The Excalibur Codex (8 page)

‘What do you think?’

Jamie was so engrossed in what he was reading that he hadn’t heard Steele returning to the library. He looked up in annoyance at the banker’s interruption. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said sharply. ‘Where was this house?’

‘My people are working on it. Probably in the north of England, we believe. We’ve confirmed that MI5 suspected the Hitler Youth of sending out spying missions just like Ziegler’s, under the guise of a cultural exchange. They were also worried that the Boy Scouts who went to Germany were being indoctrinated.’ He smiled. ‘Apparently Baden Powell was very keen on Adolf Hitler.’

‘Have you considered that this might be another Hitler Diaries hoax? What better way to lure you into paying a fortune for some expensive forgery.’ The Hitler Diaries had been one of the great scandals of
the nineteen eighties, after the German magazine
Stern
claimed to have bought sixty-two handwritten volumes of memoirs written personally by Adolf Hitler and recovered from a crashed plane at the end of the war. Reputations and careers had been destroyed when the diaries were authenticated, only to turn out to be crude fakes written by a small-time Stuttgart art dealer called Konrad Kujau.

Steele nodded solemnly. ‘Yes, that was the first thing I considered. But unlike
Stern
and
The Times,
I’ve already had the papers scientifically analysed by some of the country’s top experts. The Hitler Diaries were an enormous fraud; this is a simple account that can be easily verified. Wulf Ziegler is a real person. He exists, or at least existed, and his family still live in the centre of Dortmund.’ Passion made his voice quiver. ‘The codex is the key that opens the first door into what could be a straightforward journey, or a bloody complicated quest, Jamie. Can we afford not to turn that key?’

Jamie wasn’t convinced. ‘I still think it’s impossible.’

‘That may be so, but what if you’re wrong?’ Steele demanded, the over-bright eyes daring his guest to argue. ‘We are talking about creating history. The greatest sword ever created. Excalibur. There, I’ve said it even if you won’t. The sword of Arthur, lost for a hundred generations. Proof positive that the man who wielded it truly existed. And I want
you
to find it. Take up my offer and the name Jamie Saintclair could be mentioned in the same breath as Howard Carter and
the Earl of Carnarvon. I want to know, Jamie, and I’m willing to commit a million pounds to find out, and a lot more to get hold of it if it does exist.’

The audacity of it took Jamie’s breath away and for a moment he was tempted to laugh off the offer as a joke. Did Adam Steele really believe finding Excalibur would rank alongside the discovery of the Valley of the Kings and the golden treasure of Tutankhamun? ‘You forgot to mention Schliemann,’ he said mischievously.

But Steele was deadly serious. ‘Schliemann was a crook,’ he snorted. ‘A fantasist who discovered Troy by mistake and destroyed his reputation by stealing the treasure for himself. This will be different, Jamie. All above board. I’m in it for the glory, not the money. The most famous sword in history. A collector’s dream. But I won’t keep it for myself. It will go on display in the British Museum with my name beside it, but it will be for the people of Great Britain.’

‘Then why don’t you go looking for it yourself? Then the name Adam Steele will be mentioned in the same breath as Carter and Carnarvon.’

Steele looked up sharply with a dangerous glint in his eye, but the threat quickly subsided. ‘Because you’re the man with the skills, Jamie. You know how to unlock the doors the Excalibur codex leads to. Besides, I have a bank to run.’

Jamie stared at him. It was too soon. Abbie was barely cold in her grave. He couldn’t leave her now. But what would Abbie have said if she was here? He remembered the plans they’d made.
The great adventures they were going to have. Machu Picchu. The Great Wall. Swimming with sharks and walking with lions. And always it had been Abbie who made the running. Abbie seeking out something new and exciting. Suddenly it all became clear.

‘When do you want me to start?’

Adam Steele gave a loud roaring laugh as if he’d just won the final of a fencing competition and Jamie found himself clasped in a pair of incredibly powerful arms. Eventually the banker loosened his grip. He grinned. ‘Now is as good a time as any. Take as long as you like. I’ll pay you twenty thousand pounds a month, plus expenses. First class all the way. I’ll also provide you with a little insurance.’

He pressed a button on the desk and Gault reappeared a moment later. ‘Don’t be deceived by the grey hairs – Mr Gault isn’t quite ready for his pipe and slippers yet. He speaks pretty good German and I think you’ll find him a very handy man to have around.’

Gault held Jamie’s eyes and dared him to say no. ‘Where will we start?’

Jamie looked from one man to the other, taking in the raw excitement in Steele’s eyes and something he couldn’t quite read in the former soldier’s. ‘Dortmund, I think. Let’s see what other secrets your Herr Ziegler has been keeping up his sleeve. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to catch up on.’

The second part of my story opens on the Oder front, in mid April 1945, south of the village of Seelow. I had recently been promoted to the rank of SS-Unterscharführer and transferred from Third SS Totenkopf Division to command a company of Hitler Jugend holding a strategic crossroads near Dolgelin. My unit consisted of eighty-four boys aged between fourteen and sixteen and armed with Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets and First World War rifles they barely had the strength to carry. Facing us were veterans of Katukov’s First Guards Tank Army and Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army who had fought their way to the Oder from Stalingrad, via Kursk and the Vistula. We were dug in with other units on the height overlooking the river, defending Reichstrasse One, which stretched away behind us like a dagger into the very heart of Berlin. By now I was worn thin by war and death and constant terror; when I looked in the mirror I saw the face of a decaying corpse, eyes sunk into dark pits and bones fighting to free themselves from the flesh. My heart was no longer my own. My soul, if it had ever existed, was buried somewhere out on the Russian steppe with the bodies of a thousand kameraden. I had seen things and done things that would haunt me for ever. More important, perhaps, I no longer believed, but to even think it was to risk a bullet from the chain dogs of the Feldgendarmerie. Tomorrow would be my twenty-fourth birthday.

On the night of 15 April I inspected our position and whispered words of encouragement to my ‘men’. The boys stared at me from beneath over-large helmets that wobbled on their heads, wrapped in greatcoats that enveloped their thin bodies. Their frightened eyes seemed too big for faces pinched and narrow from constant hunger. More than half were orphans, or believed they were; their parents casualties of one front or another, or buried in the rubble of bombed-out homes in Berlin. They had known nothing but war, or the preparations for war, so that this, lying in the damp earth at the very heart of Dante’s inferno, with the smell of roasted flesh in their nostrils and the star shells lighting up the sky all around, could be reckoned normal. As I went I passed out boiled sweets, and they smiled shyly as they accepted them, like children at a school prize-giving.

‘When will they come?’ It was a lad called Werner, one of the youngest, but eager to prove himself; still bright-eyed and unknowing.

‘Soon enough.’ I managed a grin. ‘Get some sleep, junge!’ I hoped that, in their innocence, they would all sleep well, for tomorrow we would die.

The bombardment began before dawn, the shells from a thousand artillery pieces marching across the flood plain and up the hill like an unstoppable army; an inferno of fire and steel that struck terror into every man who endured it. Horrified, we watched the monster approach, devouring everything in its
path, hurling trees and houses and men into the air, where they hung or disintegrated as was the beast’s pleasure, dropping back to bury the dead and wounded alike.

‘Down,’ I screamed. ‘Get in the bottom of your holes and stay there.’

The ground shook as if it were a living thing and the beast closed on us with the wind of its coming gusting across the top of our pits and trenches like the precursor of a storm. I tried to make myself part of the earth, but no matter how hard I dug it rejected my living flesh. An instant later we were at the centre of an apocalypse of heat and light and noise, the air torn from our lungs and our ear drums bursting with the hellish percussion of the devil’s orchestra of shells and rockets.

As quickly as it had arrived, it was gone, and in the relative silence the only sound was of sobbing, and the distant screams of someone who had only seconds to live.

‘Please, sir,’ the shrill voice seemed unnaturally loud, ‘I think Werner’s hurt.’

He lay on his back, his dark eyes like bruises against the marble white of his flesh. He was still alive and when I placed a sweet between his lips they turned up in a smile that he would wear for ever. The boy in the next rifle pit had been wounded and Werner had run to his aid like a brave little Hitler Jugend. He was fortunate. He never even felt
the enormous shell splinter that cut him in half at the waist.

The sound of the barrage subsided into the distance, replaced by the rumble of engines and the sharp cry of whistles, punctuated by incessant bursts of heavy machine-gun and rifle fire.

‘Tanks!’ The warning was unnecessary because as the smoke lifted we could see them crossing the flood plain below like a plague of giant beetles, swarms of brown-clad tommy-gunners running among them, urged on by their political commissars. Occasionally, one of the machines would turn into a bright match-head of flame as a faust or a shell hit its mark, and the little figures around it would shrivel up or drop to the ground. The engine note changed to a deep growl as the machines hit the steep slope of the Seelow Heights and began the climb towards us. I called out to check the position of the faust teams and gripped the MG-42 more tightly. Manfred, my loader, a fifteen-year-old baker’s son from Bielefeld, crouched beside me, his face serious and determined, eyes narrowed behind thick, round spectacles.

‘Steady,’ I called. ‘Wait until they’re right on top of us.’

The firing came closer and fleeing men began to spill back towards us over the brow of the hills.

‘Hold your fire, they’re ours.’

‘Cowards!’ A high-pitched voice called from the far end of the line.

‘Shut up!’ Where was our artillery? Of course, the slope wouldn’t allow them to see their targets yet.

A man staggered into sight, using his rifle as a crutch. He was making for the sanctuary of one of the front trenches and the men occupying them shouted encouragement. At first, it seemed he would make it, but without warning a massive shape mounted the crest and bore down on the fleeing soldier. He looked back and desperately tried to speed up, but the T-34 kept pace with him like a cat playing with a mouse. The game went on for a few moments before the commander became bored, the tank accelerated and with a terrible shriek the landser went down under the tracks to be crushed flat by the twenty-six-tonne monster.

His terrible death brought a retaliatory fusillade of fire from the front trenches. The infantry around the tanks went down as if a scythe had cut the feet from under them, but the tank, now accompanied by three more, came on, undeterred even by a Panzerfaust strike. When the machines reached the trenches a few men ran, to be chopped down in their turn by the T-34’s machine guns. We were trained to stay in our trenches. Every two men were issued with a magnetic anti-tank mine. Once the tank passed over the trench you emerged to clamp the mine to the weaker armour at the rear and blow the beast to kingdom come. Of course, the covering infantry were likely to kill you before you had the chance to
celebrate your victory, but the sacrifice would be deemed worthwhile. But these Russian tankers knew their business and I heard my boys gasp as the T-34s settled over the trench before dancing on their axis, crushing everything below them to a pulp.

‘Steady.’

Somewhere along the line a quiet voice was praying, a practice not encouraged in the Hitler Jugend. For once no one seemed to care.

I clamped my teeth shut to stop them chattering. Our turn. Somewhere, someone was growling like a dog and it wasn’t until I saw Manfred’s look of puzzlement that I realized it was me. I had fought tanks before, but familiarity made it no easier on the nerves or the bowels. They seemed to grow before the eyes as they advanced over the rough ground. Machine-gun fire sprayed across the top of the trench and I heard a frightened yelp from not far away.

‘Keep your fucking heads down. Steady. Faust teams one and two take the tank on the left. Three and four, the one in the centre.’

Fifty paces. The infantry had returned, thick as wasps around rotting fruit and seeking out targets with their tommy guns. I aimed at a group to the left of the centre tank. The MG-42 bucked in my hands, spewing out twenty rounds a second in a series of short buzz-saw rasps and, as the men fell, the MG was joined by the crack of rifles and the familiar raw thump of the Fausts. I looked up expecting to see
the tanks burning, but they kept coming on and it was only then I noticed the spring mattresses tied to their fronts and sides; a crude but effective protection against our single-shot rockets.

Shit. ‘Aim for the tracks,’ I screamed, but I knew it was too late. In horror I watched the rifle pits ahead of me obliterated. I tried spraying the driver’s eye slits, but knew I had as much chance of stopping them as I had of surviving the war. I exchanged a desperate glance with Manfred. Should we take our chances in the open? Anything was better than being turned into mincemeat by those tracks. I was reaching for the rear of the trench when an incredible flat crack tore the air above my head, followed instantly by the enormous clang of a giant bell being struck. The next time I looked, black smoke was boiling from the tank and the first crewman was struggling to escape from the turret.