A parking lot spanned the entire length of the plant, its pavement crumbling. Huge swaths of macadam had rotted away completely, replaced by dirt and crabgrass and weeds. The lot was empty, of course. The entire property gave off an air of desperation and abandonment. There would be no reason for even the most suspicious of observers to believe a treasure worth hundreds of millions of dollars might be contained here.
Gruber downshifted and eased into the decrepit parking lot. He had no choice but to drive slowly; the lot was in such deplorable condition that any speed over a couple of miles per hour would have put him at risk of breaking an axle or blowing a tire. Or both.
“Where to?” he asked.
Tracie thought for a moment. The administration area was clearly located on the north side of the plant. Whereas the vast majority of the building was constructed of cement block, bland and utterly lacking in personality, the area to the far left was marginally nicer: red brick and glass. The glass was long gone, the windows now boarded up and barred, and harsh weather conditions had severely damaged the brick walls, but she believed this section of the plant would constitute their best bet.
“The main entrance,” she said. “Stallings claims there are dozens of tunnels running under the city of Wuppertal, of which more than one pass beneath this building. Various tunnels are accessible from various points throughout the structure. But the one we want is most likely located beneath the former plant manager’s office. Supposedly, a high-level Nazi from this area named Erich Koch installed the facility manager into his position for the sole purpose of safeguarding the Amber Room treasure. The manager’s appointment created a stir among Nazi military leaders, because the guy had absolutely no experience running a munitions plant. All their complaints were ignored by Koch and also by Adolph Hitler himself, though, which makes sense.”
Gruber braked to a stop as close to the plant’s entrance as possible. He turned to Tracie and said, “Makes sense? How?”
“Think about it. The treasure disappeared shortly after the Nazis looted it from the Russians in 1941. At that point, the war was going well for Hitler. Life was good in the Third Reich. He would have been willing to accept slightly lower-than-expected production from one munitions factory in favor of placing a man he trusted implicitly in a position where he could guard such a valuable treasure. When the tide began turning against him later in the war, his attitude may have been totally different. But by then, the treasure was ensconced here and his priorities had shifted drastically. Moving the Amber Room at that point would have been far down on his to-do list.”
She shrugged. “It makes sense in theory, at least. I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether the theory is proven out by reality.”
Gruber killed the engine. A stillness as complete as any Tracie had ever experienced dropped over them. No birds sang in the distance, no small animals rustled the thick underbrush. No crickets chirped. Even the air was dead calm. Only the ticking of the cooling engine disrupted the silence.
They opened their doors and stepped out of the car. “How do you know all this?” Gruber asked.
“Research,” Tracie said. “The flight over the Atlantic was a long one, and the information about Koch and this munitions plant was buried deep inside the intel I received from Stallings. There was no mention of the Amber Room being here, of course, but the fact that the Nazis had put a man with zero experience in the field of weapons manufacturing in charge of a key munitions plant in the middle of what was going to be a long war stuck out like a sore thumb to me. It didn’t make sense.”
“So when Stallings told you the location the intelligence community believes is holding the Amber Room…”
Tracie nodded. “It all came together.”
“I’m impressed,” Gruber said.
“Don’t be.” Tracie shrugged again. “Like I said, the trip here was long and boring. There wasn’t much else to do than study my paperwork.”
He let the subject drop, but Tracie knew exactly what he was thinking: maybe if he had paid as much attention to detail, he wouldn’t be about to fly back to Langley with his CIA career hanging in the balance.
Gruber sighed. “What do we do now?”
“Now we go find three hundred million dollars.”
34
November 19, 1987
8:55 a.m.
Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
Tracie bent back inside the car and lifted out a backpack stuffed with supplies. She turned toward the abandoned building and stared at it through narrowed eyes. In keeping with the condition of the rest of the structure, the front entrance had deteriorated badly. The twin wooden doors hung drunkenly, prevented from dropping to the ground only by a thick chain, which had been threaded through the handles and padlocked.
Gruber followed her glance and frowned. “Maybe we should just go through a window,” he said, “rather than expending all of the energy required to break through those doors.”
“No,” Tracie said. “It would take at least as much time and energy to cut through the bars covering the windows as to break down the doors. And once we were finished, we’d still have to cut through or remove the plywood sheets that have been nailed into place.”
Gruber looked unconvinced.
“I know the wood looks thick,” she said, “but look at how those doors are hanging. We might be able to get away with cutting through the chains and pushing the doors off to the side. And if that’s the case, I’d rather use the entrance. I’d be willing to bet the manager’s office is located right off the main lobby. Let’s find out.”
She handed the backpack to Gruber and reached one more time into the car’s rear seat, pulling out a large bolt cutter. Then she turned and strode toward the front of the empty, hulking building.
It was a short walk, but by the time they reached the entrance, Tracie realized the doors were in even worse condition than she had originally thought. They weren’t the glass, steel, and aluminum construction typical of modern industrial doors. Rather, they were constructed entirely of thick, reinforced wood, with what once had been a single small window cut out of each, approximately at eye level. As with the rest of the facility, the glass had long since been shattered out and now a pair of small holes, one per door, was all that remained. The holes were so tiny they hadn’t even been boarded up.
The padlock securing the chains was large and forbidding, but decades of exposure to the German elements had caused it to become badly corroded. The shackle was now fused to the padlock’s body, and even had she possessed the key—which she didn’t—Tracie knew it would have been useless.
She placed the jaws of the bolt cutter around the shackle and eased the handles together. The tool went through the rusty padlock like a warm knife through butter, and the lock fell to the ground with a heavy thud, rust flakes fluttering away on the heavy air.
The doors creaked and groaned but stayed put. They leaned inward like a pair of drunks supporting one another after last call. The hinges had corroded away over the years and Tracie could see there was nothing actually securing them to the building.
She stepped away from the doors and placed the bolt cutter on the ground, then looked up at Gruber. “You grab the handle on the left,” she said, “and I’ll take the one on the right. I think if we pull at the same time, the doors might just fall away from the entryway.”
He nodded and grabbed his handle. There was one on each door, large iron monstrosities that would have looked at home in a medieval castle. Rust had attacked them, like it had attacked the padlock, but they were thick and heavy and in no danger of corroding away any time soon.
“Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t let the doors fall on you. Give a good pull and then use your momentum to keep going out of range of the doors as they fall.”
“Will do,” Gruber answered. “Just tell me when to pull.”
“On three,” Tracie said.
She gripped her
handle firmly and began counting, and when she reached three, heaved back on the handle with all the strength she could muster out of her one hundred five pounds. The door resisted initially, seemingly out of sheer inertia, and then began dropping away from the building.
Gruber was bigger and stronger than Tracie and had been able to exert more torque. His door crashed to the ground first, kicking up dust and dirt when it fell. Tracie’s hit the ground a split-second later with the sound of rotted wood splitting and cracking and breaking apart.
“You okay?” she asked, and Gruber nodded.
She stepped carefully over the smashed remains of the doors and entered the ancient munitions plant. The air inside felt musty, stale. Although all of the plant’s windows on the first floor had been boarded up, some of those boards had begun to rot away, and small gaps in the windows allowed a bit of light to filter through and into the building. There hadn’t been many windows to begin with, though. Long stretches of the plant featured nothing but concrete block after concrete block, and ventilation inside the structure had been minimal.
It felt more like an ancient dungeon than a World War II-era factory. Gruber flicked on his flashlight and Tracie did the same. They played their beams slowly around the interior. Dust and rat droppings littered the worn linoleum floor, and aside from bits of trash scattered randomly, the foyer was empty.
Doorways to what were obviously three staff offices lined the wall to the left, and more than a half-dozen corridors stretched off into the inky blackness from left to right beyond the offices. The section of the foyer where they now stood had probably been a reception area, although if a desk had once stood here it was now long gone.
“If your intel is accurate,” Gruber said, “the manager’s office would have to be one of those three.” He trained his flashlight beam on the trio of doorways lined up on the left side of the foyer.
Tracie nodded. “Presumably the facility manager would have had the biggest office, so it should be fairly easy to determine which was his. Worst case, we go one by one and examine all three.”
She crossed the foyer in the direction of the offices, the dank mustiness increasing with each step. She stifled a sneeze and wished they had thought to include respirators or dust masks with their supplies.
Too late now.
She selected a door at random, deciding to examine the offices from left to right. She had thought Gruber would follow, or perhaps select one of the other two offices to explore, but instead he began crossing the lobby floor. He stopped at one of the corridors and shined his light through the entry before whistling softly.
“Fiona,” he said. “Come here, you’ve got to check this out.”
Her heart began beating a little faster. It couldn’t possibly be this simple, could it? Could the Nazis have pulled the Amber Room treasure up out of its subterranean hiding place, only to leave it in the middle of a munitions plant before simply abandoning it?
She turned on her heel and crossed the lobby, joining Gruber at the oversized doorway. Aimed her flashlight through the door.
There was no treasure stored in the manufacturing area of the plant; at least, none that she could see. But the sight that greeted her tempered her disappointment a little and she raised her eyebrows in surprise. The factory floor looked exactly as it must have more than four decades earlier. If not for the thick layer of dust covering every surface, it almost appeared as though the workers had shut production down for the weekend, or to go home overnight, and as soon as they began arriving for their shifts, the factory would roar to life once again.
All the machinery was there, and looked more or less intact. Long conveyor belts ran from one end of the floor to the other. Cranes hung suspended over the belts, chains dangling from their jaws as if awaiting the start of another workday.
Giant furnaces lined the far wall, open doors ready to melt iron or lead or whatever other metal was being used to manufacture Nazi weaponry. Machinery was everywhere, scattered about the factory floor in a seemingly random manner, for unknown purposes. Hand tools—sledgehammers, hacksaws, etc.—littered the workspace.
The Nazis had abandoned the munitions plant in the face of advancing Allied forces with virtually no cleanup, perhaps walking out the doors in the middle of a shift at the appearance of Allied troops. There must have been little warning, and for their part, the Allies had simply boarded up the facility, securing it as best they could before moving on.
And it had sat like this for forty-two years.
Why the West German government had never cleared the facility of its machinery and torn the place down was a mystery, although the plant’s isolation and the new government’s desire to distance itself as much as possible from the stain of the Nazi legacy probably had a lot to do with it.
Tracie realized she was holding her breath, and she blew out forcefully before inhaling the musty air. The sight was ghostly and chilling. How many lives had been lost to the bombs manufactured here? How many Allied soldiers had suffered agonizingly from the output of this very factory floor before going to the grave? How much death and misery had this plant caused?
“Let’s get back to work,” she said, her voice shaking slightly.
35
November 19, 1987
9:10 a.m.
Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
All the furniture had been removed from what Tracie believed to be the plant manager’s office with the exception of one chair. It was constructed entirely of wood and looked solid but extremely uncomfortable. Its heavy base featured four rollers, making the chair easy to move, and it had been shoved off into the far corner of the room.
Which made the trap door in the middle of the floor impossible to miss.
The door was oversized and perfectly square, easily six feet by six feet. It had been fitted to the concrete floor with hinges on one side and a gap on the other large enough for a 1940s plant manager—or 1980s CIA operatives—to slip a hand under and lift.
The trap door had been installed so that when closed, it fit flush with the rest of the floor. When covered with, say, an Oriental rug and a desk, it would have been invisible, while still reasonably accessible to the manager, or to any Nazi bigwig who might wish to examine the tunnel’s contents.
Maybe even the Führer himself.
The trap door was, of course, padlocked closed, but the locks would provide little resistance to a bolt cutter, and once again, Tracie wondered why the Allies wouldn’t have spent a little time exploring the unexpected find they had undoubtedly made after wresting control of the facility from the Nazis.
Then she thought about the sheer chaos that must have been present in early 1945, of Allied troops advancing deep into German territory, taking ground and moving relentlessly forward, anxious to press their advantage and rid the world of the scourge of Nazism once and for all after seven long years of war.
In all likelihood, Allied leaders on the ground would have had little interest in a Nazi munitions plant, secret trap door or no secret trap door, other than to secure it and ensure it could no longer provide the means of killing and wounding Allied troops. If Stallings’s intel was correct regarding the existence of dozens of tunnels crisscrossing the earth under Wuppertal, leaders responsible for the Allied advance into Germany had likely just ignored the trap door, thinking it nothing more significant than another means of escape for a nervous Nazi plant manager.
Or maybe the tunnel had been examined, and then new locks installed as the Allies churned forward.
Tracie and Gruber looked at the trap door and then at each other, and she said, “Go back outside and grab the bolt cutters. Let’s get this done.”
Thirty seconds later he was back.
“Have at it,” she said, and Gruber bent over the door. It was secured by one padlock on each corner opposite the hinged end. These locks had been protected from the elements and they looked as forbidding in November 1987 as they probab
ly had back in the 1940s.
They were no match for the jaws of the bolt cutter, though, and in seconds Gruber had sliced through the shackles and removed them.
Together, the operatives slipped their hands into the space built into the floor and lifted. The trap door swung open easily, its hinges unaffected either by the passage of time or the accumulation of dust and grime in the office.
Tracie and Gruber eased the door to the floor and bent over the now-gaping hole. An iron ladder had been affixed to the tunnel wall, the first rung hanging just below the base of the floor. The setup looked remarkably similar to the escape route she had discovered at the Phoenix safe house despite the fact the two tunnels had been constructed decades apart. The air flowing up from underground felt cool and moist, and Tracie could see that the bars had become heavily corroded over time.
The hole was pitch-black, as dark as an overcast night, and the ladder disappeared into it like a magician’s trick. Tracie gazed skeptically at the iron, trying to gauge the extent of the corrosion, picturing the bars giving way as she and Gruber climbed down into the pit.
“I’ll go first,” Gruber said, sensing of her concern. “If the ladder breaks, you can pull me back up with our rope and we’ll find a different way into the tunnel. There has to be more than one access point.”
He didn’t address the issue of how Tracie would be able to pull a man nearly double her own weight out of a deep hole with no tools and no way to gain leverage. She knelt at the trap door and grabbed the uppermost rung of the ladder in both fists and then yanked hard.
Nothing happened. The ladder felt solid. But she knew the force she had been able to exert on the iron bar was nothing compared to the stress that would be placed on it when Gruber began climbing down into the tunnel.
She sighed.
Shook her head.
“I don’t like this,” she said.
“It’s not like we have any choice,” Gruber pointed out. “You have your orders, and unless you want to end up unemployed, like I’m about to be, we have to find a way into that tunnel.”
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 92
