Amber

Chapter 28

“This is wild. Look at all this stuff! It’s like a museum down here.” Bones swept his flashlight around the space, a long corridor with evenly spaced alcoves, each one like a room with only three walls. As Maddock passed the first alcove, on his right, he saw that it was indeed filled with all sorts of German World War II relics. There were piles of uniforms, swastika armbands, huge stacks of boots, boxes piled high with medals. The team chattered with all of the new finds they discovered, but it troubled Maddock as a soldier to think that these items had once been worn in the service of a nation’s military, and that they had ended up here, obviously stockpiled in a secret, hidden location. Had they been grave-robbed?

“Oh my God. Look at this. You’ve got to see this!” Professor’s voice was a strange mixture of giddiness and disgust. Maddock was almost afraid to see what he had found but curiosity got the better of him. He left the alcove he was in, passed another to his left that was full of artillery and ammunition, shell cases and the like, and found Professor in the next alcove to the left.

Fittingly, he stood in the midst of what looked like a storehouse for a library, with stacks of dusty books piled high here and there, with other interesting odds and ends scattered about including a large, old-looking globe on an ornate, golden stand. Racks of what Maddock guessed to be old scrolls, written in Latin, lined one wall.

“I don’t believe it.” Professor mumbled, staring at the open page of a book. Maddock approached him and looked on. Wordlessly, Professor flipped to the cover, where Maddock read: Mein Kampf. Beneath the title, which Maddock knew to mean, My Struggle, was the author’s name: Adolf Hitler.

“Now look.” Professor flipped the cover open to the title page, where a two-word scrawl occupied the space below the title. “He signed it. This is an autographed copy of Mein Kampf!”

Maddock had conflicted feelings about such memorabilia, as he supposed many people did. He knew the book must be worth a substantial sum, but he himself would never feel comfortable profiting from such a dark piece of human history.

“Unless it has something to do with finding the Amber Room, we should leave it be.”

Professor looked up at him in a state of bewilderment. “Leave it? Do you know how much this thing is worth?”

Maddock shrugged. “Not enough, my friend. Not nearly enough. C’mon, forget that thing, let’s go.”

“Whoa….Whoa, man!” It was Willis’ turn to pique everyone’s curiosity. Maddock and Professor met up with him in a right-side alcove at the same time as Leopov and Bones filed in. Willis knelt in front of an open wooden crate, in a room filled with stacked crates.

Immediately Leopov read the thoughts of the others. “These crates are too small to contain the main Amber Room panels.” They looked to Willis again, who stared in fascination at a piece of paper in his hand. The crate he had opened was full of similar looking paperwork.

“Whatcha got?”

Maddock stepped up to him and he rose, pointing to a raised was seal. “Not sure, but it looks important, and whatever it is… ” He pointed to the open crate and the rest of the boxes in the room. “…There are a lot of them.”

“Let me see.” Leopov took a look. “German… I’m not fluent, but I believe these are land deeds… ” Her voice dropped off as she read on.

“What?” Willis looked up at her, but she seemed distraught, unable to continue. Professor took a look at the document.

“These are land deeds. Judging from the number of them, as well as some of the other stuff I saw in here, they were confiscated from Jews.” Everyone had a moment of silence as they contemplated this.

“They still worth anything?” Bones wanted to know.

Professor shrugged. “To the heirs of the people who owned them, sure. I would think that these could prove property ownership and therefore potentially cause major problems for the German government if all of these heirs pressed their claims at once.” Professor put the deeds back in the crate and sealed the lid.

The team moved on, fanning out and searching the different alcoves. Maddock made sure to keep a sharp yet surreptitious eye on Leopov lest she discover something she didn’t want the rest of the group to know about, and to see if she attempted communication somehow, although even if she did have a radio or other device, he doubted it would be able to get a signal into or out of this underground complex.

It wasn’t long before Professor’s voice rang out in the series of chambers. “Wow. Look at this machine!” The team found him in an alcove further along and gathered there. “I think it’s a computer.” Professor ran a hand over a metal chassis festooned with knobs and buttons occupying most of the alcove’s back wall.

Maddock nodded. “So this is one of those early computers that took up a whole room but today the same processing power fits into a desktop PC.”

Professor nodded. “Exactly. And look at this! IBM. Right here!” He wiped away some dust and sure enough, the logo of the well-known computer maker was visible engraved into the metal case.

“Wow.” Even Bones was suitably impressed. “I didn’t think IBM was around that long.”

Professor continued to examine the machine while he answered. “Oh yeah. Even for them, this is an old machine, though. This thing ran on punch cards… ”

“And here they are!” Leopov had a crate opened from a stack in the corner. She leafed through a stack of manila cards, a series of neat holes punched in orderly arrays on each one of them.

“What did they use them for?” Willis asked. This was met with silence until Professor spoke in a shaky voice.

“Wow… I… I think they were used to keep track of… ”

Leopov fanned out a group of punch cards in a hand and held them up. “It started out as a census tool for the German government. But as the war progressed, it evolved into a way to identify where people of certain races were in various regions, and some say, to keep track of where Hitler’s regime was sending all the Jewish prisoners-how many open spaces they had remaining at each camp… basically a human inventory tracking system for the Nazi war machine. Technologically speaking it was highly advanced for its time.”

Maddock appeared incredulous. “And IBM — the same company that gave us the personal computer in the early 1980s — did this?”

Leopov nodded. “They did. They don’t explicitly deny it, either, but of course they keep the details under tight wraps.”

Bones had lost interest in the computer equipment and wandered off, but now called the group to the next alcove over. “We’re getting warmer.”

The team left the punch cards behind and joined Bones, who had pried the lid off a crate and was holding a thick gold bar in each hand. “Jackpot!”

Maddock looked around the space, the floor of which was covered in crates and trunks, some stacked two or three high. “You think…?”

They moved quickly to open a few more crates. Every one they opened contained some kind of precious metal; not all were gold bars, but some held coins, medallions, jewelry. Besides gold there was platinum and precious stones as well. The accumulation of wealth was dizzying. Maddock opened yet another crate brimming with gold bullion and then dropped the lid back on it. “There’s fabulous treasure in here, probably the lost Nazi gold thought to be in the lake all these years, but it’s not the Amber Room. We need to move on.”

Just as Bones started to protest, they heard the trammel of footsteps echoing farther down the passage, toward the church.

Maddock spun and made for the main passage, well aware that the alcove was a dead end, probably literally, were they to be cornered in here. “Move!”

They poured into the passageway and continued away from the church. They entered a long stretch where there were no more alcoves on either side, only a straightaway. As they followed it at a run, the first gunshots shattered the underground quiet.