The Gods of Atlantis

8

Near Bergen-Belsen, Germany

M aurice Hiebermeyer tripped over the step into the bunker and stumbled forward, putting his arm out to catch himself on an upright metal pole that loomed in front of him. He fell into it heavily, wincing as his wrist took his weight, then lost his footing and twisted round on to his back, jarring his head and losing his grip as his hand slid down the viscous exterior of the pole. Major Penn caught him and heaved him back on to his feet, holding him upright while he regained his balance. Hiebermeyer panted hard, his heart pounding, his ears filled with the suck and pop of the diaphragm in his regulator as he drew hard on the oxygen in his backpack. He tried to calm himself, staring through the glass visor of his helmet at the mottled patch of concrete wall that was all he could see ahead. For a moment he felt disorientated, and then he realized that he had twisted around and was facing the entrance they had just come through into the bunker. The slight blurriness was a consequence of following Sergeant Jones’ advice to remove his glasses to avoid having them fog up as he perspired. It seemed to make little difference now, as the sweat on his face had already made the glass plate of his helmet seem opaque.

He breathed slowly, trying to catch his rising claustrophobia. He knew he could ask to leave and could be out of that door and back into some semblance of normality within minutes. He shut his eyes tight, then opened them again as his heart rate stabilized. A patch had cleared in the centre of his visor, allowing him to see the metal grid of the walkway in the beam of his headlamp.

‘Are you all right?’ The tinny voice through his earphones came from Major Penn, now visible beside him in his bulky white CBRN suit.

‘I’m fine,’ Hiebermeyer replied, his voice sounding oddly muffled inside the helmet. ‘A twisted wrist, but I can live with that.’

‘I’ve checked over your suit, and there’s no obvious damage,’ Penn said. ‘The worst-case scenario would be any kind of tear. Even the chance of contamination would be enough to put you in the quarantine chamber in the Portakabin for a month.’

‘No thanks,’ Hiebermeyer replied.

‘I forgot to mention that it can be a little slippery in here, like that pole. There’s not much dust because there have been no people in here for more than seventy years, so no dead human skin. But there’s a thin layer of old fungal growth over everything. The forensics guy thinks that something decayed in here and putrefied a long time ago. It’s on the floor too, so watch your step.’

Hiebermeyer stared at the yellow-brown smear on his glove from the pole. Something decayed in here. He felt a wave of nausea, swallowed hard and wiped his hand against his leg. He swung around, his headlamp beam traversing indeterminate shapes and shadows as he turned back towards their objective, the main chamber of the bunker, visible through an open door at the end of the entrance passageway. He walked forward, following Penn. The halo of condensation around the edge of his visor made it seem as if he were in a tunnel, almost moving in slow motion. Penn stopped, clicked off the intercom button on the side of his helmet and activated the external link that allowed him to communicate with the phone in the Portakabin. It was strict procedure to activate it only when absolutely vital, to keep workers inside the bunker from being distracted, and even the other two men in the chamber ahead of them would only be included in their intercom audio loop if necessary. Hiebermeyer could see that Penn was talking in an agitated manner. After about a minute he clicked the side of his helmet and his voice crackled again inside Hiebermeyer’s headset. ‘That was Sergeant Jones in the kitting-up room,’ he said, sounding annoyed. ‘The EU inspector Dr Auxelle has arrived ahead of schedule. He’s forced Jones to let him come into the bunker now. Auxelle knew I was in here already, and Jones doesn’t have the authority to stand up to him. Auxelle probably threatened him, though Jones is too professional to tell me that. It’s all completely unnecessary. Auxelle could have waited twenty minutes as the schedule dictated, so that he and Jones could have gone in as planned and the turnover worked smoothly, keeping the maximum number in the bunker to four. But he knows the pair ahead of us are making the first entry into the laboratory at the back of the main chamber, and he wants to be in on the act. It’s always like that with these people. We have to deal with EU Health and Safety nabobs all the time. They like you to think they’re in charge, and you have to go along with it or risk being blacklisted.’

‘It sounds as if I’m the one who’s arrived on your doorstep at the wrong time,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘If you hadn’t been in here with me, you could have dealt with it and made him wait.’

‘Auxelle and Jones are in the double-lock chamber already, so there’s nothing I can do about it. And it was my call to slot us in the schedule now. I promised Jack Howard that I’d personally escort you and get you in and out as fast as possible. He said that he’d been against you coming here and that you had other priorities at the moment.’

‘I’m seeing this through.’

‘Okay. With Auxelle and Jones directly behind us, we’ve got to move more quickly. I’m going to take you directly to the storage crates, and then that’s it. I want to be in the scrubbing room waiting for Auxelle when he comes out. I think the time has arrived for a little showdown.’

‘Sounds like a little suspicion on your part that he might have picked up some contamination wouldn’t go amiss.’

‘I wish. That’s one area where he can’t override my authority. A month in the quarantine chamber would certainly get him out of my hair.’ He grinned at Hiebermeyer through his visor, than put a hand on his back. ‘You okay? Let’s try to do this within twenty minutes. We’ll be using our headlamps all through. The old electrics in here still work, powered by a huge U-boat battery that we think was here mainly to keep some kind of refrigeration unit going in the laboratory, something they wanted guaranteed long-term. But we’re not risking the old electrical system. We always work with our own power supply. We should know what the electrics were powering soon enough, as the two sappers ahead of us will be at the lab door by now. I’ve asked them to hold off reporting unless there’s urgent need so that we can focus on those crates, but to give me a situation report at 1420. That’s eighteen minutes from now. I’ve just warned them on the intercom about Auxelle and Jones coming in.’

Hiebermeyer cautiously followed Penn along the metal grid on the floor. On one side his headlamp caught the window of a small room, the glass covered with the yellow-brown layer and reflecting a strange unearthly glow. Further ahead a machine gun sat on its tripod on the floor, an old German MG-42, the receiver still closed over a cartridge belt that linked to an ammunition box below. Beyond that lay the opening to the main chamber of the bunker. He followed Penn through, their beams traversing the walls. Two headlamps bobbed at the far end of the chamber, evidently the sappers at the entrance to the laboratory. He saw a small jet of intense orange flame and a shower of sparks. ‘They’re using an oxyacetylene torch,’ Penn said. ‘Before now we’d only seen the laboratory door over the crates. We work methodically, inch by inch, and that’s as far as we’d got. We knew the door was slightly ajar, and we suspected it might be rusted on its hinges. Let’s hope they get through within fifteen minutes.’

They walked further on. With only his single beam stabbing into the gloom, Hiebermeyer found it difficult to get a good sense of the dimensions, but he began to see how they fitted with the plan that Penn had shown him of a structure about the size of an underground railway station, as if a huge section of corrugated culvert pipe had been half buried in the ground. The interior seemed to be glowing yellow-green, and he realized that everything was covered with the same viscous layer he had encountered in the entranceway. He stumbled slightly, and the shadows of the crates loomed large on the wall, elongated on its concave surface. He saw Penn’s form in exaggerated silhouette as if it were advancing towards him, an unnerving image from a distant childhood nightmare, a story an older boy had told him of the trolls that lurked underground in these parts, waiting for boys like him. It had seemed frighteningly real, in the land where trolls and goblins had been invented and had then come hideously to life in the dark days of the Third Reich.

His breathing quickened, rasping and sucking through the regulator, and he stopped to calm himself. Penn veered left between two rows of wooden crates of identical dimensions, each about a metre and a half high. They looked unopened and sealed up except for one at the back, its lid slightly ajar. Hiebermeyer followed, his heart pounding. It could be an absolute treasure trove. Penn had told him about a crate he had seen containing what looked like paintings, and now they both stood in front of one isolated from the rest and narrower, with no cover. Propped up on the back was a panel that looked as if it might have been the lid, but made up of a single board rather than joined planks. Penn pointed inside. ‘I saw this on the way out this morning. Looking at it now, they’re definitely paintings, their frames removed and the canvases encased in plywood.’ He jerked his thumb at the propped-up panel. ‘That one’s a portrait. Someone must have taken it out to have a look in 1945. You can just make out the image, though I think there’s been some kind of reaction between that mould and the oil from the paint, which has oozed out. It looks irrecoverable, I’m afraid.’

Hiebermeyer could see what Penn meant. The colour definition had gone, as if someone had squeezed all the paints into one bowl and then applied the resulting mess without mixing it together properly, leaving streaks of individual colours through the layer of yellow-green. As he stood back and angled his beam, he could just make out a portrait, like a shallow relief carving, as if the form within were pressing through the panel. He looked hard, mentally checking the image against dozens of lost masterpieces that he had worked through in a catalogue before coming here, in preparation for a moment like this. He shook his head and turned away, then turned back. Still nothing. He tried again, closing his eyes this time.

‘Let’s move on,’ Penn said, pointing at the crate with the lid that was slightly ajar. ‘Whatever that painting was, it’s history now. And my guess is these bigger crates are what you’re going to want to see, more likely to contain antiquities.’

Hiebermeyer stayed rooted to the spot. Suddenly it clicked. He recognized it. ‘ Mein Gott.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the Portrait of a Young Man, 1516, stolen from the Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, Poland. It’s so famous that I hadn’t even bothered to look at it again when I was researching lost art before coming here. It’s ritratto di Raffaello, meaning either by Raphael or of Raphael, or both. Nobody knows for sure, because it’s been impossible to study the original using modern analytical techniques. It was one of the most exquisite portraits of the Renaissance and until now the most important painting still lost from the war.’

‘Well you can tick that off the list, in more ways than one. I don’t think there’s any chance of restoration. Another legacy of the Nazis. Come on.’

Hiebermeyer stared at the panel, trying to see what he had remembered from those pre-war photographs of the painting: the sensitive face, the long hair and rakish beret, the languid, confident pose of the young man, the luxurious fur shawl draped over one shoulder. If those two Allied officers really had got inside the bunker – Major Mayne and Colonel Stein – he wondered whether they had stood where he was now, and had seen the painting in its original glory: whether it had given the American, Stein, an art historian at the Courtauld before the war, a thrill of recognition and a shaft of hope before they went on to whatever darkness lay ahead, or whether they too had seen an image forever tainted by the Nazi horror they must have witnessed in the death camp in the forest. Hiebermeyer suddenly lost the image of the young man in his mind’s eye and saw only a mess of colour streaked with red, rivulets of paint at the base of the panel where oil had oozed like blood. He remembered years before when he’d realized that resurrecting the artefacts collected by the Nazi Ahnenerbe would never be possible, that they were best left as part of the ghastly history that Himmler had created for them. The image he saw now seemed to vindicate that, but he had not expected it to be so visceral, as if what this painting had become was more than just a lesson from history; rather an excrescence that could never heal.

Penn went forward to the unopened crates and knelt down, wiping a painted label on the side with the back of his glove and then doing the same to the next two crates. Hiebermeyer knelt down beside the first. One word stood out: Ahnenerbe. For a moment all he heard was his own breathing, as if it were disembodied. All those years he had dreamed of searching for these treasures, they had been here under his very nose, only a few kilometres from where he had grown up. He felt light-headed, as if the regulator were no longer giving him enough oxygen. He reached out to one of the crates to steady himself and then withdrew his hand at the last moment, remembering the awful smear of decomposition that had stained his glove when he had slipped at the entrance.

Penn came back to him. ‘That’s it, all of the crates. They look like identical markings.’

‘It all makes sense,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘ It all fits.’

‘You’d better explain.’

Hiebermeyer remained squatting. His long conversation with Dillen and Jack the day before about the events of 1945 was still fresh in his mind. He peered at Penn. ‘Those two officers in 1945, Major Mayne and Colonel Stein, they’re the key. Stein was in the Monuments and Fine Arts section, a genuine art expert, but the MFA was really a cover for a unit searching for Nazi secrets. Major Mayne was in 30 Commando Assault Unit, a deliberately misleading name for another one of those outfits. These two men only came together in the last hours on the way to this place, after Captain Frazer had returned from his visit to the camp and tipped off his friend Mayne at British HQ that there was something worth investigating here. We pieced all this together after Jack and his daughter talked to Frazer last year. A Jewish girl in the camp had drawn Frazer a picture. She’d been tortured and raped in the forest, in this bunker, but had managed to escape in the final days and was back in the camp immediately after liberation under the care of British nurses. The picture showed something she’d seen in the bunker, a golden reverse swastika that Frazer recognized as a lost antiquity from Troy. He and Mayne had excavated together at Mycenae before the war and had heard from an old Greek foreman the story of how the object had been found by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia in the Tomb of Agamemnon, and then secretly taken back to Germany. Frazer and Mayne were convinced it was the lost palladion, the sacred symbol of Troy taken by Agamemnon after he had defeated the Trojans. And now, knowing what is in these other crates, I understand,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘It makes sense that the palladion should have ended up here. Absolute sense.’

‘Go on,’ Penn said. ‘These inscriptions?’

‘Look at the dates on these crates.’ Hiebermeyer pointed at the stencilled lettering and stamps where Penn had revealed them. ‘They’re all the same: 13 April 1945. That’s only two weeks before the Allies arrived here. Two weeks. We know that in the final months of the war Hitler ordered the treasures of the Berlin museums to be taken to secret storage outside the city. Franz Bormann went to the Zoo flak tower in Berlin and took away most of the crates stored there. A lot went to Austria, to the salt mines at Merkers, well away from Allied bombing and where the salt provided a good atmosphere for storage. So I ask myself the question: if there were still much better storage sites accessible, what on earth were the Nazis doing sending art and antiquities to this place, to a bunker in Lower Saxony, in early April 1945, right into the path of the Allied advance?’

‘Maybe into the eye of the storm,’ Penn suggested. ‘Maybe that was the calculation. Send them to the least likely place, and they might have the greatest chance of surviving undetected. When the Nazis built this bunker in 1942, they went to extraordinary lengths to conceal it. We think the entrance tunnel was rigged to self-destruct, but in the event, the British bomber raid on the night of 25 April did it for them. The self-destruct button may have been a final measure planned by someone who’d actually intended to remove this stuff beforehand and wanted all evidence destroyed. Take a look beyond the final crate. There’s a row of heavy-duty suitcases on the floor. I think someone may have been about to break down the contents of the crates into manageable packages, but events overtook them and the Allied front line moved faster than they’d expected.’

‘Or maybe whoever it was had expected a ceasefire, an armistice.’

‘Are we talking about Hitler? Surely by April 1945 a few crates of art would have been the least of his concerns?’

Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘There are other markings on the crates. They say Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. And you can see the Sonnenrad sun symbol of the SS, and then the word Wewelsburg. You told me you’d studied the architectural plans for that place. The order castle of the SS, run by the man who signed the papers you found in this bunker. You see what I’m getting at?’

Penn gasped. ‘Of course. Himmler. Heinrich Himmler.’

‘The second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, who maybe wanted to be the most powerful.’

‘ Himmler,’ Penn repeated. ‘Didn’t he try to negotiate with the Americans, and then got excommunicated by Hitler for it?’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘If I’m right about this, then maybe that’s where his gamble went wrong. A truce would have allowed him to clear this place out. I’m certain that the crates contain the lost treasures of Wewelsburg Castle: antiquities brought by the Ahnenerbe in the 1930s from around the world, hijacked by Himmler to fuel his fantasy of an Aryan prehistory, of a master race including the kings of ancient Greece, Agamemnon himself, and even the rulers of a mythical Atlantis. I’ve spent half my lifetime yearning to know what happened to these artefacts.’

Penn had moved along to the side of the crate with the lid ajar, and rubbed the side of it. ‘Look at this one. The lettering’s different.’

Hiebermeyer followed him up the narrow space and squatted down again, his suit crinkling and bulging as he did so. He stared at the lettering and numbers, his mind racing. ‘That’s it. That clinches it.’

‘ Museum fur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte,’ Penn read out slowly. ‘ Troia.’

Hiebermeyer’s heart pounded. ‘That’s the Museum of Pre- and Proto-History in Berlin. That’s where the treasures were displayed that Schliemann had taken from Troy and given to the German people in 1881. In 1941 they were moved from the museum and stored in the Zoo flak tower. I always knew there would be a third crate,’ he said excitedly. ‘A crate containing the secret treasures Schliemann never gave to the German people but concealed himself somewhere in his home town near the Baltic, where Ahnenerbe researchers under Himmler discovered them. Treasures that included the golden reverse swastika, the Trojan palladion, which Himmler made into his most potent symbol.’

‘A third crate?’ Penn said. ‘Where are the other two?’

‘When Bormann went to the flak tower to take the treasures to the salt mines, he left behind two crates, the ones containing the Troy artefacts from the museum. They were still there during the final Soviet onslaught and were taken to Moscow, where they resurfaced in the 1990s. When the Soviets arrived in the flak tower, the door to the storage room was guarded by a Dr Unverzagt, an Ahnenerbe Nazi who had been director of the museum. When the story of his role came out after the artefacts were revealed in Moscow, most archaeologists assumed that he had been guarding the greatest treasures of his museum to ensure that they weren’t looted by Soviet soldiers and were captured intact; that he was doing it for the sake of archaeology and science. But I think they were wrong.’

‘You think Himmler was personally involved in this?’ Penn straightened up, and leaned over the half-open lid of the crate.

‘Himmler was obsessed with the treasures of Troy,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘And he was Unverzagt’s boss. The Ahnenerbe worshipped Himmler, the man who had given so many failed and second-rate academics the job of a lifetime. Many of them were all too happy to go along with the racist poison, and plenty of them believed in it. Why did Himmler order Bormann to leave those two crates in the Zoo tower? Because he wanted them for himself. Why were they still there when the Russians arrived? Because Himmler’s gamble didn’t pay off, and he had no time to remove them. Why was Unverzagt still there guarding them fanatically? Not for the sake of archaeology, but in the vain hope that his god Himmler would return.’

‘You should take a look in here,’ Penn said. Hiebermeyer heaved himself up, wincing as he pressed his injured wrist against his knee, then aimed his headlamp over the side of the crate. He could see neatly stacked smaller wooden boxes inside, labelled with swastikas and the SS Sonnenrad, evidently from Wewelsburg. One of them had a line of symbols along the top of the label he recognized from Stone Age cave paintings. He followed Penn’s beam. There was an empty space at the end of the crate, half filled with a lumpy yellow substance covered with mould. He realized that it had been straw, cushioning material. Then his beam crossed Penn’s, and he froze.

‘Is that what you were looking for?’ Penn asked.

Hiebermeyer was speechless. It was the shape of a swastika, indented in the straw, about fifteen centimetres across. It had clearly been a heavy object, metallic, judging by the depth of the indent. He scanned quickly around, looking inside the crate. The object that had made the indent was nowhere to be seen. ‘Is there any chance your people could have missed finding it?’ he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.

‘None of the other crates are open. I told them to leave this part of the room until you arrived and we could look at it together. Apart from this, every inch of the chamber has been inspected, up to the laboratory door. Nothing has been found. If this was that golden object you were talking about, the Trojan palladion, then it looks as if someone scarpered with it in 1945. Odd, though, that it doesn’t seem to have been carefully packaged away like this other stuff, instead of just lying here in the straw.’

Hiebermeyer swallowed hard. He had desperately hoped to find it. He brought his beam back to the shape in the straw, and stared. ‘That’s because it was never in the museum collection in Berlin, and it can only have been here in the bunker for a short time. We believe that after the Ahnenerbe discovered the palladion in Schliemann’s hiding place in his home town, it was stored in great secrecy in Wewelsburg Castle. We believe that Himmler imbued it with holy significance, perhaps involving it in some kind of initiation rite for a select few. It became a sacred symbol of the new creed, of the god Himmler had made himself. We know that it became the symbol of something called the Agamemnon Code, an activation code somehow tied up with Himmler’s plans for a dark scheme in the final days of the Reich.’

‘The reverse swastika on the letterhead of those order papers, marked Top Secret,’ Penn said. ‘Was that it?’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Himmler clearly envisaged a future for himself, rather than the self-immolation that Hitler and his cronies saw as their only way out. But before then, when the palladion had become like the Holy Grail, Himmler had it sent from Wewelsburg to a place of even greater secrecy. I mentioned salt mines? Well, Jack visited one of them last year on his hunt for this object. The man we now believe knows the use to which the palladion was to be put had blackmailed him into going there to retrieve it, by kidnapping his daughter. It had been put deep in the Wieliczka salt mine, in a shaft now flooded under almost a hundred metres of water, near the death camp at Auschwitz. All Jack found was a box containing an impression like this where the palladion had been stored. As the Soviets advanced towards that part of Poland, we believe the palladion was removed from the box and taken by another of Himmler’s chosen few on the march with the last inmates from Auschwitz to the west, to Belsen and this place. Among them was the girl who drew that image for Captain Frazer.’

‘And then someone took it from here, from this crate, in those final days.’

‘Perhaps on Himmler’s orders. Perhaps when the Agamemnon Code was activated.’

Penn was silent for a moment, then took a ruler from his tool belt, leaned over and quickly measured the impression. ‘There is one place where I’ve seen a swastika shape like this, the same wide arms and distinctive cross. The more I look at it, the more I think it might be an exact fit. It’s on the door to the laboratory. It’s an indent just like this but within a roundel. We’re fairly sure it’s some kind of locking mechanism. Sergeant Jones thought it might be magnetic, but we won’t know until we inspect it. The door’s very slightly ajar. Maybe the palladion was a key to unlock what was in there. Maybe it unlocked other places like this, part of some scheme of Himmler’s that never came to fruition.’

Hiebermeyer could barely breathe. Of course. It was a key.

‘Major Penn.’ A voice sounded through both of their intercoms. ‘You need to come to the laboratory door, now.’

‘Okay.’ Penn straightened up. ‘That’s my two sappers. And I just saw Sergeant Jones and Auxelle come through the chamber. Let’s move now.’

Hiebermeyer followed Penn from the crates on to the main walkway. He glanced back, seeing where the Raphael was propped up, the mottled colours lost in the haze of green. Listening to the rasp of his own breathing, he was reminded of film he had seen of Jack and Costas rising from an underwater site, features of the archaeology clearly visible and then suddenly lost in a green-blue haze, as if they had passed through some kind of lens in the water. He thought about the painting again. Whatever Himmler had devised, whatever ghastly wonder-weapon he had been developing, he had not been above collecting the choicest Old Masters for his own private enjoyment: not for some Nazi Valhalla, but for a real future that he envisaged for himself, perhaps a new Wewelsburg arising in his imagination like Atlantis reborn. Hiebermeyer now knew something with cold certainty. Himmler may have been a fantasist, but there was a ruthless calculating streak to him. All of this had been carefully planned, and had been thwarted only by a misplaced gamble at the end. And if Himmler had planned to hold the world to ransom with his wonder-weapon, that threat remained for others like Saumerre to find and use. For the first time Hiebermeyer forced himself to face the reality of what might be in that laboratory ahead. He hoped that the nightmare would come to an end here and now.

‘Major Penn.’ The voice of one of the sappers came through their intercom. ‘The inspector and Sergeant Jones have already gone into the laboratory. I couldn’t stop them.’

Penn snorted angrily and made his way over. The door was now half open, and there were lights moving inside. Hiebermeyer saw the swastika in the roundel that Penn had described. As they came closer, one of the sappers stepped up and stopped Penn. ‘Sir, you’ll see there’s a body in front of the door, mostly skeleton. We found it when we first arrived here twenty minutes ago, but he’s long dead and we didn’t see the need to disturb you. There was a smear of old blood on the door when we were cutting through. He was shot at close range in the back of the head, massive skull damage. You’ll see more of the same when you go in through that door. Been a little life-and-death struggle here with no winner as far as we can see. This one’s American, by the way.’

Penn went straight to the form on the floor and leaned over it. ‘A lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaf on the lapel,’ he murmured. ‘No division or corps insignia on the shoulders. He’s got a holstered Colt automatic, but he’s wearing a dress uniform, not a field uniform. Not a combat soldier.’ He peered at Hiebermeyer. ‘Sounds like our Monuments and Fine Arts man, Colonel Stein, wouldn’t you say?’

Hiebermeyer nodded, staring at the body, his head swimming. There was a sudden commotion from within the laboratory, and the sound of something falling heavily. A voice came over the intercom. ‘Quick!’ They heard the French accent of the inspector. ‘Come and help! Sergeant Jones has collapsed!’

Penn pushed into the chamber, the other two sappers following and Hiebermeyer bringing up the rear. He saw two more decomposed bodies lying entangled together just inside the door, and Sergeant Jones in his white suit stretched out beside them. The nearest body was wearing tattered striped prisoner clothes, but the one beneath it, lying face-down, wore British battledress, a major’s crown clearly visible on one shoulder. Hiebermeyer stared. It could only be Major Mayne. His revolver was still holstered, but his skeletal hand was behind his back, clutching a commando knife that poked up through the other man’s ribcage. The man in the prisoner’s uniform held a rusted pistol, a Walther, and there was a spent casing on the floor. Hiebermeyer saw a tattoo on a piece of skin that clung to the bones of the forearm. It was the SS mark. He barely had time to register it when Penn pulled his arm.

‘We’ve got to get Jones out of here,’ he said urgently. He looked angrily at Auxelle. ‘How long has he been like this?’

‘Only moments. But he had been breathing heavily. Maybe it was seeing the bodies.’

‘That’s not like Jones. More likely a malfunction with his oxygen. If that’s the case, we’ve only got minutes.’ He looked at the other two sappers. ‘You each take a leg, Auxelle and Hiebermeyer take the arms. I’ll support his waist. Let’s move.’

Hiebermeyer lifted Jones’ arm but had forgotten his own twisted wrist and slipped with the weight, twisting round and falling back against the wall, his other hand clutching a rail and slipping into something glutinous. He pushed himself up with his back against the wall, and as he did so he tripped the electric light switch. The bare overhead bulbs flickered and then came on with a sudden dazzling glare, blinding him for a moment. Then he saw walls of a sickly pale blue, like the colour of a hospital operating room. The layer of yellow-green was still there, but the light rendered it opaque, a bilious colour. He saw a small refrigerator in front of Jones’ legs, its door ajar and the interior gleaming, empty. He stared at it, transfixed, his mind blank, and then he turned to look where he had put his hand.

What he saw was an image of unspeakable horror. Along the side wall of the room were five gurneys, metal trolleys with their upper surfaces formed like shallow basins. Four contained human bodies, naked but grotesquely adiposed, as if they had been covered with a layer of white plaster. The two furthest bodies were strapped down but horribly twisted, like the plaster casts of bodies from Pompeii preserved in their death throes. His mind reeled. He forced himself to look. These people must have been strapped down alive in this laboratory, and were still alive when they were abandoned here. The third and fourth bodies were older cadavers that had been decapitated and disembowelled, with autopsy tools half rusted on a tray in front. The fifth gurney, the one he was holding, contained two severed heads, wax-like and hairless, staring at him blindly through sockets closed up with fatty secretion, the skulls held in the clutches of a three-armed forceps like the severed talons of some bird. They seemed to be embedded in a congealed layer, the glutinous substance he had put his hand into. He lifted it out, tendrils of congealed white and yellow dripping from his fingers. His stomach lurched as he realized what it was. He had seen this once inside a two-hundred-year-old lead coffin he had watched being excavated from a church crypt. The archaeologists had called it body liquor. He had put his hand into decomposed human fat.

He doubled over and threw up inside his helmet, coughing and retching as the oxygen from his regulator bubbled through the vomit. He clutched Jones’ hand tight, but he felt other hands heaving him up, pushing him forward as he staggered over the two corpses on the floor. He kept his eyes shut and his mouth wide open, breathing in oxygen and vomit, coughing it out again, retching. As they staggered out of the laboratory and back towards the entrance, he fixed his mind on the refrigerator he had seen, its interior gleaming and empty. Something had been stored there, something the Nazi scientists must have extracted from those bodies, and something they had experimented with on the living. Something unimaginable. But it was gone.

He was conscious of only one thought.

He had to call Jack.