The Doomsday Testament

XL

Jamie reached the doorway where Sarah had disappeared. To his right, her torch lay on the floor, still gently rocking, the beam playing on the base of the far wall. He froze as he heard a gentle shuffling and raised his own torch to illuminate whatever had made the noise.

‘Oh, Christ!’

The silent scream in the tormented, eyeless face reflected the terror of her end, the jagged hole in her skull clear proof of the method they had used to snuff out her life. He reached forward to touch her shoulder.

‘Why did they do this?’ Sarah’s hushed voice came from the corner behind him. He almost cried out with relief as he caught her in the spotlight. Safe. Hunched into the angle of the wall, her body seemed smaller and more fragile, her eyes shone huge and liquid in the torchlight.

He turned back to the desiccated body dressed in the remains of a striped grey shift which lay slumped across the steel bench. In the torchlight her still perfect teeth shone like pearls in the ivory skull. Small and delicate. Like Sarah’s teeth. Leathery hands with long slim fingers that might have once played the piano stretched out towards him as if in welcome. He heard the shuffling again and a mouse peered cautiously from the eye socket of the skull where it had made its nest. The torch lifted and the beam took in dozens, no, hundreds, of other skeletal bodies. A sea of bones that stretched the length of the room.

They sat in ordered rows, chained to the benches where they had worked and where they had died, some slumped forward, others reaching up, their backs permanently arched in agony from the moment the bullets had struck. The disarticulated remains of still more lay in scattered heaps on the concrete floor below the point where they had hung lifeless for years until time and gravity combined to snap their sinews. He imagined the screams of terror, the shouts of defiance as the SS men had walked along the ranks with their pistols and machine guns barking, the blood staining the work bench thick. Was the woman closest to him the first or the last? Did she know her fate before she was chained to the cold steel bench? He looked at the face again. Oh, yes. She knew.

‘To defend the Great Secret. The Wonder of the World.’

‘This was Walter Brohm’s doing?’

‘Shhhh!’ He clicked off his torch and forced her back into the corner as the first flickering beams reached the main hall. A brusque voice issued whispered instructions. Jamie crouched low and risked a glance from the doorway. Through a gap in the mountains of metal he counted them. Six, at least, and the leader hadn’t been fooled by the tracks in the dust. Jamie had hoped to lead them all down the main aisle, but whoever was giving the orders had held them back and split them into three groups. Two to take the outer passages and one to go through the centre. Once the dispositions had been made they started forward, moving with deadly intent. A torch beam swept across his hiding place, forcing him to duck back.

He pushed his head against Sarah’s so that his mouth touched her ear. ‘Listen.’

Gustav had been irritated by the enforced delay while his men investigated the office which was of so much interest to Saintclair, but he couldn’t take the chance that the Englishman had found or left something there. The empty space in the dust on the wall was intriguing, but the only thing that mattered was the journal and it was only a question of time before he had it. The scream that had just echoed through the corridors proved it. There was no escape from the bunker, apart from the way they had come.

When they reached the main production hall, a hunter’s instinct told him this was where his prey had gone to ground. They always went to ground. Fear and hopelessness robbed them of their energy and their courage. But they could still be dangerous.

‘Muller and Krauss sweep the left, Schmidt and Ritter the right. Kempner and I will take the centre. This time we take no chances. If you see them, shoot to kill.’

Very slowly they worked their way forward. Gustav allowed Kempner to take the lead, while he provided cover with the MP5. In the torch beam he noted where the two sets of footsteps had turned into one. Did they really think him such a fool to be taken in by a cheap trick like that? Well, they would learn. Away to his left one of the torch beams deviated and he noted approvingly that Muller was searching some sort of side room. Yet the further they moved into the great mounds of twisted scrap, the more the scale of the place worked against his confidence. Should he have secured the bunker and waited until they could rig up some kind of generator? No, Frederick wanted results. It had to be now. It might cost him another man, but the price was worth paying.

One more step and it was as if World War Three had broken out. Gustav whipped the machine pistol round as two shots reverberated like cannon fire around the vast echo chamber of the concrete room. The shocked silence that followed was broken by a burst of almost hysterical laughter.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ he demanded.

Krauss appeared from another side room backlit by the wavering beam of a torch. ‘Just a bunch of soaps who were resettled during the war. Muller almost shit his pants.’

Gustav cursed beneath his breath. ‘The only corpses we are interested in are Saintclair and the girl.’

He gestured to Kempner to move on. That was when he saw the silken strand of the spider’s web tauten and bend against the knee of his partner’s combat trousers.

The two figures slumped at the end of the row of corpses slowly raised their heads. Jamie’s ears rang from the incredible noise of the shots in the confined space and Sarah’s hand shook as she reached for the comfort of his in the darkness. They had taken their places on the bench where two of the dismantled skeletons had fallen to the floor, frozen in position as the torch flicked from skull to skull and the panicked German began firing. Sarah had almost cried out as a bullet shattered the jaw of the dead man next to her and spattered her with teeth and shards of bone, but some deep-set instinct for survival kept her silent.

With the men gone, Jamie pulled her to her feet and retrieved the rucksacks and the bubble-wrapped painting from below the table. Together they crept back towards the door. The closest torches had moved on, but the pair in the centre were taking more care and Jamie could see the glow of another set on the far side of the biggest hill of metal. His heart told him they should make a break for it, but his brain said wait. Ten seconds passed that felt like an hour. They must have reached it by now. What if they’d seen the nylon? He squeezed Sarah’s hand as a signal to get ready.

For a fraction of a second after Kempner’s knee felt the first pressure of the fishing line, the nylon stretched, its natural elasticity brought into play by the force placed upon it. But before the German could react it pulled the smaller piece of machinery from its position and there was a clatter as it fell to the floor. Gustav stiffened at the sound, but when nothing happened he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he noticed the rope.

Twenty feet above them, the weight of the smaller piece of machinery pulled the larger engine part out of its position in the jumble of metal holding together the top of the pile. At first it was just the rattle of a single piece of metal bouncing down the side of the slope, but very quickly it turned into an avalanche. Within a second the fragile shelf holding the big engine disintegrated and the enormous piece of steel alloy toppled to join the wave of tons of twisted metal plunging towards the Germans. Kempner let out a shriek and began to run, but Gustav knew there was no escape. He threw himself sideways in a forlorn attempt to find safety.

Jamie waited until the clamour of the avalanche subsided and wobbling torches had converged on the centre of the room. Moving fast and low he and Sarah crawled silently to the doorway and into the corridor. Right or left? He had no way of knowing whether the direction they’d come would be guarded, but at least he could be certain it was a way out. He chose right.

Ten minutes later they reached the waterfall and for the first time in an hour he felt it was safe to breathe. They headed downstream towards Braunlage, keeping away from the marked trails, and crossed the river at a hiker’s bridge.

Sarah was uncharacteristically silent as they walked, but just before they reached the main road she stopped him.

‘I asked you a question back there, but we were interrupted before you gave me an answer. Why?’

He hesitated. ‘Walter Brohm couldn’t afford to leave anyone alive. These weren’t ordinary slave workers. They were the scientists and technicians who had helped create the Uranverein. When the Nazi nuclear project was wound down between nineteen forty-one and ’forty-two Hitler decided they weren’t needed any more.’ He remembered David’s words. That was the year they sent many of their best scientists to Auschwitz. ‘But Walter Brohm needed them, and he had them brought here. The SS ran the bureaucracy of death, it would have been simple enough to arrange. The knowledge their heads contained was as precious as any research file, perhaps more so. They may have been his slaves, but we know from the journal that Brohm wanted above all to be admired. He would have confided in them his plans and his hopes for the future. He would have wanted them to believe that they were part of that future.’

‘But they were Jews.’

‘Yes, they were Jews. So they had no future. Not in Walter Brohm’s Germany.’

She nodded and stared at the distant bulk of the Brocken, the signpost that had brought them to this dread place.

‘Promise me something.’

‘Of course.’

‘No, wait until you know what I am asking. It’s important.’

He stared at her for a moment. Her face was unnaturally white. Pale as death. ‘Ask then.’

‘Promise me that if we find out that Walter Brohm is still alive you will use whatever money you get for the recovery of the Raphael to hunt him down.’

He didn’t even have to consider it. ‘I promise. If Walter Brohm is alive, I will follow him to the ends of the earth and bring him to justice.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I don’t want justice. Promise me that if Walter Brohm is still alive, you will kill him.’

At first, her words sent a shock of revulsion through him. The man who died at Wewelsburg had been more or less an accident and the hunter in the woods pure self-preservation. Did she really believe him capable of cold-blooded murder? Then he remembered the long rows of corpses in the chamber and the girl with the musician’s hands. Walter Brohm had been responsible for their deaths and if Walter Brohm was alive, it had been Matthew Sinclair who had kept him that way.

He took a deep breath.

‘If we find Walter Brohm, I will kill him.’