Kingdom of Darkness

25

Eddie surveyed the steepening hillside above. He and Julieta had intermittently crossed the narrow-gauge railway as they headed deeper into the Enklave, the line zigzagging laboriously up the slope. They were over two miles from where they had come through the fence, but the railway had covered a much greater distance in an effort to make the gradient manageable for locomotives. Anyone travelling uphill by train still had a long way to go. There were five more legs of track above their position.

A more direct route was possible on foot — once they cleared the current obstacle. ‘Are you sure this is safe?’ he asked his guide.

Julieta nodded. ‘Roland and I have crossed this before. There will not be anyone watching.’

‘I wasn’t asking if it was being watched. I meant, is the bloody thing going to collapse underneath us?’

Before them was an old wooden trestle bridge, spanning a rocky rent in the hillside about two hundred feet across and sixty deep. The railway only had a gauge of two feet, less than half that of a standard track, and the bridge itself was little wider, with no railings. The sleepers were close enough together to walk on, but had been exposed to the elements for a very long time.

‘It has stood here for over a hundred years, so there is no reason why it would fall down now.’

‘Believe me, when I’m around, stuff falls down all the time. Or blows up.’ He completed his sweep of the landscape; nobody was in sight. ‘But if we’ve got to go across it…’

‘It is the fastest way,’ she assured him. ‘If you are worried, I can go first?’

‘Nah, that’s okay,’ he said, heading for the trestle. ‘I’ll be all right. If I think light thoughts…’ he added under his breath.

His concerns about the bridge’s integrity turned out to be, if not unfounded, at least exaggerated, however. It did not take long to cross — though he had a few unsettling moments along the way as old wood crunched under his weight, splinters dropping into the void.

‘Okay,’ he said with relief as he reached solid ground, Julieta following, ‘which way now?’ He looked along the line, seeing that it looped tightly back over itself to begin the next uphill leg several hundred yards distant, where a small bridge crossed above a cutting.

‘That way.’ She pointed up the slope. ‘There is a path to a little ruin. Roland took me there to see the houses in the middle of the Enklave.’

‘How close did you get to them?’

‘A kilometre and a half, maybe? He did not take me nearer because he said it would not be safe if I got caught.’

‘For him, or for you?’

She sucked in her lower lip. ‘For him, I thought. But after today, I don’t know…’

‘You don’t have to get any closer with me. Once I’ve had a look at the place, I’ll go in on my own.’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I have to find Roland, and tell him about Volker.’

‘Okay,’ Eddie said with reluctance, ‘but when we get up there, stay behind me and do what I tell you. I’ll keep you safe.’

They set off up the stony path. ‘So you have done this before?’ Julieta asked. ‘Are you a soldier?’

‘Used to be. I work for the United Nations now.’

‘What do you do? You said your wife was an archaeologist — are you one too?’

He laughed, surprising her. ‘Nah. Nina’d love it if I was, but once she starts going on about three-thousand-year-old winnet pickers or whatever, I tune out. My job’s basically to keep her out of trouble.’ His mood became more sombre. ‘Haven’t done that great at it recently.’

‘I am sorry,’ Julieta said quietly.

‘Don’t worry about it. Right now, I just want to find her and make sure she’s okay.’

‘And… if she is not?’

‘Then I’m going to make someone regret it.’

She was noticeably less talkative for the rest of the ascent. At one point they crossed a hairpin loop at the end of a leg of track, before leaving the railway behind as they approached the top of the hill.

‘The ruin is over there,’ Julieta announced. ‘By those trees.’

Eddie saw foliage against the darkening sky. ‘Okay. Stay low.’

He dropped to a crouch as they reached the crest of the hill. The ruin, a half-collapsed stone hut, was fifty feet away. Ahead, the landscape flattened out into a plateau, gradually rising to meet the steeper foothills of the Andes. Most of it seemed to be farmland, lying empty during the winter before planting season.

‘All right,’ he said once he was certain that the Enklave’s occupants were not patrolling this part of their domain. ‘Follow me.’

He quickly reached the derelict structure, the young Argentinian scurrying behind. A collapsed beam marked an easy route up to what remained of the flat roof; he clambered along it, then at the top dropped to a crawl and moved to get his first clear view of the heart of the Enklave.

Initially it seemed nothing special; just a large farm surrounded by fields. But closer observation told him that more went on here than growing crops. The heart of the complex, about a mile to the west, looked more like a military camp.

There was a set of binoculars in his gear; he took them out as Julieta moved alongside him. ‘Roland told me he lives in one of those buildings,’ she said, pointing.

It snapped ten times closer in Eddie’s view as he brought up the binoculars. It was unmistakably a barracks: plain concrete outer walls, which he knew from his own military experience would make the interior cold and damp in winter and a sweatbox in summer. Yellow bulbs glowed behind small windows, and as he watched, a young man by the door tossed away the flaring stub of a cigarette and went inside, giving him a glimpse of metal-framed beds. ‘Doesn’t look like he gets much privacy.’

‘No, he said he has to share with twenty men. The first time he told me, I laughed, because I did not believe him. Who would live like that?’

‘People trying to start an army.’ He surveyed the other buildings. More barracks, garages and workshops, and a white-painted structure that had the look of a medical centre. It was larger than he would have expected, though — for such a small community, the odds of more than a handful of people at once needing hospital treatment were slim — and the lights within suggested that it was in continuous use. What was going on inside?

He put the question to the back of his mind as he panned across a group of houses. Unlike the utilitarian barracks, these were far more luxurious and homely, with a distinctly Bavarian style. Kroll and his cronies obviously lived there, the war criminals who had founded the hidden community treating themselves to all the comforts of their stolen wealth while their followers were crammed into concrete boxes.

A bright light came on outside his field of vision, starkly illuminating the houses. He looked over the top of the binoculars to locate the source, then examined it through the lenses. Near the barracks was an open square that he guessed was a parade ground, a raised stage at one end. A set of powerful floodlights had just come on to illuminate it. Men carrying chairs and lengths of wood filed across the open space towards the platform. They were going to build something — but what?

‘Eddie,’ Julieta whispered. The urgency in her voice instantly put him on alert, and he lowered the glasses. ‘Over there.’

A vehicle had left the central compound and was crossing the farmland. Eddie tensed, but soon saw that it wasn’t coming towards them, instead heading for some low mounds about half a mile north-west. Through the binoculars, it was revealed as an old US army-surplus Jeep, two men in the front seats.

‘Are they looking for us?’ asked the nervous Argentinian.

‘I don’t think so, but let’s not move while they’re out there.’ He watched the Jeep cross the barren fields and scrabble up a slope. Once at the top, it continued along the rise for a short way, then stopped.

Julieta squinted at the distant vehicle. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Not sure, but the two guys in it are getting out. They’re going to the back, and—’

‘And what?’

He didn’t answer, suddenly filled with fear. The men had just hauled something out of the 4x4, a shape shrouded in plastic sheeting.

A corpse.

He couldn’t make out any details through the wrapped layers, but he could tell from the overall shape that it was a woman. The pair carried the limp body away from the Jeep, then tossed it without ceremony into a ditch. Their grim job done, they went to their vehicle and returned the way they had come, not once looking back.

Eddie jumped from the roof. ‘Come on.’ Julieta climbed after him and went to one side of the ruin. ‘No, this way.’

‘But the buildings are over here.’

He fixed her with a stone-cold stare. ‘They just dumped a woman’s body. If it was Nina… I’m going to go into that place and kill every last one of them.’

The Englishman started for the mounds. Julieta hesitated, then hurried to catch up.

Nina curled in a tight ball in the corner of the cell, forehead pressed against her knees and eyes tightly shut. It was the nearest she could get to shrinking and shrinking until she fell through a crack in the floor and was swallowed by the earth, never to be seen again. Macy’s last moments kept replaying in her mind, an endless loop of pain and horror that she would see until she died.

And right now, she wanted nothing more than for that moment to come. She had failed, utterly and completely. Her stupid, selfish desire to make one last big find had handed the Nazis the very thing they had sought… and in the process, she had killed her friend.

A sob escaped her mouth. She squeezed her legs harder, trying to crush herself out of existence…

‘There was nothing you could have done.’

Zane’s words stirred Nina out of her numbness. ‘What?’

‘What happened in the bunker.’ The Israeli was lying on the bed; he painfully sat up. ‘You couldn’t have saved her. Kroll was going to kill all of us except Banna, no matter what; he’s the only one they need to find the spring.’

‘I could have saved her,’ Nina whispered. ‘If I’d told Kroll about Alexander’s tomb being moved, I—’

‘Then he would have killed Banna and Macy and kept you alive. They only need one archaeologist now that they know where to look — and the second they find what they’re after, they won’t need any. I’m sorry about your friend, and about Eddie too. But once these bastards catch you…’ He hung his head.

‘What — what happened to Eddie?’

‘There’s a town near here, and the local cops and the mayor are in Kroll’s pocket. It seems they usually just scare off tourists, but after Eddie marched into a bar and asked if anybody had seen any Nazis, it didn’t take long for them to figure out that we were a threat.’

‘He’s… not subtle, no.’ For a moment, her mental picture of the dying Macy was replaced by one of Eddie striding into a room and asking the blunt question in his broad Yorkshire accent…

She almost smiled. Almost.

But the image vanished as Zane continued: ‘The cops called Kroll and told him we’d been arrested. The man we went after in Italy, the Nazis’ middleman — he must have told Kroll about us. They knew I was a Mossad agent, but since Eddie wasn’t Israeli they didn’t know who he was. Kroll told the cops to kill him.’

‘But… you didn’t see them do it?’ The tiniest glimmer of hope rose within her. Eddie had been believed dead before…

The spark was snuffed out. ‘No, but they told Kroll that it was done. He gloated about it while Gausmann was torturing me.’ Zane clenched a fist in anger.

The only emotion Nina now felt was despair. She drew her legs up to her body once more, sinking back into anguished misery…

A rattle from above.

Even in his weakened state, Zane still jumped off the bed and whirled to find the source of the noise. ‘What was that?’

‘Quiet, quiet,’ came a whisper from outside the air vent. ‘Dr Wilde? Are you there?’

Nina looked up. ‘Roland?’

‘Yes. Is it safe?’

She stood. ‘Check the door, make sure no one’s there,’ she told Zane in a low voice, before adding: ‘He’s not a threat. I think.’

The Mossad agent was not convinced, but nevertheless went to the cell door. He listened for several seconds, then nodded. Nina climbed on to the bed and looked through the opening.

It was now dark outside, but the single bulb cast enough light to reveal the young man’s blue eyes looking back at her nervously. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘I need to know what happened to my brother,’ said Roland.

‘I already told you. He tried to give me the plans for the raid on Alexander’s tomb, but Jaekel shot him.’

He hesitated before speaking again, agitated. ‘Herr Jaekel has not been seen for days. They say he is away on important business for the Reich, but…’ Another pause, then: ‘Volker… he became opposed to the Reich after reading about the outside world on the Internet. He did not believe it at first, and nor did I. But the more he saw, the more he thought the Oberkommando had lied to us.’

‘And what did you think?’

The question caught him off guard. ‘I… do not know. I still do not. Jul— A friend, from outside the Enklave, has told me things that contradict what I have been told all my life, but… Why would our leaders lie to us?’ The question was almost plaintive.

‘To get you to do what they want,’ Nina growled. ‘There you go, your first lesson in politics. I suppose they told you they had to hide out here because they were unjustly persecuted when the rest of the world conspired against Hitler’s Germany?’

His reaction told her that was not far from the truth. ‘That is not what other people say, though.’

‘No, it isn’t. The Nazis were genocidal thugs, the most evil regime in history. Their leaders were psychopathic murderers — and they still are. They killed your brother, and they killed my—’ Her words caught in her throat. ‘And they killed my friend!’

Even through the vent, it was impossible for Roland to miss her anguish. ‘What? They killed…’

‘They killed Macy! Kroll shot her — she’d done nothing, but he murdered her!’

He drew away. ‘No, not Herr Kroll. He is our Führer! I do not believe—’

‘But she’s not here, is she?’ said Nina, wanting to scream the words into his face. She leaned away from the vent. ‘Do you see her? Do you?’

Roland’s eyes flicked across the cell, seeing Nina, Zane at the door… but nobody else. ‘No,’ he admitted.

‘That’s because she’s dead! Kroll murdered her — because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted!’

He shook his head. ‘No, the Oberkommando would not murder an innocent person…’

‘Your brother knew they would! That’s why he left here, why he came to warn me what they were doing — because he discovered how evil your precious fucking leaders are! What do you think he was reading about on the Internet? Kroll’s been lying to everyone here for the last seventy years. But Volker didn’t believe him, and went to find the truth out for himself. And you must at least have doubts, otherwise you wouldn’t be here talking to me now.’

‘I just want to learn what happened to my brother—’

‘I told you!’ Nina growled. ‘Jaekel shot him dead — just like Kroll shot Macy. He shot her, and then they wrapped her up in plastic and hauled her away like… like she was garbage!’ The pain of loss clenched around her chest once more, but she refused to be silenced. ‘They’re murderers, all your leaders. They’re wanted war criminals! Volker discovered that, and they killed him to protect their secret. Why won’t you believe me?’

Roland stared at her in silence. She thought he was about to turn and leave, that her last tiny hope was gone — but then he spoke. ‘Plastic…’

‘What?’

‘You said they wrapped Macy in plastic.’ Uncertainty filled his voice. ‘I saw something wrapped in plastic being put in a jeep.’

‘Where were they taking it?’ Zane asked.

‘There is a dump in some little hills. We burn trash there sometimes. They were going there.’

‘Then you go there,’ said Nina through clenched teeth. ‘You go there, and see for yourself.’ He blinked, about to move but then hesitating. ‘Go and see!’ she shouted, no longer caring if the guard heard her. ‘Go and see! Go and see!’

Roland glanced around fearfully, then dropped and ran. The vent cover clanked back into place.

‘The guard’s coming,’ Zane warned. He quickly returned to the bed as Nina stepped down.

A fist pounded on the metal door. ‘Silence in there! What is going on?’

‘Nothing,’ sighed Nina. She went back to the corner, tears rolling down both cheeks. ‘Nothing at all.’