The Shadow Project

Chapter Fifty-Eight

‘Again. On three.’

Dangling side by side from the filthy rungs of the ladder, Ben and Jeff kicked against the iron grate of the crematorium hatchway one more time. The dull clang resonated through the chamber.

‘I’m going to puke,’ Jeff mumbled.

‘Again,’ Ben said. They’d been trying for what seemed like forever, and he could only hope that nobody had heard the noise. They swung their weight back from the hatch, then lashed out in unison.

This time, the clang of their boots on the iron grate was mixed with a screech as hinges rusted solid for over half a century gave way and the hatch moved. Not much, just an inch. But it moved, and Ben felt the relief scorch through his veins like whisky.

‘We’re nearly there. Once more.’

The final kick sent the hatch crashing open.

‘You go first,’ Ben said, and Jeff wasted no time in clambering past him and crawling out of the hole. Ben followed. After a few feet he was able to stand, and looked around him through his night-vision goggles.

They were in the rough-hewn stone anteroom from where the SS soldiers must have flung the bodies of the dead before sloshing gasoline over them and setting them alight. Maybe towards the very end, when the soldiers needed every drop of fuel to escape the approaching Soviet troops, they hadn’t bothered burning their victims at all, but just shot those still alive in the back of the head and turfed the corpses into the hole to rot.

Ben thought about Don Jarrett, the Holocaust denier. Another trip to Bruges suddenly seemed like a very good idea.

If he ever got out of this.

Up three pitted stone steps and they were in a passageway. The air was dank and foul, but it felt like pure oxygen after the obscenity of the crematorium. The passage wound onwards. They unslung their weapons and flipped off their safeties as they came to an unmarked doorway. Ben counted one – two – three. A deep breath and they pushed through.

The light hit them. Across the corridor in which they found themselves, cobwebbed lamps strung together by loose wires threw a dim, yellowish glow that was unbearably bright with their goggles. They flipped them up, blinking to adjust their vision.

There was nobody about. They turned left and kept moving. They were on full battle-alert now, in that state of heightened awareness in which every muscle was tight, every nerve jangling and the mind racing with constant anticipation of what could be waiting around every corner. Life never felt more vivid than when death was just an instant away.

A door opened up ahead. Voices. Two men. Ben and Jeff pressed themselves flat into a shadowy alcove in the wall. Footsteps approached, and as the voices grew louder Ben could hear the two men were speaking Croat.

‘I’m not gonna take much more shit from that bastard Pelham,’ one of them was complaining bitterly sotto voce, as though he thought Pelham might be listening.

‘Relax,’ the other one said in a more laconic tone. ‘Think of the money.’

‘No fucking amount of money is worth being stuck in this hole. I hate this place.’

The men walked past where Ben and Jeff were hidden in the shadows, close enough to smell their body odour. The complaining one was stick-thin inside a rumpled leather jacket, with a facial twitch and long, greasy hair scraped back in a thin ponytail. The laconic-sounding one wore a khaki cold weather field shirt that looked like Russian military issue. His shaven head glistened in the lamplight.

Ben glanced at Jeff. He peeled himself silently off the wall as his fingers moved down to the hilt of the killing knife that was strapped to his thigh and drew it out of its sheath. Jeff was right at his side as they crept noiselessly but quickly up behind the men. The bald guy was Ben’s. Ponytail belonged to Jeff.

Then they struck. Hard and fast. Ben clamped his hand over the bald guy’s mouth and jerked his head back and stabbed the knife into his throat. In the movies, it zipped as easily through flesh as a hot knife through butter and left a clean, straight red line from ear to ear. In real life, to cut through the tough gristle and cartilage of a man’s windpipe you had to saw brutally. Close your mind to what you were doing and keep sawing like crazy through the horrific mess until the blood was spraying out over your hand and the air was hissing out of the guy’s lungs with that eerie gurgling sigh that you knew was going to haunt your dreams forever. Hold on tight until the victim’s death struggles diminished and you could wipe the bloody knife clean on his clothes and move on and hope you never had to do anything like that again. Till the next time.

Ben and Jeff dragged the bodies into the shadows. They were in, and they were committed now. It was starting.