The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  Jack’s heart was pounding. ‘The palladion?’

  Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘It had been there, Jack. We found the impression of a swastika in the packing straw in one corner of that crate, a heavy object about two hand’s breadths across. But someone had taken it. There’s no sign of it elsewhere in the bunker. We already knew the palladion had been in that salt mine in Poland, right? Some time in the final months of the war it was brought here, and some time in the final hours before the forest was bombed it was taken away again.’

  Jack closed his eyes, trying to contain his disappointment. The palladion, the most sacred object of the Trojans. He remembered his dive with Costas six months before in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow, and their desperate fight with three of Saumerre’s men at the place where the palladion had been hidden. What did the Nazis want with it? Who had given the order to move it here, to this bunker? Six months ago they had worked out that the reverse swastika of the palladion had been the symbol of the Agamemnon Code, a secret Nazi code activated near the end of the war that was somehow connected with the purpose of the bunker. He turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘You’re sure it wasn’t taken recently?’

  ‘Not a chance. The bunker was sealed in by tons of fallen trees and soil after the Allied bombing raid in April 1945. Nobody’s been in there since.’

  ‘So that’s the bad news?’

  ‘Not all of it, Jack.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  Hiebermeyer put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad Hugh Frazer isn’t with us any more. He’d lived his life since the war wondering what had gone on here, what had happened to his friend Major Mayne. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to break it to him. It was a terrible sight, Jack. It’ll stay with me always.’

  ‘You found him?’

  ‘And the American colonel, Stein. They’d both been shot at close range by a 9mm Walther P38. We know that because the pistol and the shell casings are still there. The pistol belonged to another body, with an SS tattoo on his arm. It looks as if he and Mayne were caught in a death embrace, with Mayne’s knife in his ribcage.’

  Jack swallowed hard. ‘Where were the bodies?’

  Hiebermeyer lowered his arm from Jack’s shoulder, stared at the ground and spoke quietly. ‘At the far end of the chamber with the crates was a sealed room, a laboratory. The American was found outside the doorway, Mayne and the SS man just inside. The door had swung to on its hinges afterwards, nearly but not quite shutting. What I saw inside, beyond those bodies, was a scene of even greater horror.’ He put his hand to his forehead, and paused. ‘There were badly adiposed bodies, Jack, naked and strapped into gurneys. They were partly preserved in their own body liquor. That’s where the awful yellow-green slime came from. Thank Christ the Egyptians mummified their bodies.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘The forensic anthropologist with the army team reckons they were being used as guinea pigs, as live victims for research. She thinks they were being dissected alive, to ensure that the Nazi scientists could extract living viruses and bacteria from their organs. Two of them looked as if they’d been abandoned halfway through. They’d died horribly, in agony. And they weren’t the only ones. You remember you authorized an IMU geophysics team to come over here last month and survey the site of the concentration camp? They thought there was nothing remarkable in the results, but then the forensics guy saw something unusual that has just been confirmed.’

  Hiebermeyer took a crumpled sheet out of his pocket, his hand shaking slightly, and passed it to Jack. It was the printout of an archaeological resistivity survey. Jack smoothed it out and put it on his knees. He could identify buried foundations, visible in the contrast of black-and-white features that showed where walls had been. It looked like the survey of a Roman fort, with long barrack buildings and an organized layout of smaller huts. Hiebermeyer pointed to several hazy areas that obscured parts of the buildings. ‘That’s new-growth forest, trees that grew on the bombed-out site. But look here, at the top right-hand corner.’ He pointed to a long, rectilinear feature at least ten by thirty metres in area, like a wide section of boundary ditch. Jack looked up from the sheet to the bunker, traversing his eyes along the forest boundary beyond and trying to visualize the place before the airfield was constructed. Hiebermeyer pointed to a low line of bush to the north-west. ‘The team crawled around in the undergrowth and found a track about a kilometre long between the bunker and that ditch, with impressed tyre marks from large vehicles. Yesterday the forensics lady had a hunch about the ditch. She put a borehole down, and came up with lime, lots of it. They pulled back immediately and sealed off the site behind a guarded perimeter. She said she knew instantly what she was looking at. She’d worked on mass-burial sites from the Balkans wars of the 1990s and was sure the lime had been used to slake corpses, put down here in such quantities because the bodies were contaminated. We think the people on the gurneys inside the bunker were only the last batch of victims, the ones left to die an awful death when the Nazi scientists abandoned this place as the Allied front line came closer in 1945. I can only imagine that Mayne and the American saw those bodies, probably the last thing they ever saw after they’d made their way into this place. But the normal procedure had clearly been to take the corpses from the bunker to the ditch. The forensics lady reckons it could hold five thousand bodies, stacked ten deep.’

  ‘ Christ.’ Jack looked away. He had expected that they might find evidence of Mayne and Stein, the two Allied officers who had entered the camp soon after its liberation and then disappeared into the forest. From talking to Hugh Frazer, he knew that they were both part of the forward reconnaissance teams searching for Nazi secrets, ostensibly looking for hidden caches of art but really seeking any form of secret weapons research: anything the Nazis might use to devastating effect in their final defence of the Reich. Now he knew that what those two officers had seen would have been their ultimate nightmare, the worst-case scenario they would have been briefed that they might find. It was human experimentation, a terrible disease being perfected. Jack felt a cold shiver down his spine. A disease that may have been spirited out of the past, a past not ancient but within living memory, then refined for use once again, a disease that could take more lives than all those snuffed out in concentration camps like this one, more than were killed in the entire Nazi rampage of murder.

  Hiebermeyer continued talking. ‘That chamber was like a sort of ghastly inner sanctum. A huge U-boat battery had been installed outside to provide electricity, and it was still working after all these years. Whoever constructed that place was taking no chances and had planned for this laboratory to survive the fall of the Third Reich. And I haven’t told you the full horror of the bodies on the gurneys. Two of them were different, old cadavers that had been disinterred from somewhere else, both of them partly dissected. The heads had been removed and were sitting there upright, embedded in body liquor and looking like those ancient plastered skulls of the Neolithic, only with stainless-steel forceps clamped to them like the ones the Ahnenerbe used to carry out craniological measurements when they went on their expeditions in search of Atlantis. One of them had a hole in it where the forensics lady thinks they extracted rotting brain tissue looking for something. Putting my hand in what came out of the bodies was what really did it for me, and that’s when I threw up.’

  ‘So these were different from the other corpses?’ Jack persisted.

  Hiebermeyer nodded, and swallowed hard. ‘Different vintage. The forensics lady thinks they must have come originally from sealed lead coffins. She could even work out the year of death, because she returned to the chamber after we’d left to take a sample and analyse it using her portable lab within the bunker. She found enough to pin down what she’d already suspected was the cause of death, and everything fell into place. She was convinced that those two bodies were there because of what they contained. Still living within them when they’d been disinterred had been one of the deadliest viruses known to man, a virus everyone in th
e 1940s thought had been extinguished a generation before.’

  Jack froze. The nightmare had become real. ‘You mean the Spanish influenza virus from the 1918 outbreak.’

  Hiebermeyer gave Jack a grim look. ‘We can only speculate on what was going on here, but the forensics lady and her team are convinced. They think it was refinement, a process of trial and error, mutating and selecting the virus according to its effect on the victims, finding the most lethal form. The other corpses on the gurneys were young men born since 1918 who would not have had the immunity of survivors of the 1918 outbreak. Whoever was doing this was planning something even worse than the Holocaust, Jack: mass murder on a global scale, totally indiscriminate.’

  ‘Or planning to threaten the world with it,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘This was a true doomsday weapon,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘A weapon of the apocalypse. The ultimate creation of Hitler’s madness.’

  ‘If it truly was Hitler who ordered it,’ Jack said, pursing his lips. ‘There were other architects of evil floating around him, others with egos that might have pushed them to create an insurance policy of their own if the whole Nazi scheme went belly-up.’

  Hiebermeyer paused. ‘And now for the really bad news.’

  ‘It gets worse?’

  ‘There’s no evidence yet that the virus survives anywhere in the bunker. As you can see, every precaution is being taken. But there’s a downside to that. A horrible downside.’

  Jack felt a lurch in his stomach. ‘You mean we actually wanted to find the virus. The refined virus. The weapon.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘There was a refrigerator safe in the laboratory, about the size of a microwave oven. The forensics team are certain that’s where the result of all this horror was stored. The safe was open, Jack. There was a stand for some sort of small container like a test tube inside, and it was gone.’

  ‘ Jesus.’

  ‘Someone must have taken it back in 1945. The SS man tangled up with Mayne was dressed in camp inmate clothing, as if he were in disguise, like the SS who tried to flee from Belsen and other camps that way. He may have been lurking near the bunker to keep prying eyes out, waiting for instructions. There may have been another with him, someone who got into that refrigerator and removed it.’

  ‘If they were planning to take it anywhere more secure in those final weeks of the war, it would have to be towards the shrinking Nazi perimeter around Berlin.’

  Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘That’s the real reason I wanted you in Germany.’

  Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘Berlin?’

  ‘I have an old friend who spends his free time with the Berlin Second World War archaeology group, exploring underground bunkers and tunnels of the Second World War in Berlin. When I knew I was coming to Germany, I called him on the off-chance. He told me about something they’d found just south of the Tiergarten at the site of one of the biggest bunkers of them all, the Zoo flak tower. I said I’d try to get there after this. And now because of something else we found in the bunker this morning, it’s become imperative.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘My friend in Berlin discovered a buried corridor that had once been under the tower. He found a door with a symbol deeply impressed in it, a reverse swastika within a roundel. And there’s something about the bunker I haven’t told you yet. Major Penn’s men also found a reverse swastika impressed within a roundel, concealed under a sliding panel on the door into the laboratory. Penn measured the impression of the swastika in the straw in the crate full of Schliemann’s treasures. It was the same dimensions and shape as the swastika in the door. And there’s more. The lock was embedded with a strong magnetic device, producing a very unusual signature. We think the palladion was magnetic; the ancient Trojan story that it had fallen from heaven, a meteorite? Whoever opened up that chamber of horrors used the sacred symbol of ancient Troy as a magnetic key.’

  ‘Good God,’ Jack whispered. ‘And you think it’s the same at the Berlin site?’

  ‘I phoned my friend in Berlin while you were on the way here. He said he hadn’t thought to mention it before, but the magnetic pull around the swastika symbol on the door in the tunnel was enough to lock his torch against the metal.’

  Jack’s mind raced. ‘If that’s the only lead we’ve got to go on, we need to jump on it. Remember there are still eyes watching this place. If Saumerre knew about this bunker, then he might know about Berlin too. Do we need an IMU excavation team? I can have people in Berlin by tomorrow morning.’

  Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘It turns out that beneath the Zoo tower there was a huge reservoir, designed to keep the tower self-sufficient. That’s why you need to be with me, Jack, you and Costas and your diving gear. The tunnel leads underwater.’

  Jack held his breath, and then exhaled hard. He looked at the forest edge, squinting against the sun that was breaking through the mist. He knew that his only course of action now was to deploy all of his energy and resources to see this through. Somewhere out there was a weapon of unimaginable horror, and they might have the only clues to discovering it. He gave Hiebermeyer a steely look. ‘You should get back to Aysha. I can take over from now on.’

  Hiebermeyer put a hand on his shoulder again. ‘I promised Costas I’d stay with you, and I’ll do so until he arrives. The buddy system, he calls it.’

  Jack hesitated for a moment, then relented. ‘I guess we’ll make a diver of you yet.’

  ‘After that place?’ Hiebermeyer looked towards the bunker. ‘Not a chance. That’s the last time I put on any kind of suit.’ He took his hand down. ‘Seriously, Jack. Costas told me everything that happened in the salt mine in Poland last year, when you were searching for the palladion. About your killing spree. We just want to make sure you’re in control.’

  ‘Those were Saumerre’s thugs, and they’d kidnapped my daughter. I’d do it again without a moment’s hesitation. Saumerre’s still out there, and it’s unfinished business. I want to bring him down.’

  ‘We need to tread carefully. We need to maintain the balancing act you set up with Saumerre six months ago after your showdown with his men at Troy. He knows that his position in the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels depends on you keeping quiet about his underworld background. One word from you and he’d lose everything that allows him to operate freely across Europe. He wants whatever was inside that bunker, what’s gone missing. Remember our briefing by the security people after you’d got your MI6 contact on the case? They think he’s dangled the possibility of a Nazi wonder-weapon in front of his terrorist customers. Imagine it: the biggest underworld deal of all time, far bigger than the old Soviet fissile materials that MI6 suspects he’s been feeding them for dirty bombs. It’s been quiet recently on the international terrorist front. The big boys are biding their time, because they’re expecting a delivery. But Saumerre knows that if we rumble him and he loses his credibility, he becomes a liability to them. If that happens, you may not even need to take him down. But we have to keep playing the game of bluff and counter-bluff as long as possible, to let him think we’ve found what he wanted in the bunker.’

  ‘If we had found it, the game would be over for him. He’d know he could never get his hands on it. And that’s when he’d become a liability for us. He’d assume we’d be about to blow his cover, and he’d have nothing to lose. He’d do everything he could to take us down with him.’

  ‘Or he could play a game of bluff with us.’

  ‘You mean take a risk that we were bluffing about having the weapon, and try to convince us that in fact he had somehow got hold of it? He could threaten to use it himself, but the bluff would last only as long as it took for his terrorist customers to realize he was stringing them along as well.’

  Hiebermeyer took a deep breath. ‘There is something else. Jack. Just a slight concern I’ve had, and it’s been growing as I’ve been sitting out here thinking about the last few hours. Being in that bunker was a nightmare, and I’m only getting my thoughts straight no
w. It was a niggle, but now it’s become a worry. If Saumerre did claim he had the weapon, there’s just a chance he might not be bluffing.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  Hiebermeyer paused. ‘Major Penn’s operation is impressively tight, but there was one chink in the armour. They work in two-person teams. This morning things went slightly awry because one of Penn’s men, a Sergeant Jones, collapsed in that inner chamber and we had to take him out. It’s a big concern, because he’s still not regained consciousness, but the doctor is with him now inside the bunker. Apart from me, the only one inside that chamber this morning who wasn’t one of Penn’s team was the man paired with Sergeant Jones – a European Union Health and Safety inspector named Auxelle. He’d foisted himself on Penn yesterday, arriving at the perimeter roadblock in an EU limousine with a police motorcycle escort. By all accounts he was arrogant and pompous, but Penn had him checked out by MI6 before letting him in and there seemed to be no question over his credibility. He came with the highest EU authority.’

  Jack turned to Hiebermeyer in alarm. ‘The highest authority in Brussels? Who was his line manager?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve just been wondering. I have a horrible feeling that one of Saumerre’s departments might be Health and Safety.’

  ‘ Shit,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘But there’s no chance of this man having removed anything from the bunker?’

  ‘Everyone is body-searched before leaving the double-lock chamber at the entrance, to make sure that they haven’t inadvertently got material on them from inside that might be contaminated. Each one of a pair is responsible for checking the other. But Sergeant Jones was down, and he was Dr Auxelle’s partner. In the concern to get Jones out of the laboratory chamber and attended to by the medic, there might have been a slip-up. What worries me is that we’re probably only talking about a test tube or a phial, very easily concealed in one of those suits. And Major Penn was completely preoccupied with Jones. They’ve worked together in a lot of bad places.’