood up, pressed one end of the flagstone with his foot: nothing happened. He shifted to the opposite end of the square, pressed again. The black flagstone didn’t move, but the adjacent white one rose a millimetre at the far end. Caine pressed the black flagstone a third time: the white slab rose further, the end flipped up suddenly, like a two-inch-thick seesaw: the entire slab lifted clear of the floor on what looked like a hinged metal arm, came to rest at an eighty-degree angle, with a low click.

  ‘Yeah!’ Ettore cheered.

  ‘Sssh!’ Emilia told him. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘It wasn’t medieval Christians or ancient Romans who put this trap door in,’ Caine whispered. ‘That’s modern precision engineering.’

  He shone his torch into the dark space below, noted a narrow flight of steps descending into the darkness. ‘A proper Aladdin’s cave,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to be Aladdin.’

  ‘I’m going down too,’ Emilia said.

  ‘That’s three of us,’ added Ettore.

  ‘Someone’s got to stay here,’ said Caine. ‘Keep watch.’

  Ettore screwed up his thin mouth. ‘OK, but I get to go down later. And, by the way, no smooching my sis in the dark.’

  Emilia gave him a token slap.

  They descended the steps cautiously, Caine leading, with his torch. The air smelt sharp and sour, the torch-beam showed walls of solid rock. Caine was almost on the lowest step when he stopped abruptly: Emilia stumbled into him. She was about to protest when she saw what had stopped him: the floor of the chamber was littered with dismembered skeletons, skulls, ribcages, pelvic girdles, pile upon pile of yellowed bones from scores of bodies.

  ‘A charnel-house,’ Caine said.

  He stepped down amongst the bones, kicked at a skull, saw it dissolve into fragments and chalk powder. ‘You can’t pin this one on the Nazis,’ he said. ‘Been here donkey’s years.’

  ‘Mithras worshippers,’ Emilia said: she banged the side of her fist against the rock wall. ‘This is a cave, just like the stories say: the chapel must have been built on top of it. These skeletons might have been here since the time of Christ.’

  Caine moved forward, crunched on bones, booted them aside. The cavern was about the same size as the chapel above: the walls curved, bulging out at the base in small peninsulas, like tree-roots. The rock itself was curiously fluted, giving the whole aspect an organic feel. At the far end, roughly underneath the chapel door, Caine reckoned, a deep alcove was carved into the rock, arching over a wooden chest bound with iron. Caine examined the big box carefully: it looked like a sea-chest in a pirate story – domed, barrel-like lid strengthened with an iron frame and five steel bands across the top. There were metal handles on both sides, and an iron hasp with a large brass padlock on the front face. ‘This has to be it,’ he said.

  Emilia wove her way through the bone-piles: for a long moment they stood elbow to elbow contemplating the object. ‘My father overlooked one thing,’ Emilia said. ‘The key. How are we going to open it?’

  Caine ran his hand along the iron rim of the lid, yanked at the padlock. He pushed at the chest: it didn’t budge an inch. ‘Base must be weighted with something,’ he said. ‘Probably lead.’

  ‘Couldn’t you pick the lock?’

  Caine thumped the l
id with a closed fist. ‘Dammit. We haven’t got time for lock-picking, even if I had the right tool. The only way to get in is to smash it open.’

  He began to hunt around among the bones for a sharp stone, gave up, handed the torch to Emilia. He unslung his Tommy-gun, held the butt poised over the chest. ‘I just wish we had a sledgehammer,’ he said.

  He raised the Thompson, brought the butt down with all his strength, struck the space between two iron bands with a hard crack: the wood didn’t break. Caine struck it again and again, panting with frustration.

  ‘Everything all right down there?’ It was Ettore’s voice, sounding muffled and distant, from the direction of the stairs.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Emilia called out. ‘We’ve found something.’

  She peered at the chest, holding the torch-beam close: where Caine had struck the wood, there was a hairline crack, almost imperceptibly branched. She touched it with her fingertips. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You’ve made a start. Try again.’

  Caine narrowed his eyes, belted the chest again, put all his force and bodyweight behind the blow. The Tommy-gun struck the lid: the wood splintered, caved in. Caine whacked it over and over in a frenzy of blind resolve, opened a jagged hole that grew wider as he worked at the edges, hiving off slivers and wood-chips. He was breathing hard: sweat ran down his forehead. He lifted the Tommy-gun again: Emilia grabbed his wrist.

  ‘That’s enough, Tom. We can get in now.’

  Caine let his weapon drop, saw that the aperture he’d hacked out between the iron bands was about a foot and a half square. He stood back, his chest heaving, wiped sweat off his brow. He glanced at Emilia, saw her brush hair away from her face, saw eyes that sparkled like garnets in the torchlight. ‘That’s it, then,’ he breathed. ‘You want to do the lucky dip?’

  Emilia nodded excitedly, passed the torch back to him, took a deep breath, moved nearer to the chest. She hesitated, then pushed her right arm through the opening, until her shoulder touched the lid. She groped around inside. ‘There’s nothing here,’ she gasped. ‘No, wait a minute, what’s this?’

  She fished around for a moment, let out a moan of effort, withdrew her arm carefully, brought up what looked like a double-size shoebox tied with string. Caine slung his weapon, helped her twist and manoeuvre the box between the iron bands. She laid it on the lid in front of them.

  For an instant they stood staring at it. Then Caine pulled out his knife, cut the string. He put the knife away, nodded to Emilia, who leaned across the box next to him. ‘Oh God,’ she gasped. ‘This better be it.’

  She placed her hands either side of the box, lifted the lid carefully, set it aside. Caine shone the torch-beam inside: they both gaped at the book that lay there like an infant in a cradle, in a bed of white cloth. She lifted the manuscript out gingerly: Caine shone the torch, saw a volume bound in gnarled, faded, purplish-brown calfskin with some motif – vaguely floral – embossed into it. What astonished him was how slim it was: no thicker than a commercial counterbook. ‘So this is what all the shouting’s about?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘Only twenty-three pages.’ Emilia smiled. ‘Not a book at all, really. There were several other copies, but they were all lost in the Middle Ages.’

  She opened the cover: showed Caine crinkled parchment pages covered in cramped lines of writing: a sprawl of spidery black letters with long tails: he wouldn’t even have recognized them as belonging to the alphabet. Emilia pointed to the title-page on the left: the lettering here was in alternating lines of red and black, in capitals that were, at least, legible.

  RIBVS . . . AGRICOLAE

  LIBER EXP

  LICIT INCPIT

  EIVSDEM DE O

  RIGINE ET MO

  RIBUS GERMANORU

  ‘I don’t know Dutch,’ Caine said. ‘Just tell me we got the right book.’

  Emilia closed the cover, replaced the manuscript in its box. Suddenly her arms were around him, drawing him to her: he felt her body tight against his, felt yielding, soft breasts, fluid sinew and muscle, felt her thigh against his crotch, felt her breath in his ear.

  ‘We got it,’ she whispered huskily. ‘Thank you.’

  Caine coiled his arms round her waist, touched the lean arc of her back with his left hand: the torch, still in his right, sent rills of brilliance across the stone ceiling. She moved against him: a gush of warmth spread through his blood: tiny pulses swarmed like pins and needles through his limbs. For an instant he forgot the Codex, forgot the Hun, forgot even that they were standing in a charnel-house ankle-deep in bones, forgot everything but the black-haired girl in his arms, with the pillow-soft mouth and the oriental eyes. She turned her face to his: in the deflected torchlight he saw irises like new moons, saw lips part to reveal mother-of-pearl teeth. He bent his head towards her, caressed her lips with his own, sipped the silvery taste of her mouth. She cupped a hand behind his neck, pulled his head gently down, kissed him softly, then much harder. Caine felt the magnetic force of her body dragging him in irresistibly, felt the soft breath from her nostrils on his cheek, buried himself in her. The kiss went on, searching, growing in intensity, an endless moment in which he was utterly and completely lost to the world.

  ‘How very touching,’ a cold voice said in cracked English.

  Caine broke away from Emilia’s kiss, went for his knife. ‘Stop!’ the voice lashed out. ‘Or I will shoot this boy.’

  Caine’s Thompson was slung vertically across his back: he knew he’d never bring it to bear in time. He turned his head towards the staircase at the opposite end of the chamber, saw two shadowy figures in his torchbeam, standing at the bottom of the stairs. The first was Ettore, his lean face a sick greenish ivory against the inkwashed shadows. Behind him, with a pistol pressed against his spine, he glimpsed the features of Wolfram Stengel: a penumbra of whiskers, sharp devil’s eyebrows, eyes of gunpit black.

  ‘Put down the torch,’ Stengel snapped.

  Caine hesitated: Stengel jabbed Ettore with his pistol.

  ‘All right. All right,’ Caine said.

  ‘And your weapons,’ Stengel added. ‘All of them.’

  Caine crouched, laid his torch, Tommy-gun and knife on the rock floor. He stood up slowly: his mouth was dust-dry: a fist clenched tightly in his chest. He was furious with himself. He’d got distracted, forgotten even that he was in a tactical situation. Stengel had overpowered Ettore, forced him down the steps of the crypt at gunpoint, and Caine hadn’t even heard them coming: he’d thrown all caution to the wind. It was in such unguarded moments that the enemy got you: it was almost always a fatal mistake.

  Stengel switched on a torch, caught Caine and Emilia squarely in its beam. ‘The traitor and the countess,’ he sneered. ‘A fitting match. Did you know that Mr Caine here is a traitor, Countess? Did he tell you that he wore SS uniform and swore an oath of allegiance to the Führer? No? I didn’t think so.’

  ‘Fuck you, Stengel,’ Emilia spat.

  The bearded man chuckled. ‘No, but I have fucked you. In more than one way, eh? Did you know I fucked the countess, Caine? Did she tell you?’ He leaned slightly over Ettore’s shoulder. ‘Did she tell you, boy?’

  ‘You’ll rot in hell for that, you Nazi bastard,’ Ettore spat.

  Stengel chuckled. ‘In hell? I don’t think so: we Germans prefer rational alternatives.’ He paused. ‘For myself, though, I rely a great deal on intuition. For example, I had a . . . what do you say? . . . a hunch . . . that you would return to the villa, Countess. I guessed that you needed your brother to find the Codex. What is sought lies in a place with no doors or windows, that was the clue. But not this place, not a physical place: a secret locked in your head. You are the door: your brother is the key.’

  Caine glanced at Emilia, felt his guts churn: no one could have told Stengel but Ettore, and Caine was sure he hadn’t talked. No, Stengel wasn’t boasting: he’d worked the whole thing out in a leap of insight. It was clever: Caine had to give him that.

  Stengel inched his t
orchbeam over the iron-bound chest, halted on the open box. ‘And so you have found the Codex,’ he said, ‘and so it is collection time for me. You can have no idea, any of you, how valuable this manuscript is to the German people. The Germania is the only existing record of the loftiness, purity and nobility of our Teutonic ancestors. Long before Rome was even a city, we had an empire that rivalled Alexander’s. We are a chosen people: our struggles against our neighbours are legitimate. What was once, shall be again.’

  ‘My father said the Germania shows how you Krauts were still eating cabbages and throwing stone clubs at each other when the Romans had reached the pinnacle of civilization,’ Emilia said.

  Stengel scoffed. ‘History is written by the winners, my dear Countess. Your poor father is no longer here to give his opinion. We already have copies of the text: the Codex Aesinias, though, is the only extant version of the original – an icon in itself. Herr Himmler has dreamed of obtaining this book for twenty years: he will be most pleased.’

  ‘Bully for Himmler,’ Ettore said.

  ‘Yes,’ Stengel said sharply: he prodded the boy again with his weapon. ‘Now, I want you to throw that box over to me, Countess. Be very careful. If I sense a wrong movement, your brother will be shot. Only when I have the Codex in my hand will I let him go.’

  ‘And then what?’ Emilia demanded. ‘You’re going to kill us all?’

  ‘You killed at least one SS-man: you and Caine tried to kill me, and almost succeded. What would you do in these circumstances? To tell you the truth, I have not yet decided. But if you have any ideas of escape, I suggest you forget them. I am not alone: there is a squad of SS-men outside, and they are in no mood to play around with partisans, traitors or saboteurs. Now, throw the Codex to me, please. Make sure it is packed well: I would not want to damage Herr Himmler’s present.’

  Emilia glanced at Caine: he nodded.