Echo of War

42

The beam from Tanner’s headlamp cut away only a few feet of blackness around him.

Head down, he pulled himself hand-over-hand along the rope like an inverted climber. The water was surprisingly crystalline, with only the barest trace of debris swirling in his light. With each passing foot, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The icy water seeped through the edge of his hood and into the cuffs around his wrists.

The chill was only half his problem, he quickly realized. As he passed the twenty-foot mark he felt the first draw of the undertow. With each tug downward the sensation increased, a suction pulling him toward the center of the lake. He tightened his grip on the rope and kept going. He glanced at his depth gauge: 30 feet. Halfway there.

And then he was tumbling. His legs were jerked downward by the suction. The line bowed under the strain. One of his hands slipped off the rope. As though caught in a wind tunnel, the rope was whipped into the current. The rush of water filled his ears. He could feel the slipstream tearing at his mask. He set his jaw against the strain, dragged his arm up, latched onto the rope, and pulled himself to it.

There’s your answer, Tanner thought. The skeptic in him had been wondering about Horgan’s story about Neumvield See’s deadly undertow, and how much was myth, an embroidery for the Geist Zug legend. None, it seemed. He’d assumed otherwise and it had almost gotten him killed. He idly wondered if that’s what had happened to the diving teams before him.

He took a few calming breaths, then tightened his grip, drew his legs to his chest, and wrapped his ankles around the rope. Careful to keep both hands on the line, he started downward again. Eyes alternating between the blackness ahead and his depth gauge, he caterpillar crawled past the forty-foot mark, then the fifty. He strained his eyes, trying to pick out shapes. Where are you …?

In the beam of his headlamp Tanner saw the dull glint of glass. Then it was gone. He shimmied forward another foot. A window swam into view, it’s pane half-shattered, the remaining glass tarnished with algae. The rope disappeared through the opening.

Drawing closer, Briggs noticed a shape behind the glass. Slim and white, it swayed with the current like a tendril of sea grass. He reached out, grabbed the window frame, and pulled himself closer. He froze, panic rising in his throat.

It was a human arm. Shriveled and fish-belly white, it was otherwise intact, the flesh having been preserved by the icy water. The fingers were tightened into a claw, and Tanner found himself projecting his own fear onto the gesture, imagining it as the victim’s final and desperate grasp at the window as the train rolled in the lake.

He poked his head through the window. Below him the aim trailed into darkness and was lost in a jumble of debris. Tanner wriggled through the window and slipped inside. Here the suction of the undertow was less, but still he could feel it sucking at him, surging through the car and rushing out the shattered windows.

As Jurgen had described it, the train was sitting upright, with only a slight list, as though resting on unseen tracks. In contrast, the car’s interior was a shambles. Seats, torn from the moorings during the crash, lay strewn about. Warped from either age or from the rollover, wooden floorboards jutted into the compartment at all angles. Here and there he could see mummified legs or arms or torsos jutting from under the wreckage.

Ahead, the rope trailed into the darkness. He began pulling himself along, until he reached the vestibule door, where he found the rope knotted around a support column. Here, too, he found another sign that someone had passed this way before: a smudged handprint on the vestibule’s glass door. Briggs felt his heart pounding. Getting close. He squeezed through into the next car.

Here the scene was nearly identical to that of the first car: jumbled wreckage and mummified body parts, ghostly white in the darkness. Algae whorled in the beam from his headlamp. To his right, a piece of seat fabric, snagged on a shard of glass, fluttered in the window like a pennant.

Tanner swam into the vestibule, which veered left, then right again into the next passageway. This one was a sleeper car, with individual staterooms running down the left side; opposite them lay the car’s outer wall — or what was left of it. It was as though a giant, clawed hand had ripped open the side of the train. Jurgen had said the train had grazed the hillside before plunging into the lake. Could this be where it happened?

Tanner leaned into the surge, clutched the rope with both hands, and began pulling himself forward.

The rope continued for another twenty feet then turned sharply through a cabin door. Briggs drew himself even with the threshold. On the wall beside it was a brass plaque. Tanner used his thumb to wipe away the grime until the cabin number, emerged: 7C. If Oaken’s research was correct, this was the cabin. Briggs braced his feet against the doorjamb and pushed through.

To his right, against the wall, were a pair of tiered bunks. Lying faceup on the floor was a body. Like the rest of the remains he’d encountered, this one was mummified, its pasty flesh shriveled to the bones beneath. A gold watch chain and fob shimmered dully against the belly skin.

Istvan, Tanner realized. My god. What had gone through the man’s mind in those final seconds? Had he regretted his decision to take Kestrel? Briggs felt sure of it. This must have felt like a curse, punishment for breaking the pact his grandfather had sworn so many years before.

Tanner grabbed the bunk’s railing and pulled himself toward the body. Istvan’s right forearm and hand lay under the bunk. Briggs reached forward and gently slid the arm outward. Wrapped around Istvan’s wrist was black plastic cable; patches of it had been scraped away, revealing steel beneath. Briggs grasped the cable and gave it a gentle tug.

From beneath the bunk something scraped against the floorboards.

Briggs snaked his arm under the bunk, fingers groping along the cable until he touched something solid. Curved, plastic … A handle. Moving with exaggerated slowness, he grasped the handle and began pulling. After a few seconds, the edge of a stainless-steel case appeared.

Heart in his throat, Tanner wriggled the case from side to side until it slid from under the bunk. It was slightly dented but looked otherwise undamaged. The latches were sprung. He opened the lid.

Like Root’s case from the bank, this one was lined with what had once been foam, now black and fuzzy with mildew. Also like Root’s case, into the foam had been cut two cylindrically shaped notches. They were empty.

With little Oxygen left, Tanner had no time for disappointment. Using the ropes, he finned back through the train out the window, and headed for the surface. Ten feet beneath the surface he felt the first hollow hiss from his regulator. He spit out the mouthpiece and broke into the air.

How long? Briggs thought. How much of a headstart did Svetic have, and where was he? The truth was, it was probably already too late. Having won his prize, Svetic would go to ground. But where? Bosnia? Somewhere else? He could be anywhere.

Tanner stroked to the platform, pulled himself up, then shrugged off his tank and removed his fins. It was fully dark now, the sky black and clear; stars glittered overhead. He checked his watch: almost eight o’clock.

The red message light on his sat phone was blinking. He picked it up and scrolled through the display. There were two messages. The first one — simply “Urgent, call me” from Cahil — came in a few minutes after he went into the water. The second one was from Susanna:

“Briggs, it’s me. Where are you? We’re leaving; he just told me. I don’t know what’s happened, but something’s changed. They’re in a hurry. I don’t know where we’re—”

Suddenly in the background Tanner heard a male voice — graveled with a German accent: “What are you doing? Who are you talking to?” There were a series of thumps, followed by a sharp flesh-on-flesh crack. Susanna screamed.

The phone went dead.