Joshua`s Hammer (66 page)

He had to see, to make sure.

He stepped through the doorway into the arrivals and security hall as an even larger explosion came from directly overhead. He was shoved back by the concussion as a big section of concrete ceiling caved in; tons of rubble, dirt, stone, concrete, reinforcing bars half buried the room and knocked him off his feet.

"It's our responsibility to ourselves to live, Manny," Sharon had told him. But she was wrong, God bless her. They had a greater responsibility to the human race. But she didn't understand, and she was frightened, so he had comforted her at that moment.

Goldfine picked himself up and staggered back to the half-buried doorway. He'd lost his flashlight, but the tunnel was no longer in darkness. For a second or two he thought that he was hallucinating, but then he realized that he was seeing daylight for the first time in more than two years.

Mindless of the sharp rocks and jagged steel that tore at his hands and knees, he crawled up the pile of rubble so that he could look outside. There was light streaming down through the thick dust.

Something moved above. Figures. He could suddenly feel a cool breeze, and then he saw them. Soldiers. Two of them; no, three or four. Peering down from twenty or thirty meters up the jagged shaft the explosions had opened.

Soldiers, the thought solidified in his mind. They were SS. He was sure of it.

Scrambling backwards, he hit the rubble strewn floor of the tunnel running. They were coming. He was already too late. God in heaven, forgive him.

Someone was shouting at him from above. His ears were still ringing from the last explosion but he didn't think they were speaking German. It was another language. Polish, maybe. He couldn't be sure. Possibly it was a trick. The bastards did that sometimes.

He stumbled and fell, smashing his face on the floor so hard that he blacked out for a moment. When the fuzz cleared he was lying next to Sharon's body. Her mouth and chin were bloody, the front of her striped pajamas black with crusted blood. Her eyes were half open, and milky; her hair was matted, and her skin was deathly white. But he loved her. She was the most beautiful creature that God had ever put on earth. Kind, gentle, understanding.

The shouting was much louder now, and there was more light. Goldfine tenderly kissed his wife on the lips, then without further hesitation picked up the detonator, raised the handle, and twisted it sharply to the right.

A huge explosion rocked the foundations of the bunker. Goldfine looked up as a solid wall of water raced down the tunnel directly toward him at the speed of a freight train.

"God have mercy--," he said, and he joined his wife.

Captain-Second Rank Aleksei Konalev, standing in the turret of his tank twenty meters from where the Special Bunker Demolitions Squad had been working all morning, felt, rather than heard, the deep underground explosion. His first instinct was to duck, he'd been fighting without leave for nearly three years. But then he thought that something terrible had gone wrong, and the team had either had an accident with their explosives or they had run into another booby trap.

"Yeb was," he swore. It was the goddamn Nazis. The war had been over for more than a month, and yet they were still finding their deadly little surprises lying around.

They were just above the lake here, the windows in the church steeple in the town of Neubrandenburg a few klicks to the north, twinkling in the bright sun. A second after the explosion a huge depression appeared on the surface of the lake a couple of hundred meters off shore.

Konalev reached for his binoculars at the same moment a tremendous geyser of water shot out of the shaft the squad had excavated into the bunker. Mud, concrete, rocks, steel and bodies were blasted one hundred meters into the pale blue sky. In three years of war, Konalev had never seen such a fantastic sight, and his mouth dropped open. The sound was like a thousand tanks bearing down on him, and he looked up in time to see something very large and black falling out of the sky directly toward him.

"Move, move, move!" he screamed at his driver. He ducked down into the turret and slammed the hatch shut an instant before his tank was hit with a solid, metallic bang so hard that the turret jammed on its track, and the entire tank was shoved backward at least ten meters.

But his crew had been under fire before. The driver had the engine in reverse and was racing backwards, as more debris rained down on them, hitting them like heavy caliber machinegun bullets being fired from above.

The gunner, blood streaming down from a gash where he'd hit his forehead, was peering through the periscope. "I don't see any enemy fire!" he shouted. "Where are they, sir? I can't see them!"

"Easy, Yuri," Konalev shouted him down. "We're not under fire. It was an explosion." Konalev keyed his radio, but all he was getting was static. The antenna had probably been knocked out by whatever had hit them.

The driver, looking through his periscope, backed off the accelerator, and the tank ground to a halt. He looked up, a confused expression on his battle-hardened features. "Fish," he said.

"What is it?" Konalev demanded.

"It's raining fish, sir," the driver said in wonder. "Out of the sky, fish were falling."

"Still?"

The driver turned back to the periscope. "No, sir. They're all over the ground, but they've stopped falling."

Konalev climbed back up into the turret, and he had trouble opening the hatch, but it finally gave with a squeal of metal-on-metal.

The scene was like something out of the Bible that his old grandmother had used to read to him" from. Water swirled around a large depression where the bunker entrance had been. Fish lay everywhere. Huge waves raced across the lake, and debris of all kinds littered an area at least two hundred meters in diameter.

But Konalev's eyes were drawn to a steel door lying on the front deck of his tank. It was the object that had been blasted out of the bunker and had fallen on them. A large skull and crossbones was painted on the door, beneath which was the legend: VORSICHT, danger.

david hag berg is an ex-Air Force cryptographer who has traveled extensively in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Arctic, and has spoken at CIA functions. He also writes as Sean Flannery, and has published more than twenty novels of suspense, including the USA Today best selling High Flight and Kilo Option. He makes his home in Florida.