The Black Sun (47 page)

Tom scrambled backward, dragging Viktor with him, until he reached a large snowcovered boulder, instinctively guessing which direction the shot had come from. A few moments later, Archie slid next to him as two further shots landed harmlessly in the snow.

“How is she?” Archie asked.

“Not good,” Tom said grimly, cradling her head in his lap, her face pale. A bullet slammed into the rock above Tom’s head, and he pulled back just in time to avoid a second shot, a firework of snow exploding overhead. “Who the hell is it? Where did they come from?”

Archie snatched a quick look around the other side of the rock. “It’s Hecht.”

“Hecht! Shit.” Tom kicked himself for not having tied him up. He rolled Viktor over onto her side and saw the snow sticky and dark where the bullet had penetrated her lower back. “She needs help fast. We’ve got to do something before he works out that we don’t have a gun. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“Any ideas?”

“What about the fourth charge?”

“What?”

408 james twining

“The fourth explosive charge. Didn’t you say it was near the entrance? If we set that off, we’ll bury him.”

“Where’s the detonator?”

“Viktor had it,” Tom said, feeling inside her pockets. “She took it off me when she gave me the radio. Shit, it’s not here. She must have dropped it.”

He peeked around the side of the rock and saw the deto-nator’s sleek black shape lying in the snow.

“Can you see it?” asked Archie.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “About ten feet away.”

“Then this is the plan. I’ll draw his fire while you run and get the detonator.”

“No way.” Tom shook his head. “It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s not much more dangerous than waiting here for Hecht to come and find us, is it?

And meanwhile, Viktor’s bleeding to death.”

“Okay,” Tom conceded. “But keep your head down.”

“Don’t worry, I will.” Archie grinned. “See you back here in five.”

Archie jumped up and burst over to the right, heading for the nearest tree. A barrage of gunfire immediately erupted from the mine entrance, bullets fizzing through the air and embedding themselves in the trees with a thud or landing in the snow with a hiss. At the same time, Tom rolled out from the other side of the boulder and sprinted toward the detonator. The few seconds it took him to reach it seemed to last forever. He grabbed it and turned to make his way back. The shooting stopped. Tom looked up fearfully and saw Hecht standing in the mine entrance, staring straight at him, a vicious leer etched across his scarred face, the gun raised and poised to fire. Tom froze, momentarily transfixed by Hecht’s glittering eyes. But then he noticed a shadow peel away from the mine wall behind Hecht. A shadow with a knife glinting in its hand. A shadow with one hand.

Renwick.

With a frenzied cry, Renwick jumped on Hecht, plunging the knife into the small of his back. Hecht roared in pain, the gun dropping from his grasp as he reached around and the black sun 409

clutched his wound, before bringing his blood-soaked hands back to his face. With an angry shout he spun to face Renwick, advancing slowly upon him like a bear walking on its hind legs. Renwick lunged at him again, catching him first across his forearm, then at the top of his thigh, but Hecht didn’t seem to notice, advancing irresistibly until he fell on Renwick with a series of heavy punches. Both men tumbled to the ground and rolled out of sight down into the mine.

Tom ran back behind the boulder. Viktor had regained consciousness, and she smiled at him weakly.

“Hang in there,” he said with a worried look. “Dom will have some people up here in no time. We’ll soon have you back home.”

“I’m not going back home,” she said simply.

“Of course you are,” Tom protested. “We’ll patch you up. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m never going back. I’ve got it all planned. That’s why I came here with you. So they couldn’t stop me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got money saved. I’m getting out. While I still can. Like you.”

“Good for you,” Tom said, tears filling his eyes as he saw the bloodstain swelling underneath her.

“Like you said, it’s never too late,” she said with a smile.

Tom said nothing, his throat swollen as he felt the life ebb out of her until, with a final burst of energy, Viktor suddenly reached up and pulled Tom’s lips down to hers.

“Thank you.” She exhaled, her hand slipping down Tom’s neck, along his arm, to where his hand was holding the detonator. Her eyes flickering shut, she pressed the fourth button.

This time the explosion was ferocious and immediate as the mine entrance collapsed, bits of stone and debris flying through the air. Tom threw himself to the ground, his body arched over Viktor’s to shield her. The heat of the blast seared into his cheeks, the ground twisting and groaning and moaning beneath him, the trees creaking and whining dangerously.

As the echo faded, a thick cloud of dust and smoke remained, hanging in the air like a heavy

fog,

making

him

410 james twining

cough and his eyes stream. He heard a shout and saw Dominique emerging into the clearing, accompanied by about ten armed Austrian policemen.

Tom looked down at Viktor’s pale face. A smile was frozen on her lips. He carefully rearranged her hair to cover her scarred ear.

In the moonlight, the large pool of blood that had soaked into the snow around her looked

quite

black,

like

a

dark

mirror.

EPILOGUE
A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I
remembered the line from Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita—“I am become
Death, the destroyer of worlds.” OJ. ROBERTPPENHEIMER AFTER WITNESSING

THE FIRST NUCLEAR EXPLOSION, 16 JULY 1945

LAZAREVSKOYE CEMETERY, ALEXANDER NEVSKY

MONASTERY, ST. PETERSBURG

January 13—3:02 p.m.

The freshly turned earth lay in a smooth mound, a narrow black finger against the whiteness of the surrounding ground covered in snow. In the distance, smoke rose from a small mountain range of factory chimneys. Gray and dirty, it drifted aimlessly upward until, touching the sun, it suddenly blossomed into a glorious pink cloud that soared toward the empty heavens.

Tom knelt down and grasped a handful of earth. He rubbed it through his fingers, the cold already freezing the moisture so that it crumbled like small grains of ice to the ground.

“What do you think we should put on her gravestone?” asked Archie.

“Katya. Her name was Katya,” Tom said firmly. “Katya Nikolaevna

Mostov.” “To me, she’ll always be Viktor,” Archie said with a shrug.

“Katya just doesn’t seem to fit somehow.”

“It fits who she once was and who she hoped to be again, one day,” Tom said. “She never really wanted her life as Viktor. She just sort of fell into it and found she couldn’t escape.”

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“I think that’s what she liked in you,” Archie said, drawing on a freshly lit cigarette.

“The fact that you’d also ended up in a place you realized you didn’t want to be and had somehow walked away.”

There was a pause, and Tom shifted his weight to his other foot as he stared silently at the ground.

“Any news on Dmitri?” he asked eventually.

“Bailey called me last night. There’s no sign of him yet. Lucky bastard must have been outside when we set off the charges.”

“Any survivors?”

“Sixteen in all. Four dead. They must have been caught in the tunnel.”

“What about the uranium? What’s going to happen to that?”

“It’s safe, although apparently the Germans and Austrians can’t agree who it belongs to.”

“No surprises there,” Tom said with a shrug. “What about Bailey? Is he in the clear?”

“As far as I know. He mentioned something about transferring to New York.”

“Good for him.”

“You know, he mentioned to me that Jennifer Browne had called him. Asking after you. Apparently she got wind you’d been involved.”

“And?” Tom said stonily, his eyes still fixed to the ground.

“And maybe you should call her. Look, I know I gave you a hard time about her before, what with her being a Fed and everything, but you two were good together. All this stuff with your father and Renwick and Viktor . . . it’s messing with your head. I mean, what have you got to lose?”

“You see all this, Archie?” Tom gestured at the gravestones around them. “This is what I’ve got to lose. I’ve spent too much of my life in cemeteries. Buried too many people I’ve cared about over the years. It’s easier this way. You can’t mourn something you’ve never

had.”

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“Tom? Archie?” Dominique’s voice rang out, breaking into their conversation. “Over here. I’ve found him.”

They picked their way over to where she was standing and found her at the foot of an open grave. A pile of frozen earth lay to her left, a shovel handle emerging from it like the mast of a half-buried ship.

“There.” She pointed.

Tom could just about make out the brass plaque screwed into the coffin’s lid and the name engraved onto its already dull and faded surface.

HENRY JULIUS RENWICK

“It’s over, Tom,” Dominique said gently.

Tom nodded. He knew he should feel glad that Renwick was gone; some sense of relief, elation even, that this man who had betrayed him, lied to him, and tried to kill him, was finally dead.

But instead he felt sad. Sad as the memories of the good times he had spent with Renwick as a boy came flooding back. Sad that he had lost someone who, for a long time, he had considered to be a friend and a mentor. Sad that yet another link to his father had been severed, never to be recovered.

“You all right?” asked Archie.

“Yeah,” said Tom, gently taking out his father’s gold pocket watch and twirling it by its chain between the fingers of his left hand, the case winking lazily as it turned and caught the sun.

“You don’t really think your father . . . ?” Archie began, catching sight of the watch.

“No, of course not,” Tom said with a firm shake of his head. He allowed the watch to spin for a few seconds longer, barely blinking as his eyes followed it. Then in one firm movement he grabbed it and flung it into the grave, smashing it against the coffin lid. For a few moments the three of them stood there, staring at the watch’s white face, hands frozen, the shattered glass

416 james twining

scattered around it like small drops of ice, springs and

screws strewn like shrapnel. “Let’s go and get a drink,” said Dominique eventually.

“Yeah,” said Tom, a sad smile on his face. “Let’s go and

get several.” Archie threw his cigarette to the ground, where it flared for a few seconds, then flickered, then went out.

In 1999 the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets finally admitted not only that the U.S. Army had been guilty of wrongly identifying the contents of the Hungarian Gold Train as enemy property after recovering it in 1945, but that several of its men had actively conspired in plundering it. Although the U.S. Department of Justice opposed all attempts at compensation, in 2005 the courts ruled in favor of a class-action suit brought by Holocaust survivors. A total of $25 million was ordered to be distributed to Hungarian survivors. A large number of paintings and other works of art taken from the Gold Train remain lost to this day.

Wewelsburg Castle, near Paderborn in northern Westphalia, Germany, was intended by Himmler to be the epicenter of the Aryan world. He had envisioned a vast complex radiating out from the castle’s north tower, and over 1,250 concentration camp inmates died bringing the first phases of his plan to fruition. Today the castle operates as a museum and youth hostel. The crypt and the ceremonial chamber where twelve of his generals would meet around a round table, complete with the symbol of the Black Sun inlaid into the floor, are open to visitors.

The Nazis’ nuclear research effort was centered at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under the physicist Werner Heisenberg, although a military team under the scientific leadership 418 note from the author

of Professor Kurt Diebner was also in the chase. It is a matter of historical debate as to whether Heisenberg’s team deliberately sabotaged their work or were simply lagging behind the Allies. Historians believe that Stalin deliberately ordered Marshals Zukhov and Konev to race each other to Berlin so as to secure the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute ahead of the Americans, sacrificing close to 70,000 men in the process. The special NKVD

troops dispatched to the institute recovered over three tons of uranium oxide, a material the Russians were short of at the time, allowing them to kick-start Operation Borodino, their own nuclear program. The first Soviet nuclear test took place in August 1949, over four years after the first American explosion at the Trinity site in New Mexico in July 1945.

The Amber Room was commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701, and later presented to the Russian czar Peter the Great. It decorated the Catherine Palace, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, from 1770 until September 1941, when invading German troops carried it off to Königsberg in East Prussia (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad). Fearing Allied bomb attacks, the room was again packed up in 1944 but then vanished. Opinions differ as to what happened to the room. Some believe that it was moved to an abandoned silver mine in Thuringia, others that it was buried in a lagoon in Lithuania. The latest theory suggests that the room was in fact burned by mistake by Soviet troops, with the Kremlin subsequently disguising their actions and propagating the myth of the Amber Room’s survival as a negotiating ploy.