The Gods of Atlantis

6

Near Bergen-Belsen, Lower Saxony, Germany

M aurice Hiebermeyer stared at the image on his iPad, moving it around so that the overhead light hanging from the tent roof caught the ancient Greek lettering on the papyrus to best advantage. His technician in the excavation house at Troy had worked long hours with Jeremy Haverstock to refine the image, taking advantage of IMU’s state-of-the-art computing facilities before Hiebermeyer and his Egyptian team had decamped from Troy at the end of the season to their home base at the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria. Hiebermeyer had never been part of an IMU diving team – he was an Egyptian tombs man, not a shipwreck explorer – but Jack was his oldest friend and sparring partner, the two having first met as boys when Hiebermeyer had been sent from Germany to boarding school in England, where they had discovered a shared fascination with archaeology. After having been at Cambridge University together, they had gone their separate ways, Jack to found IMU and Hiebermeyer to Egypt eventually to found the institute in Alexandria, but Jack had made him an adjunct professor of IMU and they still met to tick off discoveries and plan future projects, just as they had done as schoolboys all those years ago.

He looked up from the iPad for a moment, feeling a surge of satisfaction at the work his team had done at Troy. His first major excavation outside Egypt in association with IMU had been a dig at Herculaneum in Italy four years ago in search of a lost Roman library, looking for clues to early Christianity after Jack and Costas had found the shipwreck of St Paul off Sicily. But the last five months at Troy had been the longest time he had ever spent excavating outside Egypt. Both Herculaneum and Troy had been redeemed in his estimation by the discovery of Egyptian artefacts, in the case of Troy by spectacular New Kingdom sculpture that showed the extent of Egyptian influence in the late Bronze Age Aegean. He had been looking forward to some time off in the institute’s castle headquarters alongside Alexandria harbour, time to reflect on his theory that the last kings of Troy were Egyptian, relishing the heated debate that would cause with Jack and their old Cambridge mentor, Professor James Dillen, who had been excavating with them and could counter with spectacular evidence for Mycenaean Greek involvement, for Agamemnon himself having been at Troy.

Then Hiebermeyer had received a request from the most bizarre quarter imaginable. Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident genius, a man who had never seemed to acknowledge Hiebermeyer’s existence let alone shown the slightest interest in anything Egyptian, had sent him an email requesting an urgent scan of the Atlantis papyrus. At first Hiebermeyer had baulked, reluctant to remove the centrepiece of the Alexandria museum from its case, but then he had looked again at the multispectral scans done on the papyrus fragments from Herculaneum and relented, realizing that the imaging lab at Troy provided a ready facility for processing a new scan using technology that had been unavailable when the Atlantis papyrus had been discovered five years before. Lanowski had flown out to Turkey from the UK to be on board Seaquest II, and his email had come just before the ship had sailed from Troy for the Black Sea and Atlantis; a day later – yesterday morning – Jack himself had slipped away from the wreck excavation at Troy and followed in the helicopter. Before he had left, he had taken Hiebermeyer aside and told him of his plan to dive into the volcano. Whatever Lanowski’s reasons, resurrecting the papyrus that had started the search for Atlantis nearly six years ago meant that Hiebermeyer was part of that extraordinary project again, one that he was always privately pleased to think had begun not in the Black Sea or the Aegean but in Egypt: in the Egyptian desert with an Egyptian papyrus found in the wrapping of an Egyptian mummy.

He shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the bulky white suit half up his legs, remembering where he was. A little over an hour earlier, he had arrived by German military helicopter from Frankfurt, having flown in from Alexandria the night before. The sky had been overcast as the helicopter came in to land, with fog reducing visibility to less than two hundred metres. He had been taken from the helicopter by jeep to a large Portakabin that seemed to loom out of nowhere on the edge of the runway. As two German Bundeswehr military policemen escorted him to the entrance, he had seen a form behind the Portakabin like a grounded airship covered in camouflage netting. When he had been briefed about the bunker on the phone, he had been told about the pressurized tennis-court bubble that had been put over the excavation, sealing the outside world from any possible contamination. In the fog the place had seemed unreal, disconnected from any known points of reference, like an image in a dream.

He had to remind himself that six months before, only a handful of people still alive had known about the bunker: Hugh Frazer, a wartime British army officer; a nameless Jewish girl who had survived the adjacent concentration camp unable to speak, and who still lived in a care home near Auschwitz in Poland, the place where her parents had been gassed; and the EU commissioner and criminal mastermind Jean-Pierre Saumerre, whose grandfather – a Marseille gangster imprisoned by the Gestapo – had worked in the camp kitchens and escaped after liberation with knowledge of a secret Nazi bunker in the nearby forest, the place under excavation now. After the war, Hugh Frazer had become a classics teacher and had taught Jack and Maurice’s Cambridge professor, James Dillen. It was Dillen’s memory of something in the teacher’s possession years before that had led him and Jack’s daughter Rebecca to Frazer’s flat in Bristol late last summer; there Frazer had told them the full story of what he had experienced in the concentration camp on that terrible day of liberation in 1945, and the disappearance of his close friend Major Mayne and an American officer somewhere in the forest nearby while they were searching for hidden works of art stolen by the Nazis, shortly before the forest was destroyed by massive Allied aerial bombing.

Hiebermeyer had spoken to Dillen at length about Hugh Frazer the evening before at Troy, where Dillen and Jeremy Haverstock had been left to close down the excavation. Dillen had run through the events of last year, and their lead-up, to prepare Hiebermeyer for what he might find in the bunker. The spark had been a drawing he had seen as a schoolboy in Frazer’s room, a drawing he and Rebecca learned had been made by the Jewish girl in the camp and given to Mayne on that fateful day in 1945, a drawing of an extraordinary and terrifying shape she had seen in the bunker: a reverse golden swastika that might have been the ancient Trojan palladion. By chance, Frazer had recognized the image from his student days before the war digging at Mycenae in Greece. There he had been told by an elderly foreman of an artefact sounding remarkably similar that had been taken at night from the grave of Agamemnon by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia more than fifty years before, a treasure that had been concealed and that may have fallen into the hands of the Nazis in their search for ancient artefacts they associated with the revered warrior-kings of antiquity.

Yet the discovery last year of the existence of the bunker – and the possibility that it contained not only stolen works of art, but also the greatest lost antiquities of Troy – had also drawn in Saumerre, whose grandfather had seen enough to guess that the palladion was associated with another purpose of the bunker, its most dreadful secret. For years the grandfather and his son and grandson had waited, hoping that the NATO airbase built over the camp site after the war would be decommissioned so that they might search for the bunker. Saumerre’s conviction that the palladion itself lay in another secret Nazi storage site – deep in a flooded salt mine in Poland – had led him to kidnap Rebecca to force Jack and Costas to use their diving expertise to search for it. They had found only an empty container, but the outcome for Saumerre had been a showdown between his henchmen and Jack and Costas at Troy, where Rebecca had been rescued and Saumerre’s power to harm them further had been checked by Jack’s threat to expose his criminal empire, something Jack would only do once they were certain that Saumerre’s ability to hold others to ransom had been neutered. For decades Saumerre’s organization had been deeply involved in the search for hidden Nazi weapons, and there was no certainty what he might already have found. Hiebermeyer remembered what Jack had impressed on him in their final phone conversation yesterday, after he had spoken to Dillen: the only certainty was that Saumerre would now be watching this place with eagle eyes, and would be seeking any means possible to infiltrate the excavation to get his hands on what might lie inside.

The months since the bunker site had been discovered last year had seen a protracted process as Jack passed his knowledge to the British secret service, eventually leading to the site being opened up a week before by a specialist British army team under NATO authority. The situation, with Saumerre still in a position of power in Brussels, seemed extremely precarious to Hiebermeyer, who had never before been so closely involved in the present-day implications of one of Jack’s projects. Apart from an IMU geophysics team who had surveyed the airfield to determine where the camp lay, he was the first IMU representative at the bunker site. Yet his family home had been less than twenty kilometres away, and what had gone on here and in many other places like it during the Nazi period had shaped his own life and his passion for revealing the truth about the past, in this case with a personal family significance that had weighed on him over the last few days as the time for his visit had drawn nearer.

He pressed the icon to email the image of the papyrus to Lanowski, put the iPad on the trestle table in front of him and then fed his hands into the arms of the suit, pushing them through the wrist seals into the attached gloves and pressing his head through the neck seal, finishing by zipping up the front of the suit until it completely encased him. He was inside a tent at the back of the Portakabin that served as a kitting-up room for those entering the bunker, with suits like the one he had been struggling into hanging in a row along one side. He stretched his neck to left and right, feeling the discomfort of the rubber latex seal against his Adam’s apple. ‘It’s a little tight, but I suppose that’s necessary,’ he grumbled.

The British Royal Engineers sergeant who had helped him into the suit finished wiping off the chalk powder he had used to ease Hiebermeyer’s head through the neck seal, and then yanked the chest zip to make sure it was closed. He spoke with a strong Welsh accent. ‘It has to be that way, sir. This is the latest-generation chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear suit. We used to call them NBC suits – nuclear, biological and chemical – but they added radiological because of the terrorist threat from dirty bombs. The CBRN suits are more like astronaut suits than the old NBC gear.’

‘What happens if I need to relieve myself?’

‘That’s why we asked you not to drink for two hours and to use the toilet just now. There’s a one-hour limit for each shift inside the bunker. If you feel claustrophobic, tell Major Penn and he’ll get you out. We’ve done a few of these old Nazi bunkers before, and they can be pretty grim. There’s a diaper with a urine bag if you need it.’

‘Sergeant Jones, I am not wearing a diaper,’ Hiebermeyer said firmly. ‘This suit is bad enough as it is.’

‘Okay.’ Jones slapped his back. ‘You’re good to go. I’ll do the helmet once Major Penn has briefed you.’ He handed Hiebermeyer his glasses, then picked up a towel from the table. ‘How bad’s your eyesight?’

‘Gets blurry beyond about two metres, but I don’t need them for reading.’

‘Then I recommend you don’t wear them inside. The helmets can get a little warm, and if you sweat from the face, spectacles can fog up. It’s a small glitch in the air circulation system we’re working on.’

‘There always seem to be glitches with equipment,’ Hiebermeyer grumbled. ‘My diver colleagues at IMU are forever burning the midnight oil in the engineering department trying to fix things.’ He stretched his neck again, grimacing. ‘Myself, I’m just an old-fashioned dirt archaeologist. All I need is a trowel, my desert boots, my trusty shorts and a decent hat.’

‘I’ve seen you on TV,’ Jones enthused. ‘I’ve watched you with my kids. They think you’re the star of the show. Those old khaki shorts flying at half-mast, somehow staying up? Pretty hard to forget, if you don’t mind me saying so. It was a programme about Atlantis, and you were in Egypt unwrapping a mummy to show how you’d revealed an ancient papyrus. There was an Egyptian woman with you, really good at explaining it all. I couldn’t work out which of you was in charge.’

‘That would be Aysha,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘In answer to your question, I was, but now she is. We got married about a year after that film, and now she’s six months pregnant.’

‘Congratulations. Your first?’

Hiebermeyer gave him a doleful look. ‘It wasn’t part of my plan.’

‘You’ll love it. It’ll change your life. I’ve got three, myself.’ He nodded towards a bag on the table. ‘Sure you don’t want to try the diaper? Could be good training.’

Hiebermeyer glared at him. ‘Don’t push your luck.’

The sergeant grinned, and then swivelled him towards a full-length mirror leaning against the side of the tent. ‘The final part of the drill is to do a complete visual inspection yourself. I’ve got to nip out, but Major Penn will be here soon. He’ll be pleased to see you to talk some history. We’ve got a European Union Health and Safety official here in an hour, due to go into the bunker with me on the next rotation. The man’s been before and I’ve watched Penn having to restrain himself while he was treated like a schoolboy. That’s what makes a good officer. I’d have been at the guy’s throat.’

Hiebermeyer took the proffered towel, wiped his face and the balding top of his head and put on his glasses. He had heated up already with the exertion of getting the suit on. He stared at the image of himself in the mirror. The suit looked similar to the new thermal-resistant diving oversuits that Costas had shown him at IMU headquarters a few months ago, the ones that Costas and Jack would have worn on their dive into the volcano today. He glanced up at the clock hanging on the tent wall. It was 12.30 p.m., one hour behind Turkey. They should have finished the dive by now, but he knew Jack would not want to hear from him until there was some news from this end. The excavation of a Second World War bunker was not like the other times, not like uncovering the mummy in Egypt or breaking into the lost Roman library in Herculaneum, when Jack would have felt just as Hiebermeyer did now about the return to Atlantis, itching to hear what they had found. This time it was as if the pall from those terrible days in 1945 were still here, something they all desperately hoped that the excavation of the bunker today would dispel.

Hiebermeyer had insisted on coming here in Jack’s place to evaluate any antiquities that might be among the looted treasures found inside. He had grown up with the legacy of Germany under the Nazis, and had used that to persuade Jack that he should be the one to go into the bunker. To Hiebermeyer’s eye as an archaeologist, every Nazi site revealed – every bunker, every sunken U-boat – added clarity to the events of that time; keeping the artefacts of the period visible was the best way of ensuring that people did not forget. He hoped fervently that the possibility that this place might contain a dark secret – something more than stolen art – would prove wrong, but they would not know for sure until every inch of the bunker had been exhumed. But his line with Jack had another purpose, something he had discussed with Costas. They had seen the effect on Jack six months earlier of searching for Heinrich Schliemann’s lost treasures from Troy, a search that had brought them face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust. The future of IMU operations depended on the charisma and driving force that came from the top, and both he and Costas had been concerned that Rebecca’s kidnapping and the events of her rescue – twenty-four hours that had propelled Jack from a desperate underwater fight in a mineshaft to the final showdown beneath Troy, where he and Costas had rescued Rebecca from Saumerre’s men – may have taken a toll on Jack that he had not fully acknowledged.

Hiebermeyer thought of Jack and Costas again, diving into the side of an underwater volcano. A brief shadow of doubt crossed his mind. He hoped that keeping Jack away from this place would not have the opposite effect, leading him to make reckless decisions, overcompensating as a way of dealing with an issue he could not confront head-on. But then Hiebermeyer hardly knew of a project where Jack and Costas had not stretched the envelope about as far as it would go. He thought back to when he and Jack had been at boarding school together, carving out the undiscovered treasures of the world between them, his on land and Jack’s underwater. Hiebermeyer had sworn he would never dive, and he had stuck to it. Like Jack, he had an almost superstitious belief in his own ability to ferret out archaeological finds, and part of that certainty involved sticking to a ritual. He had been down plenty of dark tunnels and squeezed into plenty of lost tombs in his time, but never wearing more than his trusty khakis. He had told Jack that the mere idea of diving equipment clouded his thinking. He held up his arms, flexing his fingers in the white gloves. This was the nearest he had ever got, and it was stretching his own envelope. He picked up the towel and wiped his forehead. And it was making him unpleasantly hot.

‘Dr Hiebermeyer? David Penn. Royal Engineers.’ A small, fit-looking man in his early thirties came into the room, wearing a camouflage smock with a major’s star on his epaulettes.

Hiebermeyer held out his gloved hand. ‘Maurice.’

Sergeant Jones returned and quickly went over to the CBRN suits on the racks, selecting one and checking it over. Penn took off his beret and boots and Jones helped him into the suit as he talked. ‘I understand that Jack Howard won’t be here?’

‘He’s diving, in the Black Sea. But he’s on standby to join us, depending on what we find. I’m planning to call him after I’ve seen inside.’

‘I spoke to him on the phone at length last week when my team arrived here. I understand you have a personal connection with this place?’

‘Not this place exactly, but my father’s family home was about twenty kilometres north-west of here. My grandfather was a merchant seaman and then a naval officer, a U-boat captain lost with his vessel in 1940, and my grandmother and father and his two younger sisters remained here for the rest of the war. In April 1945 they were among the civilians taken by British troops into Belsen to see the horrors there. My father was only nine years old but was very badly affected. They were made to stand beside a truck while former SS guards loaded corpses. For the rest of his life my father couldn’t stand the smell of raw meat or rotting garbage. The British officer who conducted them into the camp said that what they were about to see was such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilized nations. He said it could only be restored when they had reared a new generation amongst whom it was impossible to find people prepared to commit such crimes. My father was a very responsible nine-year-old who saw himself as head of the family after his father had been killed, and he took those words to heart and interpreted them literally. He believed the officer was saying that he, a child, was forever guilty, because he had been born before the war. Even after my father had grown up and realized that the officer had not meant that, he told me that because he had spent his childhood and teenage years after the war believing in his own guilt, it would never escape him. He said that the only hope lay in my generation and beyond. So I grew up with this legacy too.’

Penn picked up a pointer and tapped a plan of the airfield pinned to the wall. ‘Then you’ll know that there was a labour camp here, an Arbeitslager, a satellite of Belsen. Its remains lie mostly under the northern end of the airfield. We’ve done one excavation there I’ll need to explain to you, but let’s leave that until we’ve been into the bunker. Did your father know anything about this place?’

‘He said his father and uncles used to hunt in the forest before the war. My father remembered the night when this sector of the forest was destroyed, a massive orange glow on the horizon.’

Penn nodded. ‘The twenty-fifth of April 1945, only hours after the camp was evacuated. A five-hundred-bomber Lancaster raid was diverted from Bremen to destroy the forest. The British 21st Army Group had been concerned that pockets of SS would stage a fanatical resistance there and hold up the Allied advance. The bombing obliterated the camp and buried the bunker under tons of earth and felled trees, which is why it remained unrecorded when the NATO airfield was built over the site after the war.’

‘Nobody in 21st Army Group knew about it?’

Penn shook his head. ‘Few of the SS camp guards survived. The British SAS who liberated the camp shot a number of them, and others who fled into the forest were hunted down by the more able-bodied inmates. I’ve seen the file with all the information that Jack and his daughter amassed last year from interviewing Captain Frazer, the British officer who was in the camp. So we know that his friend Major Mayne and an American officer, a Colonel Stein, had been here looking for stolen Nazi treasures, but that the two men disappeared. My assumption is that they went into the forest looking for the bunker and got caught out in the bombing raid, or fell foul of guards still stationed here. There’s no evidence for them in the bunker yet, but we’ve only cleared half of it. No word of its existence got back to 21st Army Group headquarters.’

‘How did it survive the bombing raid?’

‘It’s a remarkable piece of engineering,’ Penn enthused. ‘I’ll brief you as we go in. Construction was my speciality at the School of Military Engineering, but because there’s not much call for this kind of thing these days, I volunteered for the NBS clearance unit, now CBRN, which would at least give me a chance to examine these places. There’s a lot of redevelopment and construction work going on in Germany now, and a lot more underground sites are being found. I read that article you wrote last year about the archaeology of the Nazi period in Der Spiegel, and I completely agree with you about making these places scheduled monuments like any other archaeological site. It’s going to become a big political issue in Berlin, because major pipeline and utility works are planned in the centre around the Tiergarten, and there must be an enormous amount to be discovered there.’

‘An old friend of mine is a stalwart of the Berlin Second World War archaeology group, a voluntary organization that has been lobbying for more resources to do proper excavations there,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘There are also major refurbishments planned at the Berlin Zoo on the edge of the Tiergarten, on the site of the huge flak tower that was once there. That’s where the Schliemann treasures from the Berlin prehistory museum were stored, where the Russians found them. My friend believes there are tunnels from there to the site of Gestapo headquarters and the Reichstag. They’re actually doing some more exploring this week, and I’m hoping to go there after this for a quick visit.’

Penn looked at him intently. ‘Fascinating. I’d like to collaborate. There are a couple of sites in Berlin that need our expertise, possible chemical and biological production sites. It’s frightening how little is known about these places and what went on inside them. Many were deliberately hushed up, part of Allied policy. We cleared a newly discovered part of the Sarin II nerve-gas production bunker at Falkenhagen near Berlin a few months ago, a really grim place that looked as if it had been abandoned only days before.’

‘It must feel as if you’re still fighting the Second World War.’

Penn’s head briefly disappeared from view as he ducked into his suit and pushed through the rubber neck seal. He struggled out, shaking his head in a cloud of chalk powder, and then stretched his arms out to pull the flaps tight over his chest for the zipper to be shut. ‘Sergeant Jones here calls us bunker-busters.’ He staggered backwards as Jones yanked the zipper. ‘But we do real war too. We’re due to fly out to the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan in two weeks. We get called out every time they find a cave complex with weapons caches that might include the bad stuff. I mentioned it to Jack during our phone call, and was amazed to hear he’d been up the valley two years ago, at the site of the old lapis lazuli mines. Something about a shady Chinese mafia group who were after the same thing as he was. It must be more of a free-for-all in northern Afghanistan than we realize. Jack told me he’d been on the trail of a Royal Engineers ancestor of his, a colonel who died up there during the time of the Raj. Who’d have thought British sappers would be back there in the twenty-first century.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It was a big thing for Jack, finding that place. Unfortunately that mafia organization is still ticking over. You can emasculate them, but they grow back.’ Hiebermeyer remembered Saumerre, Rebecca’s kidnapping last year, the eyes that would be somewhere on them now, watching for any hint of a discovery that might bring the worst of those groups back to haunt not just IMU but the entire world. He glanced at Penn. ‘The security here is pretty tight? I don’t mean the biological containment, but security against infiltration?’

Penn pulled sideways as the sergeant secured his zipper. ‘My sapper guard detachment go through special forces training. You saw the Bundeswehr military police outside, and there’s another cordon around the airfield perimeter. This place is well and truly locked down.’ He picked up his helmet, and Jones took Hiebermeyer’s. ‘You ready? We don our oxygen kit in the next room, immediately abutting the bunker wall. Then we wait for the previous pair to signal that they’re ready to come out, about ten minutes from now. There’s an overlap so four are inside at any one time. We run the shifts with military precision. We don’t want too many in there at once in case there’s a contamination incident.’

Penn walked through a hanging plastic partition and Hiebermeyer followed, with Jones behind. They were inside a polyurethane tunnel between the Portakabin and the bunker structure, a grey mass of concrete that had been partly dug out of the earth in front of them. Above it Hiebermeyer could see the dome of the bubble that encased the site, a strange, disconcerting scene, as if he were walking in a see-through tunnel through an aquarium, watching shapes appear and disappear in the polyurethane as the air movement inside the bubble flexed the plastic, creating a muted drumming noise as if someone were banging to get in from outside.

Immediately in front of them was a structure about the size of a portable toilet, sealed to the concrete surrounding the entrance to the bunker. ‘That’s the airlock,’ Penn said. ‘Beyond that we have no contact with the exterior atmosphere.’ Sergeant Jones picked up a compact backpack that Hiebermeyer recognized as an oxygen rebreather, with a cylinder protruding from the top and a hose on either side. Penn took another one, and glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘You’ll be familiar with these from Jack’s kit. We use rebreathers because they’re completely self-contained, with no chance of contamination through an exhaust valve.’ Hiebermeyer felt the sweat on his brow, and took a deep breath. He felt hemmed in and suddenly wanted to be outside. He closed his eyes and took another couple of deep breaths, wiping his brow with his hands.

‘You okay?’ Penn asked, shifting his shoulders to ease on the rebreather and tighten the straps, peering at him. ‘It’s normal to feel spooked. One of my corporals said it’s like a tunnel into a nightmare, as if the real history of this place is just beyond that plastic membrane and has never gone away. I know that’s hardly reassurance, but if you’re feeling something like that, you’re not the only one.’

Hiebermeyer tried to relax. ‘I’ve been down tunnels before in Egypt and come face to face with some pretty nightmarish apparitions. It’s wearing the suit and being inside this bubble that takes a little getting used to.’

Jones finished tightening Penn’s straps and lifted the rebreather on to Hiebermeyer’s back. ‘Before we put on our helmets, I’ll give you a quick rundown on the structure,’ Penn said. He glanced at the red light that was shining above the door, then at the watch strapped around his left arm. ‘We should be ready to go in five minutes.’ He pointed to a plan on a small clipboard hanging from his neck. It showed a long, rectangular building with an entrance passage lined by small rooms on either side, then a large central chamber and a further area at the far end of the bunker, shaded over in pencil. ‘It’s like a large Nissen hut, a massive corrugated-iron tunnel, a classic bomb-shelter design,’ Penn said. ‘You said your grandfather was a U-boat captain? Then you’ll be interested to know that the concrete outer shell is based on the design of U-boat pens. The roof is built using a Fangrost bomb trap, concrete beams about a metre apart laid over support beams on the roof, creating space where the blast from bombs detonating against the upper beams would dissipate sideways. That’s how the U-boat pens survived everything the Allies could throw at them, and that’s how this bunker survived the raid on the forest on 25 April 1945.’

‘It seems incredible overengineering, in an obscure place in a forest where they could hardly have expected an attack,’ Hiebermeyer said.

‘Some of the paperwork survived in the front office of the bunker. The place was built by Organisation Todt, the Nazi state construction agency run by Fritz Todt, and specifically by the naval construction department, the Marinebauwesens. The naval department had the greatest expertise in bombproof bunkers, as they built the huge U-boat pens at places like Brest and Lorient. The bunker would have been built using forced labour, of course, and the Organisation Todt had its own Polizei regiment as well as dedicated Schutzkommando who would have been perfectly at home supervising slave labour next to their fellow SS thugs in the camp. We think the labourers were Soviet prisoners of war, and that those who didn’t die on the job were executed to make sure that as few people as possible knew about this place. I mentioned an excavation in the camp, and you’ll see what I mean.’ Penn paused, glancing down. ‘Every time I look at these places and get wrapped up in the technology, I have to force myself to stand back and remember that everything the Nazis created, everything, had a cost in lives and blood. We’ve been brought up to think this was all about ruthless efficiency, about the expediency of employing people the Nazis regarded as subhuman. But there was more to it than that. It’s as if the Nazi bosses fed on the terror, as if the blood were an opiate. You see it in the eyes of those Nazis in the photographs, crazed and hungry for more. Every time we excavate one of these places, I feel as if we’re unlocking the ghosts they created who have been screaming ever since, and that we’re releasing them from the nightmare.’

Hiebermeyer swallowed hard. As an archaeologist he had often thought about whether he was violating the dead, not in a spiritual sense but in terms of his own receptivity to the past: whether he was breaking a bond more important than the richest grave goods, whether by walking through a tomb entrance he was severing his empathy with people who had invested so much in sending their dead to the afterlife in tombs that were meant to be sealed for all time. But in this place, where the ghosts had not been laid to rest, where they seemed so close, it felt different, unnerving, as if he could sense the emotions, the terror, but also the most horrifying thing to him of all: the demonic certainty of the perpetrators that they were on a righteous path. It was like nothing he had felt before in all those tunnels of antiquity. He remembered the silhouettes of hands he had seen with Jack on a visit to the Lascaux cave in southern France when they were students, prehistoric hands that seemed in the flickering torchlight to be pressing out from inside the rock, spirits whose faces lay just beyond their vision. Here, looking at the shapes in the plastic, he felt the same, as if the swirling images he saw were faces caught in a scream, pressing against the membrane that had kept them locked in terrible torment.

He shook the image from his mind, and forced himself to concentrate on the plan on the clipboard. ‘Albert Speer took over Organisation Todt, didn’t he?’

Penn nodded. ‘From 1942. But that’s the odd thing. None of the paperwork was signed by Todt or by Speer. All we found were three sheets in a partly incinerated folder on the floor of the front office, beside a brazier. Someone had clearly been trying to burn it all, but must have left in a hurry. They were the usual Nazi foolscap order papers, with minutiae of costings for materials: concrete, steel girders, electrical and other equipment. But it was bizarre. Each of them had been approved and signed by the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.’

Hiebermeyer froze. ‘You’re sure of it?’

‘I know his signature. When I was studying Nazi construction design, I looked at some of the surviving documentation for Wewelsburg Castle, his SS headquarters in Westphalia. It reveals the same personal involvement and obsession with detail that Himmler showed with the Final Solution. Wewelsburg was Himmler’s private fiefdom, really nothing to do with Hitler, actually owned by Himmler himself since the early 1930s and as much his private fantasy as Hitler’s mad dream for his new capital at his home town of Linz in Austria. The papers we found in the bunker would fit perfectly within the archive for Wewelsburg, the same kind of thing. Though why Himmler should have had a personal involvement with a secret bunker in an obscure part of Lower Saxony is anyone’s guess.’

The light above the door went green, and Penn picked up a phone hanging on the wall, waiting for a response. Hiebermeyer felt a chill course through him. Heinrich Himmler. The image of that pasty face, the boyish grin, the nervous movements, seemed to be imprinted on his mind. As a student, Hiebermeyer had made a special study of the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s Department of Cultural Heritage, and had read everything he could about its expeditions to uncover evidence of Aryan roots, expeditions that took Nazi scientists around the world as well as deep into German prehistory. It had been the only time that Hiebermeyer’s fascination with Egyptology had taken a back seat; it became a moral crusade he later recognized as a young man’s attempt at expiation, at combining his archaeological fascination with a need to grapple with the Nazi past that was part of his own heritage as a German. He had wanted to reveal all he could about artefacts and sites uncovered by the Ahnenerbe, to discover what was worthwhile. But in the end he had found it impossible to disentangle reality from fiction, the real archaeology from the monstrous edifice of lies and fantasy, of twisted racial theory that made the archaeology an inextricable part of the story of hate and murder.

And behind it lay the man who more than all the other Nazis saw himself as a living god. When he viewed those newsreels and photographs, Hiebermeyer saw Himmler not as Hitler’s faithful acolyte but as absolute master of that world, as if all that was needed was a trick of the mind to create an alternative Nazi reality run by Himmler rather than by Hitler. For Hiebermeyer, the end of his project had come when he had interviewed a former Wehrmacht officer who had known Himmler in Berlin. Behind this man, the officer had said, one realized that there was something horrifying. By then Hiebermeyer had known that there could be no expiation, and that the version of the past created by this monster was a far bigger lesson from history than the stories that he might have been able to tease out of artefacts wrenched forever from their contexts and incorporated into the fabric of Nazi ideology.

Penn put down the phone, then looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Okay. They’re almost ready.’ He paused. ‘Himmler wasn’t obsessed with art like Goering, so it’s hard to believe that this bunker was built primarily as a private vault to secure a cache of paintings. That wasn’t like him. And there was something else, really curious. The folder we found with those papers had been marked Streng Geheim, “Top Secret”, odd enough for a group of construction order forms. But odder still was a strange symbol, a reverse swastika in red, and some words I’d never seen before. I know Himmler was obsessed with ancient heroes and kings, and Jack said that some of Schliemann’s lost treasures from Troy might be here. That’s what really got me. It was the name of the most famous king of the Greeks, from the Trojan Wars. They said Der Agamemnon Code.’

Hiebermeyer stared at him. ‘ Mein Gott. When did you find this?’

‘About two hours ago, during my last shift in there. You’re the first outside our group to hear about it.’

Hiebermeyer remembered the whole horror story that might lie behind this bunker: the fear of a Wunderwaffe, a wonder-weapon; not some deranged Nazi fantasy, but something real, a terrible weapon that may have lain unused for all these years. A doomsday weapon. He glanced at Penn. How much had Jack told him? Six months ago, they had learned that the Agamemnon Code was an activation signal for a covert Nazi scheme in the final months of the war, a scheme that they could only guess about but which was linked with this place. He remembered all the evidence they had marshalled last year, all the speculation, and he had a sudden cold thought. ‘Tell me something,’ he asked quietly. ‘Those order lists. Did you see there anything out of the ordinary? Any strange equipment?’

Penn hesitated. ‘There’s a guy in there now, our translator. He’s an expert on Nazi documents. We can’t risk taking anything out of this place and exposing it, so we have to do all of our work inside. I just had a quick word with him on the phone. He knows you’re German and wants your opinion on his translation. But the third sheet does contain something out of the ordinary. Something pretty bad, I’m afraid.’ He paused, again pursing his lips. ‘It’s laboratory equipment: Bunsen burners, test tubes, refrigerators, a centrifuge. That’s worrying enough, but there’s equipment not just for a lab, but for a medical lab: syringes, chloroform, metal gurneys with restraining straps, huge quantities of lime. It’s what we always hope we won’t find in these places, but it’s why all of these precautions are necessary.’ He looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘You can bail out now. Works of art are one thing, but this other stuff is way beyond your remit. We could be walking into a chamber of horrors.’

Hiebermeyer shook his head and took off his glasses, blinking to get used to the blur. Sergeant Jones came up behind him and placed the helmet on the sealing ring around his neck, locking it in place and hooking up the hoses from the oxygen tank. He was closed off again, in another kind of tunnel. He heard the suck and rasp of his breathing on the oxygen regulator. He felt the sweat drip down his nose and over his lips, and he blinked it out of his eyes. He knew he was not sweating from the heat. He was sweating from fear.

‘All set?’ Penn’s voice sounded peculiar, tinny, through the earphones inside the helmet. Hiebemeyer looked across, and gave him a diver’s okay sign.

‘If you need to come out, you tell me. Otherwise we have one hour.’

‘I’m following you.’

Penn opened the door to the airlock chamber and Hiebermeyer followed him inside, squeezing into the confined space. Sergeant Jones slammed the door behind them, and he could hear the cross-bolt being dropped. They were in total darkness, and all he could hear was the hiss of their oxygen regulators. Then the inside door swung open, and Hiebermeyer walked into his worst nightmare.