Amber

Chapter 15

“Why have I never been here on vacation?” Bones joked at the austere surroundings, the gray, chilly sky and leafless trees. In the distance, tracts of farmland were sparsely populated with old buildings. A dense treeline lay beyond. After a flight from Kaliningrad to nearby Chemnitz, the team, now numbering six with the addition of Wagner, rode in a rental van driven by Maddock, with the historical expert occupying the shotgun seat.

“This town’s biggest claim to fame,” expounded Wagner, “is that it was home to the two largest guns ever manufactured, Dora and Gustav, both commissioned by Hitler. They ran on a railway and could fire shells weighing tons.”

“Charming.” Leopov elbowed Willis out of the way as she stared out the window.

Maddock addressed Wagner so as to prompt him to refresh the team on what was known about their current objective into Germany. “So the documents you found indicate that there was an air raid of some sort in 1945, during which a wagon train was observed fleeing the area?”

Wagner nodded, taking the bait. “Yes, in Breslau, a German city at the time, now Polish and known as Wroclaw.”

Bones stopped pretending he wasn’t staring at Leopov’s figure long enough to face forward while he talked. “I’m starting to sense that whenever a country won a war, they liked to rename all the cities.”

Wagner shrugged. “To the victor went the spoils. And that included not only the cities themselves, but whatever treasures they contained. Which may very well explain this wagon train I’m telling you about. A long procession of rail cars going from Königsberg to Auerswalde, traveling under clandestine circumstances.”

Maddock followed the road as it curved to the right. “Is there actual evidence that the trains carried the Amber Room, or pieces of it?”

Wagner held his pointer finger up in the air. “This is where things get interesting. During my years of personally funded research, I also found documents indicating that a hundred or so Russian POWs were ordered to offload numerous crates from the train cars and move them to storage in an underground complex in the forest outside of town.”

“Outside of this town — Auerswalde?” Leopov clarified.

“Hot babe wants to know.” Bones and Willis exchanged grins.

“Will you two shut up already?”

Wagner appeared uncertain how to handle the banter, so Maddock assured him it was fine. “They’re working toward an operational understanding. It’s par for the course.”

The historian raised his eyebrows but continued without comment. “At any rate, yes, Huertgenwald Forest, not far from here. Not only that, but records exist of a contingent of S.S. who were dispatched to guard the activity.”

There was a moment of silence as the group digested this. Then Maddock broke it by saying, “I read that there are lots of bunkers from the war hidden in the forest around here. It sounds like we’ve got our work cut out for us. In fact, I hardly know where to start. We don’t have the manpower — and woman power, excuse me, Leopov — to search every hole in the ground in Eastern Europe.”

Wagner agreed. “Pull over at this inn up here on the left. We need to poke around Auerswalde for a spell, try to sift out a few more facts from the sands of time, as it were.”

“And how are we going to do that?” Professor sounded as though he feared the answer, but Wagner was upbeat.

“I’ve got a few contacts and ideas worth investigating. Don’t worry. I didn’t bring us all this way for a wild goose chase. At least I hope not. It could turn out that way, but we won’t know until we run down a few leads. Listen up… ”

Wagner laid out his ideas while Maddock parked the van at the inn. They sat there in the spot for a minute while the historian finished outlining what he had in mind. Maddock turned off the engine but left the windows up.

“You heard the expert. We’re looking for a bunker, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. It’s time to split up.”