The Black Gate (19 page)

“Of course, sir!”

“Then don’t let me keep you.” Peter left, closing the door behind him. Eventually, he knew, his treachery would be discovered. Every message was logged, and Baumann must surely review it on a regular basis. And if he didn’t find out, some communications officer at SS Headquarters with nothing better to do might happen upon the settings Peter used to encode the message and decrypt it. In either case, the game would be up.

***

Just as Peter had hoped, his message did indeed get someone’s attention. A wireless intercept operator at the so-called Y Station at RAF Chicksands in Bedfordshire, one of the collection sites that fed the signals intelligence operation at Bletchley Park, was monitoring his assigned frequencies when the
dits
and
dahs
of a new message in Morse Code came through his headphones. His boredom was transformed into excitement as he copied down the letters of the header, indicating that the message was bound for SS Headquarters, which was highly unusual. The German operator sending it repeated the entire thing, which made it even more unusual.

He immediately passed it to his supervisor, who flagged it as priority and packaged it up with a number of other recently arrived messages and handed it off to a motorcycle dispatch rider. Normally the collected messages would be sent to Bletchley Park by the recently installed teleprinter link, but the newfangled contraption had been balky the last few days and the dispatch riders had been recalled to their former duty to fill in until the link could be fixed.

The rider immediately took off for the thirty odd kilometer ride to Bletchley Park. Not having gotten much rest the past few days, he wasn’t paying close enough attention to the side roads as he passed through the quiet village of Clophill. He never saw the Army lorry barreling south, a drunk soldier at the wheel, that slammed headlong into his motorcycle, killing the rider instantly. His dispatch case eventually found its way to Bletchley Park where the messages were decrypted, but by then it was far too late.

PROMOTION

When Peter reported to Baumann at breakfast the following morning, sweat was running down his spine and his stomach was twisted in knots. He fully expected Baumann to greet him with an oily grin and the muzzle of his Walther pistol. To his surprise, while the oily grin was certainly there, the gun was in Baumann’s holster and no guards were about. When Peter asked for his orders for the day, Baumann made a dismissive wave.
 

“
Herr
Hoth informed me that he doesn’t require your services until the repairs are made,” Baumann told him, “so consider yourself on restricted leave, shall we say, until you are summoned.” Then he went back to sipping his coffee and reading the latest copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
. The headline, Peter saw, trumpeted the devastation the Red Army was suffering in Hungary at the hands of the German Sixth SS Panzer Army in a new offensive called Operation Spring Awakening. Peter hoped the German troops were receiving a similar thrashing from the Soviets as it had at the hands of the U.S. Army during the Battle of The Bulge only two months before.

With Baumann’s dismissal, Peter had an unexpected, and largely unwelcome, wealth of time on his hands. While he would have liked to keep Mina company, if for no other reason than to try and assuage his own sense of guilt, he only allowed himself a very brief visit each day, under the guise of learning more about Kleist’s macabre role in the facility’s operation and to make sure the soldiers refrained from abusing her. She said nothing to him, nor he to her during these visits. He looked in on her and tried to find some comforting words to say, but she refused to respond. Curled up in the same corner of the cell, she was quickly withdrawing from reality, trying to build up a wall around her psyche that he could only hope would help her weather the coming storm. She refused to eat. The only thing she would take was water. Kleist was threatening to force feed her, but Peter convinced him to hold off.
 

“Well, you’re probably right,” Kleist had finally admitted. With a conspiratorial smile, he had added, “That will get her ready for her time in one of my jars!”

Peter had forced a smile before he left Kleist laughing at his own joke.

The rest of the time, beyond what little he spent eating alone in the mess hall, he stayed in his room to work on his journals. While it was still a tedious process, he had become adept at translating his thoughts into the numerical book cipher. After encoding the most critical technical information, including a transcription of the coordinate system that Hoth was using and what he hoped were the essential elements for understanding Kleist’s ingenious work on defining the associated evolutionary trajectory patterns, Peter reluctantly opened the ancient copy of
The Black Gate
. He had reached for it on more than one occasion over the days that passed while the capacitors were repaired, but had never quite been able to bring himself to touch it. The black leather bound volume at once attracted and repelled him. He couldn’t help but be fascinated by its topic and the revelatory, if fantastical, origins of the text as von Falkenstein had described it. But there was something dark about it, an inescapable sense of malevolence that radiated from the yellowed pages, that seemed to grow stronger the more time he spent in its presence. He knew it was only his imagination, but his fingers tingled nonetheless as he drew it toward him.
 

Carefully flipping open the cover, he began to read.

***

Four hours later, with his heart pounding and a bead of sweat trickling down his spine, he slammed the book closed and shoved it away from him. While he wasn’t fluent enough in Elder Futhark to fully translate the text, the gist had been clear enough. He had harbored some small hope that the book might tell him some wondrous tale about the fall of Atlantis, as much to validate his father’s peculiar interests as anything else. In truth, it was a technical manual for the gate written as a series of allegories. The ancient builders had constructed a device that von Falkenstein and Hoth had duplicated through their own independent research. The book described
a great ring of gold
in spellbinding detail. The only major difference had been that the Atlantean gate, if he dared call it that, had been far larger. From what he could gather from the text, it must have been over a thousand feet in diameter, perhaps larger. The original builders, however, had solved the Schwarzchild radius stabilization issue that had led von Falkenstein to set his gate on a horizontal plane. The ancients had built theirs in a vertical orientation so that travelers could simply step forward into the darkness from a massive platform that spanned the gate’s diameter, and return to a similar platform on the far side.

Like von Falkenstein, the ancients had theorized their own versions of Heaven and Hell, which in the book were referred to as the Light and the Dark. The book supported the claims of Blavatsky and others that Atlantis had been home to black and white “magicians,” who had been engaged in a series of wars spanning centuries, if not millennia. But only the black magicians had actually built a gate, and had discovered the transformation phenomenon that they later used to create chimeras to suit their whims, from creatures optimized to provide sexual pleasure to man-animal hybrid warriors to unleash against their enemies.

While Peter suspected the ancients were initially driven by nothing more sinister than curiosity and personal gratification, he couldn’t help but feel as he read onward that they had flung themselves headlong into a moral abyss as deep as that plumbed by the Nazis. The book described abominations that had emerged from the far side of the gate, each more horrific than the last as the ancients reveled in the glory of one horrific discovery after another.
 

Reading the descriptions of the horrendous creatures that emerged, Peter could only wonder if the beasts of legend might not have been travelers through the gate, or perhaps their descendants. The similarities with some of the more popular creatures of fantasy — vampires, werewolves, and the like — certainly made a compelling case. What if some had somehow survived the event that had destroyed the ancient builders?

But it was the final chapter that had left his heart racing, for it spoke of that very apocalypse. The text described the last operation of the ancient gate, when the black magicians sent for a legion of men and women to be transformed into immortal warriors that could feast on the blood of their enemies. In the largest transit ever made, those doomed souls marched forth
en masse
through the gate.
 

But they did not return alone. Even as the travelers returned, the gate vomited forth a deluge of unexpected horrors that quickly overwhelmed those guarding the return side. The gate, its operators exterminated, remained open. Peter could only imagine the desperation of the original author, whom Peter presumed to be one of the black magicians, as he frantically wrote the last few lines. Unable to stem the tide of invaders flowing through the gate, the surviving Atlanteans triggered a nameless weapon that disrupted the tectonic plates beneath the island continent, destroying their civilization and the enemy in an orgy of volcanic destruction.
 

Von Falkenstein, who had translated the book himself, knew exactly what had befallen the ancient builders. He suspected Hoth, too, must have known; that would have explained his nervous reaction when Mina had brought up the possibility of travelers coming from the other side, unbidden. But von Falkenstein had chosen to ignore the warning, or perhaps thought he could control it where the ancients, whose genius far eclipsed his own, could not. It was now clear to Peter that the menace posed by an army of immortal Nazis was far less than that posed by the gate itself. Or, more precisely, whatever lay on the far side.

Unfortunately, there was nothing more Peter could do. He could only hope the Allies would take heed and could somehow destroy this place. All that remained for him was to continue to play his role in this accursed undertaking.

Taking up his pen and the well-worn copy of
The Mystic Will
, he began to encipher the salient details from
The Black Gate
in one of the journals.

He was nearly finished when the door flung open.
 

It was Baumann. Behind him stood a pair of grim-faced SS soldiers, weapons held at the ready. “You are to come with me. Now.”

Trying to keep his hand from shaking, Peter set down his pen and closed
The Mystic Will
and the journal.

“What is that?” Baumann snapped, pointing to the journal.

“My project notes, sir,” Peter answered carefully as he stood up. “May I ask what this is about?”

Baumann stepped over to the desk and snatched the journal from the desk and flipped it open. Turning icy eyes on Peter, he asked, “Since when does anyone write in numbers, Müller?”

“Sir, I can explain…”

“Yes, you will. But not here.” Grabbing up the second journal from the desk, along with von Falkenstein’s precious copy of
The Black Gate
, Baumann turned to the guards. “Take his sidearm.”

Peter made no move to stop them as one of the soldiers took his Luger while the other kept his assault rifle aimed at Peter’s chest.

Without another word, they marched him out of his room and down the corridors to von Falkenstein’s suite.
 

Baumann gave a perfunctory knock before opening the door and stepping into the parlor, where von Falkenstein was studying a long series of equations on an enormous blackboard. He turned around, an irritated expression on his face. “What is the meaning of this,
Herr
Baumann?”

“Forgive the intrusion,
Herr Professor
,” Baumann told him, “but I fear that we have a second spy in our midst.
Hauptsturmführer
Müller made an unauthorized transmission over the wireless, and I also found him with these.” He stepped forward and handed the journals to von Falkenstein before setting
The Black Gate
down on the coffee table beside the blackboard.

Von Falkenstein quickly flipped through the journals, a puzzled expression on his face.

“Those are my project notes, sir,” Peter offered, trying to inject some indignation into his voice. “The information is protected with a book cipher that my father taught me.”

Von Falkenstein closed the journals and stared at Peter. “Protected from whom?”

“From the Allies, sir.”

Baumann snorted.

“I am not a defeatist, sir,” Peter said, “but I believe that even under the best of circumstances, we may lose this facility. The Anglo-Americans are roughly a hundred and fifty kilometers to the west and moving closer every day. They…”

“…will be desiccated corpses long before they can reach us here,” Baumann said, cutting him off. “The soldiers I will lead through the gate will stop them in their tracks.”

Peter shook his head. “With all due respect, I beg to differ with you, sir.”
 

As Baumann opened his mouth to argue, von Falkenstein said held up a hand for him to be silent. To Peter, he said, “Explain.”

“Sir, as important as this facility is, you must agree that the
Führer’s
first priority will be to stop the Red Army’s advance on Berlin. He simply will not allow — cannot allow — Berlin to fall to the communists, no matter the cost. In light of that imperative, it is inevitable that the first wave of men through the gate will be sent to defend the heart and soul of the Reich.”
 

Both Baumann and von Falkenstein looked uncomfortable at the thought, but neither offered up an argument.

“Once the Allies deduce where those men came from,” Peter went on, “and they will, even if
Fräulein
Hass did not pass them that information, they will use every means at their disposal to destroy this facility.” He nodded at the journals von Falkenstein was holding. “The information on the gate’s construction and operation is more valuable than the gate itself. Everything here can be rebuilt if it is lost. But the information on how it is done is beyond value, especially if anything unfortunate should befall you, sir, or Herr Hoth.” He took a deep breath. “My journals contain the essentials of how to construct and operate the gate. And once I have finished this first set, I will courier them to
Reichsführer
Himmler.” He met Baumann’s gaze with a hard stare. “As per his personal orders before I departed SS Headquarters.”