The Doomsday Testament

XXXVI

The air sang with shards of jagged rock and ricocheting fragments of 9mm ammunition as the first burst struck within yards of Jamie’s back. Something hit his rucksack a glancing blow and he staggered over the boulders.

‘Keep going.’ Sarah turned to look back at him, but she didn’t hesitate and he loved her for it. The only chance they had was if one of them drew the sniper’s fire. It had been a short burst, just three or four rounds out of a thirty-round magazine. His back tensed for the strike of the next volley. Now. He threw himself left, praying his timing was right, and was rewarded with a second symphony of sharp-edged metal and stone. This time the shots struck further away and he felt a tiny sliver of hope. Maybe the machine-gunner wasn’t as good as he thought he was. The first burst on the clifftop had been high. The latest two had been a little behind. The angle was against him and he seemed to be overcompensating for the height of his position.

A loud shout from behind confirmed that the sound of the ricocheting bullets had alerted their pursuers and Jamie charged on, bent low and praying that the curve of the gorge wall would be enough to protect him from the next volley. As his feet raced over the rocks, somewhere in his head a little worm wriggled; a niggling irritation that worked on a level beyond the fear and the adrenalin. He saw that Sarah had slowed and he waved her on. No more bullets now, but he could hear the sound of the followers shouting encouragement to each other, and he knew the man with the silenced automatic was moving through the trees above, reloading and looking for a better shot. Or was he?

He’d fired three bursts, short and controlled. Those bursts said he was a man who knew what he was doing. An amateur would have put the selector to automatic and blazed off a full clip. Yet he hadn’t made any attempt to adjust his aim. In his position Jamie would have put the second volley ahead of his target and the third would have shredded it. Throw that into the pot with the pursuers who were doing everything they could to advertise their presence and what did you get?

‘They’re herding us,’ he gasped.

Sarah turned to stare at him, her dark eyes full of questions.

‘We need to cross the river.’

He saw the disbelief on her face. The fearful glance towards the right where the Oder swirled and eddied.

‘Somewhere downstream there are more of them. Every step south takes us deeper into a trap.’

‘He’ll slaughter us.’

‘No. He’s… aiming to… miss.’

He could tell that every instinct was warning her that to trust him was to die. But he’d made his pitch. He couldn’t drag her across. And what if he was wrong. It didn’t matter. One way or another they were finished. A long moment of decision before she nodded. ‘OK, where?’

Jamie led the way back to the spot where they’d made their leap from the clifftop. A fallen tree lay in the water on the opposite bank close to the outlet of a small stream. The tallest branches reached out almost halfway across the river. A slim lifeline, but if they could reach the first of them they could use their support for the rest of the crossing. No time to think about it.

‘Give me your backpack.’

She pulled it off and retrieved something from inside before throwing it to him.

‘Let’s go.’

‘Just one more thing. They’re too close. We need to slow them down.’ She raised the little pistol she’d taken from the dead man at Wewelsburg and aimed it into the undergrowth upstream. The sharp crack of two shots echoed from the valley walls. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Now we can go.’

From the cliff above, Gustav frowned at the sound of the shots and the deeper bark of the Sig Sauer automatics replying. The firing didn’t trouble him as long as his men retrieved the Englishman’s rucksack and the journal. All Saintclair had done was shorten his life by an hour. He moved towards the cliff edge where he would get a clear view.

Jamie grabbed Sarah’s hand and drew her down to the river’s edge. He held the two rucksacks above his head and within two strides the water reached his thighs. Already he could feel the tug of the current against his legs and his boots fought for purchase on the slippery boulders of the river bottom.

‘Hold on to my waist and don’t let go.’

He felt her arms close around him and a fleeting moment of warmth. Every step took him deeper into the river’s power. A buzz of disturbed air, as if a bee had flown close to his right ear, and the dark surface in front of him exploded in a line of white waterspouts. He felt a moment of liquid weakness; the horrible vulnerability of a man waiting for the headsman’s axe. But there was no turning back now. He ploughed on through the current, dragging Sarah with him, into the space where the burst had landed. Another line of shots, closer this time, but still ahead. They were trying stop him, but they weren’t prepared to kill him. At least not deliberately. Now his only thought was to move forward. The water reached his lower ribs and with every step the current forced him a little further downstream, but the outermost branch of the fallen tree was almost in reach. They were going to make it.

‘No.’

Sarah’s sharp cry made him look back just as two running figures reached the bank behind them. The first of the two men knelt and using a two-handed grip aimed a big automatic pistol towards them. He was so close Jamie could make out the little dark eye of the muzzle. So close that the man couldn’t miss. More bluff. But if that was the case why hadn’t he ordered them to turn back? As the seconds lengthened Jamie realized he’d miscalculated. He saw the gun steady. Imagined the finger tightening in the trigger.

‘When he shoots me, let go and dive until you’re out of range.’

He felt her arms tighten.

From his vantage point high above, Gustav had cursed as he saw Saintclair and the woman enter the river. He’d tried to force them to turn back, but when they had continued to walk into his fire he knew he’d run out of options. He was still watching when his two men burst from the upstream brush and Jurgen knelt and aimed towards the two helpless figures. Without thought, Gustav raised the MP5 to his shoulder, aimed and fired in one movement.

Jamie knew he’d feel the strike of the bullet before he heard the bark of the gun. Instead, there was a repeat of the curious woodpecker sound they’d heard earlier and the man who had been about to shoot him rose and spun before plunging face first into the river. His companion gaped and ran back into the brush.

Jamie turned and forced his way towards the far bank.

‘What happened back there?’ Sarah’s voice shook, but it wasn’t clear whether the reaction was caused by fear or the bone-numbing cold as they lay in their soaked clothing among the undergrowth on the western side of the river. Safe, for the moment.

Jamie had been pondering the same question. ‘They want the journal. Whoever was on the cliff could have killed us at any time since they tracked us down. For some reason the man with the pistol didn’t get the message. Maybe you nicked him or hit one of his friends with those shots you fired. If he’d taken us out in the middle of the river the journal would have been lost. The man on the cliff couldn’t let that happen.’

‘He must be a cold-blooded bastard, to shoot one of his own like that?’

‘Yes, he is, and now he’ll be coming for us. They’ll put people across the river, maybe even bring in more men. Our only chance is to find a way out of the valley and back to Braunlage. We need to go up.’

They searched the sheer valley walls for a hundred yards above and below their crossing point, but the only place that showed any promise was a narrow gully that cut into the cliff and carried a gushing tributary stream to join the main river.

Sarah wasn’t convinced. She stared into the shadowy interior. ‘If we go in there and it doesn’t lead anywhere we’ll be trapped.’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Would we be any worse off than we are now?’

‘I still don’t like it.’

‘Look, we don’t have time to argue. I’ll go in for a recce, you stay here. I won’t be any more than ten minutes.’

It took her about two seconds to figure out the implications of his suggestion. ‘No way are you gonna leave me behind, Jamie Saintclair.’ She hoisted her rucksack and led the way inside.

As they picked their way over the boulder-strewn gully bottom the sides rose sheer and inaccessible alongside them. Here the direct light of the sun seldom penetrated and the deeper they went the more dank, dark and forbidding it became. They’d gone a hundred yards when they were alerted by a sound like muted thunder. Minutes later they found themselves staring at a waterfall that plunged in a dirty white torrent from the lip of the cliff two hundred feet above to form a rocky, foam-flecked pool among the rocks.

Sarah’s shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘That’s it then,’ she shouted above the roar of falling water. She turned to go back, but Jamie grabbed her shoulder.

‘Wait.’ His throat was so dry with excitement that the word crackled. He stared at the cascade for a full minute before clambering over moss-slick boulders to the shallow pool where the fall landed like an emptying bottle of stout.

‘Remember that strange phrase Walter Brohm used when he was talking to my grandfather about the painting? He said: You must look behind the veil. But what the hell did he mean? A woman’s face is hidden behind a veil, but we can’t be talking about a scrap of cloth. We’ve seen moss hanging on the cliff walls, maybe that would count, but it can hardly have been here sixty-odd years ago. So he was talking about something permanent. Something natural. Some kind of curtain. Look behind the veil.’

She stared at him. ‘There is only one constant in this landscape.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Water!’

‘It fits, more or less.’ He pulled out the original drawing of the sun symbol. ‘Look. The river forms the main horizontal leg of the Black Sun. That means the stream that feeds the waterfall must form one of the others. There could have been another on the eastern bank, or maybe a road that’s since become overgrown.’

She frowned. ‘So what now?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’ Jamie peered into the dark void beyond, all thoughts of their pursuers forgotten. Nothing. But what had he expected — a crate with ‘loot’ stamped on it?

‘Keep going.’

He pushed on upwards, ignoring the water thundering from the cliff above. It was pitch black behind the fall. The cacophonous darkness battered his senses, but there came a moment when he knew something had changed. The stone beneath his feet wasn’t rounded any more, it was flat. He experienced a thrill of exhilaration as he ran his fingers over the edged surface. Concrete. He checked a few feet ahead. Concrete stairs. Slowly he felt his way forward until the natural rock of the walls gave way to a different material.

‘Well?’ Sarah was almost dancing with anticipation as he emerged from the torrent.

Jamie shook his head, spraying water like a wet dog. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have pinched another set of keys?’

‘Why?’

‘Because there’s a bloody great metal door.’

Her face creased in a determined frown. ‘Show me.’

‘Watch your feet.’ He led the way behind the cascade. When they reached the door she pulled a penlight from her bag. ‘Maybe we could hire some equipment from a hardware store; bolt cutters or a hydraulic jack?’

‘They’d think you were tooling up for a bank job. I have a better idea.’ She rummaged in the rucksack again.

‘Dynamite?’

‘Why don’t you move out of the way and you’ll find out?’

She pulled out some kind of metal punch and began to struggle with the lock, emitting little grunts as she worked. It took less than five minutes. ‘Yes!’ she shouted as the mechanism gave a sharp click. But when she turned the look she gave him was almost apologetic. ‘See, I told you there’s something to be said for growing up in a tough neighbourhood.’

He put his shoulder to it, but it didn’t budge. ‘Are you sure you unlocked it?’

She glared at him before disappearing to return a few moments later with a fallen branch as thick as her arm. ‘Try wedging the narrow end between the door and the frame.’

It took both their strength to break the rust seal of sixty years, but eventually the heavy metal barrier creaked open like something from a Hammer horror movie. They found themselves in a narrow stairway that led up into the darkness.