The Gods of Atlantis

16

J ack leaned back in his chair below the castle wall, reeling at what he had just heard. Over the past twenty minutes, Frau Hoffman had told them everything she knew about Himmler’s secret project to develop a deadly biological weapon. They had learned how two victims of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic had been exhumed from Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris and secretly transported to the bunker in the forest, where Heidi herself had been part of the team who dissected the bodies and isolated the virus. They had learned how another lethal microbe had been sought, a waterborne bacterium hinted at in the ancient sources that Himmler’s scholars thought had been the cause of Alexander the Great’s death in the third century BC. From the late 1930s, Ahnenerbe expeditions had scoured the world looking for it, eventually finding a place where the conditions were right for its growth and returning to the laboratory with a sample. The two weapons had been kept apart, the virus and the bacterium, ready to be used as a threat against the world in a scheme by Himmler that far exceeded in horror any secret wonder-weapon the Nazis were previously known to have contemplated.

Jack in turn had told Heidi everything they knew about Saumerre and his scheme: about how Saumerre’s grandfather had been in the concentration camp next to the bunker and had come to know of the secret research being carried out there; and how he and his son and grandson had pursued the truth of it as they built up their criminal empire, the prospect of a secret Nazi weapon being the greatest prize they could offer to the terrorist clients whose cause Saumerre himself supported. Jack had begun to understand more clearly the link with Atlantis, how the search for a lost Aryan civilization had been used by the Ahnenerbe to shroud the truth of what they were really after; and how an underwater archaeological discovery somewhere in the tropics had provided the perfect place for a hideaway that allowed Himmler to continue the ruse, a place that Jack felt certain was the landfall for the western exodus from Atlantis that he had hoped to find. It was now vital that they discovered every clue they could to its whereabouts, with each moment that passed risking Saumerre losing his patience and deciding to sell to the highest bidder the phial Auxelle had stolen for him from the bunker.

Hiebermeyer walked across the terrace with a glass of water for Heidi, who sipped it gratefully. He turned to Jack and spoke quietly to him. ‘I’ve just had a call from Major Penn. He was keen to help, so this morning he went ahead and contacted my friend in the Berlin underground group and asked him for the measurements of the impressed reverse swastika symbol in that corridor under the Zoo flak tower. Apparently it’s exactly like the one we saw in the bunker, but whatever’s beyond it in the corridor is flooded and crushed beneath tons of rubble. And there’s been another development. Auxelle’s been found murdered in an abandoned warehouse in Berlin.’

‘The phial?’

‘Penn was contacted before the scene had been tampered with. Auxelle had been stripped naked and garrotted. There was no phial.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. He’d served his purpose for Saumerre. From now on, your aunt has a full-time escort until this is over.’

‘You think Saumerre knows about her?’

‘He and his family have been on this trail for years. We have to assume they know about everyone still alive with any possible connection to Himmler’s schemes.’

Hiebermeyer pursed his lips, then resumed his seat on the other side of Heidi. Jack leaned towards her. ‘A crucial question,’ he asked. ‘Which phial was it that Auxelle took from the bunker?’

‘The bacterium. The Alexander bacterium.’

‘So that’s what Saumerre has now,’ Jack murmured. ‘And the virus was stored in the chamber under the flak tower. That’s the missing ingredient, what Saumerre assumes must have gone to Himmler’s secret lair.’

Hiebermeyer looked down, trying to say something. Jack had seen how distraught he had been after Heidi revealed that she had been in the bunker. He seemed to marshal his strength, and looked up again. ‘Tante Heidi,’ he said quietly. ‘Yesterday, inside that bunker, I saw something terrible, too awful for words. I saw the remains of the corpses on the gurneys that you must have worked on. But there were other bodies, young people, that looked as if they’d been dissected alive. They’d been left there to die in agony. I have to know…’

‘ Nein, nein, nein,’ she said, raising her arms as if to cover her face, then closing her eyes tight for a moment and shaking her head vehemently. ‘I had nothing to do with that. Nothing. But I knew it was going to happen. I knew that once the scientists had isolated the virus, they would want to experiment with it, to mutate it and try ever more potent forms. I knew they had wanted to use healthy young adults born after the 1918 epidemic, people whose bodies had not built up the resistance of those who’d lived through the outbreak. And the Alexander bacterium was a completely unknown quantity: it needed to be tested. As soon as they started to expand the concentration camp next door, originally a camp for Russian prisoners, I knew what it was for and that I had to get out. They thought I could become like the SS female auxiliaries who ran the camp. I was desperate. My salvation came in the call for women to join the Lebensborn.’

‘You were part of that? The Nazi eugenics programme?’ Hiebermeyer exclaimed, aghast.

‘It was a year before I met Ernst. None of us were forced into it, but some of us, like me, were there as an escape from worse situations. And I was the ideal physical specimen: blonde, blue-eyed, healthy, the perfect mother-to-be. We called the place the cattle farm. Truckloads of SS men would be driven up to visit us, every day. It was supposed to be a baby factory, but to them and to us it was a whorehouse.’

‘ Mein Gott,’ Hiebermeyer whispered. ‘I never knew anything about this.’

‘How did you find out about Himmler’s plan?’ Jack said. ‘I know you saw what was going on in the laboratory, but you’ve told us more than Himmler’s men would surely have revealed to a junior technician.’

‘Being a junior technician, a woman, and then volunteering for the Lebensborn programme probably saved my life,’ she replied. ‘The scientists seemed to disappear at regular intervals and be replaced. I think people were liquidated as soon as they’d done their task, and the turnover ensured that only a few knew the full picture. But remember my new job in the cattle farm. We mainly served the SS, whose ranks would have provided Himmler with the fanatical followers he could trust. In the bedroom, men will talk.’

‘Who was he?’

Heidi gripped her stick. ‘After four months, I had failed to get pregnant. That was the usual time limit, and I was terrified of being sent back to the laboratory. But there was one escape route. The brighter girls like me who failed to conceive could become part of the Lebensborn group used to repatriate children of Germanic background from eastern Europe, to make them into good little Nazis. For repatriate, read kidnap. I worked in the temporary hostels in Poland and was never present at the snatchings, but involvement in that awful episode was my crime against humanity. It was why, for as long as I was physically able after the war, I spent half the year working in a children’s hospice in Poland near the Auschwitz camp. It made me feel worse about what I had done, not better, but at least I was helping children and not causing them dreadful unhappiness any more.’ She seemed to slump forward, and Hiebermeyer handed her the glass of water again.

‘Tante Heidi, this is too much. You must rest.’

She waved him away, and straightened up. ‘Let me get it over with. In answer to Jack’s question, his name doesn’t matter. He was Hungarian, a volunteer for the Waffen-SS who had risen through the ranks to become an officer, a hardened veteran of fighting the Canadians in Italy and then the Russians. He was one of the core of real soldiers that formed Himmler’s innermost circle. When I was sent back to the cattle farm in Germany after working in Poland, I was given a new lease of life there as a medical assistant because of my background. But even those of us who weren’t being used to make babies were still expected to perform. The best arrangement was to find a man who would frighten others away, and stick with him. My Hungarian visited me for five months, until Himmler spotted me on one of his many visits and thought I would be a suitable partner for Ernst. One night when we heard the terror bombers overhead on yet another attack on Berlin, my Hungarian said it didn’t matter if we lost the war because Himmler had a secret weapon that would see the world cower in front of him. Before the war he’d even been with the Ahnenerbe on expeditions as a student, and later helped to acquire samples of one of the deadly components of the weapon. He told me that now he had the most important job: to go to the bunker in the forest – the same one where I had worked – when Himmler gave the signal and retrieve the weapon, then take it to Berlin. He told me about the Agamemnon Code, the secret signal that would be passed among the chosen few when the time was right. He told me how the palladion had a special purpose as a key to unlock the chambers with the phials. He told me everything I’ve told you.’

Jack remembered the image Hiebermeyer had described of the body of the SS man entangled with Major Mayne in the entrance to the bunker laboratory. If that was Heidi’s Hungarian, if Mayne had died preventing him from getting inside the laboratory and retrieving the phial, then he truly had prevented the terrible catastrophe that would have ensued had the biological weapon somehow been deployed. Jack remembered Hugh Frazer, Mayne’s friend who just recently passed away, and it sent a judder of emotion through him. He wished he’d been able to tell Hugh that Mayne had not died a meaningless death. He took a deep breath, and turned to Heidi. ‘So then you met Ernst. And you must have quickly become pregnant.’

‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I couldn’t conceive. Even so I took precautions, but then it happened.’

Hiebermeyer stared at her. ‘When was this?’

‘March 1944. I know what you are going to ask. I conceived Hans three weeks before Himmler introduced me to Ernst at a party. I knew the meeting had been arranged by Himmler because he wanted Ernst to have a good Aryan wife, and I looked the part perfectly. It was a match made for the newsreels. I jumped at it. I truly fell in love with Ernst, but it was also my escape from the Lebensborn. I realized about a week later that I was pregnant. I had to make a decision. The timing was close enough to pass the child off as ours.’

‘Did Ernst know about your involvement with the Lebensborn programme?’

‘He thought I was one of the care workers, the nannies. Himmler even encouraged him to visit me, so that the cameramen who followed Ernst everywhere could capture images of the war hero with the little blond children, the next generation of Nazis. Ernst told me he loved to see me with the orphans, that I was a natural mother. He was very tender with them, but he always looked troubled. The German people were never told that many of the so-called Lebensborn children were snatched from Polish parents; they were told that those children were orphans of German parents living in Poland, innocents caught up in war when the Poles had foolishly resisted the Nazi invasion in 1939. But Ernst had been there, during his first deployment as a Stuka pilot, and he knew what had happened to so many of those Polish parents, taken away at night and executed as the Nazis tried to exterminate the entire Polish professional class. We in Germany all knew what was going on in that war, you know. For some it was just small snippets in day-to-day life: seeing Jewish work parties, watching Jewish families disappear from your neighbourhood, working in factories alongside slave labour, or – if you were a soldier – watching the SS-Einsatzgruppen at work and seeing the bodies of women and old people hanging in every village. You didn’t have to know about Treblinka or Sobibor or Belsen to be aware of the evil that was going on. Don’t let any German who lived through those years tell you otherwise.’

Hiebermeyer sat down heavily on the chair opposite Heidi. ‘Did you tell Hans?’

‘Not for years. I left it too late, probably.’ She was weeping, and took out a tissue to wipe her eyes. ‘Ernst was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and Hans grew up blond-haired and blue-eyed. I could pass that off to him as my legacy, but as the years went by, he looked nothing like Ernst. Because of Ernst’s fame as a pilot, Hans became obsessed with him as a teenager and even learned to fly because he felt it must be in his genes. But then as a university student, he watched one of the old newsreels showing Ernst being feted followed by one showing a Lebensborn farm, with blonde young women surrounded by happy blond orphans. The film was shot about six months before Ernst and I met. Hans recognized me in the group.’

‘And that’s when you told him?’

Heidi nodded, sniffing. ‘He learned that he was the blond, blue-eyed son of a Hungarian thug who had volunteered to join the SS. It devastated him. Few of the Lebensborn children who discovered the truth lived happy lives. It put Hans on a path of self-destruction, to the anarchists and then the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He was finally shot by the police in a stand-off. He had been given the chance to surrender, but I knew it would never happen, that in his mind there was no life ahead for him. I watched it all on TV, as if I was watching one of those newsreels from the war.’ She bowed her head. ‘Do you know the Wilfred Owen poem, “Strange Meeting”? It was unfinished when he was killed in action in 1918. He wrote of escaping from battle down some profound dull tunnel, but then realizing it had only taken him to hell. Often I feel as if the war has never ended for me, as if I’m on an ice sheet on a lake trying to escape from the broken ice of the past, but every step I take just breaks more. I only hope that what I’ve been able to tell you now will bring resolution to one awful legacy.’

Hiebermeyer gripped her hand. His face was drawn with emotion, and his voice was hoarse. ‘I remember Hans from when I was a boy. He used to lift me on his shoulders, and I remember his thick blond hair, feeling very safe as he carried me along the lake shore to where we went fishing. I wish I’d known. I could have told him it was all right.’

Heidi put her hand on Hiebermeyer’s head, and bowed her own, saying nothing for a moment. Then she looked up to Jack. ‘The last time I saw Ernst was just before dawn on the second of May 1945. I was in a farmhouse outside Plon, near the Baltic coast. Two nights previously a Gestapo team had taken Hans and me from our house in a village south of Berlin, just as it was about to be overrun by the Russians. I had no idea what was going on. Gestapo coming in the night was usually bad news, but I was grateful. I thought there was no chance that I would have survived the Red Army. But then while Hans was still asleep that night at Plon, Ernst arrived with an escort of two SS men, having just flown in from Berlin. We only had twenty minutes alone together. I told the SS this might be our last chance for a while. I knew how to talk to these men, remember. I took them out of Ernst’s earshot while he was looking at Hans asleep and said that if they returned later, I would see that they were not disappointed. When we got into the bedroom, all Ernst did was talk. He told me he’d come from the Zoo flak tower, and had been visited by Himmler. To my horror, I realized that he had become part of Himmler’s plan. I also realized that Hans and I were being used as a bargaining chip. Ernst told me he had secretly written a diary of everything he knew, all the secrets and subterfuge of those awful final months in Berlin, and that he had left it with some crates of artefacts in the Zoo tower for the KGB to discover. He was carrying a satchel with something heavy in it. I didn’t ask what it was, but he said he also had something he’d retrieved from a secret place under the Zoo tower. I knew instantly what it was, because that was where the refined product of our research in the laboratory was to be stored. I now knew that it was a weapon that Himmler had secretly created and planned for his own purpose. Ultimately, only a single sample had been saved, all others having been destroyed deliberately to ensure that Himmler had complete control.’

‘The Spanish flu virus,’ Jack said quietly.

She nodded. ‘Ernst showed me the small metal tube. He said a U-boat was waiting, one of the latest types that could go stealthily for weeks without refuelling. At the U-boat’s destination, he was to unlock a chamber and place the phial inside; once he had done that, word would be radioed back and Hans and I would follow in another U-boat, accompanied by Himmler himself.’

‘But you knew that plan was all a charade,’ Jack said softly.

‘Ernst held my hand. He said he would do everything in his power to send that phial to the deepest depths of the ocean. He said he knew there would be men in the submarine watching his every move, whose task was probably to eliminate him once the delivery had been made. But he said he’d spent hours in a Type-21 U-boat during a promotional visit to a shipyard, and had been fascinated by the machinery. That was Ernst for you. He could ignore all the horror around him as long as he had a good machine to play with. He said he’d worked out how to fire a torpedo, and he’d realized on the flight from Berlin how he could eject the phial from a torpedo tube. He said he would find a way of sealing himself in the torpedo room and doing it, even if it meant no chance of escape for him.’

‘Do you believe he did it?’

Heidi swallowed hard, suddenly looking very frail. ‘I knew I’d never see him again. Part of me wanted that. If he’d found out the truth about Hans, about me, it would have destroyed him. You must remember, with the advance of the Red Army, we all thought we were going to die. But even if I were to live, I wanted that happiness we had experienced in the few days of his leave during our brief time as man and wife to still be there, to be sealed in the past where I could go when I shut my eyes. I only wish I had been right about that. I yearn to see it again, but I can’t.’

‘You will, Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, holding her hand. ‘You will.’

She turned to Jack. ‘In answer to your question, yes. With all my heart I believe he would have done it. I have never doubted that the virus was destroyed, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.’

‘We don’t want Saumerre knowing that,’ Jack murmured. ‘Our plan depends on him thinking that what his man Auxelle took from the bunker was a lesser toxic agent, far exceeded by the virus. If he thinks the virus is destroyed, he might be tempted to use what he has, the Alexander bacterium. That would be bad enough.’

‘What do we do now?’ Hiebermeyer said.

‘Two things.’ Heidi firmly put Hiebermeyer’s hand away and straightened herself up, drying her eyes. ‘I am going to organize you.’

‘That sounds like the Tante Heidi I remember,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘First,’ she said, ‘you need to find out where the U-boat was heading. All I know for certain is that it was the place where Himmler’s men discovered those symbols, the underwater cavern I saw in that slideshow at Wewelsburg. Here’s the only clue I can give you. The Ahnenerbe man who gave that lecture on Atlantis, Ernst’s old student acquaintance? He’s still alive.’

‘How do you know?’ Jack said.

‘As I get older and so many of us die, historians more often come to me for interviews about my experiences in Nazi Germany. And there are always treasure-hunters who think they’re on the trail of Nazi loot. One researcher came to my home recently, a few weeks ago. He said he’d found a surviving Ahnenerbe man in Canada who knew I was alive because I’d been interviewed for a TV programme he’d seen, and he’d advised the researcher to find me.’

Jack cast Hiebermeyer a concerned glance, then looked back at Heidi. ‘What did he want?’

‘Really he seemed to want me to talk much as I have to you. To reveal something he thought I knew, about Himmler and his plan. Once I knew who the Ahnenerbe man was, that didn’t surprise me.’

‘But you didn’t tell the researcher anything.’

‘Of course not. All I told him was that I’d been a willing sex worker in the Lebensborn. That really I’d just been a prostitute. I’m quite capable of putting that act on again, you know. That shut him up.’

‘So who was the Ahnenerbe man?’

She paused. ‘Ernst knew him from Heidelberg University before the war. He was much more of a scholar than Ernst, quite aloof. I got to know him because several times I had…’ she paused, ‘accommodated him at the Lebensborn farm. He was not at all the right Aryan type, tall and thin and Prussian, but Himmler often sent favourites down to us for entertainment, really using us as little more than a whorehouse. As I said, you always find out things in the bedroom that shouldn’t be said. He told me he had denounced to the Gestapo his and Ernst’s old professor, a reluctant Ahnenerbe recruit who had become a drunk and talked too much. Later, after he saw me in the audience of his lecture at Wewelsburg with Ernst, he forced me to visit him in secret for sex, saying he would tell Ernst the truth about me otherwise. A true Prussian gentleman. I’d been fascinated by that slide showing the underwater cavern and asked him where it was, but he himself had not been on the expedition and he hadn’t been told. But if anyone has clues, it’s him. His name was von Schoenberg.’

Jack looked stunned. ‘Von Schoenberg? Professor von Schoenberg? The classical scholar?’

‘You know of him?’

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘While we were students at Cambridge, he came on sabbatical to work with James Dillen. Do you remember we went together to his seminar on Phoenician exploration in the Atlantic?’

‘ Mein Gott. Yes. I argued with him that it wasn’t the Phoenicians, it was the Egyptians who first circumnavigated Africa.’

‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence,’ Jack said. ‘Dillen called me and said he returned from Troy to a barrage of emails and phone messages from Schoenberg saying he had something of great importance he wanted to tell. Dillen said that in the past, Schoenberg had always been trying to pin him down on matters of great importance, usually some tiny contentious detail in a translation. But the odd thing this time was that he specifically wanted to see me.’

‘Maybe not so odd after all,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘If we know about him, Saumerre might too and could have got to him first, somehow persuaded him to draw you in and reveal what you know.’

Jack clicked on his iPhone, checking his directory. ‘Dillen’s sent me his address in British Columbia.’ He turned to Heidi. ‘Your second thing?’

She grasped her stick and leaned forward, speaking in a low voice. ‘I know how to create a vaccine against the bacterium, which will make it far less dangerous as a potential weapon. We scientists knew that the bacterium would never be as deadly a threat as the virus.’

Jack gasped. ‘Go on.’

‘That was my job just before I left the laboratory to join the Lebensborn. They were all worried about themselves, the scientists and their SS handlers, about getting infected. They couldn’t find a treatment for the flu virus, but they set me to work on the bacterium. I’d been a top biochemistry student before the war, you know, and had spent a postgraduate year at Oxford. That’s where I acquired my English. After the war for many years in England I carried out research for the Ministry of Defence, where my speciality was antidotes for biological weapons they thought the Russians might use. I never revealed anything about the Alexander bacterium, because I just wanted to forget all about that bunker and I was fearful that leading anyone to it would result in contamination and expose the world to a deadly plague. But I carefully recorded all of my research data so that I could resume the work some time in the future if necessary. There was only one component missing.’

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

‘The Alexander bacterium. One would need a fresh sample to prove that the vaccine works, and as far as I know only the one marker-sample was saved by Himmler’s people.’

Jack thought hard. ‘Could you still do it now? Could you perfect it?’

‘I still have very close colleagues working in high security government labs who would relish the task. I would gladly tell them all I know. My science became my life after the war, and it’s still what keeps me going. And in answer to your next question, yes. I know where they found the bacterium. Schoenberg knows too, because he was there, part of the Ahnenerbe team who were supposedly looking for Atlantis but in reality were scouring the world for the bacterium mentioned in the ancient sources. They needed icy-cold freshwater places, where the water runs over limestone. They found it in Iceland.’

‘ Iceland,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Do you know exactly where?’

She reached into her pocket and handed him a slip of paper. ‘This is what my Hungarian told me. He was very proud of being a trained diver and had been on that expedition. It was very dangerous for them, with their primitive equipment.’

Jack paused. There was one thing he needed to know, to be sure that all of this was true. ‘Your Hungarian,’ he said slowly. ‘When he woke up the next morning after telling you everything, he must have berated himself. He would have sworn secrecy to Himmler. If you’d told anyone else and he’d been fingered, that would have been the end for him. He was getting nothing out of you after you’d met Ernst. Why didn’t he concoct some reason to have you dealt with by the Gestapo?’

Heidi gave Jack an unfathomable look. ‘Because I kept seeing him. I knew that if I didn’t, I was doomed. All the time I was with Ernst, the Hungarian was still my lover. I saw him while Ernst was on the Russian front, and while he was in Berlin. The Hungarian knew that Hans was his son. The last time I saw him was in that house at Plon on the second of May 1945, only a few hours before Ernst arrived on his way to the U-boat. I never saw either man again. Within days, weeks at the most, both were dead.’

Jack glanced at the paper, reading the details, then carefully folded it and put it in his pocket.

‘Okay.’ He stood up ‘I have to ring Costas. And set up a flight to British Columbia. But before that, Maurice, I need you to ring your friend Major Penn. Heidi’s innocent act with that researcher may have put Saumerre off for the time being, but after Auxelle’s death, I suspect that everyone who knows anything about this will be eliminated as soon as they cease to be useful. I know Penn was desperate to do something after his sergeant was murdered, and I got the impression that he was frustrated not to be the one to take care of Auxelle. But providing round-the-clock protection for Frau Hoffman is as important as it gets.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to oblige.’ Hiebermeyer took out his phone, then stood up, suddenly looking tired. ‘I’m going to take Tante Heidi home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ve got a pregnant wife to attend. Hope you don’t mind.’

Jack put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You know what I think.’

‘Aysha,’ Heidi said, suddenly beaming. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’

‘Sevety-two hours,’ Jack said, looking at Hiebermeyer. ‘Then we’ll be planning that expedition to find Akhenaten’s treasure in Egypt.’

‘Promise?’

Jack looked at his friend’s face, remembering what he had gone through in the bunker, something he had volunteered to do in Jack’s place. ‘You can count on it. But meanwhile, the clock’s ticking. I need to visit Professor Schoenberg. And I need to think about diving again.’