He stopped, letting the significance register.
“One body was that of the assassin group that waited for our people to come out of the lake with the evidence that has been outlined …”
Again the hesitation.
“Which means one member of our squad escaped.”
The uproar burst out again, but lasted only minutes because the Brigadier had gestured to a room off the main committee-chamber and then stood back as a man, huddled in a wheelchair, was pushed into the room by two white-coated doctors. Behind them came three other men, supporting what had once been a German ammunition-box. It was blackish-green from the fungi that had accumulated during the thirty-year immersion, and the metal bindings and clasps were dark with rust.
“The survivor, Lev Shapiro,” announced the Brigadier, theatrically. “And one of the boxes recovered from Lake Toplitz.”
Shapiro looked desperately ill. His skin was gray and waxy, sweat-filmed with the effort of appearing before the conference. The toweling robe he wore bulged with an enormous dressing over his left shoulder, and the sleeve of the dressing-gown hung limp and empty by his side.
“The conference involving this man will last exactly five minutes,” declared the Brigadier. “He is appearing here against doctors’ advice. There must be no inquiries how he escaped: obviously he was helped, once ashore, but the Israeli government have no intention of disclosing details of that rescue operation.”
A microphone was moved in front of Shapiro, but his voice was too indistinct, and one of the attendant doctors leaned forward, bringing it closer to the man’s lips.
“We arrived in Austria a week before the dive,” started Shapiro. He spoke in short bursts and the sounds as he sucked in air echoed through the microphone. “We knew that, because of the treasure-hunters, the area was sealed by the Austrian authorities. It took us three days to conceal sufficient diving equipment in the surrounding woods to make the dive possible.”
The Brigadier moved the water carafe towards the man and gratefully he sipped from a glass held by one of the doctors.
“We had an area, marked on a waterproofed map, where the boxes were likely to be. We dived on the fifth day. We had been trained for six months to work as a team, signaling every move by hand signals or body pressure.”
He paused, breathing deeply.
“That first night we found nothing. It was a dreadful anticlimax. We had practiced so hard and planned so completely, yet it had never occurred to us that the map references would be inaccurate … the most obvious thing and no one had thought of it …”
He stopped, apparently thinking.
“What happened then?” prompted a journalist in the front.
“We made mistakes,” confessed the commando. “The boxes not being there confused us. Although we had been warned against doing so, we used lights to try to locate them. Still we didn’t find them. But we must have alerted people ashore.”
He tried to straighten in the wheelchair, wincing at the effort. Gently one of the doctors helped.
“The following night,” continued Shapiro, “using the point where the boxes should have been, we started an organized sweep of the lake, moving towards the eastern shore and marking each section we covered on the map with wax pencils. Once we had to return to the shore to replenish our air supply. It was extremely cold. We began thinking we were going to fail again.”
For the first time he smiled, a painful expression.
“Thirty minutes after beginning the second dive, we found them. It was almost as if they had been arranged for collection. They lay there, neatly side by side. Four of them.”
He stopped.
“Tell us about the surfacing,” demanded someone in the middle of the conference hall.
Shapiro sighed. “We put ropes through the side-handles of the boxes,” he said. “It was completely dark, of course. We weren’t using the lights now. In the formation that we had practiced, we surfaced. The boxes were heavier than we had expected. We had prepared two possible landing places, neither of them where we had put ashore the previous night. But the weight could have made the rotting wood break and we would have lost forever what we sought, so the leader ignored the instructions and decided to land in the same spot we had used before. It was the nearest point of land. That was our second mistake. They were waiting for us.”
Again he stopped, gesturing for more water.
Shapiro’s head was pressed forward on his chest and his voice was only barely discernible.
“There was no warning,” he said. “It was a perfect ambush. We were cut to pieces. I only survived because I was last in the line and still up to my waist in water …”
He glanced at his empty sleeve.
“… I was hit four times in the shoulder,” he said, shuddering. “I’ve lost my arm.”
His head sank back and the doctor on his right seized his wrist, checking his pulse, then spoke to the Brigadier who again shielded the microphone.
“The last question,” announced the chairman, pointing to a man with his arm raised at the back of the hall.
“The box,” said the man. “Tell us about the box.”
Shapiro looked up, with difficulty. “It was the one I found,” he explained. “As well as putting the rope through the side supports, I was holding the handle. At the first shot, I ducked, kicking backwards. I didn’t realize immediately that I was still holding the box. My air was still on and I just swam out into the lake, taking the box with me …”
His voice began to slur and both doctors turned to the Brigadier, who nodded. There were no protests as the man was wheeled away.
Immediately the Brigadier opened the box. The wood, which had been completely waterlogged, had begun to curl away from the metal rimming as it had dried. Slowly he began unloading its contents, creating on the table before him separate piles of looted French gold Napoleon pieces, adding twelve solid gold bars stamped with the hallmark of the Third Reich, a glittering hill of diamonds and rubies, several jewel-encrusted cathedral chalices and hedges of sterling and dollar notes.
“The money is forged,” he said, dismissively, as he unpacked. “Part of the millions created by professional criminals imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin, money with which Hitler intended to flood the West and undermine the economy of both America and Britain.”
The room was completely still, as over 150 people stared at the fortune laid out in front of them.
“You are looking at loot worth £1,000,000,” announced the Brigadier, simply.
He stood back from the table, as if unwilling to come into contact with it.
“The Israeli government are tomorrow sending everything this box contained to the International Court at the Hague, for whoever considers they have a legal right to begin proceedings to establish ownership.”
He stopped, picking up some of the jewels and tossing them contemptuously inside the ammunition container.
“We have no interest in this,” he said. “It is not the box we sought. We are confident that from the bottom of the lake, in one of the three other boxes, was evidence that would have identified every surviving Nazi. Accepting the importance of what we tried to establish, the Austrian government have provided us with a detailed report of the forensic evidence available at the scene of the shooting. The boxes, as you have heard, were extremely heavy. The shoreline is soft and muddy. Very clearly visible, under scientific examination, were indentations caused by three boxes …”
He paused, turning to Golda Meir, who rose again.
“We have one,” he added. “Other evidence at the lakeside indicates the assassins recovered two. Which means one has vanished!”
Realization of the point of staging the conference swept over the journalists.
“That box could contain what we want,” she took up. “Its contents would enable us to locate Leopold Gleim, former head of the S.S. in Poland, last heard of living as a Moslem in Egypt. We would know the whereabouts of Heinr
ich Willermann, who took part in the sterilization and freezing experiments in Dachau. We would know definitely if Hans Eisele, who carried out human experiments in Buchenwald, and later acted as a judge in Prague, is living in Egypt …”
She paused, sipping from a water glass.
“It would also tell us how the Butcher of Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele, is managing to live in South America …”
There was another pause.
“And it would make it possible for us to get from the sanctuary they now occupy two scientists whom the Israeli government regard as equal to Eichmann, Mengele, or Bormann, for crimes against the Jewish people. We want to locate Dr. Otto Grüber. And Dr. Heinrich Köllman. These two men worked under Mengele in Auschwitz. Later, working as a team, they moved to Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. Their experimentation involved testing human reaction to cold, to prepare for the German assault upon the Russian front. They immersed Jews in water which froze solid, to assess their resistance. They force-marched women and children, some dressed, some stark naked, through snow and ice to establish susceptibility to frostbite …”
She paused, as if uncertain whether to continue. Then she added, “They starved them, trying to reach the point where, in such extreme conditions, the victims would resort to cannibalism to survive …”
Another pause. “And succeeded in reaching that point …”
She began talking again. “These two men, working almost under the personal direction of Adolf Hitler, were engaged upon every conceivable form of human experimentation … Hitler personally entrusted to them the task of creating a biological blue-print for his super-race. About both very little is known. We have established that Köllman definitely survived. About Grüber we don’t yet know that. Both were known to be working in Buchenwald when the Russians advanced, and Moscow refuses to answer all inquiries.”
The room was satiated with detail and sensation, and the journalists stared numbly towards the table behind which the officials sat. The woman fingered the gold bars lying before her.
“You have heard that this is worth something like £1,000,000 …” She looked up towards the television cameras. “… We accept that the missing box may contain nothing more than that which you see before you today … loot from the crematoria. We have gambled and lost the lives of five Israelis. To recover the box that could contain what we want, the Israeli government are prepared to pay, wherever and in any currency or method demanded, the similar sum of £1,000,000 …”
In another part of the Knesset building, Uri Perez glanced away from the television monitor upon which he had watched the conference, now bursting into a further flurry of questioning.
“Well?” he demanded. The tension of their argument still existed and he spoke with odd formality to the other man, to whom he had once felt closer than the family he had lost in Buchenwald and Dachau. His companion, a burly giant of a man, overflowing from his chair, his stomach bulged over his army webbing-belt, shrugged.
“Not bad,” offered Arron Mosbacher, turning down the volume on the monitor. They could read a transcript later.
“It sounded pretty good to me,” encouraged Perez, with just a trace of truculence. He could not lose his irritation at Mosbacher’s objection to what was happening up there in the committee-room.
Both men had been attached to the Mitzvah Elohim, the Wrath of God group formed from the Mossad to combat Palestinian terrorism, until they had been seconded to the Austrian assignment. Mosbacher had immediately argued against the proposal, and as the planning had progressed Perez, who had overall command, had twice considered recommending Mosbacher’s transfer. He had withheld from doing so because of their association and now wondered if he had made a mistake. He didn’t want to make another. A month before, he had stood with Mosbacher on the far side of the Austrian lake and seen men with whom they had lived daily for six months destroyed in less than two minutes of gunfire. Mosbacher’s opposition since that massacre had grown with Perez’s feeling of guilt.
“It’ll be a miracle if there’s the reaction we expect,” warned Mosbacher.
“We invented miracles,” reminded Perez, attempting the lightness that had once existed between them. He was a slight, studious man, dwarfed by his companion. A brilliant scholar, with honors degrees from Oxford and Harvard, he desperately wanted to leave his country’s security service to take the Chair of Psychiatry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Twice the government had refused his request to leave the umbrella of Mossad, knowing there was no one to equal his ability to organize spectacular intelligence operations.
“There are too many uncertainties,” argued Mosbacher, who was seriously worried about his friend. The idea was insanity, he thought, created by a man who had known only success and had thus become over-confident. It was odd, Mosbacher had often recalled, that it had been he, the older by two years, who had led Perez by the hand on to the beach at Haifa when the refugee boat had nudged ashore, and the two orphans had been shoved on to the beach to avoid British patrols. Then he had been the leader. And remained so for several years. But later the role was reversed. Was he jealous at the changeover, wondered Mosbacher? No, he dismissed, immediately. Even though he now considered the ability was wrongly channeled, Perez was unquestionably the more intelligent of the two.
The Israeli cabinet had selected the two men very carefully, regarding the realistic objectivity of the bigger man as the perfect balance for the impetuous brilliance of Perez. No one was aware of the strain that had grown between them, leading to the mutual doubt.
“There’s little to lose,” said Perez, regretting the sentence as he spoke. Immediately Mosbacher picked it up.
“We’ve already lost five people.”
Embarrassed, Perez said, “Other people are making sacrifices. Which no one seems to appreciate.”
Mosbacher looked sadly at the younger man. The tendency for self-pity supported his doubt about the man’s mental ability to carry through the operation, he thought.
“Everyone realizes what you are doing personally,” he said, soothingly.
Perez snorted, unconvinced. Mosbacher was a fool, he decided, angrily. The plan—his plan—was going to succeed. He knew it would. He’d enjoy having Mosbacher apologize, in the coming months.
“Shapiro stood up well,” said Perez, seeking neutral ground.
“Yes,” agreed Mosbacher. “Which reminds me. Shouldn’t you ring the hospital?”
Sighing, Perez nodded, then dialed a number on a security-cleared line. He was connected immediately, upon identification, to the hospital director and for several minutes became engrossed in detailed conversation. Replacing the receiver, he said to Mosbacher, “Another three weeks. And he’s unsure about that.”
Mosbacher considered the period, then humped his shoulders. “We don’t really have any choice, do we?”
“No,” agreed Perez. His see-saw outlook dropped in another direction and optimism bubbled to the surface. “That’ll be long enough,” he said, confidently. “You’ll see.”
“It’ll have to be,” said Mosbacher, gloomily, realizing that now the conference had been held, they were irrevocably committed.
In his Houston motel-room, which was securely locked, Vladimir Kurnov sat before the television-set carrying live the C.B.S. coverage of the Jerusalem conference. He was tensed forward on the edge of the chair, the habitual cigarette forgotten in its holder. After the coverage, there was a studio discussion among several alleged Hitler historians about whether the £1,000,000 offer would lead to the recovery of the document-box.
The program ended, and Kurnov realized suddenly his cigarette had almost burned itself out. Quickly he lit another from the stub he extricated from the holder, then pulled the smoke deeply into his lungs. He turned away from the set and began pacing the room, head slumped forward. The dull ache started in his left leg, as it always did in moments of stress.
Once he stopped and, with supreme irony, muttered several times, “Verdammte Scheisse.”
>
Three of the men who had formed part of the assassination squad died very quickly under interrogation in the specially sound-proofed cellar beneath a block of office buildings in West Berlin’s Ludwigsfelderstrasse. Another went insane and was shot, because he could not answer questions sensibly, thus making it pointless to preserve his life. The leader endured the questioning for five days, repeating again and again they had only recovered two boxes and admitting there had been an insufficient search of the shallow water-line to detect a third. Satisfied the missing box had not been secreted for blackmail purposes, the questioners shot the leader and the other survivor of the killer squad, then walked upstairs leaving others to incinerate the bodies.
“So,” said the man who had asked most of the questions, “there is definitely a missing box.”
Max Frieden had been the Standartenführer for the area covering Buchenwald when the war ended. But he had been far away when the Russians swept in. By the time Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner and the rest had arrived at Bad Aussee, Frieden had already “vanished,” equipped with a new face and a perfect set of genuine papers, seeing in the rebuilding of war-ravaged Berlin a far greater chance of prosperity than the mountains of Austria. He was an indulgently plump, small man who enjoyed entertaining children at Christmas and birthday parties and prided himself as an amateur conjuror, for which he now had plenty of time to practice, having established one of the most successful property-development empires in the city. Apart from the Berlin apartment, there was the country lodge in the Bavarian mountains outside Munich, and soon he intended purchasing a villa among friends on the outskirts of Madrid. Despite the fact that he was a millionaire, however, he still regarded the years as Standartenführer from 1939 to 1945 as the best of his life. He still recalled with pride among intimate gatherings of friends that, during those six years, he considered he had been personally responsible for the deaths of at least 3,000 Jews.
Man Who Wanted Tomorrow Page 2
