The Amber Knight (22 page)

‘Poor guy, shot by firing squad in 1944, lauded as a hero now.’

‘The way of the world, just like my father. Now he is a hero of the revolution, but, when he died, all my mother received was clandestine sympathy.’ Realising she had allowed the conversation to become personal, she reverted to her tour guide persona. ‘To the left are the offices of the security detective detail. The building behind it housed Hitler’s personal servants and SS guard detachment, to the right is a guest bunker. Mussolini visited here five times.’

‘With big noises like that arriving, the locals must have known about this place.’

‘There was an inner, middle and outer ring of defences. What you’ve seen is only the inner ring. No one without security clearance was allowed through the outer ring which was over 1200 metres from here. None of the low-ranking staff who worked here were given leave lest they talk, and the locals were turned back as soon as they reached the guard placements in the outer ring. They may have suspected that something was here, but they didn’t know what.’

Adam stopped walking and absorbed the atmosphere. The trees grew closer and taller here than on the perimeter of the complex, almost blocking out the sunlight. It was cool in the shade and there was a dank, musty smell of rotting vegetation. Magdalena had been right. It was easier to picture what the complex had been like during Hitler’s reign here, where the forest cloaked the ghostly ruins.

‘If we walk past the old typists’ offices and post office, we’ll come to the bunkers constructed for individual members of the High Command.’

‘I’m beginning to understand why you think the knight could have been hidden here. It would take a flame thrower to shift some of this undergrowth.’

‘An entrance to a tunnel could easily be missed.’

‘Even if it does exist, what makes you think we stand a chance of finding it in three days, when it’s lain undiscovered for fifty years?’

‘Because whoever took those photographs of the knight must have left evidence of recent entry.’

‘And if they removed the knight?’

‘Why would they risk doing that before they have to? Where are they going to find a more secure hiding place than this?’

‘I hope you’re right. So, where do we start looking?’

‘The bunkers. If a passage has been opened up from any of them, there’ll be marks.’

‘We’ve just passed –’ he checked the plan, ‘ten bunkers and buildings.’

‘All near the main gate. Not a good place to hide the entrance to a secret tunnel. If there is one, it’s my guess it will be further in. Close to the Fuhrer bunker and the railway line.’

As they penetrated deeper into the complex, Magdalena’s trained eye missed nothing. She drew his attention to the remnants of barbed wire nailed high on the trees, wires that had originally been fastened a metre above the ground. Enormous slabs of concrete, four and a half metres thick and six metres high, lay at alarming angles on the site of the former Fuhrer bunker, strands of steel reinforcing splaying out from the great masses, like the spindly legs of upturned beetles.

They crawled over concrete surfaces patterned to resemble grass and peered into moss and lichen encrusted cracks. Adam ran his torchlight over stalactites that grew down from the damp, mouldering ceilings of blacked out narrow tunnels, and delved into underground passages that traversed remarkably intact buildings. He followed Magdalena past signs warning people to stay out of the bunkers as she climbed steel rungs sunk into the concrete sides of the buildings and onto rooftops that had served as placements for anti-aircraft gun batteries or, more bizarrely, cultivated gardens.

They stepped over odd remnants of domesticity; bulky heating radiators, all but the top few inches embedded in the earth, and smashed concrete tubes that had once held the wires for the internal and external telephone systems. As they walked through the forest littered with one vast concrete ruin after another, Magdalena told him all she could remember of the internal layout of the bunkers. When her memory failed, she referred to the notebooks in her bag. And, all the while they explored, they examined the area around every step they took for signs of recent disturbance of earth, undergrowth or concrete.

‘Present for you.’ Adam presented her with a small posy of delicate purple flowers.

‘Vandal.’

‘They’d be dead tomorrow,’ he assured her.

‘How do you know? They might have continued to bloom and give pleasure to other visitors.’

‘I’m starving.’

‘You should have eaten more at breakfast.’

‘I didn’t like the company. This looks like a good place to take a break.’ He sat down and leaned against a tree. ‘Is this the boundary of the inner fence ring?’ He pointed to a clearing in front of them that was bisected by railway tracks.

‘It is.’ She sat alongside him and pulled the insect spray out of her bag.

‘Is the railway still in use?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘It’s occurred to me that if the Amber Knight is here, there’s no way anyone could come in and fish it out without the staff noticing. All we have to do is ask.’

‘No excavations, investigations, or research has been carried out here for the last four years.’

‘So no one can come in without the authorities knowing?’

‘If you have a four-wheel-drive vehicle you can leave the road and drive across country. Hitler’s fences weren’t replaced.’

‘No security?’

‘None worth speaking of. Come on, rest over.’

‘Slave driver.’ He followed her across the railway track. She led him into a building on the other side that was little more than a shell, its doors and windows blown out by Hitler’s engineers.

‘Air Force High Command Office. Behind is the cemetery.’

He walked across the concrete floor to the holes where the windows had been. ‘No headstones?’ he commented as he looked out over the expanse of uneven ground.

‘There were wooden markers but they were removed years ago.’

‘How many people are buried here?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. Even archaeologists balk at digging up sixty- to seventy-year-old bodies.’

‘Although, if you think about it, there’s not much difference between sixty- and six thousand-year-old corpses.’

‘Depends on the soil they’ve been buried in.’

‘What’s that building across there?’

‘The Naval High Command Office.’

‘Not behind, to the right.’ He pointed to another smaller shell, with the metal window frames intact.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Don’t tell me, it’s another general purpose bunker.’ He returned to the entrance, kicking aside last year’s leaves and debris. ‘There’s some peculiar smells in here.’

‘And none pleasant.’

Avoiding the rough ground of the cemetery, he led the way out of the building, across the path to the building opposite. ‘A fire’s been lit here recently. I can smell wood smoke. Look, here’s charred sticks.’

‘Probably kids. I told you, this place isn’t secure.’

He kicked through the litter on the floor. ‘Rich kids who can afford imported canned beer and –’ he picked up a butt end of a hand-rolled cigarette and sniffed it. ‘– joints.’

‘Must have been quite a party.’

‘And it ended over here.’ He reeled from the stench of urine in the corner.

‘See anything?’ she asked.

‘Dirt, leaves, wood, this is bloody impossible. An army could have slept here last night, dirtied the place up and left nothing for us to find.’ Stepping outside, he walked around the building and looked down to the right. Two huge bunkers loomed through the trees.

‘There were anti-aircraft guns mounted on the tops of those, presumably to safeguard the railway track.’ Magdalena stood beside him.

‘I’m not sure what I was expecting Hitler’s Wolfschanze to look like, but it wasn’t this. It’s so damned big.’

‘Over eighty buildings and it goes on for miles. There are bunkers scattered in fields all around here. Outposts, lookout vantage points, hides for troops, but if I’m right and the knight was hidden in a tunnel here, there has to be an access and it would have made sense for the builders to hide that access in a bunker.’ She opened her rucksack and pulled out two heavier duty torches than the ones they’d been using. Handing him one, she looked down at his plan. ‘I suggest we start there.’

‘The fire water reservoir?’

‘We’ll go over every inch before working our way backwards through every building until we reach the main gate again.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘We only have a few more hours of daylight.’

‘You don’t need daylight to search a bunker. Hurry up. We don’t want to waste any time.’

The warning bells that heralded the closing of the Wolf’s Lair had rung hours ago. The tourists had long since been herded along the paths and out through the main gate. Shadows had fallen, shrouding the trees and bunkers in a dense, compassionate darkness that softened and blurred the edges of the buildings.

Their police escort had given up dropping gentle hints in favour of outright demands that Magdalena continue her search in the morning, but it took a threat from Adam to down tools before she capitulated. As Adam followed the path back to the main entrance, he found himself aching in places he hadn’t been aware he had muscles. His hands, knees and elbows were rubbed raw, his nails were torn and broken to the quick, and he had a foul headache from scrabbling in airless spaces and peering into holes as black as the grave. But what hurt most was the knowledge that their effort had been in vain. They had come up with precisely nothing.

‘I wish I’d been soaking in a hot bath for the last hour,’ he grumbled, stumbling in the uncertain torchlight.

‘You must have been brought up soft,’ Magdalena countered.

‘Is this is your idea of a fun day out?’

‘It would have been if we’d found the knight. There’s nothing like the excitement of an archaeological dig. Never knowing what or when you’re going to turn up something momentous.’ She stopped to speak to the warden who’d been watching for them from his living quarters. He handed her a package.

‘DVD’s of all the excavations that have taken place here in the last fifty years,’ he explained to Adam.

‘I can’t wait,’ Adam enthused insincerely.

Magdalena glared at Adam before thanking the warden. ‘It will be all right for us to come back in at six tomorrow?’

‘No hotel serves breakfast at that time in the morning,’ Adam protested.

‘We’ll eat here.’

‘The restaurant doesn’t open until ten,’ the warden warned.

‘We’ll have a chance to put in a few hours work in first. Thank you for your help, and goodnight.’

Adam nodded to the warden before following Magdalena across the floodlit car park. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that we might be too late for dinner as it is?’

‘All you ever think about is food.’

‘All I’ve had today is two cups of coffee and a roll I stole from Josef’s plate.’

‘Knowing Josef, he will have booked us into an expensive hotel that caters for German and American tourists. They’ll have room service.’ She stopped next to the police car. ‘We can eat while we watch these.’ She climbed in and laid the package of DVD’s on the seat between them.

‘My mother warned me never to watch television while I eat. It interferes with the digestion.’

‘Then we’ll watch them afterwards.’

‘How long are they?’

‘Tired?’ she mocked.

‘First you deprive me of food, now you want to deprive me of sleep. Well, there’s one thing I’m not going to do without, and that’s my bath.’

‘I’ll give you half an hour.’ They sped from the darkness of the forest road towards the brightly lit facade of a modern hotel.

‘That long?’

‘I need half an hour to shower and telephone the boys.’

‘Not everyone moves at your speed. I doubt they’ll be in America yet.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘They should have landed two hours ago. Your housekeeper gave me the number of your grandfather’s security guards.’

‘Why do you always have to be so efficient?’ he griped as they drew up outside the main entrance. He waited for their police escort to make a move before prising himself painfully out of the back seat.

‘If we’re going to find this knight, one of us has to be,’ she snapped as she left the car. ‘I’ll order dinner to be served in your room as soon as I go in. I suggest you do the same. That way we may get around to seeing all the films before we go to bed.’

Adam was soaking in the bath when the telephone rang, but Josef never spared any expense when the Institute was picking up the bill. The suite was equipped with a cordless telephone in the bathroom.

‘As you’ve gathered I’m not with you.’

‘I haven’t had time to miss you, Josef.’ Adam settled back into foamy water that smelled more like creosote than pine.

‘Find anything?’

‘Muscles I didn’t know I had. What about you?’ he questioned guardedly, conscious of the switchboards the call was being routed through.

‘No sign of our mutual friend, but the two parcels arrived safely in the States. You remembered where you saw your girlfriend’s boyfriend yet?’

‘I’m trying to work out who you’re talking about.’

‘Cut the crap. Do you remember?’

‘Unfortunately not.’ Adam turned the hot tap on with his toe and picked up an iced vodka tonic he had set within easy reach.

‘I bet you haven’t given him a thought.’

‘I’ve been too busy trying to stay in one piece. I spent the afternoon crawling into holes even rats would run from.’

‘I paid your colleague a visit. The description of the man he saw with our target fits the stud in your girlfriend’s bed.’

‘So you finally admit my colleague wasn’t mistaken?’ Adam knew how meticulous Edmund Dunst was and couldn’t resist crowing.

‘You kept on about it so much I thought it was worth checking out. What are your plans for the evening?’

‘Dinner.’

‘In the suite?’

‘I’m too exhausted to walk to the restaurant.’

‘And your companion?’ Josef asked.

‘The same.’

‘How romantic.’

‘We have films to watch.’