The Black Sun (43 page)

“The man on the left. Fur hat. Next to the light. He seems to be in charge.”

Viktor took the binoculars from her and adjusted the focus. “I don’t know. I don’t recognize him.”

“What’s he doing?” Dominique squinted.

“I’m not sure,” said Viktor. The man had removed his coat and was now unfolding a white sheet that he had taken from a bag at his feet. “It looks like he’s getting changed or something.”

“Changed? Into what?”

The sheet, once unfolded, turned out to be a white coverall. The man pulled it on over his clothes, boots included, then fixed a mask and respirator over his face. Finally he pulled the hood over his head and tightened the drawstrings to form an airtight seal against his skull.

“They’re all putting them on. Look.” All the armed men were getting changed into similar outfits.

“It looks like some sort of NBC suit.”

“NBC?” Viktor frowned.

“Nuclear, Biological, Chemical—standard military issue to avoid contamination in the field.”

“Contamination!” Viktor dropped the binoculars from her face and locked eyes with Dominique. “Contamination from what? I thought we were here for the Amber Room.”

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

5:03 p.m.

From the symmetrical tool marks that inscribed the walls, the mine looked as though it had been dug out the old-fashioned way, with picks and shovels. Large wooden frames had been positioned every fifteen feet or so to buttress the roof, age having buckled and colored them until they seemed almost to have petrified and become part of the mountain itself, gray and heavy.

Tom paused and aimed his flashlight at the ceiling where blast marks had scorched the stone. “Do you see that?” Archie nodded. “Looks like some sort of explosive was sunk in there—dynamite, probably—to collapse the roof.” “Yeah,” Tom agreed. “They certainly didn’t want anyone wandering in here by mistake.”

They carried on, the mine shaft rising at a slight angle, Tom and Archie leading, Piotr and Grigory bringing up the rear; Yuri had been posted at the tunnel entrance as a precaution. Their flashlights sliced the air jaggedly as they walked, the beams fading as they disappeared into the distance until eventually the darkness swallowed them whole. Occasionally the light would catch their breath as they exhaled, and the air would momentarily

flare

like

car

headlights

burning

through

mist.

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Their breathing, even the rustle of their clothes, was amplified and bounced back at them off the tunnel walls, as if they were walking down the nave of some huge, silent church. Every so often their feet would crunch on frozen animal droppings or the occasional rabbit or bird carcass, presumably brought in there by a fox or some other enterprising creature.

Then, unexpectedly, a thin strip of light appeared in front of them. A strip of light that grew taller and taller as the shaft leveled out, until they could see what looked like a large rectangular yellow window set against the blackness of the tunnel.

“That must be it,” Tom whispered excitedly, flicking his light off. They edged carefully toward the light, covering the remaining fifty or so feet silently until they could see that the tunnel emerged into a large, naturally formed chamber. Tom heard Archie gasp behind him as he stepped gingerly inside.

The chamber had been lit with four battery-powered spotlights. A massive Nazi flag hung down from the roof, perhaps thirty feet long and twenty feet across. A Nazi flag with one crucial difference: the usual swastika had been replaced with the now familiar symbol of the Black Sun, its twelve jagged rays extending into the room like skeletal fingers clawing their way out of a grave.

“Christ,” Archie whispered as his eyes settled on the two objects positioned directly beneath the flag. “They’re here. They’re still bloody here.”

Tom shook his head, hardly believing what he was seeing. It was an incredible sight. Two missing freight cars from a mysterious train, hauled up an Austrian mountain and hidden deep inside it. Two hulking shapes, squat and solid and functional, like silent extras from a wartime newsreel—except this time rendered in color, rather than black and white.

“They don’t look like they’ve been opened yet,” whispered Tom, pointing excitedly at the thick iron bars that had been rammed through the hasp of each door.

“Renwick must be down here somewhere,” Archie warned. “Let’s deal with him first.”

They

slowly

made

their

way

around

the

two

cars,

pausing

the black sun 377

on the other side where another, much bigger tunnel—the one the cars had presumably come down—disappeared off into the darkness.

“That must lead to the main entrance,” Tom said. The muffled drone of an engine confirmed his suspicion.

“Look.” Archie’s gaze had settled on a tight bundle of slender tree trunks positioned against the wall by the tunnel entrance. He walked up to them and kicked the nearest one. It made a dull clang.

“Railway tracks,” Tom said, kneeling for a closer look. “And sleepers. See, they’re piled all the way down the tunnel.”

“Presumably, when the mine was active, there was some sort of spur off the main line that ran beside that path we’ve just walked up,” Archie said.

“They must have moved the cars up here, lifted the track behind them, and then collapsed the roof.”

“We should check out that tunnel,” Archie suggested. “See how long we’ve got before they break through. Make sure Renwick isn’t hiding from us down there.”

They set off down the tunnel, treading warily, guns leveled at the darkness ahead of them, the glow of the chamber receding behind them until it was a tiny window of light in the distance. But as the light receded, so the noise of the digging at the main entrance grew, until they could feel the earth shaking beneath their feet to the muffled beat of the machinery on the other side of the sheer wall of stone and earth that confronted them once they reached the end of the tunnel.

“They’ll be through any time now,” Tom called over the noise.

“Maybe that’s what scared Renwick off,” said Archie.

“Possibly,” Tom said skeptically. “Doesn’t seem like him, though—to come so close and then give up. Maybe he’s gone to get reinforcements.”

“Well, he’s not here now. And I don’t know about you, but I’d like to take a look inside those carriages.”

Tom smiled. “We both would. But I’m not sure there’s much point if we can’t get it out.”

“I thought you said you were going to call that FBI guy, Bailey, once we knew what was

going

on?”

378 james twining

“That was the deal, but—”

“Before you call in the cavalry, don’t you want to check there’s something here?”

“What about the people on the other side of that?” Tom nodded toward the collapsed mine entrance. “We don’t want to get caught in here when they break through.”

“Why don’t we leave Piotr down this end? As soon as they look like coming in, he can run back and tell us. We can send Grigory up the other end to keep Yuri company and make sure Renwick doesn’t sneak in behind us.”

“That should work,” Tom agreed. “But we’d better be quick.”

After some rapid instructions, mainly communicated through hand signals, Piotr and Grigory left to take up their sentry positions. As soon as both men were out of sight, Tom and Archie turned their attention to the two freight cars.

They were of standard construction, wooden panels slatted horizontally into a rectangular frame, with angled crosspieces at regular intervals for extra reinforcement. Apart from the obvious effects of age, both cars looked remarkably intact, although the left-hand one seemed to be on the losing end of a long fight against rot and woodworm, and a thick beard of rust coated both undercarriages. Against the flaking orange-red paint on the sides, two sets of faded white letters and serial numbers were just about legible. They both stepped forward to the side door of the first car, a large panel almost a third of the length, that slid back along a set of metal runners.

But just as he was about to pull back on the door, Tom noticed that the holes in the woodwork that he had previously assumed to have been caused by woodworm and rot were far too symmetrical to be the product of any natural process. They

were

bullet

holes.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

5:20 p.m.

Asudden chill ran through the pit of Tom’s stomach and he knew it wasn’t the cold. Archie, too, from the look he flashed him, had registered the locked door and the bullet holes and was asking himself the same question. Were the carriages empty when those holes had been made, or had the doors been locked for a more sinister reason than simply to ensure they didn’t fly open in transit?

Tom grasped the top of the iron bar that had been jammed into the hasp but, corroded by years of disuse, it wouldn’t budge. He tugged it from side to side, slowly gaining a bit of play, until it eventually slid free with a shriek that set his teeth on edge. He threw the bar to the ground with a clang and then folded the clasp back, the hinge stiff and cold. It required the combined efforts of both of them to tug the door open. Finally, with Tom pulling and Archie pushing on the massive iron handle, the door scraped back one foot, then two, protesting furiously all the way.

“That’ll do,” said Tom, panting. “You should be able to fit through there.”

“You mean
you
should be able to fit through there,” Archie said, smiling.

“Here, I’ll give you a leg up.” He clasped his hands together to form a cradle, and Tom

380 james twining

stepped onto it and pulled himself through the gap. Crouching in the doorway, he reached for his flashlight but realized that it was very nearly redundant. The lights outside were being funneled through the bullet holes to form hundreds of narrow splinters of light, all of different heights and angles, crisscrossing the interior of the wagon like swords thrust through the sides of a wooden box. It was strangely beautiful.

“You all right?” Archie called.

“Yeah.” Tom looked back over his shoulder and gave him a nod. He turned back and this time switched the flashlight on, running it over the ceiling and the walls. Nothing.

He stood up and took a couple of steps, then stepped on something hard that snapped under his feet. He flicked the light down to see what he had trodden on. Recoiling, he saw that it was a leg bone. A human leg bone.

“Archie, you’d better get up here,” Tom called out.

“Why, what’s up?” Archie jumped up to the open door, his legs dangling free and his shoulders only just inside the car. Tom hauled him inside.

“Look . . .”

Tom let his flashlight play across the floor. There must have been, he estimated, about thirty bodies there, all lying across each other, awkward and sunken, as if they were slowly being sucked into the floor. Only their skeletons were left, the bones, where they emerged from frayed sleeves and trouser legs or peered out from under rotting caps, glowing white.

“Who were they?” Archie breathed. “POWs? Civilians?”

“I don’t think so . . .” Tom stepped forward, picking his way carefully through the twisted remains and picked up a cap that had rolled free. He pointed at its badge, a swastika, each of its arms ending in an arrow point. “The Arrow Cross—it was worn by Nazi troops from Hungary.”

“Which is where Lasche said the Gold Train originally set out from.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “From what I remember, he said it was guarded by Hungarian troops.

This

must

be

what’s

left

of

them.”

the black sun 381

A quick search revealed nothing apart from the bodies they could already see. Nothing, that is, except, frozen in the beam of Tom’s light, a single name scratched on one wall, close to the floor.
Josef Kohl
. Someone who, Tom surmised, had survived the slaughter only to die of starvation, surrounded by the rank stench of his decaying comrades. The discovery silenced them both.

“How do you suppose this played out?” Archie asked eventually.

Tom shrugged. “We know that the train was on its way to Switzerland. When the bridge at Brixlegg was bombed, it must have turned back and hid in a tunnel in the hope that the bridge would be repaired. That’s where the Americans found it. Clearly, somewhere between Brixlegg and the tunnel, a decision was taken to uncouple these two carriages and haul them up here with the help of some of the Hungarian guards. Once they’d got it in here, the guards were disarmed, locked inside the carriage, and executed. Finally the tracks leading up here were lifted and the mine entrance was collapsed to ensure that the secret was kept safe.”

“So whatever they were protecting must be in the other carriage?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Tom said with a tight smile. But as they turned, the door rolled shut and they heard the unmistakable rasp of the metal

pin

being

slid

back

into

the

hasp.

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

5:20 p.m.

What do you think we should do?” Dominique threw a questioning glance at Viktor who, grim-faced, was studying the armed men as they checked each other to make sure the suits were correctly fitted.

“Get down there and tell them.”

“We’ll never make it in time,” Dominique pointed out. “We haven’t got the map, and I’ve no idea where the entrance is. By the time we find it, it’ll be too late.”